"But I believe each person loves in a different way.... It would be artificial."
"If you revealed your love to her in tones of sincerity, you would seem awkward."
"But I would tell her the truth...."
"The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked."
"But I want to tell her of my love, not of the love you would describe!"
"Well, if you would be believed, feign. There is no perfection without the splendor of machination."
"But she would understand that the letter is not speaking of her."
"Never fear. She will believe that what I dictate to you was made to her measure. Come now, sit down and write. Just allow me to summon my inspiration."
Saint-Savin moved about the room as if, Roberto tells us, he were imitating the flight of a bee returning to the honeycomb. He was almost dancing, his eyes restless; he seemed to read in the air the message that did not yet exist.
Then he began: "My lady..."
"Lady?"
"Well, how would you address her? Perhaps: Holà, little hussy of Casale?"
"Puta de los franceses," Roberto couldn't help murmuring, alarmed as Saint-Savin had in jest come so close, if not to the truth, at least to the insult.
"What did you say?"
"Nothing. Very well. Lady. Then what?"
"My lady, in the wondrous architecture of the Universe, it has been written since the natal day of Creation that I would encounter you and love you. But with the first line of this letter, I feel that my soul has already so poured forth that it will abandon my lips and my pen before this is concluded."
"...concluded. But I don't know if that will be comprehensible to a—"
"The truth is all the more appreciated when it is barbed with difficulties, and a revelation is more respected if it has cost us dearly. Let us raise the tone, in fact. Let us say then: My lady..."
"Again?"
"Yes. Lady. For a woman beautiful as Alcidiana, an unassailable dwelling is without doubt necessary, as it was for that Heroine. And I believe that by enchantment you have been transported elsewhere and that your province has become a second Floating Island that the wind of my sighs causes to retreat as I attempt to advance, the province of the Antipodes, a land where ice-floes bar my approach. You look puzzled, La Grive: does it still seem commonplace to you?"
"No, the fact is ... I would say quite the contrary."
"Have no fear," Saint-Savin said, misunderstanding, "there will be no lack of the counterpoint of contradictions. Let us proceed: Perhaps your charms entitle you to remain distant as is proper for the gods. But do you not know that the gods receive with favor at least the fumes of incense we burn to them here below? Do not then refuse my worship: as you possess beauty and splendor to the highest degree, you would make me impious if you prevented me from adoring in your person two of the greatest divine attributes.... Does that sound better?"
At this point Roberto was thinking that the problem now was whether or not La Novarese could read. Once this barrier was overcome, what she read would surely intoxicate her, as he was becoming intoxicated, writing.
"My God," he said, "she should go mad."
"She will. Continue. Far from having lost my heart when I entrusted my freedom to your hands, I find it has grown larger since that day, multiplied, as if, since one heart alone is not enough for my love of you, it were reproducing itself in all my arteries, where I feel it throbbing."
"Good Lord..."
"Keep calm. You are speaking of love, you are not loving. Forgive, my Lady, the raving of a desperate man, or, better, pay no heed to it. Sovereigns have never been held to account for the death of their slaves. Ah yes, I should consider my fate enviable if you take the trouble to cause my destruction. If you will deign at least to hate me, this will tell me I am not indifferent to you. Thus death, with which you think to punish me, will be for me a cause of joy. Yes, death. If love means understanding that two souls were created to be united, when one realizes that the other does not feel this union, he can only die. And this—while my body still lives, though not for long—is the message that my soul, departing from it, sends you."
"...departing from it?"
"...sends you."
"Let me catch my breath. My head is spinning."
"Control yourself. Do not confuse love with art."
"But I love her! You understand? I love her!"
"And I do not. For this reason you have come to me. Write without thinking of her. Think of—let me see—Monsieur de Toiras."
"Monsieur!"
"Do not look like that. He is a handsome man, after all. But write: Lady..."
"Again?"
"Again. Lady, I am fated moreover to die blind. Have you not made of my eyes two alembics, wherein my life must evaporate? And so it happens that the more my eyes are moistened, the more I burn. Perhaps my father did not mold my body from the same clay that gave life to the first man, but, rather, from lime, since the water I shed consumes me. And how does it happen that I still live, though consumed, finding yet more tears to be consumed further?"
"Are you not exaggerating?"
"On grand occasions thought must also be grand."
Now Roberto protested no longer. He felt as if he had become La Novarese and was feeling what she should feel on reading these pages. Saint-Savin continued dictating.
"Abandoning my heart, you have left in it an insolent creature who is your image and who boasts of having the power of life and death over me. And you have gone from me as sovereigns leave the torture chamber for fear of being importuned with pleas for mercy. If my soul and my love are composed of two pure sighs, when I die I will beseech my Agony that the breath of my love be the last to leave me, and I will have achieved—as my last gift—a miracle of which you should be proud, and for one instant at least you will draw a sigh from a body already dead."
"Dead. Is that the end?"
"No, let me think. We need a closing with a pointe...."
"A what?"
"Yes, an act of the intellect that expresses the inconceivable correspondence between two objects, beyond all belief, so that in this pleasant play of wit any concern for substance is happily lost."
