PSYCHO-ANALYSIS

May 3, 1915.

I have finished with psycho-analysis. After practising it assiduously for six whole months I find I am worse than before. I have not yet told the doctor, but nothing will make me change my mind. Yesterday I sent to say that I was prevented from coming, and I shall let him expect me for a few days. If I could be sure of laughing at him without getting into a rage, I should not mind seeing him again. But I am afraid I should end by assaulting him.

Since war broke out, this town has become more tedious than usual, and to fill up the time which I used to give to my treatment, I have returned to my beloved notebooks. I had not written a word for a year, obeying the doctor in this as in everything else; for he asserted that during the cure I must not examine myself except in his presence, as any self-examination which was not controlled by him would only strengthen my resistances, and prevent my being able to give myself up completely. But now I am more unbalanced and in worse health than ever, and I think that writing may help to work off the mischief that the treatment has done me. Anyway I am certain that this is the only way to give prominence to a past which it is no longer painful for me to dwell on, and to banish the hateful present as quickly as possible.

I had abandoned myself to the doctor with such entire confidence that when he told me I was cured I believed him absolutely, and gave no credence to the pains which still continued to torment me. I said to them: “You are not really there!” But now I can doubt no longer. They really are there. The bones in my legs have turned into sharp fish-bones which wound my muscles and my flesh.

But I should not mind that so much: that is not the reason I am giving up the cure. If, during the hours of self-examination which I spent with the doctor, I had continued to make new discoveries and to experience fresh sensations, I would never have given it up, or at least I would have waited till the end of the war which puts a stop to all my other activities. But now that I have seen through it, and know that it is nothing but a stupid illusion, a foolish trick which might take in an hysterical old woman, how can I any longer endure to be in the company of that ridiculous man, with his would-be penetrating eye, and the intolerable conceit which allows him to group all the phenomena in the world round his grand new theory? I am going to employ my free time in writing as I please. And, to begin with, I shall write the story of my cure. All sincerity had disappeared between me and the doctor; now I breathe again. I am no longer under constraint. I have no longer got to try to believe, nor to pretend to believe if I don’t. I forced myself to be cringingly subservient to him just in order to hide what I was really thinking, and that encouraged him to invent some fresh monstrosity every day. I ought to be cured, for they have found out what was the matter with me. The diagnosis is exactly the same as the one which Sophocles drew up long ago for poor Œdipus: I was in love with my mother and wanted to murder my father.

I did not even get angry. I listened enraptured. It was a disease which exalted me to a place among the great ones of the earth; a disease so dignified that it could trace back its pedigree even to the mythological age! And I don’t feel angry, even now that I sit here alone, pen in hand. I can laugh at it whole-heartedly. The surest proof that I never had the disease is that I have not been cured of it. This proof should surely convince the doctor himself. He need not worry; his words have not been able to spoil the memories of my youth. I have but to close my eyes and immediately there rises up before me my love for my mother, and the great respect and affection I felt for my father.

And then the doctor attaches too much importance to those confessions of mine, which he refuses to give back so that I may look at them again. My God! He has only studied medicine, and so he has no idea what writing in Italian means to us who talk dialect but cannot express ourselves in writing. A written confession is always mendacious. We lie with every word we speak in the Tuscan tongue! If only he knew how we tend to talk about things for which we have the words all ready, and how we avoid subjects which would oblige us to look up words in the dictionary! That is the principle which guided me when it came to putting down certain episodes in my life. Naturally it would take on quite a different aspect if I told it in our own dialect.

The doctor confessed to me that during the whole of his long practice he had never met with such violent emotion as I displayed before the images which he believed himself to have suggested to me. That was why he was in such a hurry to say I was cured.

And I did not simulate that emotion; it was really one of the strongest I have ever felt in my life. I was bathed in perspiration whilst creating the images, and in tears when I recognised them. The idea of being able to live again one day of innocence and inexperience gave me inexpressible delight. It supported me and gave me courage for months and months beforehand. Was it not like the miracle of plucking in October the roses of May? The doctor himself assured me that the image in my memory would be clear and complete, so that it would be another day added to my life. The roses would have all their fragrance, even perhaps their thorns.

And by dint of pursuing these memory-pictures, I at last really overtook them. I know now that I invented them. But invention is a creative act, not merely a lie. My inventions were like the phantasies of fever, which walk about the room so that one can survey them from all sides and even touch them. They had the solidity, the colour and the movement of living things. My desire created these images. They existed only in my brain and in the space into which I projected them; I felt the air, I saw the light that was in this space, and even its hard corners, just as in any other space that I have ever walked through.

When I fell into that dream-state which was to aid in creating the illusion, and which was probably only a mingling of great energy with extreme inertia, I thought my dream-pictures really were an actual reproduction of the past. I might have suspected at once that they were not, because directly they had vanished my memory of them was free from any excitement or agitation. I remembered them as one remembers an event one has been told by somebody who was not present at it. If they had been actual reproductions, they would have continued to move my tears or laughter as they had done when I first saw them. The doctor noted everything down. He said:

“We have had this, we have had that,” though we had really had nothing but graphic signs, mere skeletons of images.

I was persuaded into the belief that it was really my childhood I was evoking, because the first picture placed me in a relatively recent epoch, of which I still retained a pale memory that the image seemed to confirm. There was one year in my life during which I was already going to school, while my brother had not yet begun; and the hour I evoked seemed to belong to that year. I saw myself coming out of the house one sunny morning in spring, and walking through the garden on the way down to the town, on and on, with my hand in that of our old servant Catina. My brother did not appear at all in this dream-scene, but he was the hero of it. I thought of him so happy and free at home, while I had to go to school. I went there with a dragging step, and with anger in my heart, and felt as if I wanted to cry. I only saw one of those walks to school, but the bitterness in my heart told me that I should have to go to school every day, and that every day my brother would stay at home—for ever and ever. Whereas actually I believe that my brother, who was only a year younger than me, soon after went to school too. But at that moment the truth of my dream seemed to me indisputable. I was condemned eternally to go to school, while my brother was allowed to stay at home. As I trotted along beside Catina I counted up how long my torture would last: Till midday! While he is at home! And I remembered that on other days, whenever I had been scolded at school, or threatened with punishment, I had always thought, “They can’t touch him.” It was an extraordinarily realistic vision. Catina, whom I knew to have been short, seemed to me tall on that occasion, because I was so little. She had always seemed immensely old; but then children always think grown-up people are old. On the way to school I also saw in my dream the curious little columns that used, at that time, to border the pavements in our town. I was born early enough to have seen those little columns even when I was quite grown up, in the centre of the town, before they were removed. But in the street I walked along that day with Catina there were none left almost before I had outgrown my childhood.

My faith in the authenticity of these images was not shattered even when, stimulated by the dream, my sober memory began to evoke other details of that period; of which the chief was that my brother envied me too, because I went to school. I was sure that I had been conscious of this, but it was not at first enough to throw suspicion on the truth of my dream. Later on it deprived it of every vestige of truth; there certainly had been jealousy, but in my dream it had got attached to the wrong person.

