A Dancer in Darkness Page 4

  FOUR

  I

  The Cardinal’s titular church in Rome was in the old section not far from the Capitol. His palace was near by, and that of Ferdinand in the same quarter.

  It was a long time since Bosola had been to Rome. He had exchanged his lazzarone costume for the Cardinal’s livery, but he had not put it away. It was useful for roistering anonymously in the streets, and since he had not the means for the security he craved, he took his pleasure where he could. He was sure by now that the Cardinal knew his identity, and was only waiting for a summons. He had waited for six months.

  One florid evening in May he changed into his lazzarone costume, and went clomping through the streets with Marcantonio, Ferdinand’s bravo, who haunted the Cardinal’s guard on orders from his master. Together they roved the back alleys, to pick a fight or a pocket, or go wenching in the cheapest tavern they could find.

  Marcantonio led the way to the Piazza Navona.

  It was a scene of carnival. Booths had been set up around the fountains, where food was sold. The square itself was dominated by two wooden platforms. There were street musicians and the unavoidable commedia players, and already flares and torches beat against the green dusk. Somebody had lit a bonfire, and from rug-hung balconies the inhabitants of the households were looking down at the square.

  Marcantonio had taken Bosola under his wing, for he was a sadist with an unvarying instinct for a natural victim. Now he shoved Bosola to the front of the crowd.

  The crowd was waiting for an execution. In the centre of the square stood a tall T-shaped gallows. From this some black-faced devil had been hanging in the strappado since morning. He hung about ten feet from the ground, circling idly, and his face was congested with blood. It was time to take him down.

  It was not so much the torture, as the effect of that torture upon Bosola, that Marcantonio was eager to enjoy. His face was pleasantly flushed in the flicker of the torches. Bosola was restive. It seemed to him that cruelty, like intercourse, should always be a private pleasure. He wet his lips. The crowd made him shy.

  The strappado attendants were a quartet of scrawny boys from the slums, toughs too poor to feel pity. Now they scrambled over the scaffold, and lowered the prisoner. He was suspended by a chain, not a rope. He did not move when they released him. His limbs were broken and numb. He lay on the ground like a plucked chicken waiting to be stuffed, and no one did anything to help him. Among his own caste he was disgraced and knew it.

  A priest was waiting with the next victim, a man who had stolen a lute, and who was now condemned to hang until dawn. The spectacle of what he would become by dawn was no doubt supposed to edify him.

  He was just such a man as Bosola had been when young. Marcantonio seemed to notice that. He stood with his arms on his hips and chuckled.

  Torture is both a sexual parable and an aphrodisiac. That was no doubt why Marcantonio had such a taste for it. He rubbed his shoulders, ignored the lowered man, and avidly watched the man about to be strung up.

  It seemed terrible to Bosola that the new victim said nothing. It was also terrible that the boy was beautiful and would not be beautiful much longer. His arms would never again be slung from his shoulders in that easy way.

  The attendants took him to the platform and laid him on his stomach. The priest followed. They pulled the boy’s arms and legs behind him, fastening them swiftly together with the leather cuffs, as though he might struggle. But he did not struggle. Now he too looked like a chicken. His hair fell over his eyes.

  The priest tried to exhort him, but could not see his face. Neither could he crouch down to do so. Instead, raising his crucifix as though it were a baton, he turned to orchestrate the crowd.

  The attendants attached the chain to the manacles and began to wind the winch. The man rose into the air jerkily and by stages, as though pausing for breath on the landings of an invisible stair. His arms and legs tautened into a triangle over his arched back, and he began to pour with sweat.

  Marcantonio turned his head more and more upward, gaping foolishly, his eyes glistening with excitement. He was still rubbing himself. Bosola braced himself against the excitement too.

  The chain had reached the top of the gibbet. The prisoner swayed in the air, but still he made no sound. It was a slow death. The attendants were artists in suspense. They waited longer than the crowd, the priest, or the prisoner expected. A torch flared up, casting reflections on the chain.

  “Do it,” muttered Marcantonio. He was beside himself. “Do it. Do it. Why don’t they do it?” He was almost in an agony of delight.

  Bosola felt faint.

