The Vendetta

 

An undated letter, written by Lord Henry Stanton to Sir Robert Cargrave, a London physician, probably in 1876 or 1877, judging from internal evidence:

Sir Robert Cargrave
Harley Street
London, England

My dear Bobbie,

Of all the news in your last letter, the item that has struck me most forcibly is your casual mention that “telephones” have begun actually to be installed in London, and that the serenity of even your own gracious home will soon be shattered by the shrilling of that vulgar novelty. In Venice, from which I write, we are still unsullied by such encroachments.

The Byzantine domes of St. Mark’s are visible from my terrace, and with a glass I can bring them so close as to discern the cracks in the mosaics. I also can see a strip of shimmering lagoon, crowded with gondolas, and with San Giorgio rising far in the distance. Crystalline weather! Such un-English, un-clouded skies, of shamelessly vivid, unabashedly Italian blue. Morning haze; warm and starry nights. To go about in a gondola by day is jolly, but to do so by night is magical. Last night, I glided along the Grand Canal, past magnificent wraiths of fifteenth century palazzi, gaunt silent relics in the argent Venetian moonlight (yes, Venetian moonlight is like no other). No sound save that of the gondolier’s oar in the water. And then no light, either, as we turned into the Rio di San Luca and lost the moon, passing under arching bridges with feeble bracket lamps that did little more than emphasize the sudden darkness of the water, sliding beneath us like black oil.

I live here in my rented palazzo like a Renascence prince, un gran signore, sipping old wine, strolling amongst the pictures and sculpture, looking out upon the city, listening to the songs of the gondoliers and poring over old books, such as a certain crumbling volume lengthily entitled Varie avvertenze utili e necessarie agli amatori di buoni libri, written some 160 years ago by the good Father Gaetano Volpi, priest and librarian. The book is before me at this moment, and for your delectation I will copy out a few passages of his advice on the care and protection of one’s library. He warns us not to emulate the example of Magliabechi, the famous librarian of Florence, “who read during meals and was known to drop a kipper amid the pages to mark his place . . . Nor use your library to hold meetings, for it is known that bookstalls have been found convenient—o tempora, o mores!—for gentlemen to relieve themselves . . .” Mark well and profit by those sage words, Bobbie.

And do not think this is an ordinary palazzo in which I pass my days. It enjoys the distinction of being haunted; or perhaps I should say the reputation of being haunted, for I have yet to see or hear the shade of mad Count Carlo in these halls. I have heard his tale, however, recounted by the venerable person from whom I rent this palazzo—a remarkably well-preserved morsel of decayed gentry, 85 if he is a day (possibly older), yet still fond of food and wine and blest with that stamina which spinners of elaborate stories vitally require (to say nothing of their listeners).

It was just yesterday, in the latter part of the afternoon, that he was here and I asked him about the Count. He fixed me with his still bright eyes, shook his great white-haired head in the negative; then, when I entreated him to tell, he gave a sigh, and seemed to relent, and said, in his somewhat quaint and stilted way (in Italian, of course, which I here translate): “So many tales are told, so much mendacious folly spread about, that it is good for such a one as I to loose his tongue and say such words that may (if God is good and you inclined to hear them) tell the bare, unpainted truth about those hapless folk . . .”

I nodded eagerly, offering him a chair, pouring him more wine, urging him on.

He sipped the wine, and waxed ruminative. “A single cold misgiving yet I harbor,” he said, “although I will not let it stay me. It is this: my poor, stiff words, ungarlanded by malice or invention, will yet disclose a tale more crammed with cruelty, and vile device, and dark profundity of horror, than any silly falsehoods you have heard. You wish me to go on, Lord Stanton?”

Foolish question! “Certo,” I replied.

* * *

You will be relieved to know I have no intention of setting down the good old man’s words verbatim, in their admittedly colourful but convoluted and meandering original, for few of us have time for such bedizened narratives in this modern world of “telephones” and “talking machines” (have you heard of this latter?—an American named Addison or Eddisohn has spawned a devilish device that will abolish every opera house and concert hall in the world within a decade, I predict. A frightening and barbaric race, these Yankees). No, I will paraphrase my ancient host’s tale, which, I should guess, took place in the vicinity of 1790; at any rate, some time near the end of the last century.

