Casanova in Bolzano

A Writer

When the girl had left the room, her head bowed, treading as silently as only those who are used to going about barefoot can tread, Balbi spoke. “I was really frightened. You were holding that dagger in your hand as if you were about to stab her.”

“I’m not a murderer,” he solemnly replied, a little short of breath as he put the dagger back on the mantelpiece. “I am a writer.”

“A writer?” gasped Balbi. He left his mouth open for a while. “Have you written anything?” he asked incredulously.

“Written? Of course I’ve written,” muttered the stranger. He spoke grudgingly, as if he hardly thought it worth his while to answer a companion so far below him that he was sure he wouldn’t understand. “I’ve written a great many things. Poems, for example,” he proclaimed triumphantly, confident he had the evidence to back his claim.

“For money?” Balbi inquired.

“For money, among other things,” he answered. “Real writers always write for money, you blockhead. I don’t suppose you’re capable of understanding writers, Balbi. It’s a pity I didn’t stick this knife between your ribs that time on the outskirts of Valdepiadene when we were on the run and you almost got us into trouble. Then, perhaps, I might really have been the murderer you thought I was a few moments ago. There would also have been one less idiotic rogue in the world and the world would have thanked me for it! I never cease to regret the day I rescued you from that rat-infested gutter.”

“You would not have escaped without me, either,” the friar answered calmly. He was not easily insulted. He sat down in the armchair, spread his legs, and crossed his hands over his full belly, blinking and twiddling his thumbs.

“True enough,” came the matter-of-fact answer. “When a man is in trouble he will grasp at anything, even the hangman’s rope.”

They were weighing each other up. “Yes, it was a pity,” he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders to demonstrate how pointless it was for a man to dwell on all the things he had failed to do in life. “And you, potbelly, you don’t understand, are incapable of understanding, that I am a writer. What have you ever written in your life? Love letters, two-a-penny, to sell on the market to servants with holes in their shoes, a few fake contracts to self-employed tradesmen and petty criminals, some begging letters with which you might trouble your betters, people who were sufficiently easygoing and forgetful not to send you to the galleys.”

“All the same,” replied the friar in his mildest, friendliest manner, “it was writing that saved me, Giacomo. Cast your mind back. We wrote each other such letters, we might have been lovers. Long, ardent letters they were, and Lorenzo the warder, was our go-between. We made our acquaintance through those letters, told each other everything, both past and present. If I were incapable of writing I would never have started a correspondence with you, nor would I ever have escaped. You despise me and look down on me. I know you would happily kill me. You are not being fair. I know as well as you do that writing is very important, a great source of power.”

“Power?” his fellow fugitive repeated, and surveyed the friar haughtily from under suspicious, half-closed eyelids, his head thrown right back. “It’s far greater than that. It is not a matter of ‘sources,’ Balbi, but power itself. Writing is the one and only power. You are right, it is writing that freed you. I really hadn’t thought of that. The scriptures, the sacred writings, are right when they tell us that even fools are not without grace. Writing is the greatest power there is: the written word is greater than king or pope, greater than the doge. We are living proofs of that. It was in writing that we plotted our escape, letters formed the teeth that cut through our chains, letters were the ladder and the rope on which we let ourselves down, it was letters that led us back from hell to earth. Some say,” he continued, “that letters can lead us from earth up to heaven too. But I don’t believe in their power to do that.”

“What then do you believe in?” asked the friar conversationally.

“In fate,” he answered without hesitation, “in the fate we create for ourselves and thenceforth accept. I believe in life, in the multifariousness of things that eventually, miraculously, chime in harmony, in the various fragments that finally combine to make one man, one life. I believe in love and in the wheel of fortune. And I believe in writing, because the power of writing is greater than that of fate or time. The things we do, the things we desire, the things we love, the things we say, all pass away. Women pass, affairs pass. Time’s dust settles over all we have done, over everything that once excited us. But words remain. I tell you, I am a writer,” he declared with delight and satisfaction, as if he had just discovered the fact.

He ran his fingers through his uncombed hair and threw back his head like a great musician about to raise the violin to his chin and assault the strings with his bow. It was a pose he had learned to strike in his youth when he played the instrument in a band in Venice. Agitated, he paced in a somewhat peculiar limping manner across the room, then added quietly, “Sometimes it surprises even me.”

“What surprises you?” asked Balbi like a curious child.

