Two Faces in a Well

The Recovery of One's Lost Youth is, at Best, a Perilous Venture

GIOVANNI PAPINI

AS it only to see my own face reflected in a well that I went back to the university town where I had spent four years of my youth ? I could think of no other reason for returning. Yet I found myself hurrying through the familiar streets, eager to look again into the calm, black water which had mirrored my vanished self.

Making a polite explanation to the landlady of my old lodgings, I went at once into the garden. Yes, there was the well, unchanged in all these years! I sat on the rim, and, trembling with impatience and a sort of fear, leaned over and looked down ... as Ponce de Leon might have stared into the pool of youth before he stooped at last to drink. . . .

I saw a pallid face, lined, fatigued, ironic and wistful—my own: Beside it, the reflection of another face—not my own!

I turned with a start of surprise. A man was sitting beside me on the rim of the well. Like me, he was staring down at that circular mirror of polished water. I watched him, startled by a sense of familiarity. And I saw that he strangely resembled me—he was me— he was myself—at the age of twenty!

At one time I would have believed myself in the grip of an obsession. But knowing, as I do to-day, that only the impossible is real, I offered my hand to myself and said:

"You are me—myself, seven years ago. I thought you were dead, but here you are, exactly as I left you! I'm very glad to see you. What can I do for you?"

The young man regarded me for a moment with a gentle smile. Then he answered: "When you graduated, you left me here alone in this weed-grown garden, to wait until you returned. But I knew you'd come back! You left the best part of your soul with me, you know. Now you're here! And I want to know about the years between—what you've done, what you've learned, everything!"

"Certainly, my dear fellow. I have no secrets."

And, arm in arm, like two brothers, we left the garden together.

THERE then followed the most singular experience of my life. I spent several happy days with my old self. We walked through the quiet streets of the old town, talking of many things, questioning one another, exchanging old dreams for new dreams, old ideas for new ideas, old, half-forgotten experiences for new, half-realized experiences. We explored the university, wandered about the campus, poked our inquisitive noses into book shops and tea rooms and clubs—all the familiar haunts I had once known so well and appreciated so little. We rowed on the lake, we lounged in the woods, and always, always we talked. I cannot think of those confidential conversations without a sinking of my heart.

For you must know that after the first few days with my old self I began to be most horribly bored. My companion got on my nerves. Oh, decidedly! He was ingenuous, awkward, suffocatingly sentimental. He had a half-baked mind. His theories—and God bless me, how he spilled them!—struck me as absurd; his enthusiasms were childish; his tastes provincial; his beliefs old-fashioned. He professed himself an admirer of things I had learned to despise. Artistically, he was stirred by pink and blue landscapes, Byronic verses and sentimental ballads. He liked plump, blonde girls. He was horribly shy and vain. He knew nothing about life. He had no irony, no wisdom, no compassion. J was sorry for him. Good Lord, how I hated him!

He was, however, myself. How could I escape him? Seven years had passed and I had advanced so far beyond him that he could no longer understand me. Yet, when I was his age, I, too, had believed myself a superior being. I despised him now. Might I not some day despise my newer self? All of these selves were identical—judged by men as a single individuality. Who could*understand and pity me except myself? The very . thought was horrible. . . .

This youth had nothing in common with me. My mature self, as yet non-existent, would despise what I was to-day—and so on, to the end.

LITTLE by little, a silence fell between us. I could not talk to him—we were as different as two sides of a medal. What did he know of the paradoxes, the bitter encounters, the flashes of comprehension, the elusive visions, the fragmentary sensations, the beauties and terrors that had filled my life for seven years? He listened vaguely, with the contemptuous indifference of the very young for the not so very young.

At last I could contain myself no longer. "You bore me to death!" I cried. "I'm going back where I came from, and I don't ever want to see you again."

His eyes filled with tears. "Oh, I say, that's rotten of you! We're getting along so famously. You understand me. You see into a fellow's soul. Don't go away and leave me alone again in this one-horse town!"

I said nothing. Four more days passed. He followed me everywhere, like a detestable shadow. I had to listen to his calf-like confessions, his bad poetry, his abominable adolescent philosophy until I could have murdered him. And that, in the end, is what I did. . . .

We were in the lodging-house garden, sitting, as usual, upon the rim of the old well. There had been a storm and the surface of the water was strewn with leaves. Side by side, myself and I reached down and pushed the sodden leaves aside so that we could stare at ourselves in that deep, black mirror. , . .

Then I gave my old self a violent shove and bent his body down and held his hateful face under the water, and held it there and held it there with all my hate and my exasperation, with all the strength of my arms.

He fought, kicking and wriggling, choking, gasping, bubbling. But I held him fast until his body grew limp and still. Then I let him go and he slipped down beneath the leaves to the bottom of the well. . . . My old self was dead forever.

I left the garden calmly and took the first train out of town. No one ever discovered the body in the well. To this day I have gone unpunished. Yet I carry in my heart the uncomfortable, the terrible, the unique knowledge that I am the only man in the world who has killed himself and who still continues to live!