by Sándor Márai
Francesca
Teresa brought in the chocolate and announced that Giuseppe, the pretty, rosy-cheeked, blond, blue-eyed boy, had arrived and was even now waiting for his instructions. Giacomo gave the girl money, had some white stockings brought over from the nearby fashionable haberdasher, then—on credit—ordered two pairs of lace gloves and a pair of clasped shoes as an extra. While the barber lathered him, the various servants proceeded round him on tiptoe, changing the bed, pouring hot water into basins, and ironing his clothes, for he had taken considerable pains to impress upon Teresa the importance of carefully starching the ruffles on the front of his shirt. The barber’s soft hand moved over his face, rubbing the lather in, then, like a conductor, wove and teased each curl of his locks into place.
“Talk to me,” said the guest, his eyes closed, stretching his limbs out in the armchair. “What news in town?”
“Town news?” the pretty barber began in a singing, slightly effeminate voice, lisping a little. “You, sir, are the news. No other news in Bolzano since sunset last night. You alone. May I?” he asked, and with the ends of his scissors he began to snip at the hair sprouting from the guest’s wide nostrils.
“What are they saying?” came the question, along with a sigh of satisfaction. “You are allowed to tell me the worst as well as the best.”
“There is only the best, sir,” the barber answered, snapping his scissors in the air, then taking the heated curling tongs, breathing on them, and turning them about. “This morning, as usual, I was up at the crack of dawn with His Excellency. I’m there every morning. You should know, sir, that His Excellency does us the honor of affording our company his patronage. It is my privilege to shave him and to prepare his peruke for him, since His Excellency—and I tell you this in confidence—is perfectly bald now. My boss, the renowned Barbaruccia—they say there is no one, not even in Florence, who possesses his skill in cutting veins or restoring potency with a special herbal preparation—is both doctor and barber to His Excellency. My job, as I have explained, is to shave him. And Signor Barbaruccia’s wife massages him twice a week, but at other times, too, whenever he feels in need of it.”
“Surely not!” he replied coldly. “His Excellency requires both massage and restoratives? . . .”
“Only since he got married, sir,” answered the barber, and began to curl his thick hair with the hot tongs.
He only half heard the news, stretched out as he was in the exquisite minutes of self-indulgence afforded by the submission of one’s head to the soft fingers of a barber. Giuseppe’s fingers were nimble but he was even nimbler in his talk. His voice was light and gentle, like the sound of a spring, full of lisping, eyeball-rolling scandal; he spoke in the manner peculiar to barbers, who are at once friends, experts, counselors and confidants for whom the town holds no secrets, for they know about aging bodies, about the cooling of the blood, about scalps that are losing their former glories, about the slackening of the muscles, about the delicate creaking of frail bones, about toothless gums and bad breath, about the crow’s-feet gathering on smooth temples, and who listened with attention to everything that the bloodless lips of their customers had to say. “Chatter away!” thought Giacomo and stretched his body again, yielding himself to the effeminate voice, to the fine scent of the burned alcoholic tincture being rubbed into his brow and the rice powder being sprinkled on his wig. He enjoyed this half hour in this distant town, as he did in every distant town, these moments when, after rising, he would welcome the appearance of the barber, the official traitor to the municipality, who snapped his scissors and whispered the secrets of the living and the dead. He encouraged the nimble youth with the odd blink or brief aside—“Really? Completely bald?”—in mock astonishment, as though it were the most important thing in the world, as though he had his own suspicions as to the condition of the gracious gentleman who required feeding and massage now that he was married. “But surely there remain a few stray locks on his nape at least?” he asked confidentially, narrowing his eyes.
“Yes,” Giuseppe brightly replied with the unselfish volubility of one prepared to divulge still darker and more melancholy information. “But how thin those locks are, exceedingly thin. His Excellency is a great patron of ours. My master, Signor Barbaruccia, is among his favorites, as am I. It does us no harm, that sort of thing. We order him roe from Grado for the increasing of his desire, and Signor Barbaruccia’s wife prepares a brew of beetroot, horseradish, and spring onions for him to ward off apoplexy should he then be assailed by particularly carnal thoughts. His Excellency has mentioned you, sir.”
