A Dancer in Darkness (5 page)

The silence lengthened out. It made Bosola uncomfortable, even while he admired the skill with which that discomfort was accomplished. He looked down at the marble coat of arms in the floor.

When he glanced up again, the Cardinal was staring at him. In the candle-light it was a singularly boyish face Bosola saw, for guile has its own innocence. It is always a little naïve about virtue, and that keeps it young.

The Cardinal had fingers that seemed to play with invisible cats. Bosola had hoped for recognition. What he found instead was a kind of suppressed glee that was somehow transmitted to the finger-tips.

“Are you content here?” asked the Cardinal dryly.

“Quite content.”

There was a faint impatient stirring of robes. “The Duchess’s steward, Antonio di Bologna, has asked if you might attend him.” The Cardinal’s voice rippled over some inner hilarity, like water over stones when someone throws out a slop pail. “He seems to have been curiously struck by you.” The
Cardinal
looked at him with mock curiosity. “You are from Brescia, I believe.”

Bosola was startled.

The Cardinal picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk. “Niccolò Ferrante was from Brescia,” he said gently. Behind the sconce, his face flickered deceptively, but in that flickering mask the eyes did not flicker. His eyes were his authority. They never wavered. Yet they could have been squeezed out like grapes. Bosola stared at them and his fingers curled.

“Antonio di Bologna is an excellent gentleman,” said the Cardinal. “He will be our sister’s steward. A man must talk to someone, and if he should choose to talk to you, that would not be so surprising. For he seems to have a preference for you.”

Bosola understood.

“My brother does not like this preferment.” He looked at Bosola innocently. “But perhaps Antonio has made an
excellent 
choice in you. We shall see.” He seemed to grow bored with the papers before him, yet he went on toying with the sheaf as before. Finally he tapped them. “Perhaps you have forgotten, but you had excellent reasons for leaving Brescia,” he said. “And Mantua as well. But that is not important here. How often in life we choose the wrong identity.” He nodded his dismissal.

No wonder the Cardinal had smiled. For something like that would amuse the Cardinal. Bosola had made a mistake. He had forgotten that to assume another man’s identity was also to assume his sins.

Bosola’s duties with Antonio were not onerous. He had chiefly merely to attend him, and for this he had a new livery, for Antonio had an eye for such effects. He loved to live in a world of appearances, and indeed, what other kind of world is there? Bosola’s new livery was to the German, Gothic taste, as the Baroque would have it. He wore skin-tight scarlet, with a white bow on the right arm and another on the left knee, and a large Maximilian hat with a white feather. It made him look like a fantasy. Bosola had never lived in a fantasy before.

As for Antonio, he seemed as simple and as doomed as a grasshopper. Yet grasshoppers know what they are. If they imitated the ants, they would live no longer, so why should they not chirp and be gay?

About Antonio there was precisely that atmosphere of the sacred victim. It was because he was so lovable. Being lovable was what made him so beautiful, and beauty is its own shroud.

Bosola served him for the two weeks of his visit, and nothing happened until the end of that time.

Then something happened that shook him badly. It was Antonio’s piety. Bosola came upon it unexpectedly, and it shook him. For from his sister, he knew very well what piety was. Piety was a career. It was terrible to learn that piety could also have the organic sadness of a flower.

Antonio travelled with a small portable shrine, and it stood on a chest in the embrasure of his window. It was a small statue of St. Nicolaus of Bari, a little wooden waltzing thing
set in a niche between two twisted columns, with a rack for three candles before it. The candles had to be replenished every day. Sometimes, in a Venetian glass ewer, a few flowers would stand there too.

One morning Bosola had to go in to replenish the candles. He was not thinking of anything in particular, except that his service to Antonio would soon be over. He entered the room without knocking, holding the white wax stubs of the new candles in his hand, and crossed to the embrasure.

Antonio was on his knees. His eyes were closed. And that was all. But it upset Bosola.

Sometimes we come upon people unexpectedly when they are in the midst of that special world where the self lives. We are abashed. We draw back. We catch a glimpse of each other across the landscape of silence. It is a look of mutual
recognition
from which we never recover.

