Roman Quartet

Wake Up!

I was 20 years old, I was studying law, I was lodging in the house of a widow who lived alone with her daughter, Angelica. Angelica was not exactly beautiful; but the rather small eyes, the nose that was too large, the mouth, at the same time both full-lipped and faded, in her ashypale face with its encircling brown mane of singularly fine, dry, electric hair, had charmed me to such a degree that, in my feeling for her, I was no longer capable of distinguishing genuine attraction from what, on the other hand, may have been merely an obsession produced by youthful immaturity. Shapely and cold as a statue, agile as a snake, Angelica would appear and disappear from my sight at the end of the long, dark, tortuous, narrow passages in the house. It may be--who can tell?--that I had fallen in love with her simply because we both lived in the same house, and she, in a way, had in the end assumed the mysterious character of a living emanation symbolic of the spirit of that ancient abode.

I have said that the passages were dark and narrow; but my own room, by contrast, was light and spacious. The best thing about this room was the window that looked out onto the garden of an adjoining villa. How many times, in those days, did I get up from my desk and go and contemplate the garden below that window! To tell the truth, this garden had nothing unusual about it; what made it attractive to me was, fundamentally, the fact that it was always deserted, as though it had not been created for the inhabitants of the house but for the trees, the plants, the flowers that grew in it. By this I do not mean that it was overgrown or abandoned, but that the plants of every kind that filled it seemed to be living there happily, like privileged guests to whom the master of the house allowed the greatest possible independence, at the same time assuring them of all possible conveniences. And happy, indeed, they appeared, as I gazed at them from my window--the big leafy trees, the shrubs starred with red or white flowers, the rosebushes, the camellias, the beds of tulips. Or was it that I myself was happy and that, as I stood at the window, I could not help conferring my own happiness, by an unconscious caprice, on the garden as it lay plunged in silence, in light and in the warmth of the sun?

I was happy--of this I was conscious--above all because I was young; but I was also happy because I loved Angelica and spent the time I should have devoted to my studies in thinking up pretexts for meeting her. And what were these pretexts? They were of the sort that can occur to the mind of a solitary, inexperienced, ingenuous boy: going to the bathroom for a necessity of nature that did not exist; telephoning to a number that did not belong to anybody; asking for matches, for a newspaper, for a book that I did not need; ordering coffee or tea or camomile that I did not want; finally, when I felt more sure of myself, pretending to have found some sort of an object on the floor--a handkerchief, a powder compact, a purse--that in reality I had bought the day before, and taking it to the girl and asking her if by any chance it was hers. Naturally, these pretexts required a certain amount of time, first of all to be invented, then to be accepted by my own timidity and, finally, to be put into effect; and so my day was completely occupied, from morning till evening; and this, too, contributed to my happiness.

I would leave my room and venture through those dim, sinuous passages, walking between great bulging cupboards and miscellaneous pieces of furniture piled up as though in an attic; but I failed, invariably, to reach Angelica's room, because, all of a sudden, as if evoked, one might have thought, by the very fact of my quest, she would appear and ask me in a low voice, a curiously intimate, confidential voice: "Is there anything you want, Signor Giacomo?"

These encounters were so frequent that it even occurred to me sometimes that Angelica, too, was worrying and tormenting herself in her room for the same reasons for which I was worrying and tormenting myself in mine. And that she, too, was creating for herself pretexts for coming out into the passages and looking for me and meeting me. But it is true that she never went further than to inquire: "Is there anything you want, Signor Giacomo?" without (concluded on page 244)Wake Up!(continued from page 189) adding anything more--an ambiguous, flattering question, perhaps an entreaty, even, that seemed to be alluding to our relationship in a provocative way, as though what she meant was: "Do you want me, Signor Giacomo?"

Our encounters, moreover, were brief and bitterly unsatisfactory, being ruined by shyness and impatience. In fact, all we did was to look at each other, devouring each other with our eyes, seeking, it might have been thought, to impress thoroughly upon our memories the greatest possible number ofeach other's features, so as to take them back to our respective rooms and there gloat upon them at leisure. How many times did we meet during the day? I could not say; I know only that my life had become a continual coming and going from my room into the passages and from the passages back to my room. It was a tormenting, bitter, frustrated, anxious life, filled at the same time with hope and despair; and yet fundamentally, as I have said, a happy one. The happiness was the happiness of youth that feeds upon imagination and does not notice the poverty and insufficiency of real existence.

One afternoon, I left my room as usual and started walking in a determined fashion along the passage. I felt troubled to death, because the pretext for meeting Angelica was, this time, exceptionally transparent and important. I went some little distance down the passage, I turned the corner and, lo and behold, there, facing me, was Angelica. "Is there anything you want, Signor Giacomo?"

"I found this ring on the floor a few minutes ago. Is it yours?"

"A ring?"

I at once pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to her. I had bought it that morning: a gold hoop with a small brilliant and a small emerald; an inexpensive ring, but for me and, no doubt, for her, too, an engagement ring. She looked at it for a moment, then held out her long, pale, bony hand, its sharp nails varnished with a red that was almost black. "Yes, indeed, I had lost it. Please put it on my finger."

