Casanova in Bolzano (9 page)

There stood Francesca in the dawn breeze, in front of the crumbling stone wall of the count’s garden, slender, wearing a nightgown, fifteen years old, her dark hair falling across her brow, one hand clutching a white silk shawl across her breast, her eyes wide, staring at the sky. Had it been five years? No, it was only the swish of swords that had happened five years ago; the moment in which he had first seen Francesca was stored away in a deeper, more secret crevice of time. There she stood before the garden wall in the shadows of the cypresses, and the sky above them was a clear and gentle blue, as if every human passion had dissolved and gentled in that clear, all-pervading blue. The wind is embracing Francesca, the soft folds of the nightgown are hugging her girlish body like a swimming costume. Francesca seems to have stepped from a bathing pool compounded of night and dreams, her body shimmering, dew-drenched, and in the corner of her eyes there is some sparkling liquid whose precise nature is hard to define, a teardrop, perhaps, or a drop of dew that has deserted its usual habitat in the depths of the flower cup to settle on a young girl’s lashes. . . . And he stands opposite the girl and listens. Only desire can listen with such intensity, he now thinks. I tend to talk a lot, far too much, in fact, but I listened then, in Pistoia, by the crumbling castle wall, in the garden, where the olives ran riot and the cypresses stood about as somber as you could wish, as somber as the halberdiers of a king in exile. Francesca has stolen from her bed in the castle, out of the night, out of childhood and out of a sheltered life into the garden on the morning of the day that he exchanges dueling cards with the duke of Parma. He saw and felt everything now. He caught the scent of the morning, and it stirred up jealousy and other intense feelings in him, memories of moments experienced only by those who are no longer young. Because Francesca represented youth and so did those silent gardens: perhaps it was the last minute of his own youth passing in the impoverished count’s garden in Pistoia; perhaps these were the somber, tattered, grandiose theatrical props of his own decaying memory, a memory that was disintegrating under the pressure of years; maybe this scene represented his youth as it was many years ago in a garden in Tuscany when the sky was blue and Francesca stood by the garden wall, her hair and clothes fluttering in the wind, her eyes closed; when they were both listening, confused and intoxicated by a feeling, that even now sank its claws into him and tortured him. “How extraordinary she was!” he thought, and pressed his fists even tighter into his eyes. It was as if she were saturated with light, so intensely did that sweet yet disturbing energy flow from her to touch the man standing opposite her. Yes, she was filled with light. It was the rarest of all sensations, he reflected approvingly, like a connoisseur. There was light in her, and when a man looked into her eyes it was as if lamps were being lit all over the world; everything around him was brighter, more real, more substantially true. Francesca herself stood as if entranced and he did not speak as the old suitor stepped through the garden gate, offered his arm to Francesca, and led her back into the house. That was all. And a year later, in the very same place, in a corner of the yard before the castle gate, quite possibly at the same precise hour, two men fought each other.

The old man fought well, he thought again, curling his lip in homage, and smiled bitterly. Was that all? . . . Perhaps the adventure was simply about youth, the last year of real youth, that mysterious but exciting interval when even the nervous traveler lets the reins of his horse go, relaxes into the gallop, looks round, wipes his brow, and sees that the road waiting for him ahead is steep, that far off, beyond the woods and the hills, the sun is already beginning to set. When he first met Francesca it was still bright, still high noon. They stood in a valley in the foothills of Tuscany. He had just arrived from Rome, his pockets bulging with the cardinal’s gold and with letters of introduction. Travel was different then, he thought with satisfaction and a touch of envy. Few could travel the way I did, he proudly reflected. He had a shameless self-confidence born of genius, of an artist at the top of his form: “The sound I can get out of that flute! Remarkable! Can anyone compare with me? . . . Let him try!” There were indeed few who could travel like him and even fewer who could arrive in the style he did, in the good old days, five years ago! For there’s a trick, a manner of carrying things off on the stage of human endeavor, and he knew all the theatrical tricks; that there’s a way of choosing the horses, the equipment, the dimensions of the coach, and, yes, even the coachman’s uniform; that one must master the art of arriving at the palazzo of one’s host or at an inn of good reputation, as well as the art of driving through the gates of a foreign city and of leaning back in one’s seat in one’s lilac-edged gray traveling cloak, or of raising one’s gilt-handled lorgnette in one’s gloved hand and crossing one’s legs in a careless, faintly interested manner, the way Phoebus himself might have traveled at dawn in his fiery chariot drawn by four prancing horses above a world that, to tell the truth, he mildly despised. These were the tricks you had to master; this was the best way to travel and to arrive! How few people knew such tricks! There were remarkably few people who were capable of understanding that it was vital that, within half an hour of arriving at the inn or at your host’s palazzo, the whole serving staff of the establishment should be buzzing around you! This was the way he arrived one day at Pistoia, at the home of the old impoverished count who was related to the cardinal who now, in turn, was sending his blessing to the family, to the fat countess and to Francesca, his godchild. He proceeded to stay a month, entertained the family, made over a gift of two hundred ducats and golden caskets to the count, returning twice the next year, and at the end of that year, one moonlit night, fought a duel with the ancient suitor, the duke of Parma. He opened his shirt and examined the wound on his chest.

