Casanova in Bolzano

The Contract

It was dark. They were ringing the bells of Santa Maria, and down in the shadows the bar and restaurant of The Stag were tinkling with silver and glass as they spread the tables, when he heard sleigh bells. He stood still a moment, leaning over the banisters, listening. He, too, was a bat, suspended upside down over the world, the kind of creature who comes to life only when the dull lights and sounds of evening awaken him. The sleigh stopped by the doors of The Stag, someone shouted, servants came running with lanterns and fixed them to the ends of long pointed poles, settling silence on the intimate noises of restaurant and bar, the kind of noises he loved to hear down the corridors of inns in foreign towns, when he would emerge from his room on tiptoe, his black gold-buckled half soles on his feet, his white cotton stockings stretched tight over his full legs, wearing a violet-colored frock coat and a narrow, gilt-handled sword strapped to his waist under the black silk cloak that came down to his ankles, his hair carefully sprinkled with rice powder, his fingers bright with rings, a purse made of fish bladder containing gold coins hanging at his side, and a packet of marked cards in his pocket; and, thus prepared for the evening, he would be ready to face the world, impatient for adventure, his heart expectant and melancholy, expectancy and melancholia being much the same thing, then patter down the stairs, eyes darting here and there, knowing that in various rooms in the same town there would be women sitting next to candles from which the smoke gently billowed while they looked into the mirror, quickly tying a bow in a bodice, pinning flowers in their hair, anointing themselves with rice powder and perfume, adjusting the beauty patch on their faces, knowing that musicians would already be tuning up in the theaters, the stage and auditorium rich with the sour-bitter smoke of oil lamps, and that everyone was preparing for life, for the evening, which would be festive, secretive, and intimate: it was the time at which he loved to stop on the stairs of strange inns and listen to the faint brushing noises of waiters and servants and the clinking and chinking of the cutlery, the glass, the silver, and the china. There was nothing finer in life for him, anywhere in the world, than observing preparations for festivities: the prelude, the fuss, every detail infused with the sense of anticipation of all that was unpredictable and surprising. What delight it was to dress at about eight o’clock, when the church bells had stopped ringing, and when pale hands, their movements sensitive and mysterious, reached from windows to fasten the shutters, thereby closing out the world and safeguarding the house which always represents some mutuality, some turning away from worldly affairs; to put on one’s clothes and prepare for the evening with the pleasant quickening of the heart that tells us we are capable of anything, of both happiness and of despair; to stride with sure, light steps past houses, toward the dim shores of the darkening evening. It was this part of the day he loved best: his walk changed, his hearing grew keener, his eyes glittered and he could see in the dark. At such times he felt wholly human, but also, in the complex but not at all shameful sense of the word, like a creature of the wild that, after sunset, when tamer beasts have retired to shallows and watering holes, stands like a great predator, still and silent in the brush, listening to the sounds of twilight, his head raised in rapt attention. So it was now when they were laying tables that he heard the shuffling, tinkling noises rising from the restaurant, and in that instant the whole world seemed festive. Was there any feeling to compare with it, he wondered, a feeling that so quickened the heart and made it pound with apprehension as that of waiting for festivities to begin?

The clatter had stopped now. The shuffling of feet was followed by the sounds of a lighter, younger pattering movement, then he heard the knocking of shoes with wooden soles breaking into a run. “An important guest!” he thought as he stuck his tongue out and licked his dry lower lip in quick, thirsty anticipation. The agitation of the house coursed through him. To his highly developed ear, the word “guest” was one of the most magical sounds in the world, along with other words like “prize,” “prey,” “suddenly,” and “luck”: it was, in short, among the finest sounds a man could wish to hear. “A substantial guest!” he thought in approval, with a pleasant excitement. The light of the torches moved about the upper floor. The voices below were barking short, hard words: the guest must have been at the very door, the host of The Stag bowing before him, issuing stern orders and promising who-knows-what earthly and divine delights. “A difficult guest!” he thought, like a fellow professional, for he himself was just such a “difficult” guest who liked to make his host squirm with a long series of testing questions, to visit the kitchen and examine the size of the salmon, capon, or saddle of venison for himself, to try its quality, to have a much-praised vintage brought up from the cellar then take his time sniffing the cork after the bottle was opened, to wave away the offered wine with contempt and ask for a new bottle and, when it arrived, solemnly and with utmost concentration, to taste the thick, oily, blood-red drops of the French or South Italian grape, then, graciously, with a slightly sour expression, finally agree on the potential of some specific wine, and to turn round at the top of the cellar stairs, or at the door of the kitchen, with a finger half-raised to remind his host in harsh, admonitory tones that he should take care that the chestnuts, with which they were to stuff the breast of the turkey, be boiled in milk and vanilla first, and that the Burgundy be warmed in its straw carafe precisely forty minutes before serving; and it was only after all this that he would take his place at the table and haughtily survey the hall, rubbing his eyes to signify a slight weariness and satisfaction, taking in the furniture and the paintings, whose arrangement and whose local or international character did not truly interest the “difficult” guest, since the most difficult part was over, and one only had to watch that the serving staff always stood at a distance of two paces, far enough not to hear any whispered conversation, but close enough to leap to the table at the lowering of an eyelid and attend to any business immediately. “They are negotiating something!” he thought, for the hard voice of the guest and the humble, fawning voice of the host were still engaged in conversation. “A guest from out of town!” he thought. He remembered that there was a ball tonight at Francesca’s, a masked ball, to which the local nobility had been invited. There had been a lot of talk in town about the ball in the last few days, and all the tailors, cobblers, haberdashers, ribbon makers, seamstresses, and hairdressers were proudly complaining that they couldn’t keep up with demand, as a result of which he himself had spent three useless days vainly demanding his two frilly evening shirts from the washerwoman, who was too busy starching, washing, and ironing the finest linen for Francesca’s ball, and the whole town was filling up with guests preparing for wonderful games and high festivities, all caught up in the kind of exciting, intense, and, to all purposes, good-natured activity that in its own twisted and mysterious manner touches even those who are not directly involved in the affair…. I expect a lot of people will be spending the night after the ball at The Stag, he thought. The weather is dreadful, the Tuscan woman was almost eaten by wolves, and the local gentry and their ladies are hardly likely to set straight off after the event across snow-covered roads, at dawn, in their sleighs and foot muffs. And this “difficult” guest, he too must be bound for the ball, he thought, and felt a sharp stab of envy, as people do when they suddenly discover that they are barred from attending a desirable occasion. The feeling surprised him. It reminded him of his childhood when he learned that adults were planning something strange and wonderful without him. He shrugged, listened a moment longer to the discussion between guest and host, then turned back to his room.

“In other words, nobody!” the harsh commanding voice declared at the foot of the stairs, down in the depths. The answer must have been silent: he could imagine the obliging landlord, his hand crossed over his heart, his upper body bowed, and his eyes cast heavenward to indicate that everything would be as the guest demanded. But something about the voice stopped him as he was about to enter his room. It was a familiar voice, an intimately and frighteningly familiar voice, the kind a man recognizes because there has already been unavoidable and close contact between it and him. This instinctive recognition was an important force in his life: he had set his compass by it. He raised his head, listening intently, like an animal on the scent. The voice was unmistakable! He stood at the door with a serious, almost respectful look on his face, his fingers on the handle, his whole body tense, some instinct telling him that he was on the verge of a fateful encounter. He knew by now that the footsteps slowly, laboriously ascending the stairs with such even tread were a vital component of his own life, that the anonymous voice rising from the depths was bringing him a personal message. The “difficult” guest was looking for him. The astrological chart of his life was, in a few moments, once again, and not for the last time, about to undergo a dramatic readjustment. He took a deep breath and straightened up. A nervous shudder ran through him, and as always in such situations, his instinct momentarily overcame his reason, and he felt the urge to run into his room, climb through the window, shimmy down the storm drain of The Stag, and disappear in the accustomed manner, into the evening and the blizzard. It was, after all, the only voice he was afraid of, this “resonant” voice already drawing closer in the half-light on the stairs. He recognized the same unavoidable “resonance” when it radiated from women or from men who belonged to women. He had been happy enough to fight a duel in Tuscany, bare-chested in the moonlight, with only a narrow sword in his hand, against an old man maddened by jealousy who was skillful and dangerous with swords; he had been quite prepared to leap from rooftops and to tangle with vagrant scoundrels on the floor of a dive in a pub brawl; he was, in short, afraid of nothing but this “resonance,” which he associated with a specific feeling, for he sensed that every feeling, but this one above all, was woven to bind him. It was this that really frightened him. That was why he thought he should shut the door now, seize his dagger, and leave by the window. At the same time he knew that, in the end, there was no escape from this particular kind of resonance, that it was a trap from which one could not escape unscathed. So he waited at the threshold, his hair standing on end, with fear and anticipation, gripping the handle of the door, staring over his shoulder, scanning the dim space with sharp, suspicious eyes, seeking the man who would shortly address him in that familiar voice. It was past eight o’clock. The steps hesitated, apparently tired, resting at a turn of the stair. There was no more clattering of cutlery in the bar and the silence was such that you could hear the snow fall; it was as if the mountains, the snow-covered street, the river, and the stars, the whole of Bolzano, were holding its breath. “There is always this moment of silence at a vital turn in a man’s life,” he found himself reflecting, and smiled with satisfaction at the phrase, because he was, after all, a writer.

Then they came into view, the landlord first, stooping and turning as he ascended, muttering, explaining, assuring, a smoking taper in his hand and a soft satchel-shaped hat of red material on his head, the kind of hat that used to be worn by Phrygian shepherds and more recently by publicans and freethinkers in the cellars of Paris and out in the provinces. The innkeeper’s ballooning stomach was covered with a leather apron that he must have been wearing in the cellar where he was probably tampering with the sugar content and temperature of the wine, a foul habit he could not bring himself to abandon, and over the apron, a blue jerkin whose splendor exceeded that of the ceremonial vestments of guilds and connoisseurs and suggested a long-standing religious ritual such as might be conducted by a lower grade priest of an ancient, pagan cult whose devotees were crowned with rings of onions. It was he who came first. He looked over his shoulder, muttering and assuring with a great show of humility and concern, like any hotelier with an important client, for it is the duty of the hotelier to be solicitous in his attentions, to see his guest rise and set off in the morning, leaving behind a messy room, the bed his noble body had vacated, the basin with its dirty water, the vessel containing human effluent, and things even the most exquisitely refined of human beings leaves as evidence of his presence in the room of a hotel. And so the innkeeper bowed and scraped with remarkable zeal, his every gesture speaking of five decades of experience as landlord and jack-of-all-trades to all and sundry. He kept three steps ahead of his guest, much as a postilion does at night when the king, the prince de Condé, or, as it may be, the duke of Parma, happens to be passing through. And in his wake there followed the procession of four men ranged about a fifth, two in front, two behind, each member of the escort equipped with a five-branched silver candelabrum raised high above his head, each clad in his lackey’s uniform of black silk jerkin, knee breeches, and white wig, with silver chains about his neck and a flat-cocked hat on his head; the heavy calfskin pelisses around their shoulders billowed like enormous wings as they walked stiffly on, looking neither behind nor ahead, their pace as mechanical and jerky as those of marionettes at an open-air performance in the marketplace. The guest proceeded slowly in the cage of light they made for him. He gauged each step of the stair with caution before moving on, his body shrouded in a plain, violet-colored traveling cloak that flapped about his ankles, a cloak brightened only at the neck and narrow shoulders by a wide, beaver-skin collar; and so, leaning on a silver-handled stick, he made his way gradually upstairs, carefully fixing the point of the stick on the edge of the next step, as if each tread required careful consideration, not just as an intellectual proposition but as a physical problem occasioned by the condition of his heart, for his heart was finding the burden of stairs ever more difficult. The procession therefore wound on extremely slowly with the ornate and rigorous ritual of a man who has all but lost his freedom of movement but remains enslaved by his own rank, the trappings and obligations imposed on him by his station in life. “It’s not hard to see,” thought Giacomo, wide-mouthed, his contempt tempered by a grudging respect as he stood at the half-open door of his room, “that he is related to Louis Le Gros!” And so thinking, he took a step back into the shadows of the room, on the far side of the threshold, and waited there with both hands on the door frame, carefully flattening himself against the wall in the darkness while the duke of Parma made his way upstairs.

