The doctor – whom I immediately summoned – assured me that Carmen was in no danger. She had taken only a minute and greatly diluted dose of the poison. He was, however, concerned that her extreme nervous susceptibility, her heightened emotions, might bring on a brain fever. By daybreak, however, she had fallen asleep, succumbing at last to utter exhaustion, and the only signs of life she gave were the occasional sobbing sighs that racked her body.
I then went to see the countess. She had not slept at all. She was sitting at the end of the bed, wrapped in a shawl, in an attitude of grief and inertia that filled me with pity. It was dawn by then, but the shutters were still closed, and the lamps filled the room with a melancholy light. The vases were full of flowers. On a small table stood two blue china cups. The hot chocolate in them had gone cold, and the flowers were drooping.
How is he?’ she said on seeing me.
‘His wound has been dressed and he’ll be better in a month. You must leave Malta in the next two weeks, countess.’
‘I want at least to say goodbye to him… to spend a moment, even an instant by his side! You can’t deny me that. You won’t stop me, will you?’
‘On the contrary, I myself will arrange for you to see him.’
‘And what about her?’
‘Her, cousin? Well, I went to her room with the intention of marching her off to the first policeman who came along, but left there vowing that, come what may, she will find me at her side to defend her and, if she so wishes, to love her.’
‘Perhaps you’re right; she is a strong, passionate woman.’
‘She’s more than that, cousin. If ever passion in its divine form was made flesh, she is that woman. She’s the goddess of passion; besides which, she has one great quality: logic.’
I had conceived a boundless admiration for Carmen! I, who had never addressed a single gallant remark to her in the days when she was happy and her beauty at its most radiant, was now, in her hours of grief and sickness, her cavaliere servente. Don Nicazio had gone to Sicily, so I, alone, watched over her recovery. I helped her take her first steps around the room; she was wretchedly thin, her eyes sunken, her face morbidly pale and her mind troubled.
She spent long hours praying and reading pious literature. Her intention was to enter a convent in Spain and there punish her body through pain and penance. She now spent whole days in churches. Her habits and her manners were entirely changed. Her very beauty took on an ascetic quality. She had literally detached herself from the world. Sometimes she would look at me and, thinking of her future in the convent, she would say suddenly:
‘How sad! And at only twenty-eight years of age!’
But religious fervour soon reclaimed her, and she would lose herself in hopes, in ideas of redemption through prayer, fasting and contemplation. While she was in that passionate frame of mind, shaken by exalted emotions, the sombre Catholicism of Spain entered her being and, finding the place empty of all other world views, happily pitched camp there.
One day she asked if she could see Rytmel before leaving for Spain.
‘In my new role as Sister of Charity, of course!’
I took her to Rytmel’s house one night. The room was lit by the flickering light of tallow candles. Rytmel’s pale face against his equally white pillow was painful to see. Carmen went in, fell to her knees beside his bed, clasped one of his hands and stayed there, sobbing, for a long time. Rytmel wept too.
I had leaned against the wall, filled with a sadness as deep and unfathomable as the night itself. A neighbour, whose window opened onto the same narrow courtyard as Rytmel’s, was playing a plangent melody on his violin; it was the waltz from Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, whose sweet, plaintive tones aroused all kinds of conflicting feelings: celebration and death, love and the life of the cloisters.
Rytmel wanted Carmen to get to her feet so that he could talk to her. But she remained prostrate with grief, her face buried in the bed clothes, sobbing and occasionally saying:
‘Forgive me, forgive me!’
In the end, Rytmel, with great tenderness, helped her up and took her in his arms. He spoke graciously and gently to her and then, lovingly and with infinite charm, kissed her eyelids.
The poor creature blushed, and I felt tears well up in my eyes again. Poor dear Rytmel! How perfect was his tenderness at that moment and how divine his forgiveness!
With a simplicity in which one could already sense the great inner strength given her by her faith, Carmen spoke to Rytmel about God, about her preferred Order, the convent she wished to enter, and she did so with such naturalness, in such touching terms, that both Rytmel and I were filled with sadness for her. Finally, she kissed her lover’s hand.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, ‘for ever. I will pray for you.’
Still overcome with emotion, she slowly made her way to the door, where she stopped, turned and gazed at Rytmel for a long moment, her eyes lit up with a sombre, passionate light. Her breast heaved, she turned deathly pale and, with arms outstretched, her lips pregnant with kisses, she ran towards him, with all the impetuousness of her old self, all the frenzy of her old passion, intending to throw herself into his arms. But when she reached the bed, she dropped to her knees again and, in reverent silence, chastely kissed his fingertips! Then she took my arm and we left.
The next day Carmen called her maids together and distributed among them all her dresses, gowns and lace. She gave her jewels to an English priest to distribute among the poor. Vials, trinkets, perfumes, she gave them all away. She made her confession, spent hours on her knees in St John’s Cathedral, and prepared herself for her journey. Everyone who knew her wept.
In the evening, while packing her one small trunk, she sent for me, closed the door of her room and handed me the will she had written and which I was to leave there in Malta to await Don Nicazio’s return from Sicily. She had left everything to him.
Afterwards, she went silently over to the mirror and removed the net from her hair, leaving her mass of splendid, thick, poetically sensual curls to tumble almost to the floor.
She then took a pair of scissors and feverishly attacked those marvellous tresses, which would once, in ancient Greece, have been considered a national treasure.
I was captivated by her beauty and wounded by such carnage. To me it seemed as if the walls of the convent had already closed around her.
Carmen gathered up her fallen hair, wrapped it in a sheet and, handing it to me, said:
‘Keep this as a remembrance of the real Carmen, the Carmen I’m leaving behind me. Now I have one last request. Prepare your luggage and travel with me to Cádiz. Tomorrow… is that possible?’
‘Not tomorrow, no, but I promise you that within a week, we’ll be in sight of the mountains of Valencia.’
In the meantime, she quickly ran her hands through her hair, shaping it into a more masculine style. And she looked enchanting. Her beauty took on an extraordinary sweetness and innocence. She smiled at the mirror, and as I watched her, it seemed to me that her image, caught between the two lamps, was wrapped in a luminous blue mist. Slowly, abstractedly, she had taken up a comb and was arranging her hair. I stood behind her, smiling. Carmen, caught in the spell of the mirror and surprised to find how lovely she looked with short hair, was smiling too. It seemed to me that her cheeks took on the colour of life again and that her bosom once more swelled with passion. I was about to speak tenderly to her and entice her back to the world, when she flung down the comb and, bowing her head, went to kneel silently beside her bed, before the large cross on which Christ was dying, His head drooping, His lacerated forehead dripping blood, His arms outstretched, His side pierced.