Maria Guasco wrote thus to Marco Fiore—
“Marco, this sudden and unexpected letter will not surprise you. You know already that it is not a love letter, because our souls united and understood themselves too intimately in that past which can never return, and they were too much agreed in feeling the irremediable end of their love for a sentimental misunderstanding ever again to happen between us. If anybody else, a stranger, were to lean over my shoulder, and read the first word written, he would at once have no other thought but this: ‘See, it was natural, she is writing to her lover, she has never ceased to love him.’ Let it be so. Not a short time has passed since we separated freely and voluntarily, overcome by anguish, but stronger than anguish itself, since the reason for our ardent and free union was at an end. Since it is now May it is nearly two years ago. It is a year since you married Vittoria, when, placing her little hand in yours, she will certainly have pardoned your long infidelity and desertion. Well, my friend, no one about me believes that I have ceased loving you with passion, not even those who know me well, such, for instance, as a faithful friend like Flaminia Colonna, not even a would-be lover like Gianni Provana, to give another instance. No one, and especially my husband, Emilio Guasco; he does not believe, can’t believe, never will believe that I have ceased to love you passionately.
“This is the cross that I have been carrying for a year, at first with energy and Christian courage, sustained by a burning desire for expiation, by a burning desire to repair the horrible suffering inflicted on others, to heal all the deep evil inflicted on others, and in fact with the great and lofty hope of giving all the happiness possible to the man who deserved it. Marco, how happily I embraced my cross at first, and how I suffered with humility and simplicity, like a child that feels it deserves all its punishment, or some self-effacing creature who performs every deep act of contrition! You know my pride, Marco; you know that it has always been my weapon of defence and attack in this war of life; you know that my pride has taken the place of many virtues and that, as it was perhaps too great and imperious, it formed also the source of all my sorrows. Well, Marco, I swear it, and I know you believe me, that I have every day thrown this pride at my husband’s feet, and my heart has been prostrated in an almost continual prayer for pardon. To accomplish what I had set myself for you, to accomplish all my vow of reparation I suffered so joyfully, but so bravely. At every fresh sting I did not bind the bleeding point, and from every new wound I let my blood gush forth, glad to suffer, glad to expiate, glad to be able by my secret and open sufferings to unfold and complete all my expiation, rejoicing to reach the goal of being a consolation to Emilio, of being, as of yore, the giver of his happiness. I have been intoxicated with the sacrifice, Marco, but now my intoxication has vanished. Alas, my friend, I see and know that it has been useless! My repentance has been in vain, and so have been all my acts of contrition, and the lowering of my pride. In vain, too, has been my desire to do good. Emilio is unhappier than ever, and I alone am the cause of his unhappiness. It is impossible for me, I swear, to make him happy even if I lived a hundred years, even if I died to-morrow. In life or death I can do nothing more for him—nothing, nothing.
“Listen, Marco, and see if it be not all irreparable. I didn’t understand at once, because I was infatuated with my fine hopes and desires of doing good; but now I know that all is irreparable. Do you know how long my husband’s pardon lasted? The fraction of an April evening in which he pronounced the sacred words which should absolve, cancel, and redeem. Immediately afterwards he despised himself and me, and the act of pardon seemed to him one of hypocrisy and lying humiliation. Later, when in one of our more furious crises, on reminding him that a Christian pardon is an act of renewed esteem, that Christian pardon should destroy the sin and purify the sinner, and that such an one should be loved as a new soul, he replied brutally: ‘Exactly; but Jesus who founded pardon was not married to an adulteress.’ What am I to say to him, Marco? The man loves me, longs for me, but at the same time he hates me. Never for an instant, understand, can he forget that I betrayed and abandoned him, and that for three years I was yours. He spies on me and makes me spy. He scrutinises every glance, he watches every action of mine. If I speak to him he doesn’t believe me; if I am kind he refuses my kindness. If my pity breaks out he understands at once, like all morbid hearts, that it is a question of pity and not of love, and he rejects my pity. He wrongs me and you with vituperation, and asks me to love him with passion as I loved you. But I can’t lie; I can’t, I can’t. I have never lied, and if I were to do so for a minute to save him and myself he wouldn’t believe me. What am I to say; what am I to do, Marco? I have said all; I have endured everything, and I don’t want to—I can’t—add anything else, my friend. I can’t write everything; my mind refuses to raise certain veils of shame. Let us leave it, let us leave it. My cross is so heavy on my shoulders that I am on the ground and breathless. What shall I say? What shall I do? Hasn’t all my repentance been useless? Hasn’t all my dedication been useless? And useless every abnegation? Whatever shall I do to-night? Whatever to-morrow? The man whom I have returned to comfort is, as far as I am concerned, in a state of sorrow and implacable agitation; this man whom I imagined so ingenuously and sweetly to make happy again, in spite of my sufferings, is still, and always will be, unhappy. After a terrible year, Marco, after a year of every experiment and attempt, in which I have consumed my will and weakened my energy, after a year in which I have seen all the good which was accumulated in my generous mind miserably dispersed, and day by day the sacred trust of doing good dissipated, I cry to you in my sadness and impotence, in my weariness and discouragement. I ask you whatever I shall do, Marco, with myself and my life, since it is of no further use but for evil? What shall I do with myself, inept for good, inept to give joy, and so involuntarily and fatally capable of evil?