By now the procession had reached the landing, and had arrived just where the corridor curved away, so he could see a complete line of faces where the attendants formed a double guard with their raised candles, waiting for their master to get his breath. Of course he had recognized the duke of Parma before he got to the top of the stairs, even before hearing his voice; he recognized him because the duke was intensely resonant, a man of whose presence he would immediately be aware, a man with a pivotal role in his life. He knew he was nearby long before he even saw him: he was aware of it when the Tuscan woman left his room to return to her shadowy, joyless servitude, to life with her melancholy, much-traveled husband; he felt his presence when the sleigh stopped by the door and the landlord began his wheedling and assuring. Few people knew how to arrive like this, and he contemplated the arrival with a certain professional satisfaction, as if he himself were a landlord, porter, or waiter or, better still, the perennial guest accustomed to grand entrances; he studied the duke’s manner of entering, from the point of view of a fellow craftsman, with a peculiar mixture of mild contempt and involuntary respect, for the manner was formal, meticulous, and appropriate to the company that automatically accommodated itself to the rituals of the duke’s person and role, even now, even here, in this bat-infested provincial inn of somewhat dubious reputation, as if he had drawn up outside at his palace in Bologna, his sleigh dripping with dead foxes, wolves, and wild boars bagged along the way, or had marched into Monsieur Voisin’s or the Silver Tower Restaurant in Paris, or alighted from his carriage at Versailles, at the entrance of the Trianon, where His Celestial Host was entertaining a bevy of beauties at the royal court with a game of pin the tail on the donkey…. The duke of Parma did not simply “turn up” at The Stag but “made an entrance”; he didn’t simply go upstairs but was escorted there as part of a procession; he didn’t just stop when he reached the upper floor but made a ceremonial appearance. The entire progress was dreamlike: it was like a vision of the final judgment.

Now the guest drew himself up and ran his eye severely down the length of the shadowy corridor, across deep pools of tremulous darkness, while the servants raised their elaborately embroidered arms to light his way with their blazing scarlet candelabras.

The duke of Parma, the kinsman of Louis, was this year completing his seventy-second year. “Seventy-two,” calculated the stranger quite calmly as he caught his first glimpse of the visitor. He did not move from the doorway but stood clutching the doorpost, nonchalant yet watchful, exuding the indifference of someone accidentally coming upon an ordinary guest of no particular importance in a dark and none too salubrious inn, a silent, disinterested witness to a rather overelaborate procession. “It’s the only way he knows how to conduct himself,” he thought, and shrugged, but then another thought occurred to him. “He wants to intimidate me!” The idea struck him with irresistible force, flattering his self-esteem. “No one takes a room at The Stag in such a manner!” His hunches were correct as far as they went, though they did not go far enough, he suspected, and even as he watched the duke of Parma surveying the corridor, his head thrown back and his eyes screwed up until he discovered the man he had been seeking in the doorway, the tingling in his toes and stomach confirmed the suspicion. One casual glance assured him that the duke’s escort was unarmed, and, as far as he could see, the duke himself carried no weapon. His appearance, movement, and progress seemed dignified rather than threatening. At this hour of the late afternoon — or was it early evening? a stranger could not go by what usually happened at such hours in more metropolitan, glittering places — when the palazzo would have been getting ready for the ball, an especially brilliant ball, a champagne occasion that the whole district had been talking about for days, the host would not have sallied forth without good cause, not with such a splendid escort, certainly not so that he could take up rooms in a dubious inn just two steps from his own home. “It is I he has come to see, of course!” thought the stranger, and was deeply flattered, above all by the ceremonial manner of the visit. At the same time, however, he knew that this procession was only the most general of homages to him; that he was merely an itinerant, someone with whom the duke of Parma had exchanged a few valedictory words some years ago on a misty sea-colored morning at the gates of Florence; that the ceremoniousness had to be interpreted as a permanent and natural feature of the guest’s mode of existence, the pomp an organic part of his being; that the procession was the equivalent of the brilliantly colored tail the male peacock permanently drags behind him, something the peacock, when he becomes aware of being watched, opens as casually as one might a fan. This was the way the duke of Parma had traveled everywhere for a good long time now. Now he waved the lackeys aside. He recognized the straight figure standing in the doorway, carelessly raised to his eyes with a well practiced movement the lorgnette that had been dangling on a golden chain at his breast, and, slightly blinking, as if unsure that he had found what he had been looking for, gazed steadily at the stranger.

“It is him,” he pronounced at last, terse and satisfied.

“Yes, Your Excellency,” the innkeeper enthusiastically agreed.

They were talking about him in his presence as if he were an object. He was amused by the neutrality of their tone. He remained where he was, making no haste to welcome his visitor, nor did he go down on his knees, for why should he?… He felt a deep indifference, a blend of contempt and impassivity in the face of every worldly danger and even more so now. “What’s the point?” he thought and shrugged. “The old man has come to warn me off, perhaps to threaten me; he’ll try a little blackmail then call on me to leave town or else have me transported back to Venice. And what’s it all for?… For Francesca? He does have a point, of course. Why haven’t I already left this rotten town to which nothing ties me? I have sucked Mensch dry, can expect no further assistance here from papa Bragadin, there’s nobody in town with whom I could discuss the finer points of literature, I am fully acquainted with the enticing, walnut-flavored kisses of little Teresa, Balbi is pursued every night by jealous butcher’s boys wielding cudgels and machetes, and playing cards with the locals is like taking on a pack of wild boars. Why am I still here after six, or is it eight, days now? I could have been in Munich days ago. The elector of Saxony has already arrived there and will be blowing a fortune at faro. Why am I still here?” And so he pondered in stillness and silence while the duke, the innkeeper, and the lackeys carefully examined him like an object that someone had temporarily mislaid but had eventually found after a not particularly thorough, half-hearted search, an object not especially desirable or even clean, about which the only remaining question was how to handle it, whether to grasp it or hold it at arm’s length with one’s fingertips, and whether to dust it down with a rag before throwing it out of the window…. He considered the various possibilities. Then, perfectly naturally, his mind turned to Francesca. “Of course!” he thought. And in that instant he understood how all this was the result of a logical and necessary chain of events that had not begun yesterday nor would be certain to end this coming night; how once, in the dim and distant past, a process had begun whereby his own fate and the fates of Francesca and the duke of Parma were tied together. The present situation was merely the continuation of a conversation begun a long time ago, and this was why he had not moved on, why he was standing here, facing the duke of Parma, who even now was staring at him, lightly puffing and somewhat out of breath, standing at the head of his lackeys like a general preparing to charge: yes, he thought, a general with his troops. “Hello!” Giacomo exclaimed in a very loud voice and took a step toward the ornately costumed group. “Anyone there?”

The tone was sharp and it rang like a sword. There was undoubtedly a “someone” out there in the corridor, a person large as life and plain as a mountain, a river, or a fortress: you couldn’t miss him. That “someone” stood leaning on a silver-handled cane, his gray head, cocked to one side, boldly and gracefully balanced on the broad shoulders surmounting the slender figure like a miraculously carved ivory globe at the tip of a fashionable ebony walking stick. It was as if the balding, perfectly rounded skull, fringed at temple and nape by a sheen of thin, silky, metallic hair, had been turned on a lathe. Granted this, Giacomo’s voice sounded arrogant, almost insolent, for even a blind man could feel, if not see, that the person of the “someone” who had arrived at The Stag was not a person to be snubbed or taken in with a sidelong glance, that a man making a call like this, with his complete retinue, was not to be ignored, shouted at, or addressed in terms such as “Hello! Anyone there?” Aware of the potential outrage, the lackeys shrank back in terror and the innkeeper covered his mouth and crossed himself. Only the duke himself remained unruffled. He took a step forward in the direction of the voice, and the light of the candles illuminated the bloodless, ruthless, narrow mouth that appeared to be smiling in surprise at both question and tone. The question must have pleased him. “Yes, it is I,” he replied, his voice faint and dry, yet refined. He spoke quietly in the knowledge that every word of his, even the quietest, had weight and power behind it. “I have something to say to you, Giacomo.”

He advanced once more, ahead of the innkeeper and the lackeys who formed an effective guard of honor and, with a wave of his hand, instructed them to leave. “Tell the sleigh to wait,” he said and stared stonily ahead of him without catching the eyes of those he commanded. “You people wait in the stairwell. No one is to move. You,” he gestured, without so much as a flicker of his eyelids, though everyone knew he meant the innkeeper, “you will see to it that no one interrupts us. I’ll let you know when we have finished.” The lackeys set off silently according to command, disappearing along with the light to the bottom of the stairs: it was as if dusk had settled in. The innkeeper followed them with nervous stumbling steps. “May I impose on you?” asked the duke with the utmost courtesy once everyone had gone, bowing slightly, as if he were addressing a close confidant or a member of the family. “Would you be kind enough to receive me for a short while in your room? I will not take up too much of your time.” The request was made in the most elegant and aristocratic manner but there was something in the tone that sounded less like a request than a strict order. Hearing that tone, his host immediately regretted using terms like “Hello” and “anyone.” Like any host, assured that his visitor was a man of some importance and that conversation was by no means to be avoided, he bowed silently and indicated the way with a motion of his outstretched arm, allowing his guest to precede him into the room, then closed the door behind them.

“I am most grateful,” said the guest once he had taken his position by the fireplace in the armchair his host silently offered him. He stretched his two thin, pale hands — the anemic but commendably muscular hands of an old man — toward the flickering fire and for a while bathed himself in its gentle glow. “Those stairs, you know,” he confided. “I find stairs hard nowadays. Seventy-two is a substantial age and little by little one learns to count both years and stairs. I am relieved that I did not climb them in vain. I am glad to find you at home.” He gently folded his hands in front of him. “A stroke of luck,” muttered his host. “It is not luck,” he answered politely but with some finality. “I have had you watched these past eight days, and have been aware of your every movement. I even know that you were at home this afternoon, receiving visitors, halfwits who come to you for advice. Though it is not for advice that I come to you, my boy.”

He said this tenderly, like an old and trusted friend who understands human frailty and is anxious to help. Only the expression “my boy” rang a little ominously in the dimly lit room: it hung there like a highly delicate, hidden threat. Giacomo scented danger and drew himself up, casting an instinctive and well-practiced glance at his dagger and at the window.

He leaned against the fireplace and crossed his arms across his chest. “And what gives the duke of Parma the right to have me observed?” he asked.

“The right of self-defense,” came the simple, almost gracious answer. “You know perfectly well, Giacomo, you above all people, who are well versed in such matters, that there is a power in the world beyond that of ordinary authorities. Both the age in which I live and my own decrepitude, which has turned my hair white as snow and robbed me of my strength, justify me in defending myself. This is the age of travel. People pass through towns, handing keys to one another, and the police can’t keep up: Paris informs Munich of the setting forth of some personage who intends to try his luck there. Venice informs Bolzano that one of her most talented sons intends to room there on his travels. I cannot trust authorities alone. My position, age, and rank compel me to be careful in the face of every danger. My people are observant and reliable: the best informers of the region answer to me not the chief of police. It was they who told me earlier that you had arrived. I would have found out anyway, since your reputation precedes you and makes people uneasy. Did you know that since you arrived, life beneath these snow-covered roofs has become more fraught?… It seems you carry the world’s passions about with you in your baggage, much as traveling salesmen carry their samples of canvas and silk. One house has burned down, one vineyard owner has killed his wife in a fit of jealousy, one woman has run away from her husband — all in the last few days. These things are nothing directly to do with you. But you carry this restlessness with you, the way a cloud carries its load of lightning. Wherever you go you stir tempers and passions. As I said, your reputation precedes you. You have become a famous man, my boy,” he sincerely acknowledged.

“Your Excellency exaggerates,” Giacomo replied without moving.