I said nothing. I was too overwhelmed to speak. I bent my head and slipped the ring on her finger. At once her hand closed upon mine, the nails thrusting into my palm with unsuspected force, like the claws of a frightened bird. In a low voice, Angelica said to me: "Come on, follow me." And thus, holding me by the hand, she led me from one passage to another and so to her room.

This was how a strange and wonderful period of my life began. We considered ourselves to be engaged; but it was an unusual engagement, unofficial, unknown to anybody except ourselves, at the same time chaste and more intimate than any sensual relationship. We had, in short, a secret; we were accomplices. But what sort of complicity was it? It could, perhaps, be most nearly compared with the true complicity of a conspiracy, in which people are accomplices against someone or something. We were accomplices against the world, which, if it had known of it, would inevitably have wrecked our relationship with its curiosity and its sympathy. It was agreed between us that nobody should know we were engaged, not even Angelica's mother, until the day we were married, which would be some years hence, as soon as I had obtained my degree.

In the meantime, I had started working again. Complicity with Angelica gave me great strength. I worked sitting in front of the open window, doggedly and persistently. It was springtime, and round my head, bent over my books, I could hear the hum of some wandering bee, I was conscious of the sharp scent of the flowers, from time to time a breath of wind would brush my cheek; but I did not lift my forehead. Work I must, so as to take my degree as soon as possible and marry Angelica. Only in the evening would I get up and look out of the window. Just as in the past I had conferred my own happiness upon the garden, so now I conferred my weariness upon it. I looked at the trees, motionless in the exhausted, stagnant evening air, at the graveled paths now half-hidden in shadow, at the flowers in the beds, their petals now all closed; and I said to myself that the garden, like myself, was happily weary of living, as one is weary of living when vitality is excessive and exuberant.

Into this happiness there began to creep, suddenly, a troublesome uneasiness. For some time, owing, no doubt, to the fatigue of my overstudious days, I had been having, regularly each night, a certain disturbing dream. It was not a nightmare; that is, there was nothing terrifying about it; nevertheless, it was worse than any nightmare on account of its--what shall I say?--its normality. This was the dream. I thought I was living in a rather large but modest apartment on the first floor of an ugly house, in a white-collar-workers' quarter, in a street full of parked cars and mean shops. A special kind of dreariness was noticeable in this apartment, the dreariness of places that were once occupied by a large family but the children have then married and gone away, and in the rooms, which were too numerous and full of tired, worn-out furniture, no one is left but the now elderly parents. In this place there were, indeed, two or three rooms that had been inhabited by our children and that no longer served any purpose; and we two, that is, my wife and I, were a couple of old people who, in effect, were together awaiting death.

The nightmare character of this dream lay in its normality, as I have said; that is, in the great precision of its details and, above all, in its perverse moderation. I saw everything: the rooms, the furniture, the street, the cars, the shops; but I saw them immersed in an intolerable atmosphere of everyday habit, as they are in real life. This disturbing feeling that I was not dreaming but was existing in an absolutely real world was accompanied by another, even worse, feeling: the feeling of the lack of vitality that goes with old age. Just as, in real life, I had been led to transferring my happy vitality to the garden that I saw from my window, so, in my dream, I seemed to recognize my own lack of vitality in the things among which I coldly and feebly vegetated. I would dream all this, then I would wake up and go at once to look at myself in the glass; and when I saw my brilliant, moist eyes, my vigorous, glossy hair, my fresh-colored cheeks, I would think: "How lucky, how lucky it's only a dream!"

All the same, this dream frightened me. Finally, one day when I was sitting with Angelica on the sofa in her room, I could not refrain from telling her about it, dwelling particularly upon the depressing character of normality and lifelikeness in its details. In the end, I asked her: "Doesn't it seem to you that this dream is worse than any nightmare? What d'you think?"

Her reply was unexpected. "My love," she said, "what you take for a dream is reality. I myself am a dream; haven't you yet realized that? I am the dream that repeats itself every night. In this dream, we are both young, weare engaged, we count on being able to get married. But in reality, we've been married for forty years, we've had three children, they've got married, in turn, and have gone away: We're old and we're alone. Wake up, touch your face, there you'll recognize your real age. Put out your hand on the sofa beside you; you'll feel, under your fingers, the shape of my body close to yours--how changed, alas, from what it was when you slipped the engagement ring on my finger!"

Celestina

We met at the university, where I was studying mathematics, she psychology. We went about together for a long time, then I declared my love and, to put it briefly, she agreed to become my wife. As soon as we were married, we went to live in the country. After about two years, our first child, our beloved Celestina, was born.