He touched the scars with his fingertips, itemizing and remembering them. There was a line of three scars on his left, all three just above the heart, as if his enemies had unconsciously yet somehow deliberately, instinctively, aimed precisely at his heart. The central scar, the deepest and roughest of them, was the one he owed to His Excellency of Parma and to Francesca. He put his index finger to the now painless wound. The duel had been fought with rapiers. The Duke’s blade had made a treacherous incursion above his heart, so the surgeon had had to spend weeks draining the blood and the suppuration off the deep wound; and there had also been some internal bleeding, as a result of which the victim, after fever fits, bouts of semiconscious delirium, and stretches of screaming and groaning insensibility, finally bade farewell to adventure. He lay in Florence in the hospital of the Sisters of Mercy where he had had himself conveyed in the duke’s coach on the night of his wounding. He had not seen Francesca since that moment, and he learned of the engagement only some three years later in Venice, at a masked ball, from the French ambassador, who regretfully let fall that the cousin of the grand duke, a Parmesan kinsman of His Most Christian Majesty, forgetting his rank and high connections, had, in the idiotic thoughtlessness of his declining years, married some little village goose from Tuscany, a rural demi-countess of some kind. . . . He had smiled and held his peace. The wound no longer gave him any pain, and only when the weather was damp did he feel the slightest pang. So life went on and no one ever mentioned Francesca’s name.

Why is it, he wondered, that I have remained aware of her all these years? And later, too, when I received the second wound, that long jagged one above the little carte de visite left me by the duke of Parma, that long brute across the chest, administered with a sword at dawn by the hired assassin of Orly the cardsharp as I was leaving the gambling den at Murano, my greatcoat stuffed with hard-earned gold prized from the pockets of a cheating banker and various other rogues, gold earned through the judicious use of quick wits and even quicker fingers; why was it that, in those days after the assault, as I lay in a state between life and death, this image of Francesca by the garden wall under the blue Tuscan sky kept coming to mind? And the third scar, that odd scratch where the Greek woman went at him with her sharp fingernails, and which hurt more than other cuts and thrusts received at the hands of men, that mysterious wound through which the toxins of death seeped into his body, which was less than a pinprick yet so dangerous that Signor Bragadin and the finest doctors of the council fussed around his bed for weeks, torturing the poor patient with enemas and cuppings until one day he grew weary of dying and, asking for orange juice and hot broth, simply recovered—why was it that, in the delirium caused by this deadly female weapon, he kept seeing Francesca and calling on her? “Is it possible that I loved her? . . .” he mused with a sincere, almost childlike sense of wonder, and stared into the mirror above the fireplace. “Heaven knows, I might have! . . .” he thought, and looked about him with pious stupefaction.

