A Dancer in Darkness (13 page)

But Antonio was disturbed.

“Did I do wrong?” she asked, delighted to be meek.

He shrugged. “No, but it is a pity that we have to hide every trace of ourselves away.”

“I only did it to give him pleasure,” she said. But of course that was not true, and he knew it. The painting was hidden away in the sacristy, but even so, it would have been better if
it had never been painted at all. Here it would be better hidden yet.

It was evening when they came down behind Ravello. Once safely behind those gates, and the world was well away. Of course Cariola would have to know, but that only meant that she would have to be kinder to Cariola and more generous. There were no other servants at the villa. The Duchess had made these retreats even when Piccolomini was alive, camping out in the middle of the dusty, half-forgotten palace like a solemn child, sitting cross-legged on the floor, or dangling her naked feet in a fountain, like some Portuguese Princess.

She was too young to be a woman. It was nice to throw off that burden for a while and be a girl again. But not quite a girl. She had been a woman too soon and for too long to be able to manage that. Yet the imitation of innocence also has its pleasures, for then, and only then, do we realize what innocence can be.

She wanted to be private, but what do private people do? She did not know.

When Cariola brought in candles, and announced that such supper as they were to have was ready, she found them dancing in the undercroft. She was not to know they were married, for that would have frightened her. She would have more
sympathy
for an illicit escapade. So that is what their dancing seemed to her to be, and she looked at them fondly.

A dance without music is something peculiar. It makes available the secrets of a silent world. It is like moving gravely under the sea. Not since the court ballet, had the Duchess danced with Antonio, and now at last she could follow him into his secret world. The palace was built on the edge of the cliff. The undercroft was a long hall of heavy columns, open on one side to the distance and to space. It was always deep and shadowy. There they flitted like birds.

Cariola did not want to disturb them at once. It was a long time since she had heard two people laugh spontaneously together. The Duchess leaned against a column, and watched his white-clad figure, spinning in and out of the shadows. Then he circled around a pillar, and stopping in an open place, bowed to her gravely and extended his right hand. She went
forward to meet him. Cariola coughed and announced dinner. They hesitated, and then hand in hand ran down the length of the hall towards her.

It was late before they went up to bed. The Duchess was not afraid of these corridors. She was used to them. She showed Antonio the way by the light of a single candle. Plaster had fallen from the walls, and some of the Cosmedin work had come loose and was tricky underfoot. The bedroom she had chosen was at the far end of the building, with a loggia over the garden.

The Duchess thought that it was not like that first night with Piccolomini. The marriages of great princes are half stud farm and half dynastic brothel. She had felt that way waiting for Piccolomini to dodder over her. Now, as she mounted into the great state bed, she felt gay. She nestled there complacently, waiting to be found, and knowing that she would be. He blew the candle out.

Darkness has its own geography, its flora and its fauna, a coal-black world of immense rustling ferns and almost
intangible
hills. Enormous beasts pad through that underbrush, and twigs snap under them like creaking furniture. There we float in the vast waves of a dry sea, in a world without barriers, under the thought of stars. In the darkness our bodies
disappear
, the flesh exists only to excite the finger-tips, and we are what we are. In darkness we flow in and out of each other as effortlessly as seaweed in a tidal pool, and then suddenly the current grows stronger, and we are all swept one way. We pour out of ourselves. Far off, over the spray, we may dimly hear the universal sea pounding down against the barrier reefs of the self, but we are no longer there. We swim together down a safe lagoon, beach on the most delectable of shores and, amiably exhausted, sleep together in the warm summer sand. There is no need to think of waking. The sun will wake us at the proper time.

Abruptly her fingers came away sticky, as though from a spider web at dawn. She marvelled. “Why are you crying?” she whispered.

“Because I love you.”

She hugged him closer and cried too. Then she vanished
down into the endless passages of sleep, turning and twisting as they fell in each other’s arms through the green layers of a kindly sea. For a while there was silence.

