Pleasure Read online

  He intended to conceive a form of modern Poem, this unattainable dream of many poets; and he intended to compose a lyric that was truly modern in content but adorned with all the ancient elegance, profound and limpid, passionate and pure, strong and seemly. Moreover, he longed to compile a book of art on the Primitives, the artists who foreran the Renaissance, and a book of psychological and literary analysis on the poets of the thirteenth century who were mostly unknown.

  He would have liked to write a third book on Bernini, a great study of decadence, assembling around this extraordinary man, the favorite of six popes, not only all the art but also all the life of his century. For each of such works, naturally, many months, much research, much labor, a great intensity of ingenuity, a vast ability for coordination would be required.

  As far as design was concerned, he intended to illustrate with etchings the third and fourth Days of the Decameron, taking as example the “Story of Nastagio degli Onesti,”9 in which Sandro Botticelli displays so much refinement of taste in the skill of grouping and expression. Furthermore, he aspired to create a series of Dreams, Whims, Grotesques, Customs, Fables, Allegories, Fantasies, in the loose style of Callot, but with a very different sentiment and a very different style, in order to abandon himself freely to all his predilections, all his imaginings, all his most intense curiosities and wildest temerities as a designer.

  On September 15, a Wednesday, the new guest arrived.

  The marchioness went together with her firstborn son, Ferdinando, and Andrea to meet her friend at the nearby station of Rovigliano. As the phaeton descended the road shaded by tall poplars, the marchioness spoke of her friend to Andrea with much benevolence.

  —I think you will like her, she concluded.

  Then she began to laugh, as if at some thought that had suddenly crossed her mind.

  —Why are you laughing? Andrea asked her.

  —About an analogy.

  —Which?

  —Guess.

  —I don’t know.

  —This is it: I was thinking about another announcement about an introduction and another introduction that I made for you, almost two years ago, linking it with a cheerful prophecy. Do you remember?

  —Ah!

  —I’m laughing because this time, too, we’re dealing with an unknown lady and again this time, I am . . . the involuntary patroness.

  —Oh dear!

  —But it’s a different case, or at least, the character of the possible drama is different.

  —Namely?

  —Maria is a turris eburnea.10

  —I am now a vas spirituale.11

  —Fancy! I had forgotten that you had finally found Truth and the Way. “The soul smiles on its dear ones who are distant . . .”

  —Are you reciting my verses?

  —I know them by heart.

  —How sweet!

  —Besides, dear cousin, that “very pale woman” with the Host in her hand seems suspect to me. She seems to be completely fictitious, a bodiless stole, at the mercy of any angel or demon’s soul who’d like to enter it, to administer communion to you and make “the sign that consents.”

  —Sacrilege! Sacrilege!

  —Watch out for yourself, and guard the stole well, and do a lot of exorcisms . . . I’m falling back into prophecies! Really, prophecies are one of my weaknesses.

  —We’re there, cousin.

  They were both laughing. They entered the station with only a few minutes to spare until the arrival of the train. The twelve-year-old Ferdinando, a sickly young boy, carried a bouquet of roses to present to Donna Maria. Andrea, after that dialogue, felt cheerful, light, very vivacious, almost as if he had suddenly returned to his former life of frivolity and fatuity: it was an inexplicable sensation. It seemed to him that something like a feminine whiff, an undefined temptation, was passing through his spirit. He selected a tea rose from Ferdinando’s bouquet and put it in his buttonhole; he glanced rapidly at his summer clothing; he looked complacently at his well-cared-for hands, which had become thinner and whiter with his illness. He did all this without reflection, almost as if an instinct of vanity had suddenly reawoken in him.

  —Here’s the train, Ferdinando said.

  The marchioness went forward to welcome her guest, who was already at the window and was waving and nodding, her head all wrapped in a great veil the color of pearls, which half covered her black straw hat.

  —Francesca! Francesca! she was calling, with a tender effusion of joy.

