A Dancer in Darkness (14 page)

She had sat in her convent like Achilles sulking in his tent, but now, if all went well, she would move freely once again, and do great things. It was one of the happiest moments of her life. She had forgotten
The
Dream,
the madhouse, and her brother Bosola, and forgotten them with relief. The dark side of the soul did not interest her. This pomp she had made was of far greater worldly worth, and this was religion as she
understood
it.

To Sor Juana, and indeed to the Cardinal, theology was a branch of intrigue. God was a Grand Seigneur, with a court consisting of those in favour and those out of it, the three of them supported by loyal drudges and underpaid priests who, so long as they did their work and did not rebel, were of no real interest. When God’s back was turned, one scrabbled for favour catch as catch can, and then turned up blandly the next morning as Master of the Bedchamber. One had to be amusing, witty, and unctuous. Above all, one had to flatter. The Grand Seigneur was much too busy to attend to affairs of state, but statesmen must never on any account be too busy to amuse the Grand Seigneur. His amusements, it was well known, were voluptuous. And the best way to rise, was to gain favour with
his favourites. Sincerity, in this case, consisted of a talent for amiable rhetoric, in return for which one was allowed to live at court, and accumulated estates for one’s posterity.

The attitude of that priest at Arosa would have been
incomprehensible
to either of them. For one does not serve God. There are underlings to do that. One’s sole duty is to keep one’s self amusing and Him amused. And if one is beautiful or clever, and so catches His eye, so much the better. Thus Saint Teresa. Thus Bossuet. Thus the Cardinal. And thus Sor Juana. One could never become Grand Seigneur oneself. That was a matter of Blood Royal. But with patience and skill, one could, if one were Cardinal, become Pope; or if one were Sor Juana, marry into the family, and so become a Saint, a Blessed, or, like Teresa, a woman of affairs.

So, just as Antonio contrived triumphs and court dances, Sor Juana had devised her
Fiori.
It represented a battle between Sacred and Profane Love. Sacred Love was in court dress. Profane Love in Roman armour, with cuirasses, buskins, good knees, and waving plumes. The choreography was military and square. Each side declaimed the appropriate verses, which were certainly long, but the music was splendid, and the costumes marvellous.

The merits of Profane Love were undeniable. However, it was agreed by the contestants that the flowers of earthly passion fade. Sacred Love, on the other hand, was somewhat wan, though invested with a fine rolling eye. These flowers did not fade, but neither did they grow on earthly bushes.

Sor Juana had been tempted to continue the discussion, for the verse had flowed freely from her pen. She was, however, a mistress of stage mechanics, and she had sensed that the day would be cold.

So, in a united chorus of some twenty-five lines,
accompanied
by the roll of drums and some music for the trumpet, Love both Sacred and Profane announced that though the battle between them was endless, still they united in praise of the most high merits of his Eminence, Roberto,
Cardinal-Bishop
Sanducci. At this point the baize curtain was released, it dropped clingingly from the arch, and by a simple dramatic device the attention of the crowd was riveted on the gleaming
white marble profusion of the Cardinal’s gift to the Cathedral. Twisted columns, putti, graces, warriors, saints, and archangels swirled upward in a tangle of clouds, garlands, and flowers, almost obliterating the door, to where, twenty feet above the ground, two muscular stone seraphs held the enormous escutcheon of the Sanducci arms, crowned with a cardinal’s hat, and surmounted by a dove.

The performance concluded with one of those conceited sonnets she wrote so well, upon the Cardinal’s hatchments and bearings.

She could tell instantly that the Cardinal was well pleased. He turned to her and beamed, rising with an ecclesiastical prance; she was allowed to kiss his ring; and as she rose he had time to tell her that his sister, the Duchess of Amalfi, had been graciously pleased to take an interest in the proposed new
convent
, and in Sor Juana, whose name had in some way become associated with the project.

Sor Juana was delighted. The Duchess was clearly not an intellectual woman; was, in fact, a flibberty-gibbet, but perhaps that made her all the easier to flatter. Perhaps she might send her a sonnet and a memorial.

