He had already raised the knocker, when he thought he heard steps approaching within. His heart was beating so that those inside must hear it. Hardly ever in his life had he been in such a state; for the first time the inexplicable, a departure from any conceivable order, had singled him out, he felt that the secret would never let him rest: he saw the girl climbing up the naked walls, wrenching herself upwards by the crevices to reach him; he saw her, with bleeding hands, crouching in a corner of the courtyard, trying to escape him. His thoughts went no further: a rapid step approaching the door half robbed him of his senses. The door opened. Zorzi stood before him.
“For God’s sake, tell me who it was!” cried Andreas, and before Zorzi could answer, before he could ask, ran past him to the end of the passage.
“Where are you going?” Zorzi asked him.
“Into the courtyard—let me go.”
“The house has no courtyard: there’s a blank wall here, with the canal behind it and the garden of the Redentore monastery beyond.”
Andreas could not understand a word. He had lost all sense of direction; he told his story, and saw that he could tell nothing, that he had not the power to tell how momentous was the experience he had lived through.
“Whoever the person is,” said Zorzi, “rest assured that if she ever shows herself in this quarter again, I shall find out who she is: she won’t escape me, whether she is a man in disguise or a street woman having some fun.”
Andreas knew only too well that neither the one nor the other was anywhere near the truth. He could understand nothing, yet, in his heart of hearts, rejected any explanation. How gladly would he have hurried back into the church, to find, if not his mysterious enemy and friend, the nameless, strange woman who climbed up walls to swoop down on her prey from above—then at the very least her companion; for now it seemed impossible that the two beings, one of whom had risen in the other’s place, like the glass of red and yellow wine in the hand of the conjurer, should be ignorant of each other. He could not imagine why he had not thought of the connection before. He felt how careless his search of the church has been; he ought to have been able to find a trace—a crack in a wall—a secret door. If only he had been alone, how eagerly he would have hurried back! The imperious need to seek and find would have urged him back again, and then again, a third and fourth time. It had often happened so: a letter mislaid—a key we know we have; but Zorzi would not let him go. “Leave your climbing man-woman—you’ll see more than that in Venice—and hurry up to Nina. She’s expecting you. I can’t tell you all that’s been going on up there again. The Duke of Camposagrado, her protector, in a fit of rage and jealousy, stuck a rare singing-bird she had had sent to her by a Jewish admirer, Signor dalle Torre, into his mouth, living, and bit its head off. Then he was suspicious about the Hungarian captain and Nina, and had him thrashed half out of his life, and what’s more he seems to have got hold of the wrong man, and now the sbirri are after him, and have searched her lodgings. In fact, everything is upside-down, and that’s just the moment for a newcomer to get into her good graces.”
Andreas was only half listening. The staircase was narrow and dark; he hoped at every turn in it to see the strange woman appear, and even at the top, in front of Nina’s door, he half expected her to flit by. It now seemed beyond the possibility of doubt that a secret connection had existed between the two gestures—the imploring gesture of the mourner had been meant for him, just like the signal of the young girl. His excitement, his impatience to unravel the mystery of this being, was hardly bearable; she had, in some incomprehensible fashion, found the way to be alone with him for an instant: a high wall, perhaps with water flowing below it, had not deterred her from doing what seemed impossible to any creature but a cat: the blood flowing from her fingers had not daunted her. She would find the way to him again, always, everywhere.
They found Signorina Nina on a sofa in a very easy, very pretty posture. Everything about her was light, and of a most charming, delicate plumpness. Her hair was as fair as bleached gold, and she wore it unpowdered. Three things, which were charmingly curved, and perfectly in keeping, her eyebrows, her mouth, and her hand, were raised to greet the entering guest with an expression of quiet curiosity and great friendliness.
An unframed picture was leaning with its face to the wall. There was a gash through the canvas, as though it had been slashed by a knife. Zorzi picked it up and looked at it, shaking his head. “What do you think of the likeness?” he said, holding out the portrait to Andreas, who had sat down on a stool at Nina’s feet. The portrait was such that a coarse eye would have been struck by the likeness. Nina’s features were there, but they looked cold and mean. In reality, her brows, with their faint upward curve, were charming because they were traced on a face which was almost too soft; a severe judge would have found her neck not slender enough, but in the set of the head on the neck there was something enchantingly helpless and womanly. In the portrait the curve of the eyebrows was vulgar in its emphasis, the neck, cut through by the knife, was fleshy and lascivious. The eyes were fixed on the beholder with cold, insolent fire. It was one of those painful portraits of which it can be said that they contain the inventory of a face, but reveal the soul of the artist. Andreas felt a wave of inward aversion.
“Take it out of my sight,” said Nina. “It means nothing but annoyance and brutality to me.”
“I shall mend this one,” said Zorzi, “and paint another, only this time on a Flemish, not a Venetian, ground. It will be still better, and I shall make both the gentlemen pay twice. I should be an ass if I could not manage to make them both pay me.”
“Well, what do you think of it?” she asked, when the artist had vanished with his production.
