—I have never managed, in the wildest dreams of my spirit, to reach this height. You rise above all my idealities, you shine above all the splendors of my thoughts, you illuminate me with a light that is almost unbearable . . .
She was standing erect in front of the balustrades, with her hands resting on the stone, her head raised, paler than on that memorable morning when she was walking beneath the flowers. Tears filled her half-closed eyes and glinted between her lashes; and from below lowered lids, she saw the sky before her turn rose-pink through the veil of her weeping.
There was a rainfall of roses in the sky, as when on October evenings the sun sank behind the Rovigliano hill, lighting up the ponds throughout the pine forest in Vicomìle. “Everywhere, roses roses roses drifted down, slowly, densely, delicately, like snowfall at dawn.” Villa Medici, eternally green and bare of flowers, caught the countless soft petals, fallen from celestial gardens, on the peaks of its rigid arboreal walls.
She turned to go down. Andrea followed her. They walked in silence toward the stairs; they observed the woods that extended between the terrace and the belvedere. It seemed as if the brightness stopped at the edge, where the two custodial herms rise up, and could not pierce the darkness; it seemed that those trees stretched their branches into a different atmosphere or into dark water, below the sea, like oceanic vegetation.
She was possessed by sudden fear; she hurried toward the stairs, went down five or six steps; stopped, lost, quivering, hearing the beating of her arteries in the silence expanding like an enormous din. The villa had vanished; the damp gray staircase was narrowly enclosed between two walls, invaded here and there by weeds, dismal as that of a subterranean prison. She saw Andrea bend toward her, with a sudden gesture, to kiss her on the mouth.
—No, no, Andrea . . . No!
He held out his hands to restrain her, to force her.
—No!
Lost, she took his hand and drew it to her lips; she kissed it two, three times, lost. Then she began to run down the stairs, toward the door, as if demented.
—Maria! Maria! Stop!
They met face-to-face in front of the closed door, pale, panting, shaken by a terrible tremor, looking at each other’s altered eyes with the roaring of their blood in their ears, believing they would suffocate. And at the same time, with unanimous impulse, they drew close together and kissed.
She said, fearing that she would faint, leaning against the door with a gesture of supreme supplication:
—No more . . . I am dying.
They remained for a minute facing each other without touching. It seemed that all the silence of the villa weighed upon them in that narrow place surrounded by high walls, like an uncovered tomb. One could distinctly hear the low and fitful cawing of the crows that were gathering on the roofs of the building or traversing the sky. Again, a strange sense of fear occupied the woman’s heart. She glanced upward in alarm, to the summit of the walls. With effort, she said:
—We can go out now . . . You can open the door.
And her hand encountered Andrea’s on the banister, in the urgency of her haste.
As she passed the two granite columns beneath the jasmine, bare of flowers, Andrea said:
—Look! The jasmine is flowering.
She did not turn, but smiled; and her smile was very sad, full of the shadows that were cast over her soul by the sudden reappearance of the name written on the belvedere. And while she walked down the mysterious avenue feeling all her blood altered by the kiss, an implacable anguish engraved that name, that name, upon her heart!
FOURTH BOOK
CHAPTER I
The Marquis of Mount Edgcumbe, opening the great secret armoire, the arcane library, was saying to Sperelli:
—You should design the clasps for me. The volume is in quarto,1 dated by Lampsaque2 the same as Les Aphrodites by Nerciat: 1734.3 These engravings seem very fine to me. You judge for yourself.
He handed Sperelli the rare book. It was titled GERVETII—De Concubitu—libri tres,4 decorated with erotic vignettes.
—This image is very significant, he added, pointing to one of the vignettes, which depicted an indescribable coupling of bodies. —It’s something new that I did not know about. None of my erotic writers makes any mention of it . . .
He continued to talk, discussing several details, following the lines of the drawing with that whitish finger sprinkled with hairs on the first phalanx and ending in a pointed, shiny, slightly bluish nail, like the nail of quadrumanous animals. His words penetrated into Andrea’s ear with an atrocious stridency.
