Casanova in Bolzano (24 page)

“It’s I, Giacomo.”

He closed the door carefully and stepped forward fastidiously, a little awkwardly, as if not quite accustomed to wearing boy’s clothes. He bowed in masculine fashion and baldly declared, “I waited for you in vain. So I have come to you.”

“Why have you come?” the man asked, a little hoarse behind the mask, taking a step and getting tangled in his skirt.

“Why? But I explained in my letter. Because I must see you.”

She said this pleasantly, without any particular stress, as if it were the only reasonable explanation, the most natural answer a woman could give a man. The man did not respond.

“Did you not get my letter?” she asked anxiously.

“I certainly did,” the man answered. “Your husband, the duke of Parma, brought it to me this evening.”

“Oh!” said the woman and fell silent.

The “oh” was a quiet and simple acknowledgment, like a bird call. She leaned her slender boyish figure against the mantelpiece and fiddled with her sword. The mask she was wearing stared at the floor, solemn and empty. Then, even more quietly, she continued.

“I knew it. I was waiting for the answer and knew somehow that there had been some problem with the letter. You know it is very unusual for me to write letters. To tell you the truth it was the first letter I had written in my life.”

She turned her head aside gracefully, a little embarrassed, as if she had confessed her most intimate secret. Then she started laughing behind the mask, but it was a nervous laugh.

“Oh!” she said again. “I really am sorry the letter fell into his hands. I should have expected it. Do you think the groom who volunteered to bring my letter to you is still alive? . . . I should be sorry if anything happened to him, as he is still young and has a very sad and languishing way of looking at me when we are riding, and besides, he has a large family to support all by himself. Was it the duke himself delivered the letter? . . . Poor man. It can’t have been easy for him. He is so proud and so lonely, I can imagine what he felt when he set out to bring you the letter in which I said I must see you. Did he threaten you? Offer you money? . . . Tell me what happened, my love.”

She pronounced the last word loudly, confidently, enunciating clearly, as if she had articulated an important formal concept or subject with it. The mask was staring fixedly at the fire now, pale as death.

“He both threatened me and offered me money. Though that wasn’t the main reason he came,” the man replied. “He came primarily to give me the letter whose contents he analyzed in great detail. Then we came to an agreement.”

“Of course,” she said, with a brief sigh. “What agreement did you come to, my love?”

“He instructed me to dedicate my art to you alone, tonight. He asked me to make this night a masterpiece of seduction. He offered me money, freedom, and a letter of introduction that would protect me on the road and see me over frontiers. He told me you were ill, Francesca, diseased with love, and asked me to cure you. He told me that he was making us a present of this night, which should be as brief and as long as life, long enough for me to perform the impossible, so that we may experience in a single night all the ecstasies and disappointments of love, and that in the morning I should leave you to travel the world, go as far away as it is possible to go, wherever fate takes me, and that you should return to the palazzo with your head held high, where you may brighten and warm the remaining days of the duke of Parma. That is what he said. And he explained the meaning of your letter. I do believe he understood it, Francesca, every word of it. He did not raise his voice, but spoke calmly and quietly. And he also requested that I should be tender with you but hurt you enough to guarantee that everything should be over between us by morning, so that we could put a full stop to our sentence. . . . Those were his instructions.”

“He told you to hurt me? . . .”

“Yes. But he asked me, in parting, not to hurt you too much.”

“Yes,” said Francesca. “He loves me.”

“I think so, too,” the man replied. “He loves you, but it’s easy for him, Francesca. Love, as he loves, is easy, especially now that his time is running out . . . or rather, has ‘almost’ run out, and he kept repeating the word ‘almost,’ which seemed to be very important to him for some reason, if I understand him properly. It is easy to love when life is almost over.”

“My dear,” said the woman very gently and compassionately, like an adult addressing a child, and at the moment her unseen lips pronounced the words it was almost as if the mask itself were smiling. “It is never easy to love.”

“No,” the man obstinately insisted. “But it’s easier for him.”

“And so,” the other mask inquired, “did you come to an agreement?”

“Yes.”

“What were the terms of the agreement, Giacomo? . . .”

“I agreed to the terms he demanded and which you yourself declared in your letter. That we would meet tonight. That we would embrace each other, because there is a secret bond between us, Francesca, because love has touched us both. It is a great gift and a great sadness. It is a great gift because I do in fact love you, in my fashion, and because I regard love as an art; but it is also a great sadness because my love will never be easy or happy, can never grow wings and soar like a dove . . . because ours is a different kind of love from his. So we agreed that we would ‘know’ each other, in the biblical sense, and that you would then finish with me, cured and disillusioned, and after the morning we would never see each other again. That I would not be the shadow across your bed and would not haunt you when the duke of Parma leaned over you as you lay on your pillows; that I would be a memory for a while, but later not even that: that for you, I would be nothing and no one. That is what I agreed. It is what I must do tonight, in words, with kisses, with tears, and with vows, using all the tricks of my trade, according to the rules of my art.”

He stopped and tactfully, curiously, waited for an answer.

“Then go ahead, Giacomo,” said the woman quietly and calmly. And she tipped her head on one side so the mask stared indifferently into the air. “Go ahead,” she repeated. “What are you waiting for, my friend? Now is the moment. Begin. See, I have come to you, so you needn’t go out into the storm, for as you may have noticed a storm sprung up at midnight, an icy northern blast screaming and sweeping towers of snow along the street. But it is quiet here, warm, and scented. I see they have prepared the bed. Attar of roses and ambergris. And the table is set for two, carefully, in the best of taste, as custom dictates. But it is past midnight, and it is time for supper. So let us begin, Giacomo.”