Then it seemed to her that far off she heard the fretful
io
moro
of a lute. She woke up.

Antonio was lying on his side, his hair spread out against the pillow like the tassel of a black flower. He was very slim and boyish there, and very vulnerable.

She was playing a little game. She wanted to hide, so that he would come to find her. She dressed rapidly and then went out into the gardens, leaving him to sleep. The gardens were in the Italian taste, with herbal knots, shrubs carved into grotesque shapes which, from neglect, sprouted fronds like hairs in the ear, and tall avenues of narrow yew. She went down the gravel paths until she came to the pergola overlooking the sea, at the edge of the cliff.

She waited for him there, wearing an old dress that had lain too long in a chest, and had the dusty, faintly puzzling smell of daffodils. It was part of her marriage trousseau. She hoped it pleased him.

It was there he found her, and everything was as she would have wished it. For those three weeks they were children,
playing
with the idea of marriage the way children play with toys. For that period the world was scaled down within their reach, like an expensive doll’s house. They made plans. They
re-arranged
the furniture. They acted like grown-ups. They played house. Not even Cariola had the heart to remind them of reality. She stood silently by, and something in her that had come half-awake with Bosola, came wide awake with them.

They saw no one but each other until the gipsies came.

She would have remained hidden in the safe confines of the villa, but Antonio had a passion for the gipsies. As he rode over the Duchy on the Duchess’s errands, he had made friends with them wherever he found them. This was the private side of his life that he had never shown to anyone. Among them he was a magic prince, and they were his spiritual kingdom. Therefore he wanted to show this kingdom to the Duchess now. He wanted her to inhabit with him every secret corner of himself.

He spent the afternoon setting torches about the path and garden. He would not tell the Duchess what he was doing. That night he and Cariola went out to set them aflare. Then he rolled back the massive iron gates, and the gipsies poured into the grounds of the palace. Antonio shut the gates behind them.

It was a motley company. Startled and a little frightened, the Duchess watched it from a window of the palace, for Antonio had told her nothing of this invasion. Gipsies were feared in those days, not merely as a thieving people, but as a
supernatural
one, as dispossessed and fallen in the world as fairies, but older than Egypt, and full of malevolent power. The
torchlight
caught a noisy, smelly crowd bustling about the gardens. Donkey bells clamoured in the shadows. Old women weighed down with grumbling and too much work set up the camp.

They did not seem so terrible. The swagger young men on the edges of the crowd did. They were the dandies, and like all dandies they had a ruthless air, and a male vigour that was disturbing. Slim and swarthy, black-eyed, in the torchlight angular and tall, with ear-rings, floppy boots, sleek thighs that flowed out of agile hips, and great open silk shirts, something in the angry way they held their bodies made them like
predacious
cats complacently licking themselves clean after the kill. When man is a restless animal with brains, there is nothing for him to do but kill, but there is something gorgeous in that violence. Antonio was at home with these young men.
Giggling
and laughing ferociously, he might have been one of them, and clearly they treated him with respect. He glanced up towards her window mockingly and joyously, and then came to fetch her.

A dais had been set up for her under a sagging awning. She was to be mistress of the revels, and he master. He led her up to it grandly, and suddenly she understood. They could never share her court. Therefore he would have her share his, as though to prove they were equals after all. She sat down and spread out her skirt. She looked at the faces of this strange court, and the savage young men formed a guard behind her. It had never occurred to her that the world had portable
kingdoms
, whose members were fiercely loyal to each other and beyond the grasp of the sort of pomp and power she and her
brothers had. She had always thought of Antonio as a prince in disguise, but it startled her to find that among these people he virtually was one, for among these people she had no authority. It meant that he was not really her inferior. He was inferior only for her sake. For her he had abandoned a whole world, and it made her own world seem the less. She did not altogether like that.