“I am surprised to find that I am a writer,” he replied without thinking. “I cannot help it, Balbi, there is nothing I can do about it, so I beg you to keep the secret to yourself since I don’t like the idea of bragging and complaining in the same breath. I am telling this to you alone, because I have absolutely no respect for you. There are many ways of writing. Some people sit in a room and do nothing but write. They are the happy ones. Their lives are sad because they are lonely, because they gaze at women the way dogs gaze at the moon, and they complain bitterly to the world, singing their woes, telling us how much suffering they undergo on account of the sun, the stars, autumn and death. They are the saddest of men but the happiest of writers because their lives are dedicated to words alone: they breakfast on proper nouns and go to sleep with a well-fleshed adjective in their arms. They smile in a faintly wounded manner when they dream. And when they wake in the morning they raise their eyes to heaven because they are under a permanent spell and live in some cockeyed rapture, believing that by grunting and stuttering their way through all those adjectives and proper nouns they will continue to succeed in articulating that which God himself has succeeded in articulating once and once only. Yes, the happy writers are those who walk about looking sad, and women deal gently with them, taking considerable care of them as they might of their simpleminded nearest and dearest, as if they were the writers’ more fortunate, wiser sisters, obliged to comfort them and prepare them for death. I wouldn’t want to be a writer who does nothing but write,” he declared a little contemptuously. “Then there are writers who run you through with their pens as they would with a sword or dagger, writing in blood, spattering the page with bile, the kind of writers you find in the study with tasseled nightcaps on their heads, berating kings and parasites, traitors and usurers, writers who enter the service of ideas or of human causes as either volunteers or mercenaries…. I’ve known some of them. I once spent some time in the company of that scarecrow, Voltaire. Don’t interrupt me, you’ve never even heard of him. He had no teeth left but that did not stop him biting: kings and queens sought to earn his approval, and this toothless wretch with a single quill between his gouty knotted fingers could hold the world to account with it. Do you understand?… I do. Writing, for these people, was a means of changing the world, but the writers who exercised power on the basis of their strength and intellect were unhappy, both as men and writers, because they lacked silence and reverence. They could plunge daggers through constitutions and stab a king through the heart with a single sharp word but they were incapable of articulating life’s deepest secret, which is the miraculous sense of being here at all, the delight of knowing that we are not alone but are cared for by the stars, by women and by our demons, not to mention the happy realization of the extraordinary fact that we must die. Those to whom the pen is just a sword or dagger can never articulate such things, however much power they wield on earth…. Such people may influence thrones, human institutions, and individual destinies, but they can do little to suspend our sense of time…. And then there are writers like myself. They are the rarest kind,” he declared with satisfaction.

“Absolutely,” Balbi agreed in awe. “And why are they the rarest, my lord and master?”

His deep, rasping voice bore the impress of prison, alcohol, and disease, as well as wayside hovels and the beds of kitchen maids. Now it was a mixture of curiosity and wariness. He sat with his mouth wide open, still twiddling his thumbs, as if he had blundered into a theater where the actors were performing in some language he only imperfectly understood.