But life proved more resilient, more resilient than even the memory of Francesca, and every day brought something miraculous to a man providing he was healthy and did not go in fear of anything. Who was Francesca, what was she, in the years when gold coins spilled from his fingers at gaming tables, into women’s palms, into the pockets of fashionable tailors, into the fists of layabout acquaintances, into the hands of whoever happened to be about when he needed medicine to cure the terrible pox or to save him from a frightening, secret boredom? “I am a writer,” he thought, “but I don’t like being alone.” He considered this peculiar phenomenon. This might be why life dealt him such a cruel hand in the enforced solitude of the penitentiary; perhaps the sapient and subtle masters of the Inquisition knew about his secret terror; perhaps they suspected that boredom and loneliness were as much a form of torture to him as the Spanish boot, the red-hot pincers, or being broken on the wheel was to others? What was the point of life if one were removed from the busy commerce of the world? However one dreamed or imagined, thought and recalled, or meditated on sensations that life had burned up and reduced to ashes, it was no compensation for the loss of the most humble, most idiotic detail of a life experienced directly! Anything but solitude! he thought and shuddered. Better to be abject and poor, better to be mocked and despised yet able to slink over to the light and crouch there where lamps are burning and music is being played, where people crowd together and enjoy the greasy, foul-smelling yet cheeringly sweet, bestial sense of community that constitutes human life. Life was company for him, nothing more: he was always in company, always carelessly taking his wares to market because the market was where he wanted to be. He loved the racket, the proximity of other bodies, the sheer buccaneering adventure of it. Sometimes the bargaining was rough and crude, at other times sophisticated and sly, but most of the time it was like a game, a competition in which one took on all comers much as one did one’s own destiny. The marketplace was the only place for him, for the writer in him. It was life itself. He scratched his ears and felt a cold thrill run down his spine.

And that was why his clever, superior torturers had punished him with solitude, a fate worse than death, he thought with disgust. Four hundred and eighty-eight days! And the memories! Each memory just one more condemned soul. And sometimes the image, that shining blue-and-white moment in the Tuscan garden: Francesca! For hers was the only face, the one and only face he had not gazed at with the brazen curiosity he usually directed at women’s faces. Her face persisted more obstinately and with greater force than reality itself, even in his underworld prison where living men groaned and wept. It was a banal enough occasion when their paths first crossed. The cardinal’s kinsman was entertaining him in a coat with ragged elbows, in a room full of clouded mirrors and broken-legged Florentine furniture while the Apennine wind whistled through the cracked windows. As in all houses where not only plaster but discipline itself has begun to crumble, the servant had been confidential, pushy, chatty, and fat. The countess no longer wished to know about anything except occasional excursions to Florence in her threadbare coach, excursions that might take in a mass and a promenade down the corso where she might glimpse the ghost of her much-admired younger self. The count bred doves and, like the pitiful old man he was, regretfully and fearfully awaited the arrival of the messenger from Rome who on the third day of every month would bring him papal gold in a lilac-colored silk purse, this being the modest pension provided for him by the cardinal. The house was dense with dreams, spiders, and bats. Francesca’s first words to him were, “What is it like in Rome? . . .” She stared at the stranger with wide eyes and an expression of terror on her face. For a long time after that she said nothing at all.

This love matured slowly, for like the best fruit it needed time, a change of seasons, the blessing of sunlight and the scent of rain, a series of dawns in which they would walk through the dewy garden among bushes of flowering may, conversations where a single word might suddenly light up the landscape locked in her tender, cloistered heart, when it would be like looking into the past and seeing ruined castles, vanished festivals where traps with gilded wheels rolled down the paths of neat, properly tended gardens past people in brightly colored clothes with harsh, powerful, and wicked profiles. There was in Francesca something of the past. She was fifteen but it was as if she had stepped out of a different century, as if the Sun King had seen her one morning on the lawn at Versailles playing with a hoop covered in colored paper, and had summoned her to him. There was a kind of radiance in her eyes that suggested women of long ago, women who would risk their lives for love. But it was he that had risked his life, he the suitor, the soldier of misfortune, when his old, terrifyingly rich, and disturbingly aristocratic rival pierced his bare chest just above the heart. Francesca watched the duel from an upstairs window. She stood calmly, her unbound hair hanging in black tendrils over her soft youthful shoulders, wearing the nightgown that the duke of Parma had ordered for her from Lyon a few days earlier, for he had personally taken charge of his future fiancée’s trousseau, stuffing heaps of lace, silk, and linen garments into individual boxes. Calmly she stood in the moonlight in a window on the second story, her arms folded across her chest, watching the two men, the old one and the younger one, who were prepared to shed their blood for her. But why? she might have wondered in that moment. Neither had received any favors, neither was taking anything away from the other, but there they were, leaping about in the silvery light, their bodies bare from the waist up, the moonlight flashing off the blades of their swords, the steel chiming like crystal goblets, and the duke’s wig slightly askew in the heat of the contest so that Francesca was genuinely afraid that this noble encounter might result in His Excellency of Parma losing his artificial mane. Later she saw the younger man fall. She watched carefully to see if the loser would rise. She tightened the silk scarf above her breasts. She waited a little longer. Then she married the duke of Parma.