Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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THE SIROCCO
135
But this letter was different. He prayed that she
would come to him, be his, give him her life.
When she read it she was frightened at herself.
She felt how she longed to cry out into the air, “ I
am coming, I am coming,” and set out. It drew
her, carried her away.
“ Let us be happy!” he wrote. “ We are losing
time; the years are passing. Let us be happy!”
He described to her how they would live. He told
her of other women who had obeyed love and been
happy. He wrote as temptingly as convincingly.
But it was not the contents; it was the love that
glowed and burned in the letter which overcame
her. It rose from the paper like an intoxicating
incense, and she felt it penetrate her. It was
burning, longing, speaking, in every word.
Now she was no longer a saint to him, as she had
been before. It came so unexpectedly, after two
years’ silence, that she was stunned. And she was
troubled because it delighted her.
She had never thought that love was like this.
Should she really like it? She found with dismay
that she did like it.
And so she punished both herself and him by
writing a severe reply. It was moral, moral; it was
nothing but moral! She was proud when she had
written it. She did not deny that she loved him,
but perhaps Gaetano would not be able to find the
words of love, they were so buried in admonitions.
He could not have found them, for he wrote no
more letters.
But now Donna Micaela could no longer think of
Gaetano as a shelter and a support. Now he was
more dangerous than the men from the mountains.
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