“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
When 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.”
“All the same,” replied the friar in his mildest, friendliest manner, “it was writing that saved me, Giacomo. Cast your mind back. We wrote each other such letters, we might have been lovers. Long, ardent letters they were, and Lorenzo the warder, was our go-between. We made our acquaintance through those letters, told each other everything, both past and present. If I were incapable of writing I would never have started a correspondence with you, nor would I ever have escaped. You despise me and look down on me. I know you would happily kill me. You are not being fair. I know as well as you do that writing is very important, a great source of power.”
“Power?” his fellow fugitive repeated, and surveyed the friar haughtily from under suspicious, half-closed eyelids, his head thrown right back. “It’s far greater than that. It is not a matter of ‘sources,’ Balbi, but power itself. Writing is the one and only power. You are right, it is writing that freed you. I really hadn’t thought of that. The scriptures, the sacred writings, are right when they tell us that even fools are not without grace. Writing is the greatest power there is: the written word is greater than king or pope, greater than the doge. We are living proofs of that. It was in writing that we plotted our escape, letters formed the teeth that cut through our chains, letters were the ladder and the rope on which we let ourselves down, it was letters that led us back from hell to earth. Some say,” he continued, “that letters can lead us from earth up to heaven too. But I don’t believe in their power to do that.”
“What then do you believe in?” asked the friar conversationally.
“In fate,” he answered without hesitation, “in the fate we create for ourselves and thenceforth accept. I believe in life, in the multifariousness of things that eventually, miraculously, chime in harmony, in the various fragments that finally combine to make one man, one life. I believe in love and in the wheel of fortune. And I believe in writing, because the power of writing is greater than that of fate or time. The things we do, the things we desire, the things we love, the things we say, all pass away. Women pass, affairs pass. Time’s dust settles over all we have done, over everything that once excited us. But words remain. I tell you, I am a writer,” he declared with delight and satisfaction, as if he had just discovered the fact.
He ran his fingers through his uncombed hair and threw back his head like a great musician about to raise the violin to his chin and assault the strings with his bow. It was a pose he had learned to strike in his youth when he played the instrument in a band in Venice. Agitated, he paced in a somewhat peculiar limping manner across the room, then added quietly, “Sometimes it surprises even me.”
“What surprises you?” asked Balbi like a curious child.
“I am surprised to find that I am a writer,” he replied without thinking. “I cannot help it, Balbi, there is nothing I can do about it, so I beg you to keep the secret to yourself since I don’t like the idea of bragging and complaining in the same breath. I am telling this to you alone, because I have absolutely no respect for you. There are many ways of writing. Some people sit in a room and do nothing but write. They are the happy ones. Their lives are sad because they are lonely, because they gaze at women the way dogs gaze at the moon, and they complain bitterly to the world, singing their woes, telling us how much suffering they undergo on account of the sun, the stars, autumn and death. They are the saddest of men but the happiest of writers because their lives are dedicated to words alone: they breakfast on proper nouns and go to sleep with a well-fleshed adjective in their arms. They smile in a faintly wounded manner when they dream. And when they wake in the morning they raise their eyes to heaven because they are under a permanent spell and live in some cockeyed rapture, believing that by grunting and stuttering their way through all those adjectives and proper nouns they will continue to succeed in articulating that which God himself has succeeded in articulating once and once only. Yes, the happy writers are those who walk about looking sad, and women deal gently with them, taking considerable care of them as they might of their simpleminded nearest and dearest, as if they were the writers’ more fortunate, wiser sisters, obliged to comfort them and prepare them for death. I wouldn’t want to be a writer who does nothing but write,” he declared a little contemptuously. “Then there are writers who run you through with their pens as they would with a sword or dagger, writing in blood, spattering the page with bile, the kind of writers you find in the study with tasseled nightcaps on their heads, berating kings and parasites, traitors and usurers, writers who enter the service of ideas or of human causes as either volunteers or mercenaries. . . . I’ve known some of them. I once spent some time in the company of that scarecrow, Voltaire. Don’t interrupt me, you’ve never even heard of him. He had no teeth left but that did not stop him biting: kings and queens sought to earn his approval, and this toothless wretch with a single quill between his gouty knotted fingers could hold the world to account with it. Do you understand? . . . I do. Writing, for these people, was a means of changing the world, but the writers who exercised power on the basis of their strength and intellect were unhappy, both as men and writers, because they lacked silence and reverence. They could plunge daggers through constitutions and stab a king through the heart with a single sharp word but they were incapable of articulating life’s deepest secret, which is the miraculous sense of being here at all, the delight of knowing that we are not alone but are cared for by the stars, by women and by our demons, not to mention the happy realization of the extraordinary fact that we must die. Those to whom the pen is just a sword or dagger can never articulate such things, however much power they wield on earth. . . . Such people may influence thrones, human institutions, and individual destinies, but they can do little to suspend our sense of time. .