“I am so lonely, Marco. When he is here he regards me with desire and anger. Both sentiments crucify and torture me, but I daren’t repress or combat either sentiment. I have become what I never was, a creature without will or object, a passive and resigned creature—I! I! think, Maria Guasco, a creature of resignation! Often he avoids me for days together, and I don’t know what to do with my dried-up and deserted existence. I do nothing, never, because I fear that all may be for the worse, even when he ignores me—ignores me! Sometimes he leaves Rome and goes away for two or three days, for a week. I don’t know where—in his distrust he won’t say. I don’t know when he returns, as he doesn’t wish it to be known. He enters suddenly and looks for me, as if he must always find me in sin, and I am always paralysed just as if my nerves had been cut, just as if a single gesture of mine may be an offence, or the pretext of an offence to him.
“I am so lonely, so lonely.
“In this Casa Guasco, in this Rome, in this world, Marco, I am more lonely than ever woman was, and I cry to you, not as a lover, not even as a friend, but as a soul which was once mine while mine was yours, I cry out my impotence, anguish, and mortal solitude.
“Marco, I am afraid of myself: I know myself. If the hand even of an enemy is stretched towards me with the impetus of unexpected sympathy, my soul at once trembles with emotion and opens its inviolate doors, and abandons itself with tenderness and enthusiasm. If a person who loves me ill-treats me or offends me it is impossible for me not to rebel; all my pride invests me wonderfully and magically with a steel cuirass, and I feel I love no longer, and I disdain the love of the other one who knows not how to love. I am capable of breaking a heart, two hearts, my own and the other’s, with a violence which nothing can stop. You know me. You conquered me with your youthful grace, with your sincere passion mixed with gentle languor, which conquers the proudest and most reserved souls. Never once did you offend me, never once, perfect friend and perfect lover, pleasant and sweet to dream of and remember. In those three years, passed together, my simple and impetuous character, so sincere and yet inflammable, found every sentimental delight. Our short life was beautiful, beautiful with unspeakable harmony, and we could separate full of sorrow, but still without anger or a single bitter thought of each other.
“Marco, this unfortunate man for whom I returned a year ago, to heal of all the poison he had absorbed on my account, not only is he more poisoned than at first, but he vents all his revenge on me by a love composed of suspicion, contempt, sensuality, and jealousy. This man who seemed to me a hero, and was one for a single moment when he pronounced the words of pardon, this hero whom I had poetised proudly in my mind, and who deserved the lofty place of poesy for a brief moment, when he pronounced the words of pardon, is no longer a betrayed lover who must be made to forget the betrayal by lavished caresses, is no longer an offended husband whose pardon is asked and given, with whom a new, loyal, and lasting peace is re-established. No, he is now an enemy, who now loves and now hates, who now wants you and now spurns you, who adores you by day and execrates you by night, who would keep you eternally pressed to himself and who flies from you, who thinks you capable of every black action, and makes you understand his suspicions, and declares them. Emilio Guasco is an enemy to me, Maria, an enemy whose name I bear, whose fortune I share; an enemy in whose love I live, an enemy who now keeps me because I have returned, an enemy who doesn’t wish to see me dead because he would kill himself on my tomb, who wants me to be alive with him and for him, to torture me and himself.
“O Marco, Marco, how terrified I have been lest all the good with which my heart is filled be at an end! how deeply I feel that my kindness which is not superhuman, since I am a woman and not an angel, will dissolve like a cloud, and I may become a naked rock, sharp and fierce of aspect—a rock!