“Because what they write is what they have to lose, which is the text of their own lives,” Giacomo’s voice was rising. “Do you understand me, you pot-bellied flat-footed fool, you hero of hovel and brothel, do you understand? I am that rare creature, a writer with a life to write about! You asked me how much I have written?… Not much, I admit. A few verses… a few essays on the magical arts…. But none of these was the real thing. I have been envoy, priest, soldier, fiddler, and doctor of civil and canonical law, thanks be to Bettina, who introduced me to knowledge of the physical world when I was fourteen, and thanks, too, to her older brother, Doctor Gozzi, who was my neighbor in Padua, who knew nothing of what Bettina had taught me but introduced me to the world of the fine arts. But that’s not the point, it’s not the writing, it’s what I have done that matters. It is me, my life, that is the important thing. The point, you fool, is that being is much more difficult than doing. Gozzi denies this. Gozzi says only bad writers want to live and good writers find that writing is enough. But I refute Gozzi because there is only one great struggle in life and that is between powerful, justified assertion on the one hand and powerful, justified denial on the other. However Gozzi may dismiss me as a writer now, my being, my life, is the important thing. I want to live. I cannot write until I know the world. And I am only beginning to know it,” he said, more quietly, almost in awe. “I am forty. I have hardly begun to live. I can’t get enough of life. I have not seen as many dawns as I would wish, there are too many human feelings and sensations that I do not know, I have not yet finished laughing at the arrogance of bureaucrats, dignitaries, and all manner of respectable persons; I have not succeeded as often as I’d like in stuffing the words of fat priests down their throats, I mean those fat priests who count their indulgences in pennies. I have not yet laughed myself sick at human folly; have not rolled into enough ditches in uncontrolled amusement at the world’s vanity, ambition, lust, and greed; have still not woken in the arms of a sufficient number of women to know anything worth knowing about them, to have learned some truth that is more substantial than the sad, vulgar truth of what they hide beneath their skirts, which excites the imagination only of poets and adolescents…. I have not lived enough, Balbi,” he repeated stubbornly, with a genuine tremor in his voice. “I don’t want to leave anything out, you see! I am not ambitious for worldly acclaim, I am not ambitious for wealth, for a happy domestic life: there’ll be time enough later for strolling about in slippers, for inspecting my vineyard and for hearing the birds singing, for carrying a volume of De consolatione philosophiae by the pagan Boethius under my arm, or indeed one of the books of the sage Horace, who teaches that a just man is always accompanied by two heavenly sisters, Knowledge and Pity…. I don’t want to give myself over to pity now. I want to live so that, eventually, I might write. This comes at a great cost. Understand this, my unlucky companion, my fellow in the galleys, understand that I must see everything: I must see the rooms where people sleep, I must hear their whimpers as they enter old age when they can only buy a woman’s favors with gold, I must get to know mothers and younger sisters, lovers and spouses who always have something true and encouraging to say about life. I must at least get to shake their hands. I am the kind of writer who needs to live. Gozzi says only bad writers want to live. But Gozzi is not a man, Gozzi is just a timid indolent bookworm who will never write anything of permanent value.”

“But when will you have time to write, Giacomo?…” asked Balbi. “If you spend it all seeing, hearing, and getting to smell everything you’ve talked about you will never find enough time for writing. You are right, I don’t understand such things. I do, however, know something about the chore of writing, and my experience tells me that even writing a letter takes a long time. Real writing, the work that writers do, would need even more leisure, I imagine. Perhaps a whole lifetime of it.”

“I shall write when I have done as much living as I consider necessary,” he replied and stared at the ceiling, his lips moving silently as if counting something. “When I have lived, I shall want to write.”

Somebody was laughing in the yard beneath the window. It was a warm, youthful, broken laugh and the stranger hurried over to the window and leaned over the balcony. He waved and bowed, and grinning widely, put two fingers to his mouth and blew a kiss.

“Bellissima!” he cried. “My one and only! Tonight!…”

He turned around, his voice somber.

“I have to do everything now for the sake of writing later. I have to experience life and everything life offers. Writing demands serious commitment…. I must see everything so I may describe habits and habitations, the places where I was once happy or miserable or simply indifferent. I don’t yet have time for writing. And those people,” he cried with a sudden fury, so angrily that for a moment the whites of his eyes looked enormous, “had the nerve to lock me up in jail! Venice denied me. They denied a man who, even in the galleys, was as true a Venetian as any dignitary painted by Titian! They dared deprive me of my right to be an author, a real author who dedicates each day of his life to gathering material for his work! They dared stand in judgment on me, on a writer, and a Venetian writer, at that! The bigwigs of Venice took it on themselves to shut me away from life, from sunlight and moonlight; they stole an important part of my time, of my life, a life that is nothing more than a form of service undertaken for the community…. Yes, that, in my fashion, is the service I perform! I serve the community!… And they dared take sixteen months of life from me! A plague on them!” he declared lightly but firmly. “A pestilence and plague on Venice! Let the Moors come, let the pagan Turks come with their topknots and cut the senators into delicate little pieces, all except Signor Bragadin, of course, who was a father to me when I had no father and who gave me money. I’m glad I remembered him. In fact I must write to him immediately. May shame and desolation be the lot of Venice who threw me, the truest son of Venice, into a rat-infested cell! I will make it the mission of my life to revenge myself on Venice!”

“Bravo!” cried Balbi enthusiastically, his fat face, yellow and warty as a marrow, beginning to glisten. “You are right, Giacomo, I understand you. I feel the same. I might not be a Venetian when it comes down to it, but I, too, know how to write. Well said: a plague on Venice. I’m with you there, believe me.”

But he could not finish what he was saying as the stranger suddenly seized him by the neck and set about strangling him.