Having said that he stood up.
“Do we have an agreement, Giacomo?” he asked, leaning on his stick.
His host strode over to the door, his hands behind his back. He opened it, gazed meditatively at the threshold, and asked, “But what happens, Your Excellency, if the performance is unsuccessful?… I mean, if I am unable to condense and accelerate everything in such a fortunate manner as Your Excellency requires? What will happen if, come the morning after the night before, the duchess of Parma feels that the night is merely the beginning of something….”
He was unable to finish the sentence. With surprisingly quick and youthful steps the guest hurried past him, hesitated on the threshold, looked him in the eye, and answered in his most cutting manner:
“That would be a big mistake, Giacomo.”
They regarded each other for a few long minutes.
“Your Excellency’s wish is my command,” the other replied and shrugged his shoulder. “I shall serve Your Excellency to the best of my ability, as he wishes and as only I can.” He made a deep bow.
The duke turned to him with a last parting shot.
“I told you to be tender with her and to hurt her. Please don’t hurt her too much, if that is at all possible.”
He went out without closing the door behind him, slowly, slightly bent. Tapping his stick on the stairs he brought his servants hastening to meet him with their torches. Then he began to descend.
In Costume
…So what are you waiting for? Get dressed, you aging mountebank, you trembling old quack! Your room is full of shadows: the shadows of your youth. Youth is gone, isn’t it?… but you can still hear its voices, like the tinkling of bells on your decrepit guest’s sleigh. Off he goes, as if bowing and blowing kisses to an invisible audience, together with his servants, his magnificent horses, and his tinkling sled. He is passing under your window right now. They’ve swaddled him in pelts so you can’t even see the tip of his nose, a gaunt and graceless figure in the depths of the carriage, wrapped in fur, protected by his rank, old and in pain, and despite what he says, however he preaches and pontificates, on the point of death. It is he who is wounded now, not as I once was, bleeding in the garden in Pistoia and at the gates of Florence: his wound is fatal. And what about you? Are you happy now, Giacomo? Are you dead? Have they already crossed your arms across your chest? If you had your way you yourself would be making bows and blowing kisses to your invisible audience, receiving their applause. Are you lost for words? Is there a sour taste in your mouth as though you had overeaten and drunk too much? Is it penance and herrings you need? It is a mad world! Now you must kill everything in you: strangle your memories, strangle every tender feeling with your bare hands as if it were an unwanted kitten, strangle everything that smacks of human contact and compassion! Is the time of your youth over?… No, not quite. Yes, you are missing two front teeth. You find the cold harder to bear and like to snuggle up to the fire, muttering, in fur gloves, watching what you eat and carefully rinsing your mouth before kissing anyone because neither your digestion nor your teeth are exactly perfect any more! But this does not constitute a terminal condition. Your stomach, your heart, and your kidneys are faithful servants; your hair is only just beginning to go, a little thin on your crown and your temples: you will have to be careful where your lover plants her hands when she takes hold of your hair! You are not old yet, but you have to be a little careful… particularly of the pox that seems to be ravaging the world, so people say. But all is not lost. That great energy, that spontaneous overflow, that all-or-nothing the old fool spoke about with such contempt, may serve you awhile yet! The virtues of caution, wisdom, forethought, and reason are nothing without the instinctive passions of youth to heat them. What kind of life is it without the desire to take everything the world has to offer and to blow all your resources at the same time, to grab and discard at once?… Enough of this. You are not at the carnival now. You have a different kind of appointment, a different deadline! A deadline that marks the end of youth. You are an adult now, in one of your mature moments of wisdom, the kind you get at four in the afternoon in mid-October. A fine time. Your sun is still shining…. Look around, take a deep sweet breath, feel the rays of the sun, slow down, pay more attention, there’s nothing else you can do in any case. Your youth is leaving you… elsewhere people are laughing, glasses are clinking, a woman is singing, there’s the scent of falling rain, you are standing in a garden, your face wet with tears and rain, the flowers are dead but your heart is wild and happy, you yearn for completeness and annihilation, all the trodden flowers lie around you… that’s what it was like, something like that. Later perhaps, when you are an old man, you will remember it. Now get dressed, because time is passing, there are people already waiting in the ballroom and one inexpressibly tender and alert pair of eyes is looking for you because she must see you…. Where’s the note? Yes, it’s there where he left it. Let’s have a look. Large writing, careful, careworn letters… she’s not the first woman to have written to me, nor will she be the last, I suppose. And with what trembling fingers and glittering eyes that wounded old crow, her husband, explained the meaning of the letter! It really was most amusing! Sometimes it is worth being alive! I must see, yes…. Well, poor thing, what more could she have written when she has been literate for barely a year? He says that no one could mean more or write more beautifully, and perhaps he is right; it is an elegant note, and it might be that other women, like the marquesa, the cardinal’s niece, and M.M., who knew a great deal about both love and literature, wrote more wittily and at greater length, complete with verses, classical references, high vulgarity, and passionate bombast, but, I must admit, they wrote nothing more true. The jealous old fool is right to admire it…. Well, my dove, you shall see me as you desire! You shall see me, though I am not the youngest or handsomest of men, nor, as His Excellency remarked, the greatest of villains, either…. You, my dove, will see me, as you wanted and as he, too, wanted, the ruffled old crow! What a speech he made! What convoluted strategies he devised! All that threatening and prodding! Could he have been the man who betrayed me to the authorities some sixteen months ago in Venice?… The council is glad to do little favors for influential outsiders; the