by Ray Russell
“Sir, I alone am blameworthy in this. Here is my breast: draw your sword and slay me, for I know that you must, but find forgiveness for your sister and spare her life, I beseech you.”
Carlo appeared to be confused by this speech, and asked for elucidation; whereupon Ramon replied, “In my country, you, as the lady’s brother and only living relative, would be compelled by custom to observe the pundonor, the point of honour, and slay the woman as well as the man, even though the woman be raped. Blood alone, the blood of both, can wash out such a stain—”
“So may it be in Spain,” said Carlo. Then he laughed in a not unfriendly manner, and added: “Your ancient ways it ill becomes me to disparage, but all the punishment I plan for you—is marriage!”
Nothing could have pleased the two young people more than this. They joined Carlo in laughter, and then and there, under the most—shall we say informal?—of conditions, made plans for a quiet wedding, to take place in one week’s time.
It was a simple ceremony, attended almost entirely by the servants, conducted in the chapel of the palazzo by a simple padre of the district.
Ramon took up residence in the palazzo, the old walls of which seemed to glow with the love of the newlyweds. Their life was an enchanted idyll, they lived in an Eden of bliss that paled the painted Eden of his canvas. The picture was at length finished: it hangs here now, in the main hall, where all may see and admire the beauty of Fiammetta-Eve, and the talent of her adoring husband.
Some nine months after that embarrassing interruption that precipitated the hasty marriage, Carlo planned a supper for the three of them. Fiammetta was great with child, the midwife expected the infant to arrive the following day, so the supper was in the way of a celebration. The finest wines and cheeses were brought forth from the cellar, roasted birds and baked meats were proffered, fantastic pastries decorated the table. There was much laughing and joking, a deal of kissing, and Carlo and Ramon exchanged a great many stories of chivalry and brave exploits, thus delighting Fiammetta, who liked a good tale. Carlo asked Ramon if he did not perhaps know a story concerning pundonor, which would help him understand this strange custom of the Spaniards.
“I do,” replied Ramon. “A story both true and terrible, a story close to me for reasons you will soon perceive. It is a story of a beautiful Spanish widow, the still-young mother of a boy not yet fifteen, who was seduced—nay, raped would be the more honest word—by a hidalgo of hot blood and cold cunning, grown bold by the recent death of the poor lady’s husband and protector. But he did not reckon with her brother, who, as guardian of the family’s good name, slew him—then slew the lady, too, his own sister, to satisfy the code of pundonor, which demands that both defiler and defiled must be slain.”
“How cruel!” said Fiammetta. “That the lady, too, should die! It is a heartless code, this pundonor.”
Carlo, agreeing with her in his jingling, jangling way, said that the Italian vendetta was much more sensible and fair than pundonor, since it would demand the death of the traducer only, not of the wronged woman as well.
Placing a tender hand upon her husband’s arm, Fiammetta cooed, “My love, you said this tale was close to you . . . was the poor widow your mother, and yourself the lad of fifteen years?”
“No, my sweet, I was ten at the time, but there is more to tell. The unhappy lady was my dear and saintly aunt; the brother who spilt her blood, my father. My cousin, the boy of fifteen, with whom I and my little sister were wont to play and gambol for hours together, so congenial were we—that dear cousin, that jolly companion, roiled by his mother’s death and by the manner of it, wrought a horrible revenge upon us.” Ramon shuddered. “Even now, across the span of years, the picture of that vengeance poisons me . . .”
Count Carlo said, “But pray go on, although it chill your marrow—a half-told tale’s a bow without an arrow.”
Ramon resumed: “One night, while we all slept, my cousin stole stealthily into our house, crept up to the bedchamber of my little sister, and then—with his father’s saber, which we found all bloody on the floor—hacked her into unrecognizable pieces!”
Fiammetta sucked in her breath and recoiled. “Ah no!”
“Butchered that four-year-old! Butchered her tiny blameless form as if she were a suckling pig—nay, one would not even chop a pig so much, so madly!”
“Oh, my poor Ramon . . .” Fiammettta sought to solace him with tender kisses upon his cheek, so wrought was he with the reliving of the hideous event. “And your cousin?” she asked. “How did he fare? Was he caught and punished?”