“Nonsense!” answered his guest with some force. “I will accept no false modesty, you have no right to assume it. You are a famous man, your arrival has touched people’s souls, and they announced your arrival to me the way they would have announced a guest performance of the Paris opera: you are here and people find an ironic delight in the fact. You arrived eight days ago, strapped for cash. News of your escape caught people’s imagination and set it alight. Even I was filled with curiosity to see you, and thought of contacting you the day you arrived, of giving you some sign. But then I hesitated. Why has he come here? I asked myself. Our agreement was final and binding, the agreement we made at the gates of Florence just before I gave your wounded body up to the surgeons, to the world. After all, I thought, he knows very well who I am, and that my orders are never revoked. I don’t have much faith in human oaths and promises: promises flow from human mouths more easily than spittle from a cow in season. But I do believe in actions, and, I argued, he knows that my words are as good as my deeds, and that I have promised to kill him if he once so much as looks at Francesca ever again. That’s what I said to myself in my heart, for the less time we have left to live the more we have to remember and recall. And now here he is! He knows he is risking his life. Why is he here? With what purpose? I asked myself. Is he still in love with the duchess? Did he ever love her?… It is not an easy question, not one he can answer, I told myself, because he knows nothing of love: he knows a great deal about other realms of experience, about feelings that resemble love; he knows the anxious, agonizing temptations of passion and desire, but about love he is perfectly ignorant. Francesca was never his. He knows it, I know it. There have been times down the years when I was extremely lonely, when I almost regretted the fact. Are you surprised?… I am surprised that you should be. There is a time of life, and I, through the ineffable wisdom of time and fate, have now arrived at that time, a time when everything — vanity, selfishness, false ambition, and false fear — drops away from us, and we want nothing but the truth, and would give anything for it. That is why I sometimes thought it was a pity she had never been yours. Because if Francesca had ever at any time been his, I reasoned, my vanity and selfishness would have suffered, and perhaps Francesca might have suffered, too, but he would have been miles away by now, nor would he ever have returned to Bolzano as his first stop from prison, and I could be certain that something that had begun a long time ago had come full circle in human terms and ended. Because what man learns in his dotage, the total sum of all he understands and learns, is that human affairs need to run their full course and cannot be terminated before they do so: the course cannot be left unfinished, because there is a kind of order in human affairs that people obey as they would a law, one from which there is no escape. Yes, my boy, it is far harder to escape from unfinished business than it is from a lead-roofed prison, even at night, even by rope! You cannot know this yet: your soul, your nervous system, and your mind are all different from mine. I don’t even care whether you believe me or not. All you need to know is that I promised that I would kill you if you ever returned and tried to gain access to us or if you so much as glanced at the duchess. Do you believe me when I say I am pleased to see you? Do you understand, wise counselor, who for the tinkle of a few gold coins dispenses advice all day long to the simpleminded and vulnerable, how, in view of all that has happened between us or, more precisely, not happened, given the news of your impending arrival, I was confirmed in my own belief that you have been drawn into the vicinity of our premises and lives involuntarily, without design or subterfuge, by a fateful attraction, in simple obedience to a law as fixed as the law that dictates the course of the moon about the earth, and that I am therefore delighted to find that your first instinct has brought you to Bolzano. Do you believe me when I say I am delighted?… Yes, Giacomo, it is a delight and relief to me that you are here. Can you understand that?”

“I don’t understand,” he replied, intrigued.

“I will do everything in my power to explain,” came the ready, courteous, slightly sinister response. “I was not being quite precise enough when I referred to my feeling as delight. This miraculous language of ours that the great lover, Dante, made potent with his kisses is occasionally clumsy when articulating ideas. Delight is a common word, with a commonplace ring: it suggests a man rubbing his hands and grinning. I did not in fact rub my hands on hearing of your arrival, and I certainly did not grin: my heart simply beat a little faster and I felt the blood accelerate through my veins in a way that distantly reminded me of delight, to which the feeling I am seeking to name is undoubtedly related, for the same deep well feeds all human emotions, whether these appear as stormy seas or gentle ripples on the surface. J’étais touché, might be the best way of putting it, to adapt a precise expression from fencing terminology, a terminology imbued with human feelings, for fencing is an analogous language that you will be as familiar with as I am. The fact is that something touched me and the expression struck me as an accurate one, one that you as a writer — for that is what I hear you are, according to the rumors spread round town by your accomplice and familiar — would certainly understand and approve. I should say that the notion of your being a writer — Bolzano is a small town where no human frailty can be hidden for long — pleasantly surprised me; I have never doubted you had some special vocation, and indeed believed that you had been entrusted with a kind of mission among your fellow human beings, but I must confess I had never, until now, associated you with this particular vocation or role; somehow I always imagined that you were the sort of person whose fate and character was part of life’s raw material, the sort of man who wrote in blood not ink. Because your true medium is indeed blood rather than ink, Giacomo; I trust you know that?…”

“Your Excellency is quick to judgment,” he haughtily replied. “Artists take time and pains to discover the material with which they most prefer to work.”

“Of course,” the duke answered with surprising readiness and almost too much enthusiasm. “Pardon me! What am I thinking! You see how age afflicts me! I had forgotten that the artist is merely the personal embodiment of the creative genius that drives him, that he cannot choose, for his genius will press a pen, a chisel, a brush, or even, occasionally, a sword into his hand, whether he will or no. You will be thinking that the great Buonarroti and the versatile Leonardo — products of our cities, like you — wielded pen, chisel, and brush in turn; and yes, Leonardo, with his remarkable and frightening sense of adventure, even employed a scalpel, so that under the cover of night he might edge a little closer to the hidden secrets of the human body, as well as designing brothels and fortresses; just as Buonarroti, that tetchy and monstrous demigod, scribbled sonnets and plastered domes, and, my dear Giacomo, what plastering, what domes! And he designed arches, funerary monuments, and in the meanwhile, because he had time to spare, he painted The Last Judgment! There’s an artist for you! The human spirit swells, the heart throbs, when it contemplates the enormous scope of such geniuses; ordinary people grow faint when faced with such far horizons. Is that what you mean, when you say you are a writer? I understand, I really do. I am delighted to recognize the fact, my boy, for it explains a great deal to me. We have a very high regard for writers where I come from, and you, in your fashion, are a fine example of the species, as indeed you told your secretary, who faithfully repeats and disseminates all you say; you are a writer who dips his pen, now in blood, now in ink, though for the time being, to judge by your completed works, the uninitiated observer would be inclined to the opinion that so far you have written them entirely in blood, at the point of a dagger! Don’t deny it! Who is in a better position to understand this than I, who have written several bloody masterpieces with my ancestral sword? The last time, when we faced each other with swords in our hands, we must have been engaged in an as yet unwritten but perfect dialogue, a dialogue that, at that particular moonlit moment, we considered finished, with its own full stop or period to mark the end. But now I understand that you truly are a writer,” he declared with the same ambiguous air of satisfaction, “a writer who travels the world collecting material for his books!” He nodded vigorously in enthusiastic approval, his eyes shining with rapture. He was like an old man in his second childhood finally comprehending a complex web of relationships: it was as if he fully believed that the person he had sought out was indeed a writer and that the belief filled him with astonishment and delight. “So now you are coming to an end of your years of wandering! Vital years they are, too, ah yes… there was a time when I myself… but of course I have no right to compare myself to you, because I have composed no great work, no, not even in my own fashion: my work was my life and nothing more, a life that I had to live according to rules, customs, and laws, and in that enterprise, alas, I fear I have almost succeeded. Almost, I said, dear boy, and I beg you not to split hairs in your desire for exactitude, for I too have learned enough to know that we should be as precise in our use of words as possible if we want them to be of any value or help in life. Almost, I said, for you see, I, who am not a writer, find every expression difficult and am simultaneously aware of both my difficulty and of my inability to solve it. Indeed, there is nothing more difficult than expressing oneself without ambiguity, especially when the speaker knows that his words are absolute, that behind each sentence stands the specter of death. And I really do mean death, you know, yours or mine,” he added, his voice quiet and calm.

Receiving no answer, he stared at the scarlet and black embers in the fire, his head tipped to one side, gently wagging, as if he were dreaming and remembering at once.

“I am not threatening you, Giacomo,” he started again in a slightly deeper voice, but still very friendly in manner. “We are no longer at the stage when threats are appropriate. It’s just that I would like you to understand me. That is why I used the word, ‘almost.’ It was death I was talking about, pure and simple, nor was it my aim merely to admire the formal beauty of a frequently discussed philosophical concept while exploring its darker significance. The death I am talking about is direct and personal, a death that is timely and fully to be expected should we be unable to come to some agreement in an ingenious, wholly human way. For, you see, I no longer feel like fighting, if only for the simple reason that fighting never solves anything. We discover everything too late. Assaulting someone is not a conclusive way of ending any business, and defending oneself only settles things if our defense is just and reasonable: in other words, we must employ not just arms and fury, however delightful the exercise of both may be, but the wiser, leveling power of the active intellect. How old are you now? Forty next birthday…? It’s a good age for a writer. Yes, Giacomo, it’s the time of one’s life, and I can remember that time without envy, for it is not true to say that the more quickly life vanishes the more we thirst for what is gone — though the time is indeed gone, isn’t it? Do help me out if I express myself inadequately: you are after all a writer! Have we in fact lost what we had before? Are we in danger of suffering what those people who are prey to easy and false sentiments label, wholly imprecisely, ‘loss,’ meaning loss of youth, youth that bounds away from us into the distance like a hare in the meadow, and loss of manhood, manhood over which one day the sun begins to set, in other words the loss of the time we have enjoyed, the time in which we acted, that we once owned as we own objects, as a form of personal property? No, the time that is gone is a self-contained reality and there’s no reason to bewail its passing; it is only the future that I view with anxiety, with a certain intensity that may be appropriate to regret; yes, the future, however strange and comical it may seem at my time of life. As to lost time, I have no wish to recover it: that time is well-stocked and complete in itself. I do not mourn for my youth, which was full of false perceptions and fancy words, with all those touching, tender, lofty, confused, patchy, and immature errors of heart and mind. I view with equal satisfaction the vanished gilded landscape of my adult self. I have no desire to reclaim anything of the past. There is nothing as dangerous as false, unconscious self-pity, the wellspring of all man’s misery, sickness, and ignorance: self-pity is the common well of all human distress. What has happened has happened, nor is it lost, preserved as it is by the miraculous rituals of life itself, which are more complex than those dreamed up by the early priests and more mysterious than the activities of contemporary entomologists who preserve the organs of the dead for posterity. As far as I am concerned the past has its own life and it stinks of power and plenty. I am interested in the future, my boy,” he repeated very loudly, almost shouting. “Being a writer, you should understand that.”

He clearly required no answer. And there was no mockery in his voice when he stubbornly repeated the word “writer.” With great sympathy he described the exiled writer who must now be reaching the end of his wanderings, having gathered material — such as his adventures here in Bolzano, where the duke of Parma lived with his duchess for example — material that he would, one day, use for his books; he spoke as if he fully and enthusiastically approved the writer’s calling and the manner of behavior it entailed, as if he were addressing a fellow reveler at a masked ball with a courteous wink, as if to say: “I have recognized you, but I won’t tell. Keep talking.” But his host remained silent: it was only the visitor that spoke. After a short silence, he continued:

