Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (23 page)

Resigning from politics without even returning the money, and therefore knowing that unless her new husband, who had friends in three of Trieste's marine insurance companies, saved him, his best hope was death, he returned on his knees to Francesca, who unfortunately had grown happy where she was. Out of pity (and with her new husband's permission) she gave him a lily and an olive branch, instructing him to sleep with them under his pillow until he dreamed of the Madonna. But he never did. One cool whitish-pale morning when a single pale pigeon flew high across the Via Dante Alighieri, showing itself for the merest instant between the two embellished streetwalls, Nino returned to kiss Our Lady's forehead once more in secret, desperate to believe that it would bleed again, although he knew quite well not only that all hope of that had fled, but also that whatever solution the mystery of the bleeding
stone image might contain, he was better off never learning. Our Lady bowed her marble face, silently suffering the touch of his lips; and the bloodstain on her forehead matched in hue the crimson-brown garment of one of those faded figures on certain Istrian graveyard frescoes. He licked and licked at her forehead like a dog, but this time he could not obtain the slightest blood-taste. By the time death came, from complications of his rash, exacerbated by three bullets in the back, Nino had become bitter—although, come to think of it, he might always have been that way.

Dark bronze Rossetti, haughty on his plinth, held a book and clutched his heart, while among the many abject figures below, a seminude crowned lady who held a tablet of the laws essayed eternally to offer him a palm branch. As soon as the evening darkened sufficiently to be safe, he stepped down, snubbing the poor crowned lady, who grew as disappointed as if she were made of flesh, an emotion she could not sweat out or weep out, because the foundry had cast her to love only him above her, whom he unfortunately considered a mere decoration; Rossetti-adoration was in her every bronze atom. Rossetti, differently comprised, wanted women. The clashing of bronze against bronze could not seduce him. Some of our miseries may be called tragedies of place, as was the syndrome of that poor crowned lady (whose name was Giovanna); had fate simply established her farther down the coast, she might have attracted the attentions of some marble Herakles. Cloaking his face, Rossetti set off to drink a grappa in the brown and creamy-yellow silence of the Caffè San Marco, where they kept a table for him by the far wall, in a niche whose sweet dimness offered however treacherously to preserve the semiliving from recognition. He paid in bronze, of course: heavy, dark, ovoid coins from a hoard within the plinth, which was much hollower than it appeared. Our Lady of the Flowers, who performs miracles every day, replenished his treasury, out of loving pity, which indeed shored up his equanimity. Why he could not be satisfied with standing forever overlooking the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” graciously accepting the deposits of pigeons, cannot be explained; but several other plinths in Trieste had been vacated by now, their heroes and heroines having chosen ecstatic oblivion over unbending fame. There was, for instance, a certain shy little marble girl whose sculptor, Barcalgalia, had condemned her always to be half-trying to cover her pubis; meanwhile she had conveniently pulled up her marble shift, so over time she gave and took much joy. A century and more it had been since she first leaped off her marble block. Our Lady, whose hobbies include the arranging of
marriages, once proposed her to Rossetti's consideration, but he said: You know,
cara,
the thing is, I have a bitter disposition. That's why I need someone soft and yielding. I'm not saying a stone woman can't be forgiving; for instance, look at you, still smiling, with that bloodstained forehead! But you're not, how should I say, available . . .—nor would he have wished her to be; although he had several times been tempted by the exaggerated frozen gazes of the thespians at the Circulo Artistico, he longed, if such a verb is not preposterous when applied to him, for a dear woman of flesh who could warm him up as even Triestine sunlight never could, not quite; indeed, it was considerably worse for poor bronze Giovanna, who had to stand always in his shadow—not that she ever complained. And so the shy marble girl found herself another taker; one day James Joyce stepped off his plinth by the Canal Grande, and the newspapers wrote that he had been stolen by a nymphomaniacal American heiress who engaged in untrammelled sexual congress with statues. After Joyce deserted his post, even Umberto Sava, it was said, began to be tempted by a certain someone cast in pure silver. As for Rossetti, all he needed were his nightly amours. For her part, Giovanna (whose longings resembled brass railings shining in the morning sun) never imagined lowering herself to engage in such practices. Where her idol went when he departed her she suspected all too well, but since he never failed to return, she had at least someone to look up to. So on the evening under consideration, she watched his departure no less calmly than mournfully. Rossetti turned his steps to the San Marco, which, while it was not as quiet as early on a Sunday afternoon just before closing, remained a good venue for a bronze fellow who prefers to be left in peace. Whenever he had the place to himself, Rossetti liked to inspect each of the round brass-bordered portraits, whose crudeness surpassed that of worn Etruscan frescoes. To the vertically grooved column-reliefs upon the Naples yellow walls clung plaques whose import might be stylized honeybees or petals of quartered flowers; these decorative concretions soothed Rossetti by reminding him of his plinth. So he sat down in his private corner, prepared to re-explore the way that some grappas burn and others glow. And on this night the slender, elderly waiter, whose spectacles never ceased shining even when he straightened his necktie, revealed, without even any expectation of a tip, that a sweet girl all alone in a tasselled scarf
and a long pale dress dress of many embroideries had just decided to paint her lips, cock her plumed hat, and set off for the radiant sea. Can you believe it? She meant to abandon this world! Moreover, she derived not from some Serbo-Croatian-speaking karstic village high in the interior, which origin might have excused her, but from Trieste herself, empress of cities. The waiter, who took pride in knowing Rossetti's tastes, remarked that this young lady, whose name was Silvia, was worth looking over, at which Rossetti pondered and ordered another grappa. Next morning, when Silvia arrived at the port, whose ships' smokestacks resembled banded cigars, Rossetti, having without making her a single promise instructed Giovanna to take his place on the plinth, either with or without her palm branch, whatever she considered most discreetly effective, stood waiting to rescue the girl from the sea.

