Evangelista's Fan Read Free Page B

creep over his head. He remembered his father’s letter and its terrible last sentence: ‘I have no appetite for anything at all . . .’
    III
    A feebleness of spirit overtook Salvatore from this moment. It was as if the King’s edict had reached out to him, far away as he was, and annihilated him.
    On the shop door, he put up a sign: Repair suspended owing to illness. From his bedroom window he watched the London summer glare at him and depart. He heard men rioting in the street below. They were shouting about the price of bread. Salvatore felt indifferent towards the price of anything.
    In his more optimistic moments, he decided his extreme weakness was due only to exhaustion, to the difficulties he had had to endure since his arrival in London and his struggles with language. On other days, he felt certain that this new disappointment had dealt him a fatal blow. He noticed that his hair was starting to fall out. At twenty-seven, he hadn’t expected this, just as he hadn’t predicted that time could be wiped from the calendar. The capriciousness of the world was too much for the individual. However hard he fought to order his life, the random and the unforeseen lay in wait for him always.
    He remained in his bed and didn’t move. He ate nothing. He began to be prey to visions. He saw his lost beloved come into his room, naked except for her fan, which she held in front of her private parts. Then he woke one morning to the sound of someone eating. He saw his mother, sitting at his night table, spooning veal stew into a mouth that was much more fleshy than it had been, and he saw that all her flesh had magnified itself so grossly that her body almost filled the small room. He wanted to ask her why she had let this happen to her, but before he could frame the question, she said with her mouth full: ‘It’s my name. Magnifica. Why aren’t you quicker to understand things?’
    Salvatore tried to get out of bed. He wanted to lay his head in her enormous lap and ask her to forgive him. As he struggled towards her, he fainted and woke up lying on his floor, quite alone.
    After this, he tried to eat. He nibbled at biscuits, felt deafened by the sound of them being broken against his teeth.
    He put some pomade on his thinning hair. His scalp felt frozen, but he found that, under this ice, new thoughts were beginning to surface in his exhausted mind. The successful man, he decided, the man capable of a happy life, defies the random by his ability to foresee what is going to happen. He doesn’t – as I have tried to do – feebly repair the past; his mind is attuned to what will become necessary. He acts in advance to prevent (as far as is humanly possible) the random from occurring. Such a man would have foreseen the possibility of the rediscovery of his beloved’s winder key and asked discreetly for her name and address long before that possibility became a fact. Such a man, aware of the vanity of princes, would have predicted that the King of Piedmont was likely to attempt some wanton comedy with time and schooled himself as to how best to come to terms with it, so that he didn’t have to feel as if his life had been cancelled. The random will still, of course, occur, but the damage caused to a life by the unforeseen will be less severe.
    If only, if only, thought Salvatore, I were descended from a line of such men – men who possessed some cunning, not merely with the moment-by-moment measurement of the present, but also with the computation of the future – then I wouldn’t be lying in this room in mourning for my lost love; I would be holding in my hands a Dutch clock. I would be working every hour of the day and night to make myself worthy of the woman I’ve chosen as my bride and who would one day be a bridge to Piedmont and the past. I would be happy.
    The clarity of these thoughts consoled Salvatore for a time and then began to torment him.