APPENDIX I

THE DEATH AT MISSOLONGHI

A short story by Giorgio De Maria

Translated by Ramon Glazov

What follows is a private account by the Bishop Gualtiero Griffi of ­Venice, written in the December of 1879 and addressed to Cardinal Roberto Brancaleoni of Bologna, concerning an alleged episode in the life of Lord Byron:

I can see, Your Eminence, that your diocese is beset by many cares. How well I recognize the situation! I myself scarcely know where to turn anymore! But on this take my word: the backsliding of Venetian souls in my own bishopric has been truly dire! The Austrians in charge are doing everything within their purview, but for all their efforts, they are still far from omnipotent. We ought to have a duty constable and a priest standing watch over every home, but you, at least, should understand that this is beyond our earthly capabilities.

And the people, meanwhile, take advantage of this. Everywhere, their lechery finds niches which are rarely interfered with. Wherever you look, there are patriots and radicals springing up like toadstools. That bane of the spirit known as “Romanticism” has infected a good part of our populace, bringing all its sad consequences. Their hearts are unruly, they have abandoned all human decency and—woe to report—they are very, very familiar with wickedness.

You have provided me, Your Eminence, with a truly valuable piece of news in describing how that shameful goat-footed poet came to dwell in your city and how the authorities brought this to your attention. Heaven would have wanted them to apprehend him and stop, at once and forever, the harm he has caused to unguarded minds! But I don’t hold very high hopes of that happening. He is an Englishman, and the Austrians are unfailingly reluctant when it comes to laying a finger on one of those islanders. But what’s more, our man is a lord, and for him this truly accidental fact serves as a form of insurance. As if highborn ancestors could keep a man from nursing the spirit of a crook and a tavernlout! Your Eminence, have you read the things written about him in the London periodicals? He is said to be—and I quote—“a wretch whose organs, blunted by the habits and excesses of the most monstrous debauchery, can no longer find any means of excitement or stimulation except in the images of terror, suffering and destruction with which a crime-stained soul furnishes him only too easily”! Nothing, it seems to me, could lay him bare better than that. I thought much the same thing when I chanced to read some of his writings, which I tore to pieces at once before consigning them to the precious efforts of my fireplace . . . With that gesture, I felt almost as if I could stop his verses from selling like hotcakes and hamper the buyers from corrupting themselves in mind and body! (All the same, it would do well to acquaint certain constables in your native Bologna with that verdict from London: reading it will perhaps remove many of their qualms about the matter.)

Still on the subject of that Englishman, have you heard what they’ve been saying about him in certain circles for quite some time now? I don’t know how much of it is real or fabricated, but it seems positive to me that the story fits his character like a glove. You, having frequented the salons of Contessa Albizzi a few times in the past, would be the better one to judge if the gossip vented there is worth considering. I spoke about it to the Marquis of Zandonai during the last Feast of Precept when he came to visit me in the sacristy at the end of Mass. It truly is regrettable, Your Eminence, that your visits to Venice always have to be official ones and that you and I have never had the chance to wander around the city incognito for a while! I could introduce you to so many neighborhoods, to so many . . . people of interest. I’m not alluding to the Marquis of Zandonai, whom you already know, nor even to the palazzi which you used to frequent, but people rather much less visible, who could easily slip your notice if you’re not “well up” on Venetian matters. You’ve already been here, I take it, and seen our “little streets”? And you also know the odor that permeates them, that singular smell! If corruption itself ever had a smell, that for sure would be it! Of course, the place is far from a pageant of sanitation, but how I wish we were dealing purely with material foulness!

