“I chased you away at the point of a sword then, the fool that I was! You would have been perfectly entitled to call me an old fool that day. Doting old fool! you might have cried. Do you think that blades sharpened in Venetian ice and fire or scimitars forged and flexed in Damascus can destroy love?… They would have been fair questions — a little rhetorical, a little poetic perhaps — but as concerns the practicalities, they would have been fair. That is why this time I have come without sharp swords or hidden daggers. I have another weapon now, Giacomo.”
“What kind of weapon?”
“The weapon of reason.”
“It is a useless, untrustworthy weapon to use in emotional conflicts, sir.”
“Not always. I am surprised at you. It is not the answer I would have expected from you, Giacomo. Besides, it’s the only weapon I have. I speak of true reason, which has no wish to argue, to haggle, or even to convince. I haven’t come to beg nor, I repeat, to threaten. I have come to establish facts and to put questions, and in my sorry and precarious situation I am obliged to believe that the cold bright blade of reason is stronger than the wild bluster and bragging of the emotions. You and the duchess are bound together by the power of love, my boy. I state this as a fact that requires no explanation. You know very well that we do not love people for their virtues, indeed, there was a time when I believed that, in love, we prefer the oppressed, the problematic, the quarrelsome to the virtuous, but as I grew older I finally learned that it is neither people’s sins and faults nor their beauty, decency, or virtue that make us love them. It may be that a man understands this only at the end of his life, when he realizes that wisdom and experience are worth less than he thought. It is a hard lesson, alas, and offers nothing by way of consolation. We simply have to accept the fact that we do not love people for their qualities; not because they are beautiful and, however strange it seems, not even because they are ugly, hunchbacked, or poor: we love them simply because there is in the world a kind of purpose whose true working lies beyond our wit, which desires to articulate itself much as an idea does, so that though the world has been going around a long time it should appear ever new and, according to certain mystics, touch our souls and nervous systems with terrifying power, set glands working, and even cloud the judgment of brilliant minds. You and the duchess are in love, and though you make an extraordinary and baffling enough pair, only a novice in love would be amazed at the fact, because, where people are concerned, nothing is impossible. Animals keep to their kind and there is no instance, as far as I am aware, of an affair between a giraffe and a puma or any other beast: animals remain within the strict precincts of their species. I trust you will forgive me, for I do not mean to insult you by the comparison! If anyone should be insulted by it, it is I! No, animals are straightforward creatures, whereas we human beings are complex and remarkable even at our lowest ebb, because we try to understand the nature of love’s secret power even when we remain ignorant of its purposes, so that eventually we have to accept facts that cannot be explained. The duchess loves you, and, to me, this seems as extraordinary a liaison as an affair between the sun at dawn and a storm at night. Forgive me if I abandon the animal images that seem to be haunting me with a peculiar force tonight, probably because we are preparing for the ball where I shall be wearing an ass’s head. But however extraordinary the love of the duchess for you, it is still more extraordinary that you should love the duchess: it is as if you were breaking the very laws of your existence. You will be aware that the feeling of any deep emotion whatsoever represents a revolt against those laws. There is nothing that frightens you so much, that sends you scuttling away so fast, as a confrontation with emotion. You were hungry and thirsty in jail, you beat at the iron door with your fists, you shook the bars of your window, and threw yourself on the rotten straw of your bed, helpless with bitterness, you cursed the world that deprived you of your fascinating life, while knowing that behind your solitude, behind the filthy straw, behind bars and iron gates, behind your memories, there was another prison, worse than the cells of the Holy Inquisition, that jail was, in its way, a form of escape, because it was only the fires of lust that burned you there, because you were not condemned to the terrifying inferno of love. Jail was a shelter from the only feeling that might trip you up and destroy you, for feeling is a kind of death for people like you: it stifles you with responsibility, as it does all insubstantial, so-called free spirits…. But love touched you briefly when you met the duchess, who at that time was plain Francesca, and it is love that has brought you close to her again, not the memory of an affair that never quite got started. What is this love of yours like, really? I have long pondered that. I had time enough… from the encounter in Pistoia, through the period in Venice, and after that, when you were in jail, by which time Francesca had become the duchess of Parma, long after we fought for her. In all that time you continued, amusingly enough, to believe that she was just another brief fling like all the rest, a conquest which did not quite succeed, an adventure in which you were not fully your ruthless self. But charity is a problematic virtue. You are not naturally one of the merciful, Giacomo: you are perfectly capable of sleeping peacefully while, at your door, the woman you deserted is busily knotting the sheets you shared into the noose she is to hang herself with. ‘What a shame!’ you would sigh, and shake your head. That’s the kind of person you are. Your love — the way you follow a woman, the way you note her hand, her shoulder, and her breast at a glance — is a trifle inhuman. I saw you once, many years ago, in the theater in Bologna: we hadn’t yet met, nor had you met Francesca, who would have been fourteen at the time, and of whom few had yet heard, though I had heard of her, as a man might hear of some rare plant in a greenhouse, one that grows in an artificial climate, in secret, to flower and become the wonder of the world eventually…. You knew nothing of Francesca, nor of me, and you entered the playhouse at Bologna where people were whispering your name, and your entrance was splendid, like an actor’s soliloquy. You stopped in the front row with your back to the stage, raised your lorgnette, and looked around. I studied you closely. Your reputation preceded you, your name was on everyone’s lips, the boxes were buzzing with you. I want you to take what I am about to say as a compliment. You are not a handsome man. You are not one of those loathsome beaux who flounces around looking ingratiating: your face is unusual and unrefined, rather masculine, I suppose, though not in the normal sense of the word. Please don’t be offended, but your face is not quite human. It might, on the other hand, be man’s real face, the way the Creator imagined it, true to the original pattern which years, dynasties, fashions, and ideals have modified. You have a big nose, your mouth is severe, your figure is stocky, your hands are square and stubby, the whole angle of your jaw is wrong. It is certainly not what is required for a beau. I tell you, Giacomo, out of sheer courtesy that there is something inhuman about your face, but I had to understand your face before I could begin to understand the love between you and Francesca. Please don’t misunderstand me: when I say your face is somehow inhuman, or not quite human, I do not mean that it is animal; it is more as if you were some transitional creature, something between man and beast, a being that is neither one thing nor the other. I am sure the angels must have had something in mind when they were blending the elements that made you what you are: a hybrid, a cross between man and beast. I hope you can tell from the tone of my voice that I intend this as a compliment. There you stood in the playhouse, leaning against the walls of the orchestra pit, and you yawned. You looked at the women through your glasses and the women looked back at you with undisguised curiosity. The men, for their part, watched your movements, keeping a wary eye now on you, now on the eyes of the women, and in all this tension, suspense, and excitement, you yawned, showing those thirty-two yellow tusks of yours. You gave a great terrifying yawn. Once, in the orangerie of my Florentine palazzo, I kept some young lions and an aging leopard; your yawn was like that of the old leopard after he finally ate the Arabian keeper. Without a second thought, this noble creature proceeded to demonstrate his indifference to the world that held him captive with a yawn that spoke of infinite boredom and astonishing contempt. I remember thinking that I would have to throw a net over your head and impale you on a spear if I ever found you in the vicinity of a woman whom I too found attractive. And I was not at all surprised when, a year later, you turned up in Pistoia, by the crumbling wall in the garden, together with Francesca, throwing colored hoops with a gilt-tipped wooden stick for her nimble arms to catch. What was it I thought then? Nothing more than: ‘Yes, it is natural, how could it be otherwise.’ And now I have brought you Francesca’s letter.”