Love in a Bottle

by Antal Szerb

  All this time the Magus had remained sitting in his armchair. When the final moment came, he dispatched his soul to its last and greatest exaltation. One after another, his vital organs failed, and with them faded all the soft sensory impressions, the sounds, scents and images of the transient world. Then even the sense of weariness ceased, and the soul unfurled its wings on a loftier, freer, plane. An irresistible lightness carried it ever upwards, ever higher and higher—the light grew ever brighter, the boundaries of the soul ever wider. It now floated on a sea of light, the one men call the Sea of Forgetting, for when the soul comes there it can no longer remember that it was ever anywhere else, the Eternal Present floods it with a wondrous sense of peace, and the hideous shackles that constitute the sense of ‘I am’ fall away.

  And then his soul stood trembling on the final shore. It had come this far before, but always fallen back again, able to proceed no further. Normally this moment of pause would occur in the same instant as the soul’s ascent and be immeasurably brief, since the strength and desire that had propelled it on its way were great enough for it to break through the boundary, taking it on to a second sea, the one men call Death.

  Meanwhile the body the Magus had left behind had been washed and laid out, according to his instructions, on a black bier, and the procession set off on its way to the accompaniment of slow dirges.

  But his soul continued its upward flight, leaving immensities incomprehensible to human understanding far below. And now it was no longer alone. All round it appeared a multitude of spirits clad in light, and the sun’s coach, with its wheel of golden spokes, stood glittering before it.

  The soul of the White Magus stepped up into the coach, in which were gathered before him a host of other sages, magi and masters of the lore of the stars. They thronged around him, rejoicing, holding him in place, and he was able briefly to rest.

  Then the soul moved to the very edge of the sun coach and looked back at the way it had come, across immeasurable distances all the way down to the earth. There it lay, a grey, lax, languid, motionless object, far, far below. It was not a comforting sight, and the soul prepared to journey further on.

  Then suddenly, from one particular spot on the Earth, a sort of luminosity flared up. It was quite unlike the celestial radiance of heaven, but worldly, opaque, and deeply disturbing. As the soul’s vision slowly adjusted to the distance, it realised that the light was coming from the city of Byzantium.

  It saw a great multitude standing before the cathedral, around a white bier, and on the bier lay the miraculous form of a young woman, the source of the strange earthly radiance. Then, very slowly, the girl sat up, then stood fully erect. The ceremonial golden robes that enveloped her, denoting her high birth, glowed like a chalice. Now she was all the Magus’ soul could see. It watched as her arms began slowly to move, like the arms of a person walking in sleep. Never before had it beheld anything like this.

  Then suddenly it could see everything, as the earthly light spread out in all directions, enveloping the whole world as it slept in the midday sun, its radiant face adorned with a million triumphantly verdant trees and flowers… and the sea was as blue as the sky, the sky was as deep as the sea, and where they met the breezes softly caressed the fledgling waves.

  And the Magus’ soul was filled with sorrow that it had never seen any of these things before. It leant out over the edge of the sun’s coach. The running board was made of gold and very slippery, the distance below was beyond measuring, the soul was overcome with vertigo and fell headlong, plunging ever downwards towards earth. Liberated from the body, it was driven by a single gravitational force—desire.

  The soul of the White Magus hurtled down through myriad worlds, back into his abandoned body. In the tower of the great cathedral known as the Hagia Sophia, the bells were tolling twelve.

  The crowd standing around the little Princess watched as, very slowly, the royal maiden held up a hand in front of her, as if to fend off the sunlight. She was alive!

  Suddenly someone gave a great shout and pointed in horror to the other bier, the black one, on which lay the body of the Magus. And then everyone gazed in awe as the right hand of the dead Magus slowly stroked his brow. In the same instant the little Princess’ right hand fell back, under its own dead weight.