The day before yesterday, I fancied taking the pleasure of delving into this urban maze where, here and there, I could gather the information which would allow me a clear vision of the strange story that has spread thinly round. It would indeed be worth your while if I digressed to tell you about several meetings I held, with people we’ve already spoken about at length, in our nostalgia for the informants of the Mouth of Truth—but that may have to wait for another time. I should also especially update you on certain scoundrels—known vulgarly as “gnaghe,” or “meowers”—who prowl around in cat masks disguised as women and spout obscenities which shock everyone around them. And what’s particularly outrageous is they’re tolerated: you don’t see them merely in the piazza, but in the Procuratie, in the taverns and disorderly houses, at dances and celebrations, and it’s said that their real craft is in sodomy. Foreigners attest that not even in Geneva, in a nation of Calvinists and Lutherans, is there anything like the scandal these gnaghe have caused, and that it would be best to arrest or forbid these masqueraders who practice rough trade, departing from the natural use of the woman which befits them. It was to one of those precise neighborhoods, where bordellos and gambling dens are plentiful, where I went two days ago to pause among people and listen to whatever came out of their mouths.

You must have heard of a certain Venetian neighborhood called Frezzeria, which is quite well visited, not only as a place of unmentionable pastimes, but also as the spot where citizens gather to flog merchandise. It’s lost some of its energy in recent decades as trade with the Orient has waned, but there are—as always—a few exotic objects to be found, which form the perfect lure for those tourists who yearn to primp their stately wives with some bauble from Syria or Lebanon, all so that their better halves can imagine they’ve really landed in one of those distant countries. It was there, in that same neighborhood, that the poet arrived three years ago—that poet who now flourishes in the shadow of your cathedral and stands poised to sow your diocese with the weeds that have already sprung up so rampantly here. For the first several months—before he and his seraglio of vultures and carrion crows withdrew under the roof of the ­Palazzo Mocenigo—the building where he lodged was a two-story dwelling, marred by centuries of wear and tear and by the neglect of its current proprietors. It’s true that many things inside have been changed lately; you can see it especially in the upholstery and furnishings, both of which have gotten strangely refined, but, deferring such questions for now, the two proprietors are not personalities who seem much inclined toward cleanliness or decorum. The lady of the house herself is a woman of twenty-five, rather well heeled, who answers to the name of Marianna. She is rumored to have had many lovers, several of whom were even of the very basest extraction. Her husband, by contrast, is a man quite long in his years, tested harshly by life, with a past behind him filled with disappointments great and small which now envelop his existence like a swarm of reckless gnats. You would only need to look at his face to understand the burden on his memory to hold them all and to assign each one its proper weight and measure.

It would be worth your while, Your Eminence, to spare me a moment to describe this character, since everything that’s recounted appears to have its origins with him.

You need to know that before the arrival of the Englishman—the one who made the Saints turn pale with his catalogue of incests and adulteries perpetrated across Europe!—his future host kept a shop at the ground level of the house. I emphasize the word before, since today he doesn’t seem to gain much through that enterprise: not, I’d judge, from the piles of clutter and dust which grow denser each day along the shelves of his shop. It’s astounding even that he hasn’t decided to close down the shop, but indeed to leave it open night and day, practically inviting any passing thieves to plunder it wholesale. Now you should be asking how this man could earn his livelihood, put food on the table for himself and his wife and find the ducats to beautify his house with hanging tapestries and that extortionate furniture. If the matter wasn’t an enigma to me as well, then in all likelihood I wouldn’t dwell in narrating these anecdotes which Prudence—first among the supreme cardinal virtues—would bid me to reject without delay as the fruit of lies and superstition.

But, at least for now, I’ll keep to the details that are certain. I can say that the name of this man is Giuseppe and that he belongs to the Segati family, which was once renowned in our Most Serene Republic for its extensive trading with India and other territories in the Orient. However, the dynasty later fell into decline, to the point of having no assets save for that very homely curiosity shop where our Giuseppe—the last scion of his house—carried out an activity which, in truth, wasn’t very lucrative until a few months ago. Just one sign of the small esteem this man held compared to his spouse was the nickname she seemingly gave him in the first few days of their marriage. Women have a most subtle talent for pondering names that could mortally wound the men they hold in contempt, and she could not have thought of anything more merciless to inflict him with than a second Baptism, a second naming more inerasable than the first. It’s said she nicknamed him the “Straggler-Cat” for the way he used to maunder from room to room without a sound, as cats, in their muffled manner, have a habit of doing. You’ll know the grievous insult in this if you consider that Giuseppe, with his hefty figure and sagging features, has scarcely anything feline about him; at most, you can summon to mind the image of a very ancient cat who’s had too much of catching mice and, instead of nestling down in some distant corner as would be natural in such cases, drags his tired limbs around the house in an altogether vain attempt to hide his decrepitude. It’s enough, though, just for that man to come to the dinner table for all of his physical frailty to display itself: there’s no broth, no salad dish he’ll ingest without a grimace of pain etched on his lips. Nor does he have much appetite for table talk, except to ask about minor developments—who’ll sing in the role of Orfeo at the Teatro La Fenice, how this or that distant relative is faring—and often as not his young wife will abandon him to solitude, perhaps after serving him with a dry or hurtful answer.

