G. Read Free

were swollen to apoplectic proportions and the sweat ran down their faces like tears.
    Umberto considers that a sane man should always try to see himself as an exemption from the rest of the world: then he will be able to see what he can or cannot take from the world. According to him the madman demands all or nothing!
Roma o Morte!
    Umberto cannot leave his wife. Neither by way of his children (for he has none) nor by way of society can he find any sense of succession or continuity; he is alone, abandoned in time. To continue his business and gain concessions he is forced to be amiable, not once but a thousand times, to people whom he dislikes or even hates. He can never speak to anybody of more than one tenth of what is on his mind.
    Ah my little one, you are mad, quite, quite mad.
    What Umberto calls madness is what threatens him. Not what threatens him personally—another merchant, a thief, the man who will cuckold him—but what threatens the social structure in which he lives as a privileged being.
    His privilege is more important to him than his life, not because he could not survive without his American mistress, four servants at home, a fountain in his garden, hand-made silk shirts, or his wife’s dinner parties, but because implicit in his privilege are the values and judgements by which he must make sense of his lived life. All values stem from his belief—that his privileges are deserved.
    Yet the sense he makes of his life does not satisfy him. Why must liberty, he asks himself, always be retrospective, a quality already won and controlled? Why is there no liberty to pursue now?
    Umberto terms madness that which threatens the social structure guaranteeing his privileges.
I teppisti
are the final embodiment of madness. Yet madness also represents freedom from the social structure which hems him in. And so he arrives at the conclusion that limited madness may grant him greater liberty within the structure.
    He calls Laura mad in the hope that she will bring into his life a modicum of liberty.
    Umberto, I am going to have a child, and perhaps it will be a girl. If it is a girl (Laura has seized upon the subject of the cap in the hope that it will make her announcement less stark. She is happy at the thought of being pregnant, she thinks continually of what her child will be like, but she finds the announcement humiliating). If it is a girl, I will give her your Juliet cap on her fifteenth birthday and she will look beautiful in it.
    The cab has arrived at the hotel. A porter is holding the door open. Please shut the door, says Umberto. Then he instructs the driver to drive them slowly along the lake-side. The driver shrugs his shoulders. It is raining and it is getting dark and there is nothing to see of the lake.
    Are you quite sure you are right? asks Umberto.
    Quite sure.
    Have you been to a doctor?
    Yes.
    How was he called, this doctor?
    He was a doctor in Paris.
    What did he say?
    He said it was true.
    He said it was true?
    True.
    The doctor said so?
    Yes.
    The word
true
echoes at last with the authority of the doctor and this authority offers Umberto the means of coming to terms with the news. He must demystify it, he must make it manageable and negotiable, he must give it a colour so that it can be handled, so that it loses its initial infinite, entirely abstract whiteness.
    I am the father, says Umberto.
    It is a statement, not a question; but Laura nods her head. She can see no advantage to either of them in his being the father.
    Why didn’t you tell me when you wrote to me?
    I thought I could explain better when I saw you.
    Umberto’s head is teeming with calculations of what can and cannot be done in Livorno to accommodate his illegitimate son.
    How long—he makes a counting gesture with his hand.
    Three months.
    We’ll call him Giovanni.
    Why Giovanni? she asks.
    Giovanni was the name of my father, his grandfather.
    And supposing she is a girl?
    Laura! he says. But it is not altogether clear