My second vision carried me back also to a comparatively recent date, though earlier than the first. I saw a room in our house, but I don’t know which, for it was larger than any that is there in reality. The curious thing is that I saw myself shut up in that room, and was at once aware of a fact which the vision alone could not have revealed to me: the room was a long way off from another room in which my mother and Catina used to sit. Also I had not yet begun going to school.

The room was quite white, indeed I had never seen such a white room, nor one so entirely flooded with sunlight. Could it be that the sun was really shining through the walls? It must have been high in the sky, but I was still in bed with a cup in my hand from which I had drunk up all the caffelatte; I was going round and round the empty cup with my spoon, trying to get out the sugar. There came a point when I could not get any more out with the spoon, and then I tried to reach the bottom of the cup with my tongue. But I was unsuccessful. I ended by sitting with the cup in one hand and the spoon in the other, watching my brother who was in a bed next to mine, still busy drinking his caffelatte, with his nose buried in the cup. When he at last raised his head I saw his face all wrinkled up in the sun, which shone full on it, while mine, for some reason or other, was in the shade. His face was pale and slightly disfigured by a protruding jaw. He said:

“Will you lend me your spoon?”

Then I noticed for the first time that Catina had forgotten to give him a spoon. I replied without the slightest hesitation:

“Yes, if you will give me a piece of your sugar in return.”

I held my spoon up, to enhance its value. But at once I heard Catina’s voice in the room, saying:

“For shame! You little Jew!”

Fright and shame brought me back with a start to the present. I should have liked to argue with Catina, but she, my brother and I—that tiny, innocent little Jew—plunged together into the abyss and disappeared.

I was sorry to have felt so much ashamed as to have destroyed the image I had built up so laboriously. It would have been much better if I had quietly given my brother the spoon gratis, and not tried to discuss that bad action which was probably the first I had ever committed. Perhaps Catina would have called in my mother to punish me, and so I should have seen her again at last.

I did see her a few days later, or imagined that I did. I ought to have realised at once that it was an illusion, for the image of my mother, as I had evoked it, bore too much resemblance to the portrait I have over my bed. But I must confess that in that vision of her my mother behaved like a living person.

The sun! the sun! dazzling sunlight! From the picture of what I thought to be my youth, so much sun streamed out that it was hard for me not to believe in it. Our dining-room in the afternoon. My father has come home and is sitting on the sofa beside my mother, who is printing initials in indelible ink on a lot of white linen scattered all over the table at which she is sitting.

I am under the table playing with some marbles. I move nearer and nearer to mamma. I probably want her to join in my game. Suddenly I seize hold of the linen which is hanging down from the table, in order to pull myself up by it; and now a disaster happens. The bottle of ink falls on my head, soaking my face and my clothes and mamma’s skirt, and leaving a slight stain on papa’s trousers. My father lifts his leg to give me a kick....

But I got back in time from my long voyage and found myself safely here, grown-up and old. I must confess that the threatened punishment positively hurt me, and immediately afterwards I felt sorry to think that I had not been there to see mamma’s protecting gesture, which I know must have followed. But who can stop those pictures, once they have taken flight through time, which never before had seemed so much like space? At least I thought so while I still believed in the authenticity of the pictures. Now alas, to my sorrow I believe in them no longer, and know that it was not the pictures which fled, but my eyes from which a veil was lifted, so that they looked out again on real space where there is no room for spirits.

I will describe some visions which came to me another day, and which the doctor regarded as so important that he declared I was cured.

In the state between sleep and waking into which I had sunk I had a dream that was fixed and unmoving as a nightmare. I dreamt of myself as a tiny child, only to see what a baby’s dreams are like. As it lay there, its whole small being was filled with joy. Yet it was lying there quite alone. But it could see and feel with a clearness with which in dreams one sometimes perceives quite distant objects. The baby, who was lying in a room in my house, saw, God knows how, that on the roof there was a cage, built on solid foundations, without doors or windows, but filled with a gentle light, and pure, perfumed air. And the child knew that he alone could reach that cage, and that he need not move to get there, for the cage would come to him. In it was only one piece of furniture, an arm-chair on which was seated a beautiful woman, perfect in shape and dressed in black. She had fair hair, great blue eyes and exquisitely white hands; she wore patent leather shoes on her feet, which shed a faint reflexion from under her skirt. She seemed to me to be one indivisible whole in her black dress and patent leather shoes. It was all part of her. And the child dreamed of possessing that woman, but in the strangest manner; he was convinced that he would be able to eat little bits off her at the top and the bottom!

Looking back on it now I am surprised that the doctor who professed to have read my manuscript so attentively, was not reminded of another dream I had had before going to see Carla for the first time. When I thought of it some time later, the dream I have described seemed to me exactly the same, with slight variations which made it more childish.

But the doctor took everything carefully down, and then said with a rather sly air:

“Was your mother fair and good-looking?”

This question surprised me, and I replied that so was my grandmother too. But from his point of view I was completely cured. I opened my mouth wide to rejoice in his rejoicings, and listened meekly to his prescription: no more self-examination, no more analysis, no more meditation on the past, but a thorough and gradual re-education.

From thence onwards those sittings became a torture to me, and I went on with them only because I have always found it as difficult to stop once I am in motion, as to start when I am at rest. Occasionally, when he said something altogether too wide of the mark, I ventured mildly to object. It was by no means true, as he assumed, that every word and every thought of mine were criminal. That made him stare. I was cured, and I refused to admit it. It was sheer blindness! He had shown me that I had wanted to carry off my father’s wife—my mother!—and I would not allow that I was cured. It was unheard-of obstinacy. However the doctor admitted that I should be more completely cured when I had finished my re-education, and had accustomed myself to look on such things as the desire to kill my father and possess my mother as the most innocent things in the world, for which one need feel no remorse, since they often cropped up in the best families. After all, what harm could it do me? One day he told me I was like someone recovering from an illness who has not yet got accustomed to doing without fever. Only have patience! I should get used to it in time.

He felt that he had not won me completely, and besides re-educating me he went back to the cure from time to time. He tried me with dreams again, but I had no more authentic ones. Tired at last of waiting, I ended by inventing one. I should never have done it if I could have foreseen the difficulties attending my invention. It is not easy to stammer a few words as if one were half-asleep, to be covered with perspiration or grow pale, without betraying oneself; to go crimson from the effort one has made, and not to blush! I talked as if I were seeing the woman in the cage again, and as if I had persuaded her to put one of her feet through a hole which had suddenly appeared in the wall of her cell, so that I might suck it and eat it. “The left one, the left one!” I murmured, adding a singular detail which should make it more like the dreams that had gone before. I thereby showed that I had grasped perfectly the disease which the doctor insisted on my having. The infant Œdipus was just like that; he sucked his mother’s left foot, leaving the right one to the father! In the imaginative effort I made to deceive the doctor I almost succeeded (and this is no contradiction) in deceiving myself too, so that I could actually taste that foot. It made me feel quite sick.