Ramon shook his head. “He vanished. We searched for weeks, for months, a year, but he was never found.”
A silence had covered the table like a shroud. The setting sun cast a ruddiness upon the room that, at any other time, would have been lovely, but now looked like nothing more nor less than a film of blood. At length, Carlo rose from the table, stroking his chin reflectively, and paced, saying, “This haunted tale of hellish hate I might yet elaborate.”
“Elaborate?” said Ramon, wonderingly. “That story?”
Carlo nodded. “Suppose, by devilish design, indeed your cousin killed a swine, made of it a mincemeat mess, wrapped it in the silk nightdress of your sister and then fled, bearing her away not dead—not dead but very much alive, to such a place where she would thrive, and grow more beautiful each day, in a palazzo far away . . .” He turned suddenly to the puzzled Spaniard.
“In a . . . palazzo?” said Ramon. “You mean in Italy?”
Carlo nodded.
“Strewed the gory pieces of a pig in her crib and left the saber there . . .”
Carlo bowed.
Ramon tried to smile. “It is an ingenious conceit, I grant, but . . .” His voice trailed off, uncertainly.
Said Carlo: “That cousin of such horrid fame: tell me, may we know his name?”
Ramon opened his mouth, then closed it again without replying, as if the requested name had frozen in his throat. His eyes flickered from Carlo to Fiammetta and back again.
She, who had been silent through this, now said, “Ramon—what was your cousin’s name?”
Ramon did not look at her. In a chilled voice, he said, “Carlos.”
Carlo laughed.
Fiammetta laughed, too, at what she knew not. Her laughter faded and died as her mind called back a line from one of Carlo’s past nonsense verses: Blood may seem what blood is not. Did it have a meaning? And: Blood most innocent, if shed, hatred on that blood is fed. What of that? Was it mere foolery, or something much worse? She turned to regard her husband—unspeakable suspicions were beginning to distort the sweetness of his face (or was it something in her own thoughts that was making his beauty ugly to her eyes?). That which sweetest tastes of all may be changed to bitter gall. Adonis can a monster be, and songs of love—cacophony . . .
Giggling hollowly, she plucked her husband’s sleeve and said to him, “This is but a mad jest, it is his peculiar way.” Turning desperately to Carlo, she cried, “Tell him it is only a foolish verse, brother!”
Carlo was no longer laughing. He looked icily down upon her. “Nevermore call me your brother.” He pointed to Ramon. “Use that name upon this other.”
“No!” she shouted, hoarse with disbelief. “Ramon my brother? This is your silly fancy!”
Ramon howled, “It cannot be!” But he had grown pale. Now, rising, staggering under the full implication of Carlo’s words, he upset the table, sending chalices of wine clanging to the marble floor, their crimson contents gushing like sanguinary floods. “I am here of my own volition!” he cried to Carlo. “You could never have foreseen my coming!” His eyes glazed with a new thought and he reeled away from Carlo, saying, “And yet . . .”
Fiammetta now spoke, her voice blanched by dawning horror. “And yet, did you not say that tales reached your ears of a maiden whose beauty . . .” She brok
e off, her voice strangled in her throat, her ivory bosom heaving with the pound of her heart. “Oh God! Those who spread the tales—they must have been his accursed minions!”
Ramon’s whole frame was shaking. He took Fiammetta’s terror-stricken face in his hands, and studied it, and looked into her eyes as he said, in a voice all groan and whimper: “You do not resemble him . . . you are closer to me in likeness . . . to me!”
Carlo had wandered out, onto the parapet, and was now standing with his head thrown back and arms outspread, looking aloft into the blood-red sky. In a frenzied, declamatory voice, he addressed an apostrophe presumably to the spirit of his hated uncle:
“Slayer of my mother, see—I avenge that infamy! See your son and daughter wed, sharing a corrupted bed; see her swollen by his seed, soon to spawn a loathly breed! Thus Ramon and Fiammetta consummate my sworn vendetta!”
His insane laughter echoed along the canals . . .