  That voice made a singular impression on Andrea; it vaguely reminded him of a voice he knew. Which?

  Donna Maria descended with a rapid and agile movement; and with a gesture full of grace she lifted the dense veil, uncovering her mouth to kiss her friend. Immediately, that tall and supple lady beneath her traveling cloak, veiled so that he could see nothing of her but her mouth and her chin, was profoundly seductive for Andrea. His entire being, which had been deceived in the past few days by an appearance of freedom, was ready to take in the allure of the “eternal feminine.” No sooner were they agitated by a woman’s breath, the ashes gave off sparks.

  —Maria, I present my cousin, Count Andrea Sperelli-Fieschi of Ugenta.

  Andrea bowed. The lady’s mouth opened in a smile that seemed mysterious, since the shine of her veil hid the rest of her face.

  Next, the marchioness introduced Andrea to Don Manuel Ferres y Capdevila. Then she said, stroking the hair of the little girl who was gazing at the young man with two sweet astonished eyes:

  —This is Delfina.

  In the phaeton, Andrea sat facing Donna Maria and alongside her husband. She had not yet removed her veil; she held Ferdinando’s bouquet on her lap and every now and then brought it to her nose, while answering the marchioness’s questions. Andrea had not been mistaken: in her voice could be heard some accents of Elena Muti’s voice, perfectly alike. A strange impatience invaded him to see her hidden face, the expression, the color.

  —Manuel—she said, continuing to talk—will leave on Friday. Then he’ll come back to fetch me later on.

  —Much later, we hope, Donna Francesca said cordially. —Indeed, the best thing to do would be to leave all on the same day. We will stay at Schifanoja until the first of November, no later.

  —If Mother weren’t waiting for me, I would happily stay with you. But I promised to be in Siena at all costs by the seventeenth of October, which is Delfina’s birthday.

  —What a pity! The twentieth of October is the feast day of gifts at Rovigliano, so beautiful and unusual.

  —What can I do? If I don’t go, Mother will surely be terribly upset. Delfina is her darling . . .

  Her husband remained silent: he was likely taciturn by nature. Of medium height, slightly obese, slightly bald, he had skin of a peculiar color, of a pallor somewhere between greenish and purplish, against which the white of his eyes, in the movements he made as he looked around, shone like that of an enamel eye in certain ancient bronze heads. His mustaches, black, stiff, and trimmed as evenly as a brush, shadowed a severe sardonic mouth. He seemed to be a man completely irrigated with bile. He was possibly forty years old or slightly more. In his person there was something hybrid and shifty, which did not escape an observer; it was that indefinable aspect of debauchery which is borne in generations stemming from a mixture of bastardized races, proliferating amid turbulence.

  —Look, Delfina, the orange trees are all in blossom! exclaimed Donna Maria, extending her hand from the window, as they passed, to grab a twig.

  The road indeed ascended amid two citrus woods near Schifanoja. The trees were so high that they created shade. A sea breeze blew softly and sighed in the shade, laden with a scent that one could almost drink in, like cooling water.

  Delfina had gotten onto her knees on the seat and was leaning out of the carriage to grab the branches. Her mother wrapped an arm
around her to support her.

  —Careful! Careful! You could fall. Wait until I take my veil off, she said. —Sorry, Francesca; help me.

  And she leaned her head toward her friend so that her veil could be disentangled from her hat. In doing so, the bouquet of roses fell to her feet. Andrea was ready to pick it up; and, sitting back up again, he finally saw the entire face of the lady, uncovered.

  —Thank you, she said.

  She had an oval face, perhaps slightly too elongated, but with only a hint of that aristocratic elongation overemphasized by fifteenth-century artists in search of elegance. In her delicate features there was that subtle expression of suffering and fatigue which constitutes the human enchantment of the Virgins in the Florentine tondos of Cosimo’s era. A soft, tender shadow, similar to the fusion of two diaphanous tints, of an ideal violet and blue, encircled her eyes, which had the tawny irises of dark angels. Her hair encumbered her forehead and temples like a heavy crown; it was gathered and twisted on her nape. The locks in front had the density and form of those that cover, like a helmet, the head of the Antinous Farnese. Nothing surpassed the grace of her refined head, which appeared to be afflicted by the great mass, like a divine punishment.

