by Sándor Márai
“I don’t believe you,” the man said, his voice cracking.
“You don’t believe me?” echoed the woman in her sweetest, most childlike, most astonished manner. “And if I had proof, Giacomo? . . . If you had the list of names and addresses that would act as proof, would you believe me then? Because I could give you the names and addresses. Is that enough? . . .”
“It is enough,” said the man. He stood up and with a quick movement seized the dagger hidden in his breast.
The woman, however, did not move. Still kneeling, she turned the stiff gaze of the mask on the man, and spoke quietly and modestly.
“Oh, the dagger! Always the dagger, my love. It is the only answer you have for the world that inflicts itself on you! Put the dagger away, my dear; it is a one-word answer that explains nothing, it is a stupid, needless answer. And why answer me with a dagger when you are simply a coward afraid of loving me, when I can offer you neither true delight nor true pain, when all this is just a game, the pièce de résistance of a hired conjuror, a guest performance by a remarkable artist who is only passing through? The dagger is not part of the agreement, my dear. I say it again, put the dagger away, and don’t bother reaching for the mask with those trembling fingers. Why should you take off the mask? What could the face beneath the mask tell me? I wrote to say that I must see you, and now I have seen you. It wasn’t so much a face I wanted to see, Giacomo, but a man, the man I truly loved, who was a coward, who sold me and ran away from me. But it was all in vain. It was in vain that I knew who and what kind of man you were; in vain that, for five years, the fires of Gehenna have been blazing inside me; in vain that I made futile attempts to extinguish the glowing embers of that fire and to heal the wound with the kisses of other men while never ceasing to love you; in vain that I have carried this wound about with me like a bloody sword wherever I have gone, challenging everyone who crossed my path with it; in vain that I cursed it in secret, in the depths of my soul, a hundred times or more, for I was still hoping that one day I would have enough strength to tear the mask from your face and see you, as my note demanded, to see you and forgive you. That is why I asked the castrato to teach me writing. That is why I wrote and sent you the letter. That is why I waited for you, and that is why, when you did not come to me because, true to your art as ever, you were drawing up a contract with the duke of Parma, I came to you, in men’s clothes, masked, just once more, so I could see you. I told you everything, that you are truly mine and that I am the woman to whom you are eternally bound, and you knew it was true. I offered you everything I had. And your only reply was, ‘too little,’ or ‘too much.’ But finally I have got you to say, ‘enough.’ That was the word I wanted to hear. Good. Now listen carefully, my love. Everything I told you is true. And now that I have seen you like this, I have no wish to see you any other way. I will go back to my house and to my guests. And you will go out into the world to live and to lie, to loot and to steal, to snatch at every skirt you come across and to roll in every bed you find. You will continue, faithful to your art. But all the while you will know, whether you are awake or asleep, even as you are kissing another woman, that I was the truth, that I meant everything in life to you, and that you hurt me and sold me. You will know that you could have had all that life has to offer but preferred slyness and cowardice: that you chose to work to a contract and that henceforth life will offer you nothing but contracts. You will know that my body, which is partly your body, will never now be yours but will belong to anybody who asks for it. You will know that I am living somewhere, in the arms of other men, but that you will never again hold me in your arms. I too am faithful in my fashion, Giacomo. I wanted to live with you like Adam and Eve in the Garden before there was sin in the world. I wanted to save you from your fate. There is no passion, no misery, no sickness, no shame that I would not have shared with you. You know what I say is true, you knew my letter was sacred. You knew but kept silent, true to your agreement with the duke of Parma. And you should know that, now that I have seen you, I have sentenced you to unhappiness, you will never again have a happy moment in your life, and whatever sweetness you taste you will think of me. You may have seen me but you do not know me in the biblical sense, and yet you do know something, if not everything, about me now. Our time is running out. Do not forget that my sex and the name I bear demand a certain modesty and tact. You know something about me and the rest I leave you to imagine at every hour of leisure between one task and another, one contract and another, one masterpiece and another. Because you will think of me, Giacomo. I am confident in the knowledge that you will think of me. That is why I came to see you, why I promised you all a woman can promise a man, and why I tell you now that there is nothing a corrupt imagination can invent that I will not turn into reality in the future, at the very moment you think of me. That is why I came to you masked, at midnight, wearing a man’s clothes, with a sword at my side. And now I can