“I think it is a very good likeness and very ugly.”
“That’s a pretty compliment.”
He made no answer.
“Now you have been with me for not more than a minute and have already said something unkind. Do you think too that men are given greater strength and sharper wits and a louder voice just to make life harder for us poor women?”
“I don’t mean it in that way,” Andreas hastened to say. “If I were to paint you the picture would turn out quite differently, you may be sure.”
He said so much, and would have liked to say a great deal more, for she seemed unspeakably charming. But the thought that Zorzi might come back into the room at any moment disturbed him, and he said no more. Perhaps he had said enough—he did not know—for it is not words that matter, but a tone of voice—a look.
Nina looked, as if absently, past him; on her upper lip, which was curved like her eyebrows, and seemed as if it were ready to yield to something that was to come, there hovered the shadow of a smile—it seemed to be waiting for a kiss. Without thinking Andreas bent forward, a little dazed, looking at the half-open lips. Romana rose before him, only to vanish into air. He felt as if something delicious, yet intimidating, was settling softly on his heart, to dissolve there.
“We are alone now,” he said, “but who knows for how long?” He stretched out his hand for hers, yet did not take it, for he seemed to feel Zorzi’s hand on the door-handle. Andreas stood up and went to the window.
Andreas looked through the window and saw below him a pretty little roof-garden. On a flat terrace orange trees stood in tubs, lillies and roses grew out of wooden boxes, and ramblers formed a walk and a little arbour. A fig tree in the middle even bore a few ripe figs.
He asked: “Does the garden belong to you?”
“It doesn’t belong to me, and I should like so much to rent it,” returned Nina, “but I can’t pay those greedy people what they want. If I had it I should have a basin made with a little fountain in it—Zorzi says it could be done—and have a lamp put in the arbour.”
Andreas saw himself going into the neighbour’s house, paying the rent down on the table—then he saw himself coming back to Signorina Nina with the lease. In imagination he was already giving orders for the t
rellis round the roof-garden to be raised: climbing roses and convolvulus were winding up the slender lattice-work, turning the little space into a living-room, with the stars looking in from above. The night breeze played through it, the inquisitive looks of the neighbours were shut out. Fruit stood in dishes on little tables, among lights under glass shades: Nina was lying on a sofa in a light wrap, much as she lay before him in reality. But what a different Andreas stood before her! Dreamily he felt that other self: he was no chance visitor, to whom a vague, absent-minded quarter of an hour was granted. He was the legitimate lover, the master of the enchanted garden, the master of his mistress. He was lost in a vague sense of happiness, as though the sound of an Aeolian harp were pulsing through him. He did not know how little need there was of all these schemes, that the very next moment might have meant happiness.
“What is it?” asked Nina, and in her voice there lay the expression of faint wonder that came so naturally to her.
Her voice recalled him to himself. It occurred to him that it must be possible to look down from the roof-garden on to that roof of vine-leaves which stretched from one blank wall to the other and on to the canal which flowed between that courtyard and the garden of the Redentore monastery. The thought of his unknown came to him, but with terror. That being was in the world—here was something from which he could never escape. His breast contracted, he felt as if he must seek a refuge. He turned back into the room, and, leaning on the back of the sofa, bent over Nina. Her upper lip, which was delicately arched, like her eyebrows, was raised in slight wonder.
“I was thinking that I am living in the rooms where you used to live, and that I am living there alone,” he said, but his words came heavily. “If you had the little garden down there, and the arbour with the lamp in it, I should be glad to live there with somebody—really glad—but not with the one that man carried away. I should not like to live with her in any house, in any arbour, on any island. And you have no arbour, and no lamp in it!”
He would have liked to kneel before her, to lay his head in her lap; but he said all this, and especially the last sentence, in a cold, almost gloomy tone, for he thought that a woman must divine all that was going on in him. In speaking with this hard sarcasm of the Nina of the picture, she must know that another Nina was closer to him, and he to her, than could ever be said in words, and that his whole being was ready to create the circumstances whose non-existence he emphasized so caustically. But at the same moment a strange, sad picture rose before him—it was the memory of childish dreams, which seemed now far remote, and had been repeated ad nauseam: he had crept hungry to the pantry to cut himself a piece of bread; he had pressed the loaf to him, knife in hand, but again and again had cut past the loaf into the void.
His hand, without boldness, without hope even, had taken Nina’s hand, which was charming without being thin, and delicate without being small. She yielded it to him, he even thought he felt the fingers close about his with a soft, steady pressure. Her look was veiled, and the depths of her blue eyes seemed to darken; the hint of a smile still lay on her upper lip, but a fading, almost anxious smile that seemed to call for a kiss. Nothing could have startled him more deeply than such signs, which would have made another bold, even insolent. He was utterly dazed. How could he grasp what was so simple and so near? He did not think of the woman over whom he was leaning, but in a lightning flash he saw her mother, her father, her sister, her brothers, he saw the choleric duke rise from the space round the sofa, the bleeding head of a parrot in his hand; the head of a Jewish admirer pushed its noiseless way beside him—he looked like the servant, but wore no wig; and the Hungarian captain, whose hair was in plaits, ferociously brandished a curved knife.
