Ravished by Death
Corrado tightens his gloved hands on the wheel as the Voison leans toward the escarpment that falls precipitously to the ocean. A man who does not allow fear in himself, he knows that if he should let his eyes leave the road for an instant to regard his face in the mirror, he will see something resembling it. A disquiet. Later, at the villa, as he studies with the secret enjoyment of a connoisseur the light caught in the depths of his whiskey, he recalls the sensation in the nearly uncontrollable automobile, when gravity seemed in adjournment and the earth careless of its burden. It was not fear—he tells himself—but an emotion like fear, as if he were possessed suddenly by love. And by love, he means the tender prelude to desire—the exquisite regard he has for Grazia, whose body he cannot imagine abandoned to himself or any other lover. By an effort of his seigniorial will, Corrado has refused the insinuations of carnality, quelled the blood’s riot, and made of his finely strung nerves an instrument to hymn her ethereal beauty.
He is unhappy.
He has been visiting a brothel with a regularity that threatens to become habitual. Not a house favored by those of his class, but an ancient hotel near the wharves, in whose rooms the transient and the disreputable lie down by the half hour. He wonders whether he will be able to abjure the rough pleasure he takes there, in a bed doused with scent, beneath which he searches, with his finely shaped Roman nose, for the odor of other men’s sweat.
He turns to Baron Cesarea and attempts to describe again the shadow that appeared out of nothing as the motorcar swung into the final turning in the road before the villa’s gates: “It was like smoke. Black. Like soot. But odorless and tasted—if of anything—of almonds. It was like oil, although it was not at all oily. It clung to the road and to the Voison and to us—especially to Grazia. I did not see it cover her; nevertheless, I know that it did. I saw nothing. It covered us only a moment. The time it took for the Voison to slip into the turning and for me to feel the outer tires lift up, then fall. For Father’s Ferrari, behind us, to send the flower cart flying into the ditch. It tasted and smelled of almond paste, if of anything at all—the shadow, although it was something more than a shadow. It enveloped us. I could do nothing. I wanted to do nothing. I felt the tires lift, then fall back down onto the road. It could not have been any more than a few seconds. I felt cold—a damp chill. It was more mist than shadow, if a mist could be black.”
“It was nothing,” says the baron. “Merely the uncertain hour between the evening and the coming of night. It was a trick of light. I tell you it was nothing.”
“None of us was hurt in the least. Not even the man on the flower cart, although he flew through the air and landed in the road. His eyes were shut—we thought he must be dead. But he opened them after a moment, and we saw that he wasn’t in the least hurt. Not even his mule. Father gave him money.”
“The duke is always gracious.” The baron stares into his whiskey’s depths.
He puts out his hand to steady himself against one of the marble columns that decorate the villa’s reception room. The whiskey slips up the side of his glass but does not spill.
Corrado cocks his head as if hearing a tragic overture in the distance.
“It was nothing,” says the baron, whose face has paled. “Suddenly, I felt as if the earth had swung free of its orbit. I seemed to hear in the thaw of the whiskey’s ice the foundation give way.”
The baron said this, or perhaps not. Perhaps it was Corrado, who thought it, mistaking the thought for the baron’s voice. Or perhaps another spoke in the sepulchral space of the Villa Felicitá. Death, whose voice entered the room through the French window, ajar in the warm October evening, saying, Suddenly, you felt as if the earth had swung free of its orbit. You seemed to hear in the thaw of your whiskey’s ice the foundation give way.
Corrado is listening intently, his eyes searching a shadow that might have been cast by one of the moon’s mountains as readily as an Etruscan vase.
“Grazia is in the music room,” the baron says. “She plays beautifully.”
“Yes!” Corrado agrees; for it was music that he heard while Cesarea put out his hand—piano music and, at the threshold of audition, the soft crackle of ice as it suffered annihilation in the baron’s glass. Those and nothing else.
Corrado forgets the voice (if he has heard it at all). He thinks only of Grazia. The baron has no such distraction. If he heard Death’s apostrophe from the garden, where it hides among the lengthening shadows, he pretends otherwise. He concentrates on the music Grazia is playing.
“She plays beautifully.”
“Yes!”
The baron turns to the window, which is now black—night having approached the villa from the sea. He shivers and goes to close the window.
“It makes me sad,” Corrado says of the music.
