by Norman Lock
Corrado forgets the voice (if he has heard it at all). He thinks only of Grazia. The baron has no such distraction. If he heard Death’s apostrophe from the garden, where it hides among the lengthening shadows, he pretends otherwise. He concentrates on the music Grazia is playing.
“She plays beautifully.”
“Yes!”
The baron turns to the window, which is now black—night having approached the villa from the sea. He shivers and goes to close the window.
“It makes me sad,” Corrado says of the music.
“It is always so,” Cesarea replies, thinking of the hour—the hour of tristesse, when the light is extinguished and the warm Adriatic air turns damp. He would have wept had he been alone. He looks into the whiskey, watered with vanished ice. Its amber light is out. Its little sun. Baron Cesarea finishes the drink, for he cannot go to Grazia and take her in his arms.
“I wish I were a young man,” he says, turning to Corrado after both have been silent. But Corrado is looking elsewhere, into the darkness among the columns, which rise archaically from the room’s marbled floor. Night has entered unnoticed through the window, powerless to keep it out.
Like a ruin, thinks Corrado, and feels a sudden access of hatred for his father. Or is it for Grazia?
“Fedele!” the baron shouts. “Fedele!”
The duke’s man enters from an anteroom, where he has been waiting in another obscurity to perform his role. “Baron?”
“Why have you left us in the dark, Fedele?”
They cannot see one another: Corrado, Cesarea, the duke’s man. They are voices in a dark, dimensionless space. The columns are engulfed.
Unrelenting, Grazia plays Pavane pour une infante défunte. In her hands, the notes have all turned to lead, to ash. To dead leaves that the wind sweeps—rustling—away.
A wind has risen in the garden, rattles the sash, bends the cypress trees that crowd against the villa’s outer walls. Accompanying its mournful music, Death descants, This melancholy you feel at the coming of night—a sorrow blown by the flying darkness into the duke’s magnificent rooms—you have felt it many times before—at this hour, the hour of tristesse, when the day is unmade like a bed on which you fear to lie down, in case it should prove to be your last. The bed in which you were born and those vexed by ten thousand nights of sleep and dream, sickness and love. The sheet stinking of birth, of blood, of sweat, of love wound about you at last. But none of this crosses your mind. Only the unaccountable sadness of the hour, which makes you irritable and afraid. So you call for the lights to be lit. You hurriedly dress for dinner and rush out to be among other people, to laugh, to drink, to hear music.
“Where is Duke Lambert?” Cesarea asks peevishly, because he is afraid.
“In the library,” Fedele replies. “Someone arrived a little while ago, wishing to speak to him.”
“Who?”
“A stranger.”
Corrado goes to the music room to be with Grazia. She is sitting in the dark. For a moment, he thinks that she is weeping, but it is the music—its tragic current. Corrado stands in the doorway, transfixed by absence: His lover seems to have vanished, leaving only rueful notes to mark her place. Not lover—beloved. He has yet to measure the length of his body against hers. Their kisses are chaste. He wonders briefly if the unappeased desire aroused in him would be diminished by her surrender—would be erased as completely as her image by the darkness. He shakes his head to rid his mind of an unworthy thought. Hatred steals into his heart, and he turns it on himself like a knife.
“Grazia!”
“I’m here, Corrado.”
“Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“It’s pleasant to play without seeing.”
The wind, which was blowing from the sea, moves on its great hinge, turning against the music room at the opposite side of the villa and scattering the sheet music. It brushes Corrado’s face like a papery wing, so that he cries out.
“The wind is strong tonight,” she says indifferently.
Strong enough to strip trees of leaves and the sky of all its stars, says Death in a low voice hidden beneath Corrado’s footsteps as he rushes to the window.
He shuts the window, but Grazia has stopped playing and does not resume. She hears Corrado spin the flint wheel of his lighter, smells the fluid’s astringency.
“Don’t!” she tells him. “My head ached so in the light.”
“Did you hurt yourself in the accident?”
He almost touches her face.
“No, it’s only a headache.”
“I behaved stupidly.”