One day—after having asked her husband again and again why he was in the habit of leaving the house on certain nights of the year, and just as the Christmas holidays were drawing near—she didn’t hesitate to fall silent herself and follow after him as soon as she noticed him stepping past the threshold of his quarters. And when she saw him descend to the street level where the shop lies—then step outside, donning one of the masks citizens wear during ­Carnevale—she found herself so curious that she decided to shadow him in the laneways through which he advanced. Now, having observed him heading toward Giudecca, and entering a small chapel which was known to host assemblies of the most impudent characters in Venice, she robed herself the following evening in garments more appropriate for eavesdropping at close quarters. Over her face she placed a gentleman’s baùtta mask and adopted the kind of disinterested strut that allows the occasional outsider to penetrate certain secret gatherings, including this very particular meeting where, amid the smell of incense and candles, prayers were raised to a divine Cupid surrounded by shepherds, and where the sound of panpipes sometimes drifted beside whispered devotions. And we can picture her surprise, as well, when she spied her husband getting up from his pew and kneeling before a pagan altar, where he raised his arms skyward—if one could call the blue fresco of that ceiling a sky—and, in the silence which had quickly overtaken the chapel, reciting melancholy verses.

There is no poorer man in the world than one who faces the sudden airing of that secret which, for him, is the only receptacle where he can keep the flame of his vanity lit—so that he doesn’t start to resemble a pitiable shrub, winter-stricken by frost and blizzards. And there’s no woman of bad intent who doesn’t know how to make use of a cold blade which, by fate or by craft, she now has in her hand. Just as she was able to find the destination of his nocturnal walks, she also sniffed out where he hid the fruits of his Arcadian laments. There wasn’t a drawer in the house or in the shop she didn’t frantically rummage through, keen to unearth what her husband had hoped to hide from her feminine malice. And when, at last, a bundle of well-preserved parchment scrolls fell into her hands, few people in the district were unaware of what this occult activity said about a man whose domestic fate was well-known gossip; many began to treat him to a snicker as they passed by his shop, whose sign—in a hostile collusion of apathy and destiny—was a horn, to be exact, a large hunting horn painted in gold. He caught on to their mockery from behind his counter shrouded in twilight, and we too can visualize how green his face became at hearing his pagan elegies callously repeated by figures in the street. Nor was there a lack of pranksters who pinned to his door certain writings from Lombardy at the time, reproving those followers of Classicism who never tire of scratching around in the ashes of the Ancient World, who still fancy that the lost paintings of Parrhasius bear the truest promise of earthly beatitude . . . And their foolish illusion is properly savaged in those biting verses by the Lombard laureate Carlo Porta, whose Milanese pagan (or “Meneghin Classegh”) declares:

Minerva consoles me through my daily chores,

Morpheus tucks me in and bids me sleep,

Bacchus warms my heart and helps me to forget.

