Omer Pasha Latas Page 19

  But the very next day everything changed in a magical way. The drawing lesson began without Saida Hanuma. All was gray and empty. The painter’s eyes kept closing and his lips felt dry with lethargy and overwhelming lassitude. Then from an unexpected direction a door opened, slowly and tentatively, as if pushed by a timid teenager. Smiling and gesturing that the work should not be interrupted, Saida Hanuma seemed to float in with a new aura, calm, innocent, almost gay. She wore a simple dress, timeless, made of fine orange silk. The ends of a white muslin shawl crossed over her chest, covering the edge of her décolleté and creating a warm shadow out of which her neck rose and above it her small face with red lips, delicate nostrils and ears, thick red hair a whole tone darker than her dress. This meant that her gaze too changed constantly, one moment childishly smiling, then sharp and mercilessly hard, now mocking, then dreamily absent, as though saddened by the whole situation.

  Beauty. The mysterious, elusive, luxurious beauty of a woman, which demanded to be painted. Lucky the man who succeeds in this, and luckier still the one who is able to see in that painting what was there, and not stars and clouds and a mad, dangerous delusion! Beauty, the greatest of all human deceptions: if you do not grasp it—it is not there, if you try to take it—it ceases to exist. And we do not know whether it attracts us with its power or whether the power comes from within us and is broken, like water against a stone, where it encounters beauty.

  You look at her and wonder what will happen tomorrow or the day after, in what new form the many-sided Saida Hanuma will appear and which of her worlds she will bring with her into this room, where the basics of geometric drawing are being studied and, at the same time, more than one drama of tangled human destinies is being played out.

  Needless to say, that did not make things easier, it only further confused the already confused painter, exacerbating his dormant sickness.

  The same was true of their conversations. But while he always talked enthusiastically, in an exalted tone, about the great matters of art, her contributions remained, as if intentionally, on the plane of everyday life and full of bizarre observations about human imperfection and inconsistency, about the comical, ugly and pitiful aspects of all that people say or do. Everything she said was full of irony, criticism, complaint, blame, all somehow hopeless and vengefully bitter and aggressive. It did not seem to matter to whom she was talking, or what she was talking about. Her dissatisfaction spoke out of her like a third, invisible interlocutor, whose face could not be seen and whose origins were not known, but who was the protagonist here and, in the end, had the last word.

  For Karas, it was incomprehensible that such beauty and abundance and such acerbity and discontent could live side by side in one and the same being. But if he tried to change the topic of the conversation or to soften and elevate its tone, with his customary enthusiasm, the woman would interrupt him.

  “I don’t see what’s exceptional or great about that.”

  She would say it calmly, like the most natural thing in the world, apparently accustomed to sparing no one and not embellishing anything, but laying bare and caricaturing everything, looking for ulterior motives in every act. And all the while, she looked straight at him, slightly mocking, slightly pitying. Then she would unexpectedly ask him to tell her more about Rome and Italy.

  There were wonderful moments when she did not interrupt, but let him picture, in all the more vivid and daring words, what he had once seen; and picture it for her, for her alone. The paintings and statues he had once studied, frozen, feverish and poorly fed, in cold churches and gloomy palaces, now became pure beauty, immersed in a warm glow of happiness. Landscapes through which he had roamed, lost, in need of everything and most of all the cursed love of a woman, were now transformed into bright expanses, and the humble music and song of young men and girls he had listened to on lonely evenings in Rome—into the music of otherworldly choirs.

  But as soon as he returned to his room, everything would again become what it was and what it had always been: privation, solitude, melancholy, vain effort and failure, even as the beautiful, blooming Saida Hanuma grew in strength and beauty to such heights that she could not have noticed him, down there, in his misery and isolation.

  Then he paid for his brief enthusiastic accounts with hours and days of wretchedness and regret, he would plumb the depths of the bottomless but frighteningly attractive abyss that separated him from the incomprehensible and magnificent red-haired woman, the seraskier’s legal wife. And he realized that he would never have any part of that beauty that was here, beside him, and which, surely belonged to him, never.

  And then intense fear of his own desires and thoughts engulfed him. Her eyes were the color of muted, almost black amber and her long lashes, of no specific color, appeared like a strange, tremulous gleam that now seemed to sink into the darkness of her eyes, then again shielded them with an almost unnatural light. Lying in the dark, he examined the details of his behavior in the presence of Saida Hanuma, fearful that he had given himself away by a word, a movement or a look—that damned, insatiable look!—and that she had noticed how he longed for her. At the same time memories welled up like monsters. He recalled earlier similar delusions and mistakes with “noble” models, which made the blood rush to his head, the light blanket covering him become a blazing mountain.

  Then, tense, he would swear that this time it would not and could not happen, that he would be more reasonable and circumspect, that he would stop staring at her like a stray calf, that he would in no way betray his mad, impossible desire, which would shame him and debase him in her eyes and everyone else’s.

