Leporello on the Lam

by William Stafford

  He pursed his lips into a sort of facial shrug, accepting my point.

  Gingerly, I pushed the door open. We peered inside. There was the long table, still dominating the room. The velvet drapes still hung where they did, fading and dusty now, adorned with cobwebs. Too big a job for Zerlina to take them down and clean them, I supposed. It looked like Martello was not as house proud as he ought to be. Candelabras stood barren, like trees in winter. The fireplace was empty – it would need filling before the new master’s return.

  The new master thought it would be funny to push me over the threshold and shout “Boo!” - I suppose he was covering up his real feelings of dread. Although officially dead, he could still apparently be afraid. I took a step inside, then another and another. Before long I was standing on the very spot, the very place where the floor had cracked and spread apart, where the flames had risen up and my master had sunk down and down, with one final blood-curdling scream.

  I stooped and ran my hand across the surface. It was smooth and unblemished. If I hadn’t seen it for myself, I would never believe it. Its spotlessness must have increased Martello’s bravado in dining in this room. It must help him to dismiss the story of the dissolute previous occupant who was swallowed up and sucked down to Hell.

  I straightened and my eyes met my master’s. He was evidently thinking along similar lines, reliving that night as I was. After several moments of silence, he cleared his throat, moved by the return to the scene. “Let us get the bastard out of my house,” he said, his voice thick with emotion.

  I nodded. I would have hugged him if I could.

  ***

  There was much to do. Not least of it all was writing Martello’s confession – the crimes I knew about were enough to have him swing; no doubt there were countless others. He would sign it, I had every confidence, if things turned out the way I reckoned.

  Then there was Zerlina. She had to be schooled in what to say when Martello returned. This proved to be more difficult than I had envisaged and I was worried that by rehearsing her too much, she would not convince with her brief but necessary performance. Don Giovanni made mockery of her, behind her back, whenever she forgot what she was supposed to say or went off at a tangent or said completely the wrong thing to give the game away.

  ”A nice arse, though,” he added as though this compensated for her verbal shortcomings.

  I left the preparation of the dining room itself until last of all. I didn’t want to spend more time in there than was absolutely necessary. Zerlina seemed to think I perhaps was in fear of my late master’s ghost and that explained my reluctance to go in. Don Giovanni and I shared much bitter laughter over that one.

  After two exhausting days, all was in readiness. It became a matter of waiting for the guest of honour to arrive and this proved the most wearing part of the whole process, with everyone’s nerves tightly wound, in case he showed up early, or late, or not at all.

  The appointed evening came. We took our positions: me in the dining room, Zerlina at the front door as if she were dusting something or other and my master, well, he just sort of floated between the two of us, making final checks when none were needed and making me feel increasingly nervous every time he came in.

  I don’t know why but I was expecting knocking. Sudden, stentorian knocking that would startle us and herald the commencement of our little show. In an anticlimactic fashion, before we had even begun, Masetto opened the front door and Martello swept in.

  ”What a bastard!” Don Giovanni was watching, his head through the dining room wall, his backside pointing towards me. “He’s unfastening his travelling cloak. He’s thrown it at Zerlina. She’s nearly collapsed under the weight of it. Now he’s tossing his three-cornered hat in the corner. And Masetto, that lummox, is just standing there. What’s she waiting for, the silly girl? Don’t tell me she’s forgotten her lines!”

  I told him his running commentary wasn’t exactly calming my nerves but he told me to hold my peace and keep still – did I want to ruin everything?

  ”Oops, he’s coming!”

  Through the woven threads of the sheet I could make out vague shapes moving and an increase of light as Martello burst into the dining room, followed by Zerlina and, a few steps behind, the lumbering Masetto.

  ”What do you mean, the statue is here?” Martello was blustering.

  ”What I say,” said Zerlina, sticking to the script, Lord love her. “Turned up the other day. I thought you or my Masetto had brung it. But here it is, large as life. Don’t worry I haven’t tampered with it or nothing. Haven’t so much as had peep under the cloth. See, Masetto, this is what I’ve been waiting for! Look what I’ve had made to show how much I loves you.”

  She approached and made to lift the sheet but Martello grabbed her rather roughly by the arm. “What are you talking about? There is no statue, you silly goose! There never was a statue!”

  ”But there it is, a statue alls the same.”

  I couldn’t see him but I could hear my master laugh and clap and say “Bravo, Zerlina!”

  ”But this – this is impossible!” Martello was confounded. How I wished I could see his face! It must have changed colour several times by now.

  ”Let’s have a look at him, shall we?” Zerlina wriggled free from his grasp. “And...lo!” She pulled away the sheet, exposing me to view.