He wondered if all the ready money he possessed would be enough to release Nina from all these phantoms, and had to admit, for a week perhaps, for three days. And what good was a single gift, even if it was going to beggar him, when, it seemed to him, decency demanded that he should provide an income, perhaps even a lodging, a house, newly furnished, and servants—at least, he reflected, a maid and a manservant? Gotthilff’s face leered up at him; the beauty of the moment dissolved. He felt he must let go of Nina’s hand; he did so with a gentle pressure. She looked at him; again something like wonder was mingled with her expression, yet it was cooler than before. He had taken his leave, he did not know how, and had asked permission to return.
Downstairs he found Zorzi, who had the picture, wrapped up in paper, under his arm, and seemed to be waiting for him. He dismissed him quickly. He repented bitterly of having spoken to the man of his unknown; he was glad that Zorzi did not begin to speak of her. For nothing in the world ought he to have put on her track just the man whose eyes seemed to be spying on him and everybody else. He told him that he would soon visit Signorina Nina again, and did not believe it himself. Hardly had Zorzi departed with his picture when he was on his way through the street; under the archway, over the bridge, to the church.
The square lay deserted as before: the empty boat hung motionless below the bridge. It looked to Andreas like a sign of encouragement. He walked as if in a dream and did not really doubt—had no other thought than that the mourner would be sitting there, and would raise her arms anxiously, imploringly, towards him as he entered. Then he would withdraw, knowing that behind his back the other would rise from the same prie-dieu to follow him. This mystery was not past for him, but something that was repeated in the form of a circle, and he only had to step back into the circle to restore it to the present.
He entered the church—it was empty. He returned to the square, stood on the bridge, looked in every house, and found nobody. He went away, wandered through a few streets, then after a time returned to the square and entered the church through the side door, went back through the archway, and found nobody.
JOURNAL OF HERR VON N’S TOUR TO VENICE, 1779
I REMEMBER things very exactly—always had a good memory, won the Grand Cross of Excellence at school because I could recite the rulers of Austria forwards and backwards. I also took note of all my mother’s servants, and all my grandfather’s minerals, and the names of the stars in Orion.
Reasons for the tour to Venice: Artists, great names. Palaces, behaviour in drawing-rooms, starting a conversation. To make an appearance, to please. What I already knew about Venice: Uncle had friend whose relatives had been cast into oubliettes (with nails and razors) …
Arrival: Early morning. Hungry. Chilly. Starts out to look for lodgings. Troop of actors waiting on canal bank. An actress ogles him from the lap of a fellow-actor.
Walks through a street or two. The half-naked gentleman, he has a hat with a veil of coarse lace on his arm, a fine but tattered shirt. He addresses him, says he knows Vienna, mentions names. Declares he has gambled away everything he possesses. I lend him my cloak; he speaks very nobly of generosity, of times gone by. The gentleman tells how he took a lady of fashion to Grassalkovich’s; she said, Brutto nome, pare una bestemmia (an ugly name, it sounds like a curse), and would not have him as a lover. When he is dressed, his tone is much more sociable, less elevated.
Smell of cooking. The stranger will not let him breakfast here, promises to procure him a lodging at a nobleman’s, goes with him.
The lady of the house, the nobleman, the old man. I give money for breakfast to be brought. Am given the room of the daughter, who has left home. Everybody is connected with the theatre. Groans from above: the artist has colic. We go up, the stone is removed; meanwhile the nobleman brings the little fish in his daughter’s handkerchief. We eat real Venetian frittatura.
Up again to the artist, he shows me the portrait of a beautiful woman (for dalle Torre), promises to take me to see her. On the way, tells the story of the Duke of Camposagrado’s two pictures; when the brothers send him theirs, he laughs immoderately and assigns a sum of money for them to send him the Goya, copy the Tintorettos. Artist promises to present me to the Duke.
Arrive at the beautiful lady’s. Bird
in cage, fine porcelain hyacinths in front. Camposagrado. Present; details of the Pyrenean village where the Duke is magistrate.
The young lady in the other room with him. Camposagrado very angry, devours the bird and goes. I am introduced, behave with reserve. The old woman suggests I should give a present. I withdraw, cannot take things lightly. This would be the moment for an irresponsible blackguard or a clever swindler. I invite her to supper.
Go out on to the Piazza. Miss a procession, see a patrician putting on a harlequin costume. Go to the theatre. The veiled (masked) lady. Letter received on the Piazzetta.
The Knight Sacramozo sits down beside me. His appearance. The servant with the letter. The servant seems to know the Knight. Tell the Knight that I have invited the courtesan. He is surprised that it all fits in.—Go to bed. Mosquitoes.
Next morning: appointment with the Knight. To the lady’s, at her morning toilet. Am first shown into an anteroom, while the lady retires with the Knight. The lady comes, makes somewhat casual apologies. The Knight goes to breakfast with me, explains his conception of love. Former passion for the courtesan. His attempted suicide.
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