—This Dutch edition by Petronius is magnificent. And this is the Erotopaegnion printed in Paris in 1798. Do you know the poem attributed to John Wilkes, “An Essay on Woman”? Here is a 1763 edition.
The collection was exceptionally rich. It included all the Pantagruelic and rococo literature of France: the Priapeia, the scatological fantasies, the Monacologies, the burlesque elegies, the catechisms, the idylls, the novels, the poems from the Pipe cassée by Vadé to the Dangerous Liaisons, from the Arétin by Augustin Carrache to the Tourterelles de Zelmis; from the Descouverture du style impudique to the Faublas. It included everything that was most refined and most ignoble produced by the human mind over the centuries in exposition of the ancient sacred hymn to the god of Lampsacus:5 Salve, sancte pater.6
The collector took the books from the rows in the armoire and showed them to his young friend, talking continuously. His obscene hands caressingly touched the obscene books bound in leather and precious fabrics. He smiled insidiously, constantly. And a flash of madness passed through his gray eyes, beneath his enormous convex forehead.
—I also possess the first edition of Martial’s Epigrams, the Venetian one, made by Vindelino di Spira in folio. Here it is. And here is Beau, the translator of Martial, the commentator of the famous three hundred and eighty-two obscenities. What do you think of these bindings? The clasps are by a master hand. This composition of priapi is done with great style.
Sperelli listened and looked, with a kind of shock that little by little changed to horror and pain. At every moment his eyes were drawn to a portrait of Elena that hung on the red damask on the wall.
—It is the portrait of Elena painted by Sir Frederick Leighton. But look here, everything Sade wrote! Le roman philosophique, La philosophie dans le boudoir, Les crimes de l’amour, Les malheurs de la vertu . . . You, surely, do not know this edition. It was made especially for me by Hérissey, with eighteenth-century Elzivirian characters, on paper made by the imperial manufacturers in Japan, in only one hundred and twenty-five exemplars. The divine marquis deserved this glory. The frontispieces, the titles, the initials, all the decorations bring together all the most exquisite things we know of erotic iconography! Look at the clasps!
The bindings of the volumes were admirable. Sharkskin leather, rough and rugged like the kind that encases the hilt of Japanese sabers, covered the front, back, and spine; the clasps and studs were of a bronze very rich in silver, very elegantly engraved, recalling the most beautiful ironwork of the sixteenth century.
—The author, Francis Redgrave, died in a madhouse. He was a young genius. I own all his studies. I’ll show them to you.
The collector was becoming excited. He left the room to fetch the album of drawings by Francis Redgrave in the adjacent room. He walked with an unsteady, skipping gait, like a man who has the beginnings of paralysis or an incipient spinal disease; his torso remained rigid, not coordinated with the movement of his legs, like the torso of an automaton.
Andrea Sperelli watched him as he walked to the doorway, disquieted. Left alone, he was gripped by a terrible sense of anxiety. The room, papered in dark red damask, like the room in which Elena had given herself to him two years earlier, now seemed to him tragic and dismal. Maybe those were the same hangings that had heard Elena’s words: “I like it!” The open armoire display
ed the rows of obscene books, their outlandish bindings engraved with phallic symbols. On the wall hung the portrait of Lady Heathfield, alongside a copy of Joshua Reynolds’s Nelly O’Brien. Both of these creatures gazed out from the depths of the canvas with the same penetrating intensity, the same ardor of passion, the same flame of sensual desire, the same prodigious eloquence; both had an ambiguous, enigmatic, sibylline mouth, the mouth of indefatigable, inexorable drinkers of souls; and both had a marble, immaculate forehead shining with perpetual purity.
—Poor Redgrave! said Lord Heathfield, returning with the case of drawings in his hands. —Without a doubt, he was a genius. No erotic fantasy surpasses his. Look! . . . Look! . . . What style! No artist, I think, in the study of human physiognomy, has come close to the depth and acuteness Redgrave achieved in his study of the phallus. Look!