  ”Bloody hellfire!” exclaimed Masetto, with unconscious irony. He staggered forward to get a better look. Martello, his mouth open, peered a little more closely.

  I was draped in cloth to suggest a figure of the Classical period. A wreath of leaves – those same leaves that had protected my modesty – decorated my head. From top to toe, clothes, leaves and all, I had been painted with a solution of plaster. It had dried and hardened due to the heat of my body to give an outer show of stone. I had to keep my eyes still and hold my breath. It was down to Zerlina to keep things moving along.

  ”It’s nothing like him!” she complained. “I ordered the likeness of my Masetto.”

  ”Aww, my little lamb,” Masetto cooed and put his arm around his devoted wife.

  ”I – I – don’t understand –”Martello gasped, peering ever closer. He looked like he was going to reach out and poke me at any second.

  ”I wants a replacement or a refund,” said Zerlina to keep him distracted.

  ”You’ll get nothing of the sort!” he rounded on her. “This – this- ugly thing is nothing to do with me.”

  I couldn’t help it. I moved. Martello looked at me, looked away then looked back again in rapid succession.

  ”Did it move? Did that thing just move?”

  Zerlina shrugged. Masetto’s broad forehead wrinkled. Martello, slowly, cautiously, raised a shaking hand towards my face. He extended his index finger and brought it inexorably towards my cheek.

  Suddenly I turned my head and bit him. With a roar of pain and surprise, Martello pulled his injured finger away and sank to his knees.

  “Bloody hellfire!” Masetto, a man of few imprecations, repeated himself. He too sank to his knees.

  My moment had come!

  I lifted my leg and took a step towards the trembling Martello, then another and another – you get the idea. At first he recoiled leaning further and further back until he turned and scrambled towards the table to seek shelter beneath it, just as I had done that night.

  He yelped and squawked and gibbered at me to keep away, keep away, but I kept on coming. I bore down on that bastard until there was nowhere else for him to go.

  “What is it you want from me?” he cried. There was snot running from his nose to his lip. It caught the candlelight but what stopped me in my tracks was something else that glinted. On a chain around his neck was an emerald, a lozenge set in gold. It was unmistakable. It was Angelina’s! I knew at once that she had become one of his victims too
.

  With a roar that cracked my plaster face I upended a chair and hurled it across the room. This made Masetto prostrate himself and turn to prayer but the effect on Martello was more satisfying. He screamed and cried and tore at his hair and clothing. I had cornered him and he was losing his mind.

  I reached inside my robes and withdrew a roll of parchment. On it I had detailed his crimes as I knew them. I thrust the parchment towards his face then with a flourish and a snap of my wrist, I made it unroll right before his very eyes. He looked at it without really seeing it. I offered him a quill. He got the message. He snatched the feather from my hand and hastily scribbled his signature at the bottom of the scroll.

  “Kick his teeth in!” advised Don Giovanni. I shook my head as best as I could. Zerlina stepped forward. As pre-arranged she brought a length of rope. She and Masetto, who still wasn’t au courant, bound Martello to a chair and thrust an orange into his mouth for good measure.

  We had got him!

  His days of extortion were over.

  ***

  In the hours that followed, my master and I discussed the options. What was to be done with Martello? It was certain that the confession must be sent to Cardinal Ignatius so that my name could be cleared of the worst charges. It was hoped that by turning in the real culprit, I would be excused the other transgressions – the cross-dressing and so on – all would be excusable when the facts of the case became apparent.

  As for the man himself, well, Don Giovanni was all for staking Martello out in the courtyard and leaving him exposed to the siesta sun but I was less vindictive, when it came down to it. I tore the emerald necklace from his throat but that would be the extent of the physical retributions. It was not for me, a lowly and let us not forget unemployed manservant to mete out justice as I deemed fit. That was work for others.

  I wrote a letter to Cardinal Ignatius, putting forth my side of the story – a truncated version of what you have been reading – and ended with my recommendation that Martello should not be punished but treated. I happened to know of an order of nuns who would care for him in his disturbed and unhinged condition and of one nun in particular, a Sister Immaculata, who would relish the opportunity to have a man to sort out.

  I was more than a little worried about setting foot in the city again with the risk of someone claiming the bounty on my head before I could get a word out but in the end, my worries were for naught. Don Ottavio rode by to invite me to his long-awaited wedding and when he heard of my predicament, he offered, without any hint from me, to escort the felon to the Inquisition himself. He said it was the least he could do, given what I had done for him. When I asked how Donna Anna would feel at this delay to their wedding night he shrugged and sang, “Tra-la!” She had kept him waiting long enough. A few more days wouldn’t hurt either of them. And, he reckoned, I shouldn’t be at all surprised if he came back with a full pardon for me. “Stranger things have happened,” he said. I was in no position to disagree.