This was the situation our “Straggler-Cat” found himself in when my native city saw the arrival of that poet whom Nature, from the moment of his birth, seemed to have stamped with a mark of baleful predestination. He arrived in a carriage drawn by four majestic horses, so that, seeing him halt at the limits of the city, people gazed at him with the same wonder which must have stricken the crowds of olden times when the Bucentaur set sail from the Basin of San Marco. But this was the amazement of servile minds ensnared by the false luster of celebrity, not of devout and humble souls. He only had to step down from the carriage for men of all ages to swarm around him, prostrating themselves to the point of licking the ground and seizing his hand to kiss it, almost as if it carried the Piscatory Ring of His Holiness, and immediately they offered him all kinds of services. Yet he, with the air of an individual who sought nothing but to reaffirm his strength and prestige, quickly shooed off that parasitic crowd, and, leaving the horses and carriage in a stable, he made for the canals with only his luggage. Having disembarked at St. Mark’s Square, it took him little time to come across an opportune hostel, so foolproof is a libertine’s instinct for finding promising terrain. So he reached Frezzeria and, admiring the freedom with which many well-bred ladies went strolling in the evening, accompanied by their stylish servants, and finding himself enticed by the aroma that blew from certain coffee shops, where it was difficult to distinguish a highborn dame from a woman of the world, he immediately decided that this, for now, was the right place to put down his unsavory roots. He requested and obtained lodging in the house of the merchant, and under its roof he stayed, long enough to violate every rule of decency and common living.

Thus far, Your Eminence, I would not appear to have said anything in the least bit contentious or liable to doubt. Nor will I depart from the stringent truth by describing the room where the poet lived and wrote some of his most famous and celebrated verses, as a tiny, unadorned room with nothing except for a bed, a couple of chairs and a desk. It indeed seems that, time and again, those souls plagued by Romanticism find a supreme thrill in the simulation of poverty, in donning the robes of the friar, all to allow the flames of their lust to excite them better and more underhandedly. I shall not ponder for long, either, whether that dwelling had a Bible and a missal-book along with the furniture I’ve listed, or if one could find even one sonnet dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary within that poet’s vast works.

His enemies say that he loves only what he has to escape from, that genuine emotions are not enough for him and that he is never so pleased as when he sees the shadow of death overhanging the nuptial bed where he lies. Similar shadows must have festooned our city, whose obvious decline might perhaps have disappointed those with simple tastes, but not our Englishman: “I have been familiar with ruins too long to dislike desolation.” And ruins and desolation were what he found, and where he didn’t find them, he took every means to create them.

He wrote back to one of his cronies in England that, in his eyes, Venice was a “bewitching city,” and “the greenest island of my imagination.” So freely could the whims of a Romantic lend alluring color to the miasmal bogs that were ready to swallow him whole! In his usual error—or gazing with an eye that ignored the counsel of his mind—he even humored himself to describe the woman with whom he would unite in sin, as “altogether like an antelope; she has the large black oriental eyes, with that peculiar expression in them which is seen rarely among Europeans—even the Italians—and which many of the Turkish women give themselves by tinging the eyelids, an art not known out of that country, I believe.” And again he indulged in over-portraying her, “mouth small—skin clear and soft, with a kind of hectic colour,” failing indeed to observe that the hint of purple enlivening her cheeks was a thing she owed not to hectic fever—in barer words, ­consumption—but to the open air and hot sun she caught from afternoon strolls along the marina, none of which were any cure for the impropriety of her nature. But whatever judgments he made regarding the aforesaid woman, he rarely strayed from the truth writing about the love he felt for her, especially since she agreed to share his bed at any time of his choosing, a convenience which a man of his temperament was highly inclined to welcome.

I won’t linger, Your Eminence, in describing their communion; if sublime words ever came from anywhere, it was not from the closed circle of carnal embrace. Nor will I dwell on relating how their idle hours were spent by day, nor the nights consumed in the vain but deadly fires of their misdeed, nor the spite, resentment and the jealousy that haunted their lovemaking as an omen of a more eternal tempest. On several occasions she was seen outside, flustered and upset as if her soul was at the point of breaking, or tearing at the shoulder of her footman and, with no warning, showering him in the most vicious abuses that have ever risen from a woman’s lips. But the blistering grievances she spat seemed like trifles to the poet. He only had to gaze at her sweetly to draw her to him again like a mellow yeanling, and, with a short-lived caress, to put her back in her accustomed yoke.

