He touched the scars with his fingertips, itemizing and remembering them. There was a line of three scars on his left, all three just above the heart, as if his enemies had unconsciously yet somehow deliberately, instinctively, aimed precisely at his heart. The central scar, the deepest and roughest of them, was the one he owed to His Excellency of Parma and to Francesca. He put his index finger to the now painless wound. The duel had been fought with rapiers. The Duke’s blade had made a treacherous incursion above his heart, so the surgeon had had to spend weeks draining the blood and the suppuration off the deep wound; and there had also been some internal bleeding, as a result of which the victim, after fever fits, bouts of semiconscious delirium, and stretches of screaming and groaning insensibility, finally bade farewell to adventure. He lay in Florence in the hospital of the Sisters of Mercy where he had had himself conveyed in the duke’s coach on the night of his wounding. He had not seen Francesca since that moment, and he learned of the engagement only some three years later in Venice, at a masked ball, from the French ambassador, who regretfully let fall that the cousin of the grand duke, a Parmesan kinsman of His Most Christian Majesty, forgetting his rank and high connections, had, in the idiotic thoughtlessness of his declining years, married some little village goose from Tuscany, a rural demi-countess of some kind…. He had smiled and held his peace. The wound no longer gave him any pain, and only when the weather was damp did he feel the slightest pang. So life went on and no one ever mentioned Francesca’s name.
Why is it, he wondered, that I have remained aware of her all these years? And later, too, when I received the second wound, that long jagged one above the little carte de visite left me by the duke of Parma, that long brute across the chest, administered with a sword at dawn by the hired assassin of Orly the cardsharp as I was leaving the gambling den at Murano, my greatcoat stuffed with hard-earned gold prized from the pockets of a cheating banker and various other rogues, gold earned through the judicious use of quick wits and even quicker fingers; why was it that, in those days after the assault, as I lay in a state between life and death, this image of Francesca by the garden wall under the blue Tuscan sky kept coming to mind? And the third scar, that odd scratch where the Greek woman went at him with her sharp fingernails, and which hurt more than other cuts and thrusts received at the hands of men, that mysterious wound through which the toxins of death seeped into his body, which was less than a pinprick yet so dangerous that Signor Bragadin and the finest doctors of the council fussed around his bed for weeks, torturing the poor patient with enemas and cuppings until one day he grew weary of dying and, asking for orange juice and hot broth, simply recovered — why was it that, in the delirium caused by this deadly female weapon, he kept seeing Francesca and calling on her? “Is it possible that I loved her?…” he mused with a sincere, almost childlike sense of wonder, and stared into the mirror above the fireplace. “Heaven knows, I might have!…” he thought, and looked about him with pious stupefaction.
But life proved more resilient, more resilient than even the memory of Francesca, and every day brought something miraculous to a man providing he was healthy and did not go in fear of anything. Who was Francesca, what was she, in the years when gold coins spilled from his fingers at gaming tables, into women’s palms, into the pockets of fashionable tailors, into the fists of layabout acquaintances, into the hands of whoever happened to be about when he needed medicine to cure the terrible pox or to save him from a frightening, secret boredom? “I am a writer,” he thought, “but I don’t like being alone.” He considered this peculiar phenomenon. This might be why life dealt him such a cruel hand in the enforced solitude of the penitentiary; perhaps the sapient and subtle masters of the Inquisition knew about his secret terror; perhaps they suspected that boredom and loneliness were as much a form of torture to him as the Spanish boot, the red-hot pincers, or being broken on the wheel was to others? What was the point of life if one were removed from the busy commerce of the world? However one dreamed or imagined, thought and recalled, or meditated on sensations that life had burned up and reduced to ashes, it was no compensation for the loss of the most humble, most idiotic detail of a life experienced directly! Anything but solitude! he thought and shuddered. Better to be abject and poor, better to be mocked and despised yet able to slink over to the light and crouch there where lamps are burning and music is being played, where people crowd together and enjoy the greasy, foul-smelling yet cheeringly sweet, bestial sense of community that constitutes human life. Life was company for him, nothing more: he was always in company, always carelessly taking his wares to market because the market was where he wanted to be. He loved the racket, the proximity of other bodies, the sheer buccaneering adventure of it. Sometimes the bargaining was rough and crude, at other times sophisticated and sly, but most of the time it was like a game, a competition in which one took on all comers much as one did one’s own destiny. The marketplace was the only place for him, for the writer in him. It was life itself. He scratched his ears and felt a cold thrill run down his spine.
And that was why his clever, superior torturers had punished him with solitude, a fate worse than death, he thought with disgust. Four hundred and eighty-eight days! And the memories! Each memory just one more condemned soul. And sometimes the image, that shining blue-and-white moment in the Tuscan garden: Francesca! For hers was the only face, the one and only face he had not gazed at with the brazen curiosity he usually directed at women’s faces. Her face persisted more obstinately and with greater force than reality itself, even in his underworld prison where living men groaned and wept. It was a banal enough occasion when their paths first crossed. The cardinal’s kinsman was entertaining him in a coat with ragged elbows, in a room full of clouded mirrors and broken-legged Florentine furniture while the Apennine wind whistled through the cracked windows. As in all houses where not only plaster but discipline itself has begun to crumble, the servant had been confidential, pushy, chatty, and fat. The countess no longer wished to know about anything except occasional excursions to Florence in her threadbare coach, excursions that might take in a mass and a promenade down the corso where she might glimpse the ghost of her much-admired younger self. The count bred doves and, like the pitiful old man he was, regretfully and fearfully awaited the arrival of the messenger from Rome who on the third day of every month would bring him papal gold in a lilac-colored silk purse, this being the modest pension provided for him by the cardinal. The house was dense with dreams, spiders, and bats. Francesca’s first words to him were, “What is it like in Rome?…” She stared at the stranger with wide eyes and an expression of terror on her face. For a long time after that she said nothing at all.