He excused himself, and when he came back he was dressed as the dandies were. It bewildered her, but it suited him
perfectly
. She saw that inside this was what he was. He made her feel ridiculous in her heavy court dress. He wore skin-tight striped pants, tight Spanish boots, a heavy belt, a white blouse, and a short black embroidered jacket. His eyes darted at the Duchess happily. She clenched her hands, and the castanets went even faster.

They wanted her to dance. But she could not dance with them. She did not know how, and her dress was too heavy, so she let them pull Antonio into their midst instead.

Firelight leapt and snarled in the garden. It turned the shrubs into furry walls. They might have been at the bottom of a crypt. On the floor of this trench dug through the middle of the night, the torches glittered like glass jewels. There were some negroes in that company. Where they had come from, nobody could say, but of all the dandies, they were the flashiest and the most venomous.

Antonio seemed alien to her, dancing bare-chested out there, as though she did not matter to him at all. She did not like it, even while something inside her liked it very much indeed.

The dance was a
folia,
one of the Spanish-American dances the common people danced. It seemed to absorb Antonio completely, and its sickening, ravenous rhythm made her deaf. She wanted to join him, but could not. She closed her eyes.

Cariola appeared and took her back to the palace. She went unprotestingly. She lay in her bed alone, wishing he would come, as her head went round and round, but he did not come. He was too happy out there. She felt herself sucked down into sleep.

When she opened her eyes, he was sitting on the side of the bed, and the night was still. She stared at him, unable to hide
the hurt at the back of her eyes. He laughed and leaned over her, supporting himself with his outstretched hands. He was very excited. Despite herself she was roused by him, and laughed. He tumbled into the bed beside her, boots and all. He was covered with sweat and grime, and his body felt alien and strangely taut. She was frightened and subdued to find him so changed, and to find also that in this mood he had control over her, which had not happened between them before. But though she resented that, she also adored it. She held on to him eagerly, and drew him down.

That next afternoon Cariola found them playing tag in the gardens, laughing their heads off, and with a negro playing with them. It was a bright, sparkling day, with moisture high in the air; and Mestre Antonio looked like a pirate, and her mistress in a peasant’s blouse and skirt like something worse. Cariola sniffed.

The gipsies camped in the yard, slept late, and went off daily on errands of their own. When they returned through the gates, the fights, the dances, and the swaggering began again. Cariola scarcely recognized the Duchess any more.

As for the rest, God forgive them in that terrible age, for they were happy for three weeks. It was not their fault. It was a passion. They were prince and princess of the gipsies, and had forgotten who they were. They were to be reminded soon enough, so why should they not laugh while they could?

In Naples Sor Juana was having a triumph of her own. Hers, though sumptuous, was perhaps a little heartless and tinny. This was no accident. She preferred life that way, and so, for that matter, did the age.

Wishing some monument to himself, and not trusting his posterity, the Cardinal had decided to embellish the Cathedral. The work had now been going forward for several months, and the time of its dedication was at hand. What he had done was to break through a transept wall facing a likely piazza, and build there an immense baroque entrance. It was so contrived as to rivet the attention of anyone who chanced on the square,
and to tell the truth, virtually obliterated the church behind it.

For this dedication Sor Juana had written a diplomatic pageant. It was her
Fiori
di
Cuore,
a work much admired in its day for its intoxicating rhymes. An engraved volume was already prepared, fulsomely dedicated to the Cardinal, and by his dispensation she had left the convent to attend the
performance
.

She, the Cardinal, and other notables sat on a dais facing the immense drape of black baize which shrouded the door. She reigned there like a little sibyl. Her fame was great and few had seen her, even fewer had seen her with the Cardinal, rumour was unkind, and in this case inaccurate, about their
association
, and so the square was crowded. That pleased her. She suspected the Cardinal of little reading, and saw no reason why he should not see her merits acted out before him. She sat prim and amiable, but her black eyes darted about the sunlit outside world she these days seldom saw, and she relished all of it.