“It is always so,” Cesarea replies, thinking of the hour—the hour of tristesse, when the light is extinguished and the warm Adriatic air turns damp. He would have wept had he been alone. He looks into the whiskey, watered with vanished ice. Its amber light is out. Its little sun. Baron Cesarea finishes the drink, for he cannot go to Grazia and take her in his arms.
“I wish I were a young man,” he says, turning to Corrado after both have been silent. But Corrado is looking elsewhere, into the darkness among the columns, which rise archaically from the room’s marbled floor. Night has entered unnoticed through the window, powerless to keep it out.
Like a ruin, thinks Corrado, and feels a sudden access of hatred for his father. Or is it for Grazia?
“Fedele!” the baron shouts. “Fedele!”
The duke’s man enters from an anteroom, where he has been waiting in another obscurity to perform his role. “Baron?”
“Why have you left us in the dark, Fedele?”
They cannot see one another: Corrado, Cesarea, the duke’s man. They are voices in a dark, dimensionless space. The columns are engulfed.
Unrelenting, Grazia plays Pavane pour une infante défunte. In her hands, the notes have all turned to lead, to ash. To dead leaves that the wind sweeps—rustling—away.
A wind has risen in the garden, rattles the sash, bends the cypress trees that crowd against the villa’s outer walls. Accompanying its mournful music, Death descants, This melancholy you feel at the coming of night—a sorrow blown by the flying darkness into the duke’s magnificent rooms—you have felt it many times before—at this hour, the hour of tristesse, when the day is unmade like a bed on which you fear to lie down, in case it should prove to be your last. The bed in which you were born and those vexed by ten thousand nights of sleep and dream, sickness and love. The sheet stinking of birth, of blood, of sweat, of love wound about you at last. But none of this crosses your mind. Only the unaccountable sadness of the hour, which makes you irritable and afraid. So you call for the lights to be lit. You hurriedly dress for dinner and rush out to be among other people, to laugh, to drink, to hear music.
“Where is Duke Lambert?” Cesarea asks peevishly, because he is afraid.
“In the library,” Fedele replies. “Someone arrived a little while ago, wishing to speak to him.”
“Who?”
“A stranger.”
Corrado goes to the music room to be with Grazia. She is sitting in the dark. For a moment, he thinks that she is weeping, but it is the music—its tragic current. Corrado stands in the doorway, transfixed by absence: His lover seems to have vanished, leaving only rueful notes to mark her place. Not lover—beloved. He has yet to measure the length of his body against hers. Their kisses are chaste. He wonders briefly if the unappeased desire aroused in him would be diminished by her surrender—would be erased as completely as her image by the darkness. He shakes his head to rid his mind of an unworthy thought. Hatred steals into his heart, and he turns it on himself like a knife.
“Grazia!”
“I’m here, Corrado.”
“Why are you sitting in the dark?”
“It’s pleasant to play without seeing.”
The wind, which was blowing from the sea, moves on its great hinge, turning against the music room at the opposite side of the villa and scattering the sheet music. It brushes Corrado’s face like a papery wing, so that he cries out.
“The wind is strong tonight,” she says indifferently.
Strong enough to strip trees of leaves and the sky of all its stars, says Death in a low voice hidden beneath Corrado’s footsteps as he rushes to the window.
He shuts the window, but Grazia has stopped playing and does not resume. She hears Corrado spin the flint wheel of his lighter, smells the fluid’s astringency.
“Don’t!” she tells him. “My head ached so in the light.”
“Did you hurt yourself in the accident?”
He almost touches her face.
“No, it’s only a headache.”
“I behaved stupidly.”
“No, it was wonderful, Corrado! To drive so fast—wonderful! I felt—”
—as if I had been sleeping. A princess in a story—asleep for a hundred years behind thorns, behind glass. Waiting without knowing it. Dreaming of a door through which one day someone will walk. Not a door—a hole in the air—a black emptiness in the gray air, without a particle of light or sound—a rustling of cloth or wings or a murmuring. You drove faster and faster, until I felt something tear—an organ, my heart, a gland whose function has been forgotten, ripped out, ripped. Then blackness and the stinging behind the eyes, and a sickness like rapture.
“The shadow—it seemed to cling to you,” says Corrado, who has been listening to Grazia’s or to Death’s voice in the darkness of the music room.
It seemed to come from inside me, the voice continues, and when the tires left the road, I was happy. I wanted only to die.