“The future concerns me, because my life isn’t quite over yet. It is not just writers like yourself who like a story to be properly finished, the world, too, likes it that way: it is only human nature that both writer and reader should demand that a tale should reach a genuine conclusion and end appropriately, according to the rules of the craft and in line with the soul’s inner imperatives. We want the well-placed period, the full stop, all t’s crossed and all i’s dotted. That’s how it has to be. That is why I repeat the word ‘almost’ once more, thinking it might be of some help in bringing our mutual history to a conclusion. Something remains to say, something to settle, before the story can end, though it is only one story among many hundreds of millions of such human stories, a story so common that, should you ever get to write your book, having collected enough material for it, you might even leave it out. But for the two, or should I say three, of us, it is of overwhelming importance, more important than any previous story composed either with pen or sword; to us it is more important than the visit the great poet of heaven once made to hell. And we must conclude it here on earth, because for us it is more interesting than either heaven or hell. Whatever may yet happen to round off the sentence and allow us to dot our i’s and cross our t’s; whatever arranging and winding-up of our affairs is required to conclude the history of the two, or rather, the three, of us, and whether that arrangement turns out to be somber and funereal or cheerful and sensible, depends on you alone, you the writer. You can see that I am visiting you at a bad time of life, when I am plagued by gout, when, by the time evening comes round, I prefer to remain in my room with my old habits and a warm fire to console me. Nor would I have come now if I did not have to, for believe me, as we enter our dotage, our bones creaking with age, our spirits exhausted by wicked words and harsh experience, our sense of time grows keener and we develop an intelligent, economical orderliness of manner, a kind of perceptiveness or sensitivity that tells us how long to wait and when, alas, to act. I have come because the time is right. I have come at the hour when everyone in the house is preparing for festivities, when the servants are setting the tables, the orchestra is tuning up, the guests are trying on their masks, and everything is being done properly, according to the rules of the game that brings a certain delight to living, and it certainly delights me, for there is nothing I like more than observing the idiotic and chaotic rout from my corner, wearing my mask. I shall have to start home to get changed soon. Would you like to see my mask, Giacomo?… If you come along tonight — as I hope you will, please take these words as a belated invitation — you will certainly know me by my mask, which will be the only one of its sort there, though the idea itself is admittedly unoriginal, something I borrowed from a book, a verse play written not in our sweet familiar tongue but in the language used by our ruder, more powerful northern cousins, the English. I discovered the book a year ago when visiting the library of my royal cousin in Marly, and I must admit the story fascinated me, though I have forgotten the author’s name; all I know is that he was a comedian and buffoon a while ago in London, in the land of our distant, provincial cousin, that ugly, half-man, half-witch, Elizabeth. The long and short of it is that I shall be wearing an ass’s head tonight and you will recognize me by it if you come and keep your eyes peeled. You probably know that in the play it is one of the main characters who wears the ass’s head, he whom the heroine clutches to her bosom, she being a certain Titania, the queen of youth, and that she does so with the blind unseeing passion that is the very essence of love. That is why I shall wear the donkey’s head tonight — and perhaps for another reason, too, because I want to be anonymous in my mask and hear the world laugh at me; I want to hear, for the first time in my life, through donkey’s ears, the laughter of the world in its fancy dress, in my own palazzo, at the climax of my life, before we finish the sentence and dot the i. There will be quite a noise don’t you think?” He was talking loudly now, politely, but with razor-sharp edge to his voice: it was like the clashing of swords after the first few strokes in a duel. “I really do want to hear them laughing at me, at the man with the ass’s head, in my own palace. Why? because the time is ripe: the hour, Giacomo, has finally arrived, not a moment too soon, at its own pace and in its own good time, at the point when I could bring myself to knock at your door, at the point when I am ready to put on the ass’s head that befits a lover like me, the ass’s head I shall wear tonight because, in my situation, if I must go as an animal, this is the most congenial and the least ridiculous such creature, bearing in mind that it is entirely possible that come the morning I might be wearing something else, the horns of the stag for example, in accordance with a humorously mocking popular expression I have never entirely understood. Really, why is it that cheated, unloved husbands are thought to be horned?… Do you think you, as a linguist and writer, might be able to explain that to me?”

He waited patiently, his hands clasped, blinking, slightly tipped forward in the armchair, as if it were a very important matter, as if the etymology of a humorous and mocking popular expression really interested him. The host shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he answered indifferently. “It’s just a saying. I will ask Monsieur Voltaire should I happen to be passing his house in Ferney, and, if he lets me, I shall send you his answer.”

“Voltaire!” cried the rapt visitor. “What a marvelous idea! Yes, do ask him why language presents the cuckold with ornamental horns. Do let me know! But do you think that Voltaire, who is so well versed in language, has direct experience of the phenomenon, there in Ferney?… He is a cold man and his intellectual fire is like a carbuncle that glows but cannot warm. To tell you the truth, I would prefer your opinion, since I feel reasonably hopeful that your explanation might comprehend some of its power to burn….”

“Your Excellency is joking,” the host replied. “It is a joke that honors me and appeals to me. At the same time I feel I should answer a different question which has not yet been asked.”

“Really, Giacomo? Is there a question I have failed to ask?” the visitor exclaimed in astonishment. “Could I be so far wrong?… Do you really not understand why I am here, and what I want to ask you? Not after all that has and has not happened between us — for as you see, the deed is not everything, indeed it is so far from being all that I would not be sitting here at this late hour, which is in any case bad for me as well as inconvenient, if you had acted rather than spoken? Now, having said that, I have all but asked the question that you can no longer answer in words. I repeat, Giacomo, I had to come now, not a moment too soon: the time for my visit is absolutely right, for the affair I need to settle with you can no longer be postponed. It urgently requires your attention. I have brought you a letter — its author may not have thought to have it delivered by my hand, and, I must confess, it is not a particularly rewarding role I find myself playing nor a fitting one, since only once in my life have I delivered a billet-doux, and that was written by a queen to a king. I am not an official postillon d’amour, I despise the go-between’s skill and low cunning, all those qualities learned by servicing the underworld of human feeling. Nevertheless I have brought you the letter, the letter of the duchess, naturally, the one she wrote at noon, shortly after the levee when I left her to study my books. It’s not a long letter: as you must know, women in love, like great writers, write brief notes using only the most necessary words. No, the duchess could not have imagined that I would be her messenger, and even now probably thinks that the letter that she — like all lovers who share an extraordinary, blind belief in the power of the will to hurry time — was so impatient to have answered, has been lost. Lovers sometimes think they have dominion over eternal things, over life and death! There may, in fact, be reasons for believing this, because now, as I turn my eyes from the time that has vanished and concentrate entirely on the time that still remains to me, a time that, as the hourglass reminds me, is shorter than the time that preceded it, I see that the time to come may offer more than it has ever offered me before, for time is the strangest thing: you cannot measure it in its own terms, and your fellow writers, the ancients, have long been telling us that one perfect moment may contain more, infinitely more, than the years and decades that preceded it and were not perfect! Now, when I ask my question, which is also a request, the firmest and clearest of requests, I can no longer shake my head in amazement at lovers’ blind confidence in the power of sheer emotion to bring down mountains, to stop time and all the rest. Every lover is a little like Joshua who could stop the sun in its orbit in the sky above the battle, intervene in the world order and await the victory, a victory that, in my case, is also a defeat. Now when I am forced to look ahead, and I don’t need to look too far ahead, because even with my poor eyesight I can see how trifling the remaining distance is, trifling, that is, only in earthly terms, for it is timeless and impenetrable to the eyes of love, I find that I do, after all, understand the extraordinary power of a lover’s will, and believe that a tiny letter, a pleasantly scented letter, not entirely regular in its orthography — you are a writer so I beg you to excuse its imperfections when you come to glance over it — but intense in its feeling, a feeling that is vague and hilariously childish in some respects, yet is as a coiled spring in the sharpness of its desire, can really suspend the laws of nature, and, for a while, that is to say for a mere second from the perspective of eternity, assert its authority over life and death. Now, when I am constrained to face one of life’s great riddles — and both of us are in the position of having to ask and answer questions at once, Giacomo, as in some strange examination where we are both master and pupil! — now, when I should take the rusty flintlock of my life, load it with the live ammunition of the will and take certain aim as I have often done before, with hands that did not shake and eyes that did not easily mist over, when I was not as likely as I am now to miss my mark, I do begin to believe that there is a power, a single omnipotent power, that can transcend not only human laws but time and gravity, too. That power is love. Not lust, Giacomo — forgive me for attempting to correct the essential laws of your existence and to contradict your considerable experience. Not lust, you unhappy hunter, angler, writer, and explorer, you who nightly drag the still-steaming, still-bleeding, excited body of your prize into bed, now here, now there, in every corner of the world; not the grinding hunger that conceals itself and is always seeking its prey wherever lonely and hidden desires are to be found, staring wide-eyed, awaiting liberation; not the gambler’s eye for the main chance nor the military strategy that carries a rope ladder and watches the windows of sleeping virtue, preparing to assail it with a few bold words; not the yearning born of sadness and terrible loneliness: it is not these things that prepare one for action. I am talking about love, Giacomo, the love that haunts us all at one time or another, and might have haunted even your melancholy, sharp-toothed, predatory life, for there were reasons for your arrival in Pistoia some years ago and reasons for your escape. You are neither a wholly innocent man nor a wholly guilty one: there was a time when love possessed you too.

“I chased you away at the point of a sword then, the fool that I was! You would have been perfectly entitled to call me an old fool that day. Doting old fool! you might have cried. Do you think that blades sharpened in Venetian ice and fire or scimitars forged and flexed in Damascus can destroy love?… They would have been fair questions — a little rhetorical, a little poetic perhaps — but as concerns the practicalities, they would have been fair. That is why this time I have come without sharp swords or hidden daggers. I have another weapon now, Giacomo.”

“What kind of weapon?”

“The weapon of reason.”

“It is a useless, untrustworthy weapon to use in emotional conflicts, sir.”

“Not always. I am surprised at you. It is not the answer I would have expected from you, Giacomo. Besides, it’s the only weapon I have. I speak of true reason, which has no wish to argue, to haggle, or even to convince. I haven’t come to beg nor, I repeat, to threaten. I have come to establish facts and to put questions, and in my sorry and precarious situation I am obliged to believe that the cold bright blade of reason is stronger than the wild bluster and bragging of the emotions. You and the duchess are bound together by the power of love, my boy. I state this as a fact that requires no explanation. You know very well that we do not love people for their virtues, indeed, there was a time when I believed that, in love, we prefer the oppressed, the problematic, the quarrelsome to the virtuous, but as I grew older I finally learned that it is neither people’s sins and faults nor their beauty, decency, or virtue that make us love them. It may be that a man understands this only at the end of his life, when he realizes that wisdom and experience are worth less than he thought. It is a hard lesson, alas, and offers nothing by way of consolation. We simply have to accept the fact that we do not love people for their qualities; not because they are beautiful and, however strange it seems, not even because they are ugly, hunchbacked, or poor: we love them simply because there is in the world a kind of purpose whose true working lies beyond our wit, which desires to articulate itself much as an idea does, so that though the world has been going around a long time it should appear ever new and, according to certain mystics, touch our souls and nervous systems with terrifying power, set glands working, and even cloud the judgment of brilliant minds. You and the duchess are in love, and though you make an extraordinary and baffling enough pair, only a novice in love would be amazed at the fact, because, where people are concerned, nothing is impossible. Animals keep to their kind and there is no instance, as far as I am aware, of an affair between a giraffe and a puma or any other beast: animals remain within the strict precincts of their species. I trust you will forgive me, for I do not mean to insult you by the comparison! If anyone should be insulted by it, it is I! No, animals are straightforward creatures, whereas we human beings are complex and remarkable even at our lowest ebb, because we try to understand the nature of love’s secret power even when we remain ignorant of its purposes, so that eventually we have to accept facts that cannot be explained. The duchess loves you, and, to me, this seems as extraordinary a liaison as an affair between the sun at dawn and a storm at night. Forgive me if I abandon the animal images that seem to be haunting me with a peculiar force tonight, probably because we are preparing for the ball where I shall be wearing an ass’s head. But however extraordinary the love of the duchess for you, it is still more extraordinary that you should love the duchess: it is as if you were breaking the very laws of your existence. You will be aware that the feeling of any deep emotion whatsoever represents a revolt against those laws. There is nothing that frightens you so much, that sends you scuttling away so fast, as a confrontation with emotion. You were hungry and thirsty in jail, you beat at the iron door with your fists, you shook the bars of your window, and threw yourself on the rotten straw of your bed, helpless with bitterness, you cursed the world that deprived you of your fascinating life, while knowing that behind your solitude, behind the filthy straw, behind bars and iron gates, behind your memories, there was another prison, worse than the cells of the Holy Inquisition, that jail was, in its way, a form of escape, because it was only the fires of lust that burned you there, because you were not condemned to the terrifying inferno of love. Jail was a shelter from the only feeling that might trip you up and destroy you, for feeling is a kind of death for people like you: it stifles you with responsibility, as it does all insubstantial, so-called free spirits…. But love touched you briefly when you met the duchess, who at that time was plain Francesca, and it is love that has brought you close to her again, not the memory of an affair that never quite got started. What is this love of yours like, really? I have long pondered that. I had time enough… from the encounter in Pistoia, through the period in Venice, and after that, when you were in jail, by which time Francesca had become the duchess of Parma, long after we fought for her. In all that time you continued, amusingly enough, to believe that she was just another brief fling like all the rest, a conquest which did not quite succeed, an adventure in which you were not fully your ruthless self. But charity is a problematic virtue. You are not naturally one of the merciful, Giacomo: you are perfectly capable of sleeping peacefully while, at your door, the woman you deserted is busily knotting the sheets you shared into the noose she is to hang herself with. ‘What a shame!’ you would sigh, and shake your head. That’s the kind of person you are. Your love — the way you follow a woman, the way you note her hand, her shoulder, and her breast at a glance — is a trifle inhuman. I saw you once, many years ago, in the theater in Bologna: we hadn’t yet met, nor had you met Francesca, who would have been fourteen at the time, and of whom few had yet heard, though I had heard of her, as a man might hear of some rare plant in a greenhouse, one that grows in an artificial climate, in secret, to flower and become the wonder of the world eventually…. You knew nothing of Francesca, nor of me, and you entered the playhouse at Bologna where people were whispering your name, and your entrance was splendid, like an actor’s soliloquy. You stopped in the front row with your back to the stage, raised your lorgnette, and looked around. I studied you closely. Your reputation preceded you, your name was on everyone’s lips, the boxes were buzzing with you. I want you to take what I am about to say as a compliment. You are not a handsome man. You are not one of those loathsome beaux who flounces around looking ingratiating: your face is unusual and unrefined, rather masculine, I suppose, though not in the normal sense of the word. Please don’t be offended, but your face is not quite human. It might, on the other hand, be man’s real face, the way the Creator imagined it, true to the original pattern which years, dynasties, fashions, and ideals have modified. You have a big nose, your mouth is severe, your figure is stocky, your hands are square and stubby, the whole angle of your jaw is wrong. It is certainly not what is required for a beau. I tell you, Giacomo, out of sheer courtesy that there is something inhuman about your face, but I had to understand your face before I could begin to understand the love between you and Francesca. Please don’t misunderstand me: when I say your face is somehow inhuman, or not quite human, I do not mean that it is animal; it is more as if you were some transitional creature, something between man and beast, a being that is neither one thing nor the other. I am sure the angels must have had something in mind when they were blending the elements that made you what you are: a hybrid, a cross between man and beast. I hope you can tell from the tone of my voice that I intend this as a compliment. There you stood in the playhouse, leaning against the walls of the orchestra pit, and you yawned. You looked at the women through your glasses and the women looked back at you with undisguised curiosity. The men, for their part, watched your movements, keeping a wary eye now on you, now on the eyes of the women, and in all this tension, suspense, and excitement, you yawned, showing those thirty-two yellow tusks of yours. You gave a great terrifying yawn. Once, in the orangerie of my Florentine palazzo, I kept some young lions and an aging leopard; your yawn was like that of the old leopard after he finally ate the Arabian keeper. Without a second thought, this noble creature proceeded to demonstrate his indifference to the world that held him captive with a yawn that spoke of infinite boredom and astonishing contempt. I remember thinking that I would have to throw a net over your head and impale you on a spear if I ever found you in the vicinity of a woman whom I too found attractive. And I was not at all surprised when, a year later, you turned up in Pistoia, by the crumbling wall in the garden, together with Francesca, throwing colored hoops with a gilt-tipped wooden stick for her nimble arms to catch. What was it I thought then? Nothing more than: ‘Yes, it is natural, how could it be otherwise.’ And now I have brought you Francesca’s letter.”

