“Remember?” he said. “When you were very small, I sometimes took infinite pains constructing a house of cards on the dining-room table, the table we’ve been eating at today. I would have the whole space covered—I must have used half a dozen packs. Then came the moment of triumph. When, with one breath, I blew the whole edifice flat.”
I remembered it well. The fragile cards tremblingly balanced like a giant pagoda, the effect, with the last card poised, strangely awe-inspiring and beautiful to a staring child.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s that to do with my question?”
“Everything,” he answered.
He crossed the room, took down one of the sketches of aircraft that were hanging on the wall, and brought it over to me. The sketch was of a fighter plane falling to the ground in flames.
“This wasn’t mine, but it could have been,” he said. “That’s how I saw others go. Comrades, whom I’d flown beside. Mine wasn’t a true flamer, I bailed out before she flared, then she scorched to earth like a sizzling kite. The point was that at the moment of impact, when she was hit—I was climbing at the time, and I knew what it was—the explosion and my release in the sky happened almost simultaneously, and the moment of triumph, of ecstasy, was indescribable. It was death and it was power. Creation and destruction all in one. I had lived and I had died.”
He replaced the picture on the wall. I still did not see what it had to do with marriage or with founding a family, unless it was that the experience he had undergone, which I tried to imagine and into which I followed him in vain, still staring at the picture on the wall, made all things valueless. To have known and rejoiced in death belittled life.
Aldo glanced at the clock. It was a quarter to seven. “I must leave you,” he said. “I have a meeting at the ducal palace. It may not take more than an hour. Further discussions about the Festival.”
We had not touched on the Festival all day. Nor any of his present activities. The past had been with us all the time.
“Have you a date later?” he asked.
I smiled, and shook my head. What should I want with a date now we were together?
“Good,” he said. “Then I’ll take you to dinner with Livia Butali.”
He went to the telephone and called a number. Instantly I stood in fancy outside our old home further down the via dei Sogni. I heard the sound of the piano, Chopin again, and the music suddenly stopping, and I saw the player cross the room to answer the telephone, the ring of which she had been waiting for all day.
Aldo spoke into the mouthpiece. “Two of us,” he said. “Say a quarter-past eight.”
He cut short her query and hung up. I could imagine her standing there, frustrated, wondering, then returning to the piano to burst into a passionate Etude.
“Did you say you had a knowledge of German,” he asked me suddenly, “among your other superficial expertise?”
“Yes,” I said, “the legacy of the Commandant.”
He ignored the thrust, and going to a chair behind the divan picked up the volumes I had brought Signora Butali from the library the day before.
“Take a look at these, then, while I’m away,” he said. “I was going to give them to one of my boys, a German scholar, but you’ll do even better. Translate for me anything you consider especially appropriate, and write it down.” He threw the books on the table beside my chair.
“I think I should warn you,” I said, “that what I’ve read in them already—only a rough glance, I admit—suggests that the Falcon was not the misunderstood genius you described to your elite last night but something very different. If Signora Butali is really going to take them to Rome for her husband to read he’ll have another heart attack.”
“Don’t worry,” said Aldo, “he won’t read them. She got the books for me, because I asked for them.”
I shrugged. As Director of the Arts Council of Ruffano he evidently had the right.
“That German writer was prejudiced, of course,” Aldo continued. “Those nineteenth century scholars always were. The early Italian manuscripts I read in Rome last week gave a somewhat different angle to certain aspects of his life. Jacopo?” He opened the door and shouted across the hall. Jacopo appeared. “I’ll be gone for an hour,” said Aldo. “Let no one in. Beo and I will be dining later at Number 8.”
“Yes, signore,” said Jacopo, and then he added, “A lady called twice during the afternoon. She gave her name. Signorina Raspa.”
“What did she want?”
Jacopo’s poker face flickered to a smile. “Evidently the signorina wanted you,” he replied.
I pointed to the envelope still lying unopened on the hall table. “That came last night,” I said. “I watched her put it through the door. I was standing beyond the double entrance.”
Aldo picked up the envelope and threw it at me. “You read it,” he said. “She’s as much your friend as mine.”
He went out of the house, slamming the door behind him. I heard him start up the Alfa-Romeo. It was not more than four minutes’ walk to the ducal palace, but he had to use the car.
“A pilot still?” I asked Jacopo.
“Never anything else,” he replied emphatically. “Arts Council?” He snapped his fingers in the air in a superb gesture of contempt, then, pouring out a glass of vermouth, set it before me with a flourish. “May you dine well,” he said, and left me.
I opened Carla Raspa’s letter without compunction. It began formally, thanking Professor Donati for his extreme kindness in allowing her and her companion passes for the evening session at the ducal palace. The experience had affected her profoundly. She wanted to discuss the many implications of his address to the students with the speaker himself. She would be in all evening should he return before midnight, and she was free all Sunday, should he have an hour to spare at any time throughout the day. She would be delighted to call upon him, or conversely, if he had nothing better to do, she would be honored to offer him a drink or a meal at her apartment at No. 5, via San Michele. It ended with the same formality, offering salutations. The signature, Carla Raspa, looped its way across the page, the letters intertwined like amorous limbs. I replaced the letter in the envelope, wondering if the writer was waiting still, and turned, not without relief, to the Falcon’s ploys.
