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By Root 641 0

“What amount of capital do you suppose is represented within these four walls? What do you think? What’s your guess?” To which the other had replied somberly: “How should I know? I’m not a tax collector.” Often I had wondered why I felt so profound an aversion to my mother’s world; but it was only today, remembering that remark and comparing it with the faces I saw all around me, that I finally understood. As I examined the faces of my mother’s guests, I suddenly had a strong feeling that there was not one wrinkle, not one inflection of the voice, not one ripple of laughter, not a single feature, in fact, that was not directly determined by the money which, as the fat old man had said, was represented by the guests in that room, in greater or lesser quantity. Yes, I thought, in that crowd money had turned into flesh and blood; whether earned by honest and successful work or stolen by cunning and arrogance, it produced always the same result—an inhuman vulgarity that was recognizable both in well-fed fatness and in dried-up thinness. And if it was true—as indeed it was true—that money does not allow of any divorce from money, for anyone who is rich cannot make a pretense of not being so; then I understood again that I myself, even in spite of myself, formed part of this society of rich people, and that it was money—which I had renounced without being able to get rid of it—that had caused the crisis in my painting and, in general, in my life. I was therefore merely a rich man who would have liked not to be so; I might dress in rags and eat crusts and live in a hut; but the money at my disposal would transform my rags into elegant clothes, my crusts of bread into delicate and dainty dishes, my hut into a palace. Even my car, old and dilapidated as it was, was more luxurious than many luxurious cars because it belonged to someone who, just for the asking, could have had another one, brand new and of the most expensive kind.

I started as I heard my mother’s voice, saying: “Oh, Dino, what a pleasant surprise!”

She was standing in front of me, but I had not seen her, or rather, perhaps I had seen her but had not been able to distinguish her among the crowd of her guests, for at that moment she looked to me like one of them, exactly similar to them in every way and without any kind of connection with me, even of blood. Alone, my mother was my mother, but in the crowd that filled her rooms she became as indistinguishable as a bird in a flock of other birds or a fish in a shoal. Thus the strong business sense which, when my mother was alone, might appear to be an individual characteristic, revealed her impersonal, generic character among the crowd of her guests. And as in the case of all the figures thronging the rooms of the villa, so with my mother one could swear that behind the glassy glint of her blue eyes and the showiness of her massive jewelry, behind her nervous thinness, the excessive artificiality of her make-up and the disagreeable quality of her voice, there was a conformist attitude toward money, typical of the society of which she formed part, rather than any originality of private experiment.

Similar to her guests in physical appearance, my mother also resembled them in her behavior during our brief encounter. Usually, when she was alone, she was very attentive; but now, at this cocktail party—the normal rule for such occasions being, apparently, a supreme inattentiveness made up of indifference, haste and thoughtlessness—my mother behaved like all the other people, looking without seeing and talking without listening. Indeed, immediately after her lively welcoming remark, she murmured a few vague, incoherent words about how busy she was and how this would prevent her from taking much notice of me that afternoon; and then, looking around her all the time, she added, without the slightest sign of curiosity, hastily and as a matter of form, so to speak: “May I point out that you haven’t yet introduced your friend to me?”

Taking Cecilia by the arm, and with a certain solemnity, I said: “This is Cecilia, my fiancée.