  Martello and Zerlina went along for the ride. They regarded the trip as the chance to have a honeymoon. “As if freeloading in my house wasn’t enough!” Don Giovanni grumbled but I don’t think he really minded.

  “I don’t know why you sleep in here,” he said, drifting in through the wall of my bedroom. “You could have any room in the place. You could have my room, hmm, hmm?” he wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. “Think of all the adventures I’ve had in that room.”

  “Go away,” I said, turning my attention back to the letter I was writing. Don Giovanni came over and snatched the parchment from under my hands.

  “My dearest Angelina...” he read in a mocking tone. I tried to grab the letter back but he was too quick for me. “Oh, my! You really have got it bad for her, haven’t you? Well, come on, man, get the thing finished. Invite her over. Tell her what you’re going to do to her.”

  “I’m sending her the necklace,” I tried to explain. “I’m sure she’ll be glad to have it restored.”

  “I’m sure she will.”

  “She won’t – she won’t consider- anything – not with me, at any rate!”

  “Nonsense, man! You two got along just fine, did you not?”

  “That was when I thought she was a servant.”

  “Oh, I see. Not good enough for her, are you? Well, that’s a great shame, isn’t it, Don Leporello?”

  “What did you call me?”

  “Have a look at this!” He pulled out a piece of vellum, bound in black ribbon. “I imagine that all the distress and hullaballoo of my untimely, um, departure, this got completely overlooked.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s my will, you plum. In it, I leave everything to you. House, cash, title and all. Look, it’s all notarised and everything.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a nobleman now, you steaming great nit. Let’s face it: I had nobody else I could leave it all to.”

  I stared at him. He became embarrassed and looked away. I turned the will over and over in my hands without opening it. I couldn’t believe he would do this for me.

  “Well, best of luck with that!” A strange expression fell across my master’s face. “Best of luck with everything.”

  “That sounds like a goodbye.”

  “It is.”

  “Oh.”

  “So... I’ll be off, then. Now, in fact.”

  “Where to?”

  He shrugged. “I can’t say.”

  “Is it a secret?”

  “No, I mean, I don’t know. But what I do know is the afterlife is in the minds of the living. Perhaps I came back, as it were, so you could put things right. You’re a haunted man, Leporello. Perhaps I had to be redeemed so you could get on with your life. That’s something for you to think about when you’re not tossing and turning and pining away for your Angelina.”

  There was that mocking smirk of his and the twinkle in his eye. He seemed to shimmer before me and begin to fade.

  “Wait!” I cried, not ready to let him go just yet. Only his head remained. “Are you real?” I asked, “Or are you just a thought?”

  “My dear friend,” he laughed, finally fading from view. “I’m a way of life!”

  ***

  I packed up some things, loaded them onto a cart then set off into town to get the title deeds of the property signed over from my name and to Zerlina and Masetto’s. I left them a note on the kitchen table explaining the place was now legitimately theirs and I wished them well for the rest of their married life together.

  I clicked my tongue and the horse, perhaps a distant cousin of the Dobbin who had pulled Angelina’s cart with me in that bloody casket, took me away. I glanced back at the old house a final time. It held no fear for me now and whenever I think of my late master, my friend, nowadays, it is always with fondness.

  My first stop was the smithy, where Donna Flavia and her husband were overwhelmed to have her fortune restored to her. There was enough there to rebuild her house and for him to retire from his work and look after her in the style she had been used to in the days before Martello.

  I then went to the inn – that inn where Angelina and I had stayed before I was arrested for impersonating a dead woman - and finished my letter to her. I enclosed the necklace, addressed it the Contessa, Donna Dorabella of Cadiz, and dispatched it in the care of a young stable hand whose eyes had almost popped from their sockets when I paid him the handsome price for delivery up front.

  In the letter, I forgave her for speaking against me in the trial. I said I knew she meant me no harm, that I appreciated the position she was in. I reminisced about the time we had spent together and explained a little of my change in status and circumstance. Around the chain of the necklace I entwined a smaller note, telling her I was staying at “our old inn” and would be there for the foreseeable future, should s
he care to join me, and how I hoped she would.

  To pass the time, while I waited, I wrote out my story, the end of which you are fast approaching. Every coach that pulls in brings with it hope, hope that is quickly dashed, when Angelina does not appear. It’s all I want now: to see that face, to hear that laugh. Only those things could make me consider myself a rich man.

  But I’m still hopeful. One day, she might come.

  About The Author

  William Stafford is a playwright and theatre critic. He has written several theatre-in-education pieces and musicals, and has worked as a Drama teacher in schools and colleges for more years than he cares to remember. Leporello on the Lam is his first novel.

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