The doctor could not have been more eager than I was myself, that I should continue to see those pictures of my childhood, whether genuine or not, which had come to me spontaneously, without my needing to invent them. As they would no longer come when I was with the doctor, I tried to evoke them away from him. There was a danger of my forgetting them, as I was by myself, but then I was not hoping to be cured by them! I wanted to see once more in December the roses of May. I had seen them once; why should they not come again?

I found solitude sufficiently boring, but at last something came which for a while took the place of my visions. I thought I had made an important scientific discovery. I suddenly felt called to complete the physiological theory of colour. My predecessors, Goethe and Schopenhauer, had never dreamed how far one might go simply by a skilful arrangement of the complementary colours.

I must tell you that I spent my time in my study, lying on a sofa facing the window, from which I could see a stretch of the sea, and the horizon. One evening, when the sun was setting and the sky was broken by clouds, I lay there a long while watching a white cloud take on a marvellous shade of pure tender green. The clouds in the west were fringed with red, but a pale red, bleached by the white rays of the sun shining directly upon it. The light dazzled me, and after a while I closed my eyes. Then it was clear to me that all my attention and love had been given to that shade of green, for its complementary colour was produced on my retina, a brilliant red which had nothing to do with the luminous, but pale red of the sky. I gazed in enchantment at the colour which I had myself brought into being. My great surprise came when I opened my eyes again, for then I saw that flaming red spread over the whole sky and cover up my emerald green, so that for some time I was unable to see it. So I had actually found a way of painting nature! I naturally repeated the experiment several times. The strange part was that I had actually endowed the colours with movement. When I opened my eyes again, the sky would not at once take on the colour from my retina. There was a moment’s hesitation during which I could just detect the emerald green from which the red had sprung, and which seemed to have been destroyed by it. It emerged now from within and spread in all directions like a giant conflagration.

When I had convinced myself of the accuracy of my observations, I carried them to the doctor, hoping to animate our tiresome sittings a little. The doctor polished me off by saying that my retina had become ultra-sensitive from so much nicotine. It was on the tip of my tongue to reply that in that case the visions which we had regarded as a reproduction of events of my childhood might also have been due to the same poison. But that would have betrayed the fact that I was not yet cured, and he would have tried to induce me to begin again from the beginning.

But the idiot did not always treat me as if I was poisoned. That is evident from the method of re-education adopted by him to cure me from what he called my smoking-disease. This is what he said: smoking did not hurt me at all, and if I only could persuade myself that it was harmless it would really become so. Then he went on to say that now that my relations with my father had been brought to light and judged by my adult consciousness, I should be able to see that I had adopted that vice merely in order to compete with my father, and had attributed a poisonous effect to tobacco because of my secret conviction that he would punish me for attempting to compete with him.

I left the doctor’s house that day smoking like a Turk. He wanted to make an experiment, and I lent myself to it with enthusiasm. I smoked without ceasing, all day long. This was followed by a sleepless night. My chronic bronchitis had broken out again, of that there could be no doubt; the spittoon bore witness.

Next day I told the doctor I had smoked a great deal and that it no longer did me any harm. He regarded me with a complacent smile and I could guess from his expression how proud he felt of himself. He proceeded with my re-education in quiet confidence, and the certainty that every sod he stepped on would eventually bear fruit.

I remember very little of that re-education. I submitted to it, and every time I left his room, shook myself like a dog coming out of the water. Like the dog I remained wet, but was never drenched.

But I remember my indignation on hearing my tutor state that Dr. Coprossich was right in addressing to me the words that had so roused my indignation. Was it true then that I deserved the blow which my father aimed at me just before he died? I don’t know if that was one of the things he said, but I distinctly remember him saying that I hated old Malfenti, whom I had substituted for my father. There are so many people who think it impossible to live in the world without a certain amount of affection; but I, according to him, was quite lost without a modicum of hatred. I wanted to marry one or other of his daughters, it did not matter which, because all I needed was to see their father in a position where I could reach him with my hatred. I did my best to dishonour the family I had married into, so far as it lay in my power; I was unfaithful to my wife, and, if I had been able, it was clear that I would have seduced Ada and Alberta. Of course I am not attempting to deny this, and it even made me laugh when the doctor, in saying it, put on an air of Christopher Columbus discovering America. All the same I think he must be the only person in the world who, hearing that I wanted to go to bed with two lovely women, must rack his brain to try and find a reason for it!

I found it still more difficult to bear what he felt it necessary to say about my relations with Guido. He had heard from my own account how much I disliked Guido on first making his acquaintance. According to him I never ceased to do so, and Ada was quite right in regarding my absence from his funeral as a final manifestation of my dislike. He quite forgot that I was at that very moment engaged in my labour of love to save Ada’s fortune, and I did not deign to remind him of it.

Apparently the doctor had made some inquiries about Guido on his own account. He insisted that as Ada had chosen him it was impossible he should have been what I had described. He discovered that an enormous timber-yard, quite close to the house where he practised his psycho-analysis, had belonged to the firm of Guido Speier & Co. Why had I never mentioned it?

If I had mentioned it, it would have added a fresh complication to my already very difficult statement. The fact that I omitted it is only another proof that no confession made by me in Italian could ever be complete or sincere. There are a vast number of different kinds of wood, which in Trieste we call by various barbaric names, taken from our own dialect, from Croatian, from German, and sometimes even from French (zapin for instance, which does not with us only mean sapin). Who would have provided me with the necessary vocabulary? Was I, at my age, to enter the employ of a Tuscan timber-merchant? Besides, that timber-yard belonging to the firm of Guido Speier & Co. showed no profits whatever. And then there was nothing for me to say about it, because it was always in a stagnant condition, except when thieves came and made the wood with barbaric names fly through the air as if it was destined to be made into tables for experiments in psychic research.

I suggested to the doctor that he might get some information about Guido from my wife, from Carmen and also from Luciano who has now become a respected merchant. I know for a fact that he did not apply to any of them, and can only suppose that he abstained from fear that his whole edifice of false charges and suspicions would crumble, when confronted with the facts. I wonder why he took such a violent dislike to me. He is probably also a hysteric, who avenges himself for having lusted after his mother, by tormenting innocent people.

In the end I felt quite worn out by this incessant duel with the doctor whom I was paying. I don’t think those dreams were very good for me, and the freedom to smoke when I liked gave me my final coup de grâce. I had a happy idea: I paid a visit to Dr. Paoli.

I had not seen him for a good many years. He had grown rather grey, but his spare figure was as upright as ever, and he had not put on any fat. He still looked at things with a caressing air. I suddenly realised why he always makes that impression. I think it is that he enjoys observing things, and he observes the beautiful and the ugly with the same satisfaction with which he might caress someone he loved.

I went to him with the intention of asking him whether he thought I ought to go on with psycho-analysis. But when I found his cold, penetrating gaze fixed on me, my courage failed. Perhaps he would think I was merely making a fool of myself, at my age, to be taken in by such quackery. I hated keeping silent about it; it is true that it would have simplified my position very much if Dr. Paoli had forbidden me to go on with psycho-analysis, but I could not long have endured being caressed by those great eyes of his.

