A Dancer in Darkness

by David Stacton

  She took to catching glimpses of him. She told herself these glimpses were accidental. Every morning at nine he crossed the yard towards the household offices. She could watch him from the loggia that faced the court. She did so for a week. It was the event of her mornings. He never looked up. He did not seem to know that he was being watched. His figure was so trim and jaunty. She would have wished it sad. When she received him formally, on business, it seemed to her that his eyes were sad. But perhaps his eyes were always sad. It was impossible for her to say.

  On Friday he crossed the yard as usual, and she watched as usual, standing in the shadow of a column. He was very small below her, and too far away. He disappeared into the doorway to the offices. With a sob of exasperation she turned back towards her rooms.

  Cariola was standing in the middle of the loggia. She said nothing, but she dropped her eyes, though not before the Duchess had seen the eager, gratified, faintly malicious look in them. She lost her temper.

  “Send for him,” she ordered.

  “For whom?” Cariola blandly folded her hands across her dress.

  “You know perfectly well for whom. Either that or you are a worse spy than I thought you were.”

  “I was not spying.” Cariola eyed her mistress anxiously. “I don’t like to see you this way.”

  “You love to see me this way. Bring him to me at once. At once.”

  “That would be unwise.”

  The Duchess did not care whether it was wise or not. If she was going to lose everything anyway, it did not matter greatly how she lost it. “Bring him to me tonight. Smuggle him in. I must see him.”

  Cariola stirred restively. “It would be most dangerous.”

  “I don’t care whether it is dangerous or not.”

  “And what about him? Do you want to see him dead?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Your brother has arrived. He is down in the harbour now.” Cariola looked around her. “It is not good to talk here. We might be overheard.”

  It was true. Ferdinand had come. He had come because he could not stay away. He had to see what she was doing. The Cardinal knew nothing of this visit. It was not to his interest that brother and sister should meet, for it was Ferdinand’s jealousy he planned to make use of, and jealousy flourishes on partings, not meetings.

  Ferdinand sent no message and did not appear. No doubt he was spying out the land, for he had never been to Amalfi before. Besides, Ferdinand was like a dog. If he had a master, then he whiffled on the trail, but if the master was away, he was apt to follow any scent that caught his fancy. He had that capacity to find ordinary people interesting that completely disqualifies some people for any career of their own. He approached tradesmen, dancers, fishermen, soldiers, even dwarfs, as a child approaches a grown-up, humbly, and with a desire to know how the thing was done. He seemed superstitiously to believe that the poor had a secret knowledge of their own.

  The Duchess waited for him until four, and then could stand the waiting no longer. She did not want Ferdinand to see Antonio, so she had had him sent on an errand to Salerno. But she had to know why Ferdinand had come. She decided to go in search of him herself.

  She found him still at the harbour, and approached him over the hard-packed, clammy beach, her skirts trailing after her. The light was low, the shadows long. The fishing boats were drawn up on shore, their painted prow eyes staring blandly out to sea, and the sand around them was corded with nets spread out to dry.

  Since the Popinjay the Amalfitani had accepted her. They fell back respectfully as she approached, and she found herself looking at Ferdinand with some eagerness. The Cardinal she was afraid of, for she did not understand him. Something saturnine in his character had always kept her at arm’s length. But when she was a child, Ferdinand had been like a big shaggy dog which once petted becomes the best of friends. It was only his monstrous need of her affection that frightened her and drove her away from him. If he had allowed her merely to like him, she would have liked him very much.

  He was smiling, but when he looked up and saw her, his smile instantly drained away into something more serious, and his eyes became suspicious, as they always did.

  She looked at him helplessly. She would have liked nothing better than to sit down in the sand with him and eat calamari with the fishermen, by the light of their flares. But he made such young and instinctive things impossible. Paranoia had cut him off from everyone. He could be friendly only in an empty room.