Again, Corrado spins the lighter’s small rough wheel. Its flame trembles in his hand, leafs Grazia’s forehead and cheeks with gold, illuminates the line of her jaw, in which an aristocratic nature is wholly revealed. Her eyes are closed. Corrado shakes her more roughly than even his dread can explain. For an instant, he wants to humiliate her; to throw her to the floor and defile her. Grazia has fallen asleep in spite of Corrado’s shouting: “Why do you keep me always at a distance? When will you marry me? Why won’t you let me close to you?” I hate you, Grazia, for what you make me suffer! I would like to destroy you—your virtue, which is an insult to me, filling me with rage. Why do you make me ashamed? “Wake up, Grazia!”
We had an almost fatal accident, he thinks. I was driving too fast and could not hold the road when we went into the turning. It has made her hysterical. The effect of encountering, perhaps for the first time, a force she cannot command. Powerlessness before an uncontrollable event. I may also be hysterical. Because of how close we came to it. Death. It is only natural that tonight we should not be ourselves. Tomorrow, we will be restored. After we have slept. Grazia can’t keep her eyes open. Mine, too, want to close. I thought it was the whiskey. The baron is right: It was nothing—the shadow. A trick of light.
Grazia’s arm falls across the piano keys, sounding a discordant finale to Corrado’s meditation—her lovely white arm, on which she rests her head.
Fedele enters the music room, obedient to the will of others. It is the will of Duke Lambert that Grazia and Corrado come at once to the reception room. Prince Sirki has arrived, the duke’s friend. Fedele turns on the lights. (Why didn’t Corrado, who knows the location of the light switch in this, his father’s house and his?) Gently, Corrado lays his hand on Grazia’s bare shoulder. Despite himself, he hears desire whisper its insinuations. Grazia shrugs into consciousness. She lifts her face; a strand of hair falls, and she pushes it away. She lifts her arm from the piano, and a second confused chord rumbles. Corrado helps her stand. Neither of them knows that Grazia was dead—had gone a little way into Death’s kingdom. It clings to her now the way salt does a swimmer who has set out into the sea, only to repent and return to shore. If Corrado looked into her eyes, he would know that she has just returned from an immense journey. But he does not look. This man, whose eyes seldom leave Grazia when she is near, does not look at her at all. He is looking at nothing, or rather, at a seam of darkness lying somberly within the fold of a drape or the peculiar vacancy of the window, which, in its utter blackness, neither reveals anything of the outside nor reflects anything inside the lighted room. Could glass be said to have died, this glass is dead. Corrado does not remark on these uncanny effects. He does not even consider them as effects (which would lead him to ask himself, Of what?); he does not notice them. His eyes are ravished by darkness.
He leads Grazia into the salon and to Prince Sirki. The prince, Duke Lambert, and his guests would wonder at the young man’s haste if they saw him enter, but they do not see him. They form a tableau: Prince Sirki, standing by the French window, with the darkness of the garden at his back; the others facing him—Lambert in front, the apex of a triangle of bodies in postures of obeisance. Princess Maria, Grazia’s mother, indicates a curtsey: She is Sirki’s titular equal and need do no more. Alda, the contessa de Parma, is seen in an attitude of homage, which would strike Corrado as charming rather than abject. But he sees only Prince Sirki. The prince is dressed in the white dress uniform of his Balkan country. The jacket blossoms with rosettes and decorations. His black hair gleams with the light of the chandelier. Although he is aware of Corrado standing at the entrance, he has not acknowledged him—pleased by the scene of welcome before him. Corrado takes a step into the room, drawing behind him Grazia, who seems to be sleepwalking. Sirki now turns—not to Corrado, whose eyes are transfixed by the glint of light cast by the prince’s monocle, but to Grazia, in whose eyes he sees a languor irresistible to him. He walks toward her in his high, polished boots, dispersing Lambert and the others. The prince smiles. Corrado is swept aside by his indifference. Sirki marches on Grazia as if she were a town to be taken. He stops in front of her, hesitates, does not take her hand to kiss. Having cast off sleep and the remnant of whatever it was she dreamed there, she begins to fold like a flower at the coming of night. But the prince prevents her from completing this gesture of submission, which he has allowed—accepted as his right—from the others.
“It is I who should bow to you,” he says, and does. “Your beauty.”
