“Your Excellency exaggerates,” Giacomo replied without moving.
“Nonsense!” answered his guest with some force. “I will accept no false modesty, you have no right to assume it. You are a famous man, your arrival has touched people’s souls, and they announced your arrival to me the way they would have announced a guest performance of the Paris opera: you are here and people find an ironic delight in the fact. You arrived eight days ago, strapped for cash. News of your escape caught people’s imagination and set it alight. Even I was filled with curiosity to see you, and thought of contacting you the day you arrived, of giving you some sign. But then I hesitated. Why has he come here? I asked myself. Our agreement was final and binding, the agreement we made at the gates of Florence just before I gave your wounded body up to the surgeons, to the world. After all, I thought, he knows very well who I am, and that my orders are never revoked. I don’t have much faith in human oaths and promises: promises flow from human mouths more easily than spittle from a cow in season. But I do believe in actions, and, I argued, he knows that my words are as good as my deeds, and that I have promised to kill him if he once so much as looks at Francesca ever again. That’s what I said to myself in my heart, for the less time we have left to live the more we have to remember and recall. And now here he is! He knows he is risking his life. Why is he here? With what purpose? I asked myself. Is he still in love with the duchess? Did he ever love her? . . . It is not an easy question, not one he can answer, I told myself, because he knows nothing of love: he knows a great deal about other realms of experience, about feelings that resemble love; he knows the anxious, agonizing temptations of passion and desire, but about love he is perfectly ignorant. Francesca was never his. He knows it, I know it. There have been times down the years when I was extremely lonely, when I almost regretted the fact. Are you surprised? . . . I am surprised that you should be. There is a time of life, and I, through the ineffable wisdom of time and fate, have now arrived at that time, a time when everything—vanity, selfishness, false ambition, and false fear—drops away from us, and we want nothing but the truth, and would give anything for it. That is why I sometimes thought it was a pity she had never been yours. Because if Francesca had ever at any time been his, I reasoned, my vanity and selfishness would have suffered, and perhaps Francesca might have suffered, too, but he would have been miles away by now, nor would he ever have returned to Bolzano as his first stop from prison, and I could be certain that something that had begun a long time ago had come full circle in human terms and ended. Because what man learns in his dotage, the total sum of all he understands and learns, is that human affairs need to run their full course and cannot be terminated before they do so: the course cannot be left unfinished, because there is a kind of order in human affairs that people obey as they would a law, one from which there is no escape. Yes, my boy, it is far harder to escape from unfinished business than it is from a lead-roofed prison, even at night, even by rope! You cannot know this yet: your soul, your nervous system, and your mind are all different from mine. I don’t even care whether you believe me or not. All you need to know is that I promised that I would kill you if you ever returned and tried to gain access to us or if you so much as glanced at the duchess. Do you believe me when I say I am pleased to see you? Do you understand, wise counselor, who for the tinkle of a few gold coins dispenses advice all day long to the simpleminded and vulnerable, how, in view of all that has happened between us or, more precisely, not happened, given the news of your impending arrival, I was confirmed in my own belief that you have been drawn into the vicinity of our premises and lives involuntarily, without design or subterfuge, by a fateful attraction, in simple obedience to a law as fixed as the law that dictates the course of the moon about the earth, and that I am therefore delighted to find that your first instinct has brought you to Bolzano. Do you believe me when I say I am delighted? . . . Yes, Giacomo, it is a delight and relief to me that you are here. Can you understand that?”
“I don’t understand,” he replied, intrigued.