In case you are wondering whether anybody noticed the alteration of Rossetti's monument, I may as well tell you now that the painter Leonor Fini, while making her morning promenade through that same Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” in hopes of reinterring a ghoulish hangover in the smallest possible hermetic coffin at the center of her skull, paused there, and caught the substitution right away, because when her father, wishing to raise her in the Catholic Church, had sought to kidnap her away from her mama, she became a watchful little girl in her knee-length skirt and sailor hat, posing with flowers and precociously pregnant with spite, clutching her cats, jeering and staring, growing up salacious and defiant, distrusting the male category and hence preferring to play with her transvestite friends. In the grimy alleys of Trieste she not infrequently spied ghosts—for instance, an old Serb named Jovo Cirtovich, whose face had perhaps fallen in a trifle, and his ancient, black-clad daughter Tanya or Tanyotchka, who was always seeking and never finding him. To more complacent observers they might have been shadows or scraps of cheese-paper. Once Leonor saw that pair wandering under a deep Roman arch which resembled a well laid on its side; he kept sighing and clutching at his throat, as if he had lost something which used to hang there, while she strode determinedly right through him, murmuring
father, father, father.
It chilled Leonor that they could not perceive one another; the lesson she derived was that a girl might as well seek pleasure in this life! On another occasion she saw the Emperor
Massimiliano, dressed in the Mexican uniform in which he once delighted. When Leonor was a girl, her mama took her to visit Miramar, where, being apprised of the legend that who sleeps here in Massimiliano's castle dies a violent death, she giggled and shuddered. Up on the wall, the pale melancholy faces of the Emperor and Empress, painted by Heirrich in 1863, almost seemed to foresee the execution.— Poor man! sighed Leonor's mama. The Mexicans were so ungrateful . . .— The guide informed Leonor and her mama that to console him before he was shot, they performed his favorite tune, “
La Paloma.” So when she encountered him that night on Via Dante Alighieri, Leonor hummed “La Paloma,” at which the ghost lifted his head and smiled sadly. How many other phantoms did the watchful woman see?— Cat-ghosts by the score, no doubt, and perhaps even the odd vampire.— And which of the living did she not see through? In that famous 1936 photograph by Dora Maar, Leonor sits with her stockinged knees apart and a black cat peering out glowing-eyed between them; she holds her head high, presenting her cleavage, her eyebrows painted on catlike, as if she pretends to be Cleopatra. One can tell that she sees everything. Ten years later, Cartier-Bresson catches her leaning forward in darkness, ornately decorated by embroidered sleeves, wide-eyed, pursing her lips as if in concentration, ruthlessly intent on seeing and being seen. Even in the photographs of Veno Pilon her wariness is her charm; sometimes she stares over her shoulder like a streetwalker. So you may be sure that she noticed Rossetti's absence. With her loud, screeching laugh, Leonor now strolled up to the plinth and fondled Giovanna's nipples. Her estimation of Rossetti took off like an unguided missile; she had never suspected that he might be one of her very own man-women! Not knowing what else to do in the face of such treatment, Giovanna kept very still. Leonor's hangover perished with a plop, and she hurried home to paint the bronze lady and her palm branch into a crowd of bejeweled hermaphroditic clowns in the background of her latest surrealistic canvas, and before the oils had even dried down as far as tackiness, Leonor was wrapping herself in a robe of her own design and crowning her head with colored feathers, because a photographer from Marseilles had been entreating to do her portrait.