  No doubt he had come with the best of motives. She knew that much about him. He really did love her. He wished her well. But when he saw her, something happened to his friendliness. He clouded up. His voice became choked. He curled his fingers into his palm when he talked to her, even if what he said was a compliment. And sitting in shadow, with one finger to his cheek and his legs crossed below the knee, he would let his famished eyes glower out at her until everything she did was wrong. And why did he act so? She refused to know. It was something she felt she would be better off not to know.

  “You’re well liked here, sister,” he said, standing and brushing sand off his legs. He waved away the fishermen, took her arm, and turned towards the stairs leading up from the beach. “I hope you never give them cause to think otherwise of you.”

  That was the sort of thing he always said. He saw beauty only in a swift look round Eden, while the apple was being bitten. He came on stage always at the wrong time.

  “I shall not,” she said.

  “You are too pretty. They think you must have a lover.” He paused. “Have you been into the Cathedral?”

  The change of subject startled her. She must have showed it, for he laughed and said no more.

  But he was ill at ease, and that made her ill at ease. He was so eager to see her give herself away that she had an hysterical impulse to do so. Only the thought of the lover she did not, in truth, have, restrained her. She had need of restraint. Ferdinand’s conduct that evening was to say the least curious.

  He sat beside her like Minos, in a cartoon of the Last Judgment. It was indeed the age of Caravaggio, who turned the devil into a young man playing cards, died of malaria, and believed in everything but God. Ferdinand was a devil playing cards. It was not for some time that she realized what he was doing. He was memorizing the faces of her courtiers one by one, as though comparing them with some image in his own mind. Instinctively she knew what that image was. She was thinking of Antonio so intensely that he must be able to pluck that image from her mind.

  He was sullen, but he found a chance to speak to everyone, to the young ones most of all. And when he rose to retire, which he did early, she saw he had been tensing himself to ask her something.

  “That steward my brother got you, he is not here,” he said.

  “No, he is at Salerno.”

  Ferdinand dragged one foot on the floor and abruptly looked up at her. “Is he thin?” he asked.

  She blinked. Surely Ferdinand had met him at Rome. “He’s young,” she said blandly. “Most young men are thin.”

  Ferdinand grunted and then excused himself.

  She was sure it was not to sleep.

  And indeed as she lay awake that night she heard surreptitious noises along the corridor which were not the usual noises she listened for. It was the sound of Ferdinand pacing up and down the night. She dozed off, and woke up abruptly to realize that he was standing on the other side of her door, afraid to knock, and even more afraid to come in without knocking. He was not pleasant in these little ways. He snuffled like an abandoned dog. She waited, breathless, and the footsteps walked away.

  In the morning she rose early. She had once more to pose for her medallion. It was to be the last pose. Cariola brought her breakfast and the news that Ferdinand had packed up and was ready to leave. As she said this, she looked at her mistress significantly.

  It was very like him. He was going precisely because he wanted to stay; and he was in a temper precisely because he had found not
hing to be angry about. She wondered which member of her household had been got at and paid off, to send information on her movements back to Rome. She might never know.

  She arrived at the sitting half an hour late. She sat down on her field chair and wearily presented her profile to the light. The artist had been fetched from Naples, and was a dapper young man. She would have taken him for an apprentice, had he not seemed so professional. She held the pose until her neck began to ache, and could see no reason why a simple medallion should require so many sittings. Even while she tried to look benign, she felt worried. She hoped Ferdinand would leave without seeing her.

  Instead she saw him stride into the room. She did not break her pose, but squinted at him by swivelling her right eye, until the muscles ached.

  “Why do you make this pretence?” he demanded.

  She flinched. “What pretence? I told you a medal was to be struck.”

  “Do you mean to tell me you believe that?”

  “Of course I believe it. It’s true.” When he was like this he was uncontrollable.

  Ferdinand strode across the room and shook the painter like a rattle. “Who commissioned this?” he roared.