I told him of my insomnia, my chronic bronchitis, the eruptions on my face which were tormenting me just then; of the sharp stabbing pains in my legs, and finally of my inexplicable lapses of memory.

Paoli analysed my urine in my presence. The mixture turned black and Paoli looked grave. At last I was going to have a true analysis after all this psycho-analysis. I felt quite touched as I remembered the time, now long past, when I was myself a chemist and made true analyses; I thought fondly of retorts and re-agents. The element which is being analysed sleeps till it is summoned imperiously to life by the re-agent. There is no resistance in the retort, at least it yields to the smallest rise in temperature, and shamming is out of the question. Nothing took place in that retort to remind me of my behaviour with Dr. S., when, to please him, I invented fresh details of my childhood in order to conform to Sophocles’ diagnosis. Here was only the truth. The thing which had to be analysed was imprisoned in the phial and, incapable of being false to itself, awaited the re-agent. When that came it always responded in the same way. In psycho-analysis, on the other hand, neither the same images nor the same words ever repeat themselves. It ought to be called by another name: psychical adventure, perhaps. Yes, that is just what it is. When one starts such an analysis, it is like entering a wood, not knowing whether one is going to meet a brigand or a friend. Nor is one quite sure which it has been, after the adventure is over. In this respect psycho-analysis resembles spiritualism.

But Paoli did not think that sugar was the trouble. He wanted to see me again next day, after he had polarised the liquid.

I meanwhile went off triumphant, sure that I had got diabetes. I was tempted to go at once to Dr. S. and ask him how he would propose to analyse the psychical causes of that disease in order to cure it. But I had had enough of that individual and felt I could not bear to see him again, even to poke fun at him.

I must confess that the thought of diabetes was very sweet to me. I spoke of it to Augusta, who listened to me with tears in her eyes.

“You have talked so much about diseases all your life,” she said, “that you were bound to end by having one.” Then she tried to console me.

But I loved my disease. I thought with sympathy of poor Copler who preferred real diseases to imaginary ones. I agreed with him now. A real disease was so simple; you had only to let it work its will. And, in fact, when I looked up the description of my sweet sickness in a medical prescriber, I found a whole programme of life (not of death!) drawn up for the various stages of the disease. Farewell resolutions! Henceforth I should be free of them. Everything would pursue its own course now, without any intervention.

I further discovered that my disease was always, or almost always, very agreeable. The invalid eats and drinks a great deal, and suffers very little so long as he is careful to avoid getting abscesses. Then he sinks into a delightful state of coma and dies.

It was not long before I was called to the telephone by Paoli. He said he could find no trace of sugar. I went to see him next day, and he ordered me a diet which I only kept to for a few days, and a medicine illegibly scribbled on a prescription, which did me good for a whole month.

“That diabetes gave you a fright, I know!” he said smiling.

I denied this, but did not tell him that I felt very lonely now that I was deserted by my diabetes. He would never have believed me.

It was about this time that Dr. Beard’s famous work on neurasthenia fell into my hands. I followed his advice and changed my medicine every week, according to the prescriptions which I copied clearly out of his book. For a few months I thought the treatment was doing me good. Not even Copler, in the whole course of his life, could have had such consolation from drugs as I had then. My faith in them evaporated by degrees, but I had had a certain respite from psycho-analysis, and kept putting off my return from day to day.

One day I met Dr. S. by chance. He asked if I had decided to give up treatment. He was most polite, much more so than when he had had me in his clutches. He was evidently anxious to get hold of me again. I told him I had a great deal of business to attend to, family affairs which took up all my time and attention, but that directly I had settled them and had some time to myself again, I should return to him. I wanted to ask him to give me back my manuscript, but I did not dare; it would have been as good as confessing that I wanted to have nothing more to do with his treatment. I decided to put off asking him till another time, when he should have realised that I had given up all idea of returning to him, and become reconciled to it.

Before we parted, he said a few words with the obvious intention of drawing me again into his net.

“If you examine your state of mind,” he said, “you will find a great change in it. You’ll see that you will want to come back to me of yourself, when you realise how much good I did you in a comparatively short space of time.”

What I really think is that, with his help and by dint of studying my psyche, I only infected myself with new diseases.

My one thought now is how to recover from his treatment. I avoid dreams and memories, which produced such a state of confusion in my poor head that it is hardly sure yet whether or not it is firmly fixed between my shoulders. I am terribly absent-minded. Whilst I am talking to someone I am all the time trying to remember what it was I said or did a little while ago, and have quite forgotten. Or it may be a thought I am trying to recapture, which I feel to be of enormous importance, as much importance as those thoughts my father had a short while before he died, and which he likewise failed to remember.

I must put a stop to all this folly, unless I want to end in a lunatic asylum.

May 15, 1915.

We have been spending the two feast-days in our villa at Lucinico. My son Alfio is recovering from influenza, and is to stay on for several weeks with his sister. We shall come back here for Whitsun.

I have succeeded at last in getting back again to my former good resolutions, and I have given up smoking. I feel much better already, since renouncing the liberty which that fool of a doctor forced on me. To-day we have reached the middle of the month, and I am struck by the obstacles which our calendar places in the way of carrying out a straightforward, well-ordered resolution. All the months are a different length. In order to demonstrate my resolution properly I ought to stop smoking at the same time that something else comes to an end—the month, for instance. But except for July and August, December and January, there are no two successive months which have an equal number of days. Time is really very ill-ordered!

In order to be able to concentrate better, I spent the afternoon of the second day alone, on the banks of the Isonzo. Nothing helps one to concentrate so well as gazing for a long time at running water. One remains perfectly still oneself and all the necessary diversion is provided by the water, which is never the same for a single instant, either in colour or design.

It was a wonderful day. A strong wind must have been blowing in the upper air, for the clouds were continually changing shape, but down below there was no movement in the atmosphere. From time to time the sun, which already gave some warmth, found a gap in the swiftly moving clouds and streamed through, flooding with light some expanse of upland or some mountain peak, and lifting the tender May green out of the shadow which covered all the landscape. The air was warm, and there was something spring-like even in that flight of clouds across the sky. There could be no doubt the weather too was convalescent!

In my contemplative mood I enjoyed one of those moments which niggard life so rarely grants, when one ceases to feel oneself a victim, and can take a large, impersonal view of things. In the midst of all that green, so exquisitely radiant under the fitful sunrays, I was able to smile at life and at my malady. Women played a great part in both. Even the details of a woman’s body—her feet, her waist, her mouth—were enough to fill my days. And as I looked back over my life and my malady, I felt that I loved and understood them both. How much better my life had been than that of the so-called normal healthy man who, except at certain moments, beats or would like to beat his mistress every day. But I had always been accompanied by love. Even when I was not thinking of my mistress, I still thought of her in the sense that I craved her forgiveness for thinking of other women as well. Other men leave their mistresses disillusioned and despairing of life. I have never known life without desire, and illusions sprang up afresh for me after every shipwreck of my hopes, for I was always dreaming of limbs, of gestures, of a voice more perfect still.

