“Four,” he counted, then stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, adding and subtracting. “No, five!” he declared, precise as any tradesman. He gazed into the candle flame, fascinated and round mouthed. “I am a poet about to write a poem,” he thought, quill in hand, leaning back in the armchair, facing the writing desk and the fireplace, his hair lightly combed, his clothes washed and starched. He was enjoying the situation. “Five,” he considered again, this time a little anxiously, and raised the five fingers of his hand, as if showing or proving something to someone, like a child claiming, “It wasn’t me!”
“Five,” he grumbled, and bit hard on his lower lip, wagging his head. Screwing up his eyes, he gazed into the flame, then into the deep shadows of the room, then finally into the far distance, into the past, into life itself. And suddenly he gave a low whistle, as if he had found something he had been looking for. He pronounced the name, “Francesca.”
He raised the quill and with a gesture of amazement wrote the name in the air, as if to say, “The devil take it! But what can I do?” He stretched his legs in the scarlet light of the fire, breathed in the scented warmth, threw away the quill, and watched the flames. “That’s the one,” he thought. “Francesca!” And once again: “The duke of Parma! Bolzano! What a coincidence!” But he knew there was no such thing as coincidence, and that this was no coincidence, either. Suddenly, it was as though a hundred candles had been lit in the room: he saw everything clearly. He heard a voice and was aware of the familiar scent of verbena mingling with the sane, cheerful smell of freshly ironed women’s underwear. Yes, it had been five years, he thought, mildly horrified. For these last five years had swept away everything in their filthy hot torrent, everything including Francesca, nor had he once reached out to save what had vanished in it. Yes, it had been five years: and he wondered whether they recalled the story in Pistoia, in the palazzo from which the aged countess would ride out in a black baldachin-covered coach into Florence at noon when the gilded youth and little lordlings of the city went promenading before the exquisite stores of the Via Tornabuoni? Would they still recall the midnight duel in Pistoia where the bald and elderly aristocrat waited for him, sword in hand, where they fought in the square before the palazzo, in the presence of the silent Francesca and the old count who kept rubbing his hands? They had fought silently, for a long time, their swords glittering in the moonlight, in a genuine fury that transcended the very reason for which they were fighting, so there was no more yearning for revenge or satisfaction but simply a desire to fight, because two mortal men in pursuit of one Francesca was one too many. “The old man fought well!” he acknowledged under his breath. “He didn’t need Signor Barbaruccia’s wife’s aphrodisiacs then: he could vie for Francesca’s affections without such things.” He covered his eyes to see more clearly, unable, not even willing, to shut out the images that now grew clearer and assumed ever more life-size proportions behind his closed eyelids.
There stood Francesca in the dawn breeze, in front of the crumbling stone wall of the count’s garden, slender, wearing a nightgown, fifteen years old, her dark hair falling across her brow, one hand clutching a white silk shawl across her breast, her eyes wide, staring at the sky. Had it been five years? No, it was only the swish of swords that had happened five years ago; the moment in which he had first seen Francesca was stored away in a deeper, more secret crevice of time. There she stood before the garden wall in the shadows of the cypresses, and the sky above them was a clear and gentle blue, as if every human passion had dissolved and gentled in that clear, all-pervading blue. The wind is embracing Francesca, the soft folds of the nightgown are hugging her girlish body like a swimming costume. Francesca seems to have stepped from a bathing pool compounded of night and dreams, her body shimmering, dew-drenched, and in the corner of her eyes there is some sparkling liquid whose precise nature is hard to define, a teardrop, perhaps, or a drop of dew that has deserted its usual habitat in the depths of the flower cup to settle on a young girl’s lashes…. And he stands opposite the girl and listens. Only desire can listen with such intensity, he now thinks. I tend to talk a lot, far too much, in fact, but I listened then, in Pistoia, by the crumbling castle wall, in the garden, where the olives ran riot and the cypresses stood about as somber as you could wish, as somber as the halberdiers of a king in exile. Francesca has stolen from her bed in