He went over to the window, stretched out his arms, and opened the casement wide. The cold expansive November light flooded into the room with the force of an alpine waterfall. He held the window open, his head bent back in the light, bathing his pale face in the brightness, his eyes closed to its refreshing touch, and he smiled.
“Go now!” he said without moving, with closed eyes, still smiling, to the women cowering in the corner. “Go and say that I am here. The underworld has vanished. The sun is out.”
He breathed deeply. Quietly, with a touch of wonder in his voice, as if he were informing the world of a particularly rare piece of good news, he declared: “I am awake.”
And so he stood with eyes closed, not bothering to turn his head toward the door over whose threshold the inquisitive women of the Bolzano market tiptoed out into the corridor. Female feet tap-tapped with sharp quick steps down the stairs. He heard their clatter, neither moving nor opening his eyes, but with half-opened mouth gulped down the cold light like someone who could see and was aware of everything that was happening in the room. Then he called out to Teresa, the young girl who had remained behind and whose red but not unshapely hands were even now on the door handle.
“You, you stay here.”
He spoke casually yet commandingly, knowing that his orders were not to be countermanded. He was watching the square, scanning the clear outlines of the houses bathed in light. He gave a gentle sigh as if he were only just now waking and stirring, finally realizing that he had things to do and that the day had imposed certain obligations on him. “Come closer,” he said in a distracted, friendly voice.
Five-finger Exercise
He turned and moved swiftly across to the gilt-legged, floral-silk-covered armchair that stood before the fireplace and the great mirror, sat down, and crossed his right leg, which was sinewy and powerful like those of people who ride or walk a lot, over his left knee, resting his arms on the chair, keeping his eyes on the girl, solemnly inspecting her. “A little closer,” he ordered her quietly. “Come right up to me.” And when the girl had finally made her steady way over to him he took hold of her small red hand and lifted it lightly into the air as if he were a cavalier and she his partner at a dance, or like a tailor inspecting his latest ball gown as demonstrated by a model; he took it in an amiable, professional manner, turning the girl in a half circle with a gentle, almost incidental adjustment of his hand.
“What is your name?” he asked, and when Teresa told him, inquired further. “How old are you?”
Having heard the answer he nodded, humming and hawing as he considered it.
“Why,” he eventually asked, “why did you let those women into my room?” And then, as if he were not expecting an answer, he immediately continued: “People think I am a decadent fellow, Teresa, and indeed I am just what they say. I am tired of traveling. A man gets a reputation because the world is small and because transport has very much improved these last few years, so news travels fast. Thanks to gossip in the press and in the corridors of theaters, people know everything and there are no more secrets: indeed, I do believe, there is no personal life left. It was quite different when I was young. Venice today is like a glass box with people sitting in the window, cheating, lying, stuffing their bellies, and making love in public. Have you ever been to Venice? I’ll take you there sometime. From a Saturday through to a Monday,” he added as an afterthought. “No, dear child, you should not believe what Venetians say. Look into my eyes. Do you see how sad they are?… The gossips have turned me into a figure of fun, a marketplace scandal, so that everywhere I go now, spoiled youths and spies, denizens of gambling dens, and women who prosper because there are women younger and clumsier than themselves, turn their heads to watch me; poor wallflowers and others who hang about dance halls whisper my name to each other as they promenade; from balconies and from passing coaches, with beagle eyes, they follow me; women glance at me as if shortsighted. They raise their gilded lorgnettes, turn their heads away, and lisp: ‘Oh! Is that he?… What a disgrace!… Why do they tolerate such people in town? Invite him in!’ That’s the way women go on. Come closer, my dear. Look into my eyes. Are you afraid of me?…”
“I’m not afraid,” said the girl.
The stranger thought this over.
“That’s not good,” he responded a little anxiously.
But Teresa, who was both servant and relative at The Stag, really did not fear him. Now that she is standing there, allowing her hands to be at once caressed and grasped in this peculiar manner that seems both to give and take, perhaps it is necessary to say something about her after all. For though the girl was a person of no account, an unattached young female, there was occasionally something that played about her lips that spoke volumes to men. She was sixteen, as has already been stated, acquainted with the rank secrets of the rooms and recesses of The Stag Inn; she made and stripped beds, she emptied basins after guests had used them, she had a skirt of dark-blue cloth that was given her as a memento by a trader from Turin, she had a neatly cut pale-green bodice that was left behind at the bottom of a wardrobe by a traveling actress, she had a prayer book bound in white leather that included a portrait of the Blessed Saint of Padua, and other than that she had nothing at all to call her own. Except perhaps a Venetian comb. She slept in the attic above the guest rooms, near the space occupied by Balbi, and her home was in the southern Tyrol, in a village that practically gasped for air at the foot of a great mountain, so oppressed was it by the peak, by the condition of the land, and by poverty. Her father set off one day to become a mercenary in the service of the king of Naples and never returned. Teresa looked at the stranger and was not afraid.
The fear that had first gripped her the previous night when the innkeeper, who sometimes beat her and sometimes invited her into his widower’s bed, asked her to observe the stranger; the fear that startled her when she saw the stranger half-asleep, snoring and snuffling, shortly after he had eaten his meal, had, now that the man had taken her hand, passed away. She was a little embarrassed by her hand, which was red from washing and carrying wood, and rough and scaly from the wind that eternally whistled round Bolzano, the wind she thought she would never get used to. She was therefore somewhat reluctant to yield her hand to this man whose own hand was firm yet soft, aristocratic, and smooth to the touch, like cool, finely worked leather. But touching it relaxed her. Yes, his hand, the grip of it, had about it something that would both give and take. And from his cool palm there slowly spread, across the skin and through the veins, an extraordinary warmth different from that which the stove gave out, more like when one went and sat out in the sun. This warmth radiated and extended; then, for a moment or two, it seemed to cease, as when one blows out a candle or a draft puts out a lantern — it was a sensation of approaching flames and thunder. Then it warmed again. Teresa was no longer afraid. She wasn’t thinking of anything. Her favorite pastime was talking to the dog, the sharp-eared little white dog in the garden of The Stag, and to no one else; she also liked to spend an hour or two, winter or summer, in one of the chapels of the church, under the picture of the Virgin, just beneath the pulpit. At these times she closed her eyes and thought of nothing. Occasionally she did think of love but only in the way a fisherman thinks of the sea. She was acquainted with love and was not afraid of it.