Bosola set down the candles and Antonio rose. After a moment of insight, it is as though we had come suddenly into a darkened room. For a moment we lose our bearings. Our eyes still project the image of what we have just seen. And what Bosola had seen was goodness. It was unendurable. He turned and fled.

For the ambitious man should never be doomed to see the object he covets with the eyes of a man who does not covet it at all. Ambition must see everything from the front, or else die.

That day the Cardinal was holding levee. Here were all the rich and great. And now they did not seem rich and great. Bosola passed them in the anterooms and shivered. He had wanted to rise by these people. Now it occurred to him that he would rather pull them down on top of him.

The one thing kept from the masses, is that the great ones of the world are freaks. They have been so pulled about by eminence that they no longer have any shape of their own. Greatness is like a cancer. It grows unseen until it is strong enough to gobble us up. Greatness is a disease.

Bosola with his eyes opened stood in the middle of a pest house, and it revolted him. For once in his life he saw the running sores of those who rode themselves too hard.

At the head of that procession pranced the Cardinal, with
his curiously asexual charm. For the man who is only one sex is not only rare. He is also a monster. Like the deaf mute, he is cut off from communication with far more than half the world. Yet the Cardinal was not effeminate. He was only clever, and as lacking in sexual differentiation as is the sexual act itself.

It was more than Bosola could bear. He had not the courage of his predilections.

So when at evening Antonio came upon him, he burst into a tirade as children burst into tears at a kind word from their mothers.

Antonio listened silently.

“Perhaps you do not belong here,” he said. His eyes seemed to search Bosola’s face for something that was not there.

“What?” The idea took Bosola aback. It had never occurred to him that he belonged anywhere else, for his nature had been bent on one purpose, as a tree is bent one way by the prevailing wind. Besides, though he might hate, hatred is the mulch of ambition. It burns the fingers, but it feeds the will.

“Why not?” asked Antonio. “I am going to Amalfi
tomorrow
. Something could be found for you to do.”

“I cannot leave here.”

“You do not belong here,” said Antonio. “You are a good man.”

Bosola shook his head. Goodness was a weakness, and he would not be weak. Goodness made him feel less than he was. Indeed, if someone tells us we are good, we feel a sort of
helpless
silliness steal over our faces, our knees wobble, and our testicles draw up, as they do when we are afraid. The worst tempters, after all, are not the devils, but the saints. Besides, he had his own reasons for not wanting to go to Amalfi.

Antonio left him and moved down the stairs to the hall. Bosola wandered restlessly through the palace, he did not know why, as it gradually fell asleep, for he clung to ambition as a blind man clings to his cane, or a leper to his bell. He could not give it up.

Far ahead of him, down in the main hall, towards midnight, he seemed to hear the angry rise and fall of voices. Only one sconce burned down there. Bosola crept to the balustrade of the loggia and peered down.

It was the Cardinal and Ferdinand, pacing back and forth in the litter of the hall, for the servants would not sweep it out until just before dawn. Ferdinand was manifestly in a temper. The Cardinal seemed alternately to be fanning him up and soothing him down. They talked in furious whispers. Bosola craned forward.

“He shall not go,” snapped Ferdinand. “He shall not go to that strumpet.”

“He is harmless.”

“I know my sister. I know what she will do.”

The Cardinal looked at his brother warily, waved a jewelled hand, and smiled.

“If she will do it now, then she has done it before.”

“She is not to remarry. I will not have that man go there.” Ferdinand was trembling like a wet dog. He seized his brother by the shoulders. “What are you plotting? What are you doing to me?”

The Cardinal shook him off. “I do not plot. I watch,” he said quietly.

“You want Amalfi for yourself.”

The Cardinal did not answer directly. “She is your sister,” he said. “I hope you do not know why you are so angry, for that is a sin.”

Ferdinand stopped in the middle of the hall and burst out laughing. “What would you know of sin?” he demanded. “Sin is a passion.”

The Cardinal was very still. Then he moved towards the stairs, and his robes swished over the marble as he ascended, as though he moved upward on a raft of snakes. Below Bosola, Ferdinand looked up, and when he did, his eyes were white with fury.

