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.
She wrote again in her notebook, calm now, sitting under a lamp by the open window of her room, a moth making its tiny soft racket around the bulb and the small waves breathing below on the shingle. Columbine is sick. The Doctor is called. Oh, save me, save me, Dot-tore! Columbine is going to have a baby. The Old Man is angry. She smiled and put away the notebook and folded her arms on the table and laid her head on her arms. She felt herself slipping gradually down a dark, immense incline. That is time, she thought, time is the curve, it steepens. Everything she had ever done, her smallest acts, even in earliest infancy, had brought her to this moment, these unavoidable moments, the last. So strange, and yet so simple. She lifted her head with an effort, for she was tired, and sat for a while, listening to the drowsy noises of the night. She had gone to see the doctor, the elegant old doctor with the dyed hair. He had been kind, moving his priestly hand over her belly, sighing. She saw the numbers on his wrist and understood. He had wanted her to go into a clinic, to end it, to have it ended. "What will you do?" he had asked. "Where will you turn?" And he had looked at her for a long time. "Ah, signorina!"
The postcard would arrive tomorrow. She was glad she had sent him the pen along with it. She wanted him to know all that she knew.
In the bedroom in Franco Bartoli's apartment after she had collapsed that night Kristina Kovacs had got into bed beside her. So hot, there, and airless, and yet how cool Kristina's hand had felt, resting on her heart. She had slept, knowing the woman was lying awake, watching over her. She could feel Kristina's fear, it was like a living presence, a third person lying with them, veiled, silent, unappeasable. Later she woke, and Kristina had talked to her, soothingly, as if she were talking through an open window to a madwoman out on a ledge. Well, what else are you, she asked herself now, what else are you, but a madwoman, on a ledge? She smiled into the darkness outside the window. She had looked in Kristina's handbag and found a phial of sleeping pills and thought of stealing them, but did not. She knew Kristina was watching her. She wondered if that was what he had asked her to do, to watch over her, and make sure she did not take the pills, or leap from the ledge.
She opened her guidebook at random and read about Shelley's death. He had been to Livorno to see Lord Byron. The schooner was the Ariel. The poet, and Edward Williams, and a boy to tend the sail. Why did they give the other names, even the name of the boat, and not say what the boy's name was? They burned Shelley's body on the beach. She put the book away and rose from the chair and stood a moment motionless, listening; not a sound, anywhere, except the little waves. She went out and locked the door behind her and went as quietly as she could down the stairs and out into the night. Who was it she was afraid would hear her, try to hold her back? There was no one. The man at the desk with the grey hair and the moustache did not even lift his eyes as she went past.
The air outside was warm, and had a strong, astringent smell, like the smell of iodine. It was the sea. She could taste salt on her lips. All these vivid things, as if they knew they were the last. She walked down through the hushed streets to the harbour. She knew where she was going. On the quayside people were out strolling, not many, the last of the tourist boats had left long ago. She was aware of glances, women's, mostly. Did they know, just by looking at her? Would they remember her? The sea was invisible, just a blackness, with no horizon, as if half the world out there had fallen clean away. Tomorrow the sun's eclipse, tonight her own. There were no voices in her head any more; they had said all they had to say, had done all they had to do. She imagined them behind her, the horde of them, standing back, big-eyed, their hands over their mouths, staring in gleeful expectation, unable to credit that she was doing at last what they had been urging for so long that she must do.