Since that night he and Itale had been friends, linked always in Itale’s thought and the old count’s memory by that other Itale who lay beside the chapel of St Anthony under the pines of Malafrena; and Itale had first admitted a liking for George Helleskar when he saw the younger man’s pride in and tenderness toward the irascible, frail old soldier.
This night Count Helleskar recalled the last meeting of the Estates, in 1796: “They were trying to choose a king then, and went all to pieces over it. Maybe they’ll do better at getting rid of a grand duchess, eh?” He laughed, like a wolfhound barking. Among his son’s radical friends he enjoyed stating the most extreme opinions, outdoing the young men in attacking Austria, the Metternich system, censorship, the Sinalya court, and so on. The emotion was real but the opinions, if he tried to defend them rationally, disintegrated; at their root was only esteem for courage, scorn for opportunists, and the bitter pessimism of a nobleman who saw his class becoming obsolete and an officer whose last battle had been lost.
Estenskar soon joined them. Old Helleskar did not like the poet, but was polite to him, as to all guests of the house, a forced, fine courtesy that reminded Itale painfully of his own father. Others came over; not Luisa, though she had signified with one glance as Itale entered that she wanted to see him tonight. The old count had some records of the ’96 convocation, and took the group to his study to look these up. Like everyone else he had, after the day’s unlooked-for triumph, begun to hope great things of the Assembly. He and Estenskar talked vehemently. Itale listened. It had been a long day. George Helleskar looked in on them and had a bottle of brandy brought in with the message, “To restore the Deputy from the Fourth Estate.” Itale drank a little and fell fast asleep, deep in a leather armchair. The others left without disturbing him. An hour went by very quietly in the oak-panelled study, no sound but the tick of the clock and the crackle of the fire. Luisa came in, moving softly. She wore black; her mother had died in July after cruel illness, through which Luisa had cared for her; it was a suspicion of that illness that had brought her back from Aisnar before Easter. She had said nothing of it to Itale then and as little as possible about it since; she spoke plainly of her mother’s death as a release, and showed no grief. She had lost the robust, radiant quality of beauty she had had at twenty, when Itale first saw her. She was thin, and looked thinner still in black, and rather pale. Her bearing was tense and proud. She stood beside the armchair for some little while, watching the face of the sleeping man, his hands that still laxly cupped the empty brandy glass on his lap. Her face showed no expression but watchfulness. At last she took the glass from his hands, and as he woke she said, “Can you come tonight?”
He stared, shook his head, rubbed a hand over his face and hair, yawned, and said aloud, “What?”
She set the glass down on a table, went over to the bookcases, and repeated, half turned from him, “Can you come tonight?”
“What time is it?” He pulled out his watch. “Two-thirty?”
“About two.”
“Did I fall asleep? Listen, has Karantay left? We have to get to the office tonight and write up the report—Verba goes to press Wednesday noon, that’s tomorrow, today now— Listen, tomorrow night, Luisa.” He struggled out of the deep chair and went towards her. She did not turn to him, but moved on along the shelves looking at the titles of books.
“I’ll be at court tomorrow night,” she said. “Here he is, George, the Sleeping Beauty wakened by my kiss. Don’t you wish you’d gone to sleep too?”
“No,” said young Helleskar. “You’d probably have bitten me. All the radical elements in the salon are looking for you, Sorde.”
“We have to get this issue set up so the Censor can look it over, last week they took fifty-six hours to pass it— Come on with us, Helleskar, these all-night bouts are entertaining.” Refreshed and wide awake, Itale’s vitality was as bright and warm as the fire on the hearth, and George Helleskar said, “All right! if I won’t be in the way?”
“We’ll put you to work, don’t worry. Good night, baronina,” he said gaily, frankly, using her title as he always did before other people.
“Will you forgive the absconding host?” George Helleskar asked her with his kindly effrontery. She smiled and said, “I have been trying to make Enrike take me home this hour. Enjoy yourselves. Do you really think the Censor will let you print anything, now?”
