Zeno's Conscience

by Italo Svevo

After his first two novels were ignored, Svevo considered giving up writing and devoting himself full-time to business. Aiming to improve his English, he fell under the tutelage of James Joyce, twenty years his junior. Svevo read early portions of Dubliners, and Joyce read Svevo’s two novels and encouraged him to take up writing again. When Svevo completed Zeno’s Conscience, Joyce arranged to have it published in France, where Svevo was dubbed “the Italian Proust.” He soon emerged from obscurity in Italy, and his rank as a major writer was already established when he died in a car accident in 1928.

My father left some half-smoked Virginia cigars around the house, perched on table edges and armoires. I believed this was how he threw them away, and I believe our old maidservant, Catina, did then fling them out. I carried them off and smoked them in secret. At the very moment I grabbed them I was overcome by a shudder of revulsion, knowing how sick they would make me. Then I smoked them until my brow was drenched in cold sweat and my stomach was in knots. It cannot be said that in my childhood I lacked energy.

When the doctor left me, my father (my mother had been dead for many years), his cigar clenched firmly between his teeth, remained a little longer to keep me company. As he went out, after gently running his hand over my blazing brow, he said: “No smoking, eh!” A huge uneasiness came over me. I thought: “It’s bad for me, so I will never smoke again. But first I want to have one last smoke.” I lit a cigarette and felt immediately released from the uneasiness, though my fever was perhaps increasing, and at every puff I felt my tonsils burning as if they had been touched by a red-hot coal. I finished the whole cigarette dutifully, as if fulfilling a vow. And, still suffering horribly, I smoked many others during my illness. My father came and went with his cigar in his mouth, saying: “Bravo! A few more days without smoking and you’ll be cured!” These words alone made me yearn for him to leave, to go out at once, allowing me to rush to my cigarettes.

The whirl of last cigarettes, begun at twenty, continues still. My resolutions are less extreme, and my weakness finds greater indulgence in my elderly soul. When we are old, we smile at life and at everything it contains. I can say also that for some time I have been smoking many cigarettes … and they are not the last. On the flyleaf of a dictionary I find this note of mine, recorded in an elegant, even ornate, hand: “Today, 2 February 1886, I am transferring from the school of law to the faculty of chemistry. Last cigarette!!” That was a very important last cigarette. I remember all the hopes that accompanied it.

Now that I am here, analyzing myself, I am seized by a suspicion: Did I perhaps love cigarettes so much because they enabled me to blame them for my clumsiness? Who knows? If I had stopped smoking, would I have become the strong, ideal man I expected to be? Perhaps it was this suspicion that bound me to my habit, for it is comfortable to live in the belief that you are great, though your greatness is latent. I venture this hypothesis to explain my youthful weakness, but without any firm conviction. Now that I am old and no one demands anything of me, I still pass from cigarette to resolve, and from resolve to cigarette. What do those resolutions mean today? Like that old doctor described by Goldoni,* can I expect to die healthy, having lived with illness all my life?

Certain dates were favorites of mine because of the harmony of the numbers. From the last century I remember one date that I felt should seal forever the coffin in which I wanted to bury my habit: “Ninth day of the ninth month of 1899.” Significant, isn’t it? The new century brought me dates of quite a different musicality: “First day of the first month of 1901.” Today I still believe that if that date could be repeated, I would be able to begin a new life.

The doctor had a big belly, and his asthmatic breathing accompanied the clicking of the electric mechanism he employed immediately, at the first session: a disappointment, because I had expected that the doctor would study me and discover the poison polluting my blood. On the contrary, he pronounced my constitution healthy, and when I complained of difficulty in digesting and sleeping, he opined that my stomach lacked acids and that my peristaltic action (he used that adjective so many times that I have never forgotten it) was rather sluggish. He administered also a certain acid that ruined me; ever since then, I have suffered from excess acidity.