  “Stop that,” said the Duchess. “The citizens commissioned it.”

  “So then you do know,” he said. “Which one of them?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” she told him.

  “Don’t you?” He threw the painter aside, grabbed her hand, and hurried her from the room and through the courtyard into the streets. They went up the steps to the Cathedral, and turned left into the cloisters, and then into a room opening off them, which had been set up as a studio.

  In the centre of the room, on a large easel, stood an altar-piece. It was not yet finished. It glistened because it was still wet.

  “Have you no shame?” he demanded, “to set your filthy loves up even in the Church?”

  She had not been posing for a medallion after all. It was an Adoration of the Virgin, in the new style, painted in blinding light and deep shadow, and yet all pink and blue. The Virgin, her clothes fluttering in a spiral, floated in the air, her eyes cast up, her hair falling free, one hand to her breast, the other holding a drooping nosegay, and her elegant foot on an elegant crescent moon. Cherubs held back the clouds like vast silk canopies. She rose above a landscape of the Amalfi uplands, lightly brushed in. The Virgin was herself.

  Frankly bewildered, she turned to her brother. “I knew nothing of this,” she said.

  “Did you not?” He sounded ironic, but was watching her closely. She tried to make her face expressionless. “Then look again.”

  The foreground of the picture was a small field of meticulous flowers. On this coloured grass knelt a crowd of adorers, all men of the court. Only one figure was unfinished. It had been lightly sketched in, and the body already painted, but the head mercifully was still bare sizing covered with one or two charcoal lines. It was the most prominent and extravagant of the adorers. The figure knelt, with arms upraised.

  She knew every movement of that body, whose gestures were more personal even than the missing face. It was Antonio. And of course Ferdinand was right. It was not an altar-piece. It was an erotic ex voto. It was bold, audacious, and beautiful. But it was an act of courtship, not of faith or civic pride. It moved her deeply.

  Ferdinand took her silence for confession.

  “Who is he?” he demanded, poking a finger at the canvas. “Which in that court, is your paramour?”

  “I have told you, I have no paramour.”

  “And you pretend you had nothing to do with this shameless thing.”

  “Nothing.”

  Something in her tone must have stopped him. He peered at her, and then stamped out of the room. When she followed, he was waiting for her in the cloister.

  “Perhaps I misjudged you, sister,” he said. “But I give you warning. If paramour there is, I will find him out. And when I find him, he will not live very long or die very comfortably.”

  “You have no power over me.”

  “Do you think you rule here? We could snuff you out in an instant!” He paced up and down the cloister. “I will not have you with anyone,” he shouted at her. “With anyone, do you understand?”

  “You married me off to Piccolomini.”

  “That was different.”

  “How different? I had his child.”

  Ferdinand blinked his eyes. “I will not have you with any young man,” he told her. His voice was low and earnest now. “You are my sister. You will not disgrace me so.”

  “And you are my brother.”

  He flushed and made an impatient gesture. “Do not anger me,” he said. “It is not safe to anger me. Not even for you. Not for anyone.” He looked suddenly like a small child. But he was not a small child. He was a dangerous man. She had feared him for Antonio’s sake. Now she feared him for her own.

  “I shall know everything you do,” he said. “Everything. And have that abomination burnt, lest others know it too.” Suddenly tears appeared in his eyes, and he took her hand. “I am fond of you. It is wrong of you to disgrace me,” he said.

  Later, when she was sure he had gone, she went back to the studio and looked at the picture for a long time. The artist entered, and seemed disconcerted.

  “I want to sit here,” she said. “Do your work.”

  He seemed displeased, but after all he had no say in the matter. She sat in a chair in the corner, and watched him busy himself with his palette and his brushes.

  She sat there all morning, watching him, as rapidly Antonio’s face took form. It was not so much that the painter created it as that it lay latent, and he merely rubbed it up until it gleamed.

