Cornélie was glad to find a Dutch element in the hotel that was not uncongenial. She enjoyed being able to speak Dutch and freely admitted it. In the space of a few days she was on intimate terms with Mrs Van der Staal and the two girls, and the first evening after the arrival of Mr Van der Staal Jr, she revealed more of herself than she had ever thought herself capable of doing to strangers whom she had known just a few days.
They were in the Van der Staals’ sitting-room, Cornélie in an easy chair, by the tall blazing wood fire, as it was a chilly evening.
She had talked about The Hague, about her divorce, and now she talked about Italy, about herself.
“I can’t see anything any more,” she confessed. “My head is spinning from Rome. I can’t see any more colours, any more shapes. I don’t recognise people any more. They swirl about me so. Sometimes I feel a need to sit alone for hours in my birdcage, upstairs, in order to recover. This morning in the Vatican, I can’t remember it, I didn’t retain a thing. Things are always dull and grey around me. Then the people in the pensione. The same faces every day. I see them and yet I don’t see them. I see … Mrs Von Rothkirch and her daughter, then the beautiful Urania, Rudyard and the English lady, Miss Taylor, who is always worn out with sightseeing, and finds everything ‘most exquisite’. But my memory is so bad that in my solitude I have to work it out: Mrs Von Rothkirch is tall, stately, with the smile of the German empress, whom she resembles slightly, talkative yet indifferent, as if her words were just falling indifferently from her lips …”
“You’re very observant …” said Van der Staal.
“Oh, don’t say that!” said Cornélie, almost annoyed. “I can’t see anything, can’t retain anything. I have no impressions. Everything around me is grey. I don’t really know why I travel … When I’m alone I think of the people I meet … I’ve got Mrs Von Rothkirch now and I’ve got Else. A round witty face with tall eyebrows, and always a witticism or a ‘punch line’: I sometimes find it tiring, it makes me laugh so much. But still, they are nice. Then there’s the beautiful Urania. She tells me everything: she is as communicative as I am at this moment. And Rudyard too, I can see him in front of me.”
“Rudyard!” smiled Mrs Van der Staal and the girls.
“What is he?” asked Cornélie, curious. “He’s always so polite, he recommended a wine to me; he’s always able to get tickets.”
“Don’t you know what Rudyard is?” asked Mrs Van der Staal.
“No, and neither does Mrs Von Rothkirch.”
“Then beware,” laughed the girls.
“Are you Catholic?” asked Mrs Van der Staal.
“No …”
“And nor is the beautiful Urania? Or the Von Rothkirchs?”
“No …”
“Well, that’s why ‘la Belloni’ put Rudyard on your table. Rudyard is a Jesuit. In every pensione in Rome there’s a Jesuit who has free board and lodging, if the owner is on good terms with the church, and with great charm tries to win souls …”
Cornélie found this hard to believe.
“Believe me,” Mrs Van der Staal went on. “In a pensione like this, an important, reputable pensione, a great deal of intrigue goes on …”
“‘La Belloni’ …?” asked Cornélie.
“Our marchesa is a born intriguer. Last winter three English sisters were converted.”
“By Rudyard?”
“No, by another priest. Rudyard came here this winter.”
“Rudyard walked along with me for quite a way this morning in the street,” said young Van der Staal. “I let him talk, and sounded him out.”
Cornélie fell back in her chair.
“I’m tired of people,” she said with the strange honesty that she had in her. “I’d like to sleep for a month without seeing anyone.” And after a little while she got up, said good night and went to bed, with her head swimming …
VI
SHE STAYED IN for a few days, and ate in her room. One morning, however, she went for a walk in the Borghese gardens and bumped into the young Van der Staal on his bicycle.
“You don’t cycle?” he asked, jumping off.
“No …”
“Why not?”
“It’s a kind of movement that doesn’t agree with my kind of person,” replied Cornélie, annoyed at meeting someone who disturbed the solitude of her walk.
“May I walk with you?”
“Of course.”
He left his bicycle in the charge of the gateman, and walked along beside her, naturally, without saying much.
“It’s so beautiful here,” he said.
His words sounded simple and sincere. She looked at him closely, for the first time.
“You’re an archaeologist, aren’t you?” she asked.
“No,” he said defensively.
“What then?”
“Nothing. Mama says that to excuse me. I’m nothing and a quite useless member of society. And not even all that rich.”
“But you’re studying, aren’t you?”
“No. I read a bit here and there. My sisters call that studying.”
“Do you like going out, as your sisters do here?”
“No, I think it’s dreadful. I never go with them.”
“Don’t you enjoy meeting and studying people?”
“No. I like paintings, statues and trees.”
“Poet?”
“No. Nothing. Really, nothing.”
She looked at him more and more attentively. He was walking beside her as if it were the most natural thing in the world, a tall thin fellow of maybe twenty-six, still more a boy than a man in his build and his face, but on the other hand with a certainty and calm that made him older than his years. He was pale, he had dark, cool, almost accusing eyes, and there was something nonchalant about his tall, thin figure in his dishevelled cycling suit, as if he cared nothing about his arms and legs.
He said nothing more, but walked beside her, easily, companionably, without finding it necessary to talk. But Cornélie became nervous and did not know what to say.
“It’s so beautiful here,” she stammered.
“Oh, it’s very beautiful here,” he replied calmly, without seeing that she was nervous. “So green, so wide, so peacefuclass="underline" those long avenues, those perspectives of avenues, an ancient arch over there, and there, look, so blue, so distant, St Peter’s, always St Peter’s. Shame about all those funny things further on; that cafeteria, that milk stand … They spoil everything these days … Let’s sit down here: it’s so beautiful …”
They sat down on a bench.
“It’s so marvellous when something is beautiful,” he went on. “People are never beautiful. Things are beautifuclass="underline" statues, paintings. And so are trees, clouds!”
“Do you paint?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted reluctantly. “A bit. But actually everything’s already been painted, and I can’t really say I paint.”
“Do you write too perhaps?”
“Even more has been written than has been painted. Perhaps not everything has been painted yet, but everything has been written. Every new book that has no particular scholarly importance is superfluous. All poetry has been said and every novel has been written.”
“Don’t you read much?”
“Almost nothing. I sometimes leaf through ancient writers.”
“But what do you do then?” she asked suddenly, in irritation.
“Nothing,” he said calmly, and looked at her humbly. “I do nothing, I exist.”
“Do you think that a good approach to life?”
“No …”
“But why don’t you try a different one?”