“I will do everything in my power to explain,” came the ready, courteous, slightly sinister response. “I was not being quite precise enough when I referred to my feeling as delight. This miraculous language of ours that the great lover, Dante, made potent with his kisses is occasionally clumsy when articulating ideas. Delight is a common word, with a commonplace ring: it suggests a man rubbing his hands and grinning. I did not in fact rub my hands on hearing of your arrival, and I certainly did not grin: my heart simply beat a little faster and I felt the blood accelerate through my veins in a way that distantly reminded me of delight, to which the feeling I am seeking to name is undoubtedly related, for the same deep well feeds all human emotions, whether these appear as stormy seas or gentle ripples on the surface. J’étais touché, might be the best way of putting it, to adapt a precise expression from fencing terminology, a terminology imbued with human feelings, for fencing is an analogous language that you will be as familiar with as I am. The fact is that something touched me and the expression struck me as an accurate one, one that you as a writer—for that is what I hear you are, according to the rumors spread round town by your accomplice and familiar—would certainly understand and approve. I should say that the notion of your being a writer—Bolzano is a small town where no human frailty can be hidden for long—pleasantly surprised me; I have never doubted you had some special vocation, and indeed believed that you had been entrusted with a kind of mission among your fellow human beings, but I must confess I had never, until now, associated you with this particular vocation or role; somehow I always imagined that you were the sort of person whose fate and character was part of life’s raw material, the sort of man who wrote in blood not ink. Because your true medium is indeed blood rather than ink, Giacomo; I trust you know that? . . .”
“Your Excellency is quick to judgment,” he haughtily replied. “Artists take time and pains to discover the material with which they most prefer to work.”
“Of course,” the duke answered with surprising readiness and almost too much enthusiasm. “Pardon me! What am I thinking! You see how age afflicts me! I had forgotten that the artist is merely the personal embodiment of the creative genius that drives him, that he cannot choose, for his genius will press a pen, a chisel, a brush, or even, occasionally, a sword into his hand, whether he will or no. You will be thinking that the great Buonarroti and the versatile Leonardo—products of our cities, like you—wielded pen, chisel, and brush in turn; and yes, Leonardo, with his remarkable and frightening sense of adventure, even employed a scalpel, so that under the cover of night he might edge a little closer to the hidden secrets of the human body, as well as designing brothels and fortresses; just as Buonarroti, that tetchy and monstrous demigod, scribbled sonnets and plastered domes, and, my dear Giacomo, what plastering, what domes! And he designed arches, funerary monuments, and in the meanwhile, because he had time to spare, he painted The Last Judgment! There’s an artist for you! The human spirit swells, the heart throbs, when it contemplates the enormous scope of such geniuses; ordinary people grow faint when faced with such far horizons. Is that what you mean, when you say you are a writer? I understand, I really do. I am delighted to recognize the fact, my boy, for it explains a great deal to me. We have a very high regard for writers where I come from, and you, in your fashion, are a fine example of the species, as indeed you told your secretary, who faithfully repeats and disseminates all you say; you are a writer who dips his pen, now in blood, now in ink, though for the time being, to judge by your completed works, the uninitiated observer would be inclined to the opinion that so far you have written them entirely in blood, at the point of a dagger! Don’t deny it! Who is in a better position to understand this than I, who have written several bloody masterpieces with my ancestral sword? The last time, when we faced each other with swords in our hands, we must have been engaged in an as yet unwritten but perfect dialogue, a dialogue that, at that particular moonlit moment, we
considered finished, with its own full stop or period to mark the end. But now I understand that you truly are a writer,” he declared with the same ambiguous air of satisfaction, “a writer who travels the world collecting material for his books!” He nodded vigorously in enthusiastic approval, his eyes shining with rapture. He was like an old man in his second childhood finally comprehending a complex web of relationships: it was as if he fully believed that the person he had sought out was indeed a writer and that the belief filled him with astonishment and delight. “So now you are coming to an end of your years of wandering! Vital years they are, too, ah yes . . . there was a time when I myself . . . but of course I have no right to compare myself to you, because I have composed no great work, no, not even in my own fashion: my work was my life and nothing more, a life that I had to live according to rules, customs, and laws, and in that enterprise, alas, I fear I have almost succeeded. Almost, I said, dear boy, and I beg you not to split hairs in your desire for exactitude, for I too have learned enough to know that we should be as precise in our use of words as possible if we want them to be of any value or help in life. Almost, I said, for you see, I, who am not a writer, find every expression difficult and am simultaneously aware of both my difficulty and of my inability to solve it. Indeed, there is nothing more difficult than expressing oneself without ambiguity, especially when the speaker knows that his words are absolute, that behind each sentence stands the specter of death. And I really do mean death, you know, yours or mine,” he added, his voice quiet and calm.