The unhappy merchant endured his wife’s betrayal as only an ambitious, disappointed, love-struck and helpless man could endure such a thing. A cute tale, spun by the evil-minded, claims that the Straggler-Cat was a creature incapable of true suffering, and that his tears were no more valid in the court of human woes than the weeping of sopranos in stage melodramas. That mean prejudice would have been shattered had anyone drawn close enough to view the terrible bite marks which can still be seen gouged into the wood of his kneeler, or certain scratches which remain on the furniture in his shop for any sharp-eyed visitor to notice—not to speak of recollections which people still trade about the solitary walks he took on sunny afternoons, dragging his feet and brushing close to the wall. His partial self-exile from the sight of his domestic spouse must have happened very early, and perhaps it came more out of instinct or lazy discretion than at his wife’s explicit urgings. Yet all the same, there had to be crucial moments in the day when the three of them could not avoid coexisting. And these are precisely the moments which the town gossip—cultivated and vulgar alike—has been most drawn to in its anecdotes and speculations:

The Marquis of Zandonai told me, for instance, that the friends of Contessa Albizzi liked to imagine the trio supping in the most nervous of silences, with the Straggler-Cat bent over his plate and unwilling to raise his eyes for fear of meeting the uncouth gaze of the poet—that face crossed with free-hanging hairs in which Marianna loved to glimpse the fascinating hieroglyphs of Heroic Destiny. Those inclined to cruder fantasies may prefer to think of a scene torn by a much harder contrast of power: the legitimate husband in a corner, taking his soup, while the other two, drinking together from the same cup, laugh and point at him. But in every case, the inequality of the two contenders always springs to our attention. Nor would we drift too far from reality if we imagined how they spent one of their evenings together. The poet has just finished reciting one of his incandescent verses, and his mistress, still swept with emotion, turns to her husband and asks: “. . . and now, Straggler-Cat, dear, why don’t you try reciting some of your lovely verses?” Whatever happened, the limits of human tolerance must have been breached a good many times if what they say isn’t a complete myth.

Conceivably, you have read or heard a certain poem, Your Eminence, which the Englishman happened to complete in my city. The poem describes a magician locked within the walls of an alpine castle inhabited by spirits and demonic beings, whose shadowy, arcane presences came to him obediently in the vast silence of those icy mountains. More, you would recall what happened when the magician, laid low by awful remorse over his incestuous crimes, asked not for more power, but to forget who he was and enjoy the deepest oblivion—and how none of these things were granted. Neither the melodious apparition of the Witch of the Alps, nor of the kinswoman he had taken in illicit love, was sufficient comfort for his soul tormented by regrets. An abbot tried to give him solace with modest and holy words, but not even these could make his proud spirit ask for the forgiveness which would have been the only release from his afflictions. As arrogant to God as he was to the Evil One, he preferred to die rejecting everyone and everything rather than bow his forehead. Nor do we know if death gave him the oblivion he sought. And as pitiless as that creature was, so too was the man who aspired to be the thing his imaginings had produced.

They say that he was still laboring over that very poem when his pen suddenly stopped as if stricken by a pitiless enchantment. Now a very different oblivion from what his hero Manfred had sought for fell over his mind and held him from bringing the dramatic work to a close. It often happens that poets spoiled by Romanticism project themselves into the personalities they happen to create, and after having aggrandized these mannequins, they fancy themselves aggrandized in turn. Or perhaps, after conjuring the Devil with their quills and envisaging his presence, black wings and all, they fancy themselves worthy to have him appear before them just as they’d pictured. This is ignoring of course that the Father of Lies knows far subtler arts of manifestation, and revealing himself so baldly gives him no pleasure.

So our poet had spent his days versifying and chasing skirts, until that strange, and perhaps even faintly miraculous, event.

Of those who saw the merchant during that ordeal, a few mentioned him to me with that ironic indifference people adopt, out of habit, to describe men stricken by conjugal misfortune. They were, indeed, rather sparing in their accounts of his tribulations and their cause. Some even seemed to hold back from fear of revealing details which—though they weren’t quite sure—­nonetheless caused them to suspect something horrifying and arcane. And I could tell you that I was just conferring with a face from that locality when a window sprang open above our heads and the very subject of our discussion appeared. And since he was watching us both so intently, my friend shut his mouth and left me, running as fast as he could. What could suddenly have entered those eyes which, years before, had only been cause for laughter and pity, eyes so soft and helpless that they seemed to shrink into their sockets if others met their stare? Suffering allows no rest for the man who becomes its prey; but, as often happens to the animal that hears the barking of hounds behind it and yet manages to evade capture—its terror-sharpened eye finding a path through the foliage which brings it momentary salvation—so a man can sometimes happen to find solace in an action or gesture that soothes his anguish but briefly.