go home to my palazzo and to the rest of my life, which I know for certain will be only half a life without you. Now go: live and create masterpieces, my friend. Perhaps one day your own life will become a masterpiece, a masterpiece glowing with cold, corrupt light. The laws of your being may be what most concern you: my concern, however, was for you yourself, my love, and now, this night being over, I know that your heart is condemned to eternal pain. Because it is not a matter of having seen you as I wished to: you have seen me, too, and having seen me, you will never forget my face, the face under the masks I show the world. Because revenge can console us, Giacomo. You may not understand that at this very moment, but you will as soon as I have left this room and vanished forever from your life, then you will suddenly understand and your whole life will be filled with that understanding. I am nobody in particular, Giacomo, not a great artist, not a man, just a woman, Francesca from Tuscany, unfit to occupy a leading place among your great works of art. But from now on I shall have some kind of place there, I have made sure of that. I have infused my being into yours, I have infused you with the knowledge that I was the truth you threw away, that you brought shame to someone who loved you and will always love you in whatever situation she chooses for herself in exacting the revenge she has vowed to take. I wanted to take other vows with you, Giacomo, vows for life. You rejected them. Life will go on, however, even like this. . . . But your life will not be what it was before, my love: you will be like the man who has been fed some exquisite slow-working poison and feels the pain at every moment. I have taken care of that. Because I, too, have my weapons, subtler than daggers. Put the dagger away, my love. I may not have been strong enough to overcome you through love, but I shall be stronger in revenge and your dagger will be useless. Put the dagger away. Or, if you want, you could give it to me as a memento of this night. I would look after it well, in Florence, keeping it together with your other gifts, the mirror and the comb. Would you like to exchange mementos? Look, I will draw this slender gold-handled sword that I strapped to my side this evening, and I will give it to you in exchange, the way enemies used to exchange hearts and arms when they had finished fighting each other. Give me the dagger as a memento. Thank you. . . . And receive in exchange this sharp, highly refined weapon, and take it with you wherever you go. You see, we have exchanged arms, if not hearts, Giacomo. And now we should both return to our respective places in the world and live on as we must, if only because you were too weak to step out of character and reject your art. I thank you for the dagger, my love,” the woman said and stood up, “and thank you for this night. Now I, too, can live on, more settled than I have been these last five years. Shall I hear anything of you? . . . I don’t know. Should I wait for you? . . . But I have already said, Giacomo, that I will wait forever. Because what we share will not pass with time. It is not only love that is eternal, Giacomo: all true feelings are, including revenge.”
She drew the sword and handed it over, attaching the Venetian dagger the man had wordlessly handed over to her to a link of the golden belt she was wearing. “It’s almost
dawn,” she said in a voice as clear as glass. “I must go. Don’t see me out, Giacomo. If I could find my way here by myself I can find my way back, too, to life, to my home. How quiet it is. . . . The wind has died down. And the fire, too, has gone out, you see, as if speaking its own language, which tells us that every passion, all that passes, must eventually turn to ashes. But that is not something I want to believe. Because this night has, after all, provided us with an encounter and a chance of deepening our acquaintance, even if not quite as the duke of Parma imagined or the Bible describes. Now you have a seal on your agreement, Giacomo, that seal being your consciousness of all I have told you. It is the seal of revenge, a powerful seal, as strong as love or life or death. You can tell the duke of Parma that you were true to your agreement, that you did not cheat him, my love, nor did you fail, but have earned your fee and merit your reward. By the end of the night everything had happened as you had agreed, and now that I have got to know you I am returning to the man who loves me and is waiting for me to ease his departure from life. Travel well, Giacomo, trip through the world on light steps. Your art remains infallible and the task you took on is accomplished, not quite as you imagined, you two clever men between you, but it’s the result that matters, and the result is that I know you, that I know I have no real hold on your heart, and can therefore only resign myself to my fate, the only power remaining to me being revenge. Take this confession, this promise with you as you go, for your road will be long and certain to be fascinating and full of variety. But I want something from you, too, by way of farewell. Rather unusually for me, I wrote a letter: if ever you feel that you have understood my letter and wish to answer, don’t be lazy or cowardly: answer as is fit, with pen and ink, like the well-versed literary man you are. Do you promise? . . .”