Stone Virgin (15 page)

It was in the garden that he first spoke to me about his situation, the banality of which naturally he did not see, as our misfortunes seem always to be uniquely ordained. At the moment he approached I was standing at the entrance to the arbour, looking at the statue; and it can therefore be truly said that this comedy begins and ends with her. I was wondering what she was intended to represent.

The garden was large for Venice, running a good way behind the house, ending in a high wall with a gate set in it; beyond this there were the precincts of an abandoned church. On one side of the garden, back towards the wall, were the ruins of a stone arcade, three arches still standing; and it was within the last of these, the one farthest from the house, that the stone lady dwelt. At some time the former owners had planted roses here, white on one side, red on the other, and they grew up the shafts of the columns to the height of the arch, where they met and mingled colours very prettily; and a grape vine which looked old enough to be a cutting from Eden, lacing with the ruins of the masonry, formed rafters with its thick stems and a roof with its leaves, to make a bower for her. There was a wooden bench inside, where one could shelter from suns that were too burning. She was made of white stone but in the light of the vine leaves she had a faint hue of green and as always she was smiling, a slight smile difficult to interpret. At that time we had no idea what she was.

Then Boccadoro came shambling towards me. He spent some time in preliminaries, glancing at me with his fierce little eyes. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘you are young, but you have a good head on your shoulders. I have often noted it. I am speaking to you because you are more nearly of an age with my wife, though of course there is some difference of years, the more so because of this fact, which, as I say, I have noted. Do you not think so?’

‘What fact is that?’ I said – he had lost me. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘to be sure, this very fact of this excellent head that you have on your shoulders. And then, you have attended one of our very best Universities … I have a deal of acquaintance, a great deal, but there are not many who are close to me, not many that I can call friend.’

I did not see cause for astonishment in this, after his lifetime of usury. Now I tried to combine in one regard modest acknowledgement of this praise and respectful interest in what was to follow, with what success I do not know – but in any case nothing did follow, nothing more came from him; he began to stare about the garden; caution – or pride – had intervened.

It was now that I took the first of many gambles in this affair. It was that species of gamble called a
bluff
by the practitioners of
spigolo
, the attempt to make your opponent think you are stronger than you are, the penalty for failing being full exposure of your weakness. ‘My dear sir,’ I said, ‘I understand what you are referring to. Believe me, you have my sympathy.’

His face lost all expression for some moments through undiluted wonder at my words. I have often noted that when men are in distressful situations or situations of perplexity, however common these may be, however patent to view, yet will the smallest insights into them on the part of others seem wondrously perceptive to the one afflicted. So much is this the case that often, as now, the mere pretence of such an insight will suffice to unlock a man’s tongue. ‘What,’ he said, ‘you have sensed it then?’ ‘How could I not?’ I said. ‘How could I not?’ ‘She wants an increased allowance,’ he said. ‘She wants to rent an apartment of her own, a
casino
. She tells me she feels foolish among her friends through not having one.’

‘This fashion for
casini
is the curse of the age,’ I said. ‘It has been the ruin of many families, as I know for a fact.’ This was it then: having bought the merchandise he was now complaining at the price. But there was more. Encouraged by my nods, he came out with it. It seemed that the ordering of his house was not enough for Donna Francesca. She neglected to supervise the servants. She did not appear when he had guests.

I thought of the lady as I had seen her first, on the day of my arrival in the house. I had stood waiting in the interior courtyard, where there was a circular well-head, decorated with lions’ heads round the rim. Their manes had been carved to resemble foliage and I was admiring the inventiveness of the carver when I heard the rustle of her clothes and looked up and saw her above me, descending the staircase in a pale-blue gown high at the collar and low-cut in front, in the fashion of those days, with the shining coils of her hair dressed high on her head, the gaze of a well-bred Venetian girl, equable, intrepid, without undue boldness however; and a figure whose shape and suppleness the stiff brocade could not conceal. I had not expected her to be so well-favoured – perhaps because beauty of any kind in conjunction with Boccadoro was not a thought easily entertained. I had seen her before, in the street with her brothers once, when I still lived in Venice; but she had been no more than a schoolgirl then. She was more now, certainly.

These thoughts were in my mind as I looked at Boccadoro. It was all I could do to control my face. He was proposing to make this high-mettled creature, luxurious and wilful as all our Venetian ladies are, into an adjunct of the parlour, a devotee of the spinet, to soothe his unlovely brow when he returned from the counting-house, and serve grenadines to his grotesque cronies as they sprawled grossly, wigless and unbuttoned, after dinner! Truly those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad … Then it occurred to me: why did he not go to them, to these same farting cronies, for advice? The way to deal with an unruly wife, that would be within their scope and range. Why did he come to me?

‘It is the chief affliction of the age,’ I said, ‘and one to which our women are unfortunately all too prone, to think of pleasure as something to be sought outside the home rather than in it. This constitutes a reversal of all traditional values.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Exactly so. You are a very Cato. Or perhaps Cicero is the one I mean.’

I replied that I would not scorn comparison with either of these
signori
. A kind of excited suspicion was beginning to stir in me.

‘Maria, her maid, grows insolent,’ he said, ‘and Donna Francesca refuses to check her.’

‘Refuses?’ I allowed myself a tone of gentle wonder. ‘
Refuses?
’

That I stressed this word was no more than a fortunate accident. I had meant only to keep my ascendancy over him. He bridled and reddened and I thought I had gone too far; but then I saw how his eyes avoided mine: here was not anger, here was shame. Stronger, more definite came the scent of his misfortune, rising to my jubilant nostrils like a savoury steam. Where women are concerned there is only one refusal that matters. What if Francesca’s went further than the drawing room – higher, I should say – a flight of stairs higher?

