L'Innocente by Gabriele D'annunzio

Author:Gabriele D'annunzio
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909232631
Publisher: Dedalus Ebooks
Published: 2013-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XV

IN the violence of my many and conflicting agitations, in the first outburst of grief, under the menace of imminent danger, I had not yet stopped to consider the question of the Other. But also, from the very first moment, I had never had the shadow of a doubt as to the justice of my old suspicion. Instantly, in my own mind, the Other had assumed the image of Filippo Arborio; and at the first rush of jealousy which assailed me in Giuliana’s bedroom, his odious image had been associated with hers in a series of abhorrent visions.

And now, while Federico and I rode towards the forest along the tortuous river I had watched on that dreary Saturday afternoon, the Other was ever with us; the figure of Filippo Arborio insinuated itself between me and my brother, animated so intensely by my hatred, that in looking at it I had a sensation of reality, a physical repulsion, something of the savage thrill I had sometimes experienced on confronting my adversary before a duel, at the signal for attack.

My brother’s presence increased my distress enormously. Compared with Federico, the figure of the other man—so over refined, so nervous, so emasculate—dwindled to miserable proportions, became offensive and ignoble in my eyes, Under the influence of the new ideal of strength and manly simplicity inspired in me by my brother’s example, I not only loathed, but I despised this complicated and ambiguous being notwithstanding that he belonged to my own strain, and that we had certain intellectual peculiarities in common, as was evident in his literary work. I imagined him like one of his own characters; affected by the saddest maladies of the mind, warped, false, cruelly inquisitive, soured by the habit of analysis and studied irony, continually occupied in converting the warmest and most spontaneous movements of the soul into hard and fast conceptions, wont to regard every human being purely as a subject for psychological speculation, incapable of love, incapable of a generous action, of renunciation, of self-sacrifice, hardened in duplicity, licentious, cynical, vile.

By this man Giuliana had been seduced—certainly never loved. The tactics he had employed were apparent in the dedication written on the fly-leaf of The Secret, the sole documentary evidence, within my knowledge, of the past relations between the novelist and my wife. To him she had never been anything but an object of sensual passion, that was certain. To lay siege to and take the Tower of Ivory, to corrupt a woman popularly lauded as incorruptible, to test his powers of seduction on so rare a subject, were enterprises arduous enough but full of attraction, and worthy in all respects of a cunning artist, of the fastidious psychologist who had written the Cattolicissima and Angelica Doni.

The longer I thought over it, the more the facts appeared before me in all their brutal crudity. Filippo Arborio had undoubtedly come upon Giuliana in one of those periods in which a woman—however; so called ‘spiritual ’—who has suffered from

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