“Duke Claudio’s precocious gallantry,” I read, “was a scandal to the more staid of Ruffano’s citizens, and proved ruinous to his own constitution. His follies and his vices attained a dangerous height, so alarming the older members of the Court that they feared greater excesses would threaten their ruler’s life. The Duke’s evil genius brought him into the company of strolling players, and, delighting in their loose manners, he threw himself among them without reserve, appointing the younger of them to high places in his Court.”
Well, Aldo had asked for it. I found a piece of paper and a pencil, and, sipping my vermouth, scribbled a translation of the more forceful passages.
“The Falcon’s casual acquaintance with the comedians ripened into intimacy, gradually monopolizing his time and thoughts. These persons, belonging to the vilest classes, became the Duke’s associates in public and in private. Conforming his morals to theirs, he defied decency, advancing from one extravagance to another, and producing spectacles of so shameless a nature before his subjects that…”
The German writer, shuddering, turned to Greek. My Turin degree had not covered the classics. Perhaps, from the point of view of the Festival, it was just as well, but I felt frustrated. I flipped back over the pages to those I had read in the library the day before. Someone, Aldo’s young student doubtless, had forestalled me. My brother must have called for the books soon after I left them with Signora Butali, and brought them back for his translator to skim through. A slip had been inserted to mark the passage I remembered.
“… When accusations were made against him by the outraged citizens of Ruffano, Duke Claudio retaliated by declaring that he had been divinely appointed to mete out to his subjects the punishment th
ey deserved. The proud would be stripped, the haughty violated, the slanderer silenced, the viper die in his own venom. The scales of heavenly justice would thus be balanced. On one occasion a page neglected to provide lights for the Duke’s evening repast. He was seized by the Falcon’s bodyguard, who enveloped the wretched lad in cerecloth coated with combustibles, and after setting fire to his head drove him through the rooms of the ducal palace to die in agony.”
A pretty tale. A little rough for heavenly justice. I read on.
“The citizens, indignant at the dishonor which nightly violated their domestic circles, finally rose at the instigation of the leading citizen, whose handsome wife had been profaned by the Falcon himself. It was in the riot that followed that the unhappy Duke met his end. The buffoonery he had learned upon the stage with his low followers decided him to execute a feat, hitherto unattempted, of driving eighteen horses from the fort on the northern hill of Ruffano through the center of the city and up the further hill to the ducal palace. He was set upon and pursued by almost the entire populace, after having trampled many of them to death beneath his horses’ hooves. This last ride, known to the Ruffanesi in after years as the Flight of the Falcon, ended in the Duke’s massacre.”
I poured myself another glass of vermouth. I thought the Duke had flung himself from the topmost pinnacle of the tower, declaring that he was the bird whose name he bore. The German scholar said none of this. Perhaps the Italian manuscripts were more explicit. Laboriously I copied down the details for my brother. Somebody else would have to decipher the Greek.
When he returned a few minutes before eight, in excellent spirits, having cast aside the more somber mood of early afternoon when together we revived the past, I handed him my notes and left him reading them while I washed my hands. I came back after a few minutes to find him smiling.
“This is good,” he said, “very good indeed. It tallies with what I had read earlier.”
I told him, in American fashion, that he was welcome. He stuffed the notes into his pocket. Then he called good-bye to Jacopo and we left the house. This time, I noticed, he did not use the car. We walked down the via dei Sogni to our former home.
“How do you explain me to Signora Butali?” I asked.
“I told her,” he answered, “before I left this morning. She’s as safe as Jacopo.”
He led the way into the garden, and up the pathway to the house. The door was open for us. We might have been the pair of us, returning from some foray in the past, with our parents awaiting dinner, he to make the excuses, myself to be sent immediately to bed.
Our hostess had changed for the occasion. She looked, so I thought, more beautiful by evening light, the dark blue dress becoming her. She came towards me first, smiling and holding out her hand.
“I should have known,” she said. “It wasn’t Chopin or Debussy that drew you here. You wanted to see your home.”
“It was all three,” I said, kissing her hand. “If I seemed very rude and abrupt I ask forgiveness now.”
I was no longer the assistant librarian who had walked home with her from church. I belonged, because of Aldo.
“It is fantastic,” she said, “and very wonderful. I still can’t believe it’s true. This is going to make such a difference to both your lives. I’m so happy for you.” She looked from one to the other of us, and tears, that possibly had been near the surface all day, rose to her eyes.
“Emotion,” said my brother, “is wasted. Where’s my Campari? Beo prefers vermouth.”
She shook her head at him, protesting at his lack of feeling, and handed us the waiting glasses, filling one for herself.
“To you both,” she said. “Long life and every happiness,” and then to me, “I’ve always loved your name. ‘Il Beato.’ I think you fill it well.”