Receiving no answer, he stared at the scarlet and black embers in the fire, his head tipped to one side, gently wagging, as if he were dreaming and remembering at once.
“I am not threatening you, Giacomo,” he started again in a slightly deeper voice, but still very friendly in manner. “We are no longer at the stage when threats are appropriate. It’s just that I would like you to understand me. That is why I used the word, ‘almost.’ It was death I was talking about, pure and simple, nor was it my aim merely to admire the formal beauty of a frequently discussed philosophical concept while exploring its darker significance. The death I am talking about is direct and personal, a death that is timely and fully to be expected should we be unable to come to some agreement in an ingenious, wholly human way. For, you see, I no longer feel like fighting, if only for the simple reason that fighting never solves anything. We discover everything too late. Assaulting someone is not a conclusive way of ending any business, and defending oneself only settles things if our defense is just and reasonable: in other words, we must employ not just arms and fury, however delightful the exercise of both may be, but the wiser, leveling power of the active intellect. How old are you now? Forty next birthday . . . ? It’s a good age for a writer. Yes, Giacomo, it’s the time of one’s life, and I can remember that time without envy, for it is not true to say that the more quickly life vanishes the more we thirst for what is gone—though the time is indeed gone, isn’t it? Do help me out if I express myself inadequately: you are after all a writer! Have we in fact lost what we had before? Are we in danger of suffering what those people who are prey to easy and false sentiments label, wholly imprecisely, ‘loss,’ meaning loss of youth, youth that bounds away from us into the distance like a hare in the meadow, and loss of manhood, manhood over which one day the sun begins to set, in other words the loss of the time we have enjoyed, the time in which we acted, that we once owned as we own objects, as a form of personal property? No, the time that is gone is a self-contained reality and there’s no reason to bewail its passing; it is only the future that I view with anxiety, with a certain intensity that may be appropriate to regret; yes, the future, however strange and comical it may seem at my time of life. As to lost time, I have no wish to recover it: that time is well-stocked and complete in itself. I do not mourn for my youth, which was full of false perceptions and fancy words, with all those touching, tender, lofty, confused, patchy, and immature errors of heart and mind. I view with equal satisfaction the vanished gilded landscape of my adult self. I have no desire to reclaim anything of the past. There is nothing as dangerous as false, unconscious self-pity, the wellspring of all man’s misery, sickness, and ignorance: self-pity is the common well of all human distress. What has happened has happened, nor is it lost, preserved as it is by the miraculous rituals of life itself, which are more complex than those dreamed up by the early priests and more mysterious than the activities of contemporary entomologists who preserve the organs of the dead for posterity. As far as I am concerned the past has its own life and it stinks of power and plenty. I am interested in the future, my boy,” he repeated very loudly, almost shouting. “Being a writer, you should understand that.”