As I hope will have been apparent to the reader before this, I am a sensitive man, and an observant man and a man of acute perceptions; and now, as I talked to him, suspicion became conviction almost at once. This was why he had come to me. From colleagues he would fear derision – an old man with a young wife; but he was paying me for my services; and to Boccadoro’s primitive sense, that restored the balance.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the pleasure this notion afforded me. I am willing to recognize that it was not, to speak strictly, Boccadoro’s fault that I had been reduced to taking wages. We were products both of changing times. Half the great houses of Venice were owned by men like him, who had come from nothing. Nevertheless, by employing me he had demeaned me, imposed a slight on me, fixed me in an odious relationship. All this demanded redress. Hitherto, until this morning, I had found this in my deliberate insincerities. In all our conversations I was fencing with him, scoring off him all the time. However, it was less than satisfactory. He did not know it, for one thing; and then, a duel cannot be carried on by feints alone. Now, if I was right, not only had he exposed his vitals but also given me the means of delivering the thrust.

‘Why should you have this to contend with?’ I said. ‘A man does his work. He expects to find peace at home. They do not understand this.’

‘Everything is difficult,’ he said. ‘Everything requires argument. It is tiring and moreover it interferes with business.’

‘It is this endless quest for pleasure I have referred to, which undermines all our institutions. It is the ruin of the state. What is happening to all our fine and great traditions?’

‘What indeed?’ he said. ‘They are going to perdition.’

‘And it is the women who lead the way,’ I said. ‘We take our tone from them. They are the keepers of our morals, that is a well-known fact.’

‘By God, yes,’ he said with feeling. (If my nose told me rightly, his were being kept pretty well.)

‘That is the paradox of it,’ I said. ‘They are the keepers of our morals, but they must still be guided by us. Guided not coerced, as we are not barbarians.’

‘By God, no,’ he said.

‘True pleasure, for women,’ I said, ‘lies in the performance of their wifely duties, omitting no smallest thing that can add to their husbands’ comfort and pleasure. That is the secret of it.’

Boccadoro was so delighted by this that he rubbed his skullcap back and forth over his head causing some of his scant grey hair to stick out from under it. He was a man of violent and impulsive gesture. ‘My dear fellow,’ he said. ‘I only wish she could hear you now.’ He paused and I saw an idea born on his face – his eyes were reddish-brown, deep-set and normally quick-glancing, but they became fierce and staring when any calculation was involved. ‘But she could,’ he said. ‘She could hear you.’

His considerations were clear to me though I did not at first believe he would closet us together. I was near Francesca’s age, as he had begun by saying; and he was wondering if I might sway her, bring her somehow to a sense of duty – including the duty of the bedchamber. I, Sigismondo Ziani, the moral voice of my generation, advocate of the conjugal couch! There was something so innocently hopeful in his staring shrewdness that almost my heart warmed to him – almost.

‘There is one obstacle only,’ he said.

‘And what is that?’

‘My poor friend,’ he said, ‘she hates you.’

Ziani laid down his pen and reached with mottled paw across the table for the brass handbell which, as essential to his survival, was one of his few possessions left unpawned. He held it at arm’s length and rang it in sustained and querulous fashion, knowing however, from experience so ancient even the rancour had gone from it, that Battistella would certainly not come at the first summons and quite possibly not at the second.

While he waited he grew pensive. Reflected light from the slopping canal moved in leisurely ripples, over the walls of the apartment, the tented shapes, the faded baize of his table, his curled fingers, the stained satin of his robe – he spilt his food often these days, through tremulousness and the haste of his appetite. Reflections of light, sounds from the canal and
riva
below, these were the accompaniments to his days; with his view over the water, they were all that linked him to the world outside. He had not been out of the apartment for more than three years now. Poverty, misanthropy, growing infirmity, kept him immured.
There is one obstacle only
, his mind repeated, with self-delighting lucidity.
And what is that?
With sardonic interior laughter that moved no fraction of his face he dwelt on the complacency of Boccadoro’s reply.
My poor friend, she hates you
.

He was commencing, with habitual imprecations, to ring for a third time when Battistella appeared and moved slowly towards him with his shuffling gait.

‘Old fool,’ Ziani said, though his servant was a year younger than himself, ‘you are getting very deaf. When my
Mémoires
are published I shall buy a bigger bell. What ridiculous thing are you wearing?’

Battistella made no reply to this but stood surveying his master, mouth slightly open, breathing audibly. He was a spindly old man with inflamed eyes, very steady and direct. The short wig, which he hastily donned from old habit whenever he heard the bell, was rakishly askew on his brow. He was wearing a pink coat with silver embroidery in the fashion of thirty years before, very much too large for him, with sleeves rolled back and enormous ragged pockets so low as to be almost out of reach – he would have had to adopt a crouching posture to get into them. Below the flaps of the skirt his thin legs in their wrinkled hose seemed too frail, the patched shoes too narrow, to bear the pink and silver bulk above.

Ziani peered closely. ‘I know that coat,’ he said. He felt a movement of rage. ‘You have been at my wardrobe again,’ he said. He at once regretted saying this, as it gave Battistella the chance, which he immediately took, to list his grievances, a thing he enjoyed doing: the dampness of the house, the lack of any proper heating, his bad chest, his wages two years in arrears … Battistella’s face, throughout this wheezing catalogue, remained quite impassive. ‘Provide me with livery,’ he ended by saying – an old gibe, this – ‘and I will wear it, not only with pleasure, but with pride.’

Ziani felt the eyes of his servant upon him. There was no denying that Battistella had scored a point. He assumed an air of languid superiority. ‘I am in the midst of composition,’ he said. ‘I have no time for trivial matters. I am relating the Boccadoro business. You remember that, I suppose?’