I remembered that among the many lies I had imposed on that profound observer, Dr. S., one was that I had never betrayed my wife after Ada went away. He built up a whole theory on that lie. But on the river-bank I suddenly realised with horror that for some days past, perhaps since I had given up treatment, I had not run after any woman except my wife. Was I really cured then, as Dr. S. pretended? I am getting old and it is some time now since women ceased to take any interest in me. If I were to lose interest in them, there would be an end to all relationship between us.

If such a doubt had assailed me in Trieste I should at once have known how to solve it. Here it was a little more difficult.

A few days before I had had in my hands the memoirs of Da Ponte, an adventurer who was contemporary with Casanova. He too must certainly have passed through Lucinico, and I dreamed of meeting one of his powdered ladies, with her limbs hidden by a crinoline. Good Lord! How did those women manage to give themselves so quickly and so often, cased as they were in all those clothes?

I found the thought of a crinoline sufficiently exciting, in spite of my cure. But it was rather an artificial desire which it aroused, and it did not suffice to reassure me.

The proof I was in search of came to me soon after, and certainly reassured me, though I paid dearly for it. In order to obtain it I spoilt and destroyed the purest relationship I have ever had in my life.

I happened to meet Teresina, the eldest daughter of a peasant who had settled on a plot of ground near to my villa. Her mother had died two years before, and the large family of small brothers and sisters had found a second mother in Teresina, a robust girl who rose early to begin work, and went to bed directly the day’s work was over, to rest before beginning again. That day she was leading the donkey which was generally entrusted to her young brother, and she was walking beside the cart laden with new hay, because so small a beast would not have been able to carry the girl’s weight as well, going up the hill.

A year ago Teresina had seemed to me quite a child, and I had felt nothing but a fatherly affection for her. Only the day before, when I had seen her again for the first time, although I noticed that she had grown, that her sunburnt face had become more serious, and her slender shoulders had widened out above the swelling curve of her breasts, her undeveloped, hard-worked little body made me look on her still as a mere child, in whom I could only admire her extraordinary activity and the maternal instinct which she lavished on her little brothers and sisters. If it had not been for that odious cure, and the necessity of verifying on the spot exactly what stage my malady had reached, I should have left Lucinico this time too, without troubling her perfect innocence.

She wore no crinoline, and her round, smiling little face was innocent of powder. She was barefooted and I could see half-way up her naked leg. Neither her face, feet nor legs sufficed to kindle my desire. Her face and such limbs as I could see were all the same colour; they belonged to the open air, and there was no harm in their being abandoned thus to the air. Perhaps that was why they failed to excite me. But I was shocked to find myself so cold. Could it be that after my cure I needed a crinoline to stimulate my imagination?

I began by stroking the donkey, which was thus obliged to take a few minutes’ rest. Then I turned my attention to Teresina, and put in her hand no less than ten kronen. It was my first attempt on her virtue! Last year I had given her and her brothers centesimi only, as an expression of my fatherly affection for them. But everyone knows that fatherly affection is quite a different thing. Teresina was dumbfounded by such a magnificent gift. She carefully lifted her skirt to put the precious piece of paper away in her pocket, and as she did so I caught a glimpse of her leg above the knee, but that was just as sunburnt and chaste.

I returned to the donkey and kissed it on the head. My display of affection aroused its own. It stretched out its neck and emitted that impressive cry of love which I have always listened to with respect. How far-reaching it is, and how significant, with that first cry which it utters again and again like an invocation, growing feebler and feebler till it ends in a despairing sob. But to listen to it at such close quarters was positively painful.

Teresina laughed, and her laughter encouraged me. I turned again to her and seized her suddenly by the forearm, moving slowly up it with my hand towards the shoulder, and studying my sensations the while. Thank Heaven I was not cured yet! I had stopped the treatment just in time.

But Teresina urged on the donkey with a stick. She evidently intended to go on and leave me behind.

I could not help laughing heartily; I felt very happy, even if the peasant girl would have none of me. I said:

“Have you a lover? You ought to have. It would be a pity if you hadn’t got one yet.”

She answered, as she continued to move away from me:

“When I take one, he will certainly be younger than you!”

Even this could not obscure my happiness. I should have liked to read Teresina a little lesson, and turned over in my mind that episode in Boccaccio—“Maestro Alberto of Bologna virtuously shames a lady who would have shamed him for falling in love with her.” But Maestro Alberto’s reasoning took no effect, for Madonna Malgherida de’ Ghisolieri said to him: “Your love is precious to me, as that of a wise and valiant man must always be, and therefore, saving my honour, impose your will on me, as on all things that are yours.”

I tried to improve on this:

“When will you begin to look at old men, Teresina?” I shouted, so that she might hear me—for she was already some way off.

“When I am old too,” she shouted back without even stopping, and burst out laughing.

“But the old men won’t look at you then. You mark my words! I know them!”

I shouted at the top of my voice, enjoying a joke which was directly inspired by my sex.

At that moment the clouds opened at various points in the sky and let some sunrays through, which fell straight on Teresina, who was now about fifty yards away and more than thirty feet above me. She was dark and small, but shining!

The sun did not shine on me! When you are old, you have to stay in the shade, however witty you may be.

The war has reached me at last! I used to listen to stories of the war as if it were a war in times gone by, which it was amusing to talk about, but about which it would be foolish to excite oneself; when, to my astonishment, I found myself right in the middle of it, and was surprised then to think I had not realised that I must sooner or later become involved. I had lived quite peacefully in a building of which the ground-floor had caught fire, and it had never occurred to me that sooner or later the whole building, with me in it, would go up in flames.

The war took hold of me, shook me out like a rag, and robbed me at one blow of all my family, including my steward. From one day to the next I became a completely new man or, to be more exact, every one of my twenty-four hours was different. Since yesterday I have felt a little calmer, for after waiting a whole month I have at last had news of my family. They are safe and sound at Turin, while I had already lost all hope of ever seeing them again.

I have to spend the whole day in my office. There is nothing for me to do there, but the Olivis, who are Italian citizens, have had to go, and all the best of my employees have gone off to fight in one place or another; so I must stick to my post and superintend it all. I go home in the evening laden with the huge warehouse keys. To-day, when I felt so much calmer, I took this manuscript with me to the office, thinking it might help to pass the time. And it did in fact procure me a wonderful quarter of an hour, which reminded me that there was once a time in the world’s history when one could allow oneself the luxury of sitting down in peace and quietness to enjoy such trifles as this.

It would be nice if someone were to invite me seriously to fall into a state of half-consciousness in which I might live again even one hour of my former life. I should laugh in his face. How could one give up a present like this to pursue such frivolous trifles? It is only now that I feel myself definitely detached from my preoccupation with health and disease. As I walk through the streets of our unfortunate city I am conscious of being a privileged person who does not have to go and fight and who daily has what he needs to eat. In comparison with all the rest I feel so happy (especially since I had news of my family) that I should be afraid of provoking the wrath of the gods if everything were absolutely well with me.

My first encounter with the war was a violent one, of which I can now see the comic side.

