Casanova in Bolzano

Five-finger Exercise

He turned and moved swiftly across to the gilt-legged, floral-silk-covered armchair that stood before the fireplace and the great mirror, sat down, and crossed his right leg, which was sinewy and powerful like those of people who ride or walk a lot, over his left knee, resting his arms on the chair, keeping his eyes on the girl, solemnly inspecting her. “A little closer,” he ordered her quietly. “Come right up to me.” And when the girl had finally made her steady way over to him he took hold of her small red hand and lifted it lightly into the air as if he were a cavalier and she his partner at a dance, or like a tailor inspecting his latest ball gown as demonstrated by a model; he took it in an amiable, professional manner, turning the girl in a half circle with a gentle, almost incidental adjustment of his hand.

“What is your name?” he asked, and when Teresa told him, inquired further. “How old are you?”

Having heard the answer he nodded, humming and hawing as he considered it.

“Why,” he eventually asked, “why did you let those women into my room?” And then, as if he were not expecting an answer, he immediately continued: “People think I am a decadent fellow, Teresa, and indeed I am just what they say. I am tired of traveling. A man gets a reputation because the world is small and because transport has very much improved these last few years, so news travels fast. Thanks to gossip in the press and in the corridors of theaters, people know everything and there are no more secrets: indeed, I do believe, there is no personal life left. It was quite different when I was young. Venice today is like a glass box with people sitting in the window, cheating, lying, stuffing their bellies, and making love in public. Have you ever been to Venice? I’ll take you there sometime. From a Saturday through to a Monday,” he added as an afterthought. “No, dear child, you should not believe what Venetians say. Look into my eyes. Do you see how sad they are?… The gossips have turned me into a figure of fun, a marketplace scandal, so that everywhere I go now, spoiled youths and spies, denizens of gambling dens, and women who prosper because there are women younger and clumsier than themselves, turn their heads to watch me; poor wallflowers and others who hang about dance halls whisper my name to each other as they promenade; from balconies and from passing coaches, with beagle eyes, they follow me; women glance at me as if shortsighted. They raise their gilded lorgnettes, turn their heads away, and lisp: ‘Oh! Is that he?… What a disgrace!… Why do they tolerate such people in town? Invite him in!’ That’s the way women go on. Come closer, my dear. Look into my eyes. Are you afraid of me?…”

“I’m not afraid,” said the girl.

The stranger thought this over.

“That’s not good,” he responded a little anxiously.

But Teresa, who was both servant and relative at The Stag, really did not fear him. Now that she is standing there, allowing her hands to be at once caressed and grasped in this peculiar manner that seems both to give and take, perhaps it is necessary to say something about her after all. For though the girl was a person of no account, an unattached young female, there was occasionally something that played about her lips that spoke volumes to men. She was sixteen, as has already been stated, acquainted with the rank secrets of the rooms and recesses of The Stag Inn; she made and stripped beds, she emptied basins after guests had used them, she had a skirt of dark-blue cloth that was given her as a memento by a trader from Turin, she had a neatly cut pale-green bodice that was left behind at the bottom of a wardrobe by a traveling actress, she had a prayer book bound in white leather that included a portrait of the Blessed Saint of Padua, and other than that she had nothing at all to call her own. Except perhaps a Venetian comb. She slept in the attic above the guest rooms, near the space occupied by Balbi, and her home was in the southern Tyrol, in a village that practically gasped for air at the foot of a great mountain, so oppressed was it by the peak, by the condition of the land, and by poverty. Her father set off one day to become a mercenary in the service of the king of Naples and never returned. Teresa looked at the stranger and was not afraid.

The fear that had first gripped her the previous night when the innkeeper, who sometimes beat her and sometimes invited her into his widower’s bed, asked her to observe the stranger; the fear that startled her when she saw the stranger half-asleep, snoring and snuffling, shortly after he had eaten his meal, had, now that the man had taken her hand, passed away. She was a little embarrassed by her hand, which was red from washing and carrying wood, and rough and scaly from the wind that eternally whistled round Bolzano, the wind she thought she would never get used to. She was therefore somewhat reluctant to yield her hand to this man whose own hand was firm yet soft, aristocratic, and smooth to the touch, like cool, finely worked leather. But touching it relaxed her. Yes, his hand, the grip of it, had about it something that would both give and take. And from his cool palm there slowly spread, across the skin and through the veins, an extraordinary warmth different from that which the stove gave out, more like when one went and sat out in the sun. This warmth radiated and extended; then, for a moment or two, it seemed to cease, as when one blows out a candle or a draft puts out a lantern — it was a sensation of approaching flames and thunder. Then it warmed again. Teresa was no longer afraid. She wasn’t thinking of anything. Her favorite pastime was talking to the dog, the sharp-eared little white dog in the garden of The Stag, and to no one else; she also liked to spend an hour or two, winter or summer, in one of the chapels of the church, under the picture of the Virgin, just beneath the pulpit. At these times she closed her eyes and thought of nothing. Occasionally she did think of love but only in the way a fisherman thinks of the sea. She was acquainted with love and was not afraid of it.