The Cardinal said not yet, but he, too, seemed well pleased. “It would not do to hurry the matter on,” he said. “We must have patience. Perhaps in eight or nine months….” His voice dwindled away, and lowering it, he asked about the conduct of the boy, who must for the moment be kept in strict secrecy.

That being the case, Sor Juana saw no point in telling him that Bosola knew who he was.

Pink-faced, unwrinkled, and beaming, with a look of
bloodcurdling
benevolence, the Cardinal moved forward to receive the compliments of the company, leaving both his architect and Sor Juana well to the rear.

Sor Juana did not mind. It takes time to bring great schemes to birth, and nine months, after all, was only the normal length of any pregnancy. She returned to the convent in the happy thought that it need not contain her long.

Suddenly events caught up with them, for it is impossible for an honest man to keep his footing in a world of intrigue. He is like a man blindfolded. No matter how clever he is, eventually he is bound to lose his way.

It is impossible to understand how they managed to conceal their relationship for so long. Yet, though they could not see each other as much as they would wish, and though the Duchess was forced to confide in Cariola, no one knew what was going on, or with whom. Gossip, after all, soon wearies. It has to be fed constantly. Give it nothing to feed on, and it thinks the ground barren and passes on to other fields. That was their margin of safety. They forgot that it is not gossip that betrays us, but the truth of it.

In public she treated Antonio with a fine affectionate
indifference
. They both enjoyed that, for it meant their marriage was still a game. As a game, they were equal to it. What would happen to them when it ceased to be a game was something neither of them had thought about.

The court noticed only that she smiled again, and was pleased to see her smile, though even Bosola could not
discover
the reason for that joy. Then again, having Cariola,
perhaps
even he relaxed. Thus matters went on for many months. Spring came, and summer was warm to the hand.

One morning the Duchess woke to find that she was ill. She could think of no reason for it, and said nothing about it, but it frightened her.

She went at once to her glass, without summoning Cariola, and holding it in her hands, stood at the window, examining herself intently. She could see no change. She had slept alone that night. To be without Antonio sometimes made her
restless
. Often in the morning she felt clogged and dull after such a
night. There was in that nothing unusual, and the effect soon passed. Yet they had been safe for so long that she had almost forgotten the one consuming terror of passionate women of that age. She did not look at her body, because she was afraid to look.

But the days passed, and nothing seemed to be wrong. She relaxed. Only towards the end of the month was she nervous. She would not see Antonio. She could scarcely bear even to see Cariola. A week later she was ill again, and then she knew. She told no one.

She did not dare. She waited a day or two. Then, unable to sleep, waking before dawn, and before Cariola was up, she got out of bed, stripped off all her clothes, and stood naked and shivering on the stone floor of the room, looking at what she could see of her flesh in the glass. Her breasts seemed as small and firm as ever. Her belly was taut. She turned this way and that, as the cold air from the unglazed window rippled the fine hairs on her body. There was a faint almost imperceptible growth, for when she had grown the Piccolomini heir, nothing had shown for seven months. She had a deep, wide pelvis.

She felt like running away to hide, but only the anonymous can hide. The well-known and the famous have nowhere to go. She wanted to rush down the private stair, go secretly to Antonio’s quarters, take him by the shoulders, and shake him. There must be something he could do to help.

Apart from panic, she felt astonishment that fate could change what had been so delightful suddenly into something so horrible, without warning, and overnight. She knew what it felt like to be trapped. She stood in the cold light, shivering, the mirror still in her hand.

There was a creaking sound behind her. She whirled,
dropping
the mirror, which shattered in all directions on the floor. Her hands flew over her breasts.

It was Antonio. “I had to come,” he said. “I had to know what was wrong.” He looked at her and his eyes widened. Whatever he had been expecting to find, it was not this.

He wrapped her in a cloak and led her gently back to her bed. She let him do so. She wanted to be comforted, and lost control of herself. She began to shake. To her overwhelming
relief and surprise he held her tightly in his arms. She was not a Duchess then. She gave way and became a frightened
woman
.

