Pleasure (37 page)

—
Oui ! Le papillon s'est envolé . . . Oui ! . . . Ah! ah! ah! ah! ah! . . .

Andrea looked at his watch.

—It's already two o'clock! Forgive me, Marquis. I must go.

And approaching the group:

—Forgive me, Princess. At two I have a consultation at the stables with the veterinarians.

He greeted everyone in great haste. Elena gave him the tips of her fingers to press. Barbarella gave him a
fondant,
saying to him:

—Take this to poor Miching from me.

Ludovico wanted to accompany him.

—No, stay.

He bowed and went out. He ran down the stairs in an instant. He jumped into his carriage, shouting to the coachman:

—Fast, to the Pincio!

He was possessed by a mad desire to find Maria Ferres, to recover the happiness that he had earlier renounced. The rapid trot of the horses did not seem fast enough to him. He watched with anxiety, waiting to see the Trinità de' Monti finally appear, the wide tree-lined street, the gates.

The carriage passed through the gates. He ordered the coachman to slow down and to traverse all the avenues. His heart jumped each time he saw, from afar, amid the trees, the figure of a woman; but in vain. On the level he got out of the carriage and walked up the small roads that were closed to vehicles, exploring every corner: in vain. People watched him from benches, curiously, because his anxiety was evident.

As Villa Borghese was open, the Pincio was reposing in tranquillity beneath that languid February smile. Few coaches and few pedestrians interrupted the peace of the hill. The still-bare trees, whitish, some slightly violet, held their arms up to a delicate sky, scattered with fine spiderwebs that the wind was tearing and destroying with its gusts. The pine trees, the cypresses, the tall evergreen trees took on some of the common pallor, became indistinct, faded, fused in common accord. The diversity of tree trunks and the tracery of the branches lent greater solemnity to the uniformity of the herms.

Was there not something of Donna Maria's sadness still floating in that air? Leaning against the gate of Villa Medici, Andrea felt an enormous weight bear down on him for some minutes.

And the succession of events continued, in the coming days, with the same tortures, with worse tortures, with crueler lies. By some phenomenon not uncommon in the moral degradation of men of intellect, he now had a terrible lucidity of conscience, a continuous lucidity, without any more clouding, without any more eclipses. He knew what he was doing, and judged later whatever he had done. His contempt for himself was equal to the lassitude of his will.

But precisely these disparities of his, and his uncertainties and his strange silences and his strange effusions and, in short, all his peculiarities of expression, which brought about such a state of mind, increased and incited Donna Maria's passionate mercifulness. She saw him suffer and felt pain and tenderness because of it; and thought:
Little by little, I will heal him.
And little by little, without being aware of it, she was gradually losing her strength and submitting to the desire of the sick man.

She submitted gently.

In Countess Starnina's salon, she felt an indefinable shiver when she felt Andrea's gaze on her bare shoulders and arms. For the first time, Andrea was seeing her in an evening gown. He knew only her face and her hands: now her shoulders seemed to him of an exquisite form; her arms, too, albeit perhaps somewhat thin.

She was dressed in ivory-colored brocade mixed with sable. A narrow strip of sable ran along her neckline, lending an indescribable refinement to her skin; and the line that led from the base of her neck to the edge of her shoulder slanted downward somewhat, with that sloping grace that is a sign of physical aristocracy that by now has become extremely rare. On her abundant hair, arranged in that style that Verrocchio favored for his busts, there glittered neither a gem nor a flower.

In two or three opportune moments, Andrea murmured words of admiration and passion to her.

—It is the first time that we are seeing each other “in society,” he said to her. —Will you give me a glove, as a memento?

—No.

—Why, Maria?

—No, no; be quiet.

—Oh, your hands! Do you remember when I drew them at Schifanoja? It seems that they belong to me by right; it seems that you should concede ownership of them to me, and that of your entire body, they are the things that are most intimately inspired by your soul, the most spiritualized, almost I could say the purest . . . Hands of goodness, hands of forgiveness . . . How happy I would be to own at least one glove: a shadow, a semblance of their form, a slough scented with their scent! . . . Will you give me a glove, before you leave?

