A LOVE AFFAIR TO REMEMBER

In this dazzling book by Dino Buzzati, the sentences and the sensuality left me breathless by page 11.

A Love Affair by Dino Buzzati. translated by Joseph Green from the Italian in 1964. Published by New York Review Books in 2023.

A Love Affair by the late Dino Buzzati reached out to me from the shelves at the local Saratoga Library on the day I discovered that my name was emblazoned in the Saratoga Hall of Fame. It is a nice feeling to be celebrated by a town of which I’ve been a part for over twenty years. Although I feel like an imposter on most days there are other days when I feel I haven’t received any recognition whatsoever.

That’s part and parcel of being in the creative arts, I think. One day you feel validated and the sunflowers poke into the blue yonder, and the next day is laden with grey clouds because an essay of yours is tossed right back at you with a “Sorry, I’ll have to pass on this one, but please don’t hesitate to send us more of your work.”

At my lowest points in the last two years, reading weekly has entertained me and given me much perspective. The trials and tribulations of characters on the page seem more pressing and arduous than mine. Every complaint of mine at any given moment seems puerile and inconsequential. Besides, I’ve also been in places I’ve almost never visited. Like the late Dr. Seuss said, Oh, the places you’ll go when you read! This week, I entered a stylish brothel in Milan, Italy, a space that most often passes for a boutique.

Originally published as Un Amore in 1963 by Buzzati, this 1964 translation by Joseph Green was only recently published by the New York Review of Books. A gifted painter as well as writer, Dino Buzzati wrote five novels and many short stories, as well as a children’s book in 1945 called The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, in which his skill as an illustrator won him plaudits.

I found the writing in The Love Affair as clear, vivid and detailed as a painting I purchased by Lynn Shaler, a painter in Paris whose work captivated me right away when I lived there in 1998. Buzzati uses his pen like a painter uses a brush and palette. Each thought becomes a splash of color and mood on the page.

In the passage below, the protagonist Antonio Dorigo has already made an appointment to visit the brothel. Signora Ermelina has got a girl for him, a new one, she says, a young one, “under-age”, too, hardly appropriate in these times, but that’s exactly where we are. Our man, Dorigo, a 50-year-old architect of national repute, is restlessly smoking his fourth cigarette in his office while he awaits this tryst.

Once a date was made, his whole body began to wait; it was painful but at the same time marvelous, hard to explain, almost the feeling of being the victim offered in a sacrifice, the whole body naked, with an outpouring of burning energy that flowed through every part of his limbs and his guts and his flesh. A charge of temendous power, not at all animal or blind—on the contrary, poetic, full of dark obscenities.

Without resorting to the cringe factor of direct references to body parts, Buzzati conveys the force of Dorigo’s anticipation. It’s potent. It’s unbearable—for me too, might I add—and I’m a postmenopausal woman who is on the cusp of the 62nd year of her life.

Buzzati is clearly a virtuoso at this game. For several pages, we are teased about this and that in a sort of protracted foreplay that surely Italians must love more than anything in the world—while biting into their antipasto and letting their tongue play footsie with the wine. While I hated Buzzati more and more with every stalling paragraph, I was also falling madly in love with his writing. During the first formal encounter inside the suite of the brothel, the girl, Laide, (🙄) short for Adelaide, gets to try a dress at the “boutique”.

Her arms still high, her back to him, she turned her head, looking at Antonio with a little mischievous smile. Did she realize how beautiful, in that pose, she was? Had she become aware of it on her own, with a flash of female intuition, looking at herself in the glass? Or had someone taught her the pose?

Dorigo, it turns out, has briefly met this girl before in an alleyway at Corso Garibaldi and during that brief exchange of glances, he realized he sensed a visceral response to her, “as if the momentary crossing of their glances had forged between them a link that could never be broken, though they two remained unaware of it.”

We watch a man falling hopelessly in love with his call girl and his despair is writ in every meeting of theirs. Her life puzzles him. She is a conundrum, yes, but soon, however, it’s clear she is beginning to manipulate him. Yet he seeks to spend every possible moment with her. Despite the three decades between them he stretches every second with her as if the more time he spends with her, the greater the chance of something cementing their relationship forever.

The day he meets her at his friend’s empty apartment, she dances alone to the tune of Los Carinosos. He watches her as her lilac dress sways gracefully to the music, and he wallows in despair yet again. The hopelessness of the years between them strikes him ever more and that day he confesses that he has fallen in love with her. Her reaction is unexpected; it’s noncommittal and she is preoccupied with a trip to Modena. He tries to see meaning in nature as he drives to the town of Modena to pick her up.

How often had he stood in admiration before a landscape, a monument, a square, a foreshortened street, a garden, the interior of a church, a cliff, a path, a wilderness. Only now, at last, had he learned the secret.

A very simple secret: Love. Everything in all the inanimate world that fascinates us, forests, plains, mountains, rivers, seas, valleys, steppes, and more, and more, cities, palaces, stones, more, the sky, sunsets, storms, yet more, the snow, still more, the night, the stars, the wind, all these things, empty and indifferent in themselves were charged with meaning for us because, without our suspecting it, they held a foregleam of love.

Once she senses that Antonio Dorigo is smitten with her and will do anything for her, Laide leads him on. The favors begin almost innocuously at first. She has him hooked. She uses, teases and humiliates him. The first time he does a favor, it’s to drop her off at the train station. In a few months, he’s paying her 50, 000 lire to “keep” her for himself. He’s her chauffeur, her dog sitter, her porter, a sucker who will do anything just so she can look upon him kindly. What’s absolutely brilliant about this novel is how Dorigo sees and knows exactly what’s happening to him, how he’s being used and how he lets himself be strung along because, according to him, that’s what love does to people. He realizes it all. The more he knows her, the mystery deepens and the more there is to know about her. She is an enigma he simply cannot stay away from and therein lies the tragedy of it all.

Each time I admit it’s my fault. I admit I’m a nut it’s a kind of mental state but what can I do? No I can’t go on this way any longer I don’t work any more I don’t eat any more I don’t sleep any more, people talk to me and I don’t hear them, I’m like a dummy I’m not myself any more I’m killing myself I’ve got to get rid of her.

In the passage above which I thought was brilliantly translated, Joseph Green seems to have used “any more” instead of “anymore” and I’ve been wondering why. I also noticed that there are no end markers to the sentences, no periods, where they should be. Is it all part of the frustration and madness that has now consumed Dorigo?