  The silence, and the horror, were indescribable. Slowly, very slowly, the White Magus raised his head, with its huge crown of white hair, and at the same time Princess Zoë’s head drooped, like the head of a broken lily. Slowly the Magus sat up, as the maiden sank to her knees. Like a ghost or supernatural apparition, he rose to his feet, while she lay down on the white bier. He gave a great sigh and spread his arms out wide, as the Princess clutched her hands to her breast, like a statue on the lid of a coffin. His eyes opened fully, and his appalled gaze met that of the Princess—in its very last half-second of life. Then her eyes closed for ever.

  The great bells tolled. In the stunned silence of the pitiless midday sun the crowd fell to their knees and beat their breasts, though none knew why. Very few noticed that the Magus had leapt down from his bier, thrown himself on the ground, and was sobbing like a child.

  As the little Princess lay on her bier, the diadem slowly slipped from her forehead, and the eternal sun of ancient Greece wove flowers of gold in her radiant hair.

  1923

  THE TYRANT

  DUKE GALEAZZO’S new Commander-in-Chief came marching at the head of his army through the triumphal arches of Milan. To welcome their returning soldiers the city had put on display some of the prodigious wealth that had accumulated under the Duke’s sagacious rule. The clothes worn by the burghers were worth fortunes. Banners hung from balconies, fluttering proudly in the wind. At banqueting tables across the city the poor were to be Galeazzo’s guests.

  The King of France’s younger daughter, who was passing through on her way to a nunnery in Rome, could only marvel at the unparalleled splendour. But she was sorry that the Duke, whom she had never seen, was not there in person. The gossip was that there was another purpose to her visit, and certainly the French court would have welcomed a connection with the powerful Duke of Milan. But so far he had lived a life of confirmed celibacy, and the chronicles of scandal had never managed to link his name with any sort of bedfellow. It was said that he kept himself aloof from love in order not to be blinded by passion and fall prey to the wiles of a woman.

  The procession had now reached the market square, where the crowd was at its greatest and most distinguished. Strange rumours were circulating. Their source was unknown, but everyone was convinced that the day of celebration was about to witness something that had never happened before—the Duke would come down into the city and make his appearance in the square before his triumphant general. Everyone looked forward to his coming with intense curiosity, not least because very few people had any idea what he looked like—not the colour of his hair, or even how old he was. This was because since infancy he had not once, in all his extremely long reign, set foot outside his castle, and had never visited the city he ruled with such great prudence and care.

  The Commander-in-Chief, a stout, powerfully built military man, halted his horse before the cathedral. He was still unfamiliar with the customs of the Milanese Court and imagined that the Duke would now ride out to meet him, clap him on the shoulder in front of the assembled crowd and invite him to a princely feast in the castle; the wine would flow until dawn, he and the Duke would be on first-name terms, and they would live as true friends ever after.

  A fanfare of trumpets sounded and the Duke’s feared personal guard, clad from head to foot in steel, rode into the square. Many of them were huge, grim-faced Hungarians and Germans, men who had no dealings with the citizenry.

  The guard fanned out in line. Now everyone was certain that the Duke would step forward, and thousands of eyes focused on one point. But the person they saw was an emaciated old Benedictine, the Duke’s Chancellor. The monk made a humble bow, informed the Commander that the Du
ke was unable to be present, and that he had come instead, as his representative. He would receive his report and give him his instructions for the rest of the day. The arrangement was that that the Commander and the leaders of the mercenaries were to be feasted in the Council House.

  The Commander’s triumphant face instantly darkened, his head dropped, and he followed the little old man into the Council House. The French King’s daughter left the same day.

  The banners were rolled up and trundled off, and the flowers given away. People pulled their hats down over their eyes and took no pleasure in the free canteens. The old feeling of hatred that seemed to have been briefly forgotten was back again. If two pairs of eyes met over a raised glass, it was to drink silently to the Duke’s demise. If a sixteen-year-old burnt with a nameless ardour, it was because he saw himself as a future tyrannicide, while the older folk simply regretted that the time for that great day was not yet ripe. Once again, the dark shadow of the invisible tyrant lay across the city.

