As a Man Grows Older

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Text originally published in 1932 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

AS A MAN GROWS OLDER

BY

ITALO SVEVO

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY BERYL DE ZOETE

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

1 4

2 11

3 18

4 27

5 40

6 51

7 59

8 70

9 77

10 88

11 104

12 116

13 136

14 143

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 148

1

AT ONCE, with his very first words, he wanted to make it perfectly clear that he had no intention of beginning anything in the nature of a serious flirtation. For this reason he addressed her more or less as follows: “I love you very much and it is for your sake that I feel we ought to agree to behave with great prudence.” His words sounded, indeed, so very cautious that it was hard to believe the sentiment which inspired them was altogether disinterested; had he been able to speak a little more frankly he would probably have said something of this sort: “I am very much in love with you, but it is impossible that I should ever consider you as more than a plaything. I have other duties in life, my career and my family.”

And his family? An only sister who made no claim at all on him, either physically or morally. She was small and pale, several years younger than himself, but older in character, unless it were perhaps that the conditions under which she had lived so long made her appear so.

Of the two it was really he who was the egoist. She was like a mother to him in her unselfish devotion, but this did not prevent him from speaking as if his shoulders were weighed down by the burden of another precious life bound to his own, and of acting as if this weight of responsibility obliged him to go cautiously through life, avoiding all its perils, but also renouncing all its pleasures and all hope of earthly felicity. At the age of thirty-five, the desire for pleasures he had never tasted, for love he had never known surged up in his heart, but with a sense of bitterness and frustration at the thought of all he might have enjoyed; and he was conscious at the same time of a great mistrust of himself, and of the weakness of his own character which hitherto he had had occasion rather to suspect than to prove by actual experience.

Emilio Brentani’s career was a more complicated matter, because at that time it consisted of two distinct occupations, with completely diverse aims. His official career was a quite subordinate post in an Insurance Society, which was just sufficient to provide for the needs of his small family. His other career was literary, and apart from a mild degree of fame, which flattered his vanity rather than satisfied his ambition, it brought him in nothing, but also took nothing out of him. For many years now, in fact since the publication of a novel on which praise had been showered by the local Press, he had written nothing at all, not from any mistrust of his own powers, but from sheer inertia. His novel, printed on bad paper, had turned yellow on the shelves of the bookshops, but Emilio, who at the time of its publication had been spoken of only as a literary star of the future, had by degrees come to be looked upon as a solid literary asset who had some weight in the petty artistic scales of the city. The original estimate had never been revised, it had merely developed with time into something else.

He had too clear a perception of the insignificance of his own work ever to boast about the past; but in art as in life he regarded himself as being still in a preparatory stage, secretly considering his genius to be a powerful machine in process of construction but not yet functioning. He lived in a perpetual state of impatient expectation of something which was to be evolved for him by his brain, namely art, and of something which was to come to him from outside—good fortune, success—as if he had not already passed the age when his vitality was at the full.

Angiolina walked beside him. She was a tall, healthy blonde, with big blue eyes and a supple, graceful body, an expressive face and transparent skin glowing with health. As she walked, she held her head slightly on one side, as if it were weighed down by the mass of golden hair which was braided round it, and she kept looking down at the ground which she tapped at each step with her elegant parasol, as if she hoped there might issue from it some comment on the words that had just been spoken. When at last she was sure she had heard aright, she murmured: “How strange!” and looked at him from under her eyelids. “No one ever said such a thing to me before.” She could not understand him, but somehow felt flattered at seeing him assume a responsibility that was not really his, that of warding off a danger from her. It made the affection he offered her seem of a tender, brotherly nature.

Having stated his conditions, Emilio felt that he had set his mind at rest, and could allow himself to resume a tone more in keeping with the occasion. He rained down on her fair head the lyrical effusions which the desire of all these long years had ripened and refined, and as he uttered them, they seemed to him to have been born afresh at that moment, under the inspiration of Angiolina’s blue eyes. It seemed to him that it was years since he had really tried to compose, since he had drawn ideas and words from his inner consciousness; and this discovery endowed the humdrum tenor of his life with a rare and unforgettable quality of peace and suspended movement. A woman had come into his life! The glamour of her youth and of her beauty was over it all, banishing from his mind the memory of his sad and lonely past, full of unsatisfied desires, and holding out to him the promise of a joyful future which could not, he felt sure, be compromised by her.

He had approached her with the idea of a brief and easy intrigue, such as he had so often heard described, but had never yet experienced, at least hardly in such a form as to be worthy of the name. She had dropped her sunshade just in time to provide him with an excuse for accosting her, and now that he was thus cunningly entangled in the pretty web of the young girl’s life he felt no desire to free himself from it until he should have advanced much farther into her intimacy.

But the amazing purity of her profile and her incomparable health—are not good health and corruption always assumed by the rhetorician to be incompatible?—had subdued the ardor of his first onset and, overcome with a sudden reluctance to go farther, he now found all his delight in marveling at the mystery of her face, with its clear and delicate chiseling and infinite sweetness of expression. His happiness was complete, he was at rest.

She had told him very little about herself, and he was so much preoccupied with his own feelings that at the time he did not even listen to the little she told him. She was obviously poor, very poor even, but for the moment, as she related to him with a certain amount of pride, she had no need to earn her living. This added a certain charm to the adventure, for to carry on a flirtation with someone who is on the brink of starvation has a disturbing influence on one’s enjoyment. Emilio had therefore not much information to go on, but it seemed to him on the whole that such conclusions as he was able to draw were sufficiently reassuring. If the girl were honest, as her limpid gaze seemed to suggest, he should certainly not be the one to deprave her. If, however, her profile and that clear eye of hers belied her real character, so much the better for him. In either case he had a fair prospect of enjoying himself, and in neither did there seem to be any danger.

Angiolina had not understood a great deal of what he was saying, but there were plenty of small indications to enable her to interpret the rest. Even the words she found most difficult to comprehend were spoken in a tone of voice which left no doubt as to how they should be interpreted.