  —My God! she exclaimed, trying to lift the weight of the braids bound together below the straw hat. —My entire head is as painful as if I had been hung by the hair for an hour. I can’t go for very long without undoing it; it tires me out too much. It’s an enslavement.

  —Do you remember—asked Donna Francesca—in the conservatory, when so many of us wanted to brush your hair? There were such great arguments every day. Just imagine, Andrea, that even blood was drawn! Ah, I will never forget the scene between Carlotta Fiordelise and Gabriella Vanni. It was a craze. To brush the hair of Maria Bandinelli was the aspiration of all the boarders, big and little. The contagion spread throughout the conservatory; prohibitions, penalties, even threats of tonsure were imposed. Do you remember, Maria? All our hearts were bound by that beautiful black snake that hung down to your heels. How much desperate crying went on, at night! And when Gabriella Vanni, out of jealousy, gave you a treacherous snip of the scissors! Gabriella really lost her head! Do you remember?

  Donna Maria was smiling, a particular smile, melancholic and almost bewitched, like that of a person dreaming. In her half-closed mouth, her upper lip emerged slightly over the lower one, but so slightly that it was barely perceptible, and the corners twisted down in pain and in their gentle hollow they held a shadow. These things formed an expression of sorrow and goodness, but tempered by that pride which reveals the moral elevation of those who have suffered greatly and have known how to suffer.

  Andrea thought that in none of his lady friends had he possessed such tresses, such a vast and somber forest, in which one could lose oneself. The story of all those girls in love with a braid, fired up with passion and jealousy, in a frenzy to place the comb and their fingers within the living treasure, seemed to him a gentle and poetic episode of cloistral life; and the girl with flowing hair lit up gracefully in his imagination like the heroine of a fable, like the heroine of a Christian legend describing the girlhood of a saint, destined to martyrdom and future glorification. At the same time, an illusion of art arose in his soul. How much richness and variety of lines that voluble and divisible mass of hair could bring to the design of a female figure!

  It was not truly black. He was looking at it the next day at table, at the point where the glint of the sun struck it. It had reflections of dark purple, those reflections that have the hue of logwood or even sometimes of steel tested by fire or even a certain type of polished rosewood; and it seemed dry, so that even in its compactness the strands remained separated from one another, penetrated by air, almost breathing. The three luminous and melodious epithets by Alcaeus were naturally destined for Donna Maria: “ . . .”12 She spoke with refinement, displaying a delicate spirit inclined toward things of intelligence, toward rarity of taste, toward aesthetic pleasure. She was a woman of abundant and varied learning, with an extensive imagination, the colorful speech of those who have seen many countries, lived in diverse climates, met different people. And Andrea felt an exotic aura envelop her form, felt a strange seduction emanating from her, an enchantment composed of the vague phantasms of the distant things she had looked at, of the sights she still preserved in her mind’s eye, in the memories that filled her soul. And it was an indefinable, inexpressible enchantment; it was as if she carried in her person a trace of the light in which she had been immersed, of the scents she had breathed, of the idioms she had heard; it was as if she carried within her, mingled, faded, indistinct, all the magic of those lands of the sun.

  In the evening, in the large hall that led into the vestibule, she approached the piano and opened it to test it, saying:

  —Do you still play, Francesca?

  —Oh no, replied the marchioness. —I stopped studying many years ago. I think that simply listening is a preferable pleasure. However, I do fancy myself as protecting the art; and in winter at my house, I always preside over a little good music. Don’t I, Andrea?