  One of the attendants released the ratchet on the winch. The chain roared down like an anchor. There was a roar of gratification from the crowd. The priest turned away and put his hand piously to his eyes.

  The prisoner reached the end of the chain, which jerked back convulsively. His body bent into an almost perfect circle, and as his bones cracked, he gave a single, guttural scream. He was a sturdy man. He would live until dawn, and even after that, if such was living. But his beauty was dead.

  That was what the crowd had come for. They liked to see beauty die. There was a long sigh of gratification, and then they looked round for diversion.

  Bosola watched them and shuddered. This could happen to anyone, and what revolted him most was how thoroughly he had enjoyed that man’s broken scream, for like the crowd he, too, was ugly. How had he become so?

  He turned and fled back to the palace. When he arrived he was in no mood to learn that Antonio Bologna, the Duchess’s new steward, had arrived to take up his duties. He sensed the meshing of invisible gears, in an engine as infernal as the strappado in the square. There is a point at which ambition becomes a form of terror. Yet he did not take fright. Why should he take fright? He had no reason to.

  II

  In selecting the Duchess a steward, the Cardinal had chosen well, and with his usual double purpose. It was one of the follies of the Duchess to make the request at all. On the other hand, she may merely have wished to be certain of the identity of the spy in her household. But the Cardinal was wilier than she. He would not send his spy on invitation. He had chosen Antonio for quite a different use.

  His sister was a secretive person, but the Cardinal thought he knew her well. He himself had had many mistresses, and from them he believed that he had learned a great deal about the nature of woman. Their brains no man could touch, for they did not think as men did, but at bottom they were animal, and an animal can be trapped. It was only necessary to provide the right lure. He had studied his sister for years. She was discreet, but discretion has secrets of its own. If he had divined accurately, then Antonio should unlock some of them.

  Now that Antonio was in Rome, on his way to take up his duties at Amalfi, the Cardinal arranged a tourney and asked Ferdinand to preside over it. Ferdinand was vain of his abilities at a tourney, but lacked finesse. Antonio was reputed skilful, and Ferdinand could not bear to lose any contest in which he engaged. It was the Cardinal’s desire that an enmity should spring up between the two of them as soon as possible, and a tourney might well accomplish that.

  The street before the palace was closed off, and there the guests would ride at the Saracen, the ring, and the handkerchief, all three sports at which, so the Cardinal understood, Antonio Bologna was proficient. He was, after all, a gentleman, of good family, and perhaps a trifle spoiled.

  Bosola and Marcantonio watched the sport from the ground; the Cardinal, from a balcony. The Cardinal watched Ferdinand; Marcantonio, the sport; and Bosola, with some alarm, Antonio.

  For Antonio was an astonishing man.

  It was his whiteness that struck Bosola, for it was not the whiteness of alabaster or pampered skin, but the whiteness of an ideal. In truth, his skin was not white, but brown, and his eyes were dark. Yet this extraordinary whiteness of his was phosphorescent. He left behind him something shining as he passed, that lingered in the mind far longer than did
his features. He was that special sort of man who is born to be deeply loved, and who therefore has the attribute of being lovable. He was a human epitome, and to see an ideal walking around on two legs, unconscious of not being an ordinary man, was a startling spectacle.

  For the rest, he was a slim-hipped and a handsome man. His body was set in his pelvis as a stalk rears up from between parted leaves, and had the resilience of bamboo, which shudders and yields, but never breaks.

  From his balcony the Cardinal looked down on him and was very pleased. His eyes sought out first Ferdinand, then Bosola, and he pursed his lips.

  Ferdinand was in a bad mood. He was scowling. Indeed, a scowl was his habitual expression, as though he must always be Gianlorenzo di Medici, in the one famous portrait. But if Gianlorenzo was a lesser man, Ferdinand was lesser still.

  Earlier the guests had tilted at the Saracen. The Saracen was a late medieval amusement, but Ferdinand was fond of it. It stood on a swivel post in the centre of the street, a gaily painted wooden bust with a black face and a yellow turban, holding a wooden paddle.