He drew the narrow, much-folded letter from the inner pocket of his fur-lined cape with a slow, leisurely movement and held it high in the air:

“Please overlook any errors you may find. Have I said that before? It is only recently that she learned to write, from an itinerant poet in Parma, a man who had been castrated by the Moors and whom I had ransomed, his father having been our gardener. I have a fondness for poets. Her hand seems to have shaken a little with excitement and there is something terribly touching about that, for her capital letters have never been good, poor dear; I can see her now, her fevered brow and her chill, trembling fingers as she scratches her message on the blotted parchment — and where in heaven’s name did she get that from? — with whatever writing implements she could find, implements probably obtained for her by her companion and accomplice, the aged Veronica, whom we brought with us from Pistoia and whom, it has just occurred to me, we might have been wiser to leave back in Pistoia. But here she is, willing to be of service, and when the moment came, she found some writing paper, a pen, some ink, and some powder, as she was perfectly right to do, for every creature, even one such as Veronica, has some inescapable, traditional part to play. It is not only onstage that nurses have acted as bawds! It is a short letter, so please allow me to read it to you. You can afford to allow it because it is not the first time I have read it; I read it first at about four this afternoon when it was passed to the groom to deliver to you, and again this evening before I set out on my postmasterly, messenger’s errand: a man shouldn’t leave such tasks to strangers, after all. Are you frowning?… Do you think it impertinent of me to read a lady’s letter?… You wish to remain silent in your disapproval of my curiosity? Well, you are right,” he calmly continued, “I don’t approve either. I have lived by the rules all my life, as an officer and gentleman, born and bred. Never in all that time did I imagine that I would meet such a woman and find myself in a situation that would lead me to behave in a manner unbefitting my upbringing, abandoning the responsibilities of my rank: never before have I opened a woman’s letter, partly on principle, and partly because I did not think it would be of such overwhelming interest as to tempt me to act against my principles. But this one did interest me,” he continued in a matter-of-fact manner, “since Francesca has never written me a letter, indeed could not have written me a letter even if she had wanted to, because, until a year ago, she didn’t know how to write. Then, a year ago, shortly after the castrated poet came to us, she began to show an interest in writing — which, now I come to think of it, was at roughly the same time as the news of your incarceration by the Holy Inquisition arrived from Venice. She learned to write in order to write to you, because as a woman, she likes to undertake truly heroic tasks in the name of love. She learned to use those terrible cryptic cyphers of your profession — the modest, meek, and chubby e, the corpulent s, t with its lance, f with its funny hat — all so that she might offer you comfort by writing down the words that were burning a hole in her heart. She wanted to console you in prison and, for a long time, I thought you corresponded. I believed in the correspondence and looked out for it; I had ears and eyes, dozens of them, at my command, the best ears and sharpest eyes in Lombardy and Tuscany, and those are places where they know about such things…. She learned to write because she wanted to send you messages; yet, after all that, she didn’t write: I know for certain that she did not write because, to a pure and modest heart like hers, the act of writing is the ultimate immodesty, and I could sooner imagine Francesca as a tightrope dancer, or as a whore cavorting in a brothel with lecherous foreign dandies, than with a pen in her hand describing her feelings to a lover. Because Francesca is, in her way, a modest woman, just as you, in your way, are a writer, and I, in my way, am old and jealous. And that is how we lived, all of us, each in his or her own way, you under the lead roofs of Venice, she and I in Pistoia and Marly, waiting and preparing for something. Of course you are right,” he waved his hand dismissively as if his host were about to interrupt, “I quite admit that we lived more comfortably in Pistoia, Bolzano, Marly, and other places, near Naples up in the mountains, in our various castles, than you on your louse-ridden straw bed, under the lead roof. But comfort, too, was a prison, albeit in its own twisted, rather improper way, so please do not judge us too harshly…. As I was saying, the castrato taught Francesca to write, and I watched her, thinking ‘Aha!’ Quite rightly. There are times when Voltaire himself thinks no more than that, particularly when Voltaire is thinking about virtue or power. Each of us is wise at those unexpected moments of illumination when we suddenly notice the changing, surprising aspects of life. That is why I thought ‘Aha!’ and began to pay close attention, employing the sharpest ears and eyes that Lombardy and Tuscany could offer. But I heard and saw nothing suspicious: Francesca was too shy to write to a writer like you, too embarrassed by the prospect of putting her feelings into words — and isn’t it a fact that you writers are a shameless lot, putting the most shameful human thoughts down on paper, without hesitation, sometimes even without thinking? A kiss is always virtuous but a word about a kiss is always shameful. That might be what Francesca, with that delicacy of perception so characteristic of her and of most women in love, actually felt. But she might simply have been shy about her handwriting and about corresponding in general, for, though her heart was troubled by love, it remained pure. And so, when she finally got down to writing to you, I can imagine her agitated, overwrought condition and the shudder of fear that ran through her from top to toe as she sat with fevered brow and trembling fingers, with paper, ink, and sand, to undertake the first shameless act of her life in writing to you. It was a love letter that she was writing, and in giving her all and trusting herself entirely to pen and paper, and thereby to the world and to eternity, which is always the last word in shamelessness, she was venturing into dangerous territory, but she ventured further than that, into yet more dangerous territory, for the point at which someone reveals their true feelings to the world is like making love in a city marketplace in perpetual view of the idiots and gawpers of the future; it is like wrapping one’s finest, most secret feelings in a ragged parcel of words; in fact it is like having the dogcatcher tie one’s most vital organs up in old sheets of paper! Yes, writing is a terrible thing. The consciousness of this must have permeated her entire being as she wrote, poor darling, for love and pain had driven her to literacy, to the symbolic world of words, to the mastery of letters. But when she did write, she wrote briefly, in a surprisingly correct style, in the most concise fashion, like a blend of Ovid and Dante. Having said that, I shall now read you Francesca’s letter.” He unfolded the parchment with steady fingers, raised one hand in the air, and, being shortsighted, used the other to adjust the spectacles on his nose, straightening his back and leaning forward a little to peer at the script. “I can’t see properly,” he sighed. “Would you bring me a light, my boy?” And when his silent and formal host politely picked up a candle from the mantelpiece and stood beside him, he thanked him: “That’s better. Now I see perfectly well. Listen carefully. This is what my wife, Francesca, the duchess of Parma, wrote to Giacomo, eight days after hearing that her lover had escaped from the prison where his character and behavior had landed him, and that he had arrived in Bolzano: ‘I must see you.’ To this she has appended the first letter of her name, a large F, with a slight ceremonial flourish, as the castrato had taught her.”

He held the letter at arm’s length, perhaps in order that he might be able to see the tiny letters more clearly.

