In my time at Bartoli's apartment his mother kept carefully out of my way. I felt a certain sympathy for her. It must have been distressing to be confronted anew each morning by this startling stranger, for I am certain that overnight, every night, monotonously as in a fairy-tale, the fact of my lodging there slipped through her hopelessly porous memory. Maria, the ancient cook, on the other hand, took a great shine to me, her colosso, and plied me coquettishly with all sorts of delicacies and sweetmeats, plates of pasta smothered in fresh truffles, and slices of panforte that threatened to pull out by the roots my few remaining molars, and tiny glasses of a metal-bright, thick, sweet liqueur with floating coffee beans and a wisp of ghostly blue flame trembling on the brim. She and Franco Bartoli between them had rigged up a makeshift study for me in a room at the back of the apartment looking on to the gloomy garden; here, as Franco indicated, in a tone of hushed reverence, I would be free to do my work without fear of interruption. That room became for him a hallowed place, a sanctum of intellectual sacrifice, a tabernacle of the real presence – he was, I discovered with some surprise, devoutly religious – consecrated here at the heart of his little domestic establishment. I would hear him creaking past the door on tiptoe, could almost feel him smiling in excited happiness and pride at his good fortune in having Vander the Great for a house guest. I had not known he held me in such high, such heroic, regard. No detractor ever ruffled the placid surface of my self-esteem, but an eager admirer can make me cringe for shame. I did not have the heart to tell poor Franco that my work, such as it was, had all been done, and there would be no more. Instead, I went each morning dutifully into that room, with the look of a man whose gaze is fixed unswervingly on immortality, and shut the door firmly behind me, and felt all outside it go still, waiting for the soundless roar of my mighty intellect starting up its engine. All a sham. For hours I would sit there, slumped in an uncomfortable antique chair, an elbow on the card table that served as a desk, my chin on my fist, gazing out at the place by the garden wall where Cass Cleave mat last day had stood up from her chair and taken my arm and walked me off across the parched and crackling grass and told me, so calmly, smiling, with eyes cast down, as though it were the simple answer to an unanswerably complicated question, that she was going to have a child, and that it would be mine.
How is it that men are always astonished by the phenomenon of conception? It might have been understandable in primitive times, when we believed it was the wind that got women with child, but what excuse is there for us in this jadedly over-informed age?True, in the course of a long life I had slept with many women without once, so far as I was informed, impregnating a single womb. What prankster god of fertility had decreed that at the very end I should be allowed to shoot one of his potent arrows straight to its secret and palpitant home? Who would have thought that my dry old seed could still sprout? What an embarrassment! How foolish I felt! And yet, how grateful, too. I saw at once, you see, the implications, the possibilities, what I shall call the saving grace, of this absurdly wonderful happening. Let me be clear; it was not I who would be saved. For once, perhaps really for the first time, it was others I was thinking of. Growing already inside this girl was the enfolded bud of what would be a world reclaimed. Out of the unimaginably complex coils in the hollow heart of the blastula I had set swelling in her belly there had already sprung the new beginnings of my people, my lost people. It was as simple as that. My gentle mother, my melancholy father, my siblings put to summary death before they had lived, all would find their tiny share in this new life. Oh, fond old man! How could I have thought this world would allow for such redemption?
The final postcard bore a brightly tinted picture of a church on a rock in the middle of an improbably berylline bay. She sent it in a package, along with her fountain pen, of all things. Dearest Svidrigailov - I am going to America - Your Cassandra. She had posted it in the town of Chiavari three days previously. She must have calculated that it would take just that time, no more, no less, to reach me. I marvel at her faith in the reliability of this country's postal system, although it proved remarkably well founded, for it was a mere ten minutes later, as I was standing helplessly by the window in the garden room with the postcard in one hand and her pen in the other, trying to think what to do, that Franco Bartoli tapped at the door and put in his head warily and whispered that there was a person – una persona – on the telephone who wished to speak to me.
Of all the traditional characters of the Italian comedy, Harlequin is at once the most individual and the most enigmatic. Who is this inexplicable being? Are his head and his heart made like our own? If an effigy were to be raised to him it must be made of rubber, for only rubber could receive the impress of his fierce and subtle spirit, created by the gods in a moment of incontrollable mirthfulness and malice. He is called by many names, and no one can say which was rightfully and originally his; many authorities maintain his name was first of all a sobriquet. He is without doubt of divine essence, if not, indeed, Mercury himself, god of twilight and the wind, the patron of thieves and panders. He is Proteus, too, now delicate, now offensive, comic or melancholic, sometimes lashed into a Jrenzy of madness. He is the creator of a new form of poetry, accented by gestures, punctuated by somersaults, enriched with philosophic reflections and incongruous noises. He is the first poet of acrobatics and unseemly sounds. His black half-mask completes the impression of something savage and fiendish, suggesting a cat, a satyr, an executioner. Consider how he is viewed by public opinion, and try to conceive, if you can, how he could ignore this opinion or confront it! Scarcely have the authorities assigned his dwelling, scarcely has he taken possession of it, when other men move their houses elsewhere so they no longer have to see his. Here he lives alone with his mate, whose voice is the only voice he knows and without which he would hear only groans. The day comes. A dismal signal is given. He sets out, with a black hue and a red eye. It is morning. He arrives at a public square packed with a pressing and panting crowd. He is thrown a poisoner, a parricide, a blasphemer. There is a thrilled, a terrible silence. He seizes the condemned one, stretches him on the rack, then takes and breaks him on the wheel. The head dangles down, the hair hangs on end, the mouth, gaping like a furnace, emits a bloody word, begging for death. It is finished. He steps down; he holds out his bloodstained hand; he is thrown from afar a few gold coins, which he carries away through a double row of men drawing back in horror. He returns home, sits down to table and eats, then goes to his bed and sleeps. Awaking on the morrow, he thinks not at all of what he did the day before. Is this a man?Yes. God receives him in his shrines and allows him to pray. He is not a criminal and yet no tongue would say of him that he is virtuous, that he is honest, that he is admirable. No moral praise seems appropriate for him, since this would suppose a relation with other human beings, and he has none. He has none, this Harlequin.
So this, she saw, was where it would end. There was nowhere farther for her to go, and she was glad. She had watched from the deck of the little ferry boat the five towns receding into the evening vaguenesses of sea and sky and the humped night rising plum-blue behind the headlands, and thought how she too was disappearing, into the dark. That was how it had been all along, since she had left Turin, if not before, if not long before, a secret, gradual process of thinning and fading. The world was letting her go, as he too had let her go. She understood clearly what was happening, what must happen, so that the pattern would be complete. She had tried to explain it to Kristina Kovacs, the way everything was a part of everything else, the way it was all ordained, but Kristina had not understood. Kristina, she saw clearly, was trying to save her, as once she in turn had thought it was her task to save him. But that was not it, that was not it at all. Now they were docking, and she had a moment almost of bliss as the boat glided in silence toward the quayside, where vague figures waited, strangely still, until an old man in a seaman's cap stepped forward nimbly and caught the rope one of the sailors threw to him. The water swayed, smooth as oil, its surface running with coloured lights, peach and mauve and rose. Bats flitted in the sombre air. There were cafés and bars and little restaurants all along the quay, and, behind that, the village climbed the hillside, lamps in the windows of the houses, so many lives. There was a lamp too, or a lantern, above the door of the church that stood on its jagged promontory outlined against the darkening sky. A sailor from the ferry carried her bag all the way up to the hotel. How simply everything was happening.