  And perhaps he really would not have betrayed himself if he had been the only one to talk; perhaps it would have ended with those brief moments of rapture and long hours of feverish nocturnal regret and penitence. But now she too spoke, and often. It was apparent that she too had an urge to talk, and was now increasingly giving into it.

  Human relations are such that, under various guises, consciously or not, one person is exploited by and exploits others in many ways, from the most innocent forms of manipulation to the crudest kinds of abuse. So the painter, in relation to Saida Hanuma, stole from her all that it was possible to steal through the eyes, warmed himself on her beauty, fanned his imagination to brazen flights of fancy, not thinking that she too might be exploiting him. She, on the other hand, had found him a sufficiently weak and harmless interlocutor, “a man who was out of the question” and before whom it was therefore possible to speak freely about anything, to say it all openly and without consideration, to ease her heart, and it would have no consequences. She herself may not have been aware of this, but that was how it was.

  From her unexpectedly and inexplicably acerbic comments and judgments about all manner of things, the woman moved onto disjointed but more wide-ranging topics; she expressed her opinions and judgments ever more freely and incautiously not only about matters of general interest but also about personalities and circumstances in the residence, and she spoke about herself and her life as if confiding in the earth or the wind and not in a living man with his own name and his own passions and needs.

  While she talked, the painter could watch her freely. Her face—a little plump, he noticed, but a full and perfect oval—was smooth as marble, flower-fresh and naturally rose-hued. Only when she was lost in thought, gazing straight at a point in front of her, did a short, dark unexpected line appear between her eyebrows. These moments became steadily more frequent and lasted longer.

  It was at one such moment that what Karas most feared and had striven with all his strength to avoid occurred.

  The drawing lesson was over. The child and her nursemaid had gone. The woman and the painter stayed on talking. She began to speak unexpectedly openly and fully about her studies in Vienna, then about the difficult days after her father’s death when she had abandoned the studies just as she was so close to their brilliant conclusion. It was only in music and her work that she could be happy
, and she had abandoned both and set off in the opposite direction, like a lost child.

  Here she abruptly stopped talking, leaned her head against the palm of her right hand and sank into a painful silence.

  Karas flared with a compassion that suddenly overwhelmed him, bearing him up like a powerful, fiery wave. Why yes, he understood better than anyone love of art and inability to find one’s place and expression in it. That was his situation too and there was no longer any doubt that she was his woman. He had only to stretch his arms toward her for them to become entirely one and to support each other unto death, through all upheavals and difficulties, in perfect love and understanding.

  His old passion that had deceived him so often and driven him to foolhardy actions (different each time) betrayed him now under the mask of compassion. Not knowing what he was doing, he stood up and stepped toward her, his arms wide.

  To start with the woman did not notice him; his outstretched arms were already in front of her when she roused herself from her reflection.

  “Ah!” a brief cry broke from her, immediately suppressed.

  She made no special movement nor did she change the expression on her face; she did not deign to, she had no need to. As if through a slight effort of her strong will she returned him to the path he had stepped off, and coldly put him back in his rightful place. Just for an instant did she rise, but only partially, without fluster or dramatic movements. Now they were again sitting opposite each other, at the accustomed distance.

  Karas was even paler than usual; his eyes downcast, his lips pursed, in an effort to conceal his trembling. In fact he had been struck with a deadly blow in the most sensitive part of his inner being and now lay prostrate on the sand, in the arena of his eternal, unvarying defeats. Here was yet another woman who did not want him and who was more surprised and taken aback than offended or indignant at his attempt to draw closer to her. Was it possible, knowing who and what he was, that he could really have imagined it could be possible . . . that she could have . . . ? Ah!

  And that was all. But it sealed the fate of Karas’s work and his continued stay in Bosnia. After his great rapture and painful ascent, he found himself once again on the hard ground like a feeble insect that had tried for the tenth, the twentieth time to clamber up a stalk. Once again without the beautiful, luxurious woman, which meant without joy, without any point in his work or in life. He did not know whether he was more frightened by the deathly desert that stretched before him once more, or ashamed because he had yet again reached for what was not for him and which, he now himself saw clearly, could never be his.

  On the face of it, nothing changed. He went on for days and weeks, teaching the child and sitting afterward in conversation with Saida Hanuma, but with numbed senses and a leaden spirit. The shadow of a man. While in the armchair before him the magnificent woman, sunk in her own memories, was in her own way gathering together her defeats and plumbing the depths of her misunderstandings with people, telling all this to the unfortunate painter, without inhibition, as if confiding in the earth or the clouds. That deep furrow of her dark moments would gather from time to time between her eyes. Gazing at that furrow, as if reading it, forgetting himself, Karas endeavored in silence to fill in and explain what he had just heard and to guess what had not been said. And a little later the woman would continue talking.

  So the short and senselessly disjointed life of Saida Hanuma took shape before him.

  THE HISTORY OF SAIDA HANUMA

  NO ONE who had seen the single-story but dignified and spacious patrician house on the main square of Brasov, where she came from, would ever have imagined that this woman could be afflicted by such disquiet and disorder.