. . And then there are writers like myself. They are the rarest kind,” he declared with satisfaction.
“Absolutely,” Balbi agreed in awe. “And why are they the rarest, my lord and master?”
His deep, rasping voice bore the impress of prison, alcohol, and disease, as well as wayside hovels and the beds of kitchen maids. Now it was a mixture of curiosity and wariness. He sat with his mouth wide open, still twiddling his thumbs, as if he had blundered into a theater where the actors were performing in some language he only imperfectly understood.
“Because what they write is what they have to lose, which is the text of their own lives,” Giacomo’s voice was rising. “Do you understand me, you pot-bellied flat-footed fool, you hero of hovel and brothel, do you understand? I am that rare creature, a writer with a life to write about! You asked me how much I have written? . . . Not much, I admit. A few verses . . . a few essays on the magical arts. . . . But none of these was the real thing. I have been envoy, priest, soldier, fiddler, and doctor of civil and canonical law, thanks be to Bettina, who introduced me to knowledge of the physical world when I was fourteen, and thanks, too, to her older brother, Doctor Gozzi, who was my neighbor in Padua, who knew nothing of what Bettina had taught me but introduced me to the world of the fine arts. But that’s not the point, it’s not the writing, it’s what I have done that matters. It is me, my life, that is the important thing. The point, you fool, is that being is much more difficult than doing. Gozzi denies this. Gozzi says only bad writers want to live and good writers find that writing is enough. But I refute Gozzi because there is only one great struggle in life and that is between powerful, justified assertion on the one hand and powerful, justified denial on the other. However Gozzi may dismiss me as a writer now, my being, my life, is the important thing. I want to live. I cannot write until I know the world. And I am only beginning to know it,” he said, more quietly, almost in awe. “I am forty. I have hardly begun to live. I can’t get enough of life. I have not seen as many dawns as I would wish, there are too many human feelings and sensations that I do not know, I have not yet finished laughing at the arrogance of bureaucrats, dignitaries, and all manner of respectable persons; I have not succeeded as often as I’d like in stuffing the words of fat priests down their throats, I mean those fat priests who count their indulgences in pennies. I have not yet laughed myself sick at human folly; have not rolled into enough ditches in uncontrolled amusement at the world’s vanity, ambition, lust, and greed; have still not woken in the arms of a sufficient number of women to know anything worth knowing about them, to have learned some truth that is more substantial than the sad, vulgar truth of what they hide beneath their skirts, which excites the imagination only of poets and adolescents. . . . I have not lived enough, Balbi,” he repeated stubbornly, with a genuine tremor in his voice. “I don’t want to leave anything out, you see! I am not ambitious for worldly acclaim, I am not ambitious for wealth, for a happy domestic life: there’ll be time enough later for strolling about in slippers, for inspecting my vineyard and for hearing the birds singing, for carrying a volume of De consolatione philosophiae by the pagan Boethius under my arm, or indeed one of the books of the sage Horace, who teaches that a just man is always accompanied by two heavenly sisters, Knowledge and Pity. . . . I don’t want to give myself over to pity now. I want to live so that, eventually, I might write. This comes at a great cost. Understand this, my unlucky companion, my fellow in the galleys, understand that I must see everything: I must see the rooms where people sleep, I must hear their whimpers as they enter old age when they can only buy a woman’s favors with gold, I must get to know mothers and younger sisters, lovers and spouses who always have something true and encouraging to say about life. I must at least get to shake their hands. I am the kind of writer who needs to live. Gozzi says only bad writers want to live. But Gozzi is not a man, Gozzi is just a timid indolent bookworm who will never write anything of permanent value.”
Casanova in Bolzano Page 5