But I must bring this to a close, Bobbie, for my eye-lids grow heavy. I was kept awake last night by these confounded bells of Venice: the tolling of the enormous Campanile bell first, followed by that pair of sledge-hammermen on the Orologio, one of them always two minutes behind the other ever since 1497, I am told. In that two minutes there is no silence, however, for there is another, unidentifiable, bell in the vicinity of St. Mark’s to fill the vacuum. Promptly at six in the morning, the Campanile again shakes the town as its great bell calls the faithful to worship. And yet I love this glorious clangour! What is mere sleep compared to such a symphony? There will be sleep and to spare, for all of us, when we are laid in the earth.
The rest of my story you can guess, or most of it. Ramon, driven by justified rage as well as by the dictates of pundonor, killed Carlo (or Carlos) and Fiammetta, and, finally, himself.
This treble tragedy grows even starker when we consider the distinct possibility that Carlo’s little disclosure may have been a figment, made up out of whole cloth, just as Fiammetta fleetingly had hoped. His mad mind may have fabricated the whole thing for the first time when he heard Ramon’s account of those childhood horrors.
And certain convenient facts relating to the resemblance between Ramon and Fiammetta may have seemed to corroborate Carlo’s story. But have you not seen two strangers more alike in looks than some siblings you have known? Have you not seen brother and sister quite unlike each other in appearance? As for the seeming prophecy of the earlier verses, which so terrified Fiammetta when she recalled them, did they really contain secret knowledge or were they no more than crazy Carlo’s cryptic word-juggling, meaningless jingles with obligatory classical allusions? I fear we will never know whether Carlo’s mischief was a fiendish plot stretching over many years, or merely a tall tale concocted that fatal night.
My venerable host offers no opinion on this matter. When he left me yesterday, he merely added that Fiammetta’s child did not die (as one would assume) but was born at the moment of his mother’s death. You, Bobbie, are a physician, and will know if such a thing is possible. He further claims that this child is still alive. And he hints, rather broadly, that this offspring of a possibly unnatural, possibly quite natural union is none other than himself. I will admit he is old enough to be.
Before I close, I must tell you that the great diva, Maria Waldmann, is here in Venice, preparing what will be her last opera season (she is retiring to marry Count Galeazzo Massari) and she has promised to write me a letter of introduction to her friend Signor Verdi, whom I hope to visit soon at his home, Sant’ Agata. He is searching for a subject for his next opera, and I propose to recount the above story and perhaps undertake the writing of the libretto—Ramon e Fiammetta, or possibly Carlo, Conte di Venezia, or better still: La Vendetta, un dramma di Enrico Stanton, musica di Giuseppe Verdi. What do you think? Please write, a good long letter, whenever you are not chattering on your “telephone.” And when you do write, please tell me if it is true what I have heard: that the Empress of Brazil has sent our dear Victoria a gown woven entirely of spider web. I prefer to believe it, but my preferences, as you know, have always been for the baroque.
Your friend,
Harry
The Cage
“They say,” said the Countess, absently fondling the brooch at her young throat, “that he’s the devil.”
Her husband snorted. “Who says that? Fools and gossips. That boy is a good overseer. He manages my lands well. He may be a little—ruthless? cold?—but I doubt very much that he is the Enemy Incarnate.”
“Ruthless, yes,” said the Countess, gazing at the departing black-cowled, black-hosed, black-gloved figure. “But cold? He seems to be a favorite with the women. His conquests, they say, are legion.”
“‘They’ say. Gossips again. But there you are—would the angel Lucifer bed women?” The Count snorted again, pleased at his logical triumph.
“He might,” replied his wife. “To walk the earth, he must take the shape of a man. Might not the appetites of a man go with it?”
“I am sure I do not know. These are delicate points of theology. I suggest you discuss them with a holy father.”
The Countess smiled. “What did he want?”
“Nothing. Business. Shall we go in to dinner?”
“Yes.” The Count proffered his arm and they walked slowly through the tapestried halls of the castle. “He seemed most insistent about something,” the Countess said after a moment.
“Who did?”
“Your efficient overseer.”
“He was urging more stringent measures with the serfs. He said his authority had no teeth if he could not back it up with the threat of severe punishment. In my father’s day, he said, the thought of the castle’s torture chamber kept them in line.”
“Your father’s day? But does he know of your father?”
“My father’s harshness, my dear, has ever been a blight on our family’s escutcheon. It has created enemies on many sides. That is why I am especially careful to be lenient. History shall not call us tyrants if I can help it.”