“This, then, is the letter,” he declared with a peculiar satisfaction, dropping the parchment together with his spectacles into his lap and leaning back in the chair. “What do you think of the style? I am absolutely bowled over by it. Whatever Francesca does is done perfectly: that’s how she is, she can do no other. I am bowled over by the letter, and I hope it has had an equally powerful impact on you, that it has shaken you to the core and made its mark on your soul and character the way all true literature marks a complete human being. After years of reading it is only now, this afternoon, when I first read Francesca’s letter, that I fully realized the absolute power of words. Like emperors, popes, and everyone else, I discovered in them a power sharper and more ruthless than swords or spears. And now, more than anything I want your opinion, a writer’s opinion, of the style, of the expressive talent of this beginner. I should tell you that I felt the same on a second reading — and now, having glanced over Francesca’s letter for a third time, my opinion has not changed at all. The style is perfect! Please excuse my shortcomings as a critic, do not dismiss the enthusiasm of a mere family member from your lofty professional height — but I know you will admit that this is not the work of a dilettante. There are four words and one initial only, but consider the conditions that forced these four words onto paper, consider that their author, even a year ago, had no acquaintance with the written word: turn the order of the words over in your mind, see how each follows the other, like links in a chain hammered out on a blacksmith’s anvil. Talent must be self-generating. Francesca has not read the works of either Dante or Virgil, she has no concept of subject or predicate, and yet, all by herself, without even thinking about it, she has discovered the essentials of a correct, graceful style. Surely it is impossible to express oneself more concisely, more precisely, than this letter. Shall we analyze it?… ‘I must see you.’ In the first place I admire the concentrated power of the utterance. This line, which might be carved in stone, contains no superfluous element. Note the prominence of the verb, as is usual in the higher reaches of rhetoric, especially in drama and verse-play, with action to the fore. ‘See,’ she writes, almost sensuously, for the word does refer to the senses. It is an ancient word, coeval with humanity, the source of every human experience, since recognition begins in seeing, as does desire, and man himself, who before the moment of seeing is merely a blind, mewling, bundle of flesh: the world begins with sight and so, most certainly, does love. It is a spellbinding verb, infinite in its contents, suggesting hankering, secret fires, the hidden meaning of life, for the world only exists insofar as we see it, and you too only exist insofar as Francesca is capable of seeing you — it is, in the terms of this letter at least, through her eyes that you re-enter the world, her world, emerging from the world of the blind that you had inhabited, but only as a shadow, a shade, like a memory or the dead. Above all, she wants to see you. Because the other senses — touch, taste, scent, and hearing — are all as blind gods without the arcana of vision. Nor is Cupid a blind god, Giacomo. Cupid is inquisitive, light-desiring, truth-demanding: yes, above all he wants to see. That’s why the word ‘see’ is so prominent in her discourse. What else might she have said? She might have written ‘talk with,’ or ‘be with,’ but both of these are merely consequences of seeing, and her use of that verb confirms the intensity of the desire that drives her to take up the pen; the verb practically screams at us, because a heart smitten by love feels it can no longer stand the dark of blindness, it must see the beloved’s face; it must see, it must light a torch in this incomprehensible and blind universe, otherwise nothing makes sense. That’s why she chose a word as precise, as deeply expressive as ‘see.’ I hope my exposition does not bore you?… I must admit it is of supreme interest to me, and it is only now, for the first time, that I understand the endeavors of lonely philologists who, with endless patience and anxious care, pore over dusty books and ancient undecipherable texts, spending decades disputing the significance of some obscure verb in a forgotten language. Somehow, through the energy of their looking and the vitality of their breath they succeed in coaxing a long-dead word back to life. I am like them in that I think I can interpret this text, that is to say the text of Francesca’s letter. Seeing, as we have said, is the most important aspect of it. Next comes ‘must.’ Not ‘I would like to,’ not ‘I desire to,’ not ‘I want to.’ Immediately, in the second word of the text, she declares something with the unalterable force of holy writ — and doesn’t it occur to you, Giacomo, that our young author was, in her way, producing a kind of holy writ by writing her first words of love? Don’t you think that the writ of love somehow resembles sacred hieroglyphs on a pagan tomb, directly invoking the presence of the Immortal, even when it speaks of no more than arrangements for a rendezvous, or of a rope ladder to be employed in the course of an escape?… Naturally, there’s nothing irrelevant in Francesca’s discourse: she is far too fine a poet for that as we may see at a glance. Poet, I said, and I don’t believe that my feelings or my admiration lead me to exaggerate in the use of the word, which I realize signifies status, the very highest human status: in China, as in Versailles, it is poets like Racine, Bossuet, and Corneille, that follow the king in a procession, sometimes even those who in life were a little dirty or disreputable looking, such as La Fontaine: they all take precedence over Colbert, over even Madame Montespan and Monsieur Vendôme when the king grants an audience. I know very well that to be a poet is to belong to an elite, an elite accorded intimate luster and invisible medals. That may be why I feel that Francesca is a poet, and in saying that, I feel the same awe as I would if I were reading the first work of any true poet, an awe that sends shudders through me and fills my soul with dizzy admiration, with an extraordinary flood of feelings that unerringly signify the most elevated thoughts about the solemnity of life. That, then, is why she wrote must. What refined power radiates from the word, my boy! Its tone is commanding, regal: it is more than a command because it is both explanation and significance at once. If she had written ‘want’ it would still have been regal but a little peremptory. No, she chose precisely the right word, the perfectly calibrated word, the word that, while it commands some humility: must, she says, and thereby confesses that when she commands, she herself is obeying a secret commandment; must suggests that the person requesting the meeting stands in need of something, that she can do no other, can no longer wait, that when she addresses you severely and gives you to understand her meaning she is throwing herself on your mercy. There is something touchingly helpless and human about the word. It is as if her desire to meet you were involuntary, Giacomo. Yes, it’s true! I cannot tell whether my eyes are capable of reading clearly anymore, whether I can trust these old ears of mine, but there is something in the whole sentence, which might be the first line of a poem, that is helpless and abject, as when a man confronts his destiny under the stars and tells the sad, brilliant truth. And what is that truth? Both more and less than the fact that Francesca must see you. The voice is anxious, in need of help; she commands but, at the same time, admits that she is both the issuer and the helpless executor of the command. I must see: there is something dangerous about the association of these words; only people who are themselves in danger issue commands like these. Yes, they would prefer to withdraw and defend themselves but there’s no alternative, and so they do what they must: they command. The words are perfect. And there follows, naturally enough, a word that is like the lin-lan-lone of bells in the distance: the word you. You is a mighty word, Giacomo. I don’t know whether anyone can say something that means more to another, or is of greater importance to them. It is a fulfilling word whose reverberation fills the entire human universe, a painful word that forms and names, that enlivens identity and gives it a voice. It is the word God used when He first addressed man at the Creation, at the point that He realized that flesh was not enough, that man needed a name, too, and therefore He named him and addressed him with the familiar You. Do you fully understand the word? There are millions upon millions of people in the world but it is you she wants to see. There are others nobler, handsomer, younger, wiser, more virtuous, more chivalrous than you, oh indeed there are, and without wishing to offend you, I do think it incumbent on you to consider, however unpleasant it may be, however it may hurt your self-esteem, that there may also exist people more villainous, more artful, more deceitful, more heartless, and more desperate than you are; and yet it is you she desires to see. The word elevates you above your fellow mortals, distinguishes you from those whom in part you resemble; it hoists you up and slaps you on the back, it crowns you a king and dubs you a knight. It is a fearsome word. You, writes Francesca, my wife, the duchess of Parma, and the instant she writes the word you are ennobled; despite your notoriety as an adventurer, despite hitherto having assumed a false aristocratic name, you are ennobled. You, she writes, and with what a certain hand, the letters leaning with full momentum, like arms raised for action, pumping blood and flexing powerful muscles: by now the author knows what she wants to say and is no longer seeking alternatives. She places on paper the only word that can hold the sentence, the syntax, together as though she had addressed the subject of it by its proper name. You… A mysterious word. Just consider how many people there are in the world, people who are interesting to Francesca, too, people worth seeing even if there is no must about it, people who would offer her something more substantial, more true, more of everything than you can, notwithstanding the fact that you are a writer and traveler. For there are men out there who have voyaged to the Indies and the New World, scientists who have explored the secrets of nature and discovered new laws for humanity to wonder at: there are so many other remarkable men alive, and yet it is you she wants to see… and in so naming you it is as if she were engaged in an act of creation, re-creating you. Because, for example, it is possible that she might want to see me, but there would be nothing out of the ordinary in that, I am her husband after all: but it is you that she must see, only you!…

“Well, there is the text and we have explored its meaning. And now, let us behold it once more with amazement, having examined its parts, seeing the compact, solid whole, admiring the logic of the thought, the momentum of the execution, the terse perfection of the style that, without a hint of superfluity, tells you everything. And finally, let us consider the signature, which is so modest, a mere initial — for true letters and true works of art require nothing more: the work itself identifies the author, is one with her. No one imagines that the Divine Comedy required the name of the author below the title… not that I wish to invite comparisons, of course. But what need for names when the whole text speaks so clearly, the words, the syntax, the individual letters; when everything is infused with the same character, the same soul, a soul driven by necessity and inspiration to creation, in the recognition that its fate is to see you, nothing more. And having said that,” he added carelessly, holding the letter between two fingers and passing it over, “we have done. Here’s the letter.” And when the host and addressee did not move, he lightly placed the letter on the mantelpiece beside the candlestick.

“You will read it later?” he asked. “Yes, I understand. I think you will often read and reread that letter in the years to come, but later, when you are older. You will understand it then.” And he fell silent, breathing heavily, as if he had overexcited himself with all that talking, his heart worn out, his lungs exhausted.

“We have done,” he repeated, old and tired now, and leaned against his stick, holding it with both hands. But he continued speaking, still seated, leaning on his stick, not glancing at his host but staring into the fire, frequently blinking and screwing up his eyes, watching the embers.

