‘What a surprise!’ she cried out. Then with a sweet and most affectionate smile she raised the candle to Sindbad’s face.
‘You’ve grown old. Time passes. Whatever happened to you? Whose feet are you kneeling at now? Has one of my immoral old friends consented to adopt you as her cavalier servente? It must be that little brunette you told stories to the afternoon you begged me to bring her to you? Do you remember you were telling her about the black-scarved girls of Venice. Oh, how you’ve aged.’
Sindbad smiled patiently at her. ‘And if you could see yourself, you poor thing. When I was a boy I fell in love with a village girl. She was sent to the city where she could learn sewing and stitching. She was away for half a year. By the time she returned her face was ruined by cheap paint, her hair was dyed green and yellow and some of her teeth were gone. Much like you, poor thing,’ Sindbad thought to himself and tried not to look at her shoulders, her neck, and under her arms since she had just raised an arm and her sleeves had slipped back.
‘I remember this dress,’ murmured Sindbad with a tired indifference. ‘It is the one you wore when you tried to kill yourself. You had tied the string around your neck and knelt down under the door-handle. I happened to come in at that moment.’
‘Nonsense!’ she exclaimed. ‘I saw you coming across the market square, after you had left me and escaped. I had written to you, asking you to visit me one last time. That is when the little incident with the string occurred. If this doesn’t work, I thought, I will give you up.’
Sindbad gazed thoughtfully into the woman’s eyes. ‘Did you really think, my dear lady, that I would believe in this so-called suicide? …’
‘Heaven knows,’ Artemisia answered with bowed head. ‘Men are idiots and will believe anything. Even that a woman would kill herself for a man’s sake. Every attempt at suicide begins as a joke or a game. There are times the door fails to open in time, or the gun happens to go off … What woman would be fool enough to die for a man?’
Sindbad laughed silently. In that case he was perfectly justified in leaving the women he had seduced without the slightest pang of conscience … Were not all women alike? With the passage of time, after a little loving, they were all the same. Their wicked little natures, their contempt for some ridiculed suitor, their defences against laughable sentimentality: eventually they were always driven to name-calling and mockery. In old age they talk slightingly of the grandly moustached suitor in his yellow boots, and make particular remarks on the amusing appearance of the visiting stranger who meant everything to them and for whom they would have given their lives at the time.
‘You might care to remember, Sindbad, that on the day of my so-called suicide I spent the night at a ball where I had a wonderful time, staying till well into the morning. It was the miners’ ball and the hall was filled with the scent of hot punch which clung to everything, from the mirrors’ scarlet hangings to the men’s mouths. The snow came down in drifts throughout the night and the roads were buried under it. It was impossible to get home in my delicate little dancing shoes. A kind young man volunteered to carry me home in his arms across the market square. My poor old husband was left stumbling behind with his lantern and bunch of keys. I caught a glimpse of myself in the confectioner’s window. I looked rather pretty in my pink ball gown …’
‘And the secret room?’ enquired the night visitor.
‘The secret room soon had a new lodger. Neither my heart nor the room were ever empty of lodgers. I never could live without love. It was only yesterday, or the day before, that the most recent tenant left, a half-crazy violinist. The room is vacant. If Mr Sindbad has nothing better to do he could take up his old residence,’ answered Artemisia.
Sindbad looked away. ‘Strange, how while I was lying in my grave I believed that because I had suffered greatly for your sake and finally put an end to my own life you would remain true to my memory. You were nearing forty when I left you.’
‘A woman’s age does not count, my dear.’
‘I loved you, I burned for you, I was a slave to you. I thought no one could whisper such lovely eloquent words in your ear as I did, I, who practically died in an ecstasy of happiness whenever I was in your company.’
‘A red-bearded mercenary soldier arrived in town,’ muttered the woman. ‘A caveman, who dragged me around by the hair … Will you not take up your old quarters, Sindbad? Lord, how you have aged!’
Sindbad didn’t answer. He was bored. And recognising this he left the house in which he had spent a year and a half slaving and suffering in the most delightful way.
Escape from Women
Here begins the last tale of the voyager which young girls and young men may read, questioning perhaps a detail here and there. In time they too will encounter those miracles which remain wholly unsuspected in one’s youth: the miracle of the inexpressible goodness of women as they sit on their beds combing out their long hair, speaking to their lovers with such ardour and selfless devotion that the lovers believe themselves loved for ever; and the miracle of the treachery of women when a man can only clench his fist, seize a knife, load a revolver, wake with bloodshot eyes, or chew in despair on his own tear-drenched pillow.
Dead as he was, Sindbad was often astonished to recall that he had never once killed a woman. As his carriage entered that region where the power of women no longer extends, he looked back and saw mostly pious charitable women in his wake.
‘The strange thing,’ he thought to himself, ‘is that women tend to behave better than one has a right to expect. Poor things, giving their all, their kisses, their dreams and sighs, smuggling my name into their evening prayers — I’d be surprised if the angels didn’t wonder at times what my name was doing among the usual company of aged fathers, mothers and tiny children … They were very good indeed, poor creatures. From now on Sindbad will teach the young to cherish women, as they do flowers, as indeed they do so many odd, weak, cheated, robbed, often tortured beings … Is it not touching that for all the times they have been disappointed, the hours they have wept and mourned, nothing continues to engage them so intensely as the serious subject of love. Love is everything to them: the air they breathe, the water they thirst for, the miracle they marvel at. They talk of love as though it were something that had independent existence, something so solid it might be grasped. Though it is true that the subject of fashion runs a close second to love in their thoughts.
‘God bless you then, dear good women — virgins, countesses, women of affairs, half-crazed Jewesses* — all who listened with trembling lips, sceptical smiles and with desire and astonishment in your hearts when Sindbad favoured you with softly spoken, delicately enunciated lies that filled your heads and souls, that heightened your colour and your mood, and gave you something to think about … For his part, Sindbad would go on to leap from the windows of cursed castles and cry his eyes out for some other woman. At other times, in a complete daze, wholly undiscriminating, he would reach out to pluck one of you, almost anyone — a tea-rose or a roadside thistle — and would have forgotten your name by the morning. Forgotten names and voices, voices into which whole lives were poured, your endless self-sacrifice, the dangers into which your passions led you, and the peculiar, precious vows which Sindbad managed to extract from you with the skill of a practised father-confessor — all forgotten. You were all happy to forswear yourselves in the hour of love … Really it hardly mattered that not one of you ever kept her vow. And, oh, how often you offered up your jewels, your influence, the remainder of your lives.’