He clearly required no answer. And there was no mockery in his voice when he stubbornly repeated the word “writer.” With great sympathy he described the exiled writer who must now be reaching the end of his wanderings, having gathered material—such as his adventures here in Bolzano, where the duke of Parma lived with his duchess for example—material that he would, one day, use for his books; he spoke as if he fully and enthusiastically approved the writer’s calling and the manner of behavior it entailed, as if he were addressing a fellow reveler at a masked ball with a courteous wink, as if to say: “I have recognized you, but I won’t tell. Keep talking.” But his host remained silent: it was only the visitor that spoke. After a short silence, he continued:
“The future concerns me, because my life isn’t quite over yet. It is not just writers like yourself who like a story to be properly finished, the world, too, likes it that way: it is only human nature that both writer and reader should demand that a tale should reach a genuine conclusion and end appropriately, according to the rules of the craft and in line with the soul’s inner imperatives. We want the well-placed period, the full stop, all t’s crossed and all i’s dotted. That’s how it has to be. That is why I repeat the word ‘almost’ once more, thinking it might be of some help in bringing our mutual history to a conclusion. Something remains to say, something to settle, before the story can end, though it is only one story among many hundreds of millions of such human stories, a story so common that, should you ever get to write your book, having collected enough material for it, you might even leave it out. But for the two, or should I say three, of us, it is of overwhelming importance, more important than any previous story composed either with pen or sword; to us it is more important than the visit the great poet of heaven once made to hell. And we must conclude it here on earth, because for us it is more interesting than either heaven or hell. Whatever may yet happen to round off the sentence and allow us to dot our i’s and cross our t’s; whatever arranging and winding-up of our affairs is required to conclude the history of the two, or rather, the three, of us, and whether that arrangement turns out to be somber and funereal or cheerful and sensible, depends on you alone, you the writer. You can see that I am visiting you at a bad time of life, when I am plagued by gout, when, by the time evening comes round, I prefer to remain in my room with my old habits and a warm fire to console me. Nor would I have come now if I did not have to, for believe me, as we enter our dotage, our bones creaking with age, our spirits exhausted by wicked words and harsh experience, our sense of time grows keener and we develop an intelligent, economical orderliness of manner, a kind of perceptiveness or sensitivity that tells us how long to wait and when, alas, to act. I have come because the time is right. I have come at the hour when everyone in the house is preparing for festivities, when the servants are setting the tables, the orchestra is tuning up, the guests are trying on their masks, and everything is being done properly, according to the rules of the game that brings a certain delight to living, and it certainly delights me, for there is nothing I like more than observing the idiotic and chaotic rout from my corner, wearing my mask. I shall have to start home to get changed soon. Would you like to see my mask, Giacomo? . . . If you come along tonight—as I hope you will, please take these words as a belated invitati
on—you will certainly know me by my mask, which will be the only one of its sort there, though the idea itself is admittedly unoriginal, something I borrowed from a book, a verse play written not in our sweet familiar tongue but in the language used by our ruder, more powerful northern cousins, the English. I discovered the book a year ago when visiting the library of my royal cousin in Marly, and I must admit the story fascinated me, though I have forgotten the author’s name; all I know is that he was a comedian and buffoon a while ago in London, in the land of our distant, provincial cousin, that ugly, half-man, half-witch, Elizabeth. The long and short of it is that I shall be wearing an ass’s head tonight and you will recognize me by it if you come and keep your eyes peeled. You probably know that in the play it is one of the main characters who wears the ass’s head, he whom the heroine clutches to her bosom, she being a certain Titania, the queen of youth, and that she does so with the blind unseeing passion that is the very essence of love. That is why I shall wear the donkey’s head tonight—and perhaps for another reason, too, because I want to be anonymous in my mask and hear the world laugh at me; I want to hear, for the first time in my life, through donkey’s ears, the laughter of the world in its fancy dress, in my own palazzo, at the climax of my life, before we finish the sentence and dot the i. There will be quite a noise don’t you think?” He was talking loudly now, politely, but with razor-sharp edge to his voice: it was like the clashing of swords after the first few strokes in a duel. “I really do want to hear them laughing at me, at the man with the ass’s head, in my own palace. Why? because the time is ripe: the hour, Giacomo, has finally arrived, not a moment too soon, at its own pace and in its own good time, at the point when I could bring myself to knock at your door, at the point when I am ready to put on the ass’s head that befits a lover like me, the ass’s head I shall wear tonight because, in my situation, if I must go as an animal, this is the most congenial and the least ridiculous such creature, bearing in mind that it is entirely possible that come the morning I might be wearing something else, the horns of the stag for example, in accordance with a humorously mocking popular expression I have never entirely understood. Really, why is it that cheated, unloved husbands are thought to be horned? . . . Do you think you, as a linguist and writer, might be able to explain that to me?”