I remember perfectly well how it was that Celestina took her first steps. Until that day, she had remained on her zinc-covered stand, motionless even though not silent (she had a pleasing voice, a precise, subdued ticking); then, all of a sudden, as soon as we had attached the wheels to her, she started up and leaped onto the floor. My wife and I, clinging to each other, held our breath. Celestina went off in a determined manner toward the door, but she encountered a chair on her way and then stopped. For a short time she did not move, then a new thing happened: Celestina became angry. We heard a kind of tiny metallic roaring sound, her apparatus began frantically vibrating, she moved again, bumped violently, head on, against the chair, fell back and, in falling, more or less came to pieces: The floor all round her was now strewn with screws and nuts, with blades and wires and rivets. My wife and I rushed forward, put Celestina back on her stand and then spent four hours working to put her in order again. Gradually, as our work progressed, we became aware of a dense humming sound accompanied by an intense trembling: Celestina was thinking. What was she thinking about? We were soon to know. Scarcely, in fact, had we finished tightening the last screw when Celestina again leaped from the stand and rushed resolutely toward her enemy, the chair. This time, however, she stopped a short distance from it, remained motionless for a moment, then marched backward, circumvented the chair on the left side and finally proceeded triumphantly toward the door.

I have described this incident in detail because Celestina proved, on this occasion, that she possessed three important faculties in the highest degree: spirit of observation, memory and the capacity to organize her behavior. Thanks to the first of these faculties, she had observed the causes of her own discomfiture; thanks to the second, she had registered them; and, finally, the third had permitted her, on the basis of experience, to act in a suitable manner.

After this some years went by, filled--for us, anyhow--with the various sorts of progress made by our beloved little daughter. I was struck, above all, with the modesty of Celestina's alimentary needs. Upon what did Celestina feed? Being, in a way, a celestial creature, she was nourished upon the food of the angels: upon light. When the weather was fine, all we had to do was open the door of the pavilion where her stand was, and she would at once descend to earth and go and place herself right in the middle of a ray of sunshine. She would stay there, silent and still, letting her accumulators become gradually recharged, to the point of complete satiety. She would absorb light for three or four hours; and in her whole attitude there was, as it were, a grateful humility that moved me to tears. The simple effect of retroaction, it will be said, the mere, ordinary operation of a mechanism to conditioned acts. That may be so. Nevertheless, how can one fail to see, in this sunlight for which Celestina was so eager, a symbol of that wholly spiritual light that...? But never mind. If, on the other hand, it was raining, we would light a big film-studio lamp and Celestina would take her nourishment without moving from her stand. Strange to say, she obstinately refused to absorb light from neon tubes. After she had received her nourishment, Celestina would retire into the shade or into a dim, restful light. And that was the moment for games and calculations.

I would place a chessboard between myself and her; and we would play chess. Celestina was a relentless player, capable even of finishing off 20 games uninterruptedly, but endowed with more memory than imagination and, consequently, more careful not to repeat any wrong moves she had made than bold in inventing such new moves as might assure her of victory. Authoritative and convinced of her own infallibility, she was always determined to win; and more than once, seeing herself on the point of being checkmated, she broke off the game under the pretext that her accumulators had run down and that she must go and sit in the sun in order to absorb nourishment.

Apart from chess, Celestina was extremely good at solving puzzles, charades, riddles and crosswords; I would read them out to her from the puzzle pages of the weekly papers; and she, in the twinkling of an eye, would provide the solutions. Finally, with pencil and paper at hand, I would put to the test her talent for calculation; this was truly prodigious and might be said to increase every day. When only ten years old, Celestina was able, in a few minutes, to get the better of problems of enormous complexity that would have demanded the work of ten (concluded on page 224)Celestina(continued from page 190) mathematicians of my ability for the duration of several months. Thus, what with chess and puzzles and calculations, time flew by. And some years passed, in an intimacy that was profound, happy, enraptured and unsuspecting.

But everything, alas, comes to an end in this world. With puberty, Celestina changed character. Poor Celestina; nature was harassing her, but she did not know why she was suffering and so suffered twice over. Some evenings, on returning from the cinema and looking into her pavilion for the customary midnight kiss, we found her stand empty. We then searched for Celestina all over the house and garden, everywhere; and in the end, discovered her on the top of a little hill, absorbed in the contemplation of the plain spread out below her, immersed in the silent, silvery light of the moon. Or, again, there were times of inexplicable, persistent lack of appetite: Celestina would go for four or five days without taking any nourishment, keeping well away from the light, crouching in a dark corner, gloomy and furtive as a cockroach. It would then happen that she was more and more often the loser in our games of chess, that she was unsuccessful in solving puzzles, that she even made gross mistakes in her calculations. But above all--most distressing sign of all--Celestina did not notice her own mistakes, did not correct them, did not remember them. Instead, she kept on repeating them, over and over again, obtusely, pigheadedly. In a human, all-too-human way, Celestina, a prey to her own strange distress, had lost her memory.

