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 invitation — 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?”