Difficult Loves Read online

  He received an unexpected satisfaction: the salesman had fallen asleep sitting up, without changing position, the newspaper on his lap. Federico considered people capable of sleeping in a seated position with a sense of estrangement that didn’t even manage to be envy: for him, sleeping on the train involved an elaborate procedure, a detailed ritual, but this, too, was precisely the arduous pleasure of his journeys.

  First, he had to take off his good trousers and put on an old pair, so he wouldn’t arrive all rumpled. The operation would take place in the W.C.; but before – to have greater freedom of movement – it was best to change his shoes for slippers. From his bag Federico took out his old trousers, the slippers’ bag, took off his shoes, put on the slippers, hid the shoes under the seat, went to the W.C. to change his trousers. “Je voyage toujours!” He came back, arranged his good trousers on the rack so they would keep their crease. “Trallalà-la-la!” He placed the pillow at the end of the seat, towards the passage, because it was better to hear the sudden opening of the door above your head than to be struck by it visibly as you suddenly opened your eyes. “Du voyage, je sais tout!” At the other end of the seat he put a newspaper, because he didn’t lie down barefoot; he kept his slippers on. He hung his jacket from a hook over the pillow, and in one pocket he put his change-purse and his bill-clip, which would have pressed against his leg if left in his trouser-pocket. But he kept his ticket, in the little pocket below his belt: “Je sais bien voyager . . .” He replaced his good sweater, so as not to wrinkle it, with an old one; he would change his shirt in the morning. The salesman, waking when Federico came back into the compartment, had followed his maneuvering as if not completely understanding what was going on. “Jusqu’à mon amour. . .” He took off his tie and hung it up, took the celluloid stiffeners from his shirt collar and put them in a pocket of his jacket, along with his money. “. . . j’arrive avec le train!” He took off his suspenders (like all men devoted to an elegance not merely external, he wore suspenders) and his garters; he undid the top button of his trousers so they wouldn’t be too tight over the belly. “Trallalà-la-la!” He didn’t put the jacket on again over his old pullover, but his overcoat instead, after having taken his house-keys from the pocket; he left the precious token, though, with the heart-rending fetishism of children who put their favorite toy under the pillow. He buttoned up the overcoat completely, turned up the collar; if he was careful, he was able to sleep in it without leaving a wrinkle. “Maintenant voilà!” Sleeping on the train meant waking with your hair all disheveled and maybe finding yourself in the station without even the time to comb it; so he pulled a beret all the way down on his head. “Je suis prêt, alors!” He swayed across the compartment in the overcoat which, worn without a jacket, hung on him like a priestly vestment; he drew the curtains over the door, pulling them until the metallic buttons reached the leather button-holes. With a gesture towards his companion, he asked permission to turn off the light; the salesman was sleeping. He turned the light off: in the bluish penumbra of the little safety light, he moved just enough to close the curtains at the window, or rather to draw them almost closed; here he always left a crack open: in the morning he liked to have a ray of sunshine in his bedroom. One more operation: wind his watch. There, now he could go to bed. With one bound, he had flung himself horizontally on the seat, on his side, the overcoat smooth, his legs bent, hands in his pockets, token in his hand, his feet – still in his slippers – on the newspaper, nose against the pillow, beret over his eyes. Now, with a deliberate relaxation of all his feverish inner activity, a vague anticipation of tomorrow, he would fall asleep.

  The conductor’s curt intrusion (he opened the door with a yank, with confident hand unbuttoned both curtains in a single movement as he raised his other hand to turn on the light) was foreseen. Federico, however, preferred not to wait for it: if the man arrived before he had fallen asleep, fine; if his first sleep had already begun, a habitual and anonymous appearance like the conductor’s interrupted it only for a few seconds, just as a sleeper in the country wakes at the cry of a nocturnal bird but then rolls over as if he hadn’t waked at all. Federico kept the ticket ready in his pocket and held it out, not getting up, almost not opening his eyes, his hand remaining open until he felt the ticket again between his fingers; he pocketed it and would immediately have fallen back to sleep, if he hadn’t been obliged to perform an operation that nullified all his earlier effort at immobility: namely, get up and fasten the curtains again. This trip, he was still awake, and the ticket-check lasted a bit longer than usual, because the salesman, caught in his sleep, took a while to get his bearings, to find his ticket. He doesn’t have prompt reflexes like mine, Federico thought, and took advantage to overwhelm him with new variations on his imaginary song. “Je voyage l’amour . . .” he crooned. The idea of using the verb voyager transitively gave him the sense of fullness that poetic inspiration, even the slightest, gives, and the satisfaction of having finally found an expression adequate to his spiritual state. “Je voyage amour! Je voyage liberté! Jour et nuit je cours . . . par les chemins-de-fer . . .”