But Itale had met up with Karantay at the doorway, and did not hear her, or pretended not to hear her.
V
From the first time she saw him, fresh off the Montayna coach, bewildered and out of place in her salon, Luisa had been afraid of him. Everything about him frightened her, his height, his blue eyes, his big nose, his strong hands, his awkwardness, his vulnerability, his ideas, his masculinity, the spirit that she saw play in him as bright and dangerous as lightning in a heavy sky. He was completely strange to her: completely different from her. She shared nothing with him. His reality was a denial of hers. To touch him would be to destroy him or to be destroyed. —So extreme a reaction displeased her; she sought control over herself, both mind and body; coolness, courage, self-possession were her own ideals. Itale’s presence was a severe test of these qualities, but to avoid him, which would have been the simplest and most natural thing in the world, to send him off and not see him again, would also be cowardice, admission of defeat. She had invited him back, against Enrike’s feeble protest. Helleskar and Estenskar had both taken him up, and now the whole group of radical journalists were people of some note in the city; she would have had to meet him in society anyhow, unless to escape him she had gone over the widening gap and joined the “Viennese,” the conservative and pro-Imperial salons. She kept in touch with that portion of society by accepting the very minor position at court which had been her mother’s; she was called to the palace once a week or once a fortnight, while the grand duchess was in town. She enjoyed the contrast of the sad, stuffy, shabby court formalities with her own increasingly brilliant and animated circle. She enjoyed testing her own nerve and her power on these ambitious and argumentative men. For most of them she had a good deal of contempt, which she concealed most of the time. Towards Itale, no degree of self-control and self-mockery could dispel the attraction she felt, or the fear of that attraction, and the resentment of it, and the terror and pleasure of his presence, which challenged all she was and all she thought she wanted.
She had grown up, not in Krasnoy for the most part, but on the immense family property in the Sovena province which her grandfather had accumulated. The parents most stayed in Krasnoy, for the court connection was the important thing in Baroness Paludeskar’s life; the children were left in the country in the care of nursemaids and servants, until when he was eleven Enrike was sent off to a military school for noblemen’s sons, where he was unspeakably unhappy, and Luisa at eight was left alone among the servants. She had done pretty much as she pleased in those years of her childhood in the big, bleak house, isolated on a knoll amidst the flat, fertile, windswept fields of her inheritance. Her playmates were the children of the estate overseer and of the tenant farmers: one step above the peasants, having had a year or two of schooling, shy, dark children, hard as nails, slaves to “the baronina’s” whim until, goaded too far, one of them would turn on her and call her a papist, their worst insult, and spit in her face, fight her, and often beat her. She could not get on with any of the girls, it led always to a fight. Her companions were boys, whom she could lead in exploits that lack of imagination, or dour sense, would have forbidden them. But they did not like being dominated either, and when she was ten she crept home with a broken wrist; she had teased the smith’s son Kass into a rage and he cracked her arm across his knee as he would crack a willow-stick. When her mother arrived for her annual visit a week later the story was that the baronina had had a fall from her horse. “She’s very wild, ma’am,” the nurse said, weakly sounding an alarm. The baroness gave orders that Luisa should stay in to study six hours a
day with her tutor, the house priest, and should not be allowed to play with Protestant children, and these orders were more or less obeyed until the end of the month, when the baroness left, and Luisa was off to the barns to find Kass before the carriage was out of sight on the long road across the windy plains.
A year later she and Kass took to playing a game which they called the wild dancing. Father Andre’s history lessons had included some confused accounts of heathen superstitions and rituals and Roman methods of divination. They could find out everything that was going to happen in the future, Luisa told Kass, if they danced the right way and killed a hen and read the messages inside her. They stole and killed a hen from the farmyard. Luisa was scared by the awful simplicity of the head-twist, she had never liked to watch that, but the boy was excited by her fear and disgust, by theft, waste, gratuitous killing: he tore the bird open with his hands, plunged his hands into the entrails, and pushed her face into the bloody mess jeering, “Read it! Read it!” She had fought down screams and vomit and said, “I see it—I see the future—I see fire, fire, a house on fire—” He danced for her, naked on the threshing-floor in a dark autumn evening of fog and fine rain. They were alone among the long, dreary fields. His thin, white, child’s body flashed before her, dancing, strong, wet with mist and sweat. She had not danced for him. After that night they had scarcely spoken to each other again.
