A Dancer in Darkness

by David Stacton

  But as they remounted and rode back to the camp, they talked as people do who have just had a serious quarrel, and are trying to overlook the fact, plodding through their words to the nearest exit.

  It is by noticing such subtle changes that a court informer earns his keep. But there was no court informer there as yet, which was lucky for both of them. But Cariola was there, and though Cariola said nothing that night, when she helped the Duchess undress, her lips were tight.

  “Madame should be more cautious.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You know very well what I mean.”

  “I don’t! I don’t! I don’t!” said the Duchess, and smashed the glass vial she was holding. She was so young.

  Cariola sniffed. “You had better send him away.”

  “No. I will go away myself.”

  “He will still be here when you come back. Madam, send him away. You do not know who watches you here.”

  Cariola was right. Nothing had happened, but she was right. But she did not send him away. It was too late for that. Instead she dismissed Cariola for the night.

  The Duchess’s bedroom was lofty and square, its arcaded windows giving on a large terrace. The enormous bed stood in the centre of the room, on a dais with three steps. The Duchess lay there restlessly until she fell asleep at dawn. If she had her eyes open, she thought about him. If she closed her eyes, she could see him, and that was even worse. No one had the right to have such eyes. No one had the right to be unique. His eyes seared her night. She would not take a lover. She could not marry. Her brothers would permit no course but chastity.

  The next few days she did not see Antonio. She saw her courtiers instead. It did not do. To her everyone was unique. You could find one trait here, another there, but never could you find the same person. You may love a body, and there are a thousand bodies, all charming. There is only one soul. Love that in anyone, and lose it, and you have lost yourself for good.

  Antonio had not waited to be dismissed. He had gone on a tour of her establishments. She admired him for that. He had more tact than she. But what was he thinking? What was he doing? Where was he? Every day she turned to speak to him, and he was not there.

  There remained her little court. She was an heiress. She was young. She passed for beautiful. She had powerful brothers. The Spanish would be back in power some day, and it was not impossible the Cardinal might one day be Pope. She did not lack for suitors. They were all diplomats.

  No doubt they were worthy men. They were not Antonio. And the pages, flunkies, and attendants? She might have taken any one of them. It would have been diverting for an hour or two. One or two might have lasted a week. This one was saintly, that was reputed animal in bed, was proud of it, and showed it, and wanted only a little favour in return, a parcel of land, a farm, a percentage on the fishing tax, a suit of clothes. That one was lubricious and wanted nothing. He was perhaps the better one. But we are not siege machines and she was not a town wall. She had no talent for the moment. What she wanted she wanted every day.

  Yet every day she must be pert, well-favoured, fortunate, polite, tactful, and the ruler of the state. Every day people watched to see if she was this or that. It was their duty to amuse her, so she must pretend to be amused. Antonio was still on tour. He would be back soon. The burden was intolerable. She fled.

  V

  She went to Ravello. The town was very old, and was already falling into decay, but it was high on the cliffs, a thousand feet above and to the south of Amalfi. It had been built by the Normans, centuries ago. Now its noble houses were empty, and many of its churches were boarded up. The palace was at the end of the town. Its gardens stretched to the precipice. She took only Cariola and some domestics with her. The precipice fell sheer several thousand feet to the sea, and was backed by a pineta. One could look down and out to the small rock islets in the lonely sea, and Amalfi was hidden somewhere to the right. At the edge of the cliff there was a small gazebo, built by one of the dead Piccolomini. It was where she went when she wished to be alone, for it suited her thoughts. Here, with the gates closed, she could be safe.

  She walked often by herself, over the hills, restlessly and thoughtfully, from one church to the next, from one empty house to the next, with only the peasants to speak to her.

  The town was divided into two halves by a ravine. One evening at dusk she found herself on the far hill. There was an enormous church there, of unadorned brick, long boarded up. The evening was full of yellow light, as though it had been dusted with sulphur. Every time she turned a corner she expected to meet a stranger.

  Instead she found herself in the piazza before the church, looking up at its twisted, eyeless façade. Attached to the church on one side was another structure. She thought she heard a horse somewhere, and, not wanting to be disturbed, tried the church door.

  The interior was vast, shadowy, and naked of all ornament. The chairs were overturned, as no doubt they had been left long ago. There was no Host, and the altar had been stripped bare. The dust made patterns underneath her shoes. She picked up her robes, so they should not become soiled, and moved aimlessly down the aisle.

  She came to an arch on her left, one step up from the nave. The opening was closed by a rusty iron grille. She peered inside. It was the ancient tombhouse of the Piccolomini, who had been little lords here, before they gained Amalfi. On an impulse she pushed against the grille, the lock gave, and the gate swung open. She hesitated and then went inside.

  It was a very different affair from their baroque mausoleum at Castello del Mare. The room was long and square, with circular lights let in near the ceiling of the high roof, and a tall open arcade that looked down across the valley towards the sea. It seemed that the Piccolomini had crowded down to death in some haste, following one another pell mell, for the floor was a maze of statuary. She threaded her way to and fro, and let her skirts trail where they would.

