Love in a Bottle

by Antal Szerb

  “You have a sure hand, Franghipani!”

  And that was all. To Lytto, who had expected something rather different after what had just happened, it showed a total want of human understanding. All he felt now was that the miracle had happened in vain. It was too late. He had lost the battle. Galeazzo had killed off the one tie that had bound him to humanity. Filled with loathing, he returned the Duke’s cold stare for a moment. Then he suddenly leapt to his feet. He had seen the Face—the face, the vision, that had driven the Milanese painter to madness, the white, expressionless, horrific face on the throne, above the dark-green cloak: Galeazzo’s true face, with the mark of the Antichrist on his brow.

  After this, Lytto spent no more time thinking. His doubts had all melted away. Now he understood everything. Instead of questions, he was filled with a bleak, dark indifference. He went about his business, fulfilled his duties mechanically, and let the hours and days pass over his head like tall cliffs tumbling down into a deserted valley. The time of his departure was drawing near. His speech was inaudible and his features expressionless—paralysed by that face, like a small animal hypnotised by the stare of a snake.

  Then, just before the date of his departure, something occurred to shake him out of his stupor. The Duke was in council with his secretaries and a document was required. He sent Lytto out to fetch it. Lytto returned, set it down before him, then allowed the hand, whose whiteness had once been such a source of pride to him, to play briefly, with a fine, unconscious grace, on the table. Galeazzo’s glance strayed towards it, Lytto noticed the look, and suddenly it was as if he had woken from a dream.

  Now he understood exactly why the Duke had said “You have a sure hand, Franghipani”. The Duke’s diabolical line of thought was clarified in a flash. Galeazzo had thought him capable of the very same act: he had been afraid that Lytto would kill him! So little did he believe in love, and so thoroughly had he banished the feeling from his own heart, that he was capable of conceiving such a thought in his head.

  The boy’s earlier lethargy gave way to a fever of excitement. Once the notion had taken hold in him he could not shake it off. It was with him night and day. He stared at his trembling hand as at some alien object, one on which Fate had laid a terrible summons.

  Now his mind was clear: Galeazzo was a tyrant—of all tyrants the most abominable—and the death of such a person was an act pleasing to God. By the end of a feverish night his plans had ripened to certainty, and the next morning he was once again as calm as he had been before temptation troubled his soul. He felt a strange strength in his limbs. His body seemed to him a light, comely thing, as if he were walking on air—as if it were something apart from him, with a will of its own, that might fly off uncontrollably.

  At last came the day before St Lawrence’s. The following day he would have to leave. His project could be deferred no longer. That morning he washed and tended his appearance with particular care. Throughout the day people were struck by his youthful beauty, and many were sorry that he was going. At matins he confessed his sins and received the body of the Lord. In his free time he read Plutarch’s portrait of Brutus in the Parallel Lives. When darkness fell, he closed the book and made his way up to the castle chapel.

  There he prostrated himself before the statue of St Ambrose. Words of profound meaning poured from his lips, as if someone were prompting him. On the evening of his great deed, Ippolyto di Franghipani prayed in the following terms:

  “Good Bishop St Ambrose, you who watch by night over the fate of your people, help me to accomplish the deed attempted by that brave young man from Milan. Grant that I might be courageous and calm in the fateful moment, worthy of my illustrious ancestors, and a faithful emulator of the many glorious heroes of antiquity. It is surely right that it should fall to me to complete what has already cost the lives of so many people. Those brave souls would merely have ended the life of a hated stranger, but I shall sacrifice the one person I have loved above all others. My soul has been washed of its sins, and no selfish desire directs my weapon—I shall act only for the city and for divine Justice. For in the fullness of my heart I believe and confess that the true Christ lives, Christ who, though God himself, suffered for all mankind—while here, Father, is a man who refuses to enter into the sweet and tender ties of love with anyone. I acknowledge that the Tempter has come close to my soul, and I too have built a tower of solitude. But I also love the people of Milan, whom I do not know, as I love all humanity. Shut away in this castle of wickedness, I have felt their blood pulsing through my heart, and I listen to the words of my heart. I have no wish to set myself above the common people, but rather to suffer on my own behalf, on behalf of others, and all mankind. No sense of guilt troubles my soul, because through this deed I shall fulfil the tyrant’s own wish. It was he who opened my eyes; who—of his own free will—revealed himself to me in all his impiety and wickedness; who planted the thought of the deed in my mind, and placed the dagger in my hand. It was his way, this non-human in the midst of humanity, of destroying himself, through my agency. Like a scorpion. I know I am your sinful and unworthy servant, weak and fallible, and even as I ask this I do not entirely wish it. But look upon the purity of my intentions, Father, and intercede for me before the Holy Trinity, now and in the hour of my death. Amen.”