“No, it was wonderful, Corrado! To drive so fast—wonderful! I felt—”
—as if I had been sleeping. A princess in a story—asleep for a hundred years behind thorns, behind glass. Waiting without knowing it. Dreaming of a door through which one day someone will walk. Not a door—a hole in the air—a black emptiness in the gray air, without a particle of light or sound—a rustling of cloth or wings or a murmuring. You drove faster and faster, until I felt something tear—an organ, my heart, a gland whose function has been forgotten, ripped out, ripped. Then blackness and the stinging behind the eyes, and a sickness like rapture.
“The shadow—it seemed to cling to you,” says Corrado, who has been listening to Grazia’s or to Death’s voice in the darkness of the music room.
It seemed to come from inside me, the voice continues, and when the tires left the road, I was happy. I wanted only to die.
Again, Corrado spins the lighter’s small rough wheel. Its flame trembles in his hand, leafs Grazia’s forehead and cheeks with gold, illuminates the line of her jaw, in which an aristocratic nature is wholly revealed. Her eyes are closed. Corrado shakes her more roughly than even his dread can explain. For an instant, he wants to humiliate her; to throw her to the floor and defile her. Grazia has fallen asleep in spite of Corrado’s shouting: “Why do you keep me always at a distance? When will you marry me? Why won’t you let me close to you?” I hate you, Grazia, for what you make me suffer! I would like to destroy you—your virtue, which is an insult to me, filling me with rage. Why do you make me ashamed? “Wake up, Grazia!”
We had an almost fatal accident, he thinks. I was driving too fast and could not hold the road when we went into the turning. It has made her hysterical. The effect of encountering, perhaps for the first time, a force she cannot command. Powerlessness before an uncontrollable event. I may also be hysterical. Because of how close we came to it. Death. It is only natural that tonight we should not be ourselves. Tomorrow, we will be restored. After we have slept. Grazia can’t keep her eyes open. Mine, too, want to close. I thought it was the whiskey. The baron is right: It was nothing—the shadow. A trick of light.
Grazia’s arm falls across the piano keys, sounding a discordant finale to Corrado’s meditation—her lovely white arm, on which she rests her head.
Fedele enters the music room, obedient to the will of others. It is the will of Duke Lambert that Grazia and Corrado come at once to the reception room. Prince Sirki has arrived, the duke’s friend. Fedele turns on the lights. (Why didn’t Corrado, who knows the location of the light switch in this, his father’s house and his?) Gently, Corrado lays his hand on Grazia’s bare shoulder. Despite himself, he hears desire whisper its insinuations. Grazia shrugs into consciousness. She lifts her face; a strand of hair falls, and she pushes it away. She lifts her arm from the piano, and a second confused chord rumbles. Corrado helps her stand. Neither of them knows that Grazia was dead—had gone a little way into Death’s kingdom. It clings to her now the way salt does a swimmer who has set out into the sea, only to repent and return to shore. If Corrado looked into her eyes, he would know that she has just returned from an immense journey. But he does not look. This man, whose eyes seldom leave Grazia when she is near, does not look at her at all. He is looking at nothing, or rather, at a seam of darkness lying somberly within the fold of a drape or the peculiar vacancy of the window, which,
in its utter blackness, neither reveals anything of the outside nor reflects anything inside the lighted room. Could glass be said to have died, this glass is dead. Corrado does not remark on these uncanny effects. He does not even consider them as effects (which would lead him to ask himself, Of what?); he does not notice them. His eyes are ravished by darkness.