I went so far as to talk with him as if he were equipped to understand psychoanalysis, into which, timidly and precociously, I had ventured. I told him of my unhappiness with women. One wasn’t enough for me, nor were many. I desired them all! In the street my agitation was immense; as women went by, they were all mine. I looked them up and down, insolently, out of a need to feel myself brutal. In my mind I undressed them, leaving only their boots on, I took them into my arms, and I let them go only when I was quite certain that I had known every part of them. Sincerity and breath wasted! The doctor was gasping: “I certainly hope the electrical treatments will not cure you of that illness. The very idea! I would never touch a Ruhmkorff* again if I had reason to fear such an effect.”

When she was at her window, I could no longer keep my eyes on the textbook. Isn’t a man who behaves like that an imbecile? I remember the little, white face of the girl at the window: oval, framed by fluffy, tawny curls. I looked at her and dreamed of pressing that whiteness and that russet gold against my pillow.” Aesculapius murmured, “Flirtation always has something good about it. When you’re my age, you won’t flirt anymore.” Today I am certain that he knew absolutely nothing about flirtation. I am fifty-seven, and I’m sure that if I don’t stop smoking or if psychoanalysis doesn’t cure me, my last glance from my deathbed will express my desire for my nurse, provided she is not my wife and provided my wife has allowed the nurse to be beautiful!

The thinned fat man did not reply at once. He was methodical, and he first pondered for a long time. Then, with a learned mien that was rightfully his, given his great superiority in the field, he explained to me that my real disease lay not in the cigarette but in the decision-making. I should try giving up the habit without any resolutions or decisions. In me – he felt – over the course of the years two persons had come into being, one of whom commanded, while the other was merely a slave who, the moment surveillance weakened, flouted his master’s will out of a love of freedom. This slave was therefore to be granted absolute freedom, and at the same time I should look my habit squarely in the face, as if it were new and I had never seen it before. It should not be fought, but neglected and forgotten in a certain way; abandoning it, I should turn my back on it nonchalantly, as on a companion now recognized as unworthy of me. Quite simple, really. In fact, it did seem simple to me. It’s true, moreover, that having then succeeded with great effort in dispelling all decisiveness from my spirit, I succeeded in not smoking for several hours, but when my mouth was cleansed and I felt an innocent taste such as a newborn infant must know, and a desire for a cigarette came over me, and when I smoked it I felt a remorse for which I renewed the decision I had tried to abolish. It was a longer way round, but it arrived at the same place.

A bit embarrassed, understanding the reason for his wonder, I said: “Of course. You don’t believe in the necessity of the treatment, or in my seriousness in undertaking it.” With a slight smile, which somehow hurt me, the doctor replied: “Why not? It may be true that cigarettes are more harmful to you than we doctors admit. Only I don’t understand why, instead of giving up smoking ex abrupto, you haven’t decided simply to reduce the number of cigarettes you smoke. Smoking is all right, provided you don’t overdo it.”

This was the first time since my marriage that I had felt jealous. What misery! It was no doubt a part of my condition as a wretched prisoner. I fought back! My wife’s smile was her usual smile, not mockery after having eliminated me from the house. It was she, indeed, who had caused me to be locked up, though she attached no importance to my habit; but she had surely arranged this to please me. And, furthermore, I should recall that it wasn’t so easy to fall in love with my wife. The doctor may have looked at her feet, but certainly he had done so to see what sort of boots to buy for his mistress. Still, I promptly smoked the last cigarette; and it wasn’t yet midnight, only eleven o’clock, an impossible hour for a last cigarette.

The night was clear and warm. I took off my hat, the better to feel the breeze of freedom. I looked at the stars with wonder, as if I had only just conquered them. The next day, far from the clinic, I would give up smoking. Meanwhile, passing a café that was still open, I bought some good cigarettes, because it wouldn’t be possible to conclude my smoker’s career with one of poor Giovanna’s cigarettes. The man who waited on me knew who I was and gave me the pack on credit.