“I have accomplished one of my missions by giving you the letter. I hope you will look after it properly. I wouldn’t like the love letter of the duchess of Parma to be left on the wine-stained table of some inn, nor would I want you to read it out while in bed with a whore, in that boasting and bragging way men have when under the influence of cheap wine and cheap passion. I would not be in a position to prevent that, of course, but it would cause me great pain, and therefore I hope it will not happen. Yet we may be sure that this kind of letter will not remain a secret, and I would not be at all surprised if at some later time, in another, more refined and more generous age, such brief masterpieces were taught in schools as a model of concision. Nor do I doubt that the letter will be imitated, as is every masterpiece, that through the fine capillaries of memory it will enter the general consciousness of our descendants: lovers will copy it and make irreverent use of it without knowing the least thing about the author and its provenance. They will copy it, and not just once, as if they themselves had composed it, committing it to paper, declaring I must see you, and signing it with their own names or initials, and by some mysterious process the text will actually have become theirs — like all true texts it will be diffused into the world and be blended with life itself, for that is its nature. All the same, I would prefer it if this process were to follow literary precedent at an appropriate pace, not through your bragging and boasting, or declaiming the text aloud in taverns or in a whore’s bed. I would be extremely sorry if that were to happen. But now that I have given you the letter whose true meaning we have, I hope, solved and understood, we must be careful lest our enthusiasm as literary critics, the peculiar and obstinate delight we take in studying it, should divert us from our true obligation: for letters can be as passionate and terrifying as kissing or murder; there is something real and living in them, and we two critics — you the writer and I the reader and connoisseur — have almost forgotten the person behind the letters, she who has committed these perfect lines to paper. It is, after all, she whom we are discussing, and Francesca is inclined to the belief that she must see you. That is the reality to which we must return now that we have finished admiring the beauties of the letter. And here we must be businesslike, since time is passing and the evening is upon us — isn’t it the case that time never flies so fast as when we lose ourselves in admiration of the hidden graces of a first-class text? — but our business is to proceed beyond the eternal literary merits of the text and to explore the meaning in its practical sense, that meaning being neither more nor, alas, less than that the duchess of Parma has fallen in love and must see you. That is an obligation you cannot avoid, even should you wish to. I have already said that I have not come to threaten you, Giacomo: I have simply brought you a letter and all I want is to understand, articulate, and settle something. I have not come to threaten: there is no need for you to stand so rigidly or to twitch like that, there is no question of us engaging in another armed encounter for the sake of Francesca, as we once did in such a laughable and yet admirably masculine manner in Tuscany, our chests bare in the moonlight! The time for that is gone: and I don’t mean just the time of year, however awful in its effects that may be, for the cold cuts through me to the bone even when I am wearing my furs, and heaven knows what it would do if I presented myself half-naked, no, I mean another kind of time, the time that has passed. I have thrown away my sword. I could, of course, buy other swords, better and finer than the old one, for once upon a time, as you will recall, I was not altogether hopeless in a duel. I could buy a sword, one that glittered as I wielded it, a rapier of ice-cold steel to twist wickedly between your ribs: I do, after all, hold your life in my hands. But this is not a threat either, Giacomo: it is a statement, no more. Please don’t protest. There is no need to get excited. Your life is in my hands, that’s all: in vain did you escape from the republic, in vain did the world look on and chuckle in approval, in vain do local laws protect you with their guarantees of personal and institutional freedom, in vain does tradition underwrite the international rights of refugees. According to laws and customs you are invulnerable here, untouchable. But people are aware, and you in particular have good reason to know, that there exists another law, a more subtle, unwritten law, whose custom and practice underlie the visible, practical, and constitutionally approved sort, a law that is more real and more effective everywhere. It is my kind of law: I dispense it, I and a few others in the world, those who are sufficiently intelligent and powerful to live by such unwritten laws without exploiting them. Believe me, Giacomo, when I say that it really was in vain that you escaped, clever monkey that you are, from the Leads on the roof of the Doge’s Palace; in vain that you scuttled like some fugitive water-rat down the filthy and noble waters of the lagoon and reached the far shore in Mestre and later, Valdepiadene; it is in vain that you reside here beyond the perilous border, in a room of The Stag, strutting with confidence, as if you had escaped every danger, for if I wished it you’d be back on the other side of the border in the clutches of the messer grande by this time tomorrow, after sunset, you can bet your life on it. And why?… Because power does not work precisely as these local boobies believe it works, and you, who are better traveled and more nimble-witted than they are, will be perfectly aware of the fact. You therefore know that there is no nook or cranny in the world where these calloused, exhausted hands, that are no longer up to dueling, would not reach you if I so wished. That is why I am not threatening you. And it’s not out of the kindness of my heart, nor out of any false if noble sense of compassion that I allow you to keep running — because run you must, Giacomo, on fleet horses, in covered coaches, or on sleighs with polished runners before the night is through. As soon as you have finished your business in Bolzano and met the duchess, who, as she has commanded both you and me, must see you, we will draw a line under the affair and place a full stop at the end of the last sentence. That is why I have no thought of threatening you in revealing to you the vague outline of what might happen behind the scenes, and exposing the real, effective relations of power. I am merely explaining and cautioning. And there is no trace of bitterness in my heart when I say that, no sense of injury, no false male pride, not any more. For you, like me, are merely a cat’s-paw, an actor, the tool of the fate that is toying with us both, a fate whose purposes sometimes appear unfathomable. Sometimes it seems the hand it is playing is not entirely above board, that it is playing for its own amusement; a manner of playing that you, who understand not only written slips of paper but those prinked out with spots and numbers too, are in the best position to comprehend. That is why I have come to you. What I want is that you should stay till morning and accommodate yourself to the duchess’s desire, which is more command than desire, something neither of us can refuse to obey, for behind it lies the must to which the duchess of Parma gives such perfect literary expression. You are, therefore, to remain in Bolzano until the morning. Should I threaten you? Should I reason with you? Should I beg you? Explain things to you? What should I do with you?… I could kill you, but then you would be more deadly than before. You would retain your current stocky, fleshy, full-blooded reality, a reality I would have turned into a shade, a memory, a rival impervious to blows, the rotten corpse of a once vigorous presence, an amorous shadow forever lurking in the folds of the curtains of my wife’s four-poster bed, taking my place on her pillow after midnight, your voice haunting other men’s voices, your eyes looking at her through unknown men’s eyes. That is why I will not kill you. Should I send you away? Order you now, this very night, to take to the sledge waiting at the gate, shrouded in the wings of your cloak, so that, under the stewardship and protection of my servants, you should rush over mountain passes, through moonlit forests restless with the shadows of wolves, into a foreign country where you might disappear from the best years of the duchess’s life?… I could insist on that, too, and you’d have no choice but to obey, because, after all, you want to save your skin, and it is that fact which allows me to exercise a degree of control over you, for you are still careful of your life, solicitous of your esteemed person, your flesh and bones and are not desperately anxious to risk them, while I, on the other hand, no longer fear for my life and am interested only in one thing which, to me, is finer and more valuable. That is why you must obey me. For this and other reasons of your own. For now I am willing to put my power and strength at the disposal of your own interests and intentions, providing we can come to a friendly, sensible agreement. That is the reason I have come to you tonight. I want to make you an offer. I have thought a great deal about you. I saw before me your face in the theater at Bologna, the way you yawned, and I remembered how, in that moment, without knowing anything much about you, I instinctively understood the nature of your being. And now I know you properly, or as well as anyone can know you, I am sure it would be a mistake to kill you. A man who is loved is a dangerous rival in death: you’d sit with us at table, lie beside the duchess in her bed, precede us into rooms, your light, ghostly footsteps would tread close behind us as we walked through the garden: you would, in short, be omnipresent. You would become funereal, your outlines blurred by ceremony, hidden among the silver and black hangings of feeling and memory. But a fierce scarlet cloud of revenge would trail behind you, its silently smoking fire lighting up the corridors. And I would have become the selfish, cowardly, stupid nonentity who had killed the unique, the miraculous person that Francesca had to see! No, my boy, I will not kill you. I could, of course, simply hand you over into the clutches of the messer grande and he wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. I could do it because I have influence and influence has long arms and moves in mysterious ways. Do you remember that morning some sixteen months ago when Venetian agents forced their way into your room and you railed at them, spitting with indignation, demanding that you be informed of your crimes? You will certainly recall the next sixteen months, buried away, sprawling on a rotten straw bed, still wondering what it was you were accused of. Do you think it might have been a word in the right ear, a little flexing of muscles that landed you there? It might easily have been my doing. Not that I am saying it was, I only mention it because I think you should consider it as a possibility among others, something you should give some thought to once this night is through. Because, although I am not a writer and am not preparing to embark on any kind of career, and though I am losing my hair and suffer shooting pains in my arms, and though time is certainly not on my side, I am nevertheless possessed of effective means. And, if I wanted to, I could still stretch out my arm and touch a life that considers itself secure in Venice, under the protection of Papa Bragadin. How pale you look! You have taken a step back. Are you looking for your dagger? Is it revenge you want?… Control yourself, my boy. I have come unarmed, as you see, and there is nothing to stop you running me through in an act of revenge and then taking to your heels to escape the police of half the world, until you are caught and find yourself on the scaffold. But how pointless that would be! You would lose everything and even your revenge would be tinged with doubt about my part in your imprisonment. Calm down. I haven’t said I was responsible for that. I have merely thrown a little light on the faint possibility that I might have been. I have fought too many battles and have lived too full a life to feel any compassion for you. My compassion is not easily earned. Only weak and frightened people shed crocodile tears and hug their enemies to their bosoms with false enthusiasm. I will not take you to my bosom, Giacomo. I will neither kill you nor exile you before your time is due. What course, if any, is there left to me, then?… Well, I believe I have found the only acceptable solution. I will strike a bargain with you. I realize that in proposing this bargain, which will be not a whit more crooked or honest than such bargains usually are, I am addressing both your feelings and your intelligence. So let me put it plainly: I want to buy you, my boy. You can name your price, and in case false modesty, false ambition, or any other false feeling prevent you, I will tell you the price, the price I am willing to pay to prevent the reality from becoming a ghostly rival, to ensure that you finally vanish from my life, having completed your business and played your part by allowing the duchess to see you, as she must, as she wishes…. I am buying you: these are ugly words, not the words an author or a duchess are likely to use, but they are my words, and they, too, are precise. I have weighed them and chosen them carefully. I know your services will not be cheap, but I am rich and powerful and I shall pay you in gold and clemency, in advice and connections, in documents and cash. Whatever it costs it will be a bargain. Please don’t protest. I shall buy you as people buy a donkey for carrying water on the market in Toulon, as they buy a slave on the market at Smyrna: I shall buy you as if I were buying a curio from one of the silversmiths on the Ponte Vecchio. Are you still protesting? Are you staring at the floor and biting your lips?… Are you planning some terrible act of revenge, a revenge that might at once wipe out this insult as well as the disgrace of your imprisonment in Venice?… Please control yourself. Naturally, I must pay you for those injuries, too, and will offer you the full pleasures of the world, for one has to buy the whole man, with the full complement of his moods and passions, or the bargain is meaningless. I am buying you because you are a mere mortal. Think it over carefully: it is almost a compliment. I used the word ‘almost’ at the beginning of our conversation and I repeat it now because words bind and their binding power extends to both the past and the future. It is almost a compliment, believe me, for what is man in the daily traffic of the world?… A chance combination of character and fate, no more. I know your character and have researched your history, so I know, with absolute certainty, that however pale you grow, however you gasp and stare, you will kill neither me nor yourself. Not because you are a coward! — not at all! — but because it is simply not in your character to do so, because, in your heart of hearts, you are already calculating how much you dare demand of me, because the bargain fundamentally appeals to you, and because there are certain things that you can do nothing about for, after all, how could you?… It’s how you are. The fact that you are not averse to a bargain might be the one and only fully human feature of your character. Don’t worry about how much you can demand of me, Giacomo: I will give you what you ask for. And more on top of that! I may be acting against my business principles in telling you this, but let that be, for I confess that whatever figure you dream up is of no interest to me. Let me offer you a thousand ducats in gold this very evening. Is that too little? Fine. Let us say two thousand, in cash, to see you through Munich and Paris. Not enough? That’s all right, my boy, carry on by all means, I understand. Let us therefore say ten thousand ducats, together with a letter of credit for use in Paris. Still not enough?… I understand, I really do understand, my boy. Let me throw in a letter of safe passage for use on the road, so you may travel like the prince de Condé, and, in addition, a personal introduction to the elector, who will be happy to hear the story of your escape from your own lips. Is that still not enough?… Well, why not? I’m not a petty man. All right, I will trump it all with a letter of introduction to my cousin, Louis himself.”

He extended the wasted, aristocratic hand that had until now been held to the fire and turned it over, palm upward, as if he were offering him the world.

“See this?” he asked, almost moved by his own generosity. “Nobody has received as much from me. It is true that the situation is unique in that I have never before played postman, lawyer, and go-between in persuading a man and woman to come together for a common purpose…. This evening is indeed unique, since for the first time in my life I shall be wearing in public the mask that befits every aging lover. The ass’s head. So it’s settled. You will receive that letter, too. Have you any idea of its value? And you will have money on top of that, money in gold and money in the form of credit to be redeemed at the most exquisite address, at any town from any conveyor of your choosing, to the full amount I have promised. I am paying a high price for you, Giacomo, as one must for a gift purchased at the close of one’s life, for something one wants to offer a woman by way of farewell, the only woman one loves. That is why I want to strike a bargain with you. I am buying you in a proper, aboveboard fashion, and the letter I shall write to my cousin, Louis, which a trusted servant will give you at dawn, providing everything happens as we have agreed, will be the first and last begging letter I address to His Most Christian Majesty, who will not deny my request. Louis will receive you at Versailles: the letter guarantees that! It is no more than I owe — not to you, nor even to myself — but to the woman on whose behalf I have played postman, the woman I love. It is your price tag. And now that I have settled that price I don’t think you can demand more of me. The other letter will open frontiers for you, and you will sleep as comfortably in the inns of foreign towns as your mother once did in the lap of the beautiful diva. The police will no longer bother you, and should clouds of strife or entanglement gather around you and enemies pursue you, it will be enough for you to show that letter and your pursuer will immediately be transformed into an admiring friend. I do this so you may safely find your way through this ugly world. It is the price of our contract. What do I demand in exchange? A great deal, naturally. I demand that you accommodate yourself to the wishes of the duchess of Parma. I demand you spend this night with the duchess of Parma.”

He raised the silver-handled stick high in the air with an easy movement, and at the end of the sentence he knocked twice, lightly, on the marble floor with it, as if knocking might put the seal on his words.

“Your Excellency seriously wishes this?” his host asked.

“Do I wish it?… No,” his guest answered with grave calm. “I command it, my boy.”

“I have said,” he continued more quietly, more confidentially, “that my contract is intended to appeal both to your feelings and your reason. Listen then. Lean closer. Are we alone?… I trust that we are. I have contracted you for one night, Giacomo. I made that decision without deluding myself, without ambition, fear, or confusion. I made the decision because my life is almost over, and that which remains of it I want to freight with the only possible cargo. That cargo is my wife, Francesca. I want to keep this woman for the time that remains, which is not long now, but is not entirely negligible, either: in fact it is precisely as long as fate has ordained for me. I want to keep her: I want not only her physical presence, but her feelings and desires, too, feelings and desires that are currently confused by the fierce intensity of the love she feels for you. I regard this love as a kind of rebellion. It may be a justified rebellion but it runs counter to my interests and I will put it down as I have put down all others. I am not a delicate, oversensitive person. I respect tradition and I respect order, which is far more substantial, far more logical, than the average ninny believes. I believe in order as a source of virtue, though not necessarily the kind of virtue mentioned in the catechism. When the bakers of Parma raised the price of bread I hanged them in their own shop doorways though the law gave me no such right, because I had power and reason enough, and because it kept the order in a manner of speaking, though not in the manner understood by nervous lawyers and august judges. I broke my top general on a wheel outside the gates of Verona because he was insolent and vile to a common soldier, and many found fault with me for this, but real soldiers and real officers understood, because real soldiers and real officers know that to command is to be responsible, and only those who are ruthless in their logic while remaining courteous and responsive are capable of keeping order. I have put down rebellions because I believe in order. There is no happiness, no true feeling, without order, and that is why, throughout my life, I have made use of the sword and the rope to eliminate every kind of sentimental rebellion, whose importunate aim it is to destroy the inner order of things, for without true order there can be no harmony, no growth, nor true revolution, either. This love between you and the duchess, Giacomo, is a form of rebellion, and because I can’t break it on the wheel, hang it by the legs at the entrance of the city, or pursue it naked and barefoot at night through the snow, I am buying it instead. I have named the price. It is a good price. Few people have the means to pay such a high price for you. I am buying you as I would a well-known singer, conjuror, or strongman, the way we pay a visiting entertainer who is passing through the city, appears on stage for the lords of the place, and amuses them as best he can for one night. I want you to perform for me in the same way, Giacomo, to make a guest appearance in Bolzano for one night only. I am hiring you to show the customers what you know, and we shall see whether you are applauded or jeered off the stage at the end. Are you still quiet? Do you think it is not enough? Or maybe it’s too much? Are you undergoing some significant inner struggle? Enjoy yourself, my boy! Have a good laugh! Let us both laugh, since we are alone, shut away from the world, face-to-face with the facts: let us laugh, for we are intimates after all, parties to a mutual agreement. Is your self-respect troubling you, Giacomo? Ah, Giacomo! I see now I shall have to improve my offer. There must be something else I can offer you, the gallant and gambler, who wants everything and nothing… are you shaking your head? Do you mean you have grown up and are no longer an adolescent? So now you know that ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’ don’t exist in real life: that there are always only gray areas of ‘something’ between the extremes of ‘nothing’ and ‘everything,’ for ‘nothing’ and ‘everything’ usually turn out to be rather a lot? Why are you hesitating? Tell me your price, there’s nobody else here. Name the sum. Money is of no value to me anymore, so go ahead, you can be as crude as you like, bellow the price that fits with your conscience or whisper it into my ear, tell me how much it will take to persuade you to spend the night with the duchess of Parma. How expensive or how cheap do you estimate your art to be?… Speak, my boy,” he said and cleared his grating throat. “Speak, because my time is up.”