"I do not understand...."
"You will. Here: let us reverse for the moment the direction of the appeal. In fact, you are not yet dead: let us give her the possibility of hastening to succor this moribund lover. Write: You could perhaps, my Lady, yet save me. I have given you my heart. But how can I live without the very motor of life? I do not ask you to give it back to me; for only in your prison does it enjoy the most sublime of freedoms, but I beg you to send me, in exchange, your own, that could find no tabernacle more prepared to welcome it. To live you have no need of two hearts, and mine beats so hard for you that it can assure you of the most eternal of fervors."
Then, half-turning and bowing like an actor anticipating applause, he asked: "Beautiful, is it not?"
"Beautiful? Why, I find it—how can I say?—ridiculous. Do you see this lady running around Casale delivering hearts, like a sort of page?"
"Would you expect her to love a man who speaks like any ordinary citizen? Sign it and seal it."
"But I am not thinking of the lady. I am thinking that if she were to show it to anyone, I would die of shame."
"She will never do that. She will keep the letter in her bosom, and every night she will light a candle beside her bed to read it, and cover it with kisses. Sign and seal."
"But let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that she cannot read. She will have to find someone to read it to her...."
"Monsieur de la Grive! Are you telling me you have been captivated by a peasant? That you have squandered my inspiration to embarrass a rustic? You must give me satisfaction."
"It was just a hypothesis. A jest. But I was taught that the prudent man must consider situations, circumstances, and along with the possible also the impossible...."
"Yo
u see? You are learning to express yourself properly. But you have considered badly and chosen the most risible among possibilities. In any case, I would not wish to force you. Strike out the last sentence and continue now as I say...."
"But if I strike it out, then I will have to rewrite the letter."
"So you are lazy, into the bargain. But the wise man must exploit misfortune also. Strike it out.... Done? Now then." Saint-Savin dipped one finger into a pitcher, then he allowed a drop to fall on the cancelled line, making a little damp spot, its edges irregular, growing gradually darker as the water caused the black ink, diluting it, to flow back on the sheet. "Now write. Forgive me, my Lady, if I lack the heart to allow the survival of a thought that, stealing from me a tear, has frightened me with its boldness. Thus may an Aetnaean fire generate the loveliest stream of brackish water. But ah, my Lady, my heart is like a seashell that, imbibing the beautiful sweat of dawn, generates the pearl and grows to be one with it. At the thought that your indifference would take from my heart the pearl it has so jealously fed, my heart flows from my eyes.... Yes, La Grive, this is unquestionably better, we have restrained the excesses. Better to end by reducing the vehemence of the lover, to increase the emotion of the beloved. Sign, seal, and send. Then wait."
"Wait for what?"
"The north of the Compass of Prudence consists in unfurling the sails to the wind of the Favorable Moment. In these affairs waiting never does any harm. Presence takes the edge off hunger, and distance sharpens it. Maintaining your distance, you will be considered a lion, while being present, you could become a mouse born of the mountain. You are certainly rich in fine qualities, but qualities lose their luster if touched too often, whereas fancy travels farther than sight."
Roberto thanked him and rushed home, concealing the letter in his bosom as if he had stolen it. He feared someone might rob him of the fruit of his theft.
I will find her, he told himself, I will bow and hand her the letter. Then he tossed in his bed, thinking how she would read it with her lips. By now he was imagining an Anna Maria Francesca Novarese endowed with all those virtues Saint-Savin had attributed to her. Declaring, even if in another's voice, his love, he had felt more than ever a lover. Doing something uncongenial, he had been enticed by Genius. He now loved La Novarese with the exquisite violence he described in his letter.
A few days later, setting out to find the one from whom he had been so prepared to remain distant, heedless of the danger as cannon fire rained down on the city, he saw her at a street corner, laden with sheaves like a mythological figure. With great inner tumult he ran to her, not knowing quite what he would do or say.
Having approached her, trembling, he stood before her and said, "Young lady..."
"Me?" the girl answered, laughing, and said, "Well?"
"...well," Roberto could think of nothing better to say. "Could you tell me which direction I should take for the Castle?" And the girl, throwing back her head and the great mass of her hair, said, "Oh, that way, of course." And she turned the corner.
At that corner, as Roberto was uncertain whether or not to follow her, a whistling cannon ball fell, knocking down a garden wall and raising a cloud of dust. He coughed, waited till the dust settled, and realized that by ambling too hesitantly through the spacious fields of Time he had missed the Favorable Moment.
To punish himself, he scrupulously tore up the letter and turned towards home, while the shreds of his heart lay crumpled on the ground.
His first, imprecise, love convinced him forever that the beloved object must dwell in the distance, and I believe this conviction sealed his fate as a lover. During the next days he went back to every corner (where he had received information, where he had found a trail, where he had heard her mentioned, where he had seen her) to reconstruct a landscape of memory. He thus laid out a Casale of his own passion, transforming alleys, fountains, squares into the River of Inclination, the Lake of Indifference, or the Sea of Hostility: he made the wounded city into the Land of his personal unsated Tenderness, an island (presage even then) of his solitude.
