The season dragged on, and whenever he could Gian-Luca went home to Maddalena. He clung to her now like a frightened child, eating without complaint the food that she prepared, in order to keep up his strength. Sometimes he would try to express his great sadness but his words would be inadequate and vague.
“I saw something horrible today,” he might begin, “a poor wretch in khaki grinding an organ—”
“They are often frauds,” Maddalena would tell him.
Then he would stammer and would want to explain that this in itself was a reason for pity, only the words would fail him. He wanted to tell her about Jane Coram and the thing that cowered behind her eyes.
“Maddalena, it is lonely because of the crowds—”
“But why must she drink as she does?” she would ask him.
Why indeed? He would stare at his wife, bewildered; somewhere deep down, he thought he knew the answer, but it always seemed to evade him.
There were days when his sadness infected Maddalena, descending upon her like a cloud, when all that she did seemed futile and useless; her very prayers lacked conviction at such times, as though there was no one to hear her. Then it was that in a kind of self-preservation she would speak to Gian-Luca of her Church.
“If only you belonged to the Church,” she would tell him, “you would know peace, amore, you would come to know God.” And the sound of her own words would comfort a little. “You would surely come to know God!”
He always listened patiently to her while she praised and glorified her faith, listened because of the burden he inflicted in making her share his sadness. But when she had finished he would shake his head:
“I cannot find God, Maddalena.”
“You have never looked for Him,” she would say reproachfully.
“Ma si,” he would tell her. “I have looked for Him lately, only I cannot find Him, and if I should find Him, Maddalena, I should have many questions to ask.”
“The Church would answer your questions, Gian-Luca, is it not God’s own mouthpiece?”
Then Gian-Luca would smile: “I do not feel God as needing a mouthpiece in that sense, piccina—I feel Him as being too vast and aloof—perhaps that is the trouble; your God is too aloof to notice poor, everyday things.”
But Gian-Luca was beginning to notice more and more those pitiful everyday things, so that now he could not pass one of the afflicted without a strong thought of pity. Sometimes it would be a long-suffering beggar who must earn a living by displaying the shame of a wretched, misshapen body; sometimes one of those dwarfed, consequential creatures who elbowed their way through the crowded streets with a kind of pathetic and impudent defiance, born of a conscious grotesqueness; sometimes it would be a man out of work, bearing military ribbons on his coat, or another performing some mean, dreary labor in the remnants of glorious khaki. And Gian-Luca would want to comfort such people, not weakly, but with the whole strength of his being, only he did not know how to set about it; he would feel inadequate, self-conscious and shy, and when he stopped to give money to a beggar he would flush with a curious feeling of shame, and as like as not would speak brusquely: “Be quiet, do not thank me!”—for the thanks of the poor filled him with a sense of outrage. He had not yet learnt that Compassion, the divine, has a sister whose name is Gratitude, and that each must form part of the perfect whole that alone is capable of healing.
V
Gian-Luca made his peace with the clan very simply, by going one day to see them. And because of the deep sadness that they saw in his eyes, their warm hearts forgave him those months of neglect—only Teresa’s heart held aloof, for her heart remembered his mother. Looking at Teresa, so stern, so much alone, Gian-Luca made one more effort to win her, returning in spirit to the days of his childhood, but offering now the pity of a man to this arrogant, defiant old woman.
He said: “I would so much like you to love me—is it impossible, Nonna? I would like you to want me, to need me a little—not because of my advice about the Casa Boselli, you have Millo to help you with that now—but because I am your grandson, the only living creature upon whom you have any real claim.” Then Teresa stood up and confronted her grandson, and they looked at each other eye to eye: “I have only loved once in my life, Gian-Luca. Only one creature have I loved in my life, and that was my daughter Olga.”
His arrogant underlip shot out a little, and he felt a quick impulse to break her: “I am the child of your child,” he said hotly; “I am the flesh and blood of that Olga for whose sake you always hate me.”
“I do not hate you,” she answered quietly; “I neither love you nor hate you; but to me you have been as alien flesh; can I help that, Gian-Luca? I respect you, I am even proud of your success, but to me you are alien flesh. I saw your mother agonize and die in order that you might have life.” Then Gian-Luca nodded slowly, and his arrogant mouth grew gentle as he silently accepted her decision, for the unassuageable grief of the old stared at him out of those hard black eyes. He seemed to be seeing the heart of Teresa, a bitter, unforgiving but desolate heart—all bleeding it was, with the sorrow and shame that his life had called into being.
“It must be as you wish,” he said very gravely, and turning away he left her; but it seemed to Gian-Luca that her sorrow went with him and followed him into the street.
VI
It was a very good thing that Gian-Luca’s under-waiters were a