He is—there is no one word to tell what Sirki is or why he has moved Grazia. He is neither charming nor courtly, for they require insouciance he lacks, nor does he have the equanimity of a Don Juan. He is possessed of an absolute authority and behaves as one used to obedience. Yet Sirki wishes to be liked in spite of the militancy with which he confronts the duke, his wife, Stephanie, and their guests. His severity of dress and manner distances him from them. Sirki wants to be admired—no, received as one of them. But they cannot receive him. He is cold: His presence in the room chills them. Lambert almost calls Fedele to close the windows, but the windows are closed; and besides, the night is not unpleasant. It is a warm autumn night; and while the summer blooms are past, the grass and leaves are green. But the chill inside the villa is undeniable, and Princess Maria shivers. Or is it that the prince is looking at her daughter with such intensity and she, having raised her head, is looking at him with equal interest? Interest scarcely describes the quality of her gaze, which, perhaps, alarms the princess. She is not the only one who registers disturbing sensations. Each of them is disconcerted by the prince, although none could tell, if asked, what it is about Sirki that dismays them. For dismay, more than any other word, most aptly describes the emotion predominant in the room. Except for Corrado, who is angry because of the way the prince is looking at Grazia. She returns his gaze without blushing—or flinching; for there is something painful in that gaze. To suffer it is almost to die. Aware of the young man’s hostility, the prince turns to him. Sirki’s eyes having left Grazia’s, she is like one who has wakened suddenly: She starts and nearly cries out. She shuts her eyes and opens them—her pale eyes no longer in thrall. She watches Corrado fall back before the prince’s stare. The young man has the look of someone about to be destroyed. Now it is Grazia’s turn to shiver—with cold or fear. She saves Corrado without knowing it.
“Corrado, I’m cold; please get my shawl. I left it in the music room.”
Prince Sirki lowers his eyes from Corrado’s, permits him to leave the room in order to bring Grazia her shawl. The young man goes without a word. Perhaps he knows how close he came to death. Perhaps not. Lambert’s guests are reminded that they, too, are cold and ask the duke if a fire cannot be made up in the great hearth. Duke Lambert pulls a sash; and a bell rings in a distant room in the villa, summoning Fedele, who arrives within moments, his face a mask showing neither irritation nor servility.
“Make up the fire, Fedele,” the duke says with the air of one who asks the impossible, because he alone understands that the room is not cold; or if it is, no fire can warm it.
Fedele bows and does as he is bidden.
Released, Grazia goes to her mother. They withdraw to a corner of the salon that puts them at the farthest remove from Sirki. The others also seek—consciously or not—to separate themselves from the prince, who stands isolated and forlorn. He is like a boy abandoned by his friends, who go off by themselves, heads together in conspiracies of mirth. Sirki is offended. Only the duke understands their danger—how cruel the prince’s rage is likely to be. (Even Lambert cannot know the extent of it. How—with a single terrible look—the prince can stop the heart of each, stop light from entering their eyes and sensations from knitting themselves into thoughts on the mind’s dark loom.) The duke herds—like a shepherd his scattered flock—his wife and guests to the center of the room, dogging them with whispered reminders of their obligation to make welcome his eminent guest. They assemble once more in a tableau of respect. Lambert implores the prince with his eyes not to give way to rage. Sirki glares in answer, reminding him with a magisterial look of their agreement and the consequences of its violation. The duke lowers his head as if to ask that the prince’s wrath fall on his alone. The others are silent, sensing in the tension between them a crisis that concerns them all. (All but Fedele, who has fallen asleep with the fire tongs in his hand. He has been neither more nor less reserved toward the prince than toward the other guests.) It is the moment when the executioner’s ax is gathering to itself the weight of finality. The air between the blade and the neck of the condemned becomes electric with an insuperable attraction. No one dares enter its dangerous current. The moment is being swiftly drained of potential. In seconds, actuality will succeed inevitability; and the ax will begin a descent that neither a king’s pardon nor the executioner’s remorse can stop. Corrado enters with Grazia’s shawl. The interruption is in time. The accumulating charge dissipates; the ax is lowered harmlessly. Prince Sirki relents. Grazia smiles. Duke Lambert takes out his cigarette case. Fedele wakes. The guests move about the room as if nothing has happened.
“Thank you,” says Grazia after Corrado wraps her white shoulders.
“Come with me into the garden!” he begs. “The moon is bloodred tonight, and nothing seems to sleep. The larks and the nightingales are singing in the trees.”
She looks toward the windows, but they are still dead, revealing nothing outside, reflecting nothing within. She shivers and closes herself within the shawl.