“What did he say?” he asked, his eyes wide with amazement.
“Only that he would like to meet you,” answered the barber in his best obedient-schoolboy manner. “His Excellency, the duke of Parma, would like to meet you. That’s all.”
“I am very much obliged,” he responded carelessly. “I will pay my respects to His excellency, if time allows.”
So they chattered on. The barber completed his task and left.
“The duke of Parma!” he muttered, then washed himself, drew on the white stockings that Teresa had left at the side of the bed for him, drank his chocolate, licked his fingers and smoothed his bushy eyebrows before the mirror, trimmed his nails with a sharp blade, pulled on his shirt, and adjusted the hard-ironed pleats with the tips of his fingers while occasionally touching his neck with the index and ring fingers of his right hand, as if testing his collar size or wishing to ascertain that his head was still there. “The duke of Parma!” he grumbled. “So he wishes to see me.” The possibility hadn’t occurred to him when he escaped and hired the trap to drive him to Bolzano. He whistled quietly, lit the candles in front of the mirror because the early afternoon had already filtered into the room with its brownish blue shadows, sat down at the spindle-legged table, arranged paper, ink, and sand for blotting, and with goosequill held high above his head, his upper body slightly reclined, his eyebrows suspiciously raised, he peered attentively and curiously into the mirror. It was a long time since he had seen himself like this, in circumstances so fitting for a writer. It was a long time since he had sat like this, in a room with fine furniture, before a fire, in a freshly starched shirt, in long white pearlescent stockings, with a real quill in his hand, ready for literary production in the hour most apt for solitude and meditation, for complete immersion in the task before him, which, at this precise moment, was neither more nor less than the composition of a begging letter to Signor Bragadin. “What a letter this will be!” he thought with satisfaction, the way a poet might contemplate a sonnet the first few rhymes of which are already jangling in his ears. “The duke of Parma!” he reflected once more, compelled by an association of ideas he could not dismiss. “Can he still be alive? . . .” Pursing his lips, he began to count aloud.
“Four,” he counted, then stared thoughtfully at the ceiling, adding and subtracting. “No, five!” he declared, precise as any tradesman. He gazed into the candle flame, fascinated and round mouthed. “I am a poet about to write a poem,” he thought, quill in hand, leaning back in the armchair, facing the writing desk and the fireplace, his hair lightly combed, his clothes washed and starched. He was enjoying the situation. “Five,” he considered again, this time a little anxiously, and raised the five fingers of his hand, as if showing or proving something to someone, like a child claiming, “It wasn’t me!”
“Five,” he grumbled, and bit hard on his lower lip, wagging his head. Screwing up his eyes, he gazed into the flame, then into the deep shadows of the room, then finally into the far distance, into the past, into life itself. And suddenly he gave a low whistle, as if he had found something he had been looking for. He pronounced the name, “Francesca.”
He raised the quill and with a gesture of amazement wrote the name in the air, as if to say, “The devil take it! But what can I do?” He stretched his legs in the scarlet light of the fire, breathed in the scented warmth, threw away the quill, and watched the flames. �
�That’s the one,” he thought. “Francesca!” And once again: “The duke of Parma! Bolzano! What a coincidence!” But he knew there was no such thing as coincidence, and that this was no coincidence, either. Suddenly, it was as though a hundred candles had been lit in the room: he saw everything clearly. He heard a voice and was aware of the familiar scent of verbena mingling with the sane, cheerful smell of freshly ironed women’s underwear. Yes, it had been five years, he thought, mildly horrified. For these last five years had swept away everything in their filthy hot torrent, everything including Francesca, nor had he once reached out to save what had vanished in it. Yes, it had been five years: and he wondered whether they recalled the story in Pistoia, in the palazzo from which the aged countess would ride out in a black baldachin-covered coach into Florence at noon when the gilded youth and little lordlings of the city went promenading before the exquisite stores of the Via Tornabuoni? Would they still recall the midnight duel in Pistoia where the bald and elderly aristocrat waited for him, sword in hand, where they fought in the square before the palazzo, in the presence of the silent Francesca and the old count who kept rubbing his hands? They had fought silently, for a long time, their swords glittering in the moonlight, in a genuine fury that transcended the very reason for which they were fighting, so there was no more yearning for revenge or satisfaction but simply a desire to fight, because two mortal men in pursuit of one Francesca was one too many. “The old man fought well!” he acknowledged under his breath. “He didn’t need Signor Barbaruccia’s wife’s aphrodisiacs then: he could vie for Francesca’s affections without such things.” He covered his eyes to see more clearly, unable, not even willing, to shut out the images that now grew clearer and assumed ever more life-size proportions behind his closed eyelids.