Augusta and I had returned to Lucinico to spend Whitsun there with the children. On May 23rd I got up early, for I had to take some Carlsbad salts and go for a walk before my morning coffee. It was during this cure at Lucinico that I realised that the heart carries on its restorative work much better on an empty stomach, and spreads a sense of well-being through the whole body. My theory was to find remarkable confirmation that very day, when I was compelled to practise a long and salutary fast.

Augusta raised her white head from the pillow to wish me good-morning, and reminded me that I had promised to get my daughter some roses. Our only rose-tree had finished flowering, so I was obliged to get them from elsewhere. My daughter has grown into a fine girl, and is very like Ada. I had suddenly forgotten to behave towards her as a stern mentor, and had assumed the rôle of a cavalier who respects femininity even in his own daughter. She at once realised her power and abused it, to Augusta’s and my great amusement. She had expressed a wish for some roses, so I must procure some for her.

I proposed to walk for about two hours. The sun was shining brightly, and as I intended to walk all the time and not to stop till I got back home, I did not even take a coat or hat with me. I fortunately remembered that I should have to pay for the roses, so I did not leave my pocket-book at home as well as my coat.

I went first of all into the neighbouring property, belonging to Teresina’s father, to ask him to cut some roses, which I would call for on my way back. I entered the great courtyard surrounded by a partially ruined wall, but found no one there. I shouted Teresina’s name. The youngest of the children, aged about six, came out of the house. I put a few coppers into his hand, and he told me the whole family had gone off early to the other side of the Isonzo for a day’s work on a field of potatoes which needed earthing up.

This was quite welcome news to me, for I knew the field, and it would take me about an hour to reach it. As I had decided to go for a two hours’ walk I was glad to be provided with a definite goal. There was no danger now of my interrupting it by a sudden attack of laziness. I set off across the plain, which lies higher than the road so that I could only see from it the tops of a few flowering trees which grew along the sides. I was in a cheerful mood; I felt so light and airy in my shirt-sleeves and without a hat. I breathed the pure air with delight, and as I walked along did some of Niemeyer’s lung gymnastics which I had been practising now for some time past. A German friend had taught me the exercises, and they cannot be too highly recommended to anyone living a sedentary life.

When I got to the field I saw Teresina working on the side nearest the road. I went towards her, and then caught sight of her father and little brothers at work a little farther on. I should think they must have been between ten and fourteen years old. Though one feels exhausted after any unusual effort when one is old, one nevertheless feels younger than when doing nothing, because of the accompanying sense of excitement. I went to Teresina and said gaily:

“There is still time, Teresina. Don’t be too long.”

She did not understand, and I did not think it necessary to explain. Since she had forgotten, I could go back to my old relations with her. I had already repeated the experiment, and the result had again been favourable. In addressing those few words to her I had caressed her, and not with my looks alone.

I soon came to an agreement with her father. He would let me cut as many roses as I liked, and we should certainly not quarrel about the price. He was going to return to his work at once, whilst I had begun to set off homewards, when he changed his mind and ran after me. When he caught me up, he asked in a low voice:

“Haven’t you heard anything? They say war has broken out.”

“Well yes, we all know that! It has been going on for nearly a year,” I replied.

“I don’t mean that,” he exclaimed impatiently. “I mean the other with ...” and he made a gesture in the direction of the Italian frontier. “Haven’t you heard anything about it?” He waited anxiously for my reply.

“You can rest assured,” I said with complete confidence, “that if I have heard nothing about it, it means that there is nothing to hear. I have just come from Trieste, and the very last thing I heard was that they will have nothing to do with the war. In Rome they have turned out the Government that wanted war, and have put in Giolitti.”

He was reassured at once.

“Then all these potatoes that we are just covering up, and which promise so well, will be ours after all. There are so many of those scaremongers about.” He wiped away the sweat that was pouring from his brow with his shirt-sleeve.

Seeing that I had made him happy, I tried to make him happier still. I do so like to see people enjoying themselves. So I said a number of things which I hardly like to remember. I asserted that even if war had broken out it would not be fought anywhere near there. First of all there was the sea, which it was time they began fighting on, and then in Europe there were battlefields enough and to spare. There was the whole of Flanders and several departments in France. I had heard say—I could not remember by whom—that there was such a shortage of potatoes in the world that they even cultivated them with great care on the field of battle. I talked a great deal, keeping my eyes fixed the while on the slender little form of Teresina, who was crouching down to feel the earth with her hand before she began digging.

The peasant went back to his work, with his mind set completely at rest. But I who had given him part of my own tranquillity had so much less left for myself. It was clear we were too near the frontier at Lucinico. I would speak to Augusta about it. Perhaps we should do well to return to Trieste, or anyway to move farther from the frontier, in whichever direction. It was true that Giolitti was now in power, but one could not tell whether, once he had arrived there, he would continue to see things in the same light as when someone else was in power.

My uneasiness was increased by a chance meeting with a troop of soldiers who were marching towards Lucinico. They were none of them young, and they were shabbily dressed and ill-equipped. They were carrying what we used to call a “darlindana” in Trieste, a kind of old-fashioned long bayonet which in the summer of 1915 the Austrians had had to fetch out of their old stores.

I continued to walk behind them for some time, eager to be at home again. But the unpleasant odour which emanated from them at last forced me to slacken my pace. My anxiety and my haste were equally foolish. It was ridiculous to be alarmed just because I had been talking to a timid peasant. I could see my villa in the distance now, and there was no sign of the soldiers on the road. I began walking faster so as to get the sooner to my caffelatte.

It was at this point that my adventure began. At a bend of the road I was suddenly stopped by a sentinel, who shouted:

“Zurück,” at the same time pointing his gun at me. I was going to talk German to him because he had given his command in German, but that was the only word he knew and he repeated it threateningly several times.

There was nothing for it but to go zurück and I did so rather hurriedly, looking behind me constantly to make sure that he was not going to enforce his words by firing; and even when he was lost to view I did not slacken my pace.

But I had not yet given up the idea of reaching my villa as quickly as possible. I thought that by climbing the hill on my right I should come out a good way behind the threatening sentinel.

It was not a difficult climb, especially as the tall grass had been trodden down by many footsteps. It seemed as if a whole crowd had come that way before me, driven to do so, no doubt, by the impossibility of going along the road. As I walked I recovered my assurance, and decided that directly I reached Lucinico I would protest to the mayor against the treatment I had received. If he allowed people who had country houses to be treated like that, very soon everyone would give up coming to Lucinico.

But when I reached the top of the hill I was unpleasantly surprised to find it already occupied by the regiment of soldiers who smelt like venison. A number of soldiers were lying in the shade of a cottage belonging to some peasants I had known for a long time; at that hour there would be no one in it. Three of them seemed to be sentinels, but they were not facing the direction I had come from; others were standing in a semicircle in front of an officer who was giving them orders, which he illustrated by pointing to a map he was holding in his hand.

