There is sometimes melancholy in revisiting after years of absence, a
place where one was joyous in the days of youth. That is why sadness
stole over me on the evening of my return to Florence.
To be sure, the physical beauties of the Italian city were intact.
Modernity had not farther encroached upon the landmarks that had
witnessed the birth of a new age, powerful, even violent, in its
individualism. From those relics, indeed--from the massive palaces, the
noble porches, the monuments rising in the public squares--there still
seemed to issue a faint vibration of ancient audacity and force. It was
as if stone and bronze had absorbed into their particles, and stored
through centuries, the great emotions released in Florence during that
time of mental expansion called the Renaissance.
But this integrity of scene and influence only increased my regrets.
Though the familiar setting was still here, the familiar human figures
seemed all departed. I looked in vain for sobered versions of the faces
that had smiled, of old, around tables in comfortable cafés, in an
atmosphere of youthful gaiety, where at any moment one might be enmeshed
in a Florentine prank that Boccaccio could not have bettered.
One such prank rose, all at once, before my minds eye, and suddenly, in
the midst of my pessimism, I laughed aloud.
I recalled the final scene of that escapade, which I myself had managed
to devise. The old café had rung with a bellow of delight; the victim,
ridiculous in his consternation, had rushed at me howling for vengeance.
But the audience, hemming him in, had danced 'round him singing a ribald
little song. The air was full of battered felt hats, coffee spoons,
lumps of sugar, and waving handkerchiefs. Out on the piazza the old
cab-horses had pricked up their ears; the shopkeepers had run to their
doorways; the police had taken notice. It was not every day that the
champion joker among us was caught in such a net as he delighted to
spread.
Where were they, all my jolly young men and women? Maturity, matrimony,
perhaps still other acts of fate, had scattered them. Here and there a
grizzled waiter let fall the old names with a shrug of perplexity, then
hastened to answer the call of a rising generation as cheerful as if it
were not doomed, also, to dispersion and regrets.
Then, too, in returning I had been so unfortunate as to find Florence on
the verge of spring.
The soft evening air was full of a sweetness exhaled by the surrounding
cup of hills. From baskets of roses, on the steps of porticoes, a
fragrance floated up like incense round the limbs of statues, which were
bathed in a golden light by the lamps of the piazza. Those marble
countenances were placid with an eternal youth, beneath the same stars
that had embellished irrevocable nights, that recalled some excursions
into an enchanted world, some romantic gestures the knack for which was
gone.
"After all," I thought, "it is better not to find one of the old circle.
We should make each other miserable by our reminiscences."
No sooner had I reflected thus than I found myself face to face with
Antonio.
Antonio was scarcely changed. His dark visage was still vital with
intelligence, still keen and strange from the exercise of an
inexhaustible imagination. Yet in his eyes, which formerly had sparkled
with the wit of youth, there was more depth and a hint of somberness. He
had become a celebrated satirist.
"What luck!" he cried, embracing me with sincere delight. "But to think
that I should have to run into you on the street!"
"I asked for you everywhere."
"In the old places? I never go to them. You have not dined? Nor I. Here,
let us take this cab."
He hurried me off to a restaurant of the suburbs. Under the starry sky
we sat down at a table beside a sunken garden, in which nightingales
were trying their voices among the blossoms, whose perfume had been
intensified by dew.
It was an old-time dinner, at least, that Antonio provided; but, alas!
those others were not there to eke out the illusion of the past. To each
name, as I uttered it, Antonio added an epitaph. This one had gone to
bury himself in the Abruzzi hills. That one had become a professor at
Bologna. Others, in vanishing, had left no trace behind them.
"And Leonello, who was going to surpass Michael Angelo?"
"Oh," my friend responded, "Leonello is still here, painting his
pictures. Like me, he could not live long beyond the air of Florence."
Antonio, in fact, could trace his family back through Florentine history
into the Middle Ages.
"Is Leonello the same?" I pursued. "Always up to some nonsense? But you
were not much behind him in those insane adventures."
"Take that to yourself," Antonio retorted. "I recall one antic, just
before you left us--" He broke off to meditate. Clicking his tongue
against his teeth, he gazed at me almost with resentment, as if I were
responsible for this depressing work of time. "No!" he exclaimed,
looking at me in gloomy speculation, while, in the depths of his eyes,
one seemed to see his extraordinary intelligence perplexed and baffled.
"That war of wit is surely over. The old days are gone for good. Let us
make the best of it." And he asked me what I had been doing.
I made my confession. In those years I had become fascinated by psychic
phenomena--by the intrusion into human experience of weird happenings
that materialism could not very well explain. Many of these happenings
indicated, at least to my satisfaction, not only future existences, but
also previous ones. I admitted to Antonio that, since I was in Italy
again, I intended to investigate the case of a Perugian peasant girl
who, though she had never been associated with educated persons, was
subject to trances in which she babbled the Greek language of
Cleopatra's time, and accurately described the appearance of
pre-Christian Alexandria.
"I am writing a book on such matters," I concluded. "You, of course,
will laugh at it----"
His somber eyes, which had been watching me intently, became blank for a
time, then suddenly gave forth a flash.