There stood Francesca in the dawn breeze, in front of the crumbling stone wall of the count’s garden, slender, wearing a nightgown, fifteen years old, her dark hair falling across her brow, one hand clutching a white silk shawl across her breast, her eyes wide, staring at the sky. Had it been five years? No, it was only the swish of swords that had happened five years ago; the moment in which he had first seen Francesca was stored away in a deeper, more secret crevice of time. There she stood before the garden wall in the shadows of the cypresses, and the sky above them was a clear and gentle blue, as if every human passion had dissolved and gentled in that clear, all-pervading blue. The wind is embracing Francesca, the soft folds of the nightgown are hugging her girlish body like a swimming costume. Francesca seems to have stepped from a bathing pool compounded of night and dreams, her body shimmering, dew-drenched, and in the corner of her eyes there is some sparkling liquid whose precise nature is hard to define, a teardrop, perhaps, or a drop of dew that has deserted its usual habitat in the depths of the flower cup to settle on a young girl’s lashes. . . . And he stands opposite the girl and listens. Only desire can listen with such intensity, he now thinks. I tend to talk a lot, far too much, in fact, but I listened then, in Pistoia, by the crumbling castle wall, in the garden, where the olives ran riot and the cypresses stood about as somber as you could wish, as somber as the halberdiers of a king in exile. Francesca has stolen from her bed in the castle, out of the night, out of childhood and out of a sheltered life into the garden on the morning of the day that he exchanges dueling cards with the duke of Parma. He saw and felt everything now. He caught the scent of the morning, and it stirred up jealousy and other intense feelings in him, memories of moments experienced only by those who are no longer young. Because Francesca represented youth and so did those silent gardens: perhaps it was the last minute of his own youth passing in the impoverished count’s garden in Pistoia; perhaps these were the somber, tattered, grandiose theatrical props of his own decaying memory, a memory that was disintegrating under the pressure of years; maybe this scene represented his youth as it was many years ago in a garden in Tuscany when the sky was blue and Francesca stood by the garden wall, her hair and clothes fluttering in the wind, her eyes closed; when they were both listening, confused and intoxicated by a feeling, that even now sank its claws into him and tortured him. “How extraordinary she was!” he thought, and pressed his fists even tighter into his eyes. It was as if she were saturated with light, so intensely did that sweet yet disturbing energy flow from her to touch the man standing opposite her. Yes, she was filled with light. It was the rarest of all sensations, he reflected approvingly, like a connoisseur. There was light in her, and when a man looked into her eyes it was as if lamps were being lit all over the world; everything around him was brighter, more real, more substantially true. Francesca herself stood as if entranced and he did not speak as the old suitor stepped through the garden gate, offered his arm to Francesca, and led her back into the house. That was all. And a year later, in the very same place, in a corner of the yard before the castle gate, quite possibly at the same precise hour, two men fought each other.
