Читать книгу The Intruder - Gabriele D'Annunzio - Страница 6

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My confidence in the future increased from day to day. It was as if I had forgotten everything. My soul, too fatigued, no longer remembered its sufferings. At certain periods of complete abandon, all became disintegrated, diluted, dissolved, lost in the original fluidity, became unrecognizable. Then, after these strange internal decompositions, it seemed to me that a new principle of life had entered into me, that a new power had penetrated me.

A multitude of sensations, involuntary, spontaneous, unconscious, and instinctive, made up my real existence. Between the exterior and the interior there was established a play of minute actions and instantaneous minute reactions, that vibrated in endless repercussions, and each one of these incalculable repercussions became converted into an astonishing psychic phenomenon. My entire being was modified by the slightest odor of the circumambient atmosphere, by a breath, by a shadow, by a flash of light.

The great maladies of the soul, like those of the body, renew a man, and the convalescences of the mind are not less charming nor less miraculous than the physical convalescences. Before a small, flowering shrub, before a branch covered with small buds, before a vigorous shoot growing out of an old and almost dead trunk, before the most modest metamorphoses accomplished by spring, I stopped, artless, ingenuous, stupefied.

Often, in the morning, I went out with my brother. At that hour, everything was cool, graceful, unconstrained.

Federico's company purified me and strengthened me not less than the good country air. Federico was then twenty-seven years old; he had almost always lived in the country, where he led a sober and laborious existence, and the earth seemed to have communicated to him its mild sincerity. He was in possession of the rule of life. Leon Tolstoï, as he kissed his fine, serene brow, would have called him, "My son."

We walked across the fields, without an object, exchanging but few words. He praised the fertility of our domains, explained to me the innovations introduced in their cultivation, pointing out the progress made. The cottages of our peasants were large and airy and coquettishly kept. Our stables were full of healthy and well-nourished cattle. Our dairies were admirably equipped. Often, on the way, he stopped to examine a plant, and his virile hands could touch with the greatest delicacy the little green leaves at the tip of a new shoot. At times we passed through an orchard. The peach-trees, apple-trees, pear-trees, cherry-trees, plum-trees, and apricot-trees bore on their branches thousands of flowers, and, below, the transparency of the rosy and silvery petals metamorphosed the light into a sort of humid atmosphere, into an indescribable thing, divinely graceful and hospitable. Through the small interstices of these light garlands smiled the blue sky.

While I was admiring the flowers, he was already anticipating the future treasure suspended from the branches, and said:

"You will see—you will see the fruit."

"Yes, I shall see it," I repeated to myself, inwardly. "I shall see the flowers fall, the leaves born, the fruit grow, color, ripen, and fall."

It was from my brother's mouth that this affirmation first issued, and it assumed for me a grave importance, as if it presaged I know not what promised and expected happiness, that was certain to arrive during the period of the vegetal labor, at the period separating the flower from the fruit. "Even before I manifested my intention to do so, it already seems natural to my brother that, henceforth, I should live here, in the country, with him and our mother; for he said I shall see the fruit of his trees. He is sure I shall see them. So it is quite true that a new life has begun again for me, and that my innate sensation does not deceive me. In fact, everything, now, is being accomplished with a strange, unusual facility, with an abundance of love. How I love Federico! Never have I loved him so much before." Such were the soliloquies that I indulged in, soliloquies somewhat disconnected, incoherent, at times puerile, because of the singular disposition of soul that made me recognize in no matter what insignificant fact a favorable sign, a happy prognostication.

My keenest joy was in knowing myself to be far removed from the past, far from certain places and certain persons, freed forever. Sometimes, in order to better enjoy the peace of this vernal country, I imagined to myself the space that separated me now from the shadowy world in which I had suffered so many and such culpable sufferings. Sometimes, too, a confused fear seized me again, compelled me to restlessly seek about me the motives of my present security, forced me to place my arm on my brother's arm, and read in his eyes the indubitable and protecting affection.

I had a blind confidence in Federico. I should have liked not only that he should love me, but that he should dominate me. I should have liked to cede to him my right as the elder, because he was more worthy, to submit to his advice, to have him for a guide, to obey him. At his side, I should not have run the peril of being lost, since he knew the right way and trod it with an infallible step. And, more than that, he was strong of arm, he would have defended me. He was the exemplary man—good, energetic, sagacious. To me, nothing equalled in nobleness the sight of his youth devoted to the religion of "to act conscientiously," consecrated to the love of the Earth. One would say that his eyes, in the continual contemplation of verdant nature, had borrowed something of its limpid vegetal color.

"Jesus of the soil," I called him one day, smiling. That was on a morning pregnant with innocence, one of those mornings that evoked the images of primordial daybreaks at the infancy of the world. My brother was speaking to a group of laborers at the edge of a field. He spoke standing, taller by a head than those around him, and his calm gesture indicated the simplicity of his words. Old men grown white in wisdom, mature men already on the confines of old age, were listening to the young man. All bore on their knotty bodies the mark of the great common toil. As there were no trees in the vicinity, and as the wheat was low in the furrows, their attitudes were fully outlined in the sanctity of the light. When he saw that I was coming towards him, he dismissed his men in order to come forward to meet me. And then fell spontaneously from my lips this salutation:

"Jesus of the soil, hosanna!"

To every vegetable growth he paid infinite attentions. Nothing escaped his penetrating and, so to speak, omnispective regard. During our matinal walks, he stopped at every step to remove from some leaf a snail, a caterpillar, or an ant. One day, while carelessly walking along, I struck the plants with the end of my stick, and at every blow the ends of the verdant stems flew in all directions. That gave him pain, since he took the stick from my hands, but with a gentle movement, and he blushed, thinking perhaps that his pity might seem to me an exaggeration of sickly sentimentality. Oh! that blush on that manly face.

Another day, as I was breaking off a flowering branch from an apple-tree, I surprised in Federico's eyes a shadow of sorrow. I stopped immediately, and withdrew my hands, saying:

"Does it displease you..."

He burst into a laugh.

"Not at all, not at all. You may despoil the entire tree."

Yet the broken branch, held by several live fibres, hung down the trunk, and, truly, that wound, moist with sap, had an appearance of a thing in pain; those fragile flowers, flesh-colored with pale spots, like bunches of simple roses, grown from a germ henceforth condemned, continued to thrill in the breeze.

Then, so as to excuse the cruelty of my aggression, I said:

"It is for Juliana."

And, breaking the last live fibres, I detached the broken branch.