Stone Virgin Page 13

  It was Ziani’s custom, every morning before resuming, to reread attentively what he had written the day before, in order to make stylistic improvements. This morning, while reading the previous day’s stint, he fell prey to very considerable disquietude concerning Francesca’s ‘hatred’ for him. All these years he had thought of this as a complacent exaggeration on Boccadoro’s part, understandable and natural at a time when the old man himself was being deprived of sexual favours. But suppose the lady had really said it? He had never asked her, as far as he could remember. If she had indeed said this, disturbing reinterpretations of the whole affair became necessary, since it could only have been meant as a signal. As an expression of true feeling, it was too excessive, on such slight grounds. Then she had wanted him to understand something by it. And how could it be understood but as an expression of interest, a kind of encouragement, something that invited a response? But that would mean … Ziani fell to stroking his jaws rapidly and repeatedly, in consternation. That would mean she had made the first move, fired the first shot. He, Ziani, master strategist, expert at plotting that route which led, deviously at first, afterwards straight and clear between the lady’s legs, had been all the time her dupe, instrumental to her purposes: she had led him by the prick … It was an appalling thought, a true monster of the mind, needing to be smothered at once, before its infant lungs became too raucous. He thought of summoning Battistella, but his servant’s responses were unreliable these days: not only did he argue on matters of literary theory, but he could not always be trusted to corroborate the past. No, he would have to wrestle with this demon alone. Adopting his usual discipline, Ziani closed his eyes and took a series of deep breaths. The thought did not quite go away but he began to feel calmer. After some minutes of this he was able to take up his pen and begin again:

  The first test, and the most crucial, was whether Francesca would agree to grant me audience. If she was as unbiddable as he said, she was capable of disobeying his express wishes; but I did not think this was likely. In fact I expected a summons through Maria; and whenever in our goings about the house our paths crossed, Maria’s and mine, I waited for some sign. However, there was none. She looked boldly at me, made a sketch of a curtsey, and that was all. This Maria was a beauty in her way and I will confess that had I not been set on the mistress I would have been strongly tempted to assay the maid. Moreover she was ripe for it; I detected invitation in her regard; all men of the world will know what I mean when I say she had breasts that seemed impatient of her bodice. Some few trinkets would have clinched it, something for her trousseau.

  When the moment came it was the lady herself who spoke, and in a way that seemed unstudied – though naturally she would not have wished it to be thought rehearsed. I was crossing the courtyard on my way to the library, which was on the first floor of the house, when Francesca came in from the garden. We met in the middle, at the well-head carved with lions’ heads, where I had stood that first morning and watched her descend the stairs. She greeted me and seemed to hesitate; my instinct told me to stop; she stopped too; talk between us thus became inevitable.

  ‘I see that you are busy,’ she said: I had papers in my hand.

  ‘Not at all,’ I said – how promptly may be imagined. ‘Not if you wish to speak to me, noble lady. What could count beside that?’

  She paused a moment, still regarding me, though without much kindness. Then she spoke again, but now as though addressing the mild lions on the well-head. ‘It is not so much that I wish to speak to him,’ she told the lions, who seemed quite to understand. ‘I would not aspire so far,’ she said. ‘Only to look at him, to observe at close quarters this faithful steward, this persona esemplare.’

  ‘Persona esemplare?’ I frowned, as if puzzled. This was a critical moment.

  ‘Such a … paragon,’ she said, still to the lions, but there was a slight breathlessness now which betrayed her. As is universally acknowledged, women are frail and tender vessels, their containing walls are more porous, feeling finds its way to the surface less resistibly than with us, whose casing is tougher. So it was now with Francesca, in that catch of the breath, a slight, the slightest, quiver of the lip. (This tendency of theirs to self-betrayal is of great advantage to us, second only to their innate credulity.) However, I was not sure yet of the precise nature of her emotion.

  ‘That sounds like a character in a play,’ I said. ‘A new type for the commedia dell’arte perhaps? A character who does nothing but moralize, and of course always at the wrong time. No, my name is Sigismondo.’