“Marco, if he doesn’t calm himself and stop, if he doesn’t become more humane, kinder, more generous; if he doesn’t become the man of pardon and not him of after the pardon, that is sad and contemptuous for having pardoned, how shall I pour the balsam over him which ought to restore him to health, the jar of which is perhaps already empty and wobbling in my hand? Marco, if he doesn’t restore to me his esteem, his trust and his friendship, unless he is affectionate and magnanimous with me, how shall I be able to improve and exalt his life? What shall I do here if he continues to be an enemy who loves me? O Marco, I tremble to the very roots of my soul, even to the most mysterious essence of my spirit, lest all my mission of peace, beauty, and affection, can never be accomplished, and lest all my rebellious heart may revolt against the enemy who loves me. Marco, what will become of me to-morrow, a week hence, a year hence?
“Maria.”
At the same time Marco wrote to Maria—
“Maria, my delight, do you know that there has not been a single day since that fatal and tragic one on which we left each other, that I have ceased to think of you, far away or near, deeply separated from me by the depth of our divine dream of love, separated for ever since we wished it to be so, but always present to my spirit, which reflects itself in you as in the coolest and most crystal mountain stream? I have thought of you, Maria, as a dear mother, as a sister, as a friend, as a womanly creature who has been and is most dear to me, wherever I have found myself, whatever the idle words which left my mouth, whatever my careless deeds, however intense my silence and immobility. I thought of you then, soul of beauty, without ardour or desire, because that flame which was so devouring is extinguished in me as in you, but I have thought of you with sweet and melancholy moral sympathy, without jealousy, without bitterness, without gall, without any of the dregs which passion leaves in the heart, but with a measured and calm recollection, as for a memory which will be ever dear. I have never sought you; I have never thought of seeking you: I have never avoided you or wished to avoid you, nor have I written to you. Only your place has been, and is within me, high, unshakable, strong, and you are like a mother, a sister, a friend, the inspirer of my thoughts and sentiments. From the high extinguished pyre a slender warmth of life prevents my heart from getting cold; a thin light, that which they say remains after a star is dead in the firmament, seems to guide me in my unstable and uncertain way.
“But at last, after such a long silence, Maria, on the anniversary of my marriage, since you are always a source of warmth and light to me, and since you can still give me light and tell me what is necessary, I am writing to you and am breaking this division of time, of place, of persons which seemed inseparable between us, and I have come to implore help as formerly, as yesterday, as to-morrow, as always. I come to ask moral help of you, because you were always my conscience, even when we broke together the ties of society and laws, since you taught me nobly the way of liberty and truth, even in that which the world calls a mistake and the Faith a mortal sin, but which we called, and shall call, by a single word—Love—whatever it may be, from wherever it may come to us, wherever it may drag us. Maria, you who in the supreme hour of farewell, when I wept upon your hand the most burning tears of my life, you who showed me what to do with my existence; you who reminded me of a great duty to be accomplished; you who spoke no more to me of happiness, no longer possible for me from the moment that our love was ended, but of that which I could still give to a human creature; you who exalted for me this duty even to making it appear adorned with every attraction: Maria, to-day you must tell me, if you know, if you will, what is necessary, since I no longer know.
“Maria, the bridal veil which the young woman wore a year ago in the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, when she knelt near me and the priest pronounced over our heads and joined hands the words which bind us till death, that soft veil which should be raised after the wedding to show me openly and loyally the face of my lady, where may be mirrored all her soul, which perhaps possesses concealed the most precious spiritual and sentimental treasures—but however light it was, neither my hands nor my kisses succeeded in rarefying its aërial woof—Vittoria has never once desired to liberate her face from it. I have always felt this veil, between me and her, no longer a bridal veil but a veil of life, in which she enveloped herself in the first vivid days of our marriage; and as time passed—and sometimes its course seemed very slow to me—it became closer and denser even to hiding my lady completely, and as time still went on its course more slowly than ever, I felt that this veil had become a seamless, opaque texture, in which she is enclosed for ever. Maria, Maria, all the solemn words of that last hour in which you enjoined me to assign this deep and great object to my life, this of offering happiness without equal to a woman who had suffered for me, I never forget, when I am with Vittoria, for an instant; and in spite of the unspeakable weariness of my soul, in spite of that mortal aridness which succeeds to great passion, in spite of my hidden distrust of myself, in spite of the fact that I doubted deeply of my success, I have always endeavoured that Vittoria, my wife, should be happy. Dear, dear Maria, if only you knew how often I have invoked you as light, and heat, and guide, so as not to lose myself or falter on the way! How often I have called on you, my conscience, to continue my duty! Well, Maria, you and I have been deceived. Or perhaps you were deceived, beautiful and magnificent soul, in thinking that that was the necessary thing, or very likely it is Vittoria who has deceived you, me, and all of us.