He walked away for a moment to go and close the door again. Then he returned to the table near the window; and began to leaf through the collection, with Sperelli looking on, talking constantly, indicating with his apelike nail, sharpened like a weapon, the details of every figure.
He was speaking in his own language,7 starting every sentence with a questioning tone and ending each one in the same tiresome cadence. Certain words lacerated Andrea’s ears like the harsh sound of iron being scraped, like the screeching of a steel blade against a crystal plate.
And the drawings of the late Francis Redgrave passed before him.
They were frightening: they seemed to be the dream of an undertaker tortured by satyriasis; they unfolded like a terrifying macabre and priapic dance; they represented a hundred variations of one single motif, a hundred episodes of one single drama. And there were two dramatis personae: a priapus and a skeleton, a phallus and a rictus.8
—This is the best page, exclaimed the Marquis of Mount Edgcumbe, pointing to the last drawing, upon which at that moment a pale gleam of sunlight fell, slanting through the windows.
It was, in fact, a composition of extraordinary imaginative power: female skeletons dancing, in a night sky, guided by a flagellating Death. Over the wanton face of the moon drifted a black, monstrous cloud, drawn with vigor and skill worthy of the pencil of Hokusai; the pose of the dark dancer, the expression of her skull with the empty eye sockets, were imprinted with an admirable vitality, with a breathing reality never achieved by any other artist in the representation of Death; and that entire grotesque Sicinnide dance9 of dislocated skeletons in scanty skirts, threatened by the whip, revealed the fearsome fever that had gripped the hand of the artist, the fearsome madness that had gripped his brain.
—This is the book that inspired Francis Redgrave to create this masterpiece. A great book! . . . the rarest among the rare . . . Do you not know Daniel Maclisius?
Lord Heathfield held out to Sperelli the treatise De verberatione amatoria.10 He became more and more aroused, reflecting on cruel pleasures. His bald temples reddened and the veins of his forehead swelled and his mouth wrinkled constantly, slightly convulsively. And his hands, those hateful hands, gesticulated with brief but excited gestures, while his elbows remained rigid, of a paralytic rigidity. The unclean, ugly, ferocious beast within him appeared, all veils stripped away. In Sperelli’s imagination11 all the horrors of English profligacy arose: the acts of the Black Army12 on the pavements of London; the implacable hunt for the “green virgins”; the brothels of the West End and of Halfousn Street; the elegant houses of Anna Rosemberg13 and of the Jefferies woman;14 the secret hermetically sealed rooms, padded from floor to ceiling, which muffle the sharp cries of the victims being tortured . . .
—Mumps! Mumps! Are you alone?
It was Elena’s voice. She was knocking softly on one of the doors.
—Mumps!
Andrea jumped: all his blood veiled his eyes, inflamed his forehead, roared in his ears, as if a sudden dizziness was about to come over him. An insurgency of brutality unsettled him; an obscene vision swept through his mind, lit by a flash of lightning; a criminal thought passed darkly through his brain; a bloodthirsty craving roused him for a moment. Amid the upheaval provoked in him by those books, those drawings, the words of that man, the same instinctive impulse was rising up again from the blind depths of his being, that he had already felt that day on the racecourse, after the victory over Rùtolo, amid the pungent exhalations of his steaming horse. The phantom of a crime of passion tempted him and dissipated, rapidly, in a flash of lightning: to kill that man, take that woman with violence, thus satisfying the terrible carnal covetousness, and then to kill himself.
—I’m not alone, said the husband, without opening the door. —In a few minutes I will be able to bring Count Sperelli, who is here with me, into the salon to you.
He replaced Daniel Maclisius’s treatise in the armoire; closed the case of drawings by Francis Redgrave and carried it into the adjacent room.
Andrea would have paid any price to extract himself from the torment that was awaiting him, and he was drawn to that torment at the same time. Once more, his gaze went up to the red wall, toward the dark painting where Elena’s bloodless face shone, with her eyes that followed one, and her sibylline mouth. An acute and constant fascination emanated from that imperious immobility. That unique pallor dominated the red dusk of the room in a somber way. And he felt, again, that his wretched passion was incurable.