  The face added nothing to the body. It was not a cunning or an intelligent face. But it was a face radiant with feeling, curiously dumb, but with those intimate yet distant eyes. It was those eyes that decided her. For his own sake she must give Antonio up.

  But the picture should not be burnt. She should not have it destroyed, for it was the only love letter she had ever received. Instead she would have it concealed, in the sacristy, where it would not be seen. Ferdinand would never go there. His brother the Cardinal had left him with a horror of the washrooms and council chambers of the Church.

  But she felt suddenly tired. How could the mere attitude of a painted body say so much?

  VIII

  Antonio returned from Salerno late that night. She sent Cariola to fetch him at once. The court was asleep and it seemed better to see him before Ferdinand’s spy should be on guard.

  Cariola would bring him up the servants’ stair that wound through the masonry. The inconvenience of this was that he would enter her room directly. And she did not know how she could face him directly. Now that they were to meet, she wanted buffers and barriers between them. And Cariola was no barrier. Cariola would only urge them on.

  The stairs were steep. Servants were not supposed to dawdle, so the risers were ten inches high. This old palace was a rabbit warren of circuitous ways. She heard a noise. A door in the wall opened and Cariola stepped out, followed by Antonio.

  His appearance shocked her. She had somehow expected him to look different, but he looked exactly as he always did. That made her feel that it was she who had changed.

  She told Cariola to wait in the next room.

  The moment was awkward. The Duchess found she half wanted him to rush forward and fling himself at her feet, cover her with kisses, and talk her out of what she was about to do. It would have been heaven to give in to him. But he did none of these things. The moment when he could properly do them passed, and both watched it pass. There were times, she thought, when rank was not altogether an advantage: otherwise he might have flown to her at once.

  He seemed to quiver there before her, as though tethered to self-restraint, yet longing to tug free. His lips were moist. His face was beautiful. He had come to her eagerly. Yet except for that first glance in them, his eyes had already
given up. Perhaps it was because he had never been in these rooms before. She watched his eyes dart round at everything that belonged to her.

  He was still dressed for the road. He stood there awkwardly, yet even in awkwardness his movements had an overpowering grace. Could he find nothing to say to her? Was she such a formidable creature in his world that he dared approach her only in hidden places, such as the tomb-house? Or was he frightened of consequences?

  The more they did not speak, the more they managed to say to each other things she was in no position to say, and that he had no right to. It was safer to tie down the interview with words. The silence between them was treacherously comfortable. It could not be allowed.

  Perhaps her imagination was too vivid. She could not see him as he saw himself. Instead she saw him as Ferdinand would have liked to see him, hanged, torn apart, or disembowelled, his face slashed to pieces, and his testicles hanging in a tree. Such thoughts are not merely frightening, but erotic, too.

  “My brother has been here,” she said. “He saw the painting in the church.”

  “Oh,” said Antonio. It was not the reaction she would have wished. He in his turn seemed to become dry and ironical. Let one doubt impinge upon a Latin’s certainty, and he will throw the thing away. He turns to ice. She did not want to hurt him. She only wanted to drive him away, whether for his good or hers she no longer knew. But if he turned to ice, then hurt him she must. She could get at him no other way.

  “It was scarcely judicious,” she said, and hated herself for the tone of her own voice. Yet some imp made her sound cruel.

  “Did you show it to him?” he asked, after a moment.

  “Of course I didn’t show it to him. He showed it to me.” This piece of wounded vanity upset her even more. “After all, you would have hung it up for all the world to see. I did not think you would brag of so small a conquest.”

  He did not quite understand what she was talking about. He was a little hurt. And that hurt was what broke down his prudence. He felt himself rushing forward, and then he had her in his arms. The distance that keeps people apart is as thick-skinned as the surface tension of water, but once break through, and down we dive. He gave himself up to sensation. And he had been right. It had been the right thing to do. He could feel her yield. He could feel himself sinking into her. He forgot his pride and caution.