Casanova in Bolzano (6 page)

Being in the arms of a strange man was both a new and yet a painfully, joyously, and frighteningly familiar situation. It is, after all, a most desirable thing for a person to be embraced by another. Teresa vaguely recalled her mother—a woman as freckled as a turkey’s egg and as short and round as a Tuscany barrel—and how she once had held her in her arms like this. Yes, this new situation was familiar, as familiar as life to a newborn baby; there was nothing particularly difficult or clever to do, no need to argue: one had only to accept and to allow events to carry one along, to resign oneself, to let the two bodies discover their own equilibrium as they engaged under the pressure of his arms but according to attractions and powers beyond such pressure. And it was right, it was absolutely in order, that this man, unknown to Teresa until yesterday, who talked a great deal, waved his dagger about, and had emerged from bed that morning with down in his tousled hair, a man who slept with his legs spread and with a furious twisted expression on his face, should now have his arms locked about Teresa, and that she should only have to make a slight adjustment in the position of her head so that it rested more comfortably, to leave her mouth softly and gently open and to close her eyes, and otherwise do nothing at all, for her to feel that everything was as it should be, as was right and proper. So much she understood. And now that she knew and understood everything she smiled, her eyes still closed, and her breathing became lighter and faster.

They stood before the window in the fierce, cold light. The man had his back to the window and was watching the girl’s powerfully lit face: he watched the woman in his arms as he moved in a peculiarly encouraging and threatening manner that suggested both rescue and assault, the movements precise and appropriate to the moment. He too found the situation reassuringly familiar. He was no longer afraid that lonely, empty months of damp and solitude had led him to lose his voice. He was aware that every word, every movement of his, found favor with the audience. He looked at the girl contentedly, being in no hurry, having plenty of time to spare. The face, that heart-shaped face, whose every feature, every subtle shade of color, was amplified by the strong light, was simply the face of a woman, that was all—which did not mean that he was lying when he said he would recognize it among a thousand women’s faces, even under a mask. One woman’s face was as a hundred women’s faces, faces he had bent over in similar situations with just such tender and solemn solicitude, as if each were a puzzle he had to solve, an arcane script, a word written in signs taken from the cabala or some other realm of magic, each a word that added some meaning to life. He watched the face patiently, solemnly. Because these signs on a woman’s face, the slightly upturned, delicately freckled nose, the mouth which was raw like the cut flesh of a plump fruit, the golden down above the upper lip, and the chin, that childish little chin set among curves, the brilliant fine-drawn line of the closed eyes, the ample blonde swell of the eyelashes, and, next to the nose and the mouth, the two harsh lines that life had left as its legacy of fear and suspicion and which now, touched by light and by a strange pair of arms, seemed to soften and melt; all this was the rune, the secret script whose meaning he had to decipher. The two faces—the serious male face, gazing, and the girl’s face with its closed eyes, its relaxation, its faint smile, and air of expectation—swam next to each other like two planets tied together by an unbreakable law of attraction.

“Why hurry?” thought the man. And so did she.

What was this? Was it love? . . . He was pretty sure that it was not. But now that he leaned over the girl’s face and felt the warm breath of her young mouth on his skin, now that the attraction, which was gradual and irresistible, forced him to move closer to her lips, advancing very slowly, with an almost religious reverence, his whole body bending, like a fugitive dying of thirst and worshipping at the fount of water he leans over, he did consider the question. “Could this be the One? . . .” But he already knew that she wasn’t, or, more precisely, that she was only one among many others who were also not the One, or, even more precisely, that she, too, was the One. He would have recognized the girl among a thousand other female faces—his powers of recollection worked with a remarkable, almost supernatural power when it came to remembering women’s faces, employing precisely the same instincts as a beast of prey does when he picks up traces and scents in the jungle—but he also knew that this relationship would be as inconclusive as the rest, for no relationship was ever conclusive: whatever the power of the mysterious, dumb, yet harshly insistent voice emanating from certain women, the signal never said anything more than, “Here I am: we have something in common that we could explore, you and I.” There was never any other signal but this. He always heard the voice and heeded the call, like an animal in the jungle. His ears would prick up, his eyes begin to shine and he would straighten his back. And so he would set off in the direction of the sound, following the scent, sniffing, listening, constantly on the alert, his instincts always reliable. This was the way they called to him, the young, the beautiful, the ragged, the mature, and the aging, serving maids and princesses, nuns and traveling actresses, seamstresses and serving girls, women who could be paid in gold and more discriminating women who lived in palazzos (who also, eventually, had to be paid, and more plentifully, in gold). So it had been with the baker’s widow, with the canny daughter of the Jewish horse trader, with M.M. the French ambassador’s favorite, with C.C. the ruined child bride in the convent, and with the dirty, lecherous creature who only recently had been swept away to be deposited in his harem at Versailles by His Most Christian Highness Louis of the Bourbons. So it had also been with the young wife of the French captain, with the lady mayoress of Cologne, and with the princess d’Urfé who was as old as the hills and so skinny that a man was likely to prick his finger on one of her bones when embracing her. . . . Each time he heard the voice and at every call he set out, never once lacking the feral excitement of sniffing the air or failing to experience the erotic trembling and the thrill of concentration when the mysterious question once again presented itself. “Could this be the One? . . .” But no sooner did he face the question than he knew that it wasn’t, that not one of them was. And so he moved on.

