The Guest Performance
The door opened, the candles flickered in the draft. A masked young man in a party cloak stood on the threshold. He was wearing short silk pantaloons, buckled shoes, a three-cornered hat, and carrying a slender gold-handled sword at his side. He bowed and spoke in a clear, sharp, almost childlike voice as if he had brought the coolness and good temper of the snow in with him.
“It’s I, Giacomo.”
He closed the door carefully and stepped forward fastidiously, a little awkwardly, as if not quite accustomed to wearing boy’s clothes. He bowed in masculine fashion and baldly declared, “I waited for you in vain. So I have come to you.”
“Why have you come?” the man asked, a little hoarse behind the mask, taking a step and getting tangled in his skirt.
“Why? But I explained in my letter. Because I must see you.”
She said this pleasantly, without any particular stress, as if it were the only reasonable explanation, the most natural answer a woman could give a man. The man did not respond.
“Did you not get my letter?” she asked anxiously.
“I certainly did,” the man answered. “Your husband, the duke of Parma, brought it to me this evening.”
“Oh!” said the woman and fell silent.
The “oh” was a quiet and simple acknowledgment, like a bird call. She leaned her slender boyish figure against the mantelpiece and fiddled with her sword. The mask she was wearing stared at the floor, solemn and empty. Then, even more quietly, she continued.
“I knew it. I was waiting for the answer and knew somehow that there had been some problem with the letter. You know it is very unusual for me to write letters. To tell you the truth it was the first letter I had written in my life.”
She turned her head aside gracefully, a little embarrassed, as if she had confessed her most intimate secret. Then she started laughing behind the mask, but it was a nervous laugh.
“Oh!” she said again. “I really am sorry the letter fell into his hands. I should have expected it. Do you think the groom who volunteered to bring my letter to you is still alive? . . . I should be sorry if anything happened to him, as he is still young and has a very sad and languishing way of looking at me when we are riding, and besides, he has a large family to support all by himself. Was it the duke himself delivered the letter? . . . Poor man. It can’t have been easy for him. He is so proud and so lonely, I can imagine what he felt when he set out to bring you the letter in which I said I must see you. Did he threaten you? Offer you money? . . . Tell me what happened, my love.”
She pronounced the last word loudly, confidently, enunciating clearly, as if she had articulated an important formal concept or subject with it. The mask was staring fixedly at the fire now, pale as death.
“He both threatened me and offered me money. Though that wasn’t the main reason he came,” the man replied. “He came primarily to give me the letter whose contents he analyzed in great detail. Then we came to an agreement.”
“Of course,” she said, with a brief sigh. “What agreement did you come to, my love?”
“He instructed me to dedicate my art to you alone, tonight. He asked me to make this night a masterpiece of seduction. He offered me money, freedom, and a letter of introduction that would protect me on the road and see me over frontiers. He told me you were ill, Francesca, diseased with love, and asked me to cure you. He told me that he was making us a present of this night, which should be as brief and as long as life, long enough for me to perform the impossible, so that we may experience in a single night all the ecstasies and disappointments of love, and that in the morning I should leave you to travel the world, go as far away as it is possible to go, wherever fate takes me, and that you should return to the palazzo with your head held high, where you may brighten and warm the remaining days of the duke of Parma. That is what he said. And he explained the meaning of your letter. I do believe he understood it, Francesca, every word of it. He did not raise his voice, but spoke calmly and quietly. And he also requested that I should be tender with you but hurt you enough to guarantee that everything should be over between us by morning, so that we could put a full stop to our sentence. . . . Those were his instructions.”
“He told you to hurt me? . . .”
“Yes. But he asked me, in parting, not to hurt you too much.”
“Yes,” said Francesca. “He loves me.”
“I think so, too,” the man replied. “He loves you, but it’s easy for him, Francesca. Love, as he loves, is easy, especially now that his time is running out . . . or rather, has ‘almost’ run out, and he kept repeating the word ‘almost,’ which seemed to be very important to him for some reason, if I understand him properly. It is easy to love when life is almost over.”
“My dear,” said the woman very gently and compassionately, like an adult addressing a child, and at the moment her unseen lips pronounced the words it was almost as if the mask itself were smiling. “It is never easy to love.”
“No,” the man obstinately insisted. “But it’s easier for him.”
“And so,” the other mask inquired, “did you come to an agreement?”
“Yes.”
“What were the terms of the agreement, Giacomo? . . .”
“I agreed to the terms he demanded and which you yourself declared in your letter. That we would meet tonight. That we would embrace each other, because there is a secret bond between us, Francesca, because love has touched us both. It is a great gift and a great sadness. It is a great gift because I do in fact love you, in my fashion, and because I regard love as an art; but it is also a great sadness because my love will never be easy or happy, can never grow wings and soar like a dove . . . because ours is a different kind of love from his. So we agreed that we would ‘know’ each other, in the biblical sense, and that you would then finish with me, cured and disillusioned, and after the morning we would never see each other again. That I would not be the shadow across your bed and would not haunt you when the duke of Parma leaned over you as you lay on your pillows; that I would be a memory for a while, but later not even that: that for you, I would be nothing and no one. That is what I agreed. It is what I must do tonight, in words, with kisses, with tears, and with vows, using all the tricks of my trade, according to the rules of my art.”
He stopped and tactfully, curiously, waited for an answer.
“Then go ahead, Giacomo,” said the woman quietly and calmly. And she tipped her head on one side so the mask stared indifferently into the air. “Go ahead,” she repeated. “What are you waiting for, my friend? Now is the moment. Begin. See, I have come to you, so you needn’t go out into the storm, for as you may have noticed a storm sprung up at midnight, an icy northern blast screaming and sweeping towers of snow along the street. But it is quiet here, warm, and scented. I see they have prepared the bed. Attar of roses and ambergris. And the table is set for two, carefully, in the best of taste, as custom dictates. But it is past midnight, and it is time for supper. So let us begin, Giacomo.”
She sat down at the neatly spread table, pulled off her gloves, breathed on her fingertips, and rubbed her bare hands together, her posture suggesting anticipation, good manners, and propriety as she looked over the foodstuffs, very much as if she were expecting the waiter to arrive so that she might start to eat.