  The compartment was again in darkness. The train devoured its invisible road. Could Federico ask more of life? From such bliss to sleep, the transition is brief. Federico dozed off as if sinking into a pit of feathers. Five or six minutes only: then he woke. He was hot, all in a sweat. The coaches were already heated, since it was well into autumn, but he, recalling the cold he had felt on his previous trip, had thought to lie down in his overcoat. He rose, took it off, flung it over himself like a blanket, leaving his shoulders and chest free, but still trying to spread it out so as not to make ugly wrinkles. He turned on his other side. The sweat had spread over his body a network of itching. He unbuttoned his shirt, scratched his chest, scratched one leg. The constricted condition of his body that he now felt evoked thoughts of physical freedom, the sea, nakedness, swimming, running, and all this culminated in the embracing of Cinzia, the sum of the good of existence. And there, half-sleeping, he could no longer distinguish present discomforts from the yearned-for good; he had everything at once; he writhed in an uneasiness that presupposed and virtually contained every possible well-being. He fell asleep again.

  The loudspeakers of the stations that waked him every so often are not as disagreeable as many people suppose. Waking and knowing at once where you are offers two different possibilities of satisfaction: you can think, if the station is farther along than you imagined: How much I’ve slept! How far I’ve gone without realizing it!, or, if the station is way behind: Good, I have plenty of time to fall asleep again and continue sleeping without any concern.

  Now he was in the second of these situations. The salesman was there, also stretched out, asleep, softly snoring. Federico was still warm. He rose, half-sleeping, groped for the regulator of the electric heating system, found it on the wall opposite his, just above the head of his traveling companion, extended his hands, balancing on one foot, because one of his slippers had come off, and angrily turned the dial to “minimum”. The salesman had to open his eyes at that moment and see that clawing hand over his head: he gulped, swallowed saliva, then sank back into his haze. Federico flung himself down. The electric regulator let out a hum, a red light came on, as if it were trying to explain, to start a dialogue. Federico impatiently waited for the heat to be dispelled; he rose to lower the window a crack, but as the train was now moving very fast, he felt cold and closed it again. He shifted the regulator towards “automatic”. His face on the amorous pillow, he lay for a while listening to the buzzes of the regulator like mysterious messages from ultraterrestrial worlds. The train was traveling over the earth, surmounted by endless spaces, and in all the universe he and he alone was the man who was speeding towards Cinzia U.

  The next awakening was at the cry of a coffee-vendor in the Principe Station, Genoa. The salesman had vanished. Carefully, Federico stopped up the gaps in the wall of curtains, and listened with apprehension to every footstep approaching alon
g the passage, to every opening of a door. No, nobody came in. But at Genoa-Brignole a hand opened a breach, groped, tried to part the curtains, failed; a human form appeared, crouching, and cried in dialect towards the passage: “Come on! It’s empty here!” A heavy shuffling replied, of boots, scattered voices, and four Alpine soldiers entered the darkness of the compartment and almost sat down on top of Federico. As they bent over him, as if over an unknown animal – “Oh! Who’s this here?” – he pulled himself up abruptly on his arms and confronted them: “Aren’t there any other compartments?” “No. All full,” they answered, “but never mind. We’ll all sit over on this side. Stay comfortable.” They seemed intimidated, but actually they were simply accustomed to curt manners, and paid no attention to anything; brawling, they flung themselves on the other seat. “Are you going far?” Federico asked, meeker now, from his pillow. No, they were getting off at one of the first stations. “And where are you going?” “To Rome.” “Madonna! All the way to Rome!” Their tone of amazed compassion was transformed, in Federico’s heart, into a heroic, melting pride.