  —My cousin is terribly modest, Donna Maria. She’s something more than a patroness; she is a restorer of good taste. This very year, in February, at her house, she organized the performance of two quintets, a quartet, and a trio by Boccherini, and a quartet by Cherubini: music almost completely forgotten, but admirable and ever young. Boccherini’s adagio and minuets are of an exquisite freshness; only the finales seem to me to be slightly stale. You, certainly, know something about him . . .

  —I remember having heard a quintet four or five years ago, at the Brussels Conservatory; and it seemed magnificent to me, and also very innovative, full of unexpected episodes. I remember well that in some parts, the quintet, through the utilization of unison, was reduced to a duet; but the effects obtained with the difference of timbres were of the most extraordinary refinement. I have never found anything similar in the other instrumental compositions.

  She spoke of music with the subtlety of a connoisseur; and in expressing the sentiment that a particular composition or the entire art of a particular maestro aroused in her, she used inspired terms and bold images.

  —I have performed and listened to a great deal of music, she said. —And of every symphony, every sonata, every nocturne, of every single piece, in sum, I retain a visible image, an impression of form and color, a figure, a group of figures, a landscape; so much so that all my favorite pieces bear a name, according to the image. I have, for example, the Sonata of Priam’s Forty Daughters-in-law, the Nocturne of Sleeping Beauty, the Gavotte of the Yellow Ladies, the Gigue of the Mill, the Prelude of the Water Droplet, and so on.

  She began to laugh, a soft laugh that on that afflicted mouth had an inexpressible grace and was as surprising as an unexpected flash of lightning.

  —Do you remember, Francesca, at boarding school, how many comments in the margins we afflicted upon the music of that poor Chopin, of our divine Frederick? You were my accomplice. One day we changed all Schumann’s titles, with grave discussions; and all the titles had a long explanatory note. I still keep all those papers as a reminder. Now, when I play the Myrthen and the Albumblätter again, all those mysterious significations are incomprehensible to me; the emotion and the vision are very different; and it is a subtle pleasure, now, to be able to compare the present sentiment with the past one, the new image with the old. It is a pleasure similar to what one feels when one reads one’s own journal; but it is perhaps more melancholy and more intense. The journal, generally, is the description of real events, the chronicle of happy days and sad days, the gray or rosy trace left by fleeting life; while the notes made in the margin of a book of music in one’s youth are the fragments of the secret poem of a soul that is opening, they are the lyrical effusions of our intact ideality, they are the story of our dreams. What language! What words! Do you remember, Francesca?

  She spo
ke with complete assurance, perhaps with a slight spiritual exaltation, like a woman who, having long been oppressed by the forced frequenting of inferior people or by a vulgar scene, has an irresistible need to open her intellect and her heart to a breath of higher life. Andrea listened to her, feeling a sweet sentiment for her that resembled gratitude. It seemed to him that she, talking of such things to him and with him, was granting him a kindly proof of benevolence and almost that she was permitting him to draw closer. He believed that he could glimpse the edges of that internal life not so much from the meaning of the words she was saying as from the sounds and modulations of her voice. Again, he recognized the accents of the other.

  It was an ambiguous voice, one could almost say bisexual, twofold, androgynous; with two timbres. The male timbre, low and slightly veiled, softened, became clearer, became effeminate at times with such harmonious passages that the listener’s ear was surprised and delighted by it at the same time, and perplexed. Just as when music passes from a minor tone to a major tone, or when music that has been formed of painful dissonances returns, after many beats, to a key tone, so, too, did that voice make its changes at intervals. The feminine timbre was the one that recalled the other.

  And the phenomenon was so notable that it was enough to occupy the listener’s mind independently of the sense of the words. These, however much they acquire in musical value from a rhythm or a modulation, so much do they lose in symbolic value. The mind, indeed, after a few minutes of attention, yielded to the mysterious charm; and remained suspended, waiting and desiring the sweet cadence as it would a melody wrought from an instrument.

  —Do you sing? Andrea asked the lady, almost shyly.

  —A little, she replied.

  —Sing, a little, Donna Francesca begged her.