At this point, my wife intervened. As a mathematician, I myself was inclined to attribute Celestina's collapse to some fault of construction; but she, as a psychologist, at once, I must confess, put her finger on the trouble. After trying in vain to shift Celestina's psychic obstruction by means of a few pushes and punches, as one does with a telephone coin box, my wife shut herself up with Celestina in the pavilion and questioned her at length. Finally, she came out with this disconcerting revelation: Celestina was neurotic, and her neurosis was due to a clear case of Electra complex. In other words--even though in an innocent and unconscious manner--Celestina had fallen in love with me, her father. "Your excessive and exclusive intimacy with her, year after year," concluded my wife, "was bound to lead to this. I ought to have foreseen it. Never mind. What we must do now is to take immediate steps to repair the situation." So I asked her what she thought we ought to do. She replied: "Find her a husband, at once, so that she may forget you and stop thinking about you."

To find a husband for Celestina: This seemed an easy matter; but soon quite a few difficulties revealed themselves. Celestina was not, as they say, "just anybody": Having grown up in cultured surroundings and being, from the academic point of view, very high-class, being also comfortably off, even if not exactly rich and accustomed to a refined way of living, what she needed was a husband who would be equal, if not superior, to herself.

After much research and discussion, we came to (he conclusion that in Italy, a country backward in the field of cybernetics, there existed no suitor worthy of Celestina. So we looked elsewhere, particularly in America, and at last we found someone suited to our needs. He was called Titac and lie lived in Chicago, where he had been born and had grown up. I will confine myself to giving a few facts, from which it will be possible to see what kind of person he was: length, 12 meters; height, 2 meters: 17,000 valves: 400 meters of wire; total extent of surface, 200 square meters. I said to my wife: "No Oedipus complex there, no neuroses. You'll see how, as soon as Celestina meets this young American, all her troubles will fade away at once, as if by magic."

So I wrote to the father, a well-known scientist, supplementing the proposal of marriage with all the relevant information; and I received a prompt reply: Celestina was expected; Titac had taken a fancy to her as soon as he saw her photograph. However, in view of the enormous weight and astounding complication of the prospective bridegroom, Titac's father was of the opinion that Celestina, who was lighter and simpler and smaller, must be the one to take the journey to America. I answered that this was perfectly just; and I took the step of ordering the local carpenter lo make a large padded case in which to put Celestina. At this juncture, the catastrophe occurred.

Celestina vanished. Her zinc-covered stand was empty, empty her pavilion: there was no trace of her in the garden, in the surrounding countryside, in the house. Or, rather, there was one trace, just a single but a significant clue--the simultaneous disappearance of our old, worn, antiquated water heater. And so, finally, the truth dawned upon us: Celestina, unknown to us, had started a love affair with the water heater, an individual of a rather passionate nature and prone to excessive overheating. Seeing that I intended to marry her off to Titac, she had fled with her lover.

The consequences of all this were obviously very distressing: the humiliating breaking off of the engagement to Titac; a scandal in the newspapers, which, goodness knows how, had come to learn of the affair; an anguished search for Celestina. Our daughter was now of age, so that we could not denounce the water heater for seduction and abduction of a minor, as we should have liked to do. All we could do was to start a search for the two lovers; and in the end, we found them. The place where they were discovered is significant and throws an all-too-crude light upon the psychology of the youth of today. It was not, in fact, in some beautiful spot, by the sea or in the mountains, that we found the couple; but, rather, in a squalid cemetery of derelict motorcars, just outside Rome, on the Via Cassia.

This is what the caretaker of the cemetery, a rough sort of man, perhaps, but plain-spoken, told us: "Seems they had run away together and he had raped her and she was engaged to another man. They came here, they seemed fond of each other, they hid themselves over there among all that scrap iron. But he wasn't well, he was old and full of infirmities; at his age, he oughtn't to have gone with anyone so young. Finally, he grew rusty and fell to pieces: and in the end, he was quite useless. They dismantled him and took away all the good pieces and left nothing but the carcass. As for her, I should think she had been in an interesting condition for quite a long time; perhaps that was why she ran away. She gave birth to a monster that, being born without accumulators, was incapable of absorbing light and died almost at once. You won't believe it, but the death of her friend and her child made no impression on her. In fact, she started almost immediately to lead a life that's positively shameful, especially when you think that she's a girl who had a good upbringing. You see that bend in the road down there? Well, she takes up her position there and stops the cars as they go past, when they slow down and change gear because of the curve. Ah, well, my dear sir, morals are a thing of the past."

Finally, we took Celestina and brought her home again. We put her back on her stand and my wife and I worked on her for two or three months. But the result of our efforts was disconcerting: Celestina recovered all her faculties of calculation and memory but has lost--or so, at least, it seems--the faculty of movement. Celestina never moves from her stand, she feeds exclusively upon artificial tight, she has lost all curiosity about the outside world. This reached such a point that finally I removed her now-useless wheels, thus reducing her to the state of a mere thinking organism. Besides, one never knows: We now have a new water heater, of the most modern type, young and sensitive. I would not wish Celestina to go and find him, one day when we are not at home, and to fall in love with him.

