by Sándor Márai
Then they came into view, the landlord first, stooping and turning as he ascended, muttering, explaining, assuring, a smoking taper in his hand and a soft satchel-shaped hat of red material on his head, the kind of hat that used to be worn by Phrygian shepherds and more recently by publicans and freethinkers in the cellars of Paris and out in the provinces. The innkeeper’s ballooning stomach was covered with a leather apron that he must have been wearing in the cellar where he was probably tampering with the sugar content and temperature of the wine, a foul habit he could not bring himself to abandon, and over the apron, a blue jerkin whose splendor exceeded that of the ceremonial vestments of guilds and connoisseurs and suggested a long-standing religious ritual such as might be conducted by a lower grade priest of an ancient, pagan cult whose devotees were crowned with rings of onions. It was he who came first. He looked over his shoulder, muttering and assuring with a great show of humility and concern, like any hotelier with an important client, for it is the duty of the hotelier to be solicitous in his attentions, to see his guest rise and set off in the morning, leaving behind a messy room, the bed his noble body had vacated, the basin with its dirty water, the vessel containing human effluent, and things even the most exquisitely refined of human beings leaves as evidence of his presence in the room of a hotel. And so the innkeeper bowed and scraped with remarkable zeal, his every gesture speaking of five decades of experience as landlord and jack-of-all-trades to all and sundry. He kept three steps ahead of his guest, much as a postilion does at night when the king, the prince de Condé, or, as it may be, the duke of Parma, happens to be passing through. And in his wake there followed the procession of four men ranged about a fifth, two in front, two behind, each member of the escort equipped with a five-branched silver candelabrum raised high above his head, each clad in his lackey’s uniform of black silk jerkin, knee breeches, and white wig, with silver chains about his neck and a flat-cocked hat on his head; the heavy calfskin pelisses around their shoulders billowed like enormous wings as they walked stiffly on, looking neither behind nor ahead, their pace as mechanical and jerky as those of marionettes at an open-air performance in the marketplace. The guest proceeded slowly in the cage of light they made for him. He gauged each step of the stair with caution before moving on, his body shrouded in a plain, violet-colored traveling cloak that flapped about his ankles, a cloak brightened only at the neck and narrow shoulders by a wide, beaver-skin collar; and so, leaning on a silver-handled stick, he made his way gradually upstairs, carefully fixing the point of the stick on the edge of the next step, as if each tread required careful consideration, not just as an intellectual proposition but as a physical problem occasioned by the condition of his heart, for his heart was finding the burden of stairs ever more difficult. The procession therefore wound on extremely slowly with the ornate and rigorous ritual of a man who has all but lost his freedom of movement but remains enslaved by his own rank, the trappings and obligations imposed on him by his station in life. “It’s not hard to see,” thought Giacomo, wide-mouthed, his contempt tempered by a grudging respect as he stood at the half-open door of his room, “that he is related to Louis Le Gros!” And so thinking, he took a step back into the shadows of the room, on the far side of the threshold, and waited there with both hands on the door frame, carefully flattening himself against the wall in the darkness while the duke of Parma made his way upstairs.
By now the procession had reached the landing, and had arrived just where the corridor curved away, so he could see a complete line of faces where the attendants formed a double guard with their raised candles, waiting for their master to get his breath. Of course he had recognized the duke of Parma before he got to the top of the stairs, even before hearing his voice; he recognized him because the duke was intensely resonant, a man of whose presence he would immediately be aware, a man with a pivotal role in his life. He knew he was nearby long before he even saw him: he was aware of it when the Tuscan woman left his room to return to her shadowy, joyless servitude, to life with her melancholy, much-traveled husband; he felt his presence when the sleigh stopped by the door and the landlord began his wheedling and assuring. Few people knew how to arrive like this, and he contemplated the arrival with a certain professional satisfaction, as if he himself were a landlord, porter, or waiter or, better still, the perennial guest accustomed to grand entrances; he studied the duke’s manner of entering, from the point of view of a fellow craftsman, with a peculiar mixture of mild contempt and involuntary respect, for the manner was formal, meticulous, and appropriate to the company that automatically accommodated itself to the rituals of the duke’s person and role, even now, even here, in this bat-infested provincial inn of somewhat dubious reputation, as if he had drawn up outside at his palace in Bologna, his sleigh dripping with dead foxes, wolves, and wild boars bagged along the way, or had marched into Monsieur Voisin’s or the Silver Tower Restaurant in Paris, or alighted from his carriage at Versailles, at the entrance of the Trianon, where His Celestial Host was entertaining a bevy of beauties at the royal court with a game of pin the tail on the donkey. . . . The duke of Parma did not simply “turn up” at The Stag but “made an entrance”; he didn’t simply go upstairs but was escorted there as part of a procession; he didn’t just stop when he reached the upper floor but made a ceremonial appearance. The entire progress was dreamlike: it was like a vision of the final judgment.
Now the guest drew himself up and ran his eye severely down the length of the shadowy corridor, across deep pools of tremulous darkness, while the servants raised their elaborately embroidered arms to light his way with their blazing scarlet candelabras.