  She was young enough to find monuments of this kind full of a curious thrill, a certain charm. Here a woman life-size knelt beside a table tomb, thinking of nothing in particular, while her husband reclined on the lid, tapping with his fingers on a marble skull. There some knight rested with his feet up on an intelligent stone porcupine.

  Farther along stood a marble countess in a farthingale, one hand on her breast, and with a stubborn, but gracious expression on her face. She stood among her children, of which there were seven, together with an eighth that lay in the cradle of her left arm. They were shown shrouded, with only their heads peeping out of their ruffs, and looked like ears of corn, stripped to show the cob.

  It made her meditative. She had no children of her own. She had only the Piccolomini heir, and even he had been taken away from her. She wondered for a moment how ordinary people felt about their children. They must like them even when they were small.

  She turned to leave, and thought she heard footsteps. She hurried towards the grille and felt herself pulled backward. For a moment it startled her. The hem of her robe had caught a cherub carved low to the floor on one of the tombs.

  Beyond the grille she saw the glow of a candle, and someone was definitely standing there. She gasped with exasperation and tugged once more at her skirt. But it would not come free. The grille creaked and the figure stepped forward. She looked at it wide-eyed. It was Antonio.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. She felt an overwhelming relief.

  ‘The building is in disrepair. Something might have happened to you.”

  “Have you been here all the time?”

  “I came to check the tombhouse, and the grille was open.”

  “You knew I was here.”

  He hesitated and then nodded reluctantly. He came no closer to her. That annoyed her. She tugged again at her dress.

  “I’m caught,” she said. Her hands moved idly, as though they had a life of their own, and wanted to say something.

  He came forward, set the thick candle on the top of the table-tomb, an
d bent to release her. He had to kneel to do so. The light flickered restlessly. She looked down and saw the small black hair curling round the nape of his neck, and remembered those early days when they had first gone hawking. The well-cherished gesture of that neck suddenly made visible was too much for her. She watched her hand reach down to touch him, as though it were not part of her. He shook it off, and then, kneeling as he was, put his arms around her legs, and buried his head in the thick, embroidered folds of her dress, with a little stifled moan, that seemed to run up through her. She felt her hands rest in his hair, and burst into floods of tears.

  VI

  Tears bring release. They sometimes spring from joy. They are like rain. They renew everything. Tears are a promise. Tears are enjoyable.

  Together they sank towards the floor. They had offered up six weeks to self-control, and now the sacrifice was over. It made them solemn. It is curious how much more you can see of the world when you cry. When two people cry together, kneeling on a stone floor, face to face, they see even more.

  He put his head on her shoulder. His fingers began to toy with her hair, and ran over the locket that hung at her throat, clutching it convulsively.

  “Oh no,” she moaned.

  He wrenched away from her, but still knelt there, his hands on his thighs, staring at her. “Why should I not?” he demanded, and his voice made him older. He was not the harmless boy she had imagined after all. “Why should I not?”

  He put his head in her lap. She could feel various parts of herself waking up. Abruptly she gave in to him. What harm could it do? It need happen only once, and there was no one to see.

  There was a soft patter all around them. She sat up and wiped her eyes. Now their tears extended into real rain, as though the world had taken their emotion up. She leaned back against the table-tomb. He lay with his head in her lap. Through the arcade they could see the veils of rain sweep across the valley and meet in the middle like curtains.

  Above them the candle spluttered, its wax rippling down its flanks and over the fancy stonework of the tomb. Its dim echo caught the needles of the rain and shimmered along them in waves of magic light.

  He lay there for a long time. They were waiting for the right moment, and then it came. He stood up.

  “Wait here,” he said. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was gone. She turned and leaned upon the tomb, gazing earnestly at the candle burning brightly in its little sea of liquid wax. Her eyes snapped and she smiled.

  He came back again, with something over his arm. “Come,” he said. He held out his hand to her, and they moved among the tombs. Close to the arcade was an open place perhaps six feet on the side. He handed her the candle to hold and threw down the cloths he had over his arm. They were gorgeous albs and chasubles from the vestry, where they might have been locked in chests for forty years. The candle-light caught the green embroidery, the saints, paste jewels, seed pearls, and gold and silver threads. The open space became a metallic meadow. He took her in his arms and the candle went out as she sank down into darkness with him. The fall seemed infinite.

  Why are people so different by night and by day? His body was like his dancing. It had the same urgent, coherent suavity. She had slept only with Piccolomini, that vain old man who had had to be helped even to produce an heir, and to whom erotics were merely a branch of genealogy.

  She laughed. She had not known that the emotions could be so easy. She was utterly detached from her body, and watched it as a nurse would watch a happy child.

  In the darkness we begin to see with the finger-tips, and then the body has no shape, but only a meaning. It becomes transubstantiated into the nature of the thing it otherwise expresses only by its appearance. The thighs become a coast, the chest a platform, the navel an eager opening. How it clutches at the fingers when we put a finger there. Yet it was not the act that excited her. It was Antonio. His body was the symbol of himself, and that is why she loved it. People had no right to be so rare. There was a pathos in the way he bent his head, and his hair was like the feathers of some plaintive bird. And all that time they said nothing. What was there to say?

