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By Root 422 0

from my aspiration, impotent perhaps but sincere, after a life that was not tainted and crippled by money or reduced to a purely physiological and material level. In a sense it was comforting to me that the image I preferred should be the best. I had to try to live up to this image, even if I had not been able to turn it to good account in the script, even if it was most improbable that I should be able to turn it to good account in life. Only in this way should I be able to convince Emilia of my reasons and so regain her esteem and her love. And how was I to accomplish this? I saw no other way than that of loving her still more, of proving to her once again, and every time it might be necessary, that my love was pure and disinterested.

I came to the conclusion, however, that for the moment it would not be a good plan to try to force Emilia. I would stay on until the next day and leave by the afternoon boat, without seeking to talk to her or to see her. Later, from Rome, I would write her a long letter, explaining all the many things I had not been able to clear up by word of mouth.

At this point in my thoughts I heard quiet voices coming, apparently, from the path below the terrace, and soon I recognized them as those of Emilia and Battista. Hurriedly I ran back into the house and went and shut myself in my room. But I was not sleepy; moreover it seemed to me it would be too painful for me to stay shut up in that stuffy room while those other two were talking and moving about the villa, all around me. Since I had been suffering from sleeplessness, especially during these last weeks, I had brought with me from Rome a very strong sleeping-medicine, very speedy in its effect. I took a double dose of it and threw myself down again—in real anger, this time—on the bed, fully dressed as I was. I must have fallen asleep almost at once, for I don’t think I heard the voices of Battista and Emilia for more than a few minutes.

22

IT WAS LATE when I awoke—judging, at least, by the rays of sunshine which penetrated into the room between the slats of the shutters—and for a moment I lay listening to the profound silence of the place, so different from silence in a town which, even when it is complete, seems always somehow to retain wounds and aches from sounds already past. Then, as I lay motionless on my back, I listened more carefully to this virgin silence, and suddenly it seemed to me that there was something lacking—not just one of those quiet sounds such as that of the electric pump drawing up water into the cistern in the morning or the servant sweeping the floor, which seem to stress the silence and make it more profound, but rather a presence. It was not a silence that was complete yet full of life, but a silence from which something vital had been withdrawn. A silence, I said to myself, finding the right word at last, a silence of abandonment. This word had barely crossed my mind before I had jumped from the bed and gone to the communicating door that led to Emilia’s room. I opened it, and the first thing my eyes lit upon was a letter lying on the pillow at the head of the wide, disordered, deserted bed.

It was brief. “Dear Riccardo, Seeing that you do not want to go away, I am going myself. Perhaps I might not have had the courage to go all alone: but I am taking advantage of Battista’s departure. Also because I am afraid of being left alone, and Battista’s company, after all, seems preferable to solitude. But in Rome I shall leave him and go and live on my own. However, if you hear that I have become Battista’s mistress, don’t be surprised: I’m not made of iron, and it will mean that I haven’t been able to manage it and couldn’t stand it. Good-bye. Emilia.”

After reading these lines, I sat down at the head of the bed with the letter in my hand and stared straight in front of me. I saw the wide-open window, and, beyond the window-sill, a few pine-trees, and, behind the trunks of the pine-trees, the wall of rock. Then I removed my eyes from the window and looked all round the room: all was in disorder, but it was an