Count Carlo lived in this palazzo with a carefully chosen minimum of servants and retainers, and no other kin but his sister Fiammetta, who was as fair as he was plain. His skin was raddled, hers was opalescent; his nose was large and shapeless, hers was a dainty, demure, delicately modelled masterpiece; his eyes were small and piggish; hers large and dark and luminous and clear and shaded by the fine fringed canopies of her lashes. Many were the swains who came here to the palazzo to win her; who came, I say, but who were discouraged, turned away, repulsed, every one of them, by her brother the Count.

“Why may not young men pay suit to me?” she often asked her brother. “Is it your plan to make of me a nun?”

At such times, he would emit his dry cackle of a laugh. “A nun! Ah no, bella sorella—” he would repeat the phrase in a singsong, a kind of daft liturgy “—sorella bella, bella sorella! You are too fair, too fine, too rare a wine, in cloistered convent walls to pine, o matchless little sister mine!”

“Matchless is well said, since you refuse to make a match for me!” And she would weep.

Then he would calm her, and soothe her, and assure her he was but saving her for a suitor worthy of her beauty, grace and station, a mate of the proper blood.

“What is this of blood?” she would wail. “These are no churls who have sung songs at my window, begging for my hand, swearing eternal love, but highborn fellows, all. Blood, indeed!”

“Blood,” repeated the Count, and the word seemed to spur his whirling mind, to spiral it into another shower of dotty doggerel: “Sangue rosso, sangue caldo . . .” (Again I shall endeavour to render this into English.) “Blood is red and blood is hot; blood may seem what blood is not. Blood most innocent, if shed, hatred on that blood is fed . . .”

“Oh, brother, leave off with these riddling rhymes, I pray you. They are sour to my ear.”

“Sour?” And that would be enough to send him into another theme: “That which sweetest tastes of all may be changed to bitter gall. Adonis can a monster be, and songs of love—cacophony!” (Did you not tell me once, Bobbie, that there is a form of mental disorder in which the patient expresses himself exclusively in rhyme? Count Carlo seems to have been an early example.)

There came to the palazzo one fateful day a traveller from Spain, a handsome young man of good family who sued to see not Fiammetta but Carlo. The Count, apparently impressed by something in the young man’s name or mode of approach, granted him audience.

“Honoured sir,” said the Spaniard, “you see before you one whose life is dedicated to beauty. The beauty of dappled hills, of horses, of guileless children, of gleaming ripe fruits, of draperies; the sad and humbling beauty of timeworn faces; the cold beauty of silver, the warm beauty of gold; the unadorned beauty of man and woman in their perfection—all these and more I have captured upon canvas. For some time now, I have dreamt of a great picture, my dear conte—Mother Eve, alone in the Garden, in the innocence before the Fall, the world a glowing quietude around her, unblemished, undefiled. This picture I have sketched and sketched again more times than I can say—the composition and much of the detail, the trees and flowers, gossamer insects, playful tame beasts, the soft sky and gentle clouds above them. I lack but one element, without which all is nought. Eve herself escapes me—nowhere have I found her, not among living models or in the realms of my mind, and it is not for want of searching.”

Carlo said, “You fascinate me, honoured guest. Pray go on and tell the rest.”

“It was a friend of mine and sometime teacher,” the young man continued, “who put me on the scent, as it were. He is himself an artist of no small gifts, recently appointed pintor de cámara, Francisco Goya by name, and one day he said to me, ‘Ramon, when a man has painter’s ears as well as painter’s eyes, he notes things other men pass by. That talk we heard in taverns a month or two ago, and again this past week, those stories, rumours, about a young Venetian maiden named Fiammetta, whose beauty is the theme of songs and sonnets in her own land—might there not be some truth behind them? Do you not recall the ardour, the passion of the song we heard that sailor sing?—

Divina Fiammetta,

Bellissima giovinetta . . .

—is it likely the subject of his song is but a fiction? Where there is smoke, is there not likewise fire? If I, like you, were searching for an Eve; and if I, like you, were unencumbered and not saddled with a court appointment, I would get me straightway to Venice!’ So said my friend, and I am here, dear count.”

Carlo, who had thwarted all others seeking interviews with Fiammetta, seemed to succumb immediately to the Spaniard’s blandishments. Even the thought that his sister, as Eve, would be obliged to pose au naturel did not perturb him. In his words: “Though men are ruled by lechery and lust, physician, priest and painter one may trust.”

One small step had yet to be taken, of course—obtaining the permission of the lady herself.