  He went back to his room, next to the tyrant’s. He waited for everything to go quiet, counting the sweet-tongued bells of Milan as they tolled the hours. He was perfectly calm, and the time passed quickly. At one hour after midnight he rose and went into the tyrant’s chamber.

  Galeazzo’s sleeping face gave away none of his secrets. A little lamp flickered at the foot of his bed. As Lytto came near, he started up and, still half-asleep, enquired:

  “Who is it?”

  “It is I, Ippolyto di Franghipani,” the boy replied calmly.

  He drew his dagger, and freed Milan from the tyrant.

  1923

  PART TWO

  1932–43

  CYNTHIA

  (a fragment)

  WHEN THEY THREW ME OUT of Cambridge for my poor taste in neckties and generally immoral conduct, I enrolled at University College London, whose chief claim to fame (though they kept this private) was that its Dean was obliged, as a matter of principle, to see off any clergyman who dared set foot on the premises.

  So one fine day, by way of experiment, I dressed up in the traditional garb of an Anglican vicar, so familiar from popular films, and seated myself conspicuously by the main entrance to the college, where English girls and Persian boys in sporting attire bathed themselves in the pallid English sun. I lowered my eyes reverently and waited in delicious terror for the Dean, the sanctified elders and university proctors to process before me. I love processions. But none came; teatime was approaching, and I suddenly realised how naive I had been, yet again. So I began to preach. I spread my arms wide and held forth to my brothers and sisters present, as seemed appropriate, about certain revelations of the divine intentions supposedly vouchsafed me on the Liverpool to London train, and how the Great Beast of the Apocalypse was actually Scotland. Clearly unimpressed, the English girls heard me out with an air of devout boredom. Only then did I leave. Utterly humiliated, I went off for some tea. I felt that English good breeding had rejected my entire being, and that, even as a cautionary example, my whole existence was theologically unsound. I was oppressed by the immensity of the world and my own insignificance in it. That evening I wandered tearfully around Hyde Park, and, in a great, rueful gesture, I made a present of the reflections on the lake, which she so loved, to my girlfriend Cynthia. I would have offered the whole world to her, or to anyone else who might be kind enough to stroke my hand in a spirit of nocturnal sentimentality. I kept nothing back. I gave it all away—most generously of all, given my incurable snobbery, the London Halberdiers.

  As a result, I was once again the first person to arrive the next morning at the Reading Room of the British Museum. Ever since my late uncle’s Jules Verne-like w
ill had sentenced me to a life of scholarly pursuits, library visits had become practically second nature to me—though my real nature might well have been to drive a locomotive or charge on horseback across the Great Hungarian Plain. I really can’t say. I never did grow out of that adolescent phase in which—in an experimental kind of way—you are forever dressing up as different people. When I contemplate the extent of my wardrobe it astonishes even me.

  I sat in my usual place. Before me lay the usual books, with their divine smell of dust and their shamefaced air of not having been read for centuries. One or two of them had, to my precise knowledge, last been handled by the poet laureate Southey in about 1830, the thought of which moved me deeply. Then the young man who sat beside me every day turned up. I was rather fond of this fellow. He seemed to me to be truly part of the atmosphere of the place, along with the great dome above our heads, the rings of shelves with their endless rows of books, and the silence, deeper and more intense than in a temple, in which the only sound was the constant rustling of paper. I settled myself down and began to read.