She did not answer again. Their conversation was interrupted. After some time, since people were begging her to do so, she sat down at the piano; she took off her gloves and placed them on the music stand. Her fingers, out of those delicate sheaths, appeared extremely white, rather long, bejeweled. On her left ring finger a large opal sparkled with fiery brilliance.

She played Beethoven's two
Fantasia
sonatas
(Op. 27).
²⁰
The one, dedicated to Giulietta Guicciardi,
²¹
expressed a hopeless renunciation and narrated the reawakening after a dream dreamed for too long. The other, right from the first beats of the andante, in a gentle and soft rhythm, suggested the calm after the storm; then, passing through the restlessness of the second movement, it expanded into an adagio of luminous serenity and finished with an allegro vivace that contained an elevation of courage and almost passion.

Andrea felt that, in the midst of that engrossed audience, she was playing for him alone. Now and then, his eyes went from the pianist's fingers to the long gloves that hung from the stand, preserving the shape of those fingers, preserving an inexpressible grace in the small opening at the wrist where earlier, a little of her feminine skin just barely showed.

Donna Maria stood up, surrounded by praise. She did not pick up her gloves, and walked away. Andrea was overcome by the temptation to steal them.—Had she perhaps left them there for him?—But he wanted only one. As a refined lover refinedly said, a pair of gloves is entirely different from one single glove.

Led once more to the piano by the insistence of Countess Starnina, Donna Maria took the gloves from the music stand and placed them at one end of the keyboard, in the shadow of the corner. She then played Luigi Rameau's gavotte, the
Gavotte of the Yellow Ladies,
the unforgettable ancient dance of Tedium and Love. “Certain blond ladies, no longer young . . .”

Andrea gazed at her fixedly, with a little trepidation. When she stood up, she took only one glove. She left the other one in the shadow, on the keyboard, for him.

Three days later, with Rome lying stupefied under the snow, Andrea found this note at home: “
Tuesday, two p.m.
—This evening, from eleven to midnight, wait for me in a carriage in front of Palazzo Barberini, outside the gate. If I haven't yet arrived by midnight, you may go. —
A stranger
.” The note had an adventurous, mysterious tone. In truth, the Marchioness of Mount Edgcumbe overly abused the use of carriages in her amorous carryings-on. Was it perhaps as a memory of March 25, 1885? Did she perhaps want to recommence the affair in the same way with which she had interrupted it? And why that
stranger
? Andrea smiled at this. He was just then returning from a visit to Donna Maria, a very pleasant visit; and his spirit was inclining more toward the Sienese woman than toward the other one. He could still hear the vague and gentle words she had spoken while at the window watching the snow fall softly, like peach or apple blossoms, on the trees of Villa Aldobrandini, which had been deluded by the presage of spring. But, before leaving for lunch, he gave very precise orders to Stephen.

At eleven he was in front of the building; and was being devoured by anxiety and impatience. The oddness of the situation, the spectacle of the snowy night, the mystery, the uncertainty, all fired his imagination and lifted him up from reality.

A fabulous full moon, casting a light such as had never been seen before, shone on Rome that memorable February night. The air seemed to be impregnated by an ethereal milk; all things appeared to exist in a dream life, seemed to be impalpable images like those of a meteor, seemed to be visible from far away due to a chimeric illumination of their forms. Snow covered all the bars of the gates, hiding the iron, composing an embroidered work of art that was lighter and more delicate than filigree, borne by the white-mantled colossi the way oak trees bear spiderwebs. The frozen garden was flowering like an immobile forest of enormous, deformed lilies; it was a kitchen garden possessed by a lunar enchantment, a lifeless paradise presided over by Selene. Mute, solemn, profound, the Barberini house occupied the air: all its structural relief was accentuated, snow-white, casting a blue shadow as diaphanous as light; and that whiteness and those shadows superimposed onto the true architecture of the building the phantom of a prodigious Ariostean architecture.
²²

Leaning down and observing the scene, the waiting man felt that beneath the charm of that miracle, the longed-for ghosts of love were rising up again, and the lyrical summits of sentiment once again sparkled like the icy lances of the gates in the moonlight. But he did not know which of the two women he would have preferred in that fantastic scene: whether Elena Heathfield dressed in purple or Maria Ferres dressed in ermine. And as his mind took pleasure in lingering in the uncertainty of preference, it occurred that in the anxiety of the wait, two anxieties mixed and mingled together strangely; the real one for Elena, and the imaginary one for Maria.

