Zeno's Conscience

My mother-in-law was still an attractive woman during the era of my first visit. Her understatedly expensive style of dressing was elegant, too. She was all gentleness and harmony. Thus, my own in-laws provided me with a paradigm of unity between husband and wife as I had imagined it should be. They were extremely happy together, he always doing the articulating, and she smiling a smile that expressed consent and compassion all at once. She loved her great big man, and it seems he had won and kept her devotion with his business acumen. He did not interest her, but she was bound to him by a sincere admiration, an admiration I shared and hence readily understood. The abundance of energy he brought to so limited an environment, a little cage with but one product and two adversaries  (his two employees) among which new combinations and alliances were constantly being born and uncovered, enlivened life in marvelous ways. He told her all about his deals and she was so well-bred that she never gave him any advice, since she worried this might irritate him. He needed this silent support and occasionally ran home to deliver a soliloquy, convinced he was going home to solicit his wife’s advice.

It was no surprise to me when I found out that he had betrayed her, that she knew, and bore him no grudge over it. I had been married a year when one day Giovanni told me highly agitatedly that he had lost a piece of correspondence that mattered intensely to him, and he wanted to look through some papers he had left in my care in the hope that it might turn up among them. Instead, a few days later he told me completely contentedly that he’d found it right in his own briefcase. “Was it from a woman?”  I asked, and he nodded yes, feeling pleased with his good fortune. Later, one day when I was being accused of having lost some papers, in my defense I told my wife and mother-in-law that I wasn’t lucky enough to have the kind of good fortune particular to my father-in-law, whose correspondence reappeared in his briefcase all by itself. My mother-in-law began  laughing so ardently that I had no doubt it was she who had put the letter back where it came from. Evidently, this was not an important issue in their relationship. We all have our own ways in love, and theirs, in my opinion, was by no means the most stupid.The lady of the house greeted me with warm courtesy. She apologized for having to bring along little Anna, who had her own quarter of an hour when she refused to be left with anyone else. The little girl scrutinized me with her serious eyes. When Augusta came back and sat down on the small sofa directly beside the one where Signora Malfenti and I were sitting, the little one went to stretch out across her sister’s lap, and she observed me from there the rest of the time, with a perseverance that charmed me, up until I found out what thoughts were circling in that little head.

The conversation was not immediately very stimulating. The lady of the house, like all well-bred people, was fairly boring on a first meeting. She also asked too many questions about the friend whom we all pretended had given me an introduction in their home and whose Christian name I could not even recall. 

Eventually Ada and Alberta came in. I could breathe once more: they were both beautiful and introduced into that salon the light that had until then been missing. Both were brunette, tall and slender, but still very different from one another. I was not faced with a difficult choice. Alberta was then not much over seventeen years old. Even though she was a brunette, she had, like her mother, a rosy and delicate complexion that augmented the youthfulness of her appearance. Ada, on the other hand, was already a woman, with her serious eyes in a face powdered somewhat bluish in order to seem fashionably pale, and her thick curly hair austerely and elegantly arranged. 

It is hard to determine the mythical origins of a sentiment that later grew so violent, but I am certain that in my case the so-called coup de foudre was not there with Ada. In place of the bolt of lightning there was, however, the instant conviction that this was the woman I needed and who would guide me to moral and physical well-being  through holy matrimony. When I look back on it, it seems surprising that there was no bolt of lightning but only that conviction instead. It is well known that we males do not look for the same qualities in a wife that we alternately adore and despise in a lover. It seems, therefore, that I did not at first see either how graceful or quite how beautiful Ada was, but instead my fascination with her lay in admiring the other qualities I attributed to her, such as seriousness and vivacity -- in short, the qualities I valued in her father, only somewhat mitigated. Given that at the time I believed (just as I still believe) that I was not mistaken to think Ada possessed those qualities as a young woman, I still judge myself an astute observer, but merely a rather blind one.