We have all heard that “Opposites attract,” but I have found this less true than the axiom that “Like speaks to like,” that beauty seeks beauty and grace calls out to grace—and surely this was the state of things when Fiammetta for the first time beheld Don Ramon José Villardos y Manadereña. For if she was a young goddess, he was a young god, a Grecian statue, a catalogue of perfections, reflecting her own beauty lustre for lustre, even to the opal glow that lit both his skin and hers. They were fated to fall immediately and furiously in love; lock and key seemed not more made to join together; and such elemental passions as theirs not hurricane nor holocaust, not puny Man nor Almighty God may tear in twain. Her permission, it is superfluous to say, was granted at once.

And so it was that Fiammetta was left behind closed doors with Don Ramon while he blocked out the main lineaments of the huge canvas, and painted the first brushstrokes. Days went by, and weeks, and on every day of this time save Sundays, Fiammetta spent hours under the eyes of Ramon, as innocent of raiment as the Eve she represented.

Are we to be surprised, then, that one morning Carlo stepped suddenly, unexpectedly into the room to find not only Eve, but also Adam, cleaving together not on canvas but in the living flesh? Behind them, like a fine theatrical cloth, stood the immense spectrum of colour that was the uncompleted canvas—the lush jungle of Eden, veiled in primordial mist, the leaves and grasses in every imaginable variety of green, the flowers a dazzling riot of vibrant scarlet, soft lavender, bright yellow, lush purple, the insects and birds almost audibly buzzing and chirping, the lion and the lamb asleep together; and, coiled sinuously in the branches of the focal Tree, the unblinking, watchful Serpent. The figure of Eve had hardly been touched—she remained a blurred charcoal outline—but this gaping cavity in the canvas was masked by the figures of the flesh-and-blood model and her painter who seemed to be part of the picture, but a part that stood out in breathtaking relief, like a masterly example of trompe-l’oeil.

With a cry of shock, the young lovers drew apart and reached for draperies to cover themselves withal. Fiammetta trembled at the wrath she knew would come. Ramon, when his voice returned to him, gathered about himself as much dignity as the circumstances would permit, and said:

“Sir, I alone am blameworthy in this. Here is my breast: draw your sword and slay me, for I know that you must, but find forgiveness for your sister and spare her life, I beseech you.”

Carlo appeared to be confused by this speech, and asked for elucidation; whereupon Ramon replied, “In my country, you, as the lady’s brother and only living relative, would be compelled by custom to observe the pundonor, the point of honour, and slay the woman as well as the man, even though the woman be raped. Blood alone, the blood of both, can wash out such a stain—”

“So may it be in Spain,” said Carlo. Then he laughed in a not unfriendly manner, and added: “Your ancient ways it ill becomes me to disparage, but all the punishment I plan for you—is marriage!”

Nothing could have pleased the two young people more than this. They joined Carlo in laughter, and then and there, under the most—shall we say informal?—of conditions, made plans for a quiet wedding, to take place in one week’s time.

It was a simple ceremony, attended almost entirely by the servants, conducted in the chapel of the palazzo by a simple padre of the district.

Ramon took up residence in the palazzo, the old walls of which seemed to glow with the love of the newlyweds. Their life was an enchanted idyll, they lived in an Eden of bliss that paled the painted Eden of his canvas. The picture was at length finished: it hangs here now, in the main hall, where all may see and admire the beauty of Fiammetta-Eve, and the talent of her adoring husband.

Some nine months after that embarrassing interruption that precipitated the hasty marriage, Carlo planned a supper for the three of them. Fiammetta was great with child, the midwife expected the infant to arrive the following day, so the supper was in the way of a celebration. The finest wines and cheeses were brought forth from the cellar, roasted birds and baked meats were proffered, fantastic pastries decorated the table. There was much laughing and joking, a deal of kissing, and Carlo and Ramon exchanged a great many stories of chivalry and brave exploits, thus delighting Fiammetta, who liked a good tale. Carlo asked Ramon if he did not perhaps know a story concerning pundonor, which would help him understand this strange custom of the Spaniards.

“I do,” replied Ramon. “A story both true and terrible, a story close to me for reasons you will soon perceive. It is a story of a beautiful Spanish widow, the still-young mother of a boy not yet fifteen, who was seduced—nay, raped would be the more honest word—by a hidalgo of hot blood and cold cunning, grown bold by the recent death of the poor lady’s husband and protector. But he did not reckon with her brother, who, as guardian of the family’s good name, slew him—then slew the lady, too, his own sister, to satisfy the code of pundonor, which demands that both defiler and defiled must be slain.”