  Later I found myself browsing through the catalogues and wondering whether I might make Cynthia a gift of them too, or perhaps bestow them on Eileen, keeping only the letter ‘T’, to which I was so devoted, when I became aware of the same young man standing beside me and wanting a word. I had long intended doing the same myself, and had he been a woman I would surely have already done so, but I had been unable to overcome my shyness with other men. But I now saw that the great moment had come when a new friendship, one determined in some cloudy pre-existence, was about to be born.

  “Yes?” I said, and smiled obligingly.

  “Oh, sorry,” he said, and stammered a bit, in his confusion deploying one or two phrasal verbs incorrectly, but very politely for all that. “You’ve been using that book by Henry Thomas on the novels of Amadis de Gaula for two weeks now, and I need it rather urgently. Would it be a very great nuisance if you could let me have it for a couple of days?”

  “Not at all. But… you’re also working on Amadis?”

  “Oh, yes,” he replied, with that warm, deeply confiding and slightly myopic smile that only philologists can produce when talking about their subject. A tingle of comfortable recognition shot through my heart. I knew that this was the heaven-sent person I so much needed. Not because of Amadis de Gaula. What was Amadis to me, and what was I to him? But I was gazing at the one man to whom in 1930 Amadis still had something to say: a man over whose head the centuries of cold reason had passed without trace; a man who still had a feeling for the charming, ever surprising and truly heroic folly that had once been Europe.

  Meanwhile teatime had come round again, as it always does, and we went out, so rapt in our great discovery of each other that we cast not a glance at the old woman who fed the pigeons every morning in the gardens outside the Museum with a strange, erotic joy written all over her face. We made our way straight to the Bury Street tearoom and, as if by unspoken agreement, both ordered buttered crumpets with our tea, and gazed at one another in wonder and expectation.

  Amadis, the unparalleled knight, must have been turning in his grave. Whole decades, perhaps I should say centuries, must have passed since anyone had spoken about him at such length as we did that day. For a full three hundred years ungarlanded oblivion had squatted on his once-great novels. Now we summoned to memory that Spanish nobleman who called on a friend one day to find the whole family in mourning. “Amadis is no more,” declared his grieving host, and pointed to an open book, that great and challenging folio whose disturbing sentences captured the dream of the centuries—the dream that has since been lost. We spoke of the wonderful names he gave his characters—Oriana, and Urganda la Discognue, and Galaor—and his countless fantastical islands set in the mystical Mediterranean Sea.

  I deeply regretted that I hadn’t had a chance to ask the young man’s name and nationality. I could tell that he wasn’t English, but his accent reminded me of no country I was familiar with. I was even sorrier that it was Friday, and that that afternoon I was going off with Cynthia for the weekend.

  In my transcendent mood I had nothing more for lunch than a couple of oysters, then took myself off to Bond Street to buy her something truly wonderful. I made several fine purchases: a state-of-the-art lip-reading tool in gold, an Old French dog collar and an evening dress that certainly would have looked very good on the little shop assistant herself—except that I realised just in time that I wasn’t really in the sort of relationship with Cynthia to buy her a dress; perhaps I should send the whole bundle of stuff to Eileen instead, and ask the assistant to dinner? Her name was Doris, and she was English. That week she was busy, but the following week we spent a very pleasant evening together, though I would prefer to keep things in their chronological order as far as possible. And anyway, this Doris isn’t really significant—I’ve since moved on from that whole ambience, and all I wanted to mention about her is that when I was taking her home in the car… but I’d rather not talk about that either.