The duke of Parma, the kinsman of Louis, was this year completing his seventy-second year. “Seventy-two,” calculated the stranger quite calmly as he caught his first glimpse of the visitor. He did not move from the doorway but stood clutching the doorpost, nonchalant yet watchful, exuding the indifference of someone accidentally coming upon an ordinary guest of no particular importance in a dark and none too salubrious inn, a silent, disinterested witness to a rather overelaborate procession. “It’s the only way he knows how to conduct himself,” he thought, and shrugged, but then another thought occurred to him. “He wants to intimidate me!” The idea struck him with irresistible force, flattering his self-esteem. “No one takes a room at The Stag in such a manner!” His hunches were correct as far as they went, though they did not go far enough, he suspected, and even as he watched the duke of Parma surveying the corridor, his head thrown back and his eyes screwed up until he discovered the man he had been seeking in the doorway, the tingling in his toes and stomach confirmed the suspicion. One casual glance assured him that the duke’s escort was unarmed, and, as far as he could see, the duke himself carried no weapon. His appearance, movement, and progress seemed dignified rather than threatening. At this hour of the late afternoon—or was it early evening? a stranger could not go by what usually happened at such hours in more metropolitan, glittering places—when the palazzo would have been getting ready for the ball, an especially brilliant ball, a champagne occasion that the whole district had been talking about for days, the host would not have sallied forth without good cause, not with such a splendid escort, certainly not so that he could take up rooms in a dubious inn just two steps from his own home. “It is I he has come to see, of course!” thought the stranger, and was deeply flattered, above all by the ceremonial manner of the visit. At the same time, however, he knew that this procession was only the most general of homages to him; that he was merely an itinerant, someone with whom the duke of Parma had exchanged a few valedictory words some years ago on a misty sea-colored morning at the gates of Florence; that the ceremoniousness had to be interpreted as a permanent and natural feature of the guest’s mode of existence, the pomp an organic part of his being; that the procession was the equivalent of the brilliantly colored tail the male peacock permanently drags behind him, something the peacock, when he becomes aware of being watched, opens as casually a
s one might a fan. This was the way the duke of Parma had traveled everywhere for a good long time now. Now he waved the lackeys aside. He recognized the straight figure standing in the doorway, carelessly raised to his eyes with a well practiced movement the lorgnette that had been dangling on a golden chain at his breast, and, slightly blinking, as if unsure that he had found what he had been looking for, gazed steadily at the stranger.
“It is him,” he pronounced at last, terse and satisfied.
“Yes, Your Excellency,” the innkeeper enthusiastically agreed.
They were talking about him in his presence as if he were an object. He was amused by the neutrality of their tone. He remained where he was, making no haste to welcome his visitor, nor did he go down on his knees, for why should he? . . . He felt a deep indifference, a blend of contempt and impassivity in the face of every worldly danger and even more so now. “What’s the point?” he thought and shrugged. “The old man has come to warn me off, perhaps to threaten me; he’ll try a little blackmail then call on me to leave town or else have me transported back to Venice. And what’s it all for? . . . For Francesca? He does have a point, of course. Why haven’t I already left this rotten town to which nothing ties me? I have sucked Mensch dry, can expect no further assistance here from papa Bragadin, there’s nobody in town with whom I could discuss the finer points of literature, I am fully acquainted with the enticing, walnut-flavored kisses of little Teresa, Balbi is pursued every night by jealous butcher’s boys wielding cudgels and machetes, and playing cards with the locals is like taking on a pack of wild boars. Why am I still here after six, or is it eight, days now? I could have been in Munich days ago. The elector of Saxony has already arrived there and will be blowing a fortune at faro. Why am I still here?” And so he pondered in stillness and silence while the duke, the innkeeper, and the lackeys carefully examined him like an object that someone had temporarily mislaid but had eventually found after a not particularly thorough, half-hearted search, an object not especially desirable or even clean, about which the only remaining question was how to handle it, whether to grasp it or hold it at arm’s length with one’s fingertips, and whether to dust it down with a rag before throwing it out of the window. . . . He considered the various possibilities. Then, perfectly naturally, his mind turned to Francesca. “Of course!” he thought. And in that instant he understood how all this was the result of a logical and necessary chain of events that had not begun yesterday nor would be certain to end this coming night; how once, in the dim and distant past, a process had begun whereby his own fate and the fates of Francesca and the duke of Parma were tied together. The present situation was merely the continuation of a conversation begun a long time ago, and this was why he had not moved on, why he was standing here, facing the duke of Parma, who even now was staring at him, lightly puffing and somewhat out of breath, standing at the head of his lackeys like a general preparing to charge: yes, he thought, a general with his troops. “Hello!” Giacomo exclaimed in a very loud voice and took a step toward the ornately costumed group. “Anyone there?”
