He waited patiently, his hands clasped, blinking, slightly tipped forward in the armchair, as if it were a very important matter, as if the etymology of a humorous and mocking popular expression really interested him. The host shrugged.
“I don’t know,” he answered indifferently. “It’s just a saying. I will ask Monsieur Voltaire should I happen to be passing his house in Ferney, and, if he lets me, I shall send you his answer.”
“Voltaire!” cried the rapt visitor. “What a marvelous idea! Yes, do ask him why language presents the cuckold with ornamental horns. Do let me know! But do you think that Voltaire, who is so well versed in language, has direct experience of the phenomenon, there in Ferney?… He is a cold man and his intellectual fire is like a carbuncle that glows but cannot warm. To tell you the truth, I would prefer your opinion, since I feel reasonably hopeful that your explanation might comprehend some of its power to burn….”
“Your Excellency is joking,” the host replied. “It is a joke that honors me and appeals to me. At the same time I feel I should answer a different question which has not yet been asked.”
“Really, Giacomo? Is there a question I have failed to ask?” the visitor exclaimed in astonishment. “Could I be so far wrong?… Do you really not understand why I am here, and what I want to ask you? Not after all that has and has not happened between us — for as you see, the deed is not everything, indeed it is so far from being all that I would not be sitting here at this late hour, which is in any case bad for me as well as inconvenient, if you had acted rather than spoken? Now, having said that, I have all but asked the question that you can no longer answer in words. I repeat, Giacomo, I had to come now, not a moment too soon: the time for my visit is absolutely right, for the affair I need to settle with you can no longer be postponed. It urgently requires your attention. I have brought you a letter — its author may not have thought to have it delivered by my hand, and, I must confess, it is not a particularly rewarding role I find myself playing nor a fitting one, since only once in my life have I delivered a billet-doux, and that was written by a queen to a king. I am not an official postillon d’amour, I despise the go-between’s skill and low cunning, all those qualities learned by servicing the underworld of human feeling. Nevertheless I have brought you the letter, the letter of the duchess, naturally, the one she wrote at noon, shortly after the levee when I left her to study my books. It’s not a long letter: as you must know, women in love, like great writers, write brief notes using only the most necessary words. No, the duchess could not have imagined that I would be her messenger, and even now probably thinks that the letter that she — like all lovers who share an extraordinary, blind belief in the power of the will to hurry time — was so impatient to have answered, has been lost. Lovers sometimes think they have dominion over eternal things, over life and death! There may, in fact, be reasons for believing this, because now, as I turn my eyes from the time that has vanished and concentrate entirely on the time that still remains to me, a time that, as the hourglass reminds me, is shorter than the time that preceded it, I see that the time to come may offer more than it has ever offered me before, for time is the strangest thing: you cannot measure it in its own terms, and your fellow writers, the ancients, have long been telling us that one perfect moment may contain more, infinitely more, than the years and decades that preceded it and were not perfect! Now, when I ask my question, which is also a request, the firmest and clearest of requests, I can no longer shake my head in amazement at lovers’ blind confidence in the power of sheer emotion to bring down mountains, to stop time and all the rest. Every lover is a little like Joshua who could stop the sun in its orbit in the sky above the battle, intervene in the world order and await the victory, a victory that, in my case, is also a defeat. Now when I am forced to look ahead, and I don’t need to look too far ahead, because even with my poor eyesight I can see how trifling the remaining distance is, trifling, that is, only in earthly terms, for it is timeless and impenetrable to the eyes of love, I find that I do, after all, understand the extraordinary power of a lover’s will, and believe that a tiny letter, a pleasantly scented letter, not entirely regular in its orthography — you are a writer so I beg you to excuse its imperfections when you come to glance over it — but intense in its feeling, a feeling that is vague and hilariously childish in some respects, yet is as a coiled spring in the sharpness of its desire, can really suspend the laws of nature, and, for a while, that is to say for a mere second from the perspective of eternity, assert its authority over life and death. Now, when I am constrained to face one of life’s great riddles — and both of us are in the position of having to ask and answer questions at once, Giacomo, as in some strange examination where we are both master and pupil! — now, when I should take the rusty flintlock of my life, load it with the live ammunition of the will and take certain aim as I have often done before, with hands that did not shake and eyes that did not easily mist over, when I was not as likely as I am now to miss my mark, I do begin to believe that there is a power, a single omnipotent power, that can transcend not only human laws but time and gravity, too. That power is love. Not lust, Giacomo — forgive me for attempting to correct the essential laws of your existence and to contradict your considerable experience. Not lust, you unhappy hunter, angler, writer, and explorer, you who nightly drag the still-steaming, still-bleeding, excited body of your prize into bed, now here, now there, in every corner of the world; not the grinding hunger that conceals itself and is always seeking its prey wherever lonely and hidden desires are to be found, staring wide-eyed, awaiting liberation; not the gambler’s eye for the main chance nor the military strategy that carries a rope ladder and watches the windows of sleeping virtue, preparing to assail it with a few bold words; not the yearning born of sadness and terrible loneliness: it is not these things that prepare one for action. I am talking about love, Giacomo, the love that haunts us all at one time or another, and might have haunted even your melancholy, sharp-toothed, predatory life, for there were reasons for your arrival in Pistoia some years ago and reasons for your escape. You are neither a wholly innocent man nor a wholly guilty one: there was a time when love possessed you too.