"I? Laugh because you have been enthralled by weirdness?" he cried, as
one who, all at once, has been profoundly moved. Yet laugh he did, in
loud tones that were almost wild with strange elation. "Pardon me," he
stammered, passing a trembling hand across his forehead. "You do not
know the man that I have become of late."
What had my words called to his mind? From that moment everything was
changed. The weight of some mysterious circumstances had descended upon
Antonio, overwhelming, as it seemed to me, the pleasure that he had
found in this reunion. Through the rest of the dinner he was silent, a
prey to that dark exultancy, to that uncanny agitation.
This silence persisted while the cab bore us back into the city.
In the narrow streets a blaze of light from the open fronts of
cook-shops flooded the lower stories of some palaces which once on a
time had housed much fierceness and beauty, treachery and perverse
seductiveness. Knowing Antonio's intimate acquaintance with those
splendid days, I strove to rouse him by congenial allusions. His
preoccupation continued; the historic syllables that issued from my lips
were wasted in the clamor of the street. Yet when I pronounced the name
of one of those bygone belles, Fiammetta Adimari, he repeated slowly,
like a man who has found the key to everything:
"Fiammetta!"
"What is it, Antonio? Are you in love?"
He gave me a piercing look and sprang from the cab. We had reached the
door of his house.
Antonio's bachelor apartment was distinguished by handsome austerity.
The red-tiled floors reflected faintly the lights of antique candelabra,
which shed their luster also upon chests quaintly carved, bric-à-brac
that museums would have coveted, and chairs adorned with threadbare
coats of arms. Beside the mantelpiece hung a small oil-painting, as I
thought, of Antonio himself, his black hair reaching to his shoulders,
and on his head a hat of the Renaissance.
"No," said he, giving me another of his strange looks, "it is my
ancestor, Antonio di Manzecca, who died in the year fifteen hundred."
I remembered that somewhere in the hills north of the city there was a
dilapidated stronghold called the Castle of Manzecca. Behind those
walls, in the confusion of the Middle Ages, Antonio's family had
developed into a nest of rural tyrants. Those old steel-clad men of the
Manzecca had become what were called "Signorotti"--lords of a height or
two, swooping down to raid passing convoys, waging petty wars against
the neighboring castles, and at times, like bantams, too arrogant to
bear in mind the shortness of their spurs, defying even Florence. In the
end, as I recalled the matter, Florence had chastened the Manzecca,
together with all the other lordlings of that region. The survivors had
come to live in the city, where, through these hundreds of years, many
changes of fortune had befallen them. My friend Antonio was their last
descendant.
"But," I protested, examining the portrait, "your resemblance to this
Antonio of the Renaissance could not possibly be closer."
Instead of replying, he sat down, rested his elbow on his knees, and
pressed his fists against his temples. Presently I became aware that he
was laughing, very softly, but in such an unnatural manner that I
shivered.
I grew alarmed. It was true that in our years of separation Antonio's
physical appearance had not greatly changed; but what was the meaning of
this mental difference? Was his mind in danger of some sinister
overshadowing? Were these queer manners the symptoms of an incipient
mania? It is proposed that genius is a form of madness. Was the genius
of Antonio, in its phenomenal development, on the point of losing touch
with sanity? As my thoughts leaped from one conjecture to another, the
tiled room took on the chill that pervades a mausoleum. From the bowl on
the table the petals of a dying rose fell in a sudden cascade, like a
dismal portent.
"The Castle of Manzecca," I ventured, merely to break the silence, "is
quite ruined, I suppose?"
"No, the best part of it still stands. I have had some rooms restored."
"You own it?"
"I bought it back a year ago. It is there that I----" He buried his face
in his hands.
"Antonio," I said, "you are in some great trouble."
"It is not trouble," he answered, in smothered tones. "But why should I
hesitate to make my old friend, whose mind does not reject weirdness, my
confidant? I warn you, however, that it will be a confidence weird
enough to make even your experience in such matters seem tame. Go first
to Perugia. Examine the peasant girl who chatters of ancient Alexandria.
Return to my house one week from to-night, at dusk, and you shall share
my secret."
He rose, averted his face, and went to throw himself upon a couch, or
porch-bed, another relic, its woodwork covered with faded paint and
gilt, amid which one might trace the gallants of the sixteenth century
in pursuit of nymphs--an allegory of that age's longing for the classic
past. I left him thus, flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling,
oblivious of my farewell.
Poor Antonio! What a return to Florence!
A week from that night, at dusk, I returned. At Perugia I had filled a
pocket-book with notes on the peasant girl's trances. The spell of those
strange revelations was yet on me, but at Antonio's door I felt that I
stood on the threshold of a still more agitating disclosure.
My knock was answered by Antonio himself, his hat on his head and a
motorcoat over his arm. He seemed burning with impatience.
"You have your overcoat? Good." And he locked the door on the outside.
We stepped into a limousine, which whirled us away through the twilight.
The weather made one remember that even in Florence the merging of March
and April could be violent. To-night masses of harsh-looking clouds sped
across the sky before an icy wind from the mountains. A burial-party,
assembled at a convent gate, had their black robes fluttering, their
waxen torches blown out.
