Last Tales (7 page)

Old Mariana looked at him for a while. “Well, well, Angelo, pretty death’s-head,” she said. “We Christian people should bear one another no grudge, and I forgive you, today, that you did reject my fond love, and kept thinking of another woman, when I wanted you. I shall help you. Now listen well, and afterwards do exactly as I tell you. Walk from the broadest street of the town into a narrower one, and from this narrow street into one still narrower, and go on like that. If from your narrowest alley you can find your way into a tighter passage, enter it, and follow it, and draw your breath lightly once or twice. And at that you will have fallen asleep.”

Angelo thanked Mariana for her advice, and pushed it down to the bottom of his mind. Only when it was quite dark did he make up his mind to test it.

His own room was in an out-of-the-way alley. He had to proceed into the broadest and best lighted of the boulevards. For a long time he had not been in this part of the town, and he was surprised to see how many people there were in the world. They walked faster than he, they were intent on their errands, and as far as he could judge an equal number were walking in each direction.

How
, he asked himself,
has it become necessary for all people who live east of the boulevard to come west, as well as to all who live west to come east? It might make one feel that the world was badly managed. The whole city of Naples is now set up as a big loom, men and women are the shuttles to it, and the weaver is busy tonight. Yet this great pattern
, he reflected as he walked on,
is no concern of mine—others will have to look after it. I myself will keep my thoughts carefully collected on what I have got to do
.

At this he turned from the Via di Toledo into a smaller street, and from that into one still narrower.
It is not impossible
, he thought, hope strangely dawning in his heart,
that this time I have been well advised
.

After a while he found himself in a lane so narrow that, looking up, he saw above him only a handbreadth of evening sky a little lighter than the eaves. The paving was here very rough, and there were no lamps; he had to place his hand on the wall of a house to walk on. The contact with solid matter did him good; he felt grateful toward this wall. It suddenly vanished under his palm. There was a doorway here, and the door was open. It gave into an exceedingly narrow passage.
I am in luck tonight
, he thought,
I am lucky to have come upon such an exceedingly narrow passage
. He proceeded until he came to a small door. Underneath this door a faint light shone.

Now for a while he stood perfectly still. In there sleep awaited him, and with the certitude of sleep memory came back to him. He felt, in the dark, his hard, drawn face smoothening, his eyelids lowering a little like the eyelids of a happy, sleeping person. This moment was a return and a beginning. He stretched out his hand, took care to draw his breath lightly twice, and opened the door.

By a table in a little, faintly lit room a red-haired man was counting his money.

The sudden entrance of a stranger did not seem to surprise the host of the room, he looked up casually and then sank back into his former occupation. But his guest felt the moment to be formidable.

The man by the table was ugly, and had nothing kind
about him. Yet in the fact that even while counting his money he left his door unlocked, to be entered by a stranger, there was a kind of friendliness which might hold great possibilities.
But what am I to say to him?
Angelo thought.

After a while he said, “I cannot sleep.”

The red-haired man waited a moment, then he looked up. “I never sleep,” he declared with extreme arrogance.

After this short interruption he resumed his work. He carefully arranged his coins in piles of two, scattered them with his big hands and re-collected them in piles of five—to scatter these once more, and build up, absorbed in the task, new piles of six, of ten and fifteen, and at last of three. In the end he stopped, and without taking his hands off the silver leaned back in the chair. He gazed straight before him and repeated, with deep scorn, “I never sleep.

“Only dolts and drudges sleep,” he took up his theme after a while. “Fishermen, peasants and artisans must have their hours of snoring at any cost. Their heavy natures cry out for sleep even in the greatest hour of life. Drowsiness settles on their eyelids. Divine agony sweats blood at a stone’s throw, but they cannot keep awake, and the whizzing of an angel’s wings will not wake them up. Those living dead will never know what happened, or what was said, while they themselves lay huddled and gaping. I alone know. For I never sleep.”

Suddenly he turned in his chair toward his guest. “He said so Himself,” he remarked, “and had He not been so hard driven, with what high disdain would He not have spoken! Now it was a moan, like the sea breaking against the shore for the very last time before doomsday. He Himself told them so, the fools: ‘What, could ye not watch with me one hour?’ ”

For a minute he looked Angelo straight in the face.