A desperate anguish assailed him. Would he therefore never again be able to possess that flesh? Was she therefore determined not to surrender to him? And would he eternally harbor within him the flame of unfulfilled desire? The arousal provoked in him by Lord Heathfield’s books intensified his suffering, stirred up the fever. There was, in his mind, a confused tumult of erotic images: Elena’s naked body joined the vile groups in the vignettes engraved by Coiny, took up poses of pleasure he had already seen during their erstwhile affair, twisted itself into new positions and offered itself up to the bestial lasciviousness of her husband. Horror! Horror!
—Would you like to go into the salon? the husband asked, reappearing in the doorway, fully composed and tranquil. —Are you going to design those clasps for me, then, for my Gervetius?
Andrea answered:
—I will try.
He could not repress his inner tremor. In the salon, Elena looked at him curiously, with an irritating smile.
—What were you both doing there? she asked, still smiling in the same way.
—Your husband was showing me memorabilia.
—Ah!
Her mouth was sardonic and she had a certain derisive air and evident mockery in her voice. She made herself comfortable on a wide couch covered with an amaranth Bukhara rug, on which pale cushions languished, embroidered with dull gold palms. She lounged in a relaxed position, looking at Andrea from beneath her enticing lashes, with those eyes that seemed to be suffused with the purest and finest oil. And she began to talk about mundane things, but with a voice that penetrated right into the young man’s deepest veins, like an invisible fire.
Two or three times Andrea caught a burning look from Lord Heathfield fixed on his wife: a look that seemed charged with all the impurities and infamies he had previously stirred up. Elena laughed at almost every sentence, a mocking laugh, with strange ease, undisturbed by the desire of those two men who together had become aroused at the figures in the obscene books. Once more, the criminal thought passed through Andrea’s mind, in a flash of lightning. All his fibers trembled.
When Lord Heathfield got up and left the room, Andrea burst out in a hoarse voice, grabbing Elena’s wrist, coming so close to her as to graze her with his vehement breath:
—I’m losing my mind . . . I am going insane . . . I need you, Elena . . . I want you . . .
She freed her wrist with a haughty gesture. Then she said, with terrible coldness:
—I will have my husband give you twenty francs. Once you leave here, you may go and satisfy your cravings.
Sp
erelli leaped to his feet, livid.
Reentering the room, Lord Heathfield asked:
—Are you already leaving? Whatever’s wrong with you?
And he smiled at his young friend, because he knew the effects of his books.
Sperelli bowed. Elena held out her hand to him without losing composure. The marquis accompanied him to the door, saying to him softly:
—I urge you not to forget my Gervetius.
Once he reached the portico, Andrea saw a carriage approaching on the avenue. A man with a great blond beard looked out of the window, waving. It was Galeazzo Secìnaro.
Instantly, the memory of the May Fair returned to mind, with the episode of Galeazzo paying for Elena Muti to dry her beautiful fingers, dipped in champagne, on his beard. He walked faster and stepped out onto the street: his senses were numbed and confused as if a deafening noise were issuing from deep inside his brain.
It was a warm and humid afternoon toward the end of April. The sun appeared and disappeared between fleecy, idle clouds. The sluggishness of the sirocco held Rome in its grip.
On the sidewalk of Via Sistina, he glimpsed ahead of him a lady walking slowly toward the Trinità. He recognized Donna Maria Ferres. He looked at his watch: it was, in fact, around five; just a few minutes before their habitual meeting time. Maria was going, certainly, to Palazzo Zuccari. He speeded up to reach her. When he was near her, he called her by name:
—Maria!
She gave a start.
—What are you doing here? I was coming up to you. It’s five o’clock.
—There’s still a few minutes to go. I was running so that I could await you. Forgive me.
—What’s wrong? You’re very pale, all agitated . . . Where have you been?
She frowned, staring at him through her veil.
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