  Her great-grandfather, a handsome, courageous imperial officer, born somewhere in Furlania, had come to Brasov with his regiment by chance and stayed on to live there, having married into a rich German Protestant household. Her grandfather had been a well-known banker and businessman and her father a philosopher and dreamer. The influence of the German branch of the family prevailed in him. Although christened a Catholic through his father, his mother’s upbringing had instilled in him a strong Protestant sense of responsibility and seriousness. With white skin and dark ginger hair, tall and slender, he was a thoughtful, withdrawn man, more inclined to reflect on life than to live it. Inherited wealth had enabled him to spend several years studying in Germany and France. When he returned to his native city, he endeavored to live the same life, among books, handing over the management of the estate to his brothers. A good-natured, amiable bachelor, he would have ended his peaceful, unconventional life like that had he not been smitten by love at first sight: an unexpected, lightning-fast and powerful madness. By now in his forties, he married the young Hungarian woman, a wild and eccentric girl of bad reputation and behavior, in no way a suitable match for him. In the space of two years, they had two children, a daughter, Ida, and a son, Karl.

  From the outset, this marriage was a particular kind of hell, which the birth of the children made neither better nor easier. On the contrary. Anywhere and for any reason malice would burst from this black-eyed, inconsiderate and capricious woman of animal strength. And she emanated a kind of smiling, arrogant and provocative vulgarity, pleased with herself and full of contempt for everything and everyone else. With every glance and every word, she mocked, belittled and dragged down everything around her.

  The clever, refined Eugene Defilipis struggled miserably with his affliction for six years, persistently, as if all his natural gifts and all his lengthy studies had been acquired simply to be expended in an irrational, debilitating battle with this crazy, crude being.

  After the first birth, his wife also turned to drink. This made life with the mother ever more difficult and unpleasant but shortened her existence and the unworthy and undeserved torments of Eugene Defilipis.

  The little girl was not yet six when her mother died. Her memories of her mother could be summed up in two words: horror and fear. She was ashamed that such a creature was her mother, she was afraid of her, trembling even in her dreams at the thought of what that woman was capable of making up, saying and doing. The shame and the fear was all she remembered of her mother. That and a conversation between adults she had overheard unnoticed. She “was not fit to clean” her father’s shoes, someone had said of her mother, and this was pronounced as a generally known and acknowledged truth.

  And she loved her father, a wise, quiet man, boundlessly and unconditionally. But shame and fear of her mother poisoned this devotion to her father, the purest and most beautiful feeling in the world, transforming it into pain.

  When her mother died, the little girl saw around her sad faces, but dry eyes and pursed lips. Everyone seemed to be shaken not by the death, but by the fact that such a creature could exist in the world and live and die and be buried like other people. Only little Ida sobbed bitterly, because the woman whom nobody was mourning was her mother.

  Then peace descended on the household, a strange peace, in which the presence of the woman who had left the world forever, unmourned, continued to be felt. It seemed that the more distant corners of the house still harbored combustible, explosive material, that one should move about cautiously and slowly. It took about a year for the inhabitants to shed that fear.

  That was when real life began for Ida and her father. From then on they lived for one another, as they had both felt life should have been lived from the start. For her these were twelve years of absolute happiness, the best time of her life, from her seventh to her nineteenth year.

  Rather neglecting his younger son, the father helped the daughter with her school work, discovering the world, gathering knowledge, sharing enthusiasms and the trifling disappointments of her school years.

  They spent every vacation together, traveling through Austria or Germany. As early as her first years at secondary school, the girl displayed a great musical gift. Her mother had had a strong alto voice and an exceptionally acute ear. Ida studied at
the local music school, and then her father sent her to Vienna to study with Czerny. She spent three years there, staying with well-to-do relatives. She grew in strength and beauty and progressed in her music, making a profound impression on everyone she met. Famous dressmakers vied to work for her. Street cleaners greeted her as she passed. Dissolute and rich men slowed their carriages to observe her. Young shop assistants’ hands would tremble as they wrapped her purchases, not taking their eyes off her. Women too, with no exception, treated her with sincere warmth and kindness. Every living thing seemed to turn to her, grateful to her for being there, for moving and laughing, for seeing and speaking, and making music. Had she happened then to vanish from the world, she would have died as the happiest human being, unaware how happy she was, for she had no inkling of evil or unhappiness. But the day came when she would learn that too.

  The first shadow fell over this wondrous life precisely because of her exceptional beauty. However blithely and innocently she looked at the world, she could not help noticing changes in the men around her. It seemed to her that there were more and more of them, forming an ever tighter ring around her and that their behavior was growing increasingly strange and importunate. Then one day her relative, a melancholy but sober and wise woman, said to her:

  “Ah yes, my child! Great beauty is always dangerous for oneself and for others. That is precisely where the misfortune of a beautiful woman lies. All desire her, no one loves her!”