“I am very tired, Corrado. I must go home to bed.”
“But, Grazia—”
“She had a fright this afternoon in the automobile,” says the baron, who has been drawn irresistibly to the young woman because of her beauty or for another reason he himself does not know. “It’s tired her.”
“We must be leaving now,” says Princess Maria, who senses that her daughter has stepped, without knowing it, into a current against which she is too weak to swim. Maria only senses it; for the dread with which she beholds her daughter standing inside the shadow of Prince Sirki remains a nameless one.
The prince’s anger overtakes them like an early frost. “They are leaving?” He looks to Lambert for an explanation.
“They did not plan to stay, Your Grace.”
Only Lambert knows the cost to them all should the prince be made to feel that he is other than what he seems.
“Believe me, Your Grace—they did not mean to stay!” Lambert pleads; and in his pleading, his son perceives an abjectness, which rankles him. Shame for his father’s humiliation and for his own before Grazia incites Corrado to act. He moves against Sirki, intending to fling an insult and a challenge at him, then halts. There is an inviolable zone around a monarch none may enter, upon pain of sovereign displeasure. It is a realm in miniature, whose borders are secured against trespass. That surrounding the prince is mined with destruction. Duke Lambert seizes his son’s arm roughly.
“Prince Sirki is my guest!”
“He insults us by his presence!” Corrado shouts, his voice tremulous with indignation and fear. “I demand that he leave at once!”
“What is this insolence, Lambert?” Sirki’s voice tolls a warning.
“Forgive him, Prince—his youth!” The duke pulls his son from the brink. “He doesn’t know what he is saying. Forgive a young man his folly!”
Corrado allows himself to be led from the room. He does not admit his terror, telling himself that he withdraws in deference to his father’s wishes. Could Lambert see him, he would be struck by a face emptied of blood. If he looked closely, he would note a wildness in his son’s eyes and a twitch in one eyelid. But the corridor leading to the music room is dimly lit.
“You must not provoke him, Corrado! He is more dangerous than you suppose.”
Feeling himself safe, the young man answers with bravado: “You should have let me slap his face for the insults he has given you.”
“It would have been the last thing you ever did on earth,” Lambert says with a solemnity that stops Corrado in mid-step.
“I thought he was your friend,” he says.
“I met him for the first time tonight.”
“Then he is not Prince Sirki?”
The duke does not reply.
“Who is he, Father? I demand to know!”
“It is enough for you to know that he is a most powerful prince who can, if he pleases, bring your life—all our lives—to an end.”
“One man—”
“He can strike us without raising a hand.”
Corrado shivers, as if the cold emanating from Sirki has pursued him. “What does he want?”
“To study us.”
Corrado is bewildered.
“Our fear.”
“I don’t understand you.”
“For all our sakes, Corrado, don’t meddle in this! And unless you want to bring catastrophe to this house, treat Prince Sirki as you would any man.”
“For how long?”
“Until tomorrow night. Now I must see to the others. Your room is the safest place for you.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Be afraid, Corrado; be very much afraid.”
Duke Lambert returns to the salon. His wife and guests are as he left them. They stand with heads bowed before the prince, who also has not moved. They are not, as Fedele appeared to be, asleep. Seeing them now so immobile, Lambert imagines that it is he and not Prince Sirki who directs the action; his consciousness, which contains them all. They are like characters in a play, who, their parts having been performed, go backstage to smoke a cigarette, embrace, or read the newspaper while their fictional lives are in suspension. Their most dramatic selves. Are Stephanie, Alda, Rhoda, Eric, Cesarea—even the prince—waiting for him to set them going again? A pretty delusion! Sirki turns to Lambert, and the others are immediately disenthralled. The duke quails as Sirki faces him. But the prince is smiling and so, too, are the others.
“I have had a most enjoyable evening,” he says.
Lambert staggers, as if felled.
“I look forward to tomorrow,” Sirki continues with the savoir faire of a courtier, which he has acquired during Corrado’s retreat.
“Where are Grazia and Princess Maria?” the duke asks.
“Gone home to their beds,” Sirki replies.
Lambert’s face registers minutely his relief. It does not escape the prince, who says, “They will be back tomorrow night for my farewell party. Grazia will be unable to resist.”