Aldo shouted with laughter. “You know what he is?” he said. “He’s nothing but a tourist tout. He scrambles around the country in a loaded coach showing the Anglo-Saxons Rome by night.”
“Why shouldn’t he?” she answered. “I’m sure he does it well and the tourists adore him.”
“He does it for tips,” said Aldo. “He dives into the Trevi fountain with his trousers off.”
“Nonsense,” she smiled, and to me, “Take no notice of him, Beo. He’s jealous because you see the world and he is stuck in a small university city.”
Beo came well from her. I liked it. And the teasing exchange between them put me at my ease. All the same… I glanced at my brother. He was walking about the room flipping at books, picking up objects and putting them down again, his restless manner, which I remembered from the past, suggesting suppressed excitement. Something brewed.
The double doors opened into what was now the dining room, revealing the table set for three, lighted by candles. The girl who had put the food on the sideboard withdrew for us to help ourselves. My old playroom, subtly transformed with the curtains drawn and the candlelight playing upon the polished table and our three faces, had lost its morning strangeness. It was mine again, but warmer, intimate, and I had the impression that I was my boyhood self, promoted out of due time to join in one of Aldo’s adult games.
It was my fortune often in the past to play the third, the aider and abetter of my brother’s whim, whether to foster some budding friendship at the liceo where he spent his days, or to damp one down. He would prepare phrases for me first, and at a given sign I must out with them, to cause confusion, perhaps a furious argument, even a battle. His methods had not changed. Only the fish he wanted to play was now a woman, and to watch her rise to the flies he cast afforded him a double satisfaction with me as witness. I wondered how far he had gone; whether the banter that passed between them—myself frequently a butt for her to defend—was a ritual flight before the final act or if, already lovers, their secret increased in intensity and excitement by being flaunted before a supposedly innocent third.
There was no talk of Signora Butali’s husband. The sick man in his hospital bed in Rome was no absent skeleton at the feast; he might not have existed. I wondered, had he been present, how it would have altered the behavior of all three of us; our hostess withdrawing into her shell and becoming simply the doyenne of her dining-table, while Aldo, flattering his host in a way that only I might possibly discern—he had done it as a boy with our father—would lead him on to self-disclosure, no matter whether interesting or tedious, as long as the undercurrent of intrigue remained unseen.
Dinner over, Signora Butali led the way upstairs to the music room, and while we drank coffee and liqueurs the conversation turned upon the Festival.
“How are rehearsals?” she asked my brother. “Or is the whole thing to be as secret as last year to those who don’t take part?”
“More so,” he said, “but to the first part of your question, the rehearsals are going well. Some of us have been at it for months.”
She turned to me. “You know, Beo,” she said, “last year I played the Duchess Emilia, who received Pope Clement. Professor Rizzio, whom you met this morning, was the Duke. So lifelike were the rehearsals, and the coaxing methods of your brother who directed us, that I truly believe Professor Rizzio has imagined himself a Duke of Ruffano ever since.”
“His manner to me this morning was certainly royal,” I said. “I did not connect it with the Festival of a year ago. I thought perhaps that as Deputy Rector of the university and Head of the Department of Education he was simply aware of the great gulf between us.”
“That’s his trouble too,” she agreed, and to Aldo, “but isn’t it his sister’s even more? I often feel sorry for the resident women students. They might be in a convent, shut up in that hostel with Signorina Rizzio.”
My brother laughed, pouring himself cognac.
“Convents in old days were easier of access,” he said. “An underground passage between the men’s and women’s hostels has yet to be constructed. Perhaps we might consider it.”
He pulled the notes I had translated for him out of his pocket
and, throwing himself in a chair, began to study them.
“There are many problems,” I said to my hostess, “that have to be surmounted before the launching of this year’s Festival.”
“Such as?” she asked.
“Whether Duke Claudio was a moralist or a monster,” I answered. “According to the historians he was a monster, and mad at that. Aldo thinks otherwise.”
“He would,” she said. “He likes to be different from everyone else.”
Her voice was mocking, but the look she gave in his direction stimulating. My hostess was ready poised for another movement of the ritual flight. I thought of the dead expression on her face when I had walked with her from church, and the comparison was not flattering to me, the third.
“Anyway,” I said, “the people of Ruffano believed him a monster and rose in a bloody insurrection against him and his Court.”
“And are we to have this in the Festival?” she demanded.
“Don’t ask me, ask Aldo,” I replied.
She strolled over to his chair, her liqueur glass in her hand, humming beneath her breath, and the way she moved, the way she bent over him sitting there in the chair, was, to me, somehow evident of desire. Only my presence there stopped her from touching him.
“Well,” she said, “do we have an insurrection, and if so who’s to lead it?”
“Easy,” he answered, without looking up. “The C and E students. They’re ripe for rebellion anyway.”
She raised her eyebrows at me and set her liqueur glass on the piano. “An innovation,” she said, throwing back the piano lid. “I thought the acting in the Festival was meant for the Arts students alone.”