Casanova in Bolzano (22 page)

Having said that he stood up.

“Do we have an agreement, Giacomo?” he asked, leaning on his stick.

His host strode over to the door, his hands behind his back. He opened it, gazed meditatively at the threshold, and asked, “But what happens, Your Excellency, if the performance is unsuccessful? . . . I mean, if I am unable to condense and accelerate everything in such a fortunate manner as Your Excellency requires? What will happen if, come the morning after the night before, the duchess of Parma feels that the night is merely the beginning of something. . . .”

He was unable to finish the sentence. With surprisingly quick and youthful steps the guest hurried past him, hesitated on the threshold, looked him in the eye, and answered in his most cutting manner:

“That would be a big mistake, Giacomo.”

They regarded each other for a few long minutes.

“Your Excellency’s wish is my command,” the other replied and shrugged his shoulder. “I shall serve Your Excellency to the best of my ability, as he wishes and as only I can.” He made a deep bow.

The duke turned to him with a last parting shot.

“I told you to be tender with her and to hurt her. Please don’t hurt her too much, if that is at all possible.”

He went out without closing the door behind him, slowly, slightly bent. Tapping his stick on the stairs he brought his servants hastening to meet him with their torches. Then he began to descend.

In Costume

 . . .
S
o what are you waiting for? Get dressed, you aging mountebank, you trembling old quack! Your room is full of shadows: the shadows of your youth. Youth is gone, isn’t it? . . . but you can still hear its voices, like the tinkling of bells on your decrepit guest’s sleigh. Off he goes, as if bowing and blowing kisses to an invisible audience, together with his servants, his magnificent horses, and his tinkling sled. He is passing under your window right now. They’ve swaddled him in pelts so you can’t even see the tip of his nose, a gaunt and graceless figure in the depths of the carriage, wrapped in fur, protected by his rank, old and in pain, and despite what he says, however he preaches and pontificates, on the point of death. It is he who is wounded now, not as I once was, bleeding in the garden in Pistoia and at the gates of Florence: his wound is fatal. And what about you? Are you happy now, Giacomo? Are you dead? Have they already crossed your arms across your chest? If you had your way you yourself would be making bows and blowing kisses to your invisible audience, receiving their applause. Are you lost for words? Is there a sour taste in your mouth as though you had overeaten and drunk too much? Is it penance and herrings you need? It is a mad world! Now you must kill everything in you: strangle your memories, strangle every tender feeling with your bare hands as if it were an unwanted kitten, strangle everything that smacks of human contact and compassion! Is the time of your youth over? . . . No, not quite. Yes, you are missing two front teeth. You find the cold harder to bear and like to snuggle up to the fire, muttering, in fur gloves, watching what you eat and carefully rinsing your mouth before kissing anyone because neither your digestion nor your teeth are exactly perfect any more! But this does not constitute a terminal condition. Your stomach, your heart, and your kidneys are faithful servants; your hair is only just beginning to go, a little thin on your crown and your temples: you will have to be careful where your lover plants her hands when she takes hold of your hair! You are not old yet, but you have to be a little careful . . . particularly of the pox that seems to be ravaging the world, so people say. But all is not lost. That great energy, that spontaneous overflow, that all-or-nothing the old fool spoke about with such contempt, may serve you awhile yet! The virtues of caution, wisdom, forethought, and reason are nothing without the instinctive passions of youth to heat them. What kind of life is it without the desire to take everything the world has to offer and to blow all your resources at the same time, to grab and discard at once? . . . Enough of this. You are not at the carnival now. You have a different kind of appointment, a different deadline! A deadline that marks the end of youth. You are an adult now, in one of your mature moments of wisdom, the kind you get at four in the afternoon in mid-October. A fine time. Your sun is still shining. . . . Look around, take a deep sweet breath, feel the rays of the sun, slow down, pay more attention, there’s nothing else you can do in any case. Your youth is leaving you . . . elsewhere people are laughing, glasses are clinking, a woman is singing, there’s the scent of falling rain, you are standing in a garden, your face wet with tears and rain, the flowers are dead but your heart is wild and happy, you yearn for completeness and annihilation, all the trodden flowers lie around you . . . that’s what it was like, something like that. Later perhaps, when you are an old man, you will remember it. Now get dressed, because time is passing, there are people already waiting in the ballroom and one inexpressibly tender and alert pair of eyes is looking for you because she must see you. . . . Where’s the note? Yes, it’s there where he left it. Let’s have a look. Large writing, careful, careworn letters . . . she’s not the first woman to have written to me, nor will she be the