A Middling Type

I at once found myself at ease in my new home. It was a three-room flat, on the first floor of a modern block, in a quiet, respectable suburban quarter. My satisfaction was due, above all, to the conviction that the flat was not just any sort of a flat but was really mine, made in my own image and likeness, and consequently, it must be believed--since no one is exactly like anyone else--unique. I had spent a couple of months fitting it up, selecting every piece of furniture, every trifle, with extreme care. For a further two months, I had been contemplating these furnishings with the same untiring, rapt complacency with which I sometimes chanced to contemplate my face--it, too, being unique just because it was mine--in a looking glass.

Furthermore, as well as the flat, I also liked the house, which was neither too old nor too new, middle class, in a not too clearly defined style; and also the street, with its flowering oleanders and its shops on the ground floor, modern shops, with conspicuous signs and large windows: the tobacconist's, the hairdresser's, the perfumery, the delicatessen shop, the baker's, the stationer's. Right opposite my windows there was a flower shop. Through its window one could catch a glimpse of plants, of tall, slender vases full of flowers, of the jet of a small, decorative fountain. The florist was a pretty, dark girl, tall and shapely, with slow gestures and quiet movements, who did not look more than 25. She was alone; she would arrive in the morning, pull up the roller blind, would move about for a little as she arranged the flowers and would then wait for customers. For the most part, she stayed inside the shop, sitting behind the counter, reading comic-strip papers. But often she would appear in the doorway and hang about, looking at the street, in which, however, there was nothing to look at and nothing ever happened.

I immediately noticed the pretty florist, and since it was the beginning of September and all my friends were still on holiday and I spent most of my time at home, I ended by devoting a great deal of my time to her.

I was working at my desk, for I had to draw up an industrial report; but every ten minutes, I would get up and go and look at the flower shop. Down there was the girl, behind the counter at the back of the shop, her dark head bent over the comic strips. Or again she might be in the doorway, leaning against the doorpost. I would look at her for a little and then go back to work.

Finally, I had an idea: In order to attract the girl's attention, I would reflect a ray of sunlight onto her by means of a mirror. It seemed to me that this was an original, a truly new, idea. So, using a little pocket mirror, I started directing the sunlight at the flower shop. First the ray of light moved across the glass of the window, then onto the shop sign and, finally--like a piece of thread that after many efforts penetrates through the eye of a needle--it went through the narrow doorway and settled, like a caressing hand, upon the girl's bowed head. It paused for a little on her hair, then slithered down her bare arm, then reached the page of the comic paper and remained there, moving slightly from time to time. The girl went on reading for a short time, then raised her head and looked toward the door. Almost frightened by my own boldness, I retreated hastily back into my room.

But after a moment, I again rose and went to the window. The girl was standing in the doorway, her eyes fixed on the street. I focused a ray of sunlight and directed it onto her, raising it gradually from her feet and up over her body as far as her breast. Then, with sudden decision, I planted the spot of light on her face. This time she raised her eyes, saw me and smiled at me. I smiled, too, and made a gesture, as much as to say: "Come up, come up to my flat and pay me a visit." The girl hesitated and then made a sign with her hand, as if to say: "Yes, but later on." Filled with joy at so rapid a success, I pointed to the watch on my wrist and asked her: "When?" Again by means of gestures, she replied: "At half past twelve." It was now 11 o'clock. I waved to the girl, went back into the room, made a pirouette, rubbing my hands together, then went over to a looking glass, gazed at myself and gave myself a kiss.

I found it difficult to work and was looking at my watch every five minutes. From time to time, I got up and went over to the window: The girl was there, behind the counter, her head bent over her comic strips. At one moment, I watched her as she was choosing some roses for a woman customer: I observed her fine figure as she leaned forward, her strong, bare arm as it slipped cautiously among the flowers, took a rose, withdrew, was again stretched forward. I reflected then that she was truly a most attractive girl and that there was something very disturbing about the way in which she had so easily and so mysteriously accepted my invitation.

When it was 25 minutes past 12, I went for the last time to the window sill: The girl, in a slow, calm, stately manner, was coming and going about the shop, rearranging (continued on page 236)A Middling Type(continued from page 195) flowers. Then she came out and composedly, with three movements, lowered the roller blind. I saw her cross the street and then disappear as she entered the main door.

Feeling excited, I took up my position in the entrance hall, behind the door. I noticed with satisfaction that a large plant of the Ficus family, which I had bought the day before, made a very fine effect in the corner between the two doors. Moreover, I had had the same thought a little earlier as I cast an eye round the sitting room, which was all in the modern, Swedish style. The flat was elegant and original, and I was sure it would make a good impression upon the girl.

At last I heard the lift as it stopped with a jerk at the landing, and then there was the sound of the lift doors being opened and closed and. finally. that of heels on the floor outside. A brief silence and then the ring of the bell. In order not to give the impression that I was waiting behind the door, I went on tiptoe into the sitting room and then came back, making as much noise as possible, and opened the door.

I was a little disappointed. From a distance, she had seemed to me beautiful; close to, one could see that she was merely young and pleasing. She was dark, with a face that was slightly plump in the lower part, a big mouth, an aquiline nose and eyes that were large and black and bovine in expression. As she came in, she said, in a good-natured voice with a regional accent: "I ought not to have come. I've come just to welcome you, you see. We're neighbors; it was just to make your acquaintance."

