by Sándor Márai
The women felt that the escape and all that followed may, to some degree, have served their interests. They couldn’t explain this feeling very precisely, but, being Venetian women, it was not for them to split hairs when it came to feelings, and they accepted the instinctive, half-whispered logic of heart and blood and passion. The women were glad that he had escaped. It was as if a long-shackled force contained by legends, proverbs, books, memories, dreams, and yearnings had found its way into the world at large, or as if the hidden, somewhat improper, yet terrifyingly true, alternative life of men and women had moved into the foreground, unmasked, without its powdered wig, as naked as a prisoner emerging from the solemn tête-à-tête of the torture chamber; and women glanced after him while raising hands or fans to cover mouths and eyes, their heads tipped a little to one side, without saying anything, though the veiled, misty eyes that peeked at the fugitive said, “Yes,” and again, “Yes.” That was why they smiled. And, for a few days, it seemed as though the world in which they lived overflowed with tenderness. In the evening they stopped by their windows and balconies, the lagoon below them, the lyre-shaped veils of fine lace fixed to their hair by means of a comb, their silk scarves thrown across their shoulders, and gazed down into the oily, dirty, indifferent water that supported the boats, returned a glance that they would not have returned the day before, and dropped a handkerchief that was caught far below, above the reflections in the water, by a lithe brown hand: then they raised a flower to their lips, and smiled. Having done so, they closed the window and the lights went out in the room. But there was something in their hearts and their movements, in the eyes of the women and in the glances of the men, that shone. It was as if someone had sent a secret signal to tell them that life was not simply a matter of rules, prohibitions, and chains, but of passions that were less rational, less directed, and freer than they had hitherto believed. And for a moment they understood the signal and smiled at each other.
The sense of complicity did not last long: the books of the law, with all their written and unwritten rules of behavior, ensured that their hearts should forget the memory of the escaped prisoner. Within a few weeks they had forgotten it in Venice. Only Signor Bragadin, his gentle and gracious supporter, still recalled it, and a few women to whom he had promised eternal fidelity, along with the odd moneylender or gambler to whom he owed money.
“A Man”
This is how he escaped, how the news preceded him, and how they remembered him, for a while at least, in Venice. But the town soon found something else to worry about and forgot its rebellious son. By the middle of the festival season everyone was talking about a certain Count B. whose body had been discovered—masked and wearing a domino cloak—hanging at dawn before the house of the French ambassador. Because, we should not forget, Venice is a cruel city.
But for now he slept, in Bolzano, in a room of The Stag Inn, behind closed shutters; and because this was the first time in sixteen months that he had slept in a properly secure, clean, and comfortable bed, he surrendered himself to the blissful underworld of dreams. He slept as if crucified, his head bathed in sweat, his legs and arms spread-eagled, lost in a passion of sleep, without a thought but with a tired and scornful smile playing on his lips, as if aware that he was being observed through the keyhole.
And indeed he was being observed, and this is how; first by Teresa, the girl the innkeeper referred to as his own child, who played the role of servant to distant relatives in the house. The girl was well developed and, according to relatives, of an even and pleasant temper, if a little simple. They tended not to speak about this. Teresa, relative and servant, did not say very much either. She is simple, they said, and gave no reasons for their opinion, since it was not thought worthwhile, indeed not fitting, to bother about her, for the girl counted for less in The Stag than did the white mule they harnessed each morning to drive to market. Teresa, to them, was a kind of phantom relative, a figure who in some ways belonged a little to everyone and was therefore not worth bothering about or even tipping. She is simple, they said, and traveling salesmen and temporarily billeted soldiers would pinch her cheeks and arms in the dark corridors. But there was a kind of gentleness in her face and something a little severe about her mouth; her hand, too, which was always red from washing, gave off a certain nobility, and a kind of question hung about her eyes, a quiet and devout sort of question, so that one could neither address it nor forget it. Despite all that, for all her heart-shaped face and questioning eyes, she was a person of no consequence. It was a shame to waste your breath on her.
