Stone Virgin (18 page)

He reached for the handbell and gave a prolonged summons. While he waited his thoughts returned with fretful obsessiveness to that room in Boccadoro’s house, the two of them there by the window. Already his triumph had been eaten away by a return of nightmare doubts.
She
it was who had made the first move,
she
who had contrived the meeting,
she
who had directed and controlled the course of the conversation. All his theatre talk had only been floundering, improvising – he was the one who belonged in the
commedia
.

With mechanical curses he rang the bell again. Why was it only then that he had begun to be conscious of desire for her? A month in the house and he had not thought of her particularly in that way. Desire had followed his will: that was why his memories of her had this painful tension. Until he had possessed her there could be no room for tenderness, he had been too afraid of failing.

‘You will not hear the trumpets,’ he said, when Battistella finally appeared. ‘You will come crawling late on the Day of Judgement.’

Battistella stood surveying him, breathing noisily. He was still in his pink coat, despite the warmth of the day, and his wig was as usual askew.

‘What is for luncheon?’ Ziani asked.

‘There is a good rice pudding.’

‘Rice pudding, rice pudding,’ Ziani said, with customary pleasurable sharpness. ‘And how is it made, this rice pudding?’

‘It is made with honey.’ Knowing how it pleased his master to protract these conversations, Battistella never revealed all the details at once.

‘And?’

‘It is cooked in milk of almonds.’

‘I am thinking seriously of raising your wages,’ Ziani said. ‘You may as well know that. And you may keep that coat, you may have it. This morning I have been describing my first tête-à-tête with Donna Francesca. I have managed it well, that colloquy, extremely well. Consummately. I have brought it home to the reader. The way I engaged her sympathies was brilliant. I have been wondering whence the initial agitation came, and it occurs to me now that she was aware of my loaded cannon right from the very commencement, she felt the danger. I was mesmeric to women in those days.’

Ziani reached for his snuffbox. ‘It was a burden in some ways,’ he said. ‘One had to –’

‘No, sir,’ Battistella said suddenly. ‘It did not lie there.’

Ziani’s hand jumped and he spilt his snuff. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, staring.

‘Begging your pardon, sir, she had no one to turn to but her maid. They sold her to him, her brothers did. Theirs were the debts and she had to pay. It is not only pagans and saracens and blackamoors. They would have shut her away or killed her, that family is well known.’

Evidently under the impression that he had made himself clear, Battistella began his snail-like withdrawal.

‘Where is all this tending?’ Ziani said. ‘Who told you that, anyway?’

‘Maria and I sometimes talked.’

‘Did you so?’ Ziani said uneasily. ‘You are a sly dog, Battistella. You did more than talk or I’m a Chinaman. But what is behind all this rambling, what point are you seeking to make?’

‘She was looking to find a friend,’ Battistella said loudly and wheezingly from the door. ‘Nothing to do with mesmeric, nothing to do with cannon.’

On this he immediately disappeared. Ziani sat for a considerable time, staring before him. He was deeply offended by this brusque rejection of his theory. I must stop discussing these
Mémoires
with him, he thought. He has no sensitivity whatever, and always gets hold of the wrong idea. But who else was there? He had only Battistella. She had no one to turn to but her maid … Could it be true that she had come to him in need, and her first hostility was to cover that? That she might have been unhappy in that way had somehow never occurred to him. But the mask of youth could cover that as well as other things. So while I was laying my groundworks, my mind set on victory, master strategist Ziani, she was merely suffering, and trying to keep that fact concealed? Of course she complained, but only conventional complaints …

He tried to shake off these disagreeable thoughts and recover his feeling of triumph, but this would not return. He had a sense of something incomplete in his memory. They had stood together in the window glancing from time to time out across the garden. The lout Bobbino kicking at the gravel. Sunlight on the boxwood hedges, the narrow leaves of the acacia, the apricot trees espaliered against the wall. She turned her back on spying Bobbino and I moved round a little so as still to look her in the face … that was it: this change of position gave a view of the statue, half-hidden as she was by foliage, with the first roses of the year climbing round her. The outbuildings of the abandoned church rose behind her, looking from that angle like a distant background in a painting. Even though she was half masked by shadow and leaves her pose was striking, the face raised with that provocative alertness, the guarding hand held out. That faint smile of hers not visible from there. Seen thus among the leaves she was like our first mother. He had known nothing at all then about the man who made her.