She sat down at the neatly spread table, pulled off her gloves, breathed on her fingertips, and rubbed her bare hands together, her posture suggesting anticipation, good manners, and propriety as she looked over the foodstuffs, very much as if she were expecting the waiter to arrive so that she might start to eat.

“How will you begin?” she asked, he having made no move, then continued, now intimate and curious. “How does one seduce and then disabuse someone who has come of her own free will because she is in love? . . . I am very curious, Giacomo! What will you do? . . . Will you use force, guile, or courtesy? It is, after all, a masterpiece you have undertaken, and that is bound to be difficult. Because, you see, we are not entirely alone, for we are here with his conscious blessing, so it is a little as if there were and will continue to be three of us in the room. Naturally, he knows that you will immediately tell me everything, or almost everything: he doesn’t think you capable of crude workmanship, of lying to me, and hiding the secret of his visit, of not revealing the terms of your agreement. He couldn’t have imagined, not for a moment, that events would proceed otherwise than they have already done; he knew very well that you would begin with a confession, and how we should go on from there, the two, or is it three, of us? But I myself don’t yet know. After everything you have told me I am merely curious. So do begin.”

Both masks remained quiet awhile. Then the male mask began talking, at first in a little boy’s voice, then, slowly, as it warmed to its subject, modulating into something more feminine, as if every trace of roughness and strangeness had fallen away.

“Then perhaps I could begin . . . since I, too, am here, if not entirely according to his will nor entirely according to yours, either: I am here of my own free will, albeit masked and in male costume, in other words dressed for fun and games . . . and for all we know, the disguises help us. Do begin and perform a miracle. It should be fascinating. So this is what you said to each other, you two, the man I love and the man who loves me? . . . And by that token I must be merely obeying his instructions by being here. So, however this night turns out, it will all be according to his instructions, just as it is according to his instructions that we two, you and I, should ‘know’ and hurt each other? How marvelous,” the voice continued indifferently. “And this is all that he could think of: this is all that you have agreed to? Could you not have devised something more ambitious, more ingenious? Two such intelligent and remarkable men as you? . . . He brought you my letter, he explained and interpreted it? But Giacomo, my love, his interpretation may not be complete. Because when I committed those words to paper, the first sensible, properly related words I have ever written in my life, and I did so all by myself, I was suddenly frightened by how much words can say when one chooses them responsibly and carefully joins the letters up. . . . Only four words, you see, and he is on his way from the palazzo, acting as postman, ascending these steep stairs, and there you stand, dressed in female costume. . . . Four words, a few drops of ink on paper, and how much has already happened as a result! All those events set in motion on account of a few words I had written! Yes I, too, wondered and shuddered. And yet I think he may not have understood the letter as completely as he thinks. He interpreted it, you say? . . . No, let me do that, Giacomo! Let me do it, even if I do it with less literary skill than you two have done. Do you think I am the kind of woman who on a whim, a desire, leaves her home at midnight to seek out a man who is only just out of jail, whose reputation is so bad that mothers and older women cross themselves at mention of his name? . . . Do you know me so little? And the duke of Parma, with whom I share a bed, is his knowledge of me so shallow? . . . Did you imagine I learned to write because I was bored and wanted to amuse myself by sending a naughty letter inviting myself to a midnight rendezvous with you? . . . Did you bind yourself to a contract that would see me come to you for a night of romance as you had planned, you two wise men, for a fling, for a single night, between two turns on the dance floor? Did you imagine that I would hurry over from my home, masked, enter a strange man’s room, and then, before the dancing is quite over in the ballroom, hasten back to the palazzo to join the other couples? . . . Do you imagine that in writing to you I am seeking some childish night to remember; and that when I come to you, when I think of you, when I warm your memory with my breath, when I count the days you spend in jail, I mean to steal over to you for a night, for a secret rendezvous, just because you happen to be here, passing through the town where I live with my husband, or because once in my girlhood I knew you and there was some romantic feeling between us? . . . Is this the much-vaunted wisdom of the mighty duke of Parma and the omniscient Giacomo, who knows women’s hearts? . . . Do you imagine that I am like a simple child, chasing shadows of the past, when I finally write the words that inform you, and yes, the duke and the whole world, that I must see you? It may be that I am not quite so simple and childlike, Giacomo, my love. Perhaps it was I that directed the groom’s footsteps so that he should walk into the trap set for him by the duke? . . . Perhaps I, too, have struck a bargain tonight, with myself and my own fate if no one else, and this bargain may be as binding as the coffin, even if it bears no seal and contains no vows? Perhaps I know better than the duke of Parma why I should have climbed these stairs. What do you think, my love? Why did I write the letter? Why did I send the groom on a secret mission? Why did I wait for you? Why did I dress in a man’s clothes? Why did I sneak from my palazzo? Why am I standing in this room? Having made the agreement, you should answer.”

The other mask responded obediently, his voice flat.

“Why, Francesca?”

“Because I am not an object of seduction, my love, not material for a masterpiece, not the subject of a sage agreement. I am not the sweetheart who hastens to her lover’s side at midnight. I am not some silly goose waiting vainly for a man, chasing shadows and illusions of happiness. I am not the young woman with the elderly husband, dreaming of hotter lips and more powerful arms, setting out in the snow in search of opportunity and recompense. I am not a bored lady of leisure who cannot resist your reputation and throws herself at you, nor the sentimental provincial bride who is unable to pass over the appearance of her dazzling childhood suitor. I am neither whore nor goose, Giacomo.”

“What are you, Francesca?” asked the man.

The voice sounded strange through the mask, as if it were addressing the other at a great distance. The woman replied in the silence across an enormous distance.

“I am life, my love.”

The man stepped toward the fire, careful that his skirts should not catch fire, and threw two fresh logs onto the flames. He turned round with the remaining logs still in his arms, as he was bending over.

“And what is life, Francesca?”