In Lisbon they were polite and attentive, unlike the Spaniards. The review was located in a handsome building on the Placa dos Restauradores, the Palacio Foz, with an English-style facade, a slate roof, and heavily carpeted rooms. They sang the praises of the Professor and he went along with them, adding a more graceful and subtle appreciation of his own, whose slyness certainly escaped the pompous editor, an unconscious symbol of idiocy. Certainly, he said, with maximum hypocrisy, he too was a friend of Portugal, a small country but a great one. For the time being he couldn’t contribute to the review; besides, his name meant nothing, he was only an assistant to the Professor and, moreover, he took no interest in politics, tie might, eventually, be able to make some translations, under a fictitious name; his Portuguese wasn’t all that good, but he could count on the help of a Portuguese reader in an Italian university, whom they doubtless knew. And they, in their turn, could count on his good will. The Professor was old, had many commitments and couldn’t make frequent trips to Portugal. He, on the other hand, was happy to travel.
And so it went. The texts he was given to translate were stupid and easy, but the pay was good. Their very stupidity bore out his inner instincts, kindling the secret fire of his resentment. As for the photograph of Machado, he hung it over his table, between the bed and the window giving onto the hospital courtyard. But he wouldn’t be staying much longer in this squalid rented room, he knew; a competitive examination for a better post was in the offing. He would come out first and then hang the photograph in a place worthy of it. Meanwhile, half consciously, he was coming to resemble his idol. He let his hair grow — bushy and unpom-maded — over his forehead, giving it the shape of Machado’s. The cut of his mouth was similar also; the thin lips were like a cynical slash, which dissembled the injustices to which he had been subjected. He was reading the reflections attributed to the fictitious Juan de Mairena and was fascinated by Machado’s capacity to wear masks, by the subtle ability to assume various roles, which he too enjoyed. “My philosophy is fundamentally sad, but I’m not a sad man, and I don’t believe I sadden anyone else. In other words, the fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell, or, rather, my faith in the human race is stronger than my intellectual analysis of it; there lies the fountain of youth in which my heart is continually bathing.” The fact that I don’t put my own philosophy into practice saves me from its evil spell — this notion gave him a feeling of infinite lightness, a sort of remission of his pains, of innocence. It was in such a state of innocence that he lived through the examination days unaware of the difficulties involved. The examination was not on Machado; obviously, it covered purely technical, theoretical matters of metrics. And yet this very abstract poetical grammar, so proudly uncontaminated, seemed to him a metaphor of his existence, of pure thought, free of thought’s harmful effects. He passed the examination with flying colours, just as he had expected. And, at this point, it was easy, too easy to give him any satisfaction, to cast off the old Professor.
When he took him the second edition of his thesis, minus the hateful dedication, he felt that he was carrying out an insipid and disappointing obligation. If the Professor had been argumentative, if he had lashed out against him, as he had expected, there would have been a frank, excited discussion. The Professor was waiting for him in his study with a melancholy air; he played the part of a man betrayed and shunted aside and welcomed him with tears in his eyes and no courage to put up a fight. “I didn’t know that you were my enemy,” he said; “it’s the greatest sorrow of my old age.” It was sentimental blackmail, based on a presumed friendship, old age, and disillusionment, which reminded him of Cecilia’s oblique reproaches. And he couldn’t bear this because it was a subtle and yet unfair way to recall Madrid and Lisbon, to accuse him of that silent and bitter scorn of which he had undoubtedly been aware and with which the Professor now hoped to put pressure upon him. At this point he voiced his disdain, calmly but sarcastically, in sentences whose rhythm recalled the Ma-chado of the Coplas per la muerte di don Guido. While he whispered bare, cutting words of revenge, his mind, off on its own tack, freed by thought from thought’s harmful effects, silently recited, in a familiar rhythm: Al fin, una pulmonia mato a don Guido, y estdn las campans todo el dia doblando por eclass="underline" din-dan! Murio don Guido, un senor de mozo muy jaranero, muy galdn e algo torero, de viejo, gran rezador.”… This was the death of Don Guido, a gentleman who, when young, was very haughty, very gallant and something of a bullfighter; but when old was given to prayer.” The Professor interrupted his silent recital and told him to go away, and he went, savouring the taste of victory. For it was a victory, and he knew that many other victories were to follow.
The second was Giuliana, a victory not over her but over life. He rescued her from the status of a premature old maid and restored to her a youthfulness that she tried to conceal, erasing her idea that she was ill and replacing it with the conviction that she was healthy, all too healthy, and needed only a man to give her protection and a feeling of security. The only thing about her that disturbed him was her conciliatory nature, of a transparency which seemed to him simple-minded and perhaps damaging to them both. He made her do away with violet perfume, a modest lambswool coat, loud laughter, and anything else that might make her conspicuous. He would teach her or, rather, “construct” for her the pattern of a university career, which was to be learned like a profession. This didn’t mean that she was to be his creature, that would be an oversimplified interpretation. What they had was a common purpose, an existential partnership, that was his idea of love, if only she could understand. And she understood.
Other victories came in a pleasing enough manner. Chiefly victory over a colleague who thoughtlessly or frivolously had wronged him. Such wrongs are searing because they presuppose a lack of attention to the wronged party. And he could not tolerate inattentiveness, it was a form of humiliation that made him pale, one which he had experienced all too many times, which reminded him of the days when he was a pariah, when he had had to buy wretched suits at the shop on the Viale Libia and to imagine that they were well-tailored. But searing wrongs are the richest and most productive; they swell in the mind and postulate elaborate and complex answers, not rapid and disappointing acts of liberation. No, he knew that searing wrongs nest in some secret area; they crouch there like lethargic larvae and then create ramifications, colonies, anthills with winding passageways which deserve their own painstaking, detailed topography. A topography which he had studied in painstaking detail, patiently, because there was no way of taking direct revenge except through an unsatisfactory, poisonously personal attack in some scholarly periodical. He had, then, to find an indirect approach. This called for alliances, deliciously allusive conversations, subtle understandings, elective affinities.