last, I suppose. And with what trembling fingers and glittering eyes that wounded old crow, her husband, explained the meaning of the letter! It really was most amusing! Sometimes it is worth being alive! I must see, yes. . . . Well, poor thing, what more could she have written when she has been literate for barely a year? He says that no one could mean more or write more beautifully, and perhaps he is right; it is an elegant note, and it might be that other women, like the marquesa, the cardinal’s niece, and M.M., who knew a great deal about both love and literature, wrote more wittily and at greater length, complete with verses, classical references, high vulgarity, and passionate bombast, but, I must admit, they wrote nothing more true. The jealous old fool is right to admire it. . . . Well, my dove, you shall see me as you desire! You shall see me, though I am not the youngest or handsomest of men, nor, as His Excellency remarked, the greatest of villains, either. . . . You, my dove, will see me, as you wanted and as he, too, wanted, the ruffled old crow! What a speech he made! What convoluted strategies he devised! All that threatening and prodding! Could he have been the man who betrayed me to the authorities some sixteen months ago in Venice? . . . The council is glad to do little favors for influential outsiders; the
messer grande
is a courteous man and he would not deny a minor service to the cousin of the French king. Well, my duke of Parma, you shall have what you asked for! You made a fine job of dressing your proposition as a gift, you spoke with feeling like a philosopher, you wanted to be producer and patron, master and accomplice, in this curious business, and you shall have what you want. . . . Might it have been really those two old arthritic hands of yours that deposited me on my straw bed in Venice? . . . he didn’t say so, not in so many words. Like a retired hangman he consulted his secret list and simply hinted at the possibility before tucking the slip of paper back in his waistcoat pocket and going off with it! Chew on that! he thought. Beware, in case I do it again! He has a point there: it was no fun in the cells. He was right, too, in speaking of other laws and other forms of order, though I could tell him a story or two myself, albeit brief ones, with neat punchlines. Father Bragadin is no angel, of course, when it comes to the public good or when one can gain one man’s favor by selling another man’s life. It is simply the way of the world. We are slow to learn its lessons but maybe it’s better that way. We prepare ourselves to face the world, we find out how it works, and soon enough we discover that there is business more dirty and dangerous than a game of cards, that affairs conducted under a veil of respectability are just as dirty. Take care, Giacomo! Take care tonight! And take care tomorrow morning, too, at cockcrow, when you take your leave in the snow. This is too carefully planned to be harmless: beware the aging grandee, the ancient, august lover who prefers not to strangle his rival, but to use those hands of his rival to strangle love itself and the memory of love . . . take care! Lights are still burning in the stable, you still have a few gold coins left over from yesterday jangling in your pocket; how would it be if you quickly packed, grabbed that hot sixteen-year-old spring chicken, Teresa, whose kisses have ensured a good night’s sleep these last eight days, and, true to the laws of your own being, following your impeccable logic, forgot the ball, the agreement, and the grand performance, and made off with her tonight? . . . It might be better than waiting for dawn. Perhaps you should let them get on with it, let the duke of Parma wear his ass’s head and ever after fret over his precious Francesca, her memories of her literary lover, and about what he might yet get up to with her? . . . Concentrate, Giacomo, little brother! Are you in two minds? Are you thinking of staying now? Do you think your agreement obliges you to carry out your role? Can you not escape a performance that is bound to be false and sad as well as dangerous and unnatural, a performance that may end in real tears and real blood trickling across the boards of the stage, with a real corpse for the stagehands to remove? . . . But you can already feel the excitement, the involuntary shudder: everything else is beginning to lose focus, desire is stoking the fire in you. Is that desire no longer subject to reason? Do you feel you have no choice but to play the part? Could it be that the jealous old coxcomb calculated right when he appealed to the artist in you, when he drew attention to your art, so you were certain to accept even if it meant that not just the memory of the artist but the artist himself came to a sticky end, stitched up by His Excellency of Parma? But no, you must not rebel, you must not protest: accept the fact that you must stay and finish your business. You can’t escape the responsibilities of your art: your entire life has been fraught with danger, so why stop now? You need the danger, you need to feel that at any moment the curtains of your bed might open and someone stick a knife between your ribs: you need to be aware of the possibility of annihilation; you need the impossible thing that the respectable citizen so desperately and helplessly craves and dreams about as he snores in his nightcap at his wife’s side, while you are creeping through somebody’s