This conversation with Battistella unsettled Ziani for the rest of the day, as if he were the dupe of time and memory. Besides, he was beginning to feel dissatisfied with the pace of his narrative. It seemed to be dragging somewhat. Perhaps he was spending too much time on the description of preliminaries. He was impatient to get Francesca’s clothes off, reveal her beauties, describe the tunes they had played together. His cold heart was stirred by the memory of these exploits; he crept to reach them, stalking them as it were through the thickets of his prose.

However, something held him back. In part he was handicapped by egotism. To sell the
Mémoires
, and retrieve his fortunes, he was depending in equal measure on the scandalous and the erotic. At the same time he wanted to be noted as stylist, as man of the world. He imagined the reader exclaiming aloud at the justice of his observations. Elements such as these are not easily combined. So far he felt he had managed things well: in Venice and elsewhere public figures and the scions of noble houses had been exposed and discredited, one revealed as a card-sharp, another as pimp to his numerous female relatives, a third voyeur of his own wife and two footmen with her knowledge but not theirs; to mention only a few. This chapter, these episodes of Francesca and old Boccadoro and the Madonna, he had envisaged as one of the highlights. But some quality of reluctance had crept in, he knew not how. Dues of recognition had to be paid, slowing him down.

When he resumed it was with the determination to get to his conquest with the least possible delay:

In the days that followed we met quite frequently in different places about the house; and whenever we met we stopped to talk. These meetings had always an air of accident about them, but it has been my experience that at certain junctures of human affairs accident is aided by design. Certainly it is true that we met more often in those few days than during my whole stay before.

We talked of indifferent things and took care not to laugh together much. We were never really alone. For one thing, Maria was always in attendance. She kept at a distance and busied herself usually with some task of stitching; all the same, those eyes and ears of hers missed nothing. But it was Bobbino that was the real constraint upon us. Wherever we looked we seemed to see him, lounging idly, doing nothing in particular. If we walked in the garden he would be there, not far away. If we sent him about his business he would be back before long, on some pretext or other. When we were behind closed doors he knew it and for how long. Thus we were obliged to speak gravely, for that was what Boccadoro would expect; and Francesca had to keep Maria by her for that same reason.

But there is a language which lies within and around what is spoken; and this developed rapidly between us precisely because of these constraints I have mentioned. In pauses, and in inflexions of the voice, we talked to each other, with eyes on eyes, with hands that did not touch. Thus the supervision aided me, fretting Francesca, making us accomplices. I owed much to the lout Bobbino.

Boccadoro himself, for ten days following, spoke no more to me about the matter, either by hint or direct question. I think now, and must have supposed then, that Francesca was deliberately keeping him waiting for her ‘verdict’. This allowed meetings in the meantime while she was supposedly making up her mind, confirmed him too in his laughable belief that there would be dislike to overcome on her part before the Ziani message of duty and morality could be brought home to her. These were the tactics of her cunning, not prompted by me. Nevertheless, I was the instigating force …

So it was that during this period the Casa Boccadoro resembled the physical universe, in which, as the Englishman Newton has shown, all bodies are bound together by a principle of mutual attraction or repulsion, either inclining to cohere in regular figures, or inclining to recede. All of us were held in balance: myself, Francesca, Boccadoro, Bobbino – even my Battistella, to whom I had complained of that animal’s intrusiveness and who sought to distract and deflect him. (Battistella was an astute fellow in those days, now addled, poor soul.)

