Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (20 page)

Erminia had seated herself at the piano, and everyone fixed their attention on her playing.
Maria only had eyes for her, even when she turned them vaguely towards daydreams of the unknown, for it was Erminia who was creating those visions and enticing her to pursue them.
The whole of the warm splendid ballroom reverberated with melodic sound.
It was one of those fatal moments when the heart swells within the breast, overpowering all reason.

Maria trembled from head to toe as she sank deeper into the armchair, forehead resting on hand, while Polidori whispered impassioned words into her ear, that caused the curls of the hair to quiver above the back of her lily-white neck.
The poor woman could no longer take in a
thing, neither the gleaming ballroom nor the throng charged with emotion, nor Erminia’s bright and piercing eyes, and she yielded to what she believed to be her destiny, drained of strength and glassy-eyed, like a dying woman.

‘Yes!
Yes!’ she murmured, with a sigh.

Polidori walked slowly away to allow her time to recover, and went off to smoke a cigarette in the billiard room.

The breeze from the lake kept the flames of the candelabras on her mantelpiece aflutter the whole night long, as she stared into the mirror for hours on end without seeing herself, her eyes staring, afire with the fever of it all.

Anxious and out ofbreath, she instinctively realized how embarrassing it was for the silence to continue.

‘I’m tired!’ she mumbled.

She was choking with emotion, and as she spoke she set off again along the path winding up the hillside.
He walked along beside her without a word; both were overcome by the strength of their feelings.
Finally they came to a kind of funeral monument.
Maria came abruptly to a stop, leant back against the rock wall with her face in her hands, and eventually burst into tears, whereupon he took her hands in his and, slavelike, implanted a gentle kiss upon them.

When at last he felt a lessening of the tremor of those poor little hands, he said softly, but in tones of ineffable tenderness, ‘Are you afraid of me, then?’

‘You don’t despise me for coming, do you?’ said Maria.

He pressed his hands together in a gesture of ardent passion and exclaimed, ‘I?
Despise you?
Never!’

Maria raised her troubled face, stared at him wide-eyed, and, with the tears still visible on her cheeks, she stammered out a series of jumbled and meaningless phrases.
‘It’s the first time!
I swear to you!
Do believe me!’

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Polidori impetuously.
‘Why do you say that to me?
To the one who loves you?
To the one who loves you so deeply!’

His words pounded away inside her like some living thing.
She held them tightly inside her breast with both hands, at the same time closing her eyes.
But at once they blazed forth on her cheeks, as if they had sped through the whole of her body in a flash, and set all her veins on fire.

‘No!
No!’ she kept saying.
‘It’s wicked of me!
It’s very wicked!
I made a mistake!
Do believe me, sir!
It’s not my fault; I made a mistake!
I’m a child, really, everyone says so, even my best friends.’ Poor woman!
She tried to smile, staring wildly this way and that.
‘I need to know you don’t despise me for coming!’

‘Maria!’ Polidori cried out.

Startled, she drew back abruptly, alarmed at the sound of her own name.

Polidori bowed his head towards her, and in humble, tender, loving tones he said, ‘How lovely you are!
And how lovely it is to be alive for moments like these!’

Maria passed her hands over her eyes and through her hair.
Confused and bewildered, she stumbled backwards, and like a machine she repeated over and over again, ‘If you only knew what an effort it was to get myself here, along the path I walk along every day.
I would never have believed it would need so much effort.
Honestly!
I would never have believed it!’ She smiled to bolster her courage, without daring to look in his direction, allowing the rock face behind her to take the weight of her body, pulling her gloves up over her arms, that were still shaking a little, and continuing to talk to herself like a child cheering itself up as it walks along the road in the dark.
‘Poor little me!
Yes, I know what a featherbrained person I am!
I have these mad ideas
about living in a world that perhaps is only a dream, a dream of a mind that’s diseased, if you like!
Sometimes I feel I’m being choked by all the reason of our world, I feel the need of fresh air, of climbing up high to breathe it in, where it’s more pure and closer to the blue of the sky.
It’s not my fault if I can’t accept how foolish I am, if I can’t resign myself to the world as it is, if I can’t understand what concerns other people.
Of course it isn’t my fault.
I’ve tried my best.
I’m a few hundred years behind the time.
I should have been born when knights errant were roaming the earth.’ Her hesitant smile had a sorrowful sweetness about it, as she yielded unawares to the magic that she herself had helped to create.
‘You’re so lucky to be able to live your life in your own way!’