the castle, out of the night, out of childhood and out of a sheltered life into the garden on the morning of the day that he exchanges dueling cards with the duke of Parma. He saw and felt everything now. He caught the scent of the morning, and it stirred up jealousy and other intense feelings in him, memories of moments experienced only by those who are no longer young. Because Francesca represented youth and so did those silent gardens: perhaps it was the last minute of his own youth passing in the impoverished count’s garden in Pistoia; perhaps these were the somber, tattered, grandiose theatrical props of his own decaying memory, a memory that was disintegrating under the pressure of years; maybe this scene represented his youth as it was many years ago in a garden in Tuscany when the sky was blue and Francesca stood by the garden wall, her hair and clothes fluttering in the wind, her eyes closed; when they were both listening, confused and intoxicated by a feeling, that even now sank its claws into him and tortured him. “How extraordinary she was!” he thought, and pressed his fists even tighter into his eyes. It was as if she were saturated with light, so intensely did that sweet yet disturbing energy flow from her to touch the man standing opposite her. Yes, she was filled with light. It was the rarest of all sensations, he reflected approvingly, like a connoisseur. There was light in her, and when a man looked into her eyes it was as if lamps were being lit all over the world; everything around him was brighter, more real, more substantially true. Francesca herself stood as if entranced and he did not speak as the old suitor stepped through the garden gate, offered his arm to Francesca, and led her back into the house. That was all. And a year later, in the very same place, in a corner of the yard before the castle gate, quite possibly at the same precise hour, two men fought each other.
The old man fought well, he thought again, curling his lip in homage, and smiled bitterly. Was that all?… Perhaps the adventure was simply about youth, the last year of real youth, that mysterious but exciting interval when even the nervous traveler lets the reins of his horse go, relaxes into the gallop, looks round, wipes his brow, and sees that the road waiting for him ahead is steep, that far off, beyond the woods and the hills, the sun is already beginning to set. When he first met Francesca it was still bright, still high noon. They stood in a valley in the foothills of Tuscany. He had just arrived from Rome, his pockets bulging with the cardinal’s gold and with letters of introduction. Travel was different then, he thought with satisfaction and a touch of envy. Few could travel the way I did, he proudly reflected. He had a shameless self-confidence born of genius, of an artist at the top of his form: “The sound I can get out of that flute! Remarkable! Can anyone compare with me?… Let him try!” There were indeed few who could travel like him and even fewer who could arrive in the style he did, in the good old days, five years ago! For there’s a trick, a manner of carrying things off on the stage of human endeavor, and he knew all the theatrical tricks; that there’s a way of choosing the horses, the equipment, the dimensions of the coach, and, yes, even the coachman’s uniform; that one must master the art of arriving at the palazzo of one’s host or at an inn of good reputation, as well as the art of driving through the gates of a foreign city and of leaning back in one’s seat in one’s lilac-edged gray traveling cloak, or of raising one’s gilt-handled lorgnette in one’s gloved hand and crossing one’s legs in a careless, faintly interested manner, the way Phoebus himself might have traveled at dawn in his fiery chariot drawn by four prancing horses above a world that, to tell the truth, he mildly despised. These were the tricks you had to master; this was the best way to travel and to arrive! How few people knew such tricks! There were remarkably few people who were capable of understanding that it was vital that, within half an hour of arriving at the inn or at your host’s palazzo, the whole serving staff of the establishment should be buzzing around you! This was the way he arrived one day at Pistoia, at the home of the old impoverished count who was related to the cardinal who now, in turn, was sending his blessing to the family, to the fat countess and to Francesca, his godchild. He proceeded to stay a month, entertained the family, made over a gift of two hundred ducats and golden caskets to the count, returning twice the next year, and at the end of that year, one moonlit night, fought a duel with the ancient suitor, the duke of Parma. He opened his shirt and examined the wound on his chest.