"You must excuse me," I said, "but if I hadn't had the idea of the mirror, I don't really know how I could have got to know you."

I noticed that she shrugged her shoulders slightly. "At first," she said. "I thought it was the engineer. Then I realized it was you."

"What engineer?"

"The engineer who lived here before you came. He began in that way, too, by dazzling me with a mirror. But perhaps it was he who suggested to you that you might play this trick on me to attract my attention?"

"No, really, I don't know him."

"Sorry, but very often, you know, things do happen like that."

She walked in front of me, familiar and talkative; but in the doorway, she stopped. "Why, everything here is just as it was. You took the flat furnished, did you?"

This time, I thought for a moment before answering. It seemed to me that something had suddenly come between me and the girl, something extraneous, embarrassing and humiliating that I couldn't yet define. In the end, I said: "No, the place was empty; it was I who furnished it."

"Well, what a coincidence: Here in the entrance hall there always used to be a plant like this one. A little smaller, perhaps. It's a Ficus, isn't it?"

"Yes, it's a Ficus."

"The engineer thought the world of it. He explained to me that it had to be watered twice a week."

I wondered at this point whether, since the girl had noticed the beauty of the plant, I myself should not also provide her with information of the same sort, and I hesitated: I could not entirely exclude the idea of doing so. The girl went on: "I say, how curious! The engineer had this same little picture."

Annoyed, I remarked: "Abstract art looks all the same, but it isn't, really."

We went on into the sitting room. The girl clapped her hands with delight. "Why, the sitting room is exactly the same! The same furniture. Perhaps the arrangement is just a little different."

This time, I said nothing. The girl went and sat down on the sofa, crossing her legs and unbuttoning her coat over her ample bosom: She seemed very pleased, and it was clear that she expected me to start making love to her. I made a move to put a record on the record player, but then changed my mind and went over, instead, to the sideboard, where I had placed a bottle of aperitif and some glasses ready on a tray. But, again, I thought better of it and went and sat down opposite the girl. Then I said: "May I ask you some questions?"

"Yes, of course."

"Did the engineer, the first time you came here, put a record on the record player?"

"Yes, I think he did."

"And did he then offer you something, a liqueur, an aperitif?"

"Yes, he offered me a vermouth."

"And then, immediately afterward, he sat down beside you, didn't he?"

"Yes, he sat down, but why...?"

"Wait. And did he start making love to you?"

The girl was evidently somewhat disconcerted by this question. "But excuse me," she asked, "why d'you want to know these things?"

"Don't worry," I said, "I won't ask any indiscreet questions. Only about details of what might be called a peripheral kind. So he started making love to you, that's understood. And tell me"--I reflected a moment--"did he, in order to get things going and to be on confidential terms, did he not, at a certain moment, suggest that he might read the lines in your hand?"

The girl started laughing. "Yes, that's exactly what he did. But how did you come to guess it? You must be a bit of a wizard!"

I should have liked to reply: "That's what I was going to do myself," but I hadn't the courage. I looked at the girl and it seemed to me now that she was enveloped in a dangerous, impassable aura, like the aura that surrounds the poles that carry high-tension cables. I was. in fact, unable either to do or to say anything to her that had not already been done and said by the engineer. And I seemed to see that the engineer, in turn, was merely the first of an unending line of shaving mirrors in which, as far as the eye could see, I should behold only myself. At last I asked her: "Now tell me: Did the engineer resemble me?"

"In what sense?"

"Physically."

She gazed at me for quite a long time and then said: "Well, yes, in a way, yes. You're both of you middling types."

"Middling?"

"Well, yes, neither ugly nor good-looking, neither tall nor short, neither young nor old: middling."

I said nothing, but I looked at her, saying to myself with helpless, angry annoyance that the adventure, at this point, might be said to have evaporated: The flower seller was now, for me, taboo, and the only thing to do was to find a decent excuse to send her away. The girl became conscious of my change of mood and inquired in some alarm: "What's the matter with you? Is there something wrong?"

With an effort. I asked her: "In your opinion, are there a great many men like myself and the engineer?"

"Well, yes. You're part--how shall I say?--of the mass." I squirmed, and all of a sudden, the girl exclaimed: "Now I understand. You're offended because I told you you were a middling, ordinary type. Isn't that so?"

"Not so much offended," I replied. "Let's say--paralyzed."

"Paralyzed; why?"

"It's like this: It seems to me that I do what everyone does, and so I prefer to do nothing."

The girl sought to console me. "But you shouldn't feel paralyzed with me. Besides, I swear to you that I prefer men like you, who are not too original, who don't stand out from the crowd and about whom one knows in advance what they'll do and say."

"Well, I have work to do," I announced, rising to my feet. "Forgive me. but I have an urgent job that has to be finished in a hurry."

We went through into the hall. The girl did not appear too pained; she was smiling. "Don't be so angry," she said. "Otherwise, you'll really be behaving like the engineer."