When she was thirteen she began the relationship that finally got her sent back to Krasnoy. She had always been savagely rude and arrogant to the overseer’s eldest son, jeering at him and inciting the other boys to bedevil his life; now she suddenly made a friend of him, and very shortly the overgrown, over-mothered boy of sixteen had achieved great power over her, cowing and fascinating her with his causeless rages, caresses, intimate talk, fits of laughter, fits of tears and threats of suicide. He told her how he had seduced a peasant girl, describing every word and act vividly, and how they had met again, and again, and all they had done. Luisa listened and at last, envious, jealous, a little incredulous, tried to match his stories, using her imagination freely. She told him that Kass had slept with her “hundreds of times.” The boy believed her, approached her and began a fumbling attempt to undress her. She took her clothes off and stood still. He made her lie down, and lay on her, but he was impotent: she began to hit at him, scratch at his face when he would not let her go, and she got away from him and scrambled into her shift and dress. The next day he talked her into trying again and the same thing happened. The boy went home and tried to shoot himself with his father’s hunting-piece; his mother came into the room as he was in the act, and he shot her instead, and blew her right hand off at the wrist. Some connection with Luisa was made out from his blubberings and wild talk. It was all kept quiet. Baron Paludeskar, then dying of cancer, never heard of it, and Luisa came back to Krasnoy to a convent school. Now after ten years all her Sovena childhood seemed infinitely far away, another person than herself in another world; yet sometimes she remembered the overseer’s son and his soft, struggling, impotent body; or, remote, the brief vision of a boy dancing naked in dusk and rain.
She did not like touching, the kisses women were expected to exchange, handshakes. She did not permit her maid to dress her or to brush her hair.
When Itale first came to her in April in the room she had taken in a hotel near West Gate she had been in unconcealable terror, trembling and stiff, silent, her eyes dry and wide. Yet she had been there waiting for him, like an animal that has walked into a trap. Nothing could have set her free but the intensity and impersonality of his desire. His passion submerged her fear like a wave over a sandcastle, and all the fear turned to equal passion, all the sand to the water of life . . . for a night; sometimes, some nights, for a while, since then.
When her mother’s illness became severe she was not able to come at all. During June and July she did not see Itale alone and only twice briefly in company. Her time was given entirely to the dying woman; she nursed her through a nine weeks’ agony, patient and competent. Her mother died clinging to her hand. After the funeral she stayed home, seeing no one, for a week, and then had taken up her usual life in so far as the customs of mourning permitted; but she made no sign to Itale. He would not be turned away, now, and she gave in to him; for the first time he made love to her in her own house. With some caution regarding Enrike and the servants, that had become their usual arrangement, her maid letting him in very late at night. Often she put off a planned meeting or made obstacles to setting a night; often when he did come she was, at first, passive and cold in manner. Never until the night at Helleskars had he told her he could not come.
She waited for him, a night in mid-September. He was late. He was at the Illyrica, or at the office of his journal, or with Karantay or with Estenskar or some or any of the others, the other men, in their world, his world, the political world. She looked about at her world with an ironical eye: the high-ceilinged, blue and white painted bedroom. Yet she had been right, that night, about the journal. “Will the Censor let you print anything, now?” she had asked, and they had not listened, going off in high spirits and goodfellowship to write up the events of the great day. The Bureau of Censorship had returned the proofs to them three days later with all reports on the Assembly’s first session deleted: it was the day the journal went to press: all they could do was take out the type and run the first three pages through entirely blank except for the heading Novesma Verba and the date.