It was a bright afternoon in summer when the merchant, by now well hounded by his torments, suddenly found himself of a mind to break his humiliating routine—so much so, indeed, that I might be permitted to think that what followed wasn’t entirely his own doing. Neither Ruzzante the Paduan nor the Roman Plautus had ever described marital distresses as sordid and laughable as those he’d lived through. And since it pleased the Englishman to no end to intensify the scorn of others as a condition to his own delight, one often heard his thundersome voice heaving abuses at the miserable shadow that loitered around, uncertain if it could still recognize the house as its own. But what could our Amphitryon do when the Jupiter in his home had barred the door to him, all the better to enjoy his wife? And perhaps some demonic intercession had even allowed this! Now was the scheduled hour when the private congress between the poet and Marianna reached its height of passion, and no person—especially not the merchant—would have dared disturb its murky sanctity. The house, as ever, was silent and an immodest twilight reigned over it. What gave our Straggler-Cat the boldness to choose that precise time to intrude into his own dwelling and swiftly climb the stairs is beyond the guess of any man who has never held such intimate shame in his heart. But he dared to do it, and, pressed by a blinding fury, he came close to that door which, as if on the sly, his imagination had breached many times. None could say now if he gripped a weapon in his hand or if his fainthearted valor was the sole armament, but once the door was open, nothing save for his eyes would shred the nestling couple. Venus—as it’s said in Lucretius—had already sown the fields of woman and already the lovers were pressed anxiously tight, tooth to amorous tooth, when the poet raised his head and saw the Straggler-Cat watching him. He said nothing, but his exhausted carnality yielded to the concentrated power of hatred and pain that shot from those once meek and fearful eyes. He tried then to cover his limbs, but the more of his miserable nudity the blanket hid, the more he felt he was exposing: that stare, which had become diamond-sharp, cut deep into his suddenly transparent being and opened vast and hidden wounds within it. And, as it happens in a city whose battlements are crumbling under a determined onslaught, when its citizens cling to each other while enemies rush in to carry out their plunder and devastation, so the poet clung to his woman. But that wretched filial gesture proved almost worthless to impede the silent claws that would dig into his depths, which were now open as daylight, and steal their unguarded treasures. He lay on that bed exactly like a thirsty man in a dream who has consumed every trace of water and now sits dying of thirst in the middle of a river. Nor do we know how long he remained there: only after the merchant had left with his hands full from an intangible robbery did he come around and find himself stripped of everything, in a confined solitude, forgetful and speechless.

Your Eminence, our late lamented Bishop Alfonsini, while speaking one day to a crowd of poets, musicians and painters who had agreed to hear him at St. Mark’s Basilica, said well that what we call “personality” is nothing more than a theft, and that it is the sum of foolishness to take pride in this supposed quality. Those who expect to turn their personality into an excuse for rebellion against human and divine laws are, in reality, behaving like gypsies who, having taken away some elegant garment or some precious necklace from others, now adorn themselves with it, and, finding their presence in the mirror more beautiful or captivating than it was before, do not hesitate to imagine that they have suddenly transformed into queens or gentlefolk. Indeed these goods only have to be repossessed for them to newly find themselves in all the misery and nakedness of their natural state. For verily only those who renounce themselves, and refuse to look at the bounties of Creation with eyes clouded by avidity and false desire, shall enter the Kingdom of Heaven, where all things are clear and pure.

The life the three of them shared wasn’t broken up as suddenly as one might expect after what had occurred; they still had their suppers together—many, many suppers—and their solitary walks and secret dialogues continued all the same. If something had changed, it was in the balance of their coexistence, as if some force had intervened to shift the weights on an invisible scale. The poet’s nights of musing and creative toil—the fruits of which Mari­anna was always the first to taste—changed so severely that they lost all their hallowed quietude, exchanging it for the sound of pacing feet, torn paper and barren sighs. Even his morning rides along the coast, where the artist mingled his self-love with the contemplation of the waves, lacked the blusterous security they once held and turned swift and convulsive. His outbursts of rage and joy alike were smothered under a gray fog.