CHAPTER 13
The Map of Tendernes
ON THE NIGHT of June 29th a great noise wakened the besieged, followed by a rolling of drums: the enemy had managed to explode the first mine beneath the walls, blowing up a lunette and burying twenty-five soldiers. The next day, towards six in the evening, something like a storm was heard to the west, and in the east a cornucopia appeared, whiter than the rest of the sky, with a tip that extended and retracted. It was a comet, which upset the soldiers and led the local inhabitants to lock themselves in their houses. Over the next weeks other parts of the wall were blown up, while from the ramparts the defenders fired back in vain, for now the enemy moved underground, and the countermines were unable to dislodge him.
Roberto lived in this wreck like an alien passenger. He spent long hours discussing with Padre Emanuele the best way to describe the fires of the siege, and he saw more and more of Saint-Savin to develop with him similarly appropriate metaphors to depict the fires of his love—whose failure he had not dared confess. Saint-Savin provided him with a stage whereon his amorous story would be happily enacted; in silence he submitted to the ignominy of drafting, with his friend, further letters, which he then pretended to deliver, rereading them every night instead, as if the diary of all those longings were addressed to him from her.
He envisaged situations in which La Novarese, pursued by Landsknechts, fell overcome into his arms as he routed the assailants and led her, exhausted, into a garden where he enjoyed her wild gratitude. On his bed he abandoned himself to such thoughts, recovered his senses after long swoons, and composed sonnets for his beloved.
He showed one to Saint-Savin, who remarked, "I consider it of an extreme repugnance, if I may say so, but console yourself: in Paris the majority of those who are called poets produce worse. Do not poetize about your love; passion deprives you of that divine coldness that was the glory of Catullus."
Roberto found himself of melancholic humor, and said as much to Saint-Savin. "Rejoice," his friend remarked. "Melancholy is not the lees but the flower of the blood, and it generates heroes because, on the border of madness, it spurs them to the bravest of actions." But Roberto did not feel spurred to anything, and he became melancholy because he was not melancholic enough.
Deaf to cries and cannon fire, he heard rumors of relief (the Spanish camp is in turmoil, they say the French army is advancing), and he rejoiced because in mid-July a countermine had finally succeeded in slaughtering many Spaniards; but meanwhile many lunettes were being evacuated, and in mid-July the enemy vanguard could already fire directly into the city. He learned that some Casalesi were afraid to fish in the Po, and, not worrying that he might be taking streets exposed to enemy fire, he ran to look, afraid the imperials might shoot at La Novarese.
He forced his way among the soldiers, who were discontent because their contract said nothing about the digging of trenches; but the Casalesi refused to do it for them, so Toiras had to promise his men extra pay. Like all the others, Roberto was delighted to learn that Spinola had fallen ill of the plague, and pleased to see a group of Neapolitan deserters enter the city, abandoning in fear the hostile camp threatened by the disease, though he heard Padre Emanuele say that the arrivals could themselves become a source of contagion....
In mid-September, when the plague appeared in the city, Roberto still paid no attention, except to fear that La Novarese might fall ill. Then he woke one morning with a high fever. He managed to send someone to inform Padre Emanuele, and was secretly borne to his convent, avoiding one of those makeshift lazarettoes where the sick died without fuss so as not to distract the others engaged in dying of pyrotechnics.
Roberto did not think of death: he mistook his fever for love and dreamed of touching the flesh of La Novarese, while he rumpled the folds of his pallet or fondled the sweating, aching parts of his body.
In the grip of an exuberant memory, that evening on the Daph
ne, as night advanced, as the sky performed its slow motions, and the Southern Cross disappeared on the horizon, Roberto no longer knew whether he was burning with revived love for the warrior Diana of Casale or for the Lady equally far from his sight.
Yearning to know where she could have fled, he rushed into the cabinet of nautical instruments, where he seemed to recall there was a map of those seas. He found it: large, colored, and incomplete, as many maps then were incomplete out of necessity; the navigator, coming upon a new land, drew the shores he could see but left the rest unfinished, never knowing how and how much and whither that land extended. Hence the maps of the Pacific often seemed arabesques of beaches, hints of perimeters, hypotheses of volumes, and only the few circumnavigated islands were defined there, like the course of the winds learned from experience. Some cartographers, to make an island recognizable, simply drew with great precision the form of the peaks and the clouds hanging over them, to render them identifiable, as you might recognize a man by his hat brim or his halting gait.
Now, on this map, the outlines of the two facing shores were visible, divided by a channel running from south to north. One of the two shores, with irregular curves, practically defined an island, and it could be his Island; but beyond a broad stretch of sea there were other groups of presumed islands of very similar formation, which could equally represent the place where he was.
We would err if we thought that Roberto was gripped by a geographer's curiosity. Padre Emanuele had trained him only too well to reverse the visible through the lens of his Aristotelian telescope; and Saint-Savin had taught him too well to foment desire through language, which can turn a maiden into a swan or a swan into a maiden, the sun into a ladle or a ladle into the sun! Late in the night we find Roberto daydreaming over the map now transformed into the desired female body.