“But no one,” he concluded slowly, in indescribable pride, “no one in the world could ever seriously believe that I myself did sleep—on that Thursday night in the garden.”

OF HIDDEN THOUGHTS
AND OF HEAVEN

I
t was a lovely spring day, and the almond trees were blossoming, delicately pink and coral like flamingo feathers, down the slope in front of the white villa. From the terrace at the top there was a wide view over the landscape, and all shapes and colors within it—the far-off, air-blue mountains, the greenish-gray olive groves on the nearer slopes; the serpentine, dust-gray road through the valley below; the free, fleeting groups of big clouds; and the noble, mathematically straight, darker blue line of the sea on the horizon—in the cool of the evening were as beautifully harmonious as if an angel had stood behind the shoulder of the observer and poured out it all from his flute.

Angelo Santasilia, the famous sculptor who owned the villa, was sitting on the terrace, shaping tiny figures in clay.
His long workday was over, and he was satisfied with his work. But his three children—two fair-limbed little boys and a little girl with a skin as transparent as an almond blossom and big, childishly unfathomable dark eyes—before consenting to go to bed had demanded that these three equestrian statues should be ready by the next morning. No one horseman was to be superior to another, yet they all were to be so different that each of the children could immediately pick out its own from among them. The task had gripped the artist’s imagination, so that he was now deeply engrossed in it. His wife, Lucrezia, wrapped in a crimson shawl, sat a little behind him, and smiled at her husband’s gravity.

A nightingale sang in a distant thicket, and all of a sudden another struck up, enraptured, quite close by.

Angelo was still in his working smock. His great beauty since we last saw him had become richer, almost blooming like that of a woman.

A small man came from the house down toward husband and wife. He did not carry his hat in his hand, for he had no hat, but his attitude was as dignified and deferential as if he had been sweeping the ground with the panache of one. Lucrezia first caught sight of him, and drew her husband’s attention to him—but Angelo, who was just about to shape a rearing horse, did not want to be interrupted. Still when he turned his head, and recognized in the approaching figure the wanderer, Giuseppino Pizzuti, a friend of old times, he waved his hand to him.

Giuseppino greeted his host as if their parting had taken place that very morning. All the same, the years had not passed over him without leaving their mark. He was even leaner than before and more poorly dressed. His eyebrows were raised high on his forehead, as if a permanent deep amazement had placed them there. He seemed to be without weight, like a withered, rolled-up leaf.

At first he seemed quite unaffected by the changed circumstances
of his old companion in misfortune; indeed, he hardly seemed to notice them at all. But when he was introduced to Lucrezia and saw what a lovely wife Angelo had, he was so deeply impressed that he styled him “Signor Santasilia” and “Maestro.”

“Nay,” Angelo interrupted him, “speak not so. I am no fine gentleman and no master. Do you remember where we last spoke together?”

“Yes,” Pizzuti answered after some deliberation, “it was at the inn of Mariana-the-Rat, the good home of thieves and smugglers, down by the harbor.”

“Aye, and let us talk together as we did there,” said Angelo.

Lucrezia after a while noticed that her husband’s guest had three fingers missing on his right hand, and turned her face away. She was expecting her fourth child, and feared any impression of ugliness which might put its stamp upon the unborn baby. She therefore rose as quickly as with courtesy she could, remarked that the wanderer must be in need of something to eat and drink, and walked back to the villa to prepare something. The two men followed her with their eyes until she disappeared through the door.

“And how, Pino,” asked the host, “have you been doing since I saw you last?”

The old man began to tell his story. He had traveled far and wide, had seen famous places and people and witnessed remarkable natural phenomena. He had also consoled the distressed and set on the right path those who had strayed from it. Suddenly he gave himself up to tears.

“Why do you weep, Pino?” asked Angelo.

“Oh, my friend, weep with me,” Pino answered. “I have loved since last we met.”

“Loved?” Angelo repeated, slowly and with astonishment, as if he were repeating a word of a foreign tongue.

“Oh, loved, loved!” cried Pino. “Life’s sorest pain has
penetrated and torn asunder even this heart of mine. A woman, radiant, triumphant like a song, smiled upon me—and went away again!”

