The End by Salvatore Scibona Page B

long ago given up hope of acquiring. It was a windfall. She had become happy—no, exuberant. While she slept, a storm had knocked the fruit out of the trees.
    In retrospect, the turn’s success had depended on her failure to notice it until it was complete. Consciousness had sabotaged her past efforts at reform so consistently that she didn’t bother to blame it anymore. It couldn’t help itself. Surgery required that the surgeon be awake and the subject etherized; operating on her own mind, she only woke herself up halfway through and made matters worse. Reform, she had slowly become convinced, was impossible. Fatalism was true. These were the tenets of a religion to which she had every intention of staying faithful. But the religion had a flaw that would prove its undoing.
    It was so all-embracing that it used her every observation as evidence for its claim: Her pudding wouldn’t thicken—why? Because it had always been the fate of this pudding to be thin. Therefore, eventually, why observe? Why be conscious? Why not sleep? And at last, she slept, firm in her faith in misery, finding nothing new to contradict it, and envisioning her death with a growing interest and fear.
    For the turn that then ensued and changed so much, she had to take at least some credit. Although she’d been asleep, yes, and hadn’t done anything to herself, she still had had the absence of mind to stay asleep and not to take heart until whatever force was acting on her had finished its work. She was like Saint Peter walking on the sea, only the moral of the story was upside down. She could do it so long as she believed she couldn’t do it and was afraid.
    Her expression at social gatherings during married life was one of regal dispassion, the face of a sleepy predator. In fact, she was abashed and so let the men talk, congratulating herself for being bored by them. She was impervious to the suffering of others and did not weep at the theater or at funerals. She did not pity the poor, the halt, or her husband, Nico, as he declined. “You are cold, cold, cold,” he said. Maybe so. She took his word for it. She could hardly feel the lack of what she had never known in the first place.
    The question arose after he died whether she was naturally ill formed in these ways or had learned her, her—the word was callousness —over a long marriage and might unlearn it. An intractable widow she knew, a muleteer’s wife, still treated herself and guests at lunch to raisin cake, for which she professed a passion while from her own piece she picked all the raisins; she disliked raisins; it was her Angelo who had liked the raisins. Those women were so stupid! But when Costanza Marini did the same things they did, she was no more forgiving than before, of them or herself. Where was her nerve? The ability to speak the truth to ourselves must have been the advantage that the adaptation called consciousness evolved to exploit. But the truth, over and over and over—that she was a sneerer and a scold, heartless, timid, fated to die alone—wasn’t only bleak, it was fatiguing. Where was her pride?
    Four years into her widowhood, Satan visited her in her garden. She was on her knees, yanking the quack grass out of the spinach. Iridescent flies dappled the carcass of a bass in the furrow. “Egoist!” said the tempter. “Despair!” To despair is a sin. But, true enough, she had no hope. She could not remember having hoped. “Die!” said the devil. She was never to speak of this episode to another soul, but she really saw him there. He was dressed like Young Werther, in a blue jacket, yellow vest and pants, and tricorn hat, and he spoke with a German accent. Her transformation was in fact slow and continuous, but if she’d had to point to an emblematic moment, a swerve, it would have been that morning with Satan in her garden. For she had straightened up her back, quaking, as he tried to lay her low, and she surveyed him head to foot in his absurd