The door opened and Cariola came in, ready to wake her mistress. Her lips tightened with disapproval. Over the Duchess’s head Antonio motioned her away. Cariola did not like that, but she went.

“Are you sure you can trust her?”

The Duchess did not know whom she could trust. “I think so.” She drew the robe more closely around her, feeling immensely frail. Soon the palace would begin to stir. There was danger in that. Yet she could not bear to send him away.

“What am I to do?” she whispered. “If my brothers find out, they will kill you.” They might also kill her, but she could not bring herself to say that.

He paused. “We must keep them from finding out. How long has it been?”

“Almost three months.”

He paced up and down the room. When he spoke he was almost brusque. “Take Cariola and go to Ravello. I’ll send you a woman there.” As though realizing how cruel his voice sounded, he smiled at her timidly.

Something inside her shrank. “No,” she said.

He shook his head. He looked abruptly old. “What else is there to do?”

She was terrified at his annoyance. She sat on the edge of the immensely high bed, her bare feet not quite reaching the floor. The room was still very cold. She swallowed bitterly: he was right. She looked up at him half shyly.

“Will you come?”

“I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be safe, for either you or me.”

“Safe!” She could not keep the bitterness out of her voice.

The distance between them seemed ungulfable. They might just as well have been strangers. No doubt he thought she had tricked him. She did not like the way he stood watching her. She knew this scene was the test of something. The process was almost visible in his face. She found herself watching it almost impersonally, the way an alchemist would watch his alembics,
sure that this ultimate test for gold would also fail, and yet rooted there by a last cynical shred of hope.

It made their love seem foolish and delusive. She forced herself to retain some dignity.

Then, she did not know how, he had his arms around her, and was smoothing her hair, with his head buried on her shoulder. “It has to be this way,” he said. She scarcely heard him. She was too overwhelmed to find that he was still there, and had not fled, even though she was sure he had wanted to. That he had wanted to somehow made his presence more real and more secure. Something had changed in both of them. She wondered what it was.

“Go tonight,” he said hastily, and pressed her hand
re-assuringly
. “Do not tell Cariola unless you have to. I must find the woman. The gipsies trust her. Try not to be too frightened. I’ll come if I can.”

She let him out the private stair, and when he had gone, all the gratitude and warmth drained out of her. For no man could help her. She was alone with it. There was no escape.

They were not children any more. Much more than the ordeal she had to face, that was the empty terror that made her want to cry out. They had aged so soon.

She dimly understood. Youth is a garden, where for a while we are allowed to play. But when a sudden storm forces us indoors and we stand on the threshold of maturity, we see for the first time those shadowy corridors that only lead one way. Even if we have someone with us, they only lead one way. The corridors are lined with identical doors on identical death. It does not matter which one we open, for each one opens on an ultimate empty room. We move among the furniture warily. We dare not face those rooms alone. But the doors are tall and narrow. We can go through them only singly, even if we do not lose our companion on the way. And we are careful not to lose that companion, for once out of sight, and he or she may be gone for good. Sor Juana no doubt would have put the matter more subtly, and felt it much less. But the Duchess was not intellectual. She was caught alone in the full blast of the truth.

Bosola was bored, and the reason why he was bored, he ironically realized, was because he was content. If he could be content with so little, then surely that must prove that he was not equal to his own ambitions, and that was a truth he would not face. He despised himself for being happy where he was, for Amalfi was insignificant. He could not understand why the Cardinal should want to bother himself with it.

His duties were not enough to keep him occupied. That is the way of small courts surrounded by too much pomp; and a court ruled by a woman is no court at all. For women cannot rule without some tincture of the masculine, and the Duchess had none of that. He thought her ornamental, and therefore useless, and so he raged against her, and never thought that it might be because he was attracted to her. He had lived in a hard world. He could not understand the tyranny of
something
soft, and had no patience with it. Women wear men away gently, as water does a stone, so that they do not notice their enfeeblement until it is too late.