“Life’s sorest pain?” Angelo repeated as before.

“She was a great lady traveling from England,” said Pino. “Three years ago, in Venice, as she got into her gondola, she gave me such a deep, friendly, animated glance, such a goddess glance, that thereby heaven came down and walked on earth! I followed her, we met again, and each time her eyes gave me the same greeting out of her soul’s inexhaustible riches. Once she spoke to me. She was tall like a statue, she wore a silk robe that rustled gently, her hair was like red-golden silk!”

Pizzuti raised his right hand to the sky. “But I,” he cried out, “I lack these my three fingers, and will nevermore make my puppets dance! When she had gone away, the world was a void—and yet how full of pain! I had just one thing left to me in my infinite destitution: to talk with somebody who might possibly, just once in the course of the day, speak her name. I remained in Venice for two years, solely to sit with her gondolier, a plebeian who could neither sing nor play, hoping for this: that he would pronounce her name, as if waiting for sweet music to come from his lips. But he married, and his wife forbade me her house. O Angelo Santasilia—all life that I have in me consumes itself!”

Pino let his head fall onto his breast; tears poured down his face onto his greasy black cloak.

“You must not let that worry you,” said Angelo. “It is a good thing to have a great sorrow. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the cross for the sake of our toothaches?”

After a while he continued: “Tell me her name, Pino. Then you will stay on in my house, and I will speak it once a day.”

Pino closed his eyes, made two attempts to speak, but remained silent. He whispered, “I cannot.”

Lucrezia’s red-cheeked maid came from the house, smiling, with a tray containing wine, cheese and bread, and a cold chicken. Angelo poured out wine to his friend and to himself. The old wanderer was obviously hungry, yet he ate and drank slowly, as now he did everything.

“And you, Angelo,” he said, “how have things gone with you?”

It was now Angelo’s turn to report on his life in the seven years that had gone. He told Pino of the works he had completed since they had seen each other, and of the large orders he received from princes and cardinals, of the pupils who flocked to his school and of his children. When he stopped, Pino’s gaze met his, and for some time they sat thus in silence. It seemed strange to Angelo to be sitting again with Pizzuti.

“Yes, you see, Pino,” he at length said slowly. “All this—art, a lovely wife, beautiful children, renown, friends, wealth—all this will constitute a man’s happiness, my happy life. But you know that there be rivers which at one place in their course disappear into the ground and run beneath it for a couple of miles. Woods and rose gardens grow in this ground, but beneath them runs the river. In that same way a river is running beneath my happiness, and only to you can I speak of it. That river is the secret which Lucrezia bears and keeps from me. For I do not know what happened on the night when I was hostage for Leonidas Allori in prison.

“She has never spoken of it. Many times I have waited for a word from her lips which would solve the riddle. On our wedding night I waited for it—and the river ran deep below our bridal bed. One day when we walked together along the seashore, and there was an offshore wind, and she gazed at me, I waited for it. But she has never spoken, her full sweet lips have always been sealed over the secret. While I was still young, I felt that I might have to kill her if she continued to keep silent.

“But I have reflected,” he went on, “that I have no claims
on her. For the entire being of a woman is a secret, which should be kept. And one more deep secret to her becomes part of it, one charm more, a hidden treasure. It is said that the tree under which a murderer buries his victim will die, but the apple tree under which a girl buries her murdered child does blossom more richly and does give more perfect fruit than others—the tree transforms the hidden crime into white and rosy, and into delicious flavor. I must not expect her to part with this secret either.”

He gazed out over the valley.

“And I have further thought,” he said, “that in the moment when at last I should be asking Lucrezia, ‘Tell me, for I suffer, what happened that night that Leonidas Allori came to you, in the house of the vintager, in the mountains? Did the master learn, then, that you and I had betrayed him?’ she would turn her face toward me, her clear eyes dark with sorrow, and answer me: ‘So you have known that your master went to the vintager’s house in the mountains, and you have never told me that you knew! For seven years, day and night, you have hidden your knowledge from me, and even my kisses have not been able to make you speak!’ Maybe, after that, she would leave me forever. Or again, maybe she would still stay with me for the sake of the children, and because my great fame gives her pleasure. But she would never again be my happy, smiling wife.