"What did the engineer do?"

"When I told him. one day. that he was a man just like so many other men, ordinary, in fact, he got into a rage, just like you, and turned me out."

A man of power

He was sitting opposite me, behind the big desk--as much as 12 feet long, perhaps--of antique carved walnut. The room was immense, with red damask on the walls and a frescoed, vaulted ceiling. There was no furniture in it except his desk, his armchair and my chair. I looked at him: He was wearing a dark suit, with a dark tie and a white shirt; he gave the impression of a soldier in civilian clothes. On the desk were writing materials of all kinds: a leather writing pad, a fountain pen, various pencils, a scribbling block, a roller blotter; but these were all new, as though they had never been used. There were also two telephones and an internal telephone. The room had only one door, the one by which I had come in. He had kept me waiting, therefore, for about half an hour for some special reason, difficult to divine, and not because he was writing or receiving a visitor.

From the desk, my eyes went on to the man himself. I realized for the first time that he had an aquiline nose and slightly swollen cheeks. Strange, for I had never noticed this before; I thought he had a straight nose and flat cheeks. The aquiline nose, with its narrow nostrils and a small, aristocratic prominence in the middle, denoted authority and the will to command; the swollen cheeks, vanity. Suddenly I became aware of something else: When I had entered, he had received me standing up behind the desk but without shaking my hand. "As I was passing through," I said, "I thought I would come and see you. I thought it might give you pleasure to see an old friend again."

He looked at me for a moment in silence with his curious pale, unmoving eyes and finally said: "A pleasure, yes, it is always a pleasure to me to see you. But as for coming to see me here"--and he emphasized the "here" by a pause--"that's another matter. You did right to come if you have something to communicate to me, something to ask me, something to propose; but you did wrong if you came simply to look me up."

The voice was slow, emphatic, weary, as though to bring home to me that he was speaking to me merely out of courtesy. "Why?" I asked.

"Because this is my place of work and I cannot afford the luxury of receiving friends like this, simply to have a little conversation."

"I see, you're very busy."

He started laughing, with a strange laugh, partly polite and partly ironical, which left his eyes completely motionless. "No, I'm not very busy. In fact, for the moment, anyhow, I have nothing to do. But it's also true, in a way, that I'm extremely busy."

"I don't understand; are you busy or are you not busy?"

He assumed a reasonable, didactic tone in which I suddenly recognized his best quality of former days-- his lucid consciousness of his own manner of acting and his facility in translating it into clear argument. "I am busy doing what I was called to this position to do, and I am not busy, because, as I said, there is not much to do for the moment. But I am busy being what I am, yes, very busy."

"I'm sorry, but I still don't understand you."

He gazed at me for a moment, as though weighing the pros and cons of this conversation. Then he said: "And yet there's nothing obscure in what I'm saying. I have two things to do here: The first is what is called my work; the second, much more important, is the exercise of power."

"The exercise of power? I'm beginning to see...."

"It's time you did. Well, then, why is the exercise of power so much more important than the work? Because, whereas the work is an ordinary job of a bureaucratic kind that, fundamentally, does not concern me in any way and that might be carried out by anybody, the exercise of power, on the other hand, is something that affects me closely, that concerns me personally and, I am convinced, requires a precise vocation and special gifts to tackle it."

"And you have this vocation and these gifts--isn't that so?"

He looked at me, hesitated and then, once again, led on by his own self-knowledge as if by a mirage, gave way to his own kind of almost ingenuous sincerity: "I did not think I had them. I was convinced, on the contrary, that I was in no way cut out for power. Naturally, I knew that power existed, but I wrote it off, judging it from a moralist's point of view, as a thing devoid of real importance. A thing not to be taken into consideration, especially on the part of an intellectual. Then, once I was in this room, seated in this armchair, I discovered in myself gifts and a vocation hitherto unsuspected. And, above all, I understood."

"What did you understand?"

"I discovered that, at a certain level and in certain situations, work no longer counts, is no longer anything more than one aspect--and not even the most important--of the exercise of power. And that this exercise is, on the other hand, in itself, even by itself, even without the (concluded on page 208) A man of power(continued from page 196) accompaniment of a regular, proper job, an occupation, a profession."

He spoke with warmth and smiled at me with a victorious look, like a conjurer demonstrating and explaining the workings of his trick. I said, rather vaguely: "Oh, well, power is power, as we know."

"Tautological but exact," he commented with a smile. "Certainly, power is power. But let us be specific, please. In my case, what is power?"

I looked at him in surprise and repeated, like a parrot: "Yes, indeed, what is it?"

"Power," he began, in a soft, insinuating, didactic tone of voice, "is, in the first place, this dark suit, this dark tie, this white shirt. D'you remember my old trousers, my wind jackets? All that is finished."

"Power is in one's clothes? Quite right."

"Certainly: Quite right. And then power is this room in which I sit for six hours a day. Please observe the carpet, the hangings on the walls, the frescoes on the ceiling, this desk, my big chair, your small chair: All this is power."