As for women, I learned from some relatives that my mother had had some cause for jealousy. Indeed, that mild woman apparently had sometimes to resort to violent measures to keep her husband in line. He allowed himself to be guided by her, whom he loved and respected, but apparently she never managed to wring any confession of infidelity from him, and thus she died in the conviction that she had been mistaken. Still, my good kinfolk tell how she caught her husband virtually in flagrante at her dressmaker’s. He excused himself on the pretext of absentmindedness and so firmly that he was believed. The only consequence was that my mother never returned to that dressmaker, nor did my father. I believe that in his shoes I would have ended up confessing, but I would not have been able to abandon the dressmaker afterwards, for where I stand, I put down roots.

The only books he read were bland and moral, not out of hypocrisy on his part, but from the most genuine conviction: I think he felt deeply the truth of those moralizing sermons, and his conscience was appeased by his sincere support of virtue. Now that I am growing old and turning into a kind of patriarch, I also feel that a preached immorality is more to be punished that an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness.

As for my contempt for serious matters, I believe his great defect was to consider serious too many things in this world. Here is an example: When, after having transferred from the study of law to that of chemistry, I sought his permission to return to the former, he said to me amiably: “The fact remains that you are certifiably crazy.” I wasn’t in the least offended, and I was so grateful to him for his acquiescence that I thought to reward him by making him laugh. I went to Dr. Canestrini for an examination and a certificate. It wasn’t an easy matter because I had to submit to long and thorough tests. When I was given a clean bill of mental health, I triumphantly carried the document to my father, but he couldn’t laugh at it. In a heartbroken voice, tears in his eyes, he cried: “Ah, you really are crazy.” And that was my reward for the laborious and innocuous little farce. He never forgave me and so never laughed at it. To persuade a doctor to examine you as a joke? To have a certificate drawn up, as a joke, complete with tax stamps? Madness!

Today, as I write, approaching the age reached by my father, I know for certain that a man can feel the existence of his own lofty intelligence, which gives no other sign of itself beyond that strong feeling. Thus, you take a deep breath, you accept yourself and you admire all nature as it is and as, unchanging, it is offered to us. This is a manifestation of the same intelligence that decreed all Creation. Certainly, in the last lucid moment of his life, my father’s feeling of intelligence originated in his sudden religious inspiration, and in fact he was led to speak to me about it because I had told him of my discussion of the origins of Christianity. Now, however, I know also that this feeling of his was the first symptom of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Weeping obscures our guilt and allows us to accuse fate, without contradiction. I wept because I was losing the father for whom I had always lived. No matter that I had given him scant company. Hadn’t my efforts to become a better man been aimed at affording him some satisfaction? The success I yearned for was to be my boast to him, who had always doubted me, but primarily it would be his consolation. And now, on the contrary, he could no longer wait for me and was going off, convinced of my incurable weakness. My tears were very bitter.

I tried to be precise, and this was not easy, considering the state I was in. I remembered also that Dr. Coprosich could not tolerate people ignorant of medicine who used medical terminology, as if they knew something about the subject. And when I came to talk about what had seemed to me “cerebral respiration,” he put on his glasses before saying to me: “Go slow with the definitions. We’ll see later what it is.” I had spoken also of my father’s odd behavior, his anxiety to see me, then his haste to go to bed. I didn’t report my father’s strange talk: perhaps I was afraid of being forced to repeat some of the replies I had made to my father. But I did say that Papà had not managed to express himself with precision, and that he seemed to be thinking intensely about something going on in his head that he couldn’t put into words. The doctor, his glasses squarely on his nose, exclaimed triumphantly: “I know what was going on in his head!” So did I, but I didn’t say so for fear of angering Dr. Coprosich: it was the hemorrhage.