  And so the journey continued. “Could you turn off the light?” They turned it off, and remained faceless in the dark, noisy, cumbersome, shoulder to shoulder. One raised a curtain at the window and peered out: it was a moonlit night. Lying down, Federico saw only the sky and now and then the row of lights of a little station that dazzled his eyes and cast a rake of shadows on the ceiling. The Alpini were rough country-boys, going home on leave; they never stopped talking loud and hailing one another, and at times in the darkness they punched and slapped one another, except for one of them who was sleeping and another who coughed. They spoke a murky dialect. Federico could grasp words now and then, talk about the barracks, the brothel. For some reason, he felt he didn’t hate them. Now he was with them, almost one of them, and he identified with them for the pleasure of then imagining himself tomorrow at the side of Cinzia U., feeling the dizzying, sudden shift of fate. But this was not to belittle them, as with the stranger earlier; now he remained obscurely on their side; their unaware blessing accompanied him towards Cinzia; in everything that was most remote from her lay the value of having her, the sense of him being the one who had her.

  Now Federico’s arm was numb. He lifted it, shook it; the numbness wouldn’t go away, turned into pain, the pain turned into slow well-being, as he flapped his bent arm in the air. The Alpini, all four of them, sat there staring at him, their mouths agape. “What’s come over him . . . He’s dreaming . . . Hey, what are you doing? . . .” Then with youthful fickleness they went back to teasing one another. Federico now tried to revive the circulation in one leg, putting his foot on the floor and stamping hard.

  Between dozing and clowning an hour went by. And he didn’t feel he was their enemy; perhaps he was no one’s enemy; perhaps he had become a good man. He didn’t hate them even when, a little before their station, they went out, leaving the door and the curtains wide. He got up, barricaded himself again, savored once more the pleasure of solitude, but with no bitterness towards anyone.

  Now his legs were cold. He pushed the cuffs of his trousers inside his socks, but he was still cold. He wrapped the folds of his overcoat around his legs. Now his stomach and shoulders were cold. He turned the regulator up almost to “maximum,” tucked himself in again, pretended not to notice that the overcoat was making ugly creases, though he felt them under him. Now he was ready to renounce everything for his immediate comfort, the awareness of being good to his neighbor drove him to be good to himself and, in this general indulgence, to find once more the road to sleep.

  From now on the awakenings were intermittent and mechanical. The entrances of the conductor, with his practiced movement in opening the curtains, were easily distinguishable from the uncertain attempts of the night travelers who had got on at an intermediary station and were bewildered at finding a series of compartments with the curtains drawn. Equally professional, but more brusque and grim, was the appearance of the policeman, who abruptly turned on the light in the sleeper’s face, examined him, turned it off, and went out in silence, leaving behind him a prison chill.

  Then a man came in, at some station buried in the night. Federico became aware of him when he was already huddled in one corner, and from the damp odor of his coat realized that outside it was raining. When he woke again the man had vanished, at God knows what other invisible station, and for Federico he had been only a shadow smelling of rain, with a heavy respiration.

  He was cold; he turned the regulator all the way to “maximum”, then stuck his hand under the seat to feel the heat rise. He felt nothing; he groped there; everything seemed cut off. He put his overcoat on again, then removed it, he hunted for his good sweater, took off the old one, put on the good one, put the old one on over it, put the overcoat on again, huddled down, and tried to achieve once more the sensation of fullness that earlier had led him to sleep, but he couldn’t manage to recall anything, and when he remembered the song he was already sleeping and that rhythm continued cradling him triumphantly in his sleep.

  The first morning light came through the cracks like the cry “hot coffee!” and “newspapers!” of a station perhaps still in Tuscany or at the very beginning of Latium. It wasn’t raining; beyond the damp windows the sky displayed an already southern indifference to autumn. The desire for something hot and also the automatic reaction of the city man who begins all his mornings by glancing at the newspapers acted on Federico’s reflexes; and he felt that he should rush to the window and buy coffee or the paper or both. But he succeeded so well in convincing himself that he was still asleep and hadn’t heard anything that this persuasion still held when the compartment was invaded by the usual people from Civitavecchia who take the early morning trains into Rome. And the best part of his sleep, that of the first hours of daylight, had almost no breaks.