His host stood before him with folded arms. They couldn’t see each other’s faces in the half light.

“Neither expensive nor cheap, Your Excellency,” he courteously replied. “This night has no price. There’s only one way you can buy this night.”

“Name the price.”

“I will do it for nothing.”

The guest stared into the fire again. He did not move, didn’t even raise his head, but his bloodless, narrow lips hissed in irritation.

“That is more than I can pay. I fear you have misunderstood me, Giacomo. I cannot pay that much.” Giacomo maintained an obstinate silence. “What I mean,” continued the duke, “is that the contract is meaningless at that price. It is an impossible sum for me to pay for a service, an art that you foolishly overvalue. You are singing a high tenor, Giacomo, if I may say so. It is not an aria I wanted to hear but the voice of clear calm reason ready to make a good bargain. I thought I was talking to a man, not a singing clown.”

“And I thought I was answering a man,” replied the other, unruffled, “not Maecenas, the patron of the arts.”

“Maecenas is good,” replied the duke, shrugging. “A fine answer. Eloquent words. It is an eloquent answer with a precise and respectable literary allusion: but it has nothing to do with reality. It is true that you need eloquence to bargain — a few fine words and some beating of the breast may be necessary — it may in fact be the only way for us to bargain. But we have done with eloquence. Let us descend from the empyrean. I fear you have failed to understand me. You believe this bargain is immoral. By the cowardly standards and timid morals of the world, it may be so. But my time is short and I cannot afford to wait on the morals and judgments of the world. The woman I love loves you, but you cannot truly love a woman, because you are doomed never to be satisfied: you are the sort of man who may drink as much as he likes from a fine crystal goblet or a stone trough but can never quench his thirst and is therefore beyond redemption. Love is a form of addiction for you. It took me a long time to understand that, and I have been trying to understand it from the moment I saw you yawning in the theater at Bologna, to the moment here in Bolzano, when I gave you the duchess’s letter. And now that I know your nature, and who you are, I cannot say to Francesca: ‘Go! Go with the man you love!’… I might be able to say it, Giacomo, if you were not who you are, if I did not wish to protect Francesca from the sad fire that burns within you. And if I pity you for anything, it is for the incapacity, the deafness, that your character and fate have bestowed on you; I pity you because you don’t know love, have never heard the voice of love, because you are deaf. Perhaps you, too, if only out of sheer boredom, occasionally give up a woman, or let one go her own way into the flames of her own choosing, because you like the gesture, are playing a game, or because you want to be gallant or generous. But what you cannot know is that love can make a man immoral; you cannot know that a man who loves can let a woman go for one night, indeed for eternity if it comes to that — not for selfish reasons, but because he feels obliged to serve her by sacrificing himself. Because to love is, and always has been, simply to serve. Now, for the first time in my life, I, too, wish to serve. Even the mighty and the privileged must bow to fate. If you were not who I believe you are, I might even let Francesca with all her youth and her inexperience go with you. But I cannot allow it because all you can give her is a few days and nights while she is with you, a few moments of almost impersonal tenderness, a flame that burns but cannot warm. What can you give her?… Only the thrill of seduction. That is your own peculiar art form. It is a high art with a long tradition, and you are certainly a master in your field. But it is the nature of a thrill to be of short duration: that is the kind of art it is and those are its rules and proportions. Now go, and perform miracles, Giacomo!” he said, his voice a little hoarse now, and turned to him, his eyes wide open. They stared at each other a while. “Make this thrill exquisite for her. I insulted you before by offering you cash, freedom, and worldly pleasure in exchange for your art, and you got on your high horse and made a grand speech, with words like ‘nothing’ and ‘Maecenas.’ These are only words. The art of which you are a master, the art you understand as truly as a goldsmith understands rings and brooches, the field in which you are a true creative spirit, is that of seduction. So go and create your seductive masterpiece. I know who I am talking to, you see, and I trust you to do a good job. What are the requirements of a seduction? Everything you might need is at your disposal: night, secrecy, a mask, a vow, fine words, sighs, a billet-doux, a covert message, a tryst in the snowdrifts, a tender abduction, the great moment when your captive lies panting in your arms, when she gives herself and cries out, and then the slow descent and conclusion, vows like ‘you alone’ and ‘forever’ though by that time you will be keeping half an eye on dawn as it begins to blush through the window, awaiting the moment you may leave in a manner appropriate to your vocation, having completed your work satisfactorily, in private, an artist contemplating his next appearance in some other place. You will not be bought, you said. A laudable sentiment. But I don’t believe you because I know that there is nothing in this world that cannot be bought. Perhaps even the fire of love may be purchased. I am striving now to buy what may remain of Francesca’s love, the tenderness that is left to comfort my remaining days, because I am weak and must die soon, and I want my last few months and days to be suffused with the wonderful light that radiates from this one body, this one soul. I realize it is a sign of weakness. I want her to get over you as she might get over an illness. It isn’t some salacious fantasy that has driven me to this point, now when the musicians are already tuning up in my own palazzo and the ass’s head is ready and waiting; no, these are not the pleadings of an ancient lover who can no longer yield his darling amusement and delight. No, Giacomo, you are an illness, the yellow fever, the plague, and the pox combined and we have to get over you. If there is nothing else we can do let us at least survive. That is why I come to you, asking you to spend the night with my wife — an odd enough request on first hearing, but when we take everything into consideration, if we examine our emotions in their true context and use our brains, a most natural one. I see the dangers of the pox, the plague, and the yellow fever and realize that it is vital that we pull through. That is why I need you to work a miracle! There is nothing else you can give her, the poor invalid, but the thrill of seduction — so let us concoct this adventure for her, in the best and most proper manner, with dignity and skill, with the mutual understanding of true accomplices, conjoined in the melancholy complicity that is the unavoidable lot of all men who are in attendance on the same woman. Consult your art and devise one brilliant act of seduction, for it is my wish that in the morning Francesca should return to the palazzo, like a patient recovered from an illness, her heart free, her head held high, not sneaking home down shady alleys, but as proud as I would have her be, for she too has a rank and I am unwilling to see her lose anything of her dignity. This is the way I have contrived in order to keep her with me for the short time that remains to me, now that I understand so much more than I did before, now that my life is almost over. That is why I am addressing my offer not to the man, the ordinary mortal in you, who takes it as an insult, but to the immortal artist and craftsman. All I want is for you to remain true to your art and to create a masterpiece. Ah, now you are looking at me! I think we are beginning to understand each other…. Look into my eyes. Good, my boy. We should face each other in the cold light of day, as accomplices. How wonderful it is to have awakened the interest of an artist. The Pope must have felt like this when he persuaded the mighty Michelangelo to raise and complete his dome. Very well, let us construct our dome, in our own fashion, and finish the business properly,” he said and gave a sad, twisted smile. “You value your art highly and I am prepared to pay a high price for it, so there’s no point in us bandying words, for by dawn tomorrow you will have need of ten thousand golden pieces and of my rare, invaluable letter. Let us not waste any more breath on the subject, nothing could be more natural. I merely mention the details in passing. What is more important is that I finally see the light of understanding in your eyes. Only a few moments have passed but now I know I have touched the artist in you: I can see the idea interests and excites you. You have a preoccupied look and are probably turning the campaign over in your mind even now, anticipating the problems of execution, wondering how to build momentum at the beginning… am I right? I suspect I am. You see, I have calculated carefully, Giacomo: I know that an artist cannot escape the siren call of his art. I am quite confident that you won’t disappoint me and that you will do something wonderful, if only because there is no alternative: you stand or fall by your success. The kind of masterpiece I want you to produce is what they call a miniature: a concentrated form of the art in which that which normally takes a month or a year happens in a few hours. I want the beginning and end to be miraculously apposite and to follow close on each other’s heels, and who in all Europe is in a better position to accomplish that than you, you above all people, and precisely at this moment when you are fresh from the prison where time and enforced meditation will have matured your talent and skill?… I know your performance will be perfect, Giacomo! It has to be: that is why I am reasonably, justifiably, paying a high price for you, in words, in gold, in the letter and in blood-curdling threats, all of which you deserve, all of which are in keeping with your person, with my person, and with the person of the woman for whose sake all this is being arranged! I want you to compress and concentrate your art. I realize it is the most difficult thing to do, but I want you for a few hours to suspend the laws of time and to produce a conjuring trick, like the Eastern magi who, in a mere few seconds, can make a bud blossom into a flower that is perfect in scent, color, and form, but dies immediately. The death of the flower is a more melancholy event, but just as spellbinding and mysterious as its blossoming. The miracle of decay, completion, and destruction and the miracle of birth are equally remarkable. How wonderful, how terrifying the relationship between awakening, climax, and conclusion. But I want this to be more than just a conjuring trick, all gold leaf and hollow words: you must give her everything, the true thrill of seduction, a whirlwind affair complete with night, fog, flight, true vows, and real passion, otherwise it is all for nothing. And everything must happen quickly, very quickly, Giacomo, because time presses. I cannot wait long, I don’t have weeks to spare for you, not a day or night more than this present one. That is why I have hired you, only you, the one giant among a crowd of fashionable fops who might perform the same service. Because I appreciate and almost — how that word keeps coming back to haunt me! — almost admire your artistry. I know the task requires an impossible blend of intelligence, craft, finesse, and ice-cold strategy on the one hand and fury, passion, tears, ecstasy, madness, the feverish beating of the heart, and even a degree of suicidal torpor on the other, and that what you will do in miniature and in accelerated form in one night would take the average bourgeois lover a long time, perhaps even an entire lifetime to achieve. That is what makes you as much an artist as the man who can engrave an entire battle scene on a tiny piece of stone or paint a crowded city full of people, dogs, and spires on a slip of ivory. Because an artist, and only an artist, can shatter the laws of space and time! And you must shatter them tonight! Tonight you will visit us because Francesca feels that she must see you! You will come in costume, wearing a mask like everyone else. Once you have recognized her, you must call her away, bring her here, and perform the miracle! I can see by the expression in your eyes that you are willing, and I, in my turn am willing to pay the price. What I want, Giacomo, what I demand, is that the duchess be back in the palazzo by dawn. In the meantime I promise you that not a word will ever again pass between us about the events of this night, however it turns out, whatever life brings us in the future. Tonight the duchess will see you, as in her sickness she desires to do, and she will know you, in the precise biblical sense of the word, for love, that contagious fever, is nothing if not a matter of getting to know. Your business as an artist, as a healer, is to ensure that by the time dawn comes round she is free of infection. I am not interested in the secrets of your craft. I want her to recover from you but in such a way that at dawn she returns to me, not surreptitiously but without her mask, as befits a woman of rank, a rank bestowed by me on her, the woman I love. In other words she will not be reliant on the silent, conspiratorial mercies of paid lackeys and procurers but will go about with her head held high. Life is an accident. I don’t want the duchess of Parma to break her neck as a result of that accident. I still have need of her. Let her return to me, to her home, at dawn, not creeping but striding, with head held high in the full light of morning, even if all Bolzano happens to be looking on. Do you fully understand me now? I want her to come home completely cured. She is yours to know, Giacomo, but you must make her realize that there is no other life for her but the one I designed for her; let her know that you are an adventure, a fling; that there is no prospect of life with you, not for her; that you are night, the storm, the plague, something that rumbles over the landscape but disappears when the sun rises in the morning and people go about their domestic chores, smoking, plastering, and scouring. That is why I am ordering you to perform a miracle. Within a few hours I want you to reveal your true self to the duchess, and by morning I want that secret self to have become a painless unintrusive memory. Be good to her, but be ruthless and malicious too, as is your way: be tender with her and hurt her, as you always do, as you would if you had a longer time to do it; squeeze everything that can happen between two people into a single night; finish all that can be finished by two people and let it be over by daybreak. Then send her back to me, because I love her and because you have nothing more to do with her.”

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.