The guests are laughing. The bond, which joined them with a force stronger than their wills, is dissolved. Each is free to move about the room with another whose interest is, for the moment, mutual. Baron Cesarea and Eric stand by the hearth, smoking cigars. Alda and Rhoda sit on a banquette, vying in their fascination for the prince—all fear of him forgotten. Stephanie goes to her husband to ask what has happened to Corrado. Fedele enters with a tray of brandies. As if the house were his, Prince Sirki proposes, “To the pleasant dreams of my guests.” His toast strikes all but Duke Lambert as presumptuous. Even so, they drink to those dreams, which are theirs—having felt, perhaps, misgivings about the coming night, when they would each leave the shore and drift out onto the black ocean alone.
Already, Grazia is drifting. She and Princess Maria travel in reverse the road that brought them earlier from Ravenna to the Villa Felicitá; but they are not menaced by shadow, and the sedan presses against the curves in the road almost amorously. Maria watches as the sea (the Adriatic, not the figurative one on which Grazia has set out) approaches and recedes according to the road’s caprice. Entranced by the wind’s mussing the water silver, she thinks of nothing, nor does she wish to ask her daughter how she has answered Corrado’s proposal of marriage or what she thinks of the irascible prince. She herself does not wish to think of him at all. His impertinent gaze disturbed her—how it bore into one! After the driver has brought the automobile to a stop in front of the palazzo, Princess Maria nearly orders him to drive on through the night, the next day and night, until he has traveled the length of Italy, to Otranto, where she and her daughter can board a ship to Africa, to China, to someplace far from the Villa Felicitá and the prince. But she does not give the order, and the driver is now opening the door for her. Maria shakes Grazia awake, gently; for she is not yet so far from shore that she cannot return.
Prince Sirki rests—he who is never tired; wills himself to sleep,who has never slept.To understand men, he must know the life they lead asleep. He has visited them so often in their beds, but never slept. He has entered their final dreams as easily as one might put a hand through a pane of water and has watched there enactments of human desire and fear—fear of Death, fear of him. Desire, too, for him. But he has never dreamed. He has listened to the cries of passion and distress, the shouts, whispers, riddling speeches concealing so much of interest to occultists and psychiatrists but not to him. Until today, when curiosity for once overcame him—curiosity concerning men: why they should claim to fear him and yet do so much in his service. For his approval and—who knows?—love.
In the Great War, men showed a genius for the invention of new forms of extermination. No longer indifferent, Death hastened from muddy ditch to the garlands of twisted wire, to flaming oil spreading mortally on the waves, to the burning cages in which men were hurtled, like angels, from the heavens to a blasted, unlovely earth. On earth, in air, water, and in fire—there was not an element in which men did not bring forth some novelty to enliven the history of slaughter. He was astounded by the eagerness of their complicity and enraptured by the sight of so many caught in attitudes of submission. For him, a death has no moral quality, although it does possess an aesthetic one. Sensuality is his only human aspect. It has enabled him to make of Grazia an object of desire. Her beauty, however, is not a sufficient explanation for his fascination. If beauty were enough, Sirki would be attracted to Countess Alda or the American girl, Rhoda. No, Grazia must possess a fatality—must be in love with Death without knowing it. Perhaps this adoration compels her each morning to pray to the Virgin—not to be delivered from it, as she believes, but unto it; for who among women is more qualified to be Death’s intercessor than she who gave birth to man’s deliverance from it? Her lassitude, her remoteness—what are they but warrants of Grazia’s willingness to be taken? In dreams from which she wakes at once troubled and exultant, like a wife remembering a lover’s embrace—she is ravished by Death.
In her bedroom in the palazzo, she is dreaming of the prince. She sees him as the medieval allegorists painted Death: faceless, cloaked in darkness, carrying a scythe and an hourglass. She knows, in her dream, that Prince Sirki and Death are one and the same. She is afraid of neither. He comes to her where she lies beneath an azure canopy embroidered in gold thread with astrological signs. She does not find him ridiculous; she does not feel revulsion at his touch. He puts aside the scythe and the glass, removes his cloak as a lover would, and lies beside her. He is a void. An emptiness. Nothing. And like nothing, immensely potent. He ravishes her. She need not part her lips or open her legs to let in her death: It enters as easily as a man does water. Only it is Grazia who drowns. Prince Sirki sleeps—he who has never slept—and dreams this while Grazia rests in his dream, smiles in its sway to be possessed by Death. To be loved by him. To be adored. In the morning, she dresses like a bride and returns to the Villa Felicitá—unable to resist.