In general, he was a restless patient, but docile. I was afraid of him because I always feared I might see him turn harsh if he came to understand his situation; so his docility did not ease my great strain. But he obediently accepted any suggestion given him, because he expected one of them might save him from his breathlessness. The attendant offered to fetch him a glass of milk, and he agreed with genuine joy. After waiting with great eagerness to receive that milk, he was equally eager to be rid of it, having taken barely a sip, and when he wasn’t promptly obeyed, he dropped the glass on the floor.

Those who have not yet experienced marriage believe it is more important than it is. The chosen companion will renew, improving or worsening, our breed by bearing children: Mother Nature wants this but cannot direct us openly, because at that time of life we haven’t the slightest thought of children, so she induces us to believe that our wife will also bring about a renewal of ourselves: a curious illusion not confirmed by any text. In fact, we live then, one beside the other, unchanged, except for an acquired dislike of one so dissimilar to oneself or an envy of one who is our superior.

He was more than willing to instruct me, and in my notebook he actually wrote in his own hand the three commandments he considered sufficient to make any firm prosper: 1. There’s no need for a man to know how to work, but if he doesn’t know how to make others work, he is doomed. 2. There is only one great regret: not having acted in one’s own best interest. 3. In business, theory is useful, but it can be utilized only after the deal has been made. I know these and many other axioms by heart, but they were of no help to me.

The following day my father-in-law retracted his confession. On his lips the deal regained the character it had had before that supper. “Wine’s a liar,” he said seraphically, and it was tacitly understood that the decree in question had been published two days after the conclusion of our affair. He never again uttered the suggestion that, seeing that decree, I could have misunderstood it. I was flattered, but he didn’t spare me out of kindness, but rather because he believed that everyone, reading the newspapers, has his own business interests in mind. I, on the contrary, when I read a paper, feel transformed into public opinion, and seeing the reduction of a tariff, I think of Cobden* and free trade. The thought is so important that it leaves no room for me to recall my wares.

My luck wasn’t enough for me, however: I tried to make it look like merit on my part. I told him the stock would not be sold until the next day, and, assuming a self-important manner, I tried to make him believe I had received some news I had forgotten to pass on to him, and it had led me to ignore his words. Grim and offended, he spoke without looking me in the face. “A man with a mind like yours shouldn’t go into business. And when he behaves so wickedly, he doesn’t confess it. You still have a lot to learn, young fellow.” I disliked irritating him. It was much more amusing when he was doing me harm. I told him sincerely how matters had gone. “As you see, a man with a mind like mine should absolutely go into business.” Mollified at once, he laughed with me. “What you earn from such a deal isn’t a profit: it’s a reward. That mind of yours has already cost you so much that it’s only fair for it to reimburse you for a part of your losses!”

As soon as I was married, I met her in my home because her husband was a friend of my father-in-law. We ran into each other often, but for many years, all the time we were young, the greatest reserve reigned between us, and there was never any allusion to the past. The other day she asked me point-blank, her face crowned with gray hair youthfully hennaed: “Why did you drop me?” I was sincere because I didn’t have time to invent a lie: “I don’t know anymore, but there are many, many other things in my life that I also don’t know.” “I’m sorry,” she said, and I was already bowing in response to the implied compliment. “In your old age you seem to me a very amusing man.” I straightened up, with some effort. There was no need to thank her.

And I said: “If the seriousness of life were not now confronting me” – and I didn’t add that I had been feeling this seriousness only a short time, since my resolution to marry – “I would have kept on transferring from one department to another.” Then, to make them laugh, I remarked on a curious thing: I always dropped a subject just at the moment when I had to face examinations. “A coincidence,” I said, with the smile of one who wants to hint he is telling a lie. And, indeed, the truth was that I had changed my courses in all seasons. So I set out to win Ada and I continued my efforts to make her laugh at me, at my expense, forgetting that I had chosen her because of her seriousness. I am a bit eccentric, but to her I must have seemed downright unbalanced.