“How cruel!” said Fiammetta. “That the lady, too, should die! It is a heartless code, this pundonor.”

Carlo, agreeing with her in his jingling, jangling way, said that the Italian vendetta was much more sensible and fair than pundonor, since it would demand the death of the traducer only, not of the wronged woman as well.

Placing a tender hand upon her husband’s arm, Fiammetta cooed, “My love, you said this tale was close to you . . . was the poor widow your mother, and yourself the lad of fifteen years?”

“No, my sweet, I was ten at the time, but there is more to tell. The unhappy lady was my dear and saintly aunt; the brother who spilt her blood, my father. My cousin, the boy of fifteen, with whom I and my little sister were wont to play and gambol for hours together, so congenial were we—that dear cousin, that jolly companion, roiled by his mother’s death and by the manner of it, wrought a horrible revenge upon us.” Ramon shuddered. “Even now, across the span of years, the picture of that vengeance poisons me . . .”

Count Carlo said, “But pray go on, although it chill your marrow—a half-told tale’s a bow without an arrow.”

Ramon resumed: “One night, while we all slept, my cousin stole stealthily into our house, crept up to the bedchamber of my little sister, and then—with his father’s saber, which we found all bloody on the floor—hacked her into unrecognizable pieces!”

Fiammetta sucked in her breath and recoiled. “Ah no!”

“Butchered that four-year-old! Butchered her tiny blameless form as if she were a suckling pig—nay, one would not even chop a pig so much, so madly!”

“Oh, my poor Ramon . . .” Fiammettta sought to solace him with tender kisses upon his cheek, so wrought was he with the reliving of the hideous event. “And your cousin?” she asked. “How did he fare? Was he caught and punished?”

Ramon shook his head. “He vanished. We searched for weeks, for months, a year, but he was never found.”

A silence had covered the table like a shroud. The setting sun cast a ruddiness upon the room that, at any other time, would have been lovely, but now looked like nothing more nor less than a film of blood. At length, Carlo rose from the table, stroking his chin reflectively, and paced, saying, “This haunted tale of hellish hate I might yet elaborate.”

“Elaborate?” said Ramon, wonderingly. “That story?”

Carlo nodded. “Suppose, by devilish design, indeed your cousin killed a swine, made of it a mincemeat mess, wrapped it in the silk nightdress of your sister and then fled, bearing her away not dead—not dead but very much alive, to such a place where she would thrive, and grow more beautiful each day, in a palazzo far away . . .” He turned suddenly to the puzzled Spaniard.

“In a . . . palazzo?” said Ramon. “You mean in Italy?”

Carlo nodded.

“Strewed the gory pieces of a pig in her crib and left the saber there . . .”

Carlo bowed.

Ramon tried to smile. “It is an ingenious conceit, I grant, but . . .” His voice trailed off, uncertainly.

Said Carlo: “That cousin of such horrid fame: tell me, may we know his name?”

Ramon opened his mouth, then closed it again without replying, as if the requested name had frozen in his throat. His eyes flickered from Carlo to Fiammetta and back again.

She, who had been silent through this, now said, “Ramon—what was your cousin’s name?”

Ramon did not look at her. In a chilled voice, he said, “Carlos.”

Carlo laughed.

Fiammetta laughed, too, at what she knew not. Her laughter faded and died as her mind called back a line from one of Carlo’s past nonsense verses: Blood may seem what blood is not. Did it have a meaning? And: Blood most innocent, if shed, hatred on that blood is fed. What of that? Was it mere foolery, or something much worse? She turned to regard her husband—unspeakable suspicions were beginning to distort the sweetness of his face (or was it something in her own thoughts that was making his beauty ugly to her eyes?). That which sweetest tastes of all may be changed to bitter gall. Adonis can a monster be, and songs of love—cacophony . . .

Giggling hollowly, she plucked her husband’s sleeve and said to him, “This is but a mad jest, it is his peculiar way.” Turning desperately to Carlo, she cried, “Tell him it is only a foolish verse, brother!”

Carlo was no longer laughing. He looked icily down upon her. “Nevermore call me your brother.” He pointed to Ramon. “Use that name upon this other.”

“No!” she shouted, hoarse with disbelief. “Ramon my brother? This is your silly fancy!”