But there she was now, kneeling by the keyhole and watching the sleeping man, which might well be the reason that we ourselves are wasting breath on her. She had raised her hands to her temples so she could see better, and even her gently sloping back and strong hips were wholly given over to the task: it was as if her whole body were glued to the keyhole. What she was seeing was, in fact, of no particular interest. Teresa had observed a good many things through keyholes: she had been serving at The Stag for four years, since she was twelve years old, had kept her mouth shut, taken breakfasts into rooms, and had regularly changed the beds in which strange men and women slept, some singly, some together. She had seen much and wondered at nothing. She understood that people were as they were: that women spent a long time before the mirror, that men—even soldiers—powdered their wigs, clipped and polished their nails, then grunted or laughed or wept or beat the wall with their fists; that sometimes they would bring forth a letter or an item of clothing and soak these indifferent objects with their tears. This is what people were like when they were alone in their rooms, observed through keyholes. But this man was different. He lay sleeping, his arms extended, as though he had been murdered. His face was serious and ugly. It was a masculine face, lacking beauty and grace, the nose large and fleshy, the lips narrow and severe, the chin sharp and forceful and the whole figure small-framed and a little tubby, for in sixteen months in jail, without air or exercise, he had put on some weight. I don’t understand it at all, thought Teresa. Her thoughts were slow, hesitant, and naïve. It’s beyond understanding, she thought, her ears reddening with excitement: what do women see in him? For all night in the bar and all morning in the market, everywhere in town, in shops and in taprooms, he was the sole topic of conversation: the way he arrived, in rags, without money, with that other jailbird, his secretary. Best not even mention his name. But mention it they did, and most frequently, both women and men, for they wanted to know everything about him, how old he was, whether blond or dark, the sound of his voice. They talked about him as they would have some famous visiting singer or strongman, or a great castrato actor who played women’s roles in the theater and sang. What is his secret? wondered the girl, and pushed her nose harder against the door and her eyes closer to the keyhole.
The man lying on the bed asleep, his arms and legs spread-eagled, was not handsome. Teresa compared him to Giuseppe the barber: now Giuseppe was clearly handsome, rosy cheeked, with soft lips and blue eyes like a girl. He often called at The Stag and always closed his eyes and blushed when Teresa addressed him. And the Viennese captain who spent the summers here: he was handsome too with his wavy, pomaded hair and the moustache he twisted into sharp points. He wore a fine satchel beside his broad sword, stomped about in boots, and spoke an unintelligible language that sounded utterly alien and savage to her ears. Later somebody told her that this savage tongue spoken by the captain was Hungarian or possibly Turkish. Teresa couldn’t remember. And the prelate was a handsome man, too, with his white hair and yellow hands, with that scarlet sash around his waist and the lilac cap on his pale head. Teresa had, she thought, a working appreciation of male beauty. This man was most certainly not beautiful, no, rather ugly in fact, quite different from other men who normally appealed to ladies. The lines on the sleeping stranger’s unshaved face looked hard and contemptuous, confirming an impression she had formed the previous evening. The cramps and tugs of indignation had tightened the
muscles around his mouth. Suddenly he grunted in his sleep, and Teresa leaped away from the door, moved to the window, opened the shutters, and gave a signal with her mop.