And everywhere there were inns, and theaters with nightly performances, and every day miraculously produced someone, something, provided one wasn’t afraid. No, I have never been afraid, he reflected with satisfaction, and drew the girl’s unresisting body still closer to him. “But it would be good if this were finally she, the One I have been looking for,” he thought. “It would be good to rest. It would be good to know that there was no more need for quick thinking and elaborate strategies, that someday the plot might be reduced to something perfectly simple, that one might live one’s life with a woman who loved one back, and so desire nothing more. It would be very good,” he ruefully thought. But it was as if the plot had become fatally confused at some point and had now to be straightened out, as if somewhere, at some time in the past, the fragile image of truth that he was seeking had been shattered and was lying in pieces at his feet. And now he had to bend down and recover each and every fragment of it. This girl, for example, had lovely ears, pink and childlike, a fine pair of ears with a most delicate shell-like curve, a lovely interplay between bone, cartilage, and the lobe’s faintly comical, simple fleshiness: yes, her ears were a practically edible delight. What should he whisper into such ears? Should he say, “You are wonderful, unique. . . .”? He had said it so often before. But it was as if he were afraid of losing his touch, and so, more for the sake of practice, for memory’s sake, he leaned toward the girl’s ear and with his hot breath whispered into it: “You are wonderful, unique.”

Fine and delightful as the ear was, it blushed to hear the words. Indeed, the girl blushed along her whole face. For the first time she felt embarrassed. There was something impudent, aggressive, almost improper in the words, as there is in every lie told at important moments. But there was something familiar and encouraging in them too, something reminiscent of certain patriotic songs, the kind of songs that people had been singing for centuries, in the shadow of public monuments and other sacred places. “Unique,” he had said, and the girl blushed as if she had heard something deliciously risqué. She blushed because she sensed the lie, and then the man fell silent again, flushed by success and a little amazed at the inevitability of it all, knowing it could not be otherwise, that there was no greater lie to be told. And both of them felt that this lie was in some way a secret truth. So they kept silent, the pair of them, somewhat disoriented. They sensed that, in its own mysterious way, “unique” was, like all eternal verities, a truth, that is to say as much a truth as when someone pronounces the words “Motherland!” or “So it must be!” and begins dutifully to weep. And however vulgar and shameless the sentiment may be, such a person feels that the grand mendacious cliché is, in some deep way, as true as his patriotism or sense of destiny, or indeed the words “You are wonderful, unique.” And so, because they could not think of anything else to say to each other, they set to kissing.

The two mouths engaged, and, almost immediately, some force started them rocking to and fro. This rocking had an incidental soothing effect, as when an adult takes a child into his arms, the evening drawing on and the child having exhausted itself and grown melancholy with running about. And the adult says something like, “That’s enough play, you are tired, little one; go and rest awhile. Don’t do anything, just close your eyes and rest. How hot you are! You are really flushed! And how your heart beats! . . . Once you’ve calmed down, a little later in the evening, I’ll give you a nice piece of Neapolitan wafer.” And then the girl, somewhat capriciously, even haughtily, will sometimes pull her lips away like a child protesting, “But I don’t like Neapolitan wafers!” They kissed again. The rocking, that sad strange rocking, gradually drew them into the element of the kiss which was exactly like the sea, the rocking of which signifies relaxation and danger, adventure and fate. And like people who, in their dizziness, slip from the shores of reality and are amazed to observe that it is possible to survive and move in a new element, even in the alien element of fate, and that perhaps it is not really so awful to drift away from the shore with such slow rocking motions, they began to lose all contact with reality and slowly to advance, without intention, without any specific desire, toward annihilation, occasionally, between kisses, glancing dreamily round, as if raising their heads from the foam before falling back into the dangerous, joy-bringing, indifferent, rocking element, to think, “Perhaps it is not so awful being annihilated! Perhaps it is the best life can offer, this rocking and forgetting, the point at which we lose our memories and everything grows vague, familiar, and misty.” The arms they had opened with such gestures of begging and inviting, gripped and held each other’s heads.

And so they would have continued had not Balbi stepped in at that moment. He hesitated by the door and in a fearful voice said: “Giacomo, don’t do it!”

Slowly they drew away from each other, loosened their hold, and glanced about them in confusion and curiosity. Now that he had let go of the girl, the man noticed that he was still gripping the dagger in his hand, in the left hand with which he had embraced the girl’s waist.

A Writer

W
hen 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.”