Ramon howled, “It cannot be!” But he had grown pale. Now, rising, staggering under the full implication of Carlo’s words, he upset the table, sending chalices of wine clanging to the marble floor, their crimson contents gushing like sanguinary floods. “I am here of my own volition!” he cried to Carlo. “You could never have foreseen my coming!” His eyes glazed with a new thought and he reeled away from Carlo, saying, “And yet . . .”

Fiammetta now spoke, her voice blanched by dawning horror. “And yet, did you not say that tales reached your ears of a maiden whose beauty . . .” She broke off, her voice strangled in her throat, her ivory bosom heaving with the pound of her heart. “Oh God! Those who spread the tales—they must have been his accursed minions!”

Ramon’s whole frame was shaking. He took Fiammetta’s terror-stricken face in his hands, and studied it, and looked into her eyes as he said, in a voice all groan and whimper: “You do not resemble him . . . you are closer to me in likeness . . . to me!”

Carlo had wandered out, onto the parapet, and was now standing with his head thrown back and arms outspread, looking aloft into the blood-red sky. In a frenzied, declamatory voice, he addressed an apostrophe presumably to the spirit of his hated uncle:

“Slayer of my mother, see—I avenge that infamy! See your son and daughter wed, sharing a corrupted bed; see her swollen by his seed, soon to spawn a loathly breed! Thus Ramon and Fiammetta consummate my sworn vendetta!”

His insane laughter echoed along the canals . . .

But I must bring this to a close, Bobbie, for my eye-lids grow heavy. I was kept awake last night by these confounded bells of Venice: the tolling of the enormous Campanile bell first, followed by that pair of sledge-hammermen on the Orologio, one of them always two minutes behind the other ever since 1497, I am told. In that two minutes there is no silence, however, for there is another, unidentifiable, bell in the vicinity of St. Mark’s to fill the vacuum. Promptly at six in the morning, the Campanile again shakes the town as its great bell calls the faithful to worship. And yet I love this glorious clangour! What is mere sleep compared to such a symphony? There will be sleep and to spare, for all of us, when we are laid in the earth.

The rest of my story you can guess, or most of it. Ramon, driven by justified rage as well as by the dictates of pundonor, killed Carlo (or Carlos) and Fiammetta, and, finally, himself.

This treble tragedy grows even starker when we consider the distinct possibility that Carlo’s little disclosure may have been a figment, made up out of whole cloth, just as Fiammetta fleetingly had hoped. His mad mind may have fabricated the whole thing for the first time when he heard Ramon’s account of those childhood horrors.

And certain convenient facts relating to the resemblance between Ramon and Fiammetta may have seemed to corroborate Carlo’s story. But have you not seen two strangers more alike in looks than some siblings you have known? Have you not seen brother and sister quite unlike each other in appearance? As for the seeming prophecy of the earlier verses, which so terrified Fiammetta when she recalled them, did they really contain secret knowledge or were they no more than crazy Carlo’s cryptic word-juggling, meaningless jingles with obligatory classical allusions? I fear we will never know whether Carlo’s mischief was a fiendish plot stretching over many years, or merely a tall tale concocted that fatal night.

My venerable host offers no opinion on this matter. When he left me yesterday, he merely added that Fiammetta’s child did not die (as one would assume) but was born at the moment of his mother’s death. You, Bobbie, are a physician, and will know if such a thing is possible. He further claims that this child is still alive. And he hints, rather broadly, that this offspring of a possibly unnatural, possibly quite natural union is none other than himself. I will admit he is old enough to be.

Before I close, I must tell you that the great diva, Maria Waldmann, is here in Venice, preparing what will be her last opera season (she is retiring to marry Count Galeazzo Massari) and she has promised to write me a letter of introduction to her friend Signor Verdi, whom I hope to visit soon at his home, Sant’ Agata. He is searching for a subject for his next opera, and I propose to recount the above story and perhaps undertake the writing of the libretto—Ramon e Fiammetta, or possibly Carlo, Conte di Venezia, or better still: La Vendetta, un dramma di Enrico Stanton, musica di Giuseppe Verdi. What do you think? Please write, a good long letter, whenever you are not chattering on your “telephone.” And when you do write, please tell me if it is true what I have heard: that the Empress of Brazil has sent our dear Victoria a gown woven entirely of spider web. I prefer to believe it, but my preferences, as you know, have always been for the baroque.

Your friend,

Harry