"Death!" muttered Antonio, with a sardonic grimace. "And they call it
unconquerable!"
As we paused before a dwelling-house, two men emerged upon the pavement.
They were Leonello, the artist, and another friend of the old days,
named Leonardo. The unusual occasion constrained our greetings. The
newcomers, after pressing my hand, devoted themselves with grave
solicitude to Antonio.
He burst forth at them like a man whose nervous tension is nearly
unendurable:
"Yes, hang it all! I am quite well. Why the devil will you persist in
coddling me?"
Leonello and Leonardo gave me a mournful look.
We now stopped at another door, where there joined us two ladies unknown
to me. Both were comely, with delicate features full of sensibility.
Neither, I judged, had reached the age of thirty. In the moment of
meeting--a moment notable for a stammering of incoherent phrases, a
darting of sidelong looks at Antonio, a general effect of furtiveness
and excitement--no one remembered to present me to these ladies.
However, while we were arranging ourselves in the limousine I gathered
that the name of one of them was Laura, and that the other's name was
Lina. In their faces, on which the street-lights cast intermittent
flashes, I seemed to discern a struggle between apprehension and avidity
for this adventure.
The silence, and the tension of all forms, continued even when we left
the city behind us and found ourselves speeding northward along a
country road.
"Northward. To the Castle of Manzecca, then?" I asked myself.
The rays from our lamps revealed the trees all bending toward the south.
The wind pressed against our car, as if to hold us back from the
revelation awaiting us ahead, in the midst of the black night, whence
this interminable whistling moan pervaded nature. Rain dashed against
the glass. Through the blurred windows the lights of farms appeared, to
be instantly engulfed by darkness. Then everything vanished except the
illuminated streak of road. We seemed to be fleeing from the known
world, across a span of radiance that trembled over an immeasurable
void, into the supernatural.
The limousine glided to a standstill.
"Here we abandon the car."
We entered the kitchen of a humble farm-house. Strings of garlic hung
from the ceiling, and on the floor lay some valises.
As the ladies departed into another room, Antonio mastered his emotion
and addressed me.
"What we must do, and what I must ask you to promise, may at first seem
to you ridiculous," he said. "Yet your acceptance of my conditions is a
matter of life or death, not to any one here present, but to another,
whom we are about to visit. What I require is this: you are to put on,
as we shall, the costumes in these valises, which are after the fashion
of the early sixteenth century. Indeed, when our journey is resumed,
there must be about us nothing to suggest the present age. Moreover, I
must have your most earnest promise that when we reach our destination
you will refrain from giving the least hint, by word or action, that the
sixteenth century has passed away. If you feel unable to carry out this
deception, we must leave you here. The slightest blunder would be
fatal."
No sooner had Antonio uttered these words than he turned in a panic to
Leonello and Leonardo.
"Am I wrong to have brought him?" he demanded, distractedly. "Can I
depend on him at every point? You two, and Laura and Lina, know what it
would mean if he should make a slip."
Much disturbed, I declared that I wished for nothing better than to
return to Florence at once. But Leonardo restrained me, while Leonello,
patting Antonio's shoulder in reassurance, responded:
"Trust him. You do his quick wit an injustice."
Finally Antonio, with a heavy sigh, unlocked the valises.
Hitherto I had associated masquerade with festive expectations, but
nothing could have been less festive than the atmosphere in which we
donned those costumes. They were rich, accurate, and complete. The wigs
of flowing hair were perfectly deceptive. The fur-trimmed surcoats and
the long hose were in fabrics suggestive of lost weaving arts. Each
dagger, buckle, hat-gem, and finger-ring, was a true antique. Even when
the two ladies appeared, in sumptuous Renaissance dresses, their
coiffures as closely in accordance with that period as their expanded
silhouettes, no smile crossed any face.
"Are we all--" began Antonio. His voice failed him. Muffled in thick
cloaks, we faced the blustery night again.
Behind the farm-house stood horses, saddled and bridled in an obsolete
manner. Our small cavalcade wound up a hillside path, which, in the
darkness, the beasts felt out for themselves. One became aware of
cypress-trees on either hillside, immensely tall, to judge by the
thickness of their trunks. More and more numerous became these trees, as
was evident from the lamentation of their countless branches. In its
groan, the forest voiced to the utmost that melancholy which the
imaginative mind associates with cypresses in Italy, where they seemed
always to raise their funereal grace around the sites of vanished
splendors.
We were ascending one of the hills that lie scattered above Florence
toward the mountains, and that were formerly all covered with these
solemn trees.
But the wind grew even stronger as we neared the summit. Above us loomed
a gray bulk. The Castle of Manzecca reluctantly unveiled itself, bleak,
towering, impressive in its decay--a ruin that was still a fortress, and
that time had not injured so much as had its mortal besiegers; the last
of whom had died centuries ago. A gate swung open. Our horses clattered
into a courtyard which abruptly blazed with torches.
In that dazzle all the omens of our journey were fulfilled. We found
ourselves, as it appeared, not only in a place embodying another age,
but in that other age itself.
The streaming torches