  Sufficient it to say, I had now come to the end of Bond Street, and still hadn’t found anything truly wonderful for Cynthia, when Providence brought before me, in all his glorious individuality, Stephen Ellesley, a fellow whose one shoulder emanated joie de vivre while the other was weighed down by the burden of his debts. I couldn’t offer him to Cynthia, I thought—I simply can’t find words to express the grotesqueness of his being—but in that precise moment I knew what I was going to surprise my lady with: a chimpanzee. From a little red cubicle I telephoned one of the directors of the zoo, a man I had recently befriended at an anti-vivisection league dinner. We settled on a baby chimp, and, to make him happy, I promised to become a life member of the Friends of the Zoo and vaguely resolved to become vegetarian once again. I left the business of parcelling the creature up and, insuring it to his expertise, went home, packed my bags, and set off for Codliver Manor.

  There was a sweet after-rain atmosphere, the trees, the red roofs of the little houses and the telegraph wires all gently dripping. The road followed its own winding way from one end to the other with the peculiar individualism of this country that accords everything its due. It was lined all the way with the cosy houses of the affluent middle class, with English families drinking tea behind carefully drawn curtains, their lives, according to experts, so immeasurably dull but to me so inexpressibly full of attractive mystery (when observed from a passing car. Actually to step inside one would have been the end of any such notion).

  By the time I had arrived at the old gate nestling between enormous beech trees, and was making my way towards the manor, I had fallen once again under the spell of Cynthia’s whole aristocratic ambience and the thought that her ancestors’ names featured in the work of several Elizabethan playwrights, not to mention Dryden’s dedication, which I had memorised verbatim when I first got to know her and mumbled in fragments while we were kissing.

  But somehow these ancestors were merely an incidental undertone in the rich music of her aristocratic identity, and the closer I got to her the more light years were set between us. I might spend an entire evening in her company, but she never failed to ask in amazement, while I was squeezing her hand:

  “So you’re still in England? How can you put up with this damp, boring little country if you’ve nothing special to do here?”

  And when after half an hour I finally got the chance to kiss her, before her lips were again in position to be used for speech, she would already have asked me the French for ‘hunting bag’.

  With her, you could do anything. She knew no moral inhibitions, nor do I believe any real passions. (“There are three sexes,” Paul Morand tells us somewhere: “men, women and the English.”) But she did go the whole way. My assigned role was to act as if what was going on wasn’t actually happening to us as well-brought-up and intellectual beings, but to two natives somewhere in Patagonia, two complete foreigners, while at the same time, half in a dream, we considered the latest cri
tique of a St John Ervine play. For a while I really enjoyed it—the mouth that wasn’t actually her mouth but rather a means to help the thoughtful philologist conjure up the image of the Oriana of the Amadis novels for himself; the shoulder she so marvellously offered for my kiss that wasn’t her shoulder so much as a precious object revealed for the greater wonderment of a guest, and the whole stunning impersonality of her physical actions. On one occasion, for those same reasons, something gradually rose up inside me, and I sank my teeth into the shoulder as it approached. Cynthia slapped me powerfully but impersonally on the cheek, and started talking about protection racketeering.

  I now see that, while we were together, for the whole of those two and a half months, we did genuinely love one another, while our love lasted. I loved her for her superior social class, starting with her Coldliver Manor poker ankles and her eighteenth-century wit. I loved it when she played golf and went riding, and visited the village poor, and fell asleep in church on Sunday morning: these things she invested with an aristocratic perfection I could never have attained in a million years. I loved most of all to think of her asleep, because every thought that ran through her head diminished her unreasoning, God-given perfection. When she slept, with her face set and rather solemn, and now so hopelessly distant from me who a few minutes before had held her in my arms, she was, beyond question, Oriana, the beloved of Amadis’ knight.

  But Cynthia, naturally, had a less awestruck attitude to her rank. It is a characteristic of the true upper classes that they are quite unaware of themselves. The sad thing was that Cynthia prided herself on her cleverness. She read a vast amount and was ashamed of all the books she hadn’t read. And she was ashamed of her aristocratic background. Once, after a game of golf, we were lying about on the side of a hill, and Cynthia, set free by a kind of erotic pleasure, allowed herself to relax in the sun, as only the English know how—as if she were experiencing the world through her skin alone. Suddenly she sat up, her face full of agitation.