Read Online Inevitable by Louis Couperus - Free Book Online

to pick up a few words to make oneself understood in a shop or with the serving staff; she decided Hare’s
Walks
was too exhausting as a guidebook, since every last stone in Rome did not excite the same interest in her as it had obviously done in Hare. Then she admitted to herself that she would never be able to see Rome the way Duco van der Staal saw it. She never saw the light in the skies and the scudding of clouds as he had in his unfinished watercolour studies. She never saw the ruins glorified as he did in his hours spent dreaming in the Forum and on the Palatine. She saw a painting only with the eyes of a layman; a Byzantine Madonna meant nothing to her. She did like sculpture; passionate love for a lump of mutilated marble such as he felt for the
Eros
seemed pathological to her, she thought at the time, but “morbid”—though the word made her smile—expressed her view better. Not pathological, but morbid. And she considered an olive a tree that resembled a willow, though Duco had told her that an olive was the loveliest tree in the world.
    She did not agree with him, either about the olive or about
Eros
and yet she felt that from some mysterious perspective that was inaccessible to her, he was right, since it was like a mystical hill amid unbridgeable mystical circles, which he passed through as emotional spheres that were not hers, just as the hill was an unknown throne of feeling and perspective. She disagreed with him and yet she was convinced that he was right in a superior way, had a superior vision, a nobler insight, a deeper feeling; and she was certain that her way of seeing Italy—in the disappointment of her dream—was not noble or good, that the beauty of Italy was escaping her; while for him it was like a tangible and embraceable vision. And she cleared away Ovid, Petrarch and Hare’s guidebook, and locked them in her case and took out the novels and pamphlets that had appeared that year on the Women’s Movement in Holland. She was interested in the issue and it made her feel more modern than Duco, who suddenly appeared to her as if belonging to a past era. Not modern. Not modern. She repeated the word with relish and suddenly felt stronger. Being modern would be her strength. One remark of Duco’s had made a deep impression: that exclamation “Oh, if only we could find a goal! Our life has a line, a path that you must travel …” Being modern, wasn’t that a line? Finding a solution to a modern question, was that not a goal? He, he was right, from his point of view, from which he viewed Italy, but was not the whole of Italy a past, a dream, at least the Italy that Duco saw, a dream paradise of nothing but art. It could not be good to stand and see and dream like that. The Present was there: on the grey horizons there was therumble of an approaching storm and the modern questions flashed like lightning. Was it not that that she must live for? She felt for Women and Girls: she herself had been a Girl, brought up with nothing but a drawing-room education, in order to shine, beautifully and charmingly, and then to marry. And she had been beautiful, and charming, she had shone and had married, and now she was twenty-three , divorced from that husband, who had once been her only goal: now she was alone, lost, in despair and mortal desolation: she had nothing to cling to, she was suffering. She still loved him, blackguard, wretch that he was; and she had thought she was being very strong by setting off on a trip, for the sake of art, to Italy. Oh, how clearly she saw, after those conversations with Duco, that she would never understand art, though she had drawn a little in the past, although she had once had an unglazed terracotta group after Canova in her bedroom:
Amor and Psyche
, so sweet for a young girl. And how certain she was now that she would not understand Italy, since she did not find an olive tree that beautiful, and had never seen the sky of the Campagna as a fanned phoenix’s wing.