'Poor man, indeed! He's an outrageous, horrible, sinister man.'
'Besides, what am I to do about shaving? You know perfectly well that there are no barbers within fifteen miles of this house.'
'Shave yourself, then.'
'But I can't shave myself.'
'What sort of a man are you, if you can't even shave yourself?'
'No, I can't shave myself- so what am I to do?'
'Grow a beard, then.'
'Please, for goodness sake! I shouldn't be able to sleep a wink.'
She was silent for a time, and then, in a voice in which there seemed to be an echo of despair, she cried: 'Well then, you refuse to do what I ask you — you refuse to do it.'
'But, Leda. .'
'Yes, you refuse to do it. . and you want to force me to see that horrible, disgusting man again. . you want to force me to come into contact with him.'
'But I don't want to force you to do anything. You needn't appear.. .You can stay in your own room.. .'
'So I've got to hide myself in my own house, because you won't do this to oblige me.'
'But, Leda.. '
'Leave me alone.' I had moved close beside her, and I was trying to take her hand. 'Leave me alone… I want you to send him away, d'you understand?'
I decided that I must at last take up an attitude of firmness. 'Listen, Leda,' I said, 'please don't go on like this. This is just an idle caprice and I don't intend to yield to caprices. . Now I shall try and find out whether what you state is true; but only if the truth of your accusations can be proved shall I dismiss this man — not otherwise.'
She looked at me for some time and then, without saying a word, got up and left the room.
When I was alone, I spent some time thinking over the incident. I was sincerely convinced that the truth of the matter was as I had said. No doubt Antonio had been excited by the contact with her arm and had been unable to control his excitement. But I was sure that he had done nothing to facilitate or repeat such contacts, which anyway, in the postion he was in, were unavoidable. He was, in fact, to be blamed only for having failed to elude his involuntary desire. Such, moreover, is still my conviction, for I consider that certain temptations are all the stronger for being neither premeditated nor courted.
These considerations, made in solitude and in perfect good faith, dissipated the last of my remorse. I knew that, fundamentally, I had acted from selfishness; but this selfishness did not contradict what I held to be true justice. I was convinced of Antonio's innocence; and I therefore felt no scruple about placing my own convenience before what I judged to be a mere caprice on the part of my wife.
A few minutes later, I joined Leda at table. She seemed perfectly calm, not to say serene. During a moment when the maid had gone out of the room with the dishes, she said to me: 'All right. . you can go on employing Antonio, but you must arrange things so that I don't see him… If I even meet him on the stairs, I won't answer for myself.. You've been warned.'
Filled with embarrassment, I pretended not to have heard. She added: 'It may be that it's only a caprice. . but my caprices ought to be more important to you than your own convenience, don't you think?'
It was just exactly the opposite of what I myself had decided; and I could not help making a mental note of it.
It so happened that, at that moment, the maid came in again and the conversation dropped. Later, during our walk, I tried to resume it: I was feeling remorse again and I wanted her to be convinced of my reasons. But this time, to my surprise, she said gently: 'Don't let's talk about it any more, Silvio, if you don't mind. This morning it seemed to matter a lot to me, I don't myself know why; but now, after having thought it over, I see that I was exaggerating…. I can assure you now that it no longer matters to me in the least. . '
She appeared sincere, and, in a way, to be almost sorry for her anger of the morning. 'Are you quite sure?' I insisted.
'Yes, I swear,' she said warmly; 'what reason could I have for lying about it?'
I was silent; and we continued our walk talking of other things. And so I was convinced that my wife had really dismissed the subject from her mind.
8
TODAY, in relating the incident of Antonio, I cannot but portray it in the perspective of events that occurred before and after it. The same thing, I imagine, happens when one writes history. But, just as events, in reality extremely important, pass almost unnoticed by their contemporaries; just as very few, not merely among the spectators but even among the actors, realized that the French Revolution was the French Revolution; so, at the moment when it took place, the Antonio episode did not strike my imagination at all forcibly — much less so, in fact, than these notes might lead one to suppose. I was really not prepared to attach importance to an incident of that kind: my relations with my wife had hitherto been rational and happy; and nobody would expect to find a medieval trap-door in the middle of a bright modern room. I must insist on this quality of innocence in my mind at that moment: it partly excuses my selfishness and explains my superficiality. In fact, whatever the reasons were, I was neither willing nor able, on that occasion, to think evil. So much so that, next day, when Antonio knocked at my study door at the usual time, I realized that I felt neither resentment nor agitation. In the state of extreme objective mental detachment in which I found myself, it seemed almost a pleasure to study the man in the new light that my wife's accusations had thrown upon him. In the first place, while he was shaving me and while I, as usual, was talking to him (and it was no effort for me to talk to him), I observed him closely. He was carefully intent, as always, upon his work and, as always, was doing his job lightly and skilfully. I thought to myself that, if my wife's accusations were true, it meant that he was exceptionally clever at dissimulation, so absorbed and so placid did that broad, rather plump face of his, with its cold yellowish-brown colour, appear to be. There still echoed in my ears those words of my wife's: 'He's an outrageous, horrible, sinister man' — but after examining him with extreme care, I was forced to conclude that there was nothing outrageous, horrible, or sinister about him. If anything, he had rather a fatherly appearance, the appearance of a man accustomed to looking after five small children, an appearance of purely physical, unconscious authority. Another thought came into my mind as I looked at him, and though I recognized in a confused way that it was a foolish thought, I immediately seized upon it as upon an irrefutable argument: so ugly a man — unless he was mad, which Antonio certainly was not — could not hope to have any success with women, least of all with a woman like my wife, who was so beautiful and of a class so different from his. Not without satisfaction, I noted that he really was fat in the face, and with an unattractive kind of fatness which did not give an impression of good health either — rather greasy, smooth and a little flabby, and with an unwholesomely swollen appearance between jaw and neck which reminded one of the similar swelling that is to be seen in certain tropical snakes at moments of anger. He had large ears, with flat, pendulous lobes; and his bald head, burnt, perhaps, by the summer sun, was brown in patches. Antonio was evidently a very hairy man: tufts of hair sprouted from his ears and from his nostrils, and even his cheekbones and the tip of his nose were hairy. After examining this ugliness for a long time with complacent minuteness, I chose a moment when Antonio had turned away to wipe his razor on a piece of paper, to say, in a careless tone: 'I've always wondered, Antonio, whether a man like you, married and with five children, can find the time and the opportunity to carry on with women.'