  It was effective. It made her look at me, and abandon this absurd pretence of conversing with lions. It was important to dispel any sense on her part that she was mistress speaking to servant. We had both been bought by Boccadoro; I would not have her thinking she was higher placed; victory is not victory if achieved by self-demeaning. Besides, my whole strategy was based on her being brought to see the natural alliance between us, against jumped-up Boccadoro. After all, we were both scudati, fallen ones. I planned to prevail on her virtue by exacerbating her desire for revenge. This had further advantages: when the citadel fell, I would have no mere compliant lump on my hands, gates flung open and nothing more to do, but a creature energetic, eager, inventive, shameless, seeing in my felicity her more exquisite vindication. Such at least was the plan. The reader will judge for himself how far I succeeded.

  ‘You must be confusing me with someone else,’ I said.

  I saw the slightest of frowns trouble her brow – a deliberate frown: she was like a child, wanting to show the adults she was puzzled. Then her face was smooth again and she wore the mask of youth, which is of all masks the strangest. ‘My husband continually sings your praises,’ she said.

  ‘Then perhaps,’ I said ‘it is he, your esteemed husband, who is confusing matters.’

  Now indeed I was on the brink. In what other game are the greatest risks taken at the beginning? I was about to reveal myself as a persona far from esemplare. If I had miscalculated in some way, misjudged her relations with Boccadoro, she would be prompt to make me suffer for it. With what haste she would repair to him, point out his faulty judgement, as all good wives so love to do! We were still standing in the same place, looking sometimes at each other, sometimes at the well-head, sometimes at the walls. It was she who moved first, turning towards the door of the small salon that led off the courtyard, but turning leisurely so that I was sure to be included. She passed into the room immediately and advanced towards the casement at the far end. Obviously I was intended to follow and I did so. We stood together in the embrasure, looking out towards the garden. We were in the full light and our faces were clear to each other as we talked. It was the first time we had been alone in a room together, and I wondered if she felt constraint. Nothing showed on that mask of her eighteen-year-old face.

  ‘It is not only as a cataloguer of books that he praises you,’ she said, ‘but in all other respects too. He talks about you constantly. It is very tedious to listen to. Sometimes he compares you to Cato, sometimes to Cicero. Sometimes, in his enthusiasm, he compares you to a person called Catero.’

  ‘A noted sage,’ I said, and she smiled. Her smile was very beautiful. Once having seen it, a man would cast about for things to say to bring it back. Next moment, however, a look of annoyance came to her face and she gestured towards the garden. I glanced through the window and there, not many yards away, was the hulking form of Bobbino, Boccadoro’s manservant, lounging insolently in full view, kicking at the gravel path. ‘My husband instructs him to wait within call,’ she said. ‘For my convenience, of course. I say that I have Maria, but that makes no difference. That is why I came to stand here at the window so at least we would be spared the sight of his pig’s face peering in.’

  My heart exulted: she was confiding in me. ‘Shall I send the oaf away?’ I said. ‘Let me kick him round the garden.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘thank you,’ and she smiled again, though not by my intenti
on this time – perhaps because Bobbino was so big. ‘Never mind him,’ she said. ‘My husband seems to think you could be a kind of tutor to me.’

  A kind of tutor I could be indeed, I thought. My eyes perhaps betrayed me, because her own expression changed and her chin lifted slightly, in a sort of defiance.

  It was this, the sense that she had seen my desire, that brought me out from cover completely, made me throw myself on her good will. ‘I don’t know where he can have got that idea,’ I said. ‘Perhaps it was at the theatre.’

  This was said at random. The truth is that I was flustered. She had seen unregenerate Adam peeping out through my eyes; and I had been excited by the defiant quality of her response. Otherwise I would not have been so disrespectful of him. But at the back of my mind there still lingered thoughts of the Commedia, and how Boccadoro resembled Pantalone – it must be remembered that the old comedy with its stock characters and improvised dialogue still ruled supreme in the Venice of those days. This was fifty years ago, before the rise of Goldoni – he was just beginning.