But Ada, who at that very time was so serious that she was casting her beautiful eyes around in search of the man she would admit to her nest, was incapable of loving a person who made her laugh. She laughed, and she laughed for a long time, too long, and her laughter clothed in ridiculous garb the man who had provoked it. Hers was a genuine inferiority and in the end it was to harm her, but first it harmed me. If I had been able to keep silent at the right moment, perhaps things would have turned out differently. As least I would have given her time to speak and to reveal herself, and I could have steered clear of her.

I had mentioned the University, and Alberta, who was in her last year of upper school, talked about her studies. She complained of finding Latin very difficult. I said I wasn’t surprised, as it was not a language suited to women, and I actually thought that even in ancient Roman times the women spoke Italian. Whereas for me – I declared – Latin had been my favorite subject. A little later, however, I was foolish enough to quote a Latin saying, which Alberta had to correct. A real stroke of bad luck! I attached no importance to it, and informed Alberta that when she had perhaps a dozen semesters of university behind her, she would also have to be on her guard against quoting Latin tags.

Here something happened that ought to have warned me and saved me. Little Anna, who till then had remained motionless, observing me, decided to express in a loud voice what Ada felt. She cried: “Is it true you’re crazy? Completely crazy?” Signora Malfenti threatened her: “Will you be quiet? Aren’t you ashamed, interrupting the grownups’ talk?” The threat only worsened things. Anna shouted, “He’s crazy! He talks with cats! We should get some ropes, quickly, and tie him up!”

But even after choosing the girl, I might have examined her a bit more closely and made sure at least that she would be willing to meet me halfway, as they never fail to do in romantic novels with happy endings. On the contrary, I selected the girl with the deep voice and the slightly unruly but severely coiffed hair, and I thought, serious as she was, she wouldn’t refuse an intelligent man like me, well-to-do, not ugly, and of good family. From the very first words we exchanged, I sensed something discordant, but discord is the road to unison. I should confess what I thought: She must remain as she is, because I like her this way and I will be the one who changes, if she wishes. All things considered, I was quite unenterprising because it’s surely easier to change oneself than to reshape others.

A long time afterwards I learned from Augusta that none of the three girls had believed my stories were true. To Augusta they seemed all the more precious because, as I had invented them, they were more mine than if fate had visited them upon me. To Alberta the part she didn’t believe was still enjoyable because she received some excellent hints. The only one outraged by my lies was the serious Ada. For all my efforts I achieved the result of that marksman who hit the bullseye, but of the target next to his. And yet to a great extent those stories were true. I can’t at this point say to what extent because, as I had told them to many other women before the Malfenti daughters, through no wish of mine, they had changed and become more expressive. They were true inasmuch as I could not have told them in any other version.

The introspection I achieved in my study, from which I had anticipated solace, only made clearer the reasons for my despair, exacerbated to the point of tears. I loved Ada! I didn’t yet know if that was the right verb, and I continued my analysis. I wanted her not only to be mine, but to be my wife: she, with that marmoreal face and that unripe body, but only she, with her gravity, that made her unable to understand my wit, which I would not impart to her, but would renounce forever while she would instruct me in a life of intelligence and work. I wanted all of her, and I wanted all from her. In the end I concluded the verb was correct: I loved Ada.

Today, when I cast my mind back to those five memorable days that led me to marriage, I am dumbfounded by the fact that my spirit was not affected on learning that poor Augusta loved me. Now cast out of the Malfentis’ house, I loved Ada wrathfully. Why did I derive no satisfaction from the clear perception that Signora Malfenti had driven me away in vain, since I continued to dwell in that house, and very close to Ada, namely in the heart of Augusta? I actually considered a further insult Signora Malfenti’s appeal to me not to compromise Augusta and, instead, to marry her. Toward the ugly girl who loved me I felt the very disdain I could not believe was addressed to me by her beautiful sister, whom I loved.