Now that the man had finally touched her — the stranger was holding her hand with two fingers as if requesting the pleasure of a dance, while resting his head on his other hand — Teresa’s intuition told her that she was the stronger. The feeling surprised her. The stranger, to all appearances, was powerful and elegant despite having arrived in rags; what was more, he was older, much older than Teresa, and to cap it all he was famous, and every woman desperately wanted to see him. Teresa should have had every reason to be afraid of him. He had also promised to take her to Venice, and Teresa was afraid of promises, because people who made promises were known to lie: the only people really to have given her something were those who had not said anything about it beforehand. She didn’t even know what exactly the man wanted from her. For there had been those who had pinched her or patted her buttocks or wanted to kiss her or whispered lascivious words into her ear, many of which were coarse and crude, or begged her for favors or made loathsome offers, inviting her into their rooms after midnight, when everyone else had gone to bed. No, Teresa knew men, all right. But this one did not pinch her, extended no invitation, and said nothing crude. He simply gazed with an expression of close concentration on his slightly careworn face, like someone who was thinking furiously about something he had forgotten: a name, some memory, some important, life-enhancing idea.

“You’re not afraid,” the man muttered under his breath. With the gentlest, most courteous, almost solicitous, yet completely unambiguous gesture, he sat the girl on his knee. Teresa allowed herself to be seated. She sat in the stranger’s lap quite decorously, as if visiting another person’s house, prepared at any moment to run should someone ring a bell or call her. They were both solemn. They looked into each other’s eyes attentively, the man slightly squinting so as to see her better, as, with two fingers, he turned Teresa’s face to the light. The girl tolerated these movements exactly as if she were visiting the doctor: it was reasonable to grant reasonable requests. “It is sixteen months,” said the stranger calmly, “since I looked into a woman’s eyes. Yours have a nice color, Teresa, like the sky over Venice. I sometimes saw that sky from a window when they took me for exercise down the prison corridor. It was a blue sky, bluish gray to be precise, a slightly cold blue, as if somehow it were reflecting the sea. You have the color of eternity in your eyes,” he told her politely. “But you don’t understand this. Not that it matters whether you do or not. There is a sort of misunderstanding between us, an eternal misunderstanding as between all men and women, and I am always ashamed of myself when I am with a woman and babble on too long. Kiss me,” he said in a friendly and natural fashion.

And when the girl made no move but continued staring at him with that gray-blue, glassy gaze of hers, her head held stiff and straight, he repeated, “Kiss me. Don’t you understand?” in a slightly puzzled voice, but still friendly. Later Teresa recalled that it was the sort of voice in which he might have asked her for a glass of water, or told her to send in Balbi because he was bored. There was simplicity and ease in his request: “Kiss me.” But Teresa had never kissed a man like this, so she continued staring, her eyes still glassy, more empty than intelligent. The man took her waist with, it seemed, half a hand, and this too he succeeded in doing in an almost incidental fashion as if reaching for a book or comb, then, amiably, in a mildly inquiring manner, asked her what she felt.

“Nothing,” replied the girl.

“You don’t understand,” he said, a little annoyed. “You don’t understand my question. I am not asking you what you feel in general about life, about men or about love. Listen here, child. What I am asking is what you feel when I touch you, when I encompass that piece of your arm above your elbow with two fingers, what you feel when I touch your heart — like this — what you are feeling now, this very moment?”

“Excuse me, sir,” said the girl decorously, as she stood up, bobbed to the stranger, and with two hands, as she had sometimes seen others do in the restaurant, slightly raised the edge of her skirt. “But I feel nothing.”

Now the man, too, stood up. Legs apart, arms crossed, his head bowed, his voice dark and troubled.

“That’s impossible,” he exclaimed, spluttering in his confusion. “It is impossible that you should feel nothing, while I… Wait, hang on a minute!” With a swift movement he embraced the girl, bent his head over her fresh young face, and stared deeply into the pale blue of her placid, maidenly, gently shimmering eyes.

“Not even now? Now that I have my arms around you? Can’t you feel my hot breath? The pressure of my hands on your ribs?… Can’t you feel how close I am to you? That in this mere moment we already know each other and that I am bringing you a miraculous gift, the gift of life and love?… You are seized by a peculiar trembling, are you not? A trembling that runs through you from your brow to the tip of your toes, a trembling you have never felt before, as if you had realized for the first time that you are alive, that this is the reason you have lived so far, the reason you came into the world?” And when he got no answer, he asked, “So what happens now?” Utterly lost, he let the girl go, allowed his hand to float to his brow, and looked about bewildered.

