She did not know. Several times she had had the impulse to say quite naturally: look what I was given by the prince, because I sold one bracelet … But she could not say it. Why, she did not know. Was it because of Duco’s jealousy? She did not know, she did not know. She thought it would create less trouble to say nothing about the bracelet and not to wear it. In fact, she would have preferred to return it to the prince. But she thought that that would be impolite after all his kindness, after all his readiness to help her.
And Duco… thought that she had sold the bracelets for a good price, and he knew that she had received money from her publisher, for her pamphlet. He asked no further questions, and thought no more about money. They lived very simply … Still, it troubled her that he did not know, even though it had been good for his work not to know.
They were small things. Small clouds in the golden skies of their great and noble life: their life of which they were proud. And only she saw them. And when she saw his eyes from which confidence in life shone, when she heard his voice sounding so sure of his new energy and pride, and when she felt his embrace, in which she felt all his happiness in her trembling … she no longer saw the little clouds, she felt all her happiness with him trembling inside her, and she loved him so much that she could have died in his arms.
XXXII
URANIA’S LETTER was very sweet. She wrote that they were leading a very quiet life at San Stefano with the old prince, that they had no guests because the castle was too gloomy, too run down, too isolated, but that they would be delighted if Cornélie could spend some time with them. And, she added, she would also send Mr Van der Staal an invitation. The letter was addressed to Via dei Serpenti and was forwarded to Cornélie from her previous residence. So she realised that Gilio had not mentioned her living in Duco’s studio, and also realised that Urania accepted their liaison, without criticism …
The Banner watercolour had been sent to London and in the studio, still cool while the city was sweltering, there was a slight air of idleness and boredom, now that Duco was no longer working. And Cornélie replied to Urania that that she would be delighted to accept and promised to come in a week. She was glad that she would not find any other guests at the castle, since she had no outfits for a vie-de-château. But with her usual flair she rejigged her wardrobe without spending much money. It took up all her time for days and she sewed while Duco lay on the sofa smoking cigarettes. He had accepted the invitation too, for Cornélie’s sake, and because the area around the lake of San Stefano appealed to him. Smiling, he promised Cornélie not to be so stiff. He would do his best to be friendly. He rather looked down on the prince. He thought him a rogue, if no longer a blackguard. He thought him a child, if not ignoble and base.
Cornélie left; he took her to the station. In the carriage she kissed him fervently and told him how much she would miss him for those few days … Would he come soon? In a week? She would be longing for him: she could not do without him. She looked deep into his eyes, which she loved. He too said how bored he would be without her. Couldn’t he come any sooner, she asked. No, Urania had fixed the date …
As he helped her into the second-class carriage, she was sad to be going without him. The compartment was full, and she got the last seat. She sat between a fat farmer and an old farmer’s wife: the farmer kindly helped her put her valise in the net, and asked her if she would mind if he smoked his pipe. She told him in a friendly tone that she would not. Opposite them sat two priests in worn cassocks and between their feet they had an unobtrusive brown wooden box: it was the Last Sacrament that they were taking to a dying soul.
The farmer made conversation with Cornélie and asked if she were a foreigner, English probably? The old farmer’s wife offered her a mandarine.
The rest of the compartment was occupied by a bourgeois family of father, mother, a little boy and two little sisters. The slow train shook, rattled and swayed, and kept stopping. The sisters hummed. At one station a lady got off with a little girl of five, in a white dress and white ostrich feathers on her hat.
“Oh, che belleza!” cried the little boy. “Mama, mama, look! Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she wonderful? Divinamente! Oh, mama …!”
He closed his black eyes, in love, dazzled by the five-year-old-girl in white. The parents laughed, the priests laughed, everyone smiled. But the little boy was not embarrassed.
“Era una belleza!” he repeated with conviction and looked around.
It was very hot on the train. Outside the mountains glowed white on the horizon and shimmered like a fire-reflecting opal. Close to the railway rose a line of eucalyptus trees, their leaves sickle-shaped, exuding a pungent smell. On the plain, dry and scorched, wild buffalo were grazing, lifting their black curly heads indifferently towards the train. The slow train shook, rattled and swayed and kept stopping. In the stifling heat people’s heads nodded up and down, while an odour of sweat, tobacco smoke and orange peel mixed with the scent of the eucalyptus outside. The train rounded a corner, rattling like a toy train with tin carriages almost tumbling over each other. And a smooth strip of azure without a ripple: a mirror of metal, crystal, sapphire became visible and spread into an oval dish among the rolling mountain country, like a vase placed very low in which a sacred liquid was preserved, very blue and pure and still, and protected by a wall of rocky hills, which climbed higher until as the train rattled and careered around the clear dish a castle rose up high on a peak, rock-coloured, broad, massive and monastery-like, with arcades running down the slope. It rose nobly and with a gloomy melancholy and from the train it was hard to make out what was rock and what masonry, as if it were a single bleakness, as if the castle had grown naturally from the rock and in its growth had assumed something of the form of human habitation in distant times. And as if the oval dish with its sacred blue water was a divine sacrificial bowl, the mountain closed off the lake of San Stefano and the castle arose like its gloomy guardian.
The train wound along the water in a sinuous swirl for a moment, described an arc and came to a halt: San Stefano. It was a small, silent town, sleepy in the sun, without any life or traffic, and only visited every day in winter by tourists who came from Rome to see the cathedral and the castle, and taste the local wine in the osteria. When Cornélie got out she saw the prince at once.
“How sweet of you to visit us in our eyrie!” he said excitedly, squeezing her hands.
He led her through the station to his carriage, a kind of gig with two little horses and a small groom. A porter would bring her case to the castle.
“It’s wonderful that you’ve come!” he repeated again. “Have you never been to San Stefano? You know that the cathedral is famous. I’ll drive right through the town, the road to the castle is round behind it …”
He was beaming with pleasure. He geed up the horse by clicking his tongue, with a repeated shaking of the reins, like a child. They flew down the road, among the low, sleepy houses, across the square where the splendid cathedral rose in the sun’s glow, Lombard Romanesque in style, begun in the eleventh century and added to century after century since, with the campanile on the left, the baptistery on the right: architectural wonders in marble, red, black and white, a single structure of angels, saints and prophets covered as it were in a thick dust of antiquity that had long ago tempered the colours of the marble into pink, grey and yellow and which hung mistily among the group as if it were the only thing that had remained of all those centuries as if they had crumbled to dust and vanished into every joint. The prince rode across a long bridge, whose arches were the remains of an ancient aqueduct, and now stood in the riverbed, which was completely dried up and had children playing in it. Then he let the horses climb at a walking pace; the road climbed steeply upwards, winding up dry and stony from the sunken valleys of olives to the castle, and looking out wider and wider over the ever expanding panorama of bluish white mountains dissolved in the glow of the sun and opal horizons, with a sudden glimpse of the lake: the oval dish, set deeper and deeper, now as if in a circle of channelled hills, gleaming blue, deeper and more fathomless, and absorbing in its mystical blue all the blue of the sky, until the air shimmered, as if in long spirals of light that swirled before one’s eyes. Until suddenly an overpowering scent of orange blossom wafted towards one, a breath heavy and sensual as that of a panting lover, as if thousands of mouths were exhaling scented breath that hung stiflingly in the becalmed atmosphere between sky and lake.