“And if I had the strength to devote myself to a goal, then the main aim would be: bread for the future.”
“How awful that sounds!” he said, impolite in his honesty. “Why on earth didn’t you go to London or Manchester, or some black industrial hole?”
“Because I didn’t have the strength and think too much about myself, about the unhappiness I’ve just been through. And I thought I would find some distraction in Italy.”
“And that’s your disappointment … But perhaps you’ll gradually grow stronger, and you’ll devote yourself to your goaclass="underline" bread for the Future. I shan’t envy you, though: Bread for the Future …”
She was silent, and he said coolly,
“It’s getting late. Let’s go home …”
VIII
DUCO VAN DER STAAL had rented a large, cavernous studio in Via del Babuino, three flights up, north-facing and chilly. Here he painted, modelled, studied, here he gathered together everything beautiful and ancient he could find in the shops along the Tiber or in the Mercato dei Fiori. It was his passion: hunting through Rome for a portion of an old triptych or an ancient fragment of sculpture. In this way his studio had not remained the great, cold, echoing workplace that testifies to diligent and serious study, but had become a refuge for a vaguely coloured past and classical art, a museum for his dreamy spirit. Even as a child, as a boy, he had felt this passion for antiquity growing in himself, had nosed around in the shop of an old Jew, had learned to haggle when he was short of cash, and collected at first worthless trinkets, later, slowly, objects of artistic and financial value. He was a devotee: it was his only vice: he spent all his pocket money on it, and later, without reservations, the little he earned. Because sometimes, very occasionally, he completed something and sold it. But usually he was too dissatisfied with himself to finish things, and it was his humble idea that everything had already been created, and that his art was useless.
This idea sometimes paralysed him for months, without making him unhappy. As long as he had a little money to keep body and soul together — and his needs were extremely few — he felt rich and was happy in his studio or wandered happily through Rome. His tall, nonchalant, sinewy and slim body would be dressed in his oldest suit, which, without affectation, revealed a slovenly sports shirt and a tie like a length of string; a hat of indeterminate colour and bedraggled shape was his favourite headgear.
His mother and sisters did not usually consider him presentable, but had given up trying to transform him into the elegant son and brother that they would have loved to take into the drawing-rooms of their Roman acquaintances. Happy to breathe in the atmosphere of Rome he wandered for hours among the ruins, and saw — a dazzling vision of dreamy columns — ethereal temples and palaces of marble rising transparently in a shimmering sunny twilight, and tourists following a trail taken from their Baedeker who passed this tall, skinny young man sitting nonchalantly on the foundations of the temple of Saturn would never have believed his illusions about architecture: harmoniously rising lines, crowned with a theory of sculpture of noble, divine gestures, high in the blue sky.
He saw them in front of him. He sent the shafts of the columns soaring upwards, he fluted the severe Doric column, he bent the soft Ionic capital around it, and made the Corinthian acanthus spread its leaves; and the temples shot upwards on their columns in a trice; the basilicas arched upwards as if by magic, the statues gestured white against the elusive depth of the sky, and the Via Sacra was alive. He found it beautiful, he was living in his dream, his Past. It was as if he had had a previous existence in ancient Rome, and did not see the modern houses, the modern Capitol and all of them surrounding the grave of his Forum, before his eyes. He could sit like that for hours, or wander, or sit down again and be happy. In the intensity of his imagination he evoked history, it rose like a cloud from the past, at first like a fog, a magic mist, from which the figures soon emerged clearly, against the marble background of ancient Rome. The gigantic dramas were enacted before his dreaming eyes as if on an ideal stage, which extended from the Forum to the hazy sundrenched blues of the Campagna; with wings that were submerged in the depths of the sky. Roman life came alive in gestures, in the movement of an arm in a toga, a line of Horace, a sudden vision of the assassination of an emperor or a gladiatorial contest in the arena. And just as suddenly the image faded, and he saw the ruins, just the ruins, as the tangible shadow of his unreal illusion: he saw the ruins as they were, discoloured brown and grey, eaten away with age, crumbling, tortured, mutilated by sledgehammers, until only a few columns still stood shaking under the weight of a trembling architrave, and threatened to collapse. And the brown and grey was so richly gilded by streaks of sunlight, the ruins were so splendid as they crumbled, so melancholy in the unconscious randomness of their broken lines, cracked arches and defaced sculpture, that it was as if he himself, after his airy vision of radiant dream architecture, had tortured them with his artist’s hand, and caused them to crack, and shake and tremble, for the sake of the melancholy afterglow. Then his eyes would grow moist, his heart would overflow and he would walk away, under the arch of Titus past the Colosseum, on through Constantine’s arch, and hurry past the Lateran to the Via Appia and the Campagna, and his stinging eyes would drink in the blue of the distant Alban hills, as if that could cure them of too much gazing and dreaming …
Neither in his mother nor in either of his sisters could he find any trace of sympathy for his eccentric inclinations, and after that one friend who had died, he had never found another and as if by predestination that never allowed him to encounter sympathy, he had borne an inner and outer solitude. But he had populated his solitude so densely with his dreams that he had never felt unhappy, and just as he enjoyed wandering alone among ruins and along byways, he also loved the intimacy of his solitary studio, with a multitude of silent silhouettes on an old fragment of triptych, on a tapestry or on the many sketches fixed to the wall close together, all around him, all with the charm of their lines and colours, all with the silent gesture of their movement and emotion, and merging with the gloom of crannies and the shade of ancient cabinets. And among these dwelt his porcelain and bronze and antique silver, and the tarnished gold braid of an ecclesiastical robe shone dully, and the leather bindings of old books stood in a cheerful row, books from which, opened in his hands, the many figures rose up in a mist, living out their love and pain in those muted browns and golds of the silent atmosphere of the studio. Such was his simple life, without much self-doubt, since he did not demand too much of himself, and without the melancholy of a modern artist, because he was happy in his reflections. He had never met many people, despite the hotel existence he shared with his mother and sisters — he slept and ate at Belloni — or dealt with strangers, and by nature he was rather wary of tourists with Baedekers, of English ladies in short skirts, with their identical exclamations of identical admiration, and felt entirely out of place in the circle — half Italian, half cosmopolitan — of his quite worldly mother and elegant sisters, who danced and cycled with Italian princes and young dukes.
And now that he had met Cornélie de Retz he had to admit how little he knew about people and how he could never have conceived of the nature of such a woman — in a book perhaps, but not in reality. Her very appearance — her pallor, the fragile charm, her weariness — had astonished him, and what she said astonished him even more: the conviction and at the same time hesitancy, the artistic sensibility yet the striving to speak in a voice appropriate to her age: an age that he had not yet been able to see as an artist, infatuated as he was with Rome and the Past. And her words astonished him, with their congenial sound, and irritated though he often was by that often bitter, cutting, and then again dull and discouraged tone, until he thought about them again and again, until in his mind he heard them again from her own lips, until she joined the heads and torsos of his studio, and loomed up before him in the soft lily-like presence of her perceived reality, amid the Pre-Raphaelite stiffness of lines, and Byzantine golds of the angels and Madonnas, in canvases and tapestries.