On the same day, the third day of debate in the Assembly, the President announced that the decision to use the vernacular had not received the grand duchess’ sanction and was thus invalidated. Oragon at once raised the question of the grand duchess’ power of sanction and veto, since the articles of the Assembly declared it to be subject only to the king, and there was no king. Since then debate had struggled on, the left trying to put the question of sovereign authority and the right interrupting mainly with demands from the chair that the deputies speak in Latin. Itale and the others had written up a cautious report of these sessions. The Censor stamped it out and the journal appeared that week with one column on its news page, a hastily composed patriotic effusion by Karantay, and the rest of the sheet dead blank. The only news the public got of events in the Assembly Room was the brief summary of motions and votes on an inner page of the Courier-Mercury. Prime Minister Cornelius saw no need for violence, which was abhorrent to the system; it was merely a matter of laying one’s trump card down quietly at the last moment, game after game.
And it was a game that he, as surely as his idealistic opponents, had staked his life on. Only he had the soldiers and the Empire on his side, which made the contest somewhat uneven. She saw that; she did not think Itale, or Estenskar, or even Helleskar saw it clearly. She did not say much about it, but she continued to fulfil her duties at court, and she entertained men who could help Enrike in his modest diplomatic ambitions whenever he asked her to or when she saw the opportunity herself. She saw no disloyalty in this. Why should she be loyal to a cause from which she was excluded? How could she be? She could not play the game, therefore she did not care who won it.
Still he did not come. It was past two. She had been sitting at her dressing table; she lay down with the magazine he had brought her, the Bellerofon, a monthly which took most of the literary stuffing out of Novesma Verba, which had become frankly political and philosophical. In this issue Itale had a long review of a Dictionary and Historical Grammar of the Orsinian Language and its Dialects by a professor at Solariy, the leading article. Apparently they were all excited by the dictionary and grammar. Patriotism. She tried to read it. Itale’s written style was terse, logical, and didactic; effective but not seductive; not for reading lying down. Luisa yawned and began skipping. Estenskar had contributed the second part of a long review of Karantay’s novel. There weren’t even enough of them to quarrel healthily, they all had to praise one another. It was small, their world, it was shabby, as mediocre as the dreary court of the grand duchess
, as futile. They were not free, though they talked forever about freedom. Nobody was free.
“There’s a nice picture,” said Itale’s quiet voice. She had gone to sleep; she opened her eyes, struggling for consciousness, but did not move. She knew from his voice that he was smiling. “Fell asleep over my review, did you?” he said bending over her, so that she smelt the night air on him and felt the warmth of his mouth brush her cheek. “Novel-reader.”
“You can read dictionaries if you like them,” she said, opening her eyes and then shutting them again to stretch a long, supple stretch and yawn. “Don’t ask me to. I don’t trust words. You’re very late.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” He took off his coat and stock and sat down on the bed in waistcoat and shirtsleeves. His face looked grave and shadowed in the light of the single candle. She watched him, studied his face, as she always did, as if by watching him she could find out what he was.
“At the Illyrica,” she said. “Talk and talk and talk. Words and words and words. . . .”
“No, I was with a friend. From that school I taught at for a while. He’s out of work.”
“You’re all out of work, always.”
She knew he did not like to be teased about the erratic jobs he had taken to pay for his rent and bread, until Novesma Verba, thriving, could pay him a tiny salary. She knew the subject of his relative poverty was one of the most dangerous ones that lay between them. It was precisely because it was dangerous that she began to edge near the crater. But no temper stirred in him now; he merely nodded, and said, “Egen quit his job, he had a good one, tutoring a family, some grain-merchant in the Trasfiuve. He’s consumptive and a doctor told him that living with the children he put them at risk. So he moved out. They tried to make him stay. I don’t know what to do for him. If he could just have a year or so to get his health back—” Itale put his head in his hands. “I don’t know, I don’t see how he can get free at all, but it can’t. . . .”
Ursula K. Le Guin Page 18