Once, while he was trying in vain to continue the work he had set into motion, his mistress approached him unseen and, folding her arms around his neck, she uttered his name in a smitten, coquettish tone. If the poet’s fit of anger still betrayed a virile urge to rebel, even this barrier fell when his head sank into the woman’s lap and stayed there. And his hands just as often seemed given to hers while they sat wordless in a box seat at the theater. Against the merchant, they were more than just a pair of lovers facing a betrayed spouse; they now behaved like two creatures seeking a defensive stronghold in the shape of a common alliance. The man’s presence had lost its old circumspection, and even if his footsteps remained hushed, he no longer hesitated to appear in front of them and give sidelong glances. He circulated through the household looking like a black beetle that comes into view from a place no one is sure of and disappears somewhere just as uncharted. One day, the poet stood alone on a balcony, gazing out at Venice’s generous expanse, where he hoped to recover the lost voice of his poetry. All of a sudden he winced as a foretoken of the images he yearned for seemed to be reborn in his mind. A smile had already come back to his lips and he was already preparing to put the suggestions of his insight to paper, when a dark power emerged to rob him of his premonitions with a greedy suction. The Englishman spun around just in time to see the merchant retreat behind an awning with the ravenous motion of a beast clutching warm prey between its teeth. And because at other times he sensed a predator at his back, he came to fear his landlord’s absence as much as his presence. It was often the case that he and Marianna would call out for him if they didn’t see his figure hunkering nearby. The merchant himself would respond quickly to their calls and straightaway reveal himself with a modest, “What is it?” But at night—while the Straggler-Cat did his mysterious and solitary work inside the shop—Marianna lay in her bed and listened to the poet’s agitated pacing echo through the house, and, never daring to move and join him, she let the sound of footsteps nourish her pained slumber.

What happened next, when the frail membrane of suspense which had enclosed their coexistence like a shell finally burst, stirs me almost with horror to recount. It was another evening with the trio sitting at the customary table. Not one of them had as yet said a word. Only the candlesticks gave life to their three presences by the fidgeting of magnified shadows on the walls, and only the faraway slap-slap of lagoon waters breached the silence. Everything seemed to be unfolding just like the evening before, when the Straggler-Cat launched into a coughing fit that suggested he was about to make some trifling household discussion. Then, in an accent one would use for everyday table talk, he began to recite certain verses in Venetian. Marianna, who didn’t recognize these rhymes as her husband’s usual mediocrity, stood stiff like a gazelle that had heard roaring nearby. The poet too repeated the words to himself and turned pale. Watching them and pretending not to notice their shock, building more and more dramatic emphasis and almost relishing his intonation, the merchant continued the strophe he had started. Perhaps it was a gesture incited by fear, or perhaps the poet was ashamed, from hearing in such a slovenly recital the words he had long and fruitlessly pursued for his Manfred, enough that it roused him to grasp the end of his tablecloth and take cover behind it as if finding himself suddenly naked. Other words, other verses, piled on without pause, in somewhat garbled diction.

There is no telling, Your Eminence, if seeing an idea of one’s own—a personal notion one has not yet brought to full ­maturity—suddenly unveiled in a distorting mirror is an experience any man could endure. Few indeed have ever tried. But from what they say, it does not seem the Englishman took it well. The scene that followed, in fact, was a frenzy of paroxysmal movements. Some recount it as a wheezing chase around the table, where the merchant slurred verse after verse while the poet begged him in vain to put an end to the costly spillage; others say instead that the poet threw himself at the merchant in an instant and took him by the throat, hoping that this would arrest the grandiose flow of those words which had grown into a mighty cascade. I could scarce know which of the many versions told might be closest to infallible truth. But it seems the more probable to me that the merchant was able to escape his opponent’s grip and dwindle away from the room. Now the poet and his woman were very desperate to track him down. There are some who claim to have spotted the pair as they combed the streets that night, asking left and right if by chance anyone had seen him. And people even now recall their shallow breath, their fluttering hither and thither like moths around an oil lamp. When at last they found him, he was locked in a wine cellar inside the house and our poet had no choice left but to stop feebly and listen. From inside, the merchant’s voice poured out in abundance, oratorical one moment, hasty and monotonous the next. The Englishman tried beyond hope to take what he heard to memory and save some word or two. Rivers of poetry . . . unborn . . . prenascent . . . pelted through that door, perhaps vanishing without a second chance to be heard; nor was there a human shorthand swift enough to jot them down. All that night the poet stood there, to listen and to hear himself, with his hands outspread like a beggar. Only when dawn came again was he able to move and climb slowly back up the stairs, almost like a shade, sapped of all he had been.