  If one did not strike it exactly right with a lance, it swirled around on its pivot and unseated the rider with its paddle. It was a game that never unseated Ferdinand, and he was clearly glad to see Antonio fall in the dust.

  Physical grace being an attribute of good humour, Antonio had the art of falling. He flew through the air like a cat, but the shock of hitting the pavement knocked him down. He tumbled over and came to rest at Bosola’s feet.

  “That man will not last my sister long. He cannot keep his seat,” said Ferdinand, and said it too loudly. Antonio had beaten him once or twice, and he could not abide that.

  Antonio paused as he heard the words, and then smiled at Bosola, rising and dusting himself off. Involuntarily Bosola smiled back. Antonio seemed puzzled. It was as though he had found someone in the wrong place.

  “We shall see,” said Antonio, and got back on his horse.

  The ring was held by a wooden arm fastened to the wall of the house. Now they rode at it, trying to pick it up on the tip of their lances. Ferdinand drank too much and brooded too deeply. He had not the steadiness to succeed in plucking the ring, and he was, moreover, angry at being bested.

  Bosola watched with something like panic. He knew that look Antonio had given him. It signified curiosity ready to turn to pity. It is the look all receive who are not quite gentlemen, and yet who are clearly gently born. He shrank from it.

  Ferdinand drove at the ring with a vertical cavalier rage that had nothing to do with correct form for the sport. When he missed it, he whirled with a baffled curse and tried again. His fourth miss set off a concealed titter. And the titter, in turn, drove Ferdinand mad, for there was nothing he feared more often or so much. He tried again and again, with short feints, his face black with fury. There were no titters now. The crowd knew him in this mood.

  Antonio did not know him. As Ferdinand dismounted, Antonio came over and said something polite to him.

  Ferdinand smiled sardonically and struck Antonio in the face with his jewelled cap. In itself the gesture meant nothing. If a lugubrious greyhound had been skulking in his path, he would have kicked it instead. Before this crowd the gesture meant much.

  Antonio flinched and made to draw his dagger. Then his eyes narrowed, as though he had thought of something better. He smiled, leaped on his horse, rode towards Bosola, snatched up Bosola’s lance, and wheeling, snagged the ring on the tip of it, and, without dismounting, shook it off. The ring, which was of metal, rolled in a drunken arc and then lay throbbing on a cobble at Ferdinand’s feet.

  Antonio returned to Bosola and handed down the lance. Looking amused, he leaned over from his saddle and spoke to Bosola eagerly and boyishly.

  “You are one of the Cardinal’s men,” he said.

  Bosola nodded.

  “You had better attend me. I have no attendant here, and the Cardinal will allow it.”

  Bosola blinked.

  “Come. I like you. You would have helped me up,” said Antonio. He turned and rode away.

  Bosola did not like it. Like all men conscious of their own wretchedness, it hurt him to be liked.

  He looked up and caught the Cardinal staring down at him.

  III

  And so, at length, after six months, he had his interview with the Cardinal. It occurred that night.

  When he was summoned, he was in the guard room near the main entrance, playing primero with Marcantonio. It is a game which teaches you how to cheat chance. Marcantonio did not like the summons, being jealous of anyone who obtained special favour.

  Bosola followed the equerry through the damp corridors of the palace and up the main stairs. It was a peculiar kind of fear he felt. He felt as though he were about to have an interview with his luck, and was afraid to be sent away empty-handed.

  The equerry pattered ahead of him to the massive guarded door which led to the Cardinal’s suite. There he was taken over by a secretary and ushered into the presence.

  The presence was standing in shadow behind a candle sconce, gazing out the window. For the Cardinal stage-managed himself very well. He had the art of making an entrance merely by turning his head; and the magnificence of his rooms was designed to make the visitor feel shabby.

  Bosola did not feel shabby. He felt naked. It had been ten years, and what did a man’s enemy look like after ten years? What would the Cardinal look like?

  For much more than Ferdinand, the Cardinal had been his model. Beauty is not always beauty. Beauty is to fit one’s own nature completely. And the Cardinal’s nature was to be wily and devious. It was that spider mind that Bosola had taken as his etiquette.

  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 forg
otten that to assume another man’s identity was also to assume his sins.

  IV

  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.