‘I would simply like to live at your feet.’

‘Your whole life?’

‘My whole life.’

‘You’ll tire yourself out if you’re not careful,’ she gaily replied.
‘You must tire yourself out quite often!’ Maria spoke these words in as bold and confident a manner as she could manage.

Polidori found her charming in the embarrassment she displayed, but it was lasting too long for his liking.

At the very last moment before coming to meet him, as she was passing through the door, Maria had experienced all the conflicting emotions aroused by the lure of the unknown, the attraction of sin, the thrill of the fear that coursed through her veins with arcane, irresistible tremors.
She was gripped by a whole mass of contradictory feelings and ideas, of misgivings and impulses that had driven her to fling herself helter-skelter into the unknown, into a kind of somnambulistic trance, without knowing what exactly she was intending to do.
If Polidori had held out his arms to her on first catching sight of her, she would probably have beaten her head against the rock on which at this moment she was gently allowing herself to lean.
But now, reassured by seeing that envied and sought-after man at her feet, she derived a delicious sensation from the velvet-smooth moss that was caressing her back, just as the tender and passionate words he whispered were sweetly caressing her ears, and gently pervading the whole of her body with exquisite feelings of languor.
He was so good, so kind, so considerate!
He would not even dare to touch the tips of her fingers, being content gently to let her bathe in the ardent breath of his passion, which left him prostrate at her feet as though before an idol.
In all of this, there was no hint of transgression, it was just wonderful.
Polidori had gradually taken her by the hand which, all unawares, she had held out towards him.
He too was deeply and sincerely moved at that moment, and tried to gaze into her eyes with a look of inebriated longing.
She felt the flames of his longing but dared not raise her eyes, and the laughter died on her lips.
She attempted over and over again to withdraw her hand, but hadn’t the strength to do it, as though the sound of his words had lulled her, body and soul, into the sweetest of sweet dreams, transported her into a state of agonizing ecstasy.

In the attitude she had assumed, Polidori was unable to take his eyes off her as she stood there lost to the world, her arms quite still, her head bowed, her breast heaving with emotion, and finally, in an outburst of passion, he stretched out his trembling arms and exclaimed, ‘How beautiful you are, Maria, and how I love you!’

She raised herself up abruptly, looking stern and serious, as though she were hearing it said to her for the first time.

‘You know how deeply I love you, and for how long!’ he repeated.

She offered no reply, but arched her whole body backwards and lowered her head in distrust, knitting her brows and instinctively waving her arms as if trying to protect herself, her lips pale and tightly closed.
Then, suddenly, resting her eyes on his anguished features and meeting his gaze, she gave out a strangled cry and retreated to the entrance of the nearby sepulchral monument, white with terror, defending herself with outstretched arms against this passion which terrified her now that she had met it face to face for the first time and knew what it involved.

‘Please…!
Oh, please…!’ she murmured.

Beside himself, he implored her once again in an animated entreaty of delirium and love, ‘Maria!
Maria!’

‘No!’ she repeated in tones of bewilderment.
‘No…!’

Polidori stopped in his tracks, and passed a hand over his forehead and his eyes in a gesture of despair.
Then, in a voice now hoarse, he said, ‘You’ve never loved me, Maria!’

‘No!
No!
Let me go!’ she repeated, when already Polidori had stepped back.
‘Please…!
Oh, please…!’

Despite himself, Polidori shared the powerful emotion of this moment, and he too, like the poor ingenuous woman, was trembling all over.