  Outside the double window the rain began to disperse. It had been sated, and fell now more fastidiously, so that clumps of fine rain hovered here and there about the hills, like silver trees. Then even they were gone. The world slowed down and settled into place. The stars appeared.

  They lay there quietly for a while. She noticed now, what she had not noticed before, that the studs, stones and threads of the copes had embossed her flesh cruelly.

  She stirred and pulled down her dress. He stood up, and when she looked around for him, he was over near one of the tombs, gravely doing a slow arabesque with his right foot. She watched, fascinated. He was utterly unaware of her. Slowly the rest of his body followed his foot, and he fluttered gravely against the shadows of the tomb behind him, like a wounded sparrow. It was spontaneous. It was beautiful. It was heart-rending. He did not even know he was doing it, and it was a little ode of joy. She could not bear it.

  “Stop that,” she said. She did not mean to be cruel.

  All the motion faded out of his body, and his head jerked towards her self-consciously. She had diminished him.

  “I mean I’m cold,” she said. “Oh, I don’t know what I mean.” She put her face in her hands. She put him back in his box like a naughty doll, and she would have given anything not to have done that, but it was too late.

  He found the candle and lit it again. She drew away, formally, and they stood together in the stone shadow of the tombs, surrounded by the quiet effigies. He was a trifle shorter than she was, and that, as she stroked the back of his head, gave her back her sense of place and some command over him, and therefore over herself.

  “We had better go,” she said.

  “There is only Cariola with you.”

  “Only Cariola,” she said, and felt a pang of fear. Cariola would only have to look at her to know. She picked up her skirts and moved uneasily towards the grille. She had thought of rank as only a barrier between them. Now she saw that rank was a system of self-control, an armour to protect us from ourselves. The difference between a gentleman and a Duchess is greater than that between a Duchess and a peasant. For his sake, then, let it remain so.

  He scooped up the copes and returned them to the vestry. Then they went outside.

  The broken silhouettes of the town were black against the paler black of the sky. The night was cold and crisp. She sat on the pillion of his horse, while he led it by the bridle.

  They passed across the church square. At the top of the stairs leading up to it, the church’s green bronze doors stood open like the doors of a rifled crypt. Both breathed easier once they had regained the narrow lanes.

  The palace was cut off from the town by a wall built entirely across the cliff, a wall with a narrow gate of wrought iron. The horse halted and the Duchess slid down to the ground. She half-moved towards Antonio, thought better of it, opened the gate, and fled inside, shutting the grille on his anguished face.

  The white gravel path was thick with shadows, and bordered with clipped yew and absurd Grecian hermæ. Despite herself, she glanced back, and he was still standing motionless, his white face a blur, gazing forlornly after her.

  The palace lay to her left, very small, very low, and without a window on the garden side. She had done right. She had sent him away. But she could not face Cariola yet.

  Instead she pushed hurriedly between the diamond-speckled shrubs, as the rain water ricocheted off on her dress, and went right to the gazebo. Far below her the fishing boats were out, each leaning heavily towards the water, on the side to which its net was attached. There was now a ghost of a moon. A thin, turbulent mist lay over the sea. Each boat carried a flare to daze the fish, and the sea was dotted with them, shimmering delusively in the mist, like fox fire in an autumn bog. The wind stirred her dress. She looked down. But even so she saw his abandoned face staring solemnly back at her
, superimposed on the sea. Love, say the poets, is the only felicity. But love in great ladies is as culpable as crime.

  VII

  Ravello made her restless. So did Cariola. She was only too aware that Cariola knew that something had happened. She was equally aware of the church and tomb-house standing empty across the valley. None the less she forced herself to remain in Ravello a week, for she told herself that by the end of that time Antonio would have forgotten the incident.

  At the end of the week she rode down to Amalfi along the cliff road. Since there was no freedom for her anywhere, it did not seem to her to matter where she went. She saw that we merely move from a larger to a smaller, a smaller to a larger cell in the prison of the world, at the whim of our gaolers, and are lucky if once in ten years we hear someone from the next cell scratching on the wall. And though commoners may take some comfort from being flung into the same dungeon, nobles, as befits their station, are locked up by themselves.

  Cariola, however, was glad to be back. No doubt she missed the gossip of the kitchens and the halls. The Duchess could not feel the same enthusiasm. A town can have a thousand inhabitants and still be empty for the absence of one.

  Court life did not interest her. Unlike her brothers, she had not risen by petty intrigue, but had been raised by it. It did not have for her the charm it had for them. She was only a woman, wedged between the world she ruled and the world that sought to rule her. She only knew that she must never look directly into Antonio’s eyes, and never grant him a private interview, both for his safety, and for hers.

  She had to sit for what she thought was to be a medal to commemorate the shooting of the popinjay. It filled up the empty hours. Her nerves were badly frayed, and the painter annoyed her. Everything annoyed her. She saw Antonio in public, and it was worse than not seeing him at all. She longed for him. It was ridiculous. A tension built up within her and could find no way out.

  She had told him to stay away, but there are times when it is not so pleasant to be obeyed. She began to feel that he was avoiding her, even that he had done with her. She was mortified. She did not dare to find out.