Bosola withdrew.

*

Early next morning Antonio and his little retinue set out on the Naples road.

Bosola felt sad. When the company had vanished down the street, he stripped off his scarlet livery and returned to the guard. Nothing had happened, and yet life was no longer the same.

A month later the Cardinal sent for him once more.

By then Bosola had lapsed back into a scowling indifference. He had almost forgotten Antonio. He had spent the month roistering with Marcantonio. There was nothing more
voluptuous
than violence, nothing more satisfying to the soul while it was going on, nothing sadder when it was done. Indeed, the sadness was so unbearable, that it only led to more violence, like a drug, which enlivens the senses only the more permanently to impair them. It was the age of Caravaggio. Slitting the noses of a few gallants out late at night in the back alleys was a kind of joy. If he could be nothing, then it was something that they would never be the same again. The sides of their noses flapped and streamed with blood. We would take the whole world down with us, if we were able.

The Cardinal had no such ambitions. Bosola found him poring over a map of Amalfi and its dependencies, which had been flung out across the desk.

It was a beautiful map, blue and black on parchment, with miniature winds in the corners.

The Cardinal grunted but did not look up. “This is
ridiculous
,” he said. “How long have you been here?”

“Eight months.”

“We may as well drop the pretence,” said the Cardinal. “If there is any hue and cry after you, it has fallen off by now. Still, you may as well be Ferrante for a while.” The Cardinal glanced at him sharply. “Do you think I have used you harshly? Still, I do not think you are altogether happy here.” Abruptly his manner changed. “I cannot keep you here,” he said. “You are restless and I must be discreet. Besides, I have no use for you.”

Bosola became motionless, like a stalked bird.

The Cardinal looked at him for a very long time, and
something
elusively like pity seemed to flood through the contempt at the bottom of his eyes. He gave a grunt and scribbled silently on a sheet of parchment, poured sand on it, blew the sand off, folded the letter, sealed it, and all this time said nothing more to Bosola.

Every year the Cardinal’s insolence grew more kindly, more indulgent, and more smoothly adapted to its purpose, for some men are born adapted only to eminence, and what would be vices in a lesser station, become virtues in them. Bosola admired him, even while inwardly raging against him. The Cardinal now had that ultimate cunning that does not have to hide itself in order to work its effect.

His Eminence wet his ring with spittle, impressed his seal, and returned the ring to his finger.

“Antonio offered you asylum,” he said.

“He wanted me to go with him.”

“Just so.” The Cardinal paced up and down the room
impatiently
, peering now and then at Bosola. “Why do you think I sent him there?”

“I do not know.”

“My sister has a lively nature, so I am told.” He stopped his pacing. “I am told,” he said. “My brother is not. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, your Eminence.”

“It is good the man has taken a fancy to you.” The Cardinal held out the letter. “You need not mention this interview. I am sending you to my brother Ferdinand. He has a mission for you. If you are wise, you will accept it. If you are sensible, you will report everything he says and does to me. He will see you tonight. Then return here.” He glanced down at the map before him. “I shall know if you lie to me. And there are spies
everywhere
, so I am told, even at Amalfi.” He nodded, and then ignored Bosola completely.

It was perhaps one of his few mistakes, for no man likes to be taken up only to be ignored. To be bullied, blackmailed, tortured, that Bosola was willing to expect. But to be ignored fed his inner insecurity, and therefore made him rage the more. Yet even while he raged, he knew he would obey, for he sought advantage as a man trapped in a tunnel seeks even the smallest chink of light.

Ferdinand was a man who could not sleep. It was not that he feared nightmares. His nightmares all took place during his
waking life. It was that he feared to dream, for his dreams had a forbidden sweetness more terrible than Eden.

He was the ruin of a passionate boy, burly, handsome, scowling, and muscular. He was also impotent.

His palace was ill-run and disorderly. All night long doors opened and shut down its corridors, and the least said about it the better. Bosola made his way undetected up the stairs, and then saw a dwarf peering down at him from the shadows. The dwarf disappeared as he reached the landing and turned towards the suite of rooms occupied by Ferdinand.