Meanwhile, as Giovanna stood anxious, shy and proud in her master's place, with an electric-grey pigeon warming her head, Rossetti, who
would have been insulted had he known Leonor's new misapprehension of him, persuaded the erratic Silvia to take him back to her rented room. The roses had not yet wilted in their vase and her tabby cat Lilith was barely getting hungry. Silvia removed her clothes with darling clicks and rustles; Rossetti undressed himself with clinks and clanks. Three bronze coins fell out of his pocket. How the procedure was carried out I who was not there cannot tell you, but it remains certain that with great success they made love in her bed, and afterwards, while he lay naked beneath the white sheet watching her and humming “La Paloma,” although he did not know why it had entered his mind, a fly crawled upon his bronze forehead as Silvia stood naked by the shuttered window, sipping wine, holding Lilith against her breast and stroking her, hungering ever more to vanish from Trieste, which was why her eyes kept shining and glittering on that late afternoon by the sea. She had booked a berth on a certain twin-masted brigantino, the
Tancredi,
a former warship which now sailed into the past, ferrying seekers of lost dreams. To get rid of her lover, she acquiesced in becoming the next Signora Rossetti; by then the
Tancredi
had already departed. The instant her intended had dressed, constructed their rendezvous for that very evening behind the botanical gardens, kissed her lips, breasts, hands and then departed, Silvia, tyrannized by the fact that in summertime Trieste the smell of sweat can drown both smell and sound of sea, smashed her wineglass in a rage, at which Lilith, frightened by the uproar, hissed and showed her claws, which impelled Silvia to throw the animal out the window; and the calmness with which she observed the cat's whirlings and screechings all the way down rendered her worthy of either damnation or pity—all because the odor of sweat from that unmade bed exasperated her. Now she desired to embark for Hvar or Opatija, where the sea's fishy vapors make frequent headway against the air. Accordingly she poured the roses and water from her vase onto the bed, hurled the vase out the window to shatter on top of her dead cat, laughed, pulled her dress on, painted her lips reddish-black, cocked that pale hat on her head, locked the door behind her, just in case (which proves her not utterly irrational) and set off once more to buy her ticket to sea-freedom, but this time Leonor Fini, unapprised of Silvia's unforgivable cruelty to cats, caught sight of her, and although she mostly preferred men she could dominate, or
men-women to play with, Leonor found herself in a mood to give and receive Communion between this girl's legs for the instruction, humiliation and delectation of all Leonor's membrane-shrouded ladies bathing in pitch, Leonor's gentle corpses and Leonor's lesbians in jester dress—for by now our talented heroine had advanced beyond seeing other people's ghosts; she invented her own. The world of Leonor Fini, the painted world, could be reached by lifting aside a certain oil painting on a certain easel. Being one of those women who say yes when they would rather say no, Silvia permitted Leonor to lead her to her studio, which was just downstairs from her mama's apartment, and presently, after cigarettes and absinthe, her hostess opened the door in the easel, took her hand, and pulled her down to the dark garden of lichens, logs and glossy greens; so that before she knew it, Silvia was standing naked in dark water, huger-breasted than ever before, with the sky red behind her, and half-submerged skull-crocodiles watching; Leonor was dancing white and naked on a black driftwood log, and the grey-wigged red-cloaked skeleton of the Angel of Anatomy performed a string solo for them both, drawing a rib across the music-hole in a woman's pelvis.— Silvia was thinking: I'd rather be in Opatija.— And then catbird ladies commenced to fly softly down, hovering just above the tarry water, swishing it around with their fat white breasts, so that before Leonor and Silvia had even made love once, Silvia was in distress, recalling all too well what she had done to Lilith and therefore (I am happy to say) repenting, which Our Lady of the Flowers found pleasing, since to her way of thinking contrition became people about as well as anything. Beneath a long veil, a jewel-like skeleton, pale and smooth like a fly's eye, now squatted to embrace a bald unconscious man-woman to whom Leonor paid more attention than to Silvia—who stole the opportunity to dress. Leonor, who had anticipated painting a portrait of her standing waist deep in that pool, threw a glass dildo at her head and commanded her never to come back, which suited both parties. By then it was Sunday afternoon, so Silvia decided to climb the stairs of the bell tower. She would sail to the radiant sea on Monday. The tower was dark. Passing the Roman griffin or Pegasus or whatever it was, and the wing-headed thing carved into the marble, the excited girl ascended and ascended. Here the light was bluish-greyish-white, yet also warm; and gazing across the world she saw the myriad masts like stalks
of dark grass in the harbor, beyond which the last roofs and the lighthouse demarcated the end of gravity. Tomorrow she would happily forsake the humid glare of the coast, gathering up armloads of those sea-diamonds which glitter all the way to Dalmatia—but spiderlike within the immense metal skirt of the cathedral bell clung Rossetti; for Our Lady, entreated with his orange-fragrant prayers, and wishing to encourage and even facilitate his promise-keeping (although his sincerity in proposing marriage I myself cannot help but fault, and the only reason she haunted his desires was that she had broken their rendezvous), had informed him where to find her. Giovanna being irrelevant, he invited Silvia to bronzify herself and share his plinth forever. She for her part, determined to be free, leaped out into the sunlight. Just before she met the pavement, the Madonna dei Fiori looked upward, not at her but at Rossetti, who, fascinated by the bloodstain on her stone forehead, was thereby saved from witnessing Silvia's death—but all the same, he wept verdigrised tears on his plinth for a full three weeks, after which he got consoled by a
slim, lovely young wasp-waisted beauty in a black jacket-skirt and black tights who held a whip and sometimes permitted him to feed tidbits to her pet bulldog. Her name was Lina. The whole time, Giovanna had heroically concealed her own troubles behind her palm branch.