‘You must listen,’ she said, utterly convulsed.
‘We’ve done wrong!
I swear it was wrong of us!
I swear it, I swear it.
We’ve done wrong…’ She felt as if she were about to faint.

At that moment, they suddenly heard a noise among the trees, and the sound of someone’s footsteps stopped no great distance away, as if the person was hesitant to go on.

‘Maria!’ called a voice so perturbed that neither of them recognized it.
‘Maria!’

Polidori, having instantly become his normal self again, took Maria by the arm and pushed her firmly towards the path in the direction from which the voice was coming, and disappeared in a flash in the maze of the burial ground.
On reaching the path, Maria found herself face to face with Erminia, likewise pale in the face, who was making a strenuous effort to hide her concern, and wanting to explain something to her, with an air of indifference.
Maria looked her between the eyes with a strange expression.

‘What is it?’ she asked simply, in a hollow voice, after what seemed like an eternity.

‘Ah!
Maria…!’ Erminia replied, throwing her arms round her neck.

And that was all.
Walking side by side, they made their way back, heads bowed, without uttering a word.
But as the hotel came into view, they both felt the need to put on a brave face.

‘Lucia told me you’d gone for a walk in the garden,’ said Erminia, ‘and that gave me the idea of doing the same, with the excuse of coming to look for you.’

‘Thank you!’ Maria replied, simply.

‘But it’s beginning to get too late for taking a walk.
The sun’s already hot.’

Maria had taken such a strong touch of the sun, in fact, that she had been dazzled and stunned by it.
It had left her feeling utterly shaken and confused.
At times she could be found clasping her hands tightly
together, as if to make sure they were really her own, or to find something there, some trace of what had happened, and she would close her eyes in a sort of trance.
Whenever people stared at her, and all eyes were cast inquisitively in her direction, or simply those of her friend, her face would turn a bright crimson.
She stayed out of sight in her apartment as much as she could, so much so that many people thought she had left.
The mere sight of Erminia would cause her to knit her brows, and a sort of cloud would come over her features.
Yet she had enough savoir-faire to be able to conceal to some extent whatever it was she was feeling.
Erminia, who was not taken in by it all, felt truly sorry for her.

‘I’m still your one and only Erminia, you know!’ she would say whenever she got the chance, taking Maria’s hands lovingly into her own.
‘I’m still your Erminia, the same as I always was, and always will be!’

Wrapped in thought, Maria gave her a gentle hint of a smile.

‘You’re wrong, you know!’ said Erminia.
‘You’re mistaken…!
You’re mistaken, if you think I don’t love you as much as ever!’

She always, in fact, displayed much motherly concern for her Maria, a concern which often irritated the other woman, as though it were a way of keeping her under discreet and affectionate supervision.

One day Erminia took her by surprise as she was starting to read a letter, and simply asked her whether it was from her husband.
The question was so ill-timed that Maria almost blushed, as though she were on the point of telling a lie.

‘No, my husband doesn’t spoil me that much!
He’s too busy.’

‘Oh, yes, of course, he’s too busy!’ Erminia repeated, without taking in the irony of her reply.
‘Terribly busy.
The poor man’s up to his neck in his affairs.’

‘What do you mean?
He lives for his business.
It’s his one and only passion.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Erminia asked, fixing her with those big, knowing eyes of hers.

‘But of course!’ Maria replied, a smile hovering at the corners of her lips.
Then she added, by way of a corrective, ‘I have no reason to be jealous, though.
My husband never gambles, never spends his time in
cafés, never goes hunting, never goes riding, never reads anything but the prices on the stock exchange.
And that’s the honest truth!’

‘Yes, I know.
You are the only woman he loves!’

Maria bowed her head and forced herself to smile.
For a while she sat without saying a word, and then, in a regretful tone of voice, ‘You’re right.
I’m not worthy of him!’

‘No, that isn’t the point.
You’re a spoilt little woman, with a cracked little brain, that gets certain things wrong and doesn’t see some others.
Your husband’s only fault is not to have made you realize how deeply he loves you.’