He leads Grazia into the salon and to Prince Sirki. The prince, Duke Lambert, and his guests would wonder at the young man’s haste if they saw him enter, but they do not see him. They form a tableau: Prince Sirki, standing by the French window, with the darkness of the garden at his back; the others facing him—Lambert in front, the apex of a triangle of bodies in postures of obeisance. Princess Maria, Grazia’s mother, indicates a curtsey: She is Sirki’s titular equal and need do no more. Alda, the contessa de Parma, is seen in an attitude of homage, which would strike Corrado as charming rather than abject. But he sees only Prince Sirki. The prince is dressed in the white dress uniform of his Balkan country. The jacket blossoms with rosettes and decorations. His black hair gleams with the light of the chandelier. Although he is aware of Corrado standing at the entrance, he has not acknowledged him—pleased by the scene of welcome before him. Corrado takes a step into the room, drawing behind him Grazia, who seems to be sleepwalking. Sirki now turns—not to Corrado, whose eyes are transfixed by the glint of light cast by the prince’s monocle, but to Grazia, in whose eyes he sees a languor irresistible to him. He walks toward her in his high, polished boots, dispersing Lambert and the others. The prince smiles. Corrado is swept aside by his indifference. Sirki marches on Grazia as if she were a town to be taken. He stops in front of her, hesitates, does not take her hand to kiss. Having cast off sleep and the remnant of whatever it was she dreamed there, she begins to fold like a flower at the coming of night. But the prince prevents her from completing this gesture of submission, which he has allowed—accepted as his right—from the others.
“It is I who should bow to you,” he says, and does. “Your beauty.”
He is—there is no one word to tell what Sirki is or why he has moved Grazia. He is neither charming nor courtly, for they require insouciance he lacks, nor does he have the equanimity of a Don Juan. He is possessed of an absolute authority and behaves as one used to obedience. Yet Sirki wishes to be liked in spite of the militancy with which he confronts the duke, his wife, Stephanie, and their guests. His severity of dress and manner distances him from them. Sirki wants to be admired—no, received as one of them. But they cannot receive him. He is cold: His presence in the room chills them. Lambert almost calls Fedele to close the windows, but the windows are closed; and besides, the night is not unpleasant. It is a warm autumn night; and while the summer blooms are past, the grass and leaves are green. But the chill inside the villa is undeniable, and Princess Maria shivers. Or is it that the prince is looking at her daughter with such intensity and she, having raised her head, is looking at him with equal interest? Interest scarcely describes the quality of her gaze, which, perhaps, alarms the princess. She is not the only one who registers disturbing sensations. Each of them is disconcerted by the prince, although none could tell, if asked, what it is about Sirki that dismays them. For dismay, more than any other word, most aptly describes the emotion predominant in the room. Except for Corrado, who is angry because of the way the prince is looking at Grazia. She returns his gaze without blushing—or flinching; for there is something painful in that gaze. To suffer it is almost to die. Aware of the young man’s hostility, the prince turns to him. Sirki’s eyes having left Grazia’s, she is like one who has wakened suddenly: She starts and nearly cries out. She shuts her eyes and opens them—her pale eyes no longer in thrall. She watches Corrado fall back before the prince’s stare. The young man has the look of someone about to be destroyed. Now it is Grazia’s turn to shiver—with cold or fear. She saves Corrado without knowing it.
“Corrado, I’m cold; please get my shawl. I left it in the music room.”
Prince Sirki lowers his eyes from Corrado’s, permits him to leave the room in order to bring Grazia her shawl. The young man goes without a word. Perhaps he knows how close he came to death. Perhaps not. Lambert’s guests are reminded that they, too, are cold and ask the duke if a fire cannot be made up in the great hearth. Duke Lambert pulls a sash; and a bell rings in a distant room in the villa, summoning Fedele, who arrives within moments, his face a mask showing neither irritation nor servility.
“Make up the fire, Fedele,” the duke says with the air of one who asks the impossible, because he alone understands that the room is not cold; or if it is, no fire can warm it.
Fedele bows and does as he is bidden.