The old man fought well, he thought again, curling his lip in homage, and smiled bitterly. Was that all? . . . Perhaps the adventure was simply about youth, the last year of real youth, that mysterious but exciting interval when even the nervous traveler lets the reins of his horse go, relaxes into the gallop, looks round, wipes his brow, and sees that the road waiting for him ahead is steep, that far off, beyond the woods and the hills, the sun is already beginning to set. When he first met Francesca it was still bright, still high noon. They stood in a valley in the foothills of Tuscany. He had just arrived from Rome, his pockets bulging with the cardinal’s gold and with letters of introduction. Travel was different then, he thought with satisfaction and a touch of envy. Few could travel the way I did, he proudly reflected. He had a shameless self-confidence born of genius, of an artist at the top of his form: “The sound I can get out of that flute! Remarkable! Can anyone compare with me? . . . Let him try!” There were indeed few who could travel like him and even fewer who could arrive in the style he did, in the good old days, five years ago! For there’s a trick, a manner of carrying things off on the stage of human endeavor, and he knew all the theatrical tricks; that there’s a way of choosing the horses, the equipment, the dimensions of the coach, and, yes, even the coachman’s uniform; that one must master the art of arriving at the palazzo of one’s host or at an inn of good reputation, as well as the art of driving through the gates of a foreign city and of leaning back in one’s seat in one’s lilac-edged gray traveling cloak, or of raising one’s gilt-handled lorgnette in one’s gloved hand and crossing one’s legs in a careless, faintly interested manner, the way Phoebus himself might have traveled at dawn in his fiery chariot drawn by four prancing horses above a world that, to tell the truth, he mildly despised. These were the tricks you had to master; this was the best way to travel and to arrive! How few people knew such tricks! There were remarkably few people who were capable of understanding that it was vital that, within half an hour of arriving at the inn or at your host’s palazzo, the whole serving staff of the establishment should be buzzing around you! This was the way he arrived one day at Pistoia, at the home of the old impoverished count who was related to the cardinal who now, in turn, was sending his blessing to the family, to the fat countess and to Francesca, his godchild. He proceeded to stay a month, entertained the family, made over a gift of two hundred ducats and golden caskets to the count, returning twice the next year, and at the end of that year, one moonlit night, fought a duel with the ancient suitor, the duke of Parma. He opened his shirt and examined the wound on his chest.
He touched the scars with his fingertips, itemizing and remembering them. There was a line of three scars on his left, all three just above the heart, as if his enemies had unconsciously yet somehow deliberately, instinctively, aimed precisely at his heart. The central scar, the deepest and roughest of them, was the one he owed to His Excellency of Parma and to Francesca. He put his index finger to the now painless wound. The duel had been fought with rapiers. The Duke’s blade had made a treacherous incursion above his heart, so the surgeon had ha
d to spend weeks draining the blood and the suppuration off the deep wound; and there had also been some internal bleeding, as a result of which the victim, after fever fits, bouts of semiconscious delirium, and stretches of screaming and groaning insensibility, finally bade farewell to adventure. He lay in Florence in the hospital of the Sisters of Mercy where he had had himself conveyed in the duke’s coach on the night of his wounding. He had not seen Francesca since that moment, and he learned of the engagement only some three years later in Venice, at a masked ball, from the French ambassador, who regretfully let fall that the cousin of the grand duke, a Parmesan kinsman of His Most Christian Majesty, forgetting his rank and high connections, had, in the idiotic thoughtlessness of his declining years, married some little village goose from Tuscany, a rural demi-countess of some kind. . . . He had smiled and held his peace. The wound no longer gave him any pain, and only when the weather was damp did he feel the slightest pang. So life went on and no one ever mentioned Francesca’s name.
Why is it, he wondered, that I have remained aware of her all these years? And later, too, when I received the second wound, that long jagged one above the little carte de visite left me by the duke of Parma, that long brute across the chest, administered with a sword at dawn by the hired assassin of Orly the cardsharp as I was leaving the gambling den at Murano, my greatcoat stuffed with hard-earned gold prized from the pockets of a cheating banker and various other rogues, gold earned through the judicious use of quick wits and even quicker fingers; why was it that, in those days after the assault, as I lay in a state between life and death, this image of Francesca by the garden wall under the blue Tuscan sky kept coming to mind? And the third scar, that odd scratch where the Greek woman went at him with her sharp fingernails, and which hurt more than other cuts and thrusts received at the hands of men, that mysterious wound through which the toxins of death seeped into his body, which was less than a pinprick yet so dangerous that Signor Bragadin and the finest doctors of the council fussed around his bed for weeks, torturing the poor patient with enemas and cuppings until one day he grew weary of dying and, asking for orange juice and hot broth, simply recovered—why was it that, in the delirium caused by this deadly female weapon, he kept seeing Francesca and calling on her? “Is it possible that I loved her? . . .” he mused with a sincere, almost childlike sense of wonder, and stared into the mirror above the fireplace. “Heaven knows, I might have! . . .” he thought, and looked about him with pious stupefaction.