The King of the Wood
Their faces breathed anger;
forgoing words, they growled;
they frequented the forests like
sitting rooms.
I, GIAN DOMENICO DESIDERII, I worked for twenty years with that old fool. They tell me he still hasn’t decided whether or not to die; from time to time I’ll hear bits of news, praise blown his way; sometimes I’ll see another recent product with the same trees, the same sheepfolds, the same palaces at sunrise, and that same sky up above, like a pit. Doubdess the same splendors, the same marvels. I’ve had my fill but he’s kept his appetite, the fat little fool, the good apostle. And if it makes him happy, he should still paint. And stew in his great devotion. I was a painter, once, and now I’m a prince. Almost a prince: I reign over thieves and deaf-mutes, carriages and liveries, coaches; and I reign over forests; in this low world I am constable and pissboy, factotum to the Monseigneur de Nevers, Duke Charles, who holds Mantua.
It rains in Mantua. It is a sad town, the sort that always seems muddy even when the sun is out. This muddiness is my business. Where have they gone, the great expectations that drove one to paint with sun in one’s face and in one’s soul, surrounded by the scent of the pines? Where have you gone, little men made by my hand, obedient gods, knaves lost in floppy felt hats and sailors lost in dreams, passersby fording streams? But they must be there, I call them in through the rain to the sheepfolds, they smell of drink and wet dogs, these knaves of mine, my thieves. Their floppy hats are dripping into their eyes, I can barely see their faces; it’s as though they are being eaten away, as though they are being swallowed by their beards, or by the rain, the anguish of morning that sends the wolves home. Is that Jean or Giovanni? I’m fairly certain that’s Hakem; he’s as black as soot. Come boys, on your horses. Once again through the forest, sounding our horns and waving madly, and tonight, deep within us, exhausted at last, our souls are at rest. Open your eyes wide, knaves: deep in this mad mix are all the little beasts you never see but to kill; they pay you to find and kill them, and with what you earn you get blind drunk and sleep a little easier. Look at the shadows around us. How they carry us off. They say it is morning. It is summer. We are galloping, that much is sure. I can’t even see the floppy hats now, in all this falling I can’t even hear the hoofbeats. Are branches cracking above us? We don’t hear them either. Wild boars are charging, or perhaps only tree stumps: which will move, which will stay still? And this unarmed prey, steeped from tip to toe in uncertainty, in impotence — you, old trees, are you succumbing too?
I PAINTED TO BE A PRINCE.
I was about twelve. It was the middle of summer, at that hour of the evening when it is hot still, but the shadows are shifting. I was running pigs back to trough, through an oak forest near Nemi, below a big road; I was nibbling a loaf and having a high time smacking the fat, clumsy beasts that moved under my hand. But I was growing tired of them and turned my attention to beheading the ferns and haughty flowers of the undergrowth, my violence filling the air with perfume; my little flail kept me busy and content. From far off, I heard a heavy coach advancing slowly; I hid and kept stilclass="underline" the summer sun was beating down on the road and I was there in the shadows, invisible, no higher than the ground itself, watching this sunny road. In the summer light, ten feet from me and my pigs, a coach stopped, painted and emblazoned with bands of blue; a girl in all her finery burst out of the emblazoned box, laughing, running, as if toward me; I could see her white teeth, her bright eyes; still laughing, she stopped at the edge of the shadows, resolutely turned her back on me, stood for an interminable instant in the sunlight, marbled by the shadows of leaves — her hair, her enormous azure skirts, the white of her hands and the gold of her cuffs, all of it blazing — and when in a dream those hands went to her skirts and lifted them, her prodigious thighs and ass were given to me like daylight, but darkly; brutally, she crouched and pissed. I was trembling. The golden flow fell somberly in the sunlight, making a hole in the moss. The girl was no longer laughing, was now preoccupied with keeping her skirts up out of the way and with feeling this rude light leaving her; her head was cocked slightly, inert, she pondered the hole she was making in the grass. Her azure frock was puffed up around her neck, crackling, inflated, extravagantly displaying her loins. The painted door of the carriage was slightly ajar, the pisseuse having only lightly pushed it shut, and behind it a man was looking out the window, wearing a ruffled silk doublet, watching her. He had as much lace around his neck as she had around her ass; he was smiling the way people smile when they think no one is watching, with a mix of disdain and pleasure, both modest and smug, and with a ferocious tenderness. The coachman was looking away, civilized and beastly. The rush from the beauty ran dry; the prince made some pleasantry, and then said a word reserved for the lowliest tarts; he smiled more openly, more tenderly. The woman’s hands tightened around the lace she was clutching, and she made a nervous little laugh, perhaps servile, perhaps beseeching or overjoyed, which excited me; she had lifted her head, and she too was looking at him. I imagined this look as blood. High white flowers bloomed by my cheek. An indifferent violence rose around me like the midday sky, like the tops of the trees.
In one bound the woman was standing, the ordinary blaze of her skirts replacing the very different blaze of her thighs; she returned to the carriage, more slowly than before, with a complaisance and affectation to her steps; she was blushing; she lowered her eyes, she was not smiling. The prince, yes. She sat before him with a rustling of silks. He lowered his hand, grabbed a fistful of her skirts, then, ceremonious, remote, tapped two fingers on the outside of the door: the horses and the coachman, but parts of the carriage, obeyed this little noise they knew so well, and docilely steered their delicate cargo for Rome, a cargo made of a substance different from the wood of carriages and the leather of harnesses, made from different flesh from that of coachmen and horses, a flesh that nevertheless, like that of horses, pisses and stares, but which has the time and the inclination to make fun of one or the other, to piss more bestially than a horse and to make fun of it, to stare more intensely than a coachman does at his road in the dead of night and to make fun of it, a flesh that wears lace about its loins as if in promise of some sweeter flesh, or which wears it around a collar to distinguish it from flesh, to reduce it to name alone, éclat, disdain, this finer flesh of princes. So this jumble of flesh moved off, dust rising from the road as though behind a flock of sheep.