  However, that one word, uttered as I say too hastily, did more for my cause, I think, than a hundred prepared phrases might have done. (Perhaps, as I think now, it was inspiration, the kind of ‘accident’ that happens only to talented persons.)

  ‘Theatre?’ she said. For some moments her face remained set in its impervious cast of youth. Then she broke into a different kind of smile, one of contempt, for Boccadoro, for me. ‘Theatre? He never goes to the theatre. What would he do in a theatre? And he does not want me to go, because it is a bad influence, so he says. For that matter he never goes to the Ridotto, either, not he, he would not risk a florin at the tables. So naturally I do not go. He does not rent an apartment, or even share the rent of one, which is often done nowadays, for meetings and conversations among friends.’

  Here was a catalogue of troubles indeed. ‘I am extremely sorry to hear this,’ I said. ‘It is medieval. It has a flavour of barbarity about it.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘four months married and I go out less now than when I lived at home with my brothers. I thought at least I would have had more freedom, but it has happened the other way. No wonder –’

  She stopped short on this and I did not press her. ‘Well, then,’ I said, ‘you should choose a cicisbeo to escort you, if he will not go. That is common enough. There are many who would undertake it gladly, asking for nothing in return but the pleasure of your company.’

  ‘My husband does not believe this she said, and she lowered her eyes. ‘Then there is this creature Bobbino’ she added after a moment, following some train of thought of her own.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘a kind of tutor I could be to you, if you consent.’

  ‘Oh indeed?’ she said, very coldly. And what kind is that?’

  ‘The kind who talks about the theatre, I said, and without giving her any time to reply, I began in fact to talk about the theatre, which I had known well in the years before I left for Rome, the quarrels and the cliques, the great Arlecchino, Sacchi, who was later to become so successful as a manager, the love-affairs of Carlo Gozzi and the comedienne Teodora Ricci, Goldoni’s Momolo Cortesan, which had run for three weeks at the San Samuele theatre, and which had a written part for the protagonist. Goldoni himself was naive, strangely so for one who created so many rogues on stage: I made Francesca laugh when I told her the story of how a trickster, dressed up as a monk, had succeeded in selling him a lace from the Blessed Virgin’s corset.

  I spoke mainly of things as they had been five years before, but that made no difference to Francesca. She attended eagerly to my every word. Looking at her absorbed face, seeing the laughter rising to it, I knew that my campaign was well and truly launched.

  Ziani stopped to reach for his snuffbox. He was pleased with his delineation of this last scene. It had pace and profundity and penetration. How she had hung upon his words! And how adroit he had been, how quick to see the matter that would interest her! As often happened in moments of self-congratulation, he sniffed too vigorously and the coarse rappee made his eyes water and smart.

  His window was open slightly, as the morning was warm, and he could hear the men working on the restoration of San Samuele – they were driving in new piles to replace those of the original foundation. Battistella, who crept around Venice like a feeble ant, in his borrowed robes, gleaning gossip along with the groceries, Battistella had seen the old piles, the ones they had taken out; they were of larch and they were seven hundred years old. Fast in the clay for seven hundred years! Black as carbon but still strong. The men were singing the ‘Bandiera Bianca’, a song almost as old. The words came to him, barely distinguishable, punctuated by the rhythms of the work:

  contro il gran turcho – bandiera bianca

  che l’enemico – segno di pace

  It was not the Turk who was the enemy now, he reflected. The enemy was nearer home – vultures more local, getting the whiff of the Republic’s decay. Revolutionary France, the Austria of the Habsburgs, an unholy league of liberty and tyranny would destroy Venice, who had kept these twin monsters in balance for so long – longer than those stakes had been bedded in the silt of the Lagoon …

  He reached for the handbell and gave a prolonged summons. While he waited his thoughts returned with fretful obsessiveness to that room in Boccadoro’s house, the two of them there by the window. Already his triumph had been eaten away by a return of nightmare doubts. She it was who had made the first move, she who had contrived the meeting, she who had directed and controlled the course of the conversation. All his theatre talk had only been floundering, improvising – he was the one who belonged in the commedia.