  But the Duke, who never knew a single day’s rest, and who had never tasted wine in his life, had risen at dawn that morning and worked away at his never-ending tasks of administration. Only for a moment had he glanced out of the window and then, with a small smile of total indifference, he had turned to his Chancellor and observed: “What a lot of people! And every one of them a taxpayer of mine, while I pay taxes to no one…”

  His entourage, ageing churchmen grown grey-haired in their studies and black servants alike, had heard this many times before. Not one of them was a Milanese. Galeazzo thought of the people’s hatred as a sort of endemic disease that the children of the city carried with them from the cradle and of which not one of them would ever be cured. He knew that—setting aside the blood of conspirators and those sacrificed in his perennial wars of defence—no stain of tyrannical behaviour, however construed, or of cruelty, was attached to his name. And yet there was not one person born in Milan in the last forty years who had not come into the world under the sign of the tyrannicide.

  As the huge crowd broke up and despondently drifted away, a rather different sort of ceremony was taking place inside the Court. This was the day when Ippolyto turned sixteen. Ippolyto (known affectionately as Lytto) was a pageboy of noble birth assigned to the Duke’s inner cohort of attendants, and the one person, it seemed, for whom Galeazzo felt any personal warmth. To mark the occasion he had presented the boy with a finely worked dagger, which seemed to signify that so far the page had served him with a boyish devotion but from now on he would be expected to defend his lord and master by arms and manly strength. Lytto was thrilled, not so much by the gift itself but by the fact that he had been given it at all, and he kissed the Duke’s cold, ring-studded hand with a totally spontaneous ardour. His radiant delight brought a smile to the Duke’s lips, and he stroked the boy’s head. That action, more than anything else, made it Lytto’s happiest hour. He could not remember anyone ever touching his long golden hair so gently before.

  The fact was that Ippolyto had come into the world some sixteen years earlier as the child of a guilty love. His mother was a high-ranking lady intimately connected with the Duke’s inner circle, and his arrival, it seems, had caused a considerable scandal. No way could be found to conceal the situation from the all-seeing, endlessly gossiping Milanese people, and Galeazzo had decided to have the boy brought up at his side, shielded from prying eyes by a veil of invisibility. The years passed, and his plans for his protégé developed further. He came to see that this young man, who had grown up in the chilling, rarified air of the Court, without parents, a proper home or family tradition, was a real treasure, and he felt that if he could keep him away from the maniacal ideas of the Milanese people during these highly impressionable years and instil in him the disciplined ethos of the court and something of his own rather cold personal charisma, then thoughts of treason would never take hold of him. The boy would become his faithful follower, someone he could trust whatever the circumstances—the sort of adherent he had never previously had.

  This scheme, like everything else, he carried out precisely and with great circumspection. Thus from the age of ten little Lytto had set aside his childish toys and spent his days in the Duke’s service. He was a serious young man, conscientious by nature, and he performed his duties well. Galeazzo jokingly called him “my walking memory” for his habit of politely drawing his attention to anything he forgot. By now the Duke was beginning to age. Not only was his memory weaker but his body was becoming more susceptible to cold, and Lytto was always to hand with a pillow, a fur coat or a soft footstool for his easily chilled limbs. The strain of too much mental work had made the Duke surprisingly delicate: he could no longer tolerate bright light, or noise, or any kind of slovenliness and dirt; and during his hours of rest only Lytto was allowed near him. With his silent, cat-like tread, his pale young figure that proclaimed both his outer purity and inward innocence, and the comforting gaze of his large eyes with their permanent expression of wonder, his entire person seemed to have been woven from the ‘dim religious light’ of the holy church itself.

  And Galeazzo, who dealt with everyone with the same cool, refined affability, knowing that the fixed smile of ceremonial courtesy would instil a sense of his superhuman, Byzantine power in all who met him, was distinctly more courteous to Lytto than anyone else. He would joke with him every morning, offer him something sweet to eat at midday, and ask him every evening to remember him in his youthful prayers. This gave the impression that of all people Lytto was closest to his heart. In fact Galeazzo behaved in this way simply because he realised that the boy would respond only to gentleness, and in that sense this affectionate treatment differed little from his usual system of government. He felt no greater love for the boy than for anyone else, nor would he permit himself such a love, knowing as he did how dangerous it was for a ruler to have a favourite.

