A Life by Italo Svevo Read Free Book Online

be able to lie about it, as I’ll have forgotten the song and will only remember her face looking so pretty in excitement. Don’t you feel that my cousin’s face isn’t lively enough, usually? Why—just as Napoleon was only really lucid on a battlefield, so my cousin is only really beautiful when she’s excited! It’s difficult to excite her though!”
    By the light of a street lamp Alfonso noticed he had not made the usual gesture. With pleasant frankness Alfonso then asked Macario if he was not really very fond of his cousin.
    “As for loving her …” he stopped to show he regretted his joke, and went on very seriously, “I love a different kind of girl. My cousin isn’t a girl, she’s a woman, and what’s more …” he gave a little laugh, “with so many gifts that at times she seems not to have done enough about them. She knows mathematics and philosophy , reads serious books for preference, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she understands them all, really understands them! She’s so scrupulously exact she might well be capable of telling me the whole contents. But an artist she’ll never be … Maybe during some instant of emotional disturbance …” Here he gesticulated so extravagantly that he might have been talking about some revolution . “She’s her father’s daughter … not her mother’s, who was a weak-minded ignoramus, pretty and nearly always attractive even when saying silly things. Annetta has an iron memory and outstanding mathematical qualities, a mind for the concrete and solid, like her father. They don’t understand character, they don’t appreciate music, they can’t distinguish an original picture from a bad copy. Now Annetta is interested in Chinese works of art; she’s the first to introduce them into our city, but she knows just as much as her authors tell her and understands nothing about them because she has no feeling for them. The only good picture they have in the house was bought by myself, of a road across rocks.”
    “I saw it, superb!” exclaimed Alfonso, and to give himself importance he asked: “Who is it by?”
    “I don’t remember the painter’s name, I remember the picture,” replied Macario. “I’m my aunt’s son.”
    Alfonso laughed, but Macario did not. Even when his remarks sounded jocular, they were said with some deep rancour, and Alfonso did not feel at ease speaking like that with him, a stranger. He began wondering whether Macario could be drunk and had not shown it at the Mallers.
    Worse came.
    “Certainly no man worth his salt would marry Annetta. D’you know the tales of Franco Sacchetti? They’re worth reading, or one unforgettable one, anyway. A friar stays at a house wherehe finds his host a weak man maltreated by his wife. In his anger the friar makes a vow to punish the woman by marrying her if circumstances allow. A plague comes; the husband dies and so do all the other friars of the monastery, which is then dissolved. The friar carries out his vow, marries the woman and, as he had intended, beats her. One would like to make a vow like that about Annetta, to destroy that rude and boring haughtiness of hers. One would get the worst of it, though, for when it came to the point one would find oneself the person beaten.”
    Maybe Macario had decided to tell truths in a tone which made them seem said in jest, and had unintentionally abandoned that tone. This occurred to Alfonso on seeing Macario now begin to explain why he was so loquacious.
    “Don’t think I’m in the habit of making such confidences to the first person who comes along. I find you sympathetic; believe me or not, but I do.”
    Alfonso, confused, muttered his thanks. Macario went on:
    “I’m glad you felt such a strong urge to revenge yourself on Annetta, and glad too that you didn’t satisfy it. Oh! I’m observant, denial’s useless! People aren’t stupid because they’re not ready with an offensive word. On the contrary!” Then, thinking he had