Had he been born a hundred years before he would have been one of the
condottieri,
those great clanking nobodies who sacked whole countrysides, murdered princes, and were high and mighty men until an arrow pierced their corselets. What he longed for was a civilization of mad dogs. But that age was long gone. Now the world had separated out into a wilderness of masters, servants, and spies. That maddened him. He could not bear to be a menial. Yet even Antonio was a menial. Everyone was a menial but the great ones, and a cage of
chirruping
mouldy birds called sculptors, artists, painters,
scientists
. Their chirruping meant nothing, but it got them attention, and they liked their cage. Or there was his sister, that downy one, who rose imperceptibly, by a kind of sacerdotal seepage, from the bottom of an ecclesiastical well, smug in the assurance that one day her fame would overflow.

But he was none of those things.

He was only an attendant on Antonio. What hurt him was that Antonio had made a friend of him. If that had been done with some purpose, Bosola would have been able to forgive it.
But now honour and gratitude confused his mind, and he did not know how he was going to betray him, should the need arise. To betray most men gave him a thrill of superiority. That was why he was a spy. But he shrank from the knowledge that with Antonio he would betray himself.

He would never forgive Antonio for having made a friend of him. It is dreadful to know oneself wicked, and then to find oneself liked. It totters everything that one believed about the world, and knew to be true.

With Cariola he felt much the same.

In the beginning Cariola came to him disdainfully, and that had filled him with a savage joy. It had made it possible for him to be brutal with her, with an animal ferocity that freed him from his own miserable body. She had loved that. She moaned and twisted and shrieked like a mandrake, and was a very different person from the starched, proud, haughty
lady-in
-waiting she outwardly seemed to be. That gave him pleasure. It showed how venal and rotten was even the most staid world. When he enjoyed himself with her, he delighted in the idea that that porcelain figure, the Duchess, if one but knew the truth, was as corruptible as they. If the good and beautiful were only an appearance and a sham, then the good and the beautiful were bearable after all, and even Antonio, who seemed so prim, no doubt had pleasures just as wild. In the midst of a sweaty night, hurting Cariola until her skin turned blue, he could avenge himself on the whole world, and rise superior to it. After all, human dignity is not much. Strip it of money, and crack it on the rack or wheel, and it soon shows it is as filthy as the rest of us.

But then even Cariola began to change. Their appointments became more regular, and she even condescended to be seen with him by day. She began to mother him. He resented that. Yet it was pleasant to be provided with better wine, or have someone stitch up his shirts. She became timid about it, and then placid. She would sit in his room and sew.

They might just as well have been married. She made little jokes at him, but they had lost their edge. And the more familiar she became, the harder it was to turn savage by night. Familiarity made brutality seem silly, and he became
self-conscious
.
He would suddenly collapse and lie in the warm bed next to her, and then she would treat him like a baby.

She came now usually on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He found himself thinking of her in a different way. It was as though energy and resentment had flowed out of him into a puddle, and left him someone else, the way we feel someone other than ourselves after a fever has left us, and we are still weak. Their life became matter of course, and silted up with small private events. It is impossible to become violent when life is matter of course. There is no channel down which our energies can rush. Instead the flood sinks harmlessly away.

On Tuesday she did not come. As soon as he missed her he knew how trapped he was. He was sinking into the mediocrity of other men. It was a warning. Yet here it was Thursday, and he sat alone in his room, well past the hour at which she
generally
came, and could not sleep. He had become as foppish as Antonio, and as useless and as foolish. After all, he was forty. It was no age at which to dawdle with women. No doubt the whole court knew their affair, and laughed behind his back.

Cariola never knocked. It was one of the things that annoyed him, as though she took it for granted that he would be alone and waiting for her. Now she slipped into the room, bearing in her arms a white bundle.

Cariola had also changed. She seemed happier and more assured. Her face now had a rested look, and her skin was healthier than it had been for years. Her voice had a kindlier authority, a tone that otherwise only the Duchess heard.

He was cross with her for being late, even while he felt relief at seeing her. He made no move towards her.

“I only came to say I cannot stay,” she said. “I’m sorry. The Duchess is going to Ravello.”

He was acutely disappointed, and refused to show it. “At this hour?”