It was because the women wanted to see him, those women in the fruit market, just in front of The Stag, and Teresa had promised the flower girls, Lucia and Gretel, old Helena the fruit vendor, and the melancholy widow Nanette, who sold crocheted stockings, that she would, if she could, let them into the room and allow them to look through the keyhole at him. They wanted to see him at all costs. The fruit market was particularly busy this morning and the apothecary stood in the doorway of his shop opposite The Stag holding a long conversation with Balbi the secretary, plying him with spirits flambé in the hope of discovering ever more details of the escape. The mayor, the doctor, the tax collector, and the captain of the town all dropped in at the apothecary’s that morning to listen to Balbi, glancing up at the shuttered windows on the first floor of The Stag, all excited and more than a little confused in their behavior, as if unable to decide whether to celebrate the advent of the stranger with torchlight processions and night music or to send him packing, the way the dogcatcher grabs and dispatches hounds suspected of mange or rabies. They could come to no conclusion on this matter, either that morning or in the following days. And so they waited at the apothecary’s, chattering and listening to Balbi, who was literally swelling with pride and passion as he gave a series of wildly different accounts of the great exploit, which hourly was being furnished with the ever-new apparatus and detail of heroic verse; and all the while they stood, their eyes darting toward The Stag with its closed shutters, or walked up and down among the fruit stalls and delicacies of the surrounding shops, acting, on the whole, in a somewhat nervous fashion, displaying as much anxiety and confusion as might be expected of respectable citizens who are responsible for the security of the town gates, for putting out fires, for the maintenance of water supplies, and for the defense of the town in case of attack by hostile forces, not knowing, all the while, whether to gag with laughter or to call the police. And so they walked and talked till noon, still lost for a plan. Then the women began to pack their stalls away and respectable citizens went off to lunch.
It was now that the stranger woke. Teresa had let the women into the darkened parlor. “Show us . . . what is he like?” the women whispered, screwing up the corners of their aprons and cramming their fists in their mouths; and so they stood in a half circle by the door that led into the bedchamber. They were pleasantly frightened, some on the point of screeching with laughter, as if someone were tickling their waists. Teresa put her finger to her lips. First she took the hand of Lucia, the hazel-eyed, plump Venus of the marketplace, and led her to the door. Lucia squatted down, her skirt billowing out like a bell on the floor, put her left eye to the keyhole, then, blushing, gave a faint scream and crossed herself. “What did you see?” they asked her, whispering, and gathered round her with a peculiar flapping like rooks settling on a branch.
The hazel-eyed beauty thought about it.
“A man,” she said in a faint and nervous voice.
It was a moment before they could take this in. There was something idiotic, strange, and fearsome in the answer. “A man, dear God!” they thought and cast their eyes to the ceiling, not knowing whether to laugh or run away. “A man, well, would you believe it!” said Gretel. The ancient Helena clapped her hands together in a faintly pious gesture and mumbled meekly through her toothless gums: “A man!” And the widow Nanette stared at the floor as if recalling something, and solemnly echoed: “A man.” So they mused, then started giggling, and one by one took their turn to kneel at the keyhole and take a peek into the room, and felt unaccountably good about it all. Ideally, they would have brewed up some decent coffee and sat down round the gilt-legged table with coffee mugs in their laps, waiting in a ceremonial and gently impudent manner for the foreign gentleman to walk in. Their hearts beat fast: they felt proud of having seen the stranger and of having something to talk about in town, at the market, round the well, and at home. They were proud but a touch anxious, particularly the widow Nanette and the inquisitive Lucia, and even the proud, somewhat dim Gretel felt a little nervous, as if there were something miraculous and extraordinary about the arrival in town of “a man.” They knew there was something foolish and irrational about their heightened, coltish curiosity, but, at the same time, they sensed that this improper curiosity did not account for the whole feeling of excitement. It was as if finally, albeit only through the keyhole, they had actually seen a man, and that husbands, lovers, and all the strange men they had ever met, had, in that moment of glimpsing the sleeping figure, undergone a peculiar reappraisal. It was as if it were utterly unusual and somehow freakish to find a man that was ugly rather than handsome, whose features were unrefined, whose body was unheroic, about whom they knew nothing except that he was a rogue, a frequenter of inns and gambling dens, that he was without luggage and that there was something dubious even about his name, as if it were not really or entirely his own; a man about whom it was said, as of many a womanizer, that he was bold, impudent, and relaxed in the company of women: as if all this, despite all appearances, was in some way extraordinary. They were women: they felt something. Faced, as they were, with the mysterious stranger, it was as if the men they had known were coming out in their true colors. “A man,” whispered Lucia, faint, anxious, and devout, and they felt the news taking wing across the market in Bolzano to the drawing rooms of Triente, through the greenrooms of theaters, through confessional booths, quickening heartbeats, telling all and sundry that he was on his way, that at this very moment a man was waking, stretching, and scratching in a room of The Stag Inn in Bolzano. “Can a man be such an extraordinary phenomenon?” asked the ladies of Bolzano in the depths of their hearts. They did not say as much, of course, but they felt it. And a single heartbeat, a heartbeat impossible to misconstrue, answered: “Yes. Most extraordinary.”