  And so this little celebration came to its end. Thereafter the days were filled with a formal, ceremonious monotony. They rose at dawn, to the calling of birds. Everyone had his prescribed duties. The only variety in Lytto’s life came through his studies, his tutors being the Duke’s learned secretaries. To Galeazzo’s great delight, he mastered the Latin language in an astonishingly short time, then the Greek, and became an inspired and enthusiastic student of the classics. These studies made him even more serious than before—what had previously been instinctive in him, his religious piety, his humility and his profound respect for the Duke, were turning into the altogether deeper qualities of a well-educated young man.

  A consequence of all this study was that his eyes began to open, and he became aware of things inside himself that he could not understand. For some time now he had been assailed by strange feelings. Galeazzo was a great lover of music, and sitting listening to it at his master’s side drove Lytto into a state of irrational agitation and distress. He loved to gaze down from the arched windows of the castle at the city below, lying there silent under the stars in all its unknown, forbidding splendour. He shed tears over the story of Nysus and Euralia. He yearned for some strange and thrilling adventure involving heroic deeds, and was haunted in his dreams by the twin stars of friendship. His loneliness tormented him and served only to deepen his feelings of tenderness towards Galeazzo, the only person (since he was uniformly ignored by the morose inhabitants of the court) who ever took any trouble with him. He never ceased hoping to be able to show some sign of his affection.

  And then at last his opportunity came, albeit a melancholy one. As a result of sitting up through the long winter nights, continuous work and a refusal to spare himself, the Duke became ill. He fell prey to nightmares, and his doctors feared for his life. But while everyone else tiptoed round the sickbed in despair, these were wonderful days for Lytto. He was with the patient at all times, cheerfully sacrificing his nights and his beloved studies. He carefully measured out Galeazzo’s medicines (a single drop too many might prove fatal), prepared his poultices, and delighted in the fact that
the man who had never before depended on anyone now found him indispensable. For the Duke could not bear any sort of woman near him—gossips and poisoners every one! Only from the boy’s gentle, love-inspired, womanlike care could he hope for cure. And with time everyone came to feel the same way. Lytto had won limitless power in the curtained sickroom, where Galeazzo’s peevishness made it impossible for anyone else to enter. And he wore his new power modestly, the sole, if double-edged, reward for his loving.

  In the castle chapel Mass was said for the Duke’s recovery. Wearily, unfeelingly, the courtiers counted their beads, while the mercenary guardsmen stood by in grim rows. Lytto went there too for a while, to supplicate the spirit of Divine Love. When the host was raised he summoned all his strength to pray, to appeal to the Presence on the altar from the very bottom of his heart. To add a genuine inwardness to his devotions, he pictured Galeazzo in his mind as already dead and lying stretched out in full armour, surrounded by his bodyguard. Next, his thoughts turned to the Duke’s great armchair, in which no one would ever again sit as he had, swaddled in furs. And his whole future life stood before him—without purpose, meaningless and lonely as the sea. He burst into loud sobbing. He saw, in his grief, that without love there could be no true life for him; never again would he enjoy the miraculous taste of Love’s feast, for if, in all the endless, empty universe, there were nothing to love, then perhaps God’s spirit, that is to say, God’s love, might never again hover over him.

  He continued to pray through his tears. Soon afterwards, Galeazzo’s fever began to abate, and under Lytto’s careful nursing he started to recover his strength. On many a bright and sunny winter’s afternoon the two would sit together out on the terrace. To the accompaniment of his lyre, the boy would sing deeply poignant Italian love songs, and every now and then Galeazzo’s sunken face would turn languidly towards him with an expression that could almost be mistaken for warmth. For all his frailty, the Duke could still tell amusing tales of students, artists and merry widows, none of whom he had ever met in the flesh but whom he knew of with all the hopeless yearning of those who read books. He was now a stooping, heavily wrapped figure. After so much self-neglect, he looked like an old man.