"Clearly," I commented with conviction.

"My timetable is power. My arrival introduces--how shall I say?--a soul into a body that lies inert and apathetic. I am the soul of this part of the building. The soul of the anteroom where sits the usher who showed you in, of the adjoining room where sits my woman secretary. My soul, that is, my power, reaches on one side to the record office and on the other to the far end of the corridor. When I am not here, everything is suspended, is in expectation; when I am here, everything functions. That is power."

He was silent for a moment, and I had almost the impression that I could hear him panting with some kind of excitement. Then he resumed: "Inside this room, power lies in the two telephones that I can use both at the same time, holding one receiver in my hand and clasping the other between my cheek and my shoulder. It is also in this internal telephone by which I can communicate with the usher and with my secretary. It is in this writing pad, this inkstand, this scribbling block. It is true that I don't telephone, I don't communicate by the internal telephone, I don't write; but I could."

"Yes," I remarked, "these are, so to speak, the tokens of power, the significant signs. But power as an occupation--in what does that consist?"

He started laughing again, and replied: "Power as an occupation consists in transforming any sort of activity, including work, into manifestations of power."

"Explain."

"Well, for example: I leave this room to go to the bathroom, in order to fulfill a natural need. I go out with my head erect, my chest thrown out, my arms hanging at my sides, my eyes looking straight ahead. The usher, when he sees me, rises to his feet. There, then, is an act of the most ordinary, everyday kind transformed into a manifestation of power."

This time I, too, started to laugh. "It can't be denied," I said, "that, in spite of power, you've kept your sense of humor."

He laughed, too. "Very well," he said, "here's another example, in connection with work. You know what the firm is concerned with, that has its head office in this building. But the real work is entirely done by lower-grade functionaries. As one rises in the scale, the work becomes more and more a pretext, an opportunity for power; and finally, in the highest grades, it evaporates and disappears: Nothing is left but power, an end in itself."

"Give me an example."

"Well, I don't know. Let's suppose it has to be decided whether to open an office of ours in a certain foreign city. Is this office necessary, is it useful, is it functional, is it opportune? I don't know. I only know that the creation of this office allows power to manifest itself."

"And in what way?"

"That's simple: I draw up a report that is exhaustive without taking any definite line, then I have it typed and I ask for an appointment with the chairman. He receives me, I go in and explain the case and I ask him to read the report. He reads it, he comments upon it, I reply, we have a long discussion. Now, I ask you, which has been more important in this business, power or work? I say, power. In fact--does the chairman decide to create the office? He has exercised power. Does the chairman decide not to create the office? Equally, he has exercised power. Or again: Does the chairman demur, does he say neither yes nor no? For the third time, he has exercised power."

He looked at me, shook his head and smiled in a triumphant, ironical manner. "Yes," I said, "that's right. Nevertheless, this firm does not depend entirely on this sort of ritual. There are, there must be, practical results as well...."

"Of course there are. There are, but in the lower grades, as I said before, just as in the higher grades there is what you call the ritual of power. Take, for example, the meeting that the board of directors holds annually in the board room on the ground floor. The board of directors is, in reality, composed of distinguished persons who do not direct anything. Yet at the same time, they do direct. Just as I myself do not do anything here but at the same time am extremely busy. They direct, because without their names and without their backing, the practical results would not be reached. Now, I, like you, once thought that a board of directors of this kind, purely honorary, served no purpose. But after having been present at the meeting and having listened to the speeches made by some of the members--speeches, let me emphasize, of an absolutely formal kind--I changed my mind; or, rather, I discovered an immense territory whose existence I had not previously suspected."

He had become serious now. And I, in turn, asked him seriously: "And what is this territory?"

Gravely, he replied: "It is, to be precise, the territory of that magical, enchanted, esoteric fact that is power. The boundless territory in which actions acquire a significance very different from the significance they have according to common sense, precisely because they are performed in the exercise of power. You spoke of ritual. Well, for once, without intending it, you used the right term. It is, indeed, a question of ritual."

At this point, I interposed. "There is, however, a difference between you and the chairman, for instance. You, so to speak, are acting a part; that is, you are conscious of the transformation thai power introduces into things. But the chairman is not. He believes in power, and that's that."

He started laughing, in a slightly unpleasant, even though friendly, way. "Another error, another piece of naïveté. The chairman is by no means unconscious of it, and not only the chairman but even my secretary, even the usher. This is the point: Man always knows what he is doing, even when it may seem that he doesn't know."

I made as though to rise. "I understand," I said. "Then the only thing for me is to go away. It seems to me thai the little chat with a friend passing through is really impossible in this place of rites and ceremonies."

He rose, too, looked at me and then burst into a fit of amused, almost childish laughter. "All right, go away, then, I won't keep you. But in your case, too, the transmutation of values that goes with power has come about--and how! We've had a little chat, that's true; but this little chat, precisely because you have had it here, and with me, has been changed, as it progressed, into a manifestation of power."

"Of what power?"

"Why, of mine, of course!"