Last Tales. Isak Dinesen
villa contained a fine library. Here its master passed most of the time that he could spare from the administration of his property and the visits of prominent ecclesiastics. Upon the library shelves tall tomes, with their backs to the world, preserved the ponderous knowledge of ages. But from time to time during three centuries, volumes of more frivolous thoughts, of longing and levity and words that rhymed, had happened to leap in amongst them. On a day when her husband was away, the mistress of the villa found her way to the library. The large cool room, which till now had known only black and bleak human figures, became the abode of a fresh young being in white muslin, whose rich tresses, as she was reading, tumbled forward and caressed the parchment, and who seemed to be lifted from her chair by her own deep sighs of sadness or delight, and to be blown by them to and fro on the marble floor. It fell in love with her; it became a bower above a fountain nymph, shaking down on its own the sweet fruits that her heart demanded.
Such excessive reading, the Prince reflected, might be harmful to his wife’s health and mind; she should be otherwise occupied. Princess Benedetta had a pure and sweet voice, and within the second year of waiting the Prince appointed for her an old singing-master, who had once sung in opera. She gave herself up to music, as she had given herself up to books; her nature at first had listened, now it sang. Here, she felt, was a reasonable human language, within which things could be truthfully expressed. She was in good understanding with the cadenza, both the full or perfect cadenza and the deceptive cadenza, the cadenza d’inganno, of which musical dictionaries will tell you that it makes every preparation for a perfect finish and then, instead of giving the expected final accord, suddenly breaks off and sounds an unexpected, strange and alarming close. Here, quite obviously, the girl’s heart told her, was the infallible rule of the irregular.
A pleasant friendship soon united teacher and pupil. The old maestro entertained the noble young lady with reminiscences of the opera, and within the third year of waiting he obtained her husband’s consent to escort her and the old aunt to Venice to a performance of Metastasio’s masterpiece Achilles in Scyros. Here she heard Marelli sing.
How describe the beatitude into which, in the course of a few hours, her whole being was transported. It was a birth, the pangs of which were sweet beyond words, a mighty process which needed, and made use of, every particle of her nature, and in which, undergoing a total change, she triumphantly became her whole self. Gratia, Saint Thomas Aquinas himself says, supponit et perficit naturam—Grace presupposes Nature and brings it to perfection. Any person of soul and imagination will recognize the experience, every lover in the world is a disciple of the Angelic Doctor. I shall leave my analysis at that; I do not venture to compete with Saint Thomas.
At the seventh recall, before the last drop of the curtain—while the whole house was afoot and applauding madly—from the stage-boards and from a nobleman’s gilt box, a pair of blue and a pair of black eyes met across the pit in a long deep silent glance, the first and the last.
Smile not—not even in pity—at the fact that the youth, who called to life a young woman’s heart, was a being of Marelli’s kind, a soprano, formed and prepared in the Conservatorio of Sant’ Onofrio, and once and for all cut off—no, laugh not!—from real life. But bear in mind that this whole love affair was of a seraphic order and went to a tune.
Old courtesans have confided to me that in their career they have met with young lovers, whose embrace had power to restore a long-lost virginity. Might there not likewise be young inamoratas with such genius for devotion that their glance will bestow upon its object the manhood of a demi-god?
And all in all—that the emotion of longing, if suddenly and mightily aroused, should choose for its object the unrealizable—this may be a tragic or a grotesque phenomenon in life, but it is by no means a rare phenomenon. Among very young people it is even common, for with very young people the contempt of death and the love of death will be but one and the same heroic passion.
Their eyes met! Was, then, the unfortunate young singer, in the same way as the lady, wounded in the heart? All authorities agree that that year, in Venice, something happened to the soprano Giovanni Ferrer, who sang under the name of Marelli. His chief biographer, possibly out of tenderness for his ill-fated hero, interprets the fact differently, but does not deny it. The world-famous treble was changed. Till this hour it had been a celestial instrument, carried from stage to stage by an exquisitely elegant and graceful doll. Now it was the voice of the human soul. When, many years later, Marelli sang in St. Petersburg, the Empress Catherine, who had never been known to weep, sobbed bitterly all through the programme and cried: “Ah, que nous sommes punis pour avoir le coeur pur!” Poor Giovanni all his life remained faithful to the dark-eyed lady of Venice.
Alas, Princess Benedetta was less stable. In the course of her second, third and fourth youths not a few lively scandals came to be associated with her name. I myself am the only person to know that all the time a slim, gentle, grave guardian-angel was walking with her and seeing to it that there should ever be music in her heart. And now, if you feel like it, you are free to smile at the fact that this dazzling and beguiling, often-embraced lady had for her only true lover the Marelli, who was the lover of no woman.
Shortly after the episode of Venice the term of waiting stipulated by Prince Pompilio expired, and the husband once more with much dignity turned toward his spouse.
No man’s hand during the three years had touched Princess Benedetta’s lovely person, yet it was changed by more than time. By now she knew the nature and value of what she was giving into the arms of her husband, and in her second bridal night she shed tears different from those of her first.
The Princess became with child, but as long as possible kept the happy state of things to herself. “Caprice de femme enceinte,” the Prince exclaimed, not a little piqued at an order of nature which would confide a momentous family matter to a lady, before informing her lord. Even afterwards she remained so strangely silent that it seemed as if she had given away only half her secret and had anchored her whole being in the other half. Her family physician had advised her not to sing, and she submitted to this recommendation as she had submitted to all other recommendations of his, for she meant her son to be glorious in strength and comeliness. In order to be secure against temptation she even dismissed her old singing-master. The old man, all in tears, blessed and kissed her at the parting hour, went back to his native village, lived on the pension granted him by his former pupil and gave no more singing-lessons. But deep in her mind and blood ran the lovely air of Metastasio’s in which some day that son was to proclaim to the world the triumph of beauty and poetry as well as his own identity: “Ha! Now I know myself Achilles!”
The change of surroundings had not meant as much to the husband as to the wife, for at whatever scene of town or country Prince Pompilio would gaze, he would see in it the figure of Prince Pompilio. But the fall of dropping water, as Lucretius tells us, wears away the stone. The monotony of a country existence—without high duties at Court, without prominent roles in grand church ceremonies or grim political conferences—after a while began to tell on the master of the villa. He looked round vaguely for something to bear out the fundamental dogma of his own importance.
The villa had a chaplain and librarian, Don Lega Zambelli, a short, paunchy man—I have seen him, and remember his face—who in his career upwards from the humble position of a swineherd’s son had become skilled in the art of handling great people, particularly in handling them by flattery. By the time the princely couple took up residence at the villa, Don Lega in his fat and secure office had begun to miss opportunities for practicing his talents, and he now welcomed such a magnificent patron of the art as the Prince. The master of the villa, on his side, was pleasantly surprised to find in the midst of wild lonely mountains a man of so much virtue and discrimination. As he listened to Don Lega, he came to realize that—unappreciated by his wife, unfortunate in his son and heir, exiled from the elevated circles in which he was wont to shine, and in the heyday of his manhood condemned to celibacy—he had been favored with a particularly noble and precious cross. Before long he saw himself as a chosen martyr on earth, and a saint in embryo. His visitors noticed that with every month their host’s waistcoats, and his face, grew longer.
On a day six weeks before the Princess’ confinement,