“This creature is unable to be happy on my account, perhaps she is unable to be happy on any account. She is a soul incapable of happiness. Such souls, Maria, are to be met with. Heaven has sent them thus on the earth to live a peculiar, cold, sad existence, without joy, without hope and without desires; they are souls incapable of reaching that extreme joy, even for a second, which is called happiness; and probably the others only have it for a single minute, but they do reach it and possess it, and through it feel themselves children of God, near to Him, near to His throne of splendour and glory. This moment you and I have possessed, Maria; but we were born to possess it. Vittoria, my wife, is unable to touch this height. Her hands are as white as her face and garments, they are as cold as her forehead and her heart. Her life, too, is white, cold, and immobile.
“O my conscience, secure and firm, do you know I have managed to extract from Vittoria her secret. Do you know that her secret is terror of you, terror of what you have been in my life, which has been painted fantastically for her—simple, innocent girl—as something horrible and tremendous. Her childish secret as betrothed, bride, and wife, was this ferocious terror that I might belong to you as a lover for ever, that through the mysterious reasons of passion you would always keep me, and that from one day to another I could again belong to you through the impetuous and imperious reasons of desire. By pressing her cold white hands I communicated a flame of life to her, by fixing my eyes on hers I placed a gleam in those two bright eyes, and then I learnt her secret. Hers is a soul sick with this terror. On your account, my lofty pure conscience, on my own, since I am pledged to follow every wish of yours, I have word for word, act for act, tried to destroy in her this morbid terror of you; and believe me, believe me in everything, any other woman would be convinced that her terror was in vain, would have given me all her heart and soul for recognition, affection, love. But the more I demonstrated to her that the bonds of passion were undone through your will and mine, the denser became the veil which surrounded her. Whatever was she wanting, whatever was she asking, for her existence as a woman and a wife; whatever was existence able to give her; more than the affectionate and tender companionship of a man like me, dedicated entirely to her, who desired nothing more than to see her smile in her juvenile happiness, and himself to be the only origin of that smile and that joy? Maria, my wife has smiled five or six times in one year of matrimony, and hasn’t laughed once. Ah, I have tried to tear the closely knit and invisible texture in which she is clothed even because of this, and I have asked her whatever she could wish from me beyond this certainty that I am no longer yours, whatever else she could expect from a man, a companion and a husband beyond this great and absolute dedication to her happiness which should be sufficient for any woman. She lowered her eyelids, closed her little mouth as usual, all her face became as marble. Oh, if only once to see that white marble face flesh!—and she replied—
“I expect nothing and I wish nothing.”
“Maria, the limpid truth is that Vittoria can’t, won’t, and doesn’t know how to become happy with me, because of her sentimental ineptitude, and it has all been a generous mistake of ours. With her I am sad, tired, and bored. Oh, how I bore myself, I can’t tell you, Maria! On some days a mad rage comes over me against this immense boredom. Why did I marry the girl? Why did I give myself this duty of a husband and companion, which I have tried and am trying to accomplish—so badly it seems, both for her and me? Why did I swear to Heaven to make this woman happy, when I am not able to keep the oath, though I want to? Perhaps she would have been happy with another. Why did I bring her my wasted heart? Why have I offered her a life where love’s harvest is gathered, and the earth which had produced too violently has been left fruitless? Why have I given her a soul which has done with love? Maria, Maria, we made a mistake on that last day; our souls did not understand the truth which is within us and not without. We have seen and understood nothing beyond ourselves. Vittoria did not ask for a husband but a lover, a lover like Maria Guasco had; she did not ask for happiness but passion. You knew, Maria, that that was impossible, and I knew it. Now I really begin to fear that I have torn the veil for ever which encloses Vittoria’s soul and person, and that I know all about her, and that I can do nothing now—never, never.
“Marco.”
In reply to her letter Maria received this from Marco—
“Maria, good and brave, make an appeal to all your goodness and strength. They are great, immense; you can’t measure them, but I can. With your goodness and strength strive to conquer Emilio, the enemy who loves you. Make a friend of him. That is the best way: do it.
“Marco.”
In reply to his letter Marco received this from Maria—
“Marco, try to love Vittoria. That is all. Try to love her.
“Maria.”
For a long time neither heard from the other.
PART IIIUSQUE AD MORTEM