“I still believe he is the devil.”
“You are a goose,” said the Count, chuckling. “A beautiful goose.”
“That makes you a gander, my lord.”
“An old gander.”
They sat at table. “My lord—” said the Countess.
“Yes?”
“That old torture chamber. How strange I’ve never seen it.”
“In a mere three months,” said the Count, “you could not possibly have seen the entire castle. Besides, it can be reached only by descending a hidden stairwell with a disguised door. We’ll go down after dinner, if you like, although there’s really nothing there to interest a sweet young goose.”
“Three months . . .” said the Countess, almost inaudibly, fingering the brooch again.
“Does it seem longer since our marriage?” asked the Count.
“Longer?” She smiled, too brightly. “My lord, it seems like yesterday.”
• • •
“They say,” said the Countess, brushing her hair, “that you’re the devil.”
“Do you mind?”
“Should I mind? Will you drag me down to the Pit?”
“In one way or another.”
“You speak in metaphor?”
“Perhaps.”
“You are equivocal.”
“Like the devil.”
“And, like him, very naughty.”
“Why? Because I am here in your boudoir and you are dressed in hardly anything at all?”
“Because of that, yes; and because you counsel my dear husband to be a tyrant, like his father.”
“Did he tell you that?”
“Yes. And he showed me the torture chamber you advised him to reopen. How wicked of you! It is a terrible place. So dark and damp, and so deep underground—why, a poor wretch could split his lungs sc
reaming and never be heard in the castle proper.”
“Your eyes are shining. I assume you found it fascinating.”
“Fascinating! Of course not! It was disgusting. That horrible rack . . . ugh! to think of the limbs stretching, the tendons tearing! . . .”
“You shudder deliciously. It becomes you.”
“And that dreadful wheel, and the iron boot . . . I have a pretty foot, don’t you think?”
“Perfect.”
“Such a high arch; and the toes so short and even. I hate long toes. You don’t have long toes, do you?”
“You forget—I have no toes at all. Only hooves.”
“Careful, I may believe you. And where are your horns?”
“They are invisible. Like those your husband will be wearing very soon.”
“Indeed. You think highly of your charms.”
“As do you. Of yours.”
“Do you know what struck me as most horrible?”
“Eh? Horrible about what?”
“The torture chamber, of course.”
“Oh, of course. What struck you as most horrible?”
“There was a cage. A little cage. It looked like something you might keep a monkey in. It was too small for anything larger. And do you know what my husband said they kept in it?”
“What?”
“People!”
“No!”
“They kept people in it, he said. They could not stand up straight, or lie down; they could not even sit, for there were only spikes to sit on. And they kept them crouching there for days. Sometimes weeks. Until they screamed to be let out. Until they went mad. I would rather be torn apart on the rack . . .”
“Or have that pretty foot crushed in the boot?”
“Don’t. That tickles . . .”
“It was meant to.”
“You must leave. The Count might walk in at any moment.”
“Until tomorrow then, my lady . . .”
Alone, smiling to herself, the Countess abstractedly rubbed the tops of her toes where he had kissed them. She had heard of burning kisses, they were a commonplace of bad troubadours, but until this evening she had thought the term a poetic extravagance. He wanted her—oh, how he wanted her! And he would have her. But not right away. Let him wait. Let him smoulder. Let him gaze at her in her diaphanous nightdress; let him, as she lifted her arms to brush her hair, admire the high beauty of her breasts. Allow him a kiss now and then. Oh, not on the mouth, not yet—on the feet, the fingertips, the forehead. Those burning kisses of his. Let him plead and groan. Let him suffer. She sighed happily as she turned down her bed. It was fine to be a woman and to be beautiful, to dole out little favors like little crumbs and to watch men lick them up and pant and beg for more and then to laugh in their faces and let them starve. This one was already panting. Soon he would beg. And he would starve for a long, long time. Then, some night when she thought he had suffered long enough, she would allow him to feast. What a glutton he would make of himself! He would try to make up for lost time, for all the weeks of starvation, and he would feast too rapidly and it would all be over too soon and she would have to make him hungry again very quickly so he could gorge himself again. It would all be very amusing . . .