The tone was sharp and it rang like a sword. There was undoubtedly a “someone” out there in the corridor, a person large as life and plain as a mountain, a river, or a fortress: you couldn’t miss him. That “someone” stood leaning on a silver-handled cane, his gray head, cocked to one side, boldly and gracefully balanced on the broad shoulders surmounting the slender figure like a miraculously carved ivory globe at the tip of a fashionable ebony walking stick. It was as if the balding, perfectly rounded skull, fringed at temple and nape by a sheen of thin, silky, metallic hair, had been turned on a lathe. Granted this, Giacomo’s voice sounded arrogant, almost insolent, for even a blind man could feel, if not see, that the person of the “someone” who had arrived at The Stag was not a person to be snubbed or taken in with a sidelong glance, that a man making a call like this, with his complete retinue, was not to be ignored, shouted at, or addressed in terms such as “Hello! Anyone there?” Aware of the potential outrage, the lackeys shrank back in terror and the innkeeper covered his mouth and crossed himself. Only the duke himself remained unruffled. He took a step forward in the direction of the voice, and the light of the candles illuminated the bloodless, ruthless, narrow mouth that appeared to be smiling in surprise at both question and tone. The question must have pleased him. “Yes, it is I,” he replied, his voice faint and dry, yet refined. He spoke quietly in the knowledge that every word of his, even the quietest, had weight and power behind it. “I have something to say to you, Giacomo.”
He advanced once more, ahead of the innkeeper and the lackeys who formed an effective guard of honor and, with a wave of his hand, instructed them to leave. “Tell the sleigh to wait,” he said and stared stonily ahead of him without catching the eyes of those he commanded. “You people wait in the stairwell. No one is to move. You,” he gestured, without so much as a flicker of his eyelids, though everyone knew he meant the innkeeper, “you will see to it that no one interrupts us. I’ll let you know when we have finished.” The lackeys set off silently according to command, disappearing along with the light to the bottom of the stairs: it was as if dusk had settled in. The innkeeper followed them with nervous stumbling steps. “May I impose on you?” asked the duke with the utmost courtesy once everyone had gone, bowing slightly, as if he were addressing a close confidant or a member of the family. “Would you be kind enough to receive me for a short while in your room? I will not take up too much of your time.” The request was made in the most elegant and aristocratic manner but there was something in the tone that sounded less like a request than a strict order. Hearing that tone, his host immediately regretted using terms like “Hello” and “anyone.” Like any host, assured that his visitor was a man of some importance and that conversation was by no means to be avoided, he bowed silently and indicated the way with a motion of his outstretched arm, allowing his guest to precede him into the room, then closed the door behind them.
“I am most grateful,” said the guest once he had taken his position by the fireplace in the armchair his host silently offered him. He stretched his two thin, pale hands—the anemic but commendably muscular hands of an old man—toward the flickering fire and for a while bathed himself in its gentle glow. “Those stairs, you know,” he confided. “I find stairs hard nowadays. Seventy-two is a substantial age and little by little one learns to count both years and stairs. I am relieved that I did not climb them in vain. I am glad to find you at home.” He gently folded his hands in front of him. “A stroke of luck,” muttered his host. “It is not luck,” he answered politely but with some finality. “I have had you watched these past eight days, and have been aware of your every movement. I even know that you were at home this afternoon, receiving visitors, halfwits who come to you for advice. Though it is not for advice that I come to you, my boy.”
He said this tenderly, like an old and trusted friend who understands human frailty and is anxious to help. Only the expression “my boy” rang a little ominously in the dimly lit room: it hung there like a highly delicate, hidden threat. Giacomo scented danger and drew himself up, casting an instinctive and well-practiced glance at his dagger and at the window.
He leaned against the fireplace and crossed his arms across his chest. “And what gives the duke of Parma the right to have me observed?” he asked.
“The right of self-defense,” came the simple, almost gracious answer. “You know perfectly well, Giacomo, you above all people, who are well versed in such matters, that there is a power in the world beyond that of ordinary authorities. Both the age in which I live and my own decrepitude, which has turned my hair white as snow and robbed me of my strength, justify me in defending myself. This is the age of travel. People pass through towns, handing keys to one another, and the police can’t keep up: Paris informs Munich of the setting forth of some personage who intends to try his luck there. Venice informs Bolzano that one of her most talented sons intends to room there on his travels. I cannot t
rust authorities alone. My position, age, and rank compel me to be careful in the face of every danger. My people are observant and reliable: the best informers of the region answer to me not the chief of police. It was they who told me earlier that you had arrived. I would have found out anyway, since your reputation precedes you and makes people uneasy. Did you know that since you arrived, life beneath these snow-covered roofs has become more fraught? . . . It seems you carry the world’s passions about with you in your baggage, much as traveling salesmen carry their samples of canvas and silk. One house has burned down, one vineyard owner has killed his wife in a fit of jealousy, one woman has run away from her husband—all in the last few days. These things are nothing directly to do with you. But you carry this restlessness with you, the way a cloud carries its load of lightning. Wherever you go you stir tempers and passions. As I said, your reputation precedes you. You have become a famous man, my boy,” he sincerely acknowledged.