cellar or scrambling about on a rooftop, fighting hired assassins, living the reality that they, the virtuous, the shuffling, dare only dream about. You represent change and transformation: you are the flesh-and-blood version of what they call adventure or art. What else can you do? You will assume the part allotted to you, you will use your talent. So it is settled and you are staying! To work then! Clap three times and get them to bring water in the silver jug, let Balbi shift his horny feet and find you an appropriate outfit in town, let Giuseppe be called for to steam and pamper your face, and have a word with little Teresa, tell her to wrap her things in a bundle and to meet you at the edge of town at dawn. I will take her to Munich and sell her as wife to the elector’s chief secretary. I will do things properly. Cheer up, there’s nothing else you can do. The duke of Parma has thought of everything. He understands me completely and has calculated correctly; he knew I would stay and make my one-night-only guest appearance, however demanding it may be, even if it cost me my neck in the end, even if the lovely ladies of Bolzano finish up singing mournful three-part harmonies over my corpse. Yes, you greedy, clever, puzzled old man, you have calculated correctly. You firmly believe that wealth, power, cunning, and a little circumspection are enough to see the thing through. But let me send you a message, now, before I put on my costume, start painting my face, and summon every time-honored feature of my art for the performance: beware! For you, too, should take care! What do you think I am? Do you really think I am some kind of conjuror who can produce a masterpiece at a moment’s notice: what an idea! You should be careful, for I am only human, and so is she. You demand, in your desperation, that we should collaborate on a single work of instantaneous genius. How could I be sure of doing that? I have never known what the morning light would bring. Not that I regret it. Half my life is over and I have never regretted anything, nor was ever bored for an instant: I have been stabbed, I have been offered drinks laced with poison, I have slept under the stars without a penny in my pocket, I have no one I could call a friend: all I have is my notoriety, but I have not regretted any of it. The best part of life is gone: I have neither house nor apartment, not a stick of furniture to my name, not a watch, not even a ring that I could truly call mine. I order new clothes in every town I visit and feel no obligation to stay in any of them, yet you, the duke of Parma, are jealous of me. You who are tied to everything and are nothing but the things you are tied to—palaces, birth, name, title, lands, possessions, sentiments, and jealousies—you, who now, when life is “almost” over, as you never tire of saying—indeed you keep repeating the word in the vain hope that by flirting with it, by saying it often enough, you might actually delay your fate and avoid your final appointment with reality—find yourself in a tangle of contradictions between what you want and what there is; are you not secretly, somewhere deep in your soul, jealous of my ability to wrap myself in clouds and travel on moonbeams, to ride the wind across borders where nobody waits or takes leave of me; of me, the man without a room, without furniture, without a single possession anywhere in the world that he can truly call his own? . . . Enough, my boy, wake up, prepare yourself. Give a nice loud whoop, the way you used to. There’s an icy wind hooting and tugging at the skirts of the ladies of Bolzano: you, too, should be like the wind, hooting with laughter! Life isn’t over yet, there’s no question of “almost” for you. You need not rely on conjuring tricks because you are the real thing! So beware, Duke, I am no longer afraid of the morning. Let the storm whose gusts are already blowing about my heart and through my mind carry me forward, let there be tears and vows, kisses and death, let everything be condensed or slowed down, as life will have it, let it all happen despite the morning. I shall serve you well tonight, dear Duke! You have purchased me in all my miraculous, wonder-working reality. I shall be like those ancient wrestlers who knew they would have to pay for their performance with their lives: I will not be churning out a dutifully composed text to whisper in her ear, no, I shall do better and improvise a true text! Are you not afraid, you old schemer, that the performance might turn out to be all too successful? . . . Her letter is rather imperious and the spell she casts may be more effective than the ingenious strategy you have devised for your remaining days. Do you think you will save the tenderness and affection you imagined she might offer you when you married her? Are you not afraid that human passions might not be subject to nice calculation, that the greatest of artists might make a mistake, that the game might turn into a reality, a kiss become a true bond, that a trickle of blood might spread and become a tide in which life itself ran away from you? . . . Yes, we have an agreement. So both of us should now see that it is carried out: you with your ass’s head, in your palazzo, with your painstaking schemes and your squint, and I in costume, the perfect costume in which no one will recognize me except the woman for whom I wear it! Are Balbi and Teresa ready for departure? . . . Balbi! . . . Hey, Balbi! . . .