For the girl standing opposite him, only one step away from him, this little, slightly slatternly, raggedy, barefooted slip of a girl, the common plaything of every innkeeper, the kind of girl he knew so well — and, if he wanted to be honest with himself, the only kind of person he ever really knew — truly did feel nothing, as he could see perfectly well. He was so confused he began groaning. The fresh young body had not shuddered pleasantly at his expert touch: not even when he had held her waist had those clear, rather glassy eyes clouded up like a mountain lake when the storm gathers above it; nor had her heart, whose pulse he had felt through her canvas blouse as he touched her warm, maidenly skin, suddenly begun to race, not even when he pressed his hot hand against her breast more firmly. The girl continued breathing evenly and stood in front of him at arm’s length. He raised his arm but it stopped in midmovement, in midair. The resistance he occasionally met with in women had always encouraged him. Was there a more beautiful game, a more exciting struggle, than the duel with a woman who resisted, who slipped from his hands, who protested, and, haughtily or in panic, fended off her amorous opponent? It was at these times that he felt the full power of his humanity, when words tumbled from his mouth with the greatest ease: only at these times could he be at once bold yet submissive, demanding yet worshipping, daunted yet daring. For resistance was already a form of contact, a game half-won; resistance was a form of surrender: she who resisted knew why she resisted and already desired that from which she was escaping…. But this girl here, in the guest room of a hostelry in a strange town, this slim, not particularly well nourished servant girl, the first woman to whom he had opened his arms after sixteen months of prison, loneliness, misery, and obscurity — this girl wasn’t even defending herself. She was not resisting. Here she stood, perfectly calmly, as if he weren’t standing right opposite her, a sweet little rag doll facing a man who had not so long ago rented a palazzo in Murano for the most beautiful nun in all Venice and who, quite recently, had been taught how to pen amorous verses by a countess in Rome, at the home of a cardinal and patron…. Here she stood and there was nothing he could do with her because she was neither defending herself nor yielding to orders and demands; she stood like light before a shadow and no female instinct was telling her to flee. He took a deep breath and wiped his brow, covered in cold sweat.

What had happened? That which had never before happened. He looked wildly around the room as if searching for something and his eye fell on the dagger he had left on the mantelpiece the previous night. With a fluid movement he seized the dagger with both hands and began carelessly to flex the blade. He was no longer concerned with the girl but walked up and down the room with the dagger in his hand, talking quietly to himself: “Well then,” he mumbled. Then: “It’s impossible!” He felt truly awful. He felt like a great actor who had not appeared in public for years and who, when the time came for him to sing again, was confronted by an icy auditorium and silence in the stalls. He was not hissed off the stage, he hadn’t failed, but this icy silence, this unechoing indifference was more terrifying than failure. He felt like a singer who notices with horror that something has happened to his voice, and that however much he bawls or attempts those well-practiced florid musical phrases, the warm resonance of his voice, the individual attractive timbre that once made his listeners shiver with delight so that women’s eyes veiled and misted over and men stared solemnly at the ground in front of them, all paying close attention, as if the perfect moment for regret and judgment had finally arrived — was gone…. It was as if he had forgotten something, a voice, a pose, some secret faculty that had been his alone, which had been the secret of his success, of his very being, and he simply couldn’t understand why people no longer applauded the performance when only yesterday they were cheering it to the rafters, and he knew that despite his talent, despite his practice and experience, something had gone wrong: his effect on the audience was not what it used to be!… What could he do? Faced as he was by the icy indifference of the auditorium, he realized that he no longer possessed his old power of attraction. He found himself groaning and raising his hands to his throat in panic, wanting to emit some sound — an aaah! or aaiigh! — but failed to make any sound whatsoever. He stood there, dagger in hand, staring at the girl.

“Impossible!” he said once more, louder this time. “You feel nothing, nothing at all? No fear? No trembling? No desire to run away?…” He was almost begging her to say something. He was aware what a pitiful figure he must cut, with a dagger in his hand and this imploring note in his voice. “Why don’t you look me in the eye?” he asked more quietly, slightly hoarsely, the voice quite melancholy now. Noticing his tone, the girl looked up and slowly turned to face the stranger, allowing her own eyes to be explored by the solemn, piercing pair of the man before her. “Ah, you see,” the man sighed with relief, shifting position as if ready to fence or to leap. “My voice has touched you,” he rejoiced, the voice quieter and more tender now. “I want you to feel that I am talking to you personally. Because I know you, I would know you now among a thousand women, even at a masked ball. See, you are responding, your eyes answer mine. I knew it. How could it be otherwise?” He gave a low whistle in his joy, then resumed in the warm, deep, sad voice he seemed to deploy like a conjuror his apparatus. “For that is the only secret, my dear, that is all: there is no trick, no catch, it’s always this simple. It’s like touching a person. You touched me when you stepped into the room, and sometimes I think that is the most mysterious form of contact. Sometimes I think it is the cause, the very meaning, of life. Is your heart beating a little faster?… Are you blushing?… You know perfectly well that you can’t go now. Come closer, return to where you were before.”

And when the girl drew closer he addressed her in his calmest, most straightforward manner:

“Don’t you remember? I asked you to kiss me.”

Slowly, with a sure and leisurely movement, he held out his arms, gently took the girl by the shoulder, and watched tenderly as she leaned her head against his arm.