Released, Grazia goes to her mother. They withdraw to a corner of the salon that puts them at the farthest remove from Sirki. The others also seek—consciously or not—to separate themselves from the prince, who stands isolated and forlorn. He is like a boy abandoned by his friends, who go off by themselves, heads together in conspiracies of mirth. Sirki is offended. Only the duke understands their danger—how cruel the prince’s rage is likely to be. (Even Lambert cannot know the extent of it. How—with a single terrible look—the prince can stop the heart of each, stop light from entering their eyes and sensations from knitting themselves into thoughts on the mind’s dark loom.) The duke herds—like a shepherd his scattered flock—his wife and guests to the center of the room, dogging them with whispered reminders of their obligation to make welcome his eminent guest. They assemble once more in a tableau of respect. Lambert implores the prince with his eyes not to give way to rage. Sirki glares in answer, reminding him with a magisterial look of their agreement and the consequences of its violation. The duke lowers his head as if to ask that the prince’s wrath fall on his alone. The others are silent, sensing in the tension between them a crisis that concerns them all. (All but Fedele, who has fallen asleep with the fire tongs in his hand. He has been neither more nor less reserved toward the prince than toward the other guests.) It is the moment when the executioner’s ax is gathering to itself the weight of finality. The air between the blade and the neck of the condemned becomes electric with an insuperable attraction. No one dares enter its dangerous current. The moment is being swiftly drained of potential. In seconds, actuality will succeed inevitability; and the ax will begin a descent that neither a king’s pardon nor the executioner’s remorse can stop. Corrado enters with Grazia’s shawl. The interruption is in time. The accumulating charge dissipates; the ax is lowered harmlessly. Prince Sirki relents. Grazia smiles. Duke Lambert takes out his cigarette case. Fedele wakes. The guests move about the room as if nothing has happened.
“Thank you,” says Grazia after Corrado wraps her white shoulders.
“Come with me into the garden!” he begs. “The moon is bloodred tonight, and nothing seems to sleep. The larks and the nightingales are singing in the trees.”
She looks toward the windows, but they are still dead, revealing nothing outside, reflecting nothing within. She shivers and closes herself within the shawl.
“I am very tired, Corrado. I must go home to bed.”
“But, Grazia—”
“She had a fright this afternoon in the automobile,” says the baron, who has been drawn irresistibly to the young woman because of her beauty or for another reason he himself does not know. “It’s tired her.”
“We must be leaving now,” says Princess Maria, who senses that her daughter has stepped, without knowing it, into a current against which she is too weak to swim. Maria only senses it; for the dread with which she beholds her daughter standing inside the shadow of Prince Sirki remains a nameless one.
The prince’s anger overtakes them like an early frost. “They are leaving?” He looks to Lambert for an explanation.
“They did not plan to stay, Your Grace.”
Only Lambert knows the cost to them all should the prince be made to feel that he is other than what he seems.
“Believe me, Your Grace—they did not mean to stay!”
Lambert pleads; and in his pleading, his son perceives an abjectness, which rankles him. Shame for his father’s humiliation and for his own before Grazia incites Corrado to act. He moves against Sirki, intending to fling an insult and a challenge at him, then halts. There is an inviolable zone around a monarch none may enter, upon pain of sovereign displeasure. It is a realm in miniature, whose borders are secured against trespass. That surrounding the prince is mined with destruction. Duke Lambert seizes his son’s arm roughly.
“Prince Sirki is my guest!”
“He insults us by his presence!” Corrado shouts, his voice tremulous with indignation and fear. “I demand that he leave at once!”
“What is this insolence, Lambert?” Sirki’s voice tolls a warning.
“Forgive him, Prince—his youth!” The duke pulls his son from the brink. “He doesn’t know what he is saying. Forgive a young man his folly!”
Corrado allows himself to be led from the room. He does not admit his terror, telling himself that he withdraws in deference to his father’s wishes. Could Lambert see him, he would be struck by a face emptied of blood. If he looked closely, he would note a wildness in his son’s eyes and a twitch in one eyelid. But the corridor leading to the music room is dimly lit.
“You must not provoke him, Corrado! He is more dangerous than you suppose.”
Feeling himself safe, the young man answers with bravado: “You should have let me slap his face for the insults he has given you.”
“It would have been the last thing you ever did on earth,” Lambert says with a solemnity that stops Corrado in mid-step.
“I thought he was your friend,” he says.
“I met him for the first time tonight.”
“Then he is not Prince Sirki?”
The duke does not reply.
“Who is he, Father? I demand to know!”
“It is enough for you to know that he is a most powerful prince who can, if he pleases, bring your life—all our lives—to an end.”
“One man—”
“He can strike us without raising a hand.”