I had not even a hat which I could take off in greeting him. I bowed several times, and putting on my best smile advanced towards the officer who, when he saw me, stopped talking to the soldiers and stared at me. The five Czeckish soldiers who were gathered round him also gave me their best attention. Under the fire of all those eyes, and on the uneven ground, I found it a very difficult matter to move at all.

The officer shouted:

“Was will der dumme Kerl hier?” (What does the fool want here?)

Amazed at being insulted like this without the slightest provocation, I should have liked to make a dignified and manly protest, but thinking discretion to be the better part of valour I left the path and was going towards the hill beyond which lay Lucinico. The officer began shouting at me that if I took another step he would order his men to fire. I at once became very polite, and from that day to this I have always been most polite. It was monstrous that I should be obliged to treat with an uncivil lout like that, but there was at least this advantage, that he talked German fluently. It was such an advantage, that the more I thought of it the easier it became for me to talk gently to him. Supposing the horrible creature had not even understood German! I should have been lost.

It was a pity I could not talk the language very fluently myself; otherwise I should have had no difficulty in making his Highness laugh. I told him my caffelatte was waiting for me at Lucinico, and that I was only parted from it by his division.

He did laugh, on my honour he laughed. He laughed and swore at the same time, and had not the patience to hear me out. He said that other people would drink up my coffee for me at Lucinico, and when he heard my wife was waiting for me there, as well as the caffelatte, he shouted:

“Auch Ihre Frau wird von anderen gegessen werden.” (And other people will eat up your wife as well.)

By this time he was in a better temper than I was. I think he was sorry to have said something which the loud laughter of his five soldiers might have made to seem offensive; he became serious, and explained to me that I must not hope to see Lucinico again for some days, and he advised me as a friend not to ask any questions, because this in itself would be enough to compromise me!

“Haben Sie verstanden?” (Do you understand?)

I did understand, but could not so easily resign myself to giving up my caffelatte which was less than half a mile away. So I hesitated to turn back; for it was clear that if I went down the hill again I should certainly never reach my villa that day at all. To gain time I said politely to the officer:

“But to whom must I apply for permission to return to Lucinico and fetch at least my hat and coat?”

I ought to have realised that the officer was in a hurry to be left alone with his map and his men, but I never expected to arouse his fury to the extent I did.

In a voice which seemed as if it would burst the drum of my ear he shouted that he had already told me not to ask any more questions. Then he bade me go where the devil took me (“wo der Teufel Sie tragen will”). The idea of being taken anywhere was not displeasing to me, for I was extremely tired; but I still hesitated. The officer meanwhile, by dint of shouting at me, had become more and more enraged, and in threatening tones called to his side one of the men who were gathered round him, and calling him Signor Caporale ordered him to take me down the hill and not to lose sight of me till I was well on the road leading to Gorizia. If I hesitated to obey him for a moment he was to fire.

On hearing these instructions I was almost glad to be on my way down again.

“Danke schön,” I said, without the least touch of irony. The corporal was a Slav who spoke Italian fairly well. He thought it best to seem brutal in the officer’s presence, and shouted: “Marsch!” to me, to indicate that I was to go ahead. But when we had gone a short distance he became quite gentle and friendly. He asked if I had any fresh news of the war and if it was really true that Italy was coming in. He awaited my reply anxiously.

So not even they knew whether they were at war or not! I wanted to cheer him as much as possible, so I gave him the same news which I had already imparted to Teresina’s father. This weighed on my conscience afterwards. In the awful storm which burst soon after, all the people I tried to reassure probably perished. What a horrified expression of surprise death must have graven on their faces. My optimism was invincible. Surely I must have felt that the officer’s words meant war, still more the tone in which he spoke them!

The corporal was much relieved, and showed his gratitude by advising me to make no further attempt to reach Lucinico. After hearing my news he felt sure that the order forbidding me to go home would be withdrawn on the following day. In the meantime he advised me to go to Trieste to the Platz Kommando who would perhaps grant me a special permit.

“To Trieste?” I exclaimed, horrified. To Trieste without a coat or hat, and without my caffelatte?

According to the corporal a close cordon of infantry was being drawn across the road into Italy at this very moment, forming a new and insuperable frontier. He said with a condescending smile that in his opinion the shortest way to Lucinico was via Trieste.

I had now heard this so often that I was getting resigned to it, and set off for Gorizia, intending to catch the midday train to Trieste. I was excited, but I must say that I felt very well. I was more light-hearted than I had been for a long time. I was not at all sorry to be obliged to go on walking. My legs were rather tired, but I thought I could hold out as far as Gorizia, my breathing was so free and deep. Once my legs had warmed up to walking at a good rate, I got along without any difficulty at all. I went at an unusually quick pace, beating time as I walked, and with my physical well-being my optimism returned. They were threatening here and threatening there, but they wouldn’t really fight. And that is why when I reached Gorizia I hesitated as to whether I had not better reserve a room in the hotel to spend the night, and go back to Lucinico next day to make my complaint to the mayor.

I hurried to the post-office to telephone to Augusta. But they could get no answer from my villa.

The only thing I remember about the clerk at the post-office is that he was a little man with a scanty beard whose small stature and stiff movements gave him a rather absurd and pompous air. When he heard me swearing furiously at the dumb telephone he came up to me and said:

“This is the fourth time to-day that we have had no reply from Lucinico.”

When I turned towards him his eyes shone with a malicious joy (I was mistaken in saying I remembered nothing else!) and he gave me a piercing look as if to see whether I was really as surprised and angry as I seemed. It was a good ten minutes before I really understood. Then I had no further doubts. Lucinico was already in the line of fire, or would be in a few minutes’ time. It was not till I was on my way to the café to drink the cup of coffee I had been waiting for since the early morning, that I realised the full significance of that eloquent glance. I at once changed my direction and went to the station instead. I wanted to be nearer to my family and, in accordance with the direction of my friend the corporal, I took a ticket for Trieste.

It was during my brief train journey that war broke out.

Thinking that I should soon be at Trieste, I did not even drink the cup of coffee I had been panting for so long, though I should have had plenty of time for it. When I was alone in my compartment my thoughts turned at once to my family from whom I had been separated in so strange a manner. Nothing unusual happened to the train till beyond Monfalcone.

Apparently the war had not yet got as far as this. I recovered my peace of mind by reflecting that at Lucinico things would by now have reverted to what they were on this side of the frontier. Augusta and my children would probably already be in the train on their way into Italy. The peace of mind which this thought gave me combined with the vast and astounding calm produced by hunger to send me into a sound sleep.

It was probably hunger also which woke me. My train had come to a standstill in the middle of the great stony plain, known as the Sassonia di Trieste. The sea was not visible, though we must have been very near to it, for a light mist prevented me from seeing far. The Carso has a great charm in May, only to be appreciated by one who has not been spoilt by the brilliant colours and exuberance of spring in other places. The stone which everywhere emerges from the soil is encircled by a tender green which soon becomes the predominant note of the landscape.