For men—or so, in that moment, however mysteriously, their beating hearts told them—were fathers, husbands, and lovers who enjoyed behaving in a manly fashion: they jangled their swords like gallants and paraded their titles, rank, and wealth, chasing every skirt in sight; this was the way they were in Bolzano and elsewhere, too, if stories were to be believed. But this man’s reputation was different. Men liked to act in a superior manner, bragging, sometimes almost crowing with vanity: they were as ridiculous as roosters. Under their display, though, most of them were melancholy and childish, now simple, now greedy, now dull and insensitive. What Lucia had said was true, the women felt: here was a man who was genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more, the way an oak tree is just an oak tree and a rock is simply a rock. They understood this and stared at each other wide-eyed, their mouths half-open, their thoughts troubled. They understood because Lucia had said it, because they had seen it with their own eyes, and because the room, the house, and the whole town were tense with an excitement that emanated from the stranger; they understood, in short, that a genuine man was as unusual a phenomenon as a genuine woman. A man who is not trying to prove anything by raising his voice or rattling his sword, who does not crow, who asks no favors except those he himself can grant, who does not look to women for either friendship or maternal comfort, who has no wish to hide in love’s embrace or behind women’s skirts; a man who is only interested in buying and selling, without hustling or greed, because every atom of his being, every nerve, every spark of his spirit and every muscle of his body, is devoted to the power that is life: that kind of man is indeed the rarest of creatures. For there were mummy’s boys and men with soft hands, and there were loud and boastful men whose voices had grown hoarse declaiming their feelings to women, and there were vulgar, oafish, and panting kinds of men—none of whom were as real as this. There were the handsome, who cared less for women than for their own beauty and success. And there were the merciless, who stalked women as though they were enemies, their smiles sticky as honey, who carried knives be
neath cloaks wide and capacious enough to hide a pig. And then occasionally, very occasionally, there was just a man. And now they understood the reputation that preceded him and the anxiety that had spread through town: they rubbed their eyes, they sighed, their breath came in shallow gasps, and their hands flew to their breasts. Then Lucia gave a scream and they all backed away from the door. For the door had opened and behind the great white panels stood the low, tousled, unshaven, slightly stiff figure of the stranger, his eyes blinking, somewhat inflamed in the strong light, his whole body bent over as if exhausted but ready to leap.
Waking
The women backed away toward the wall and the door. The man turned his tousled head to one side, blinked—there were traces of down from the pillow in his hair, and he looked as if he had come fresh from a masked ball or some underworld carnival of dreams where he had danced like a dervish until witches had tarred and feathered him—then ran his piercing glance over the room and the furniture, turning his head this way and that at leisure as if he had all the time in the world, as if he knew that everything was of equal importance, because it is only the feelings we have about what we see that makes things seem different. At this point he noticed the women and rubbed his glazed, half-closed eyes. He stood for a moment like that, with his eyes closed. Then, his head still tilted to one side, he surveyed them in a proud, inquisitorial manner, the way a master looks at his servants, a real master, that is, who does not regard his servants as peculiarly fallible people just because he is the master and they his servants, but as people who have willingly undertaken their roles as servants. Now he raised his head and seemed to grow a little. He drew his gown over his left shoulder with a rough movement of his short arms and bony yellow hands. It was a grand, theatrical gesture. The women sensed this and it was as if they were released from the spell that had first bound them, for, with this movement, the man showed that he was not as certain of himself as he first seemed, that he was merely strutting and miming the actions of the privileged and powerful: and so they relaxed and started coughing and clearing their throats. But no one said anything. They stood like that a long time, silent, unmoving, locking eyes with him.