At this you should ask, Your Eminence, how that husk of a man still happens to enthrall the masses, to sell poems and to be a prolific and celebrated wordsmith. If his whole store of rhymes and images had perished that night, then perhaps I wouldn’t worry myself too deeply over his destiny and the ruination his presence in the world even now serves to propagate. I would leave him to his fate, to chase whatever shallow death awaits him in some far-off land. But such is certain, however, that he has not remained entirely quiet, and that the lengthiest poems still jet out from his pen. You must be conscious of his Don Juan and of his Manfred, both taken skillfully to completion, and other works of his lately published to sizable admiration. It happens at times that men can outlive themselves and persevere, like wraiths, by carrying out the actions they have always carried out; their souls are mute but not their voices, and their hands and feet do not stop moving. Seeing them in the street or riding in the saddles of their chargers, no one would think that their minds had lost their hum, that the blood in their veins was heatless and spent; nor do the women they still hold tight to their bosoms ever imagine such a tremendous absence . . . And in the city there’s no lack of them . . . Often, even, the more the vacuum inside them is pierced, the more grandiosely they act, giving shows of themselves, fashioning great spectacles of gaiety, dauntlessness and brio. There’s never a Carnevale in Venice where their masks don’t make an appearance. And if times and manners continue to slide as they do now, it shall not be long before these walking husks will form great crowds, whose presence no one will be able to evade.

In the meantime, I can tell you that so far our Englishman hasn’t stopped making hasty and sporadic jaunts here in Venice. No one—at least, not anyone who isn’t in the know about his intimate secrets—would recognize him during these visits. Because Venice for him is a realm of humiliation, he hesitates to come here with his features so changed, like a leper who doesn’t wish to be pointed out. What could he still hope to do or find in this place, that he hasn’t done or gotten already? It’s painful to answer that kind of question. He does, at any rate, bring himself here, and after nightfall, he approaches the merchant’s house and knocks a number of times as a recognized signal. The door can be seen opening and the merchant leans out just a little; with a quick wave of his hand he bids his guest into the quiet of the house, where they both remain for a few short moments. So indeed it stipulates, the unsavory pact which binds them, and has bound them since that night. The Englishman divests himself of a bag of money; the merchant, a bag of parchment scrolls. What they discuss among themselves cannot be anything two mortals should ever say to each other in this life. Their sad haggling complete, the Englishman pulls away from the house and dissolves into the murk without breathing a word. Certainly, whatever is written on the scrolls could sound nothing like his mother tongue; but it serves him little to shed tears over so much infidelity if they nonetheless contain the works that ought to have been his. Arriving as he will at some outlying hostel, far from the inquisitive glances of his friends and the crowd, he will begin to unravel that priceless bundle at once. And then his pen shall stand ready to translate his verses from that humble dialect into his native English. Once that barren struggle comes to a close, others will undertake to publicize it and to entrust it to the wings of fame. Can it incite much wonder, then, that the Englishman’s assets continue to dwindle and his castle at Newstead is no longer the crown jewel of his estate? Or that the Venetian merchant has so quickly shaken the grip of his old privations?

I can leave you no more, Your Eminence, save my word that these things are told in Venice, and that, in all humility, I have tried for nothing save a dependable summary,

Ever Yours, Most Faithfully,

BISHOP GUALTIERO GRIFFI