At another time I should have been in a terribly bad temper at not being able to eat when I was so hungry. But the tremendous nature of the historic event I had witnessed this day impressed me so much that I resigned myself to the inevitable. The guard to whom I gave a good cigarette could not even procure me a bit of bread. I told no one about my experiences that morning. I thought I would wait till I got to Trieste and found a friend. No sound of fighting reached my ears from the frontier towards which I was going. We had stopped there in order to let eight or nine trains go winding down the long serpentine curves towards Italy. The open wound, as they soon began to call the Italian front, in Austria, had broken out again and needed more matter to feed it. And the poor men advanced towards it shouting and singing. From every train which I passed issued the same sounds of joy and intoxication.

When I reached Trieste night had already descended on the city.

The darkness was lit by the glow of many incendiary fires, and a friend who saw me going towards my house in my shirt-sleeves called out to me:

“Have you been taking part in the sack too?”

At last I was able to get something to eat, and I went to bed at once, overcome by an immense fatigue, which was caused, no doubt, by the hopes and fears that chased each other perpetually through my mind. I was still feeling very well, and during the short time before I fell asleep, when I had become accustomed by psycho-analysis to retain the images which came to me, I remember I had one last childish idea with which to end my day: No one had been killed yet at the frontier, so it was still possible for peace to be patched up again.

Now that I know my family to be safe and sound I don’t dislike the life I lead. There is not much for me to do, but I cannot say I am altogether idle. One is not allowed to buy or sell. Trade will begin again when peace has come. Olivi sends me good advice from Switzerland. If only he knew how inappropriate it is to these surroundings, where everything is entirely changed! At the moment I am doing nothing.

March 24, 1916.

I have not touched this notebook since May of last year. And now suddenly Dr. S. has written from Switzerland asking me to send him as much as I had written up to now. It is an odd request, but I have no objection to sending him these notes as well; they will show him pretty clearly what I think of him and his treatment. He already has all my confessions; let him keep these few pages too, as well as a few more which I shall willingly add for his edification. I have very little time, as business takes up my whole day. But I shall let Dr. S. have it, and not spare him. I have thought about it so much that my ideas on the subject are quite clear.

He is no doubt expecting to receive more confessions of weakness and ill-health, and will receive instead an account of my perfect health; as perfect, that is, as my rather advanced age permits. I am cured! I not only have no desire to practise psycho-analysis, but no need to do so. And my good health is not merely the result of feeling myself to be a privileged person among so many martyrs. It is not only by comparison with others that I feel myself to be well: I really am well, absolutely well. For some time past I have realised that being well is a matter of conviction, and that it is a mere day-dreamer’s phantasy to try and get cured otherwise than by self-persuasion. Of course I have pains from time to time, but what do they matter when my health is perfect? I may have to put on a poultice now and then for some local ailment, but otherwise I force my limbs to keep in healthy motion and never allow them to sink into inertia. Pain and love—the whole of life, in short—cannot be looked on as a disease just because they make us suffer.

I admit that my fate had to change, and my body to be warmed up by fighting and above all by victory, before I arrived at the conviction that I was well. It was my business which cured me, and I should like Dr. S. to know it.

Up to the end of August in last year I watched the convulsions of the world in a state of horrified inaction. Then I suddenly began to buy. I underline this word because it has a greater significance than it had before the war. At that time, when a business man used it, he meant that he was ready to purchase a particular article. But when I used it I meant that I was ready to become a buyer of any goods which offered themselves. Like all strong characters I had only one idea in my head, and on this I lived, and made my fortune by it. Olivi was not at Trieste; if he had been he would never have allowed me to take such a risk; he would rather have left the profits to others. But for me there was no risk at all. I was absolutely convinced of the success of my venture. First of all, in accordance with a time-honoured custom in time of war, I proceeded to convert my whole fortune into gold; but there was a certain difficulty about buying and selling gold. Ready money, as being more easy to handle, was my merchandise, and I laid in a large stock. I sold from time to time, but my sales were far smaller than my purchases. Because I had begun at the right moment, I was so lucky in my buying and selling that I soon acquired the means of realising more ambitious schemes.

I remember with pride that my first purchase was apparently sheer lunacy, and I only made it in order to put my new idea into practice as soon as possible. It consisted of a stock of incense. The seller boasted of the possibility of using incense as a substitute for resin which was already beginning to run short. As a chemist, I knew for an absolute certainty that incense could never take the place of resin, from which it differs toto genere, but I thought the world would soon reach such a pitch of misery that it would be obliged to accept incense as a substitute for resin. So I bought! A few days ago I sold quite a small portion of it, and received as much for it as I had originally paid for the whole amount. When I pocketed the money my breast swelled at the thought of my strength and abounding health.

When the doctor gets the last part of my manuscript, he will have to give me back the whole. I should be able to write it all over again with absolute certainty now; how was it possible for me to understand my life when I did not know what this last part was going to be? Perhaps I only lived all those years in order to prepare for it!

I am not so naïve as to blame the doctor for regarding life itself as a manifestation of disease. Life is a little like disease, with its crises and periods of quiescence, its daily improvements and setbacks. But unlike other diseases life is always mortal. It admits of no cure. It would be like trying to stop up the holes in our body, thinking them to be wounds. We should die of suffocation almost before we were cured.

Our life to-day is poisoned to the root. Man has ousted the beasts and trees, has poisoned the air and filled up the open spaces. Worse things may happen. That melancholy and industrious animal—man—may discover new forces and harness them to his chariot. Some such danger is in the air. The result will be a great abundance—of human beings! Every square yard will be occupied by a man. Who will be able then to cure us of the lack of air and space? The mere thought of it suffocates me.

But it is not only that, not only that. Every effort to procure health is in vain. Health can only belong to the beasts, whose sole idea of progress lies in their own bodies. When the swallow realised that emigration was the only possible life for her, she enlarged the muscles which worked her wings, and which became by degrees the most important part of her body. The mole went underground, and its whole body adapted itself to the task. The horse grew bigger and changed the shape of his foot. We know nothing about the development of certain animals, but it must have existed, and can never have injured their health.

But spectacled man invents implements outside his body, and if there was any health or nobility in the inventor there is none in the user. Implements are bought or sold or stolen, and man goes on getting weaker and more cunning. It is natural that his cunning should increase in proportion to his weakness. The earliest implements only added to the length of his arm, and could not be employed except by the exercise of his own strength. But a machine bears no relation to the body. The machine creates disease because it denies what has been the law of creation throughout the ages. The law of the strongest disappeared, and we have abandoned natural selection. We need something more than psycho-analysis to help us.

Under the law of the greatest number of machines, disease will prosper and the diseased will grow ever more numerous.

Perhaps some incredible disaster produced by machines will lead us back to health.

When all the poison gases are exhausted, a man, made like all other men of flesh and blood, will in the quiet of his room invent an explosive of such potency that all the explosives in existence will seem like harmless toys beside it. And another man, made in his image and in the image of all the rest, but a little weaker than them, will steal that explosive and crawl to the centre of the earth with it, and place it just where he calculates it would have the maximum effect. There will be a tremendous explosion, but no one will hear it and the earth will return to its nebulous state and go wandering through the sky, free at last from parasites and disease.

[End]