  When he really did wake up, he was dazzled by the light that came in through the panes, now without curtains. On the seat opposite him a row of people were lined up, and actually there was also a little boy on a fat woman’s lap, and a man was seated on Federico’s own seat, in the space left free by his bent legs. The men had different faces, but all had something vaguely bureaucratic about them, with the one possible variant of an air force officer in a uniform bright with ribbons; and also the women, it was obvious, were going to call on relatives who worked in some government office: in any case these were people going to Rome to deal with red-tape for themselves or for others. And all of them, some looking up from the conservative newspaper Il Tempo, observed Federico stretched out there at the level of their knees, shapeless, bundled into that overcoat, without feet like a seal, as he was detaching himself from the saliva-stained pillow, disheveled, the beret on the back of his head, one cheek marked by the wrinkles of the pillowcase, as he got up, stretched with awkward, seal-like movements, gradually rediscovering the use of his legs, slipping the slippers on the wrong foot, and now unbuttoning and scratching himself between the double sweaters and the rumpled shirt, while running his still sticky eyes over them, and smiling.

  At the window, the broad Roman campagna spread out. Federico sat there for a moment, his hands on his knees, still smiling; then, with a gesture, he asked permission to take the newspaper from the knees of the man facing him. He glanced at the headlines, felt as always the sense of finding himself in a remote country, looked olympically at the arches of the acqueducts that sped past outside the window, returned the newspaper, and got up to look for his toilet-kit in his suitcase.

  At the Stazione Termini the first to jump down from the car, fresh as a daisy, was Federico. He was clasping the token in his hand. In the niches between the columns and the news-stalls, the gray telephones were waiting only for him. He put the token in the slot, dialed the number, listened with beating heart to the distant ring, heard Cinzia’s “Hello . . .” still suffused with sleep and soft warmth, and he was already in the tension of their days together, in the desperate battle against the hours; an
d he realized he would never manage to tell her anything of the significance of that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day.

  (1958)

  The adventure of a reader

  THE COAST road ran high above the cape; the sea was below, a sheer drop, and on all sides, as far as the hazy mountainous horizon. The sun was on all sides, too, as if the sky and the sea were two glasses magnifying it. Down below, against the jagged, irregular rocks of the cape, the calm water slapped without making foam. Amedeo Oliva climbed down a steep flight of steps, shouldering his bicycle; which he left in a shady place after closing the padlock. He continued down the steps amid spills of dry, yellow earth and agaves jutting into the void, and he was already looking around for the most comfortable stretch of rock where he could lie down. Under his arm he had a rolled-up towel and, inside the towel, his bathing trunks and a book.

  The cape was a solitary place: a few groups of bathers dived into the water or took the sun, hidden from one another by the irregular conformation of the place. Between two boulders that shielded him from view, Amedeo undressed, put on his trunks, and began jumping from the top of one rock to the next. Leaping in this way, on his skinny legs, he crossed half the rocky shore, sometimes almost grazing the faces of half-hidden pairs of bathers stretched out on beach-towels. Having gone past an outcrop of sandy rock, its surface porous and irregular, he came upon smooth stones, with rounded corners; Amedeo took off his sandals, held them in his hand, and continued running barefoot, with the confidence of someone who can judge distances between rocks, and whose soles nothing can hurt. He reached a spot directly above the sea; there was a kind of shelf running around the cliff at the halfway point. There Amedeo stopped. On a flat ledge he arranged his clothes, carefully folded, and set the sandals on them, soles up, so no gust of wind would carry everything off (in reality the faintest breath of air was stirring from the sea; but this precaution was obviously a habit with him). A little bag he was carrying turned into a rubber cushion; he blew into it until it had filled out, then set it down, and below it, at a point slightly sloping from that rocky ledge, he spread out his towel. He flung himself onto it, supine, and already his hands were opening his book at the marked page. So he lay stretched out on the ledge, in that sun glaring on all sides, his skin dry (his tan was opaque, irregular, as of one who takes the sun without any method, but doesn’t burn), on the rubber cushion he set his head sheathed in a white canvas cap, moistened (yes, he had also climbed down to a low rock, to dip his cap in the water), immobile except for his eyes (invisible behind his dark glasses) which followed, along the black and white lines, the horse of Fabrizio del Dongo. Below him opened a little inlet of greenish-blue water, transparent almost to the bottom. The rocks, according to their exposure, were bleached white or covered with algae. A little pebbled beach was at their foot. Every now and then Amedeo raised his eyes to that broad view, lingered on a glinting of the surface, on the oblique dash of a crab; then he went back, gripped, to the page where Raskolnikov counted the steps that separated him from the old woman’s door or where Lucien de Rubempré, before sticking his head into the noose, gazed at the towers and roofs of the Conciergerie.