  With mechanical curses he rang the bell again. Why was it only then that he had begun to be conscious of desire for her? A month in the house and he had not thought of her particularly in that way. Desire had followed his will: that was why his memories of her had this painful tension. Until he had possessed her there could be no room for tenderness, he had been too afraid of failing.

  ‘You will not hear the trumpets,’ he said, when Battistella finally appeared. ‘You will come crawling late on the Day of Judgement.’

  Battistella stood surveying him, breathing noisily. He was still in his pink coat, despite the warmth of the day, and his wig was as usual askew.

  ‘What is for luncheon?’ Ziani asked.

  ‘There is a good rice pudding.’

  ‘Rice pudding, rice pudding,’ Ziani said, with customary pleasurable sharpness. ‘And how is it made, this rice pudding?’

  ‘It is made with honey.’ Knowing how it pleased his master to protract these conversations, Battistella never revealed all the details at once.

  ‘And?’

  ‘It is cooked in milk of almonds.’

  ‘I am thinking seriously of raising your wages,’ Ziani said. ‘You may as well know that. And you may keep that coat, you may have it. This morning I have been describing my first tête-à-tête with Donna Francesca. I have managed it well, that colloquy, extremely well. Consummately. I have brought it home to the reader. The way I engaged her sympathies was brilliant. I have been wondering whence the initial agitation came, and it occurs to me now that she was aware of my loaded cannon right from the very commencement, she felt the danger. I was mesmeric to women in those days.’

  Ziani reached for his snuffbox. ‘It was a burden in some ways,’ he said. ‘One had to –’

  ‘No, sir,’ Battistella said suddenly. ‘It did not lie there.’

  Ziani’s hand jumped and he spilt his snuff. ‘What do you mean?’ he said, staring.

  ‘Begging your pardon, sir, she had no one to turn to but her maid. They sold her to him, her brothers did. Theirs were the debts and she had to pay. It is not only pagans and saracens and blackamoors. They would have shut her away or killed her, that family is well known.’

  Evidently under the impression that he had made himself clear, Battistella began his snail-like withdrawal.

&nbs
p; ‘Where is all this tending?’ Ziani said. ‘Who told you that, anyway?’

  ‘Maria and I sometimes talked.’

  ‘Did you so?’ Ziani said uneasily. ‘You are a sly dog, Battistella. You did more than talk or I’m a Chinaman. But what is behind all this rambling, what point are you seeking to make?’

  ‘She was looking to find a friend,’ Battistella said loudly and wheezingly from the door. ‘Nothing to do with mesmeric, nothing to do with cannon.’

  On this he immediately disappeared. Ziani sat for a considerable time, staring before him. He was deeply offended by this brusque rejection of his theory. I must stop discussing these Mémoires with him, he thought. He has no sensitivity whatever, and always gets hold of the wrong idea. But who else was there? He had only Battistella. She had no one to turn to but her maid … Could it be true that she had come to him in need, and her first hostility was to cover that? That she might have been unhappy in that way had somehow never occurred to him. But the mask of youth could cover that as well as other things. So while I was laying my groundworks, my mind set on victory, master strategist Ziani, she was merely suffering, and trying to keep that fact concealed? Of course she complained, but only conventional complaints …

  He tried to shake off these disagreeable thoughts and recover his feeling of triumph, but this would not return. He had a sense of something incomplete in his memory. They had stood together in the window glancing from time to time out across the garden. The lout Bobbino kicking at the gravel. Sunlight on the boxwood hedges, the narrow leaves of the acacia, the apricot trees espaliered against the wall. She turned her back on spying Bobbino and I moved round a little so as still to look her in the face … that was it: this change of position gave a view of the statue, half-hidden as she was by foliage, with the first roses of the year climbing round her. The outbuildings of the abandoned church rose behind her, looking from that angle like a distant background in a painting. Even though she was half masked by shadow and leaves her pose was striking, the face raised with that provocative alertness, the guarding hand held out. That faint smile of hers not visible from there. Seen thus among the leaves she was like our first mother. He had known nothing at all then about the man who made her.