Grazia Deledda: A Phantasm

Grazia Deledda

A Phantasm

From Faults of Others

(Translated from the Italian by Florence Trail)

“And thou believest that thou wilt be happy with the other? Think well, my darling.”

Vittoria shrugged her shoulders, but immediately the expression of her face became grave: “It is not this, mother! I don’t care about happiness!”

And she looked out at length toward the background of the heath, wrinkling her brow. She felt in one instant a mysterious agony, as if the evening was falling even within her: and the need of stopping the light on the horizon, of filling the world with the cry of her passion, impelled her to get the fisarmonica and to seat herself on the little door step.

With the instrument resting on her knee, she leaned her head to the right to listen better to the notes, while her fine dark fingers ran over the keys, at first light as the feathers of a wing, then tenacious as claws. At once all the heath even to the red horizon seemed to be animated and palpitating .they were cries of joy, calls of love, laments of desire that went from spot to spot, from bush to bush as if seeking in the shadows of the twilight a fantasm that would respond on the same tone; and not finding it turned back, became groans, sobs, voices that asked aid and then quieted down and t hen changed into foolish laughs of derision. But from the depths of the instrument ascended uninterruptedly a breath at first light, then harsh as the trembling of the bagpipe; and very softly it also increased, it made itself the murmur of the wind, the roar of the sea and the far away woods. It seems the voice of all the heath around when the March winds beat it; flowers flew, the birds passed shrieking drunk with the whirlwind and with love; then it grew quiet.

All returned sweet and ardent, but with a desolating ardor; the ardor of June, the ardor of a woman who waits yet knowing that she waits in vain and revels in the thought of death.