A clock tolled nearby in the silence, with a clear and vibrating sound; and it seemed as if something made of glass in the air cracked with every toll. The clock of Trinità de' Monti replied to the call, as did that of the Quirinale; other clocks far away responded, faintly. It was a quarter past eleven.

Andrea looked toward the portico, watching carefully. Would she dare to walk across the garden? He thought about Elena's figure amid the great whiteness. The figure of the Sienese woman rose up spontaneously, obscured the other one, and outdid the whiteness:
candida super nivem.
²³
The night of moon and snow was hence under the dominion of Maria Ferres, as under an invincible astral influence. From the sovereign purity of things arose the image of the pure lover, symbolically. The force of the Symbol subjugated the poet's spirit.

Then, still watching to see if the other one was coming, he abandoned himself to the dream suggested to him by the appearance of things.

It was a poetic, almost mystical dream. He was waiting for Maria. Maria had chosen that night of supernatural whiteness in order to immolate her own whiteness to his desire. All the white things around him, conscious of the great immolation, were waiting to say
Hail
and
Amen
to the passage of the sister. The silence endured.

“Here, she's coming:
incedit per lilia et super nivem
.
²⁴
She is enveloped in ermine; she is wearing her hair bound and hidden in a band; her step is lighter than her shadow; the moon and the snow are less pale than she.
Hail.

“A shadow, cerulean like the light that colors a sapphire, accompanies her. The enormous, deformed lilies do not bow down, because the frost has petrified them, because the frost has made them similar to the asphodels that illuminated the pathways of Hades. However, like those of the Christian paradise, they have a voice; they say:
Amen.

“So be it. The beloved goes to sacrifice herself. So be it. She is already near the waiting man; cold and mute, but with ardent and eloquent eyes. And first he kisses her hands, those dear hands that seal wounds and uncover dreams. So be it.

“Here and there, the churches vanish, from their places high up atop columns whose gables the snow illustrates with whorls and magic acanthi. The deep fora disappear, buried beneath the snow, immersed in an azure brightness, from which the ruins of the porticoes and arches rise up toward the moon, more incorporeal than their own shadows. The fountains disperse, sculpted in crystal rock, spilling not water but light.

“And then he kisses the lips, the dear lips that do not know false words. So be it. Her hair streams out of the loosened band, like a great dark wave, in which all the nocturnal shadows seem to be gathered, fleeing from the snow and the moon.
Comis suis obumbrabit tibi et sub comis peccabit.
²⁵
Amen
.”

The other was not coming! Into the silence and the poetry the hours of men interceded once again, struck by the towers and belfries of Rome. A few carriages, making no noise, descended via the Four Fountains toward the square or ascended with difficulty to Santa Maria Maggiore; and their headlamps were yellow like topazes in the clarity. It seemed as if this clarity was growing and becoming more limpid, as night reached its highest point. The filigrees formed by the gates sparkled as if the silver embroidery were being adorned with gems. In the building, great circles of dazzling light shone at the windows, resembling diamond shields.

Andrea thought:
What if she does not come?

That strange wave of lyricism that had passed through his spirit in the name of Maria had masked the anxiety of his wait, had assuaged his impatience and stilled his desire. For a moment, the thought that she was not coming appealed to him. Then, once more, the torment of uncertainty pierced him more strongly and he was disturbed by the image of pleasure that he would perhaps have enjoyed within that small warm alcove, where the roses exhaled such a soft scent. And as on New Year's Eve, his suffering was sharpened by vanity; since, after all, he regretted that such an exquisite setting for love should go wasted without being put to any use.