This celestial state was shattered when Boccadoro announced his intention of leaving for Verona, where he had business to attend to. He would be away for one night, he said. Bobbino was left behind of course, to spy. All the same, I don’t think Boccadoro had any suspicions; he was not a man to review judgements once formed; and this explains his fury later, when he discovered us.

He left early in the morning, but it was not until mid-afternoon that Francesca and I met. She kept to her own quarters till then, perhaps to mark the vulgarity of haste. For one so young she had a great sense of occasion.

Ziani paused, sighing. He had not known then what monstrously memorable forms her sense of occasion could take. That same night he was to discover it …

He had made up his mind to take her to the theatre, this being the first thing in which they had found a mutual interest. However he had spent his wages and had no money besides, or very little. He had borrowed two liras from Battistella, who could always, by means Ziani did not inquire into, feeling they verged on the miraculous, produce a little money, but it had still not been enough. He had hung around Florian’s for an hour or so before lunch in the hope of making a touch – there was only Florian’s then, Quadri had not yet opened on the other side of the Piazza. But it was awkward, after he had been away so long – awkward, on being recognized, to start asking for a loan. Bad policy, too. He had given it up almost and was walking on the Broglio, feeling dispirited, when by great good fortune he had met Pietro Gradenigo who had been a fellow student and who at once agreed to lend the eight liras he needed. Enough, with what he had already, for a box at the San Samuele, also wine and biscuits. However, after all this, with the well-known perversity of women, she had asked to be taken to a gaming-house … Should I mention my poverty, he wondered, my ploys to obtain money? No, it is incompatible with conquest. He took some snuff, wiped his eyes, resumed writing:

She wanted to go to the Ridotto, where she had never been in her life before. She wanted to do something she had never done before, she said, and she could not keep the pleasure from shining in her eyes. This was an occasion to do something
for the very first time
.

But what about Bobbino? We looked at each other for a moment. Then I asked if she could trust Maria. Yes, she said, she had complete faith in Maria’s discretion. And I in Battistella’s, I said, he is the most faithful creature alive. So let us take them into our confidence, let us appeal to them for help, let us throw ourselves upon their mercy.

And this is what we did, and at once, summoning them to us, holding a council of war. Neither was well disposed towards Bobbino: Maria because – and this I understood only from nods and compressions of the lips and salvoes of glances – he did not keep his dirty hands to himself; and Battistella – but this I knew already – because Bobbino was a bully and jealous of his position in the household. Jointly they begged us to have no further inquietude: they would take care of booby Bobbino.

We were set on the adventure anyway; less assurance would have been sufficient; but I felt relieved to have Battistella’s support. In many difficult situations, before that time and since, I have benefited from his resourcefulness and sagacity. (He is less reliable now, through age, poor soul. His mind inclines to stray.)

We left by the street door, quite soon after dinner, while Bobbino was in the pantry still. We were masked, of course. Therefore once on the street anonymous, completely free from recognition and detection. Venice, alone perhaps of cities, confers this freedom on her children, because of the universal custom of masking, which in the middle years of the century was more widespread even than now, masks being commonly worn in public places whether it was Carnival or not and by people of all degrees. With this custom comes that other one of sexual debauchery, the casual trafficking for which our city has long been famous, even more than Rome, that
città delle donne
. The anonymity conferred by masks has been a potent force in our history, adding to the excitement of intrigue as it grants immunity from the consequences, emboldening the prick while it renders the cunt more yielding. I was sensible of boldness myself in that region, not to say effrontery. For her state I couldn’t answer, but I hoped. She was elated and inclined to laughter.

The masks we wore were full face, of that close-fitting kind, oddly like death masks as it always seemed to me, white in colour; and with them we wore the
bauta
, which had become very fashionable, more ample in those days than now, covering the head and shoulders. In these, and our loose-fitting clothes, we were well disguised.