What had happened? That which had never before happened. He looked wildly around the room as if searching for something and his eye fell on the dagger he had left on the mantelpiece the previous night. With a fluid movement he seized the dagger with both hands and began carelessly to flex the blade. He was no longer concerned with the girl but walked up and down the room with the dagger in his hand, talking quietly to himself: “Well then,” he mumbled. Then: “It’s impossible!” He felt truly awful. He felt like a great actor who had not appeared in public for years and who, when the time came for him to sing again, was confronted by an icy auditorium and silence in the stalls. He was not hissed off the stage, he hadn’t failed, but this icy silence, this unechoing indifference was more terrifying than failure. He felt like a singer who notices with horror that something has happened to his voice, and that however much he bawls or attempts those well-practiced florid musical phrases, the warm resonance of his voice, the individual attractive timbre that once made his listeners shiver with delight so that women’s eyes veiled and misted over and men stared solemnly at the ground in front of them, all paying close attention, as if the perfect moment for regret and judgment had finally arrived — was gone…. It was as if he had forgotten something, a voice, a pose, some secret faculty that had been his alone, which had been the secret of his success, of his very being, and he simply couldn’t understand why people no longer applauded the performance when only yesterday they were cheering it to the rafters, and he knew that despite his talent, despite his practice and experience, something had gone wrong: his effect on the audience was not what it used to be!… What could he do? Faced as he was by the icy indifference of the auditorium, he realized that he no longer possessed his old power of attraction. He found himself groaning and raising his hands to his throat in panic, wanting to emit some sound — an aaah! or aaiigh! — but failed to make any sound whatsoever. He stood there, dagger in hand, staring at the girl.
“Impossible!” he said once more, louder this time. “You feel nothing, nothing at all? No fear? No trembling? No desire to run away?…” He was almost begging her to say something. He was aware what a pitiful figure he must cut, with a dagger in his hand and this imploring note in his voice. “Why don’t you look me in the eye?” he asked more quietly, slightly hoarsely, the voice quite melancholy now. Noticing his tone, the girl looked up and slowly turned to face the stranger, allowing her own eyes to be explored by the solemn, piercing pair of the man before her. “Ah, you see,” the man sighed with relief, shifting position as if ready to fence or to leap. “My voice has touched you,” he rejoiced, the voice quieter and more tender now. “I want you to feel that I am talking to you personally. Because I know you, I would know you now among a thousand women, even at a masked ball. See, you are responding, your eyes answer mine. I knew it. How could it be otherwise?” He gave a low whistle in his joy, then resumed in the warm, deep, sad voice he seemed to deploy like a conjuror his apparatus. “For that is the only secret, my dear, that is alclass="underline" there is no trick, no catch, it’s always this simple. It’s like touching a person. You touched me when you stepped into the room, and sometimes I think that is the most mysterious form of contact. Sometimes I think it is the cause, the very meaning, of life. Is your heart beating a little faster?… Are you blushing?… You know perfectly well that you can’t go now. Come closer, return to where you were before.”
And when the girl drew closer he addressed her in his calmest, most straightforward manner:
“Don’t you remember? I asked you to kiss me.”
Slowly, with a sure and leisurely movement, he held out his arms, gently took the girl by the shoulder, and watched tenderly as she leaned her head against his arm.
The Kiss
And now, on the third day after his escape from the notorious Leads where he had spent sixteen months, he finally kissed the maid in a room of The Stag, in Bolzano. What was it like? To begin with he simply kissed the girl’s cracked lips which met the male mouth, softly, helplessly, without responding before the two mouths parted. They stayed like that a long time. He watched her eyes, catching her glance, the startled clear look of another living being, then blinked as if blinded by the strong light. Both of them shut their eyes for a moment. This was a situation both recognized, in their different ways. It was as if it were the single most natural, most sensible position in human existence, and it was impossible to understand why they had ever bothered with anything else or with any other position, having prepared themselves a long time for precisely this moment, bending every effort and every desire, awake or asleep, to this end. The girl shifted in the strange man’s arms, her expression serious and relaxed. She was like someone who, after a long search and hours of puzzling, had finally sighed and declared, “Oh, I see! So this is what it was about!” Suddenly everything fell into place. She shifted her weight in the man’s arms, quite carefully, with delicate, small movements, shy yet certain, feeling that every adjustment of her body had a meaning; and so the great wordless dialogue started, one established a long time ago by man and woman, the dialogue that is continued by every pair of lovers the moment one embraces the other. It was the right position she sought. To be accurate, she was not even moving but simply allowed her body to settle on his knee into the position prepared for her by the median route between resistance and attraction. She leaned her head against his arm and her youthful body readily bent back, his strong, relaxed arms supporting her without effort, taking the alien weight, almost appearing to lift it slightly as if disobeying, if only for a few moments, the force of gravity. The girl’s precise position at that point might be described as collapsing in the stranger’s arms, on tiptoe, head bent back, slightly off balance, keeling over to one side. Had anybody been observing them through the keyhole, he or she might have thought that the girl had fainted or had just been dragged from some invisible stream and was languishing unconscious in the arms of the person who had saved her, soon to be deposited on the bed or the floor where she would have her arms raised and her heart massaged so she might be brought back to life. Because the girl’s posture suggested someone lost and unconscious yet rescued. It is, as a matter of fact, how the girl herself felt at that moment: she felt like a would-be suicide who had plunged into the river but who had been rescued and was just now being carried to shore. Essentially, she was adjusting herself to her new situation.
Being in the arms of a strange man was both a new and yet a painfully, joyously, and frighteningly familiar situation. It is, after all, a most desirable thing for a person to be embraced by another. Teresa vaguely recalled her mother — a woman as freckled as a turkey’s egg and as short and round as a Tuscany barrel — and how she once had held her in her arms like this. Yes, this new situation was familiar, as familiar as life to a newborn baby; there was nothing particularly difficult or clever to do, no need to argue: one had only to accept and to allow events to carry one along, to resign oneself, to let the two bodies discover their own equilibrium as they engaged under the pressure of his arms but according to attractions and powers beyond such pressure. And it was right, it was absolutely in order, that this man, unknown to Teresa until yesterday, who talked a great deal, waved his dagger about, and had emerged from bed that morning with down in his tousled hair, a man who slept with his legs spread and with a furious twisted expression on his face, should now have his arms locked about Teresa, and that she should only have to make a slight adjustment in the position of her head so that it rested more comfortably, to leave her mouth softly and gently open and to close her eyes, and otherwise do nothing at all, for her to feel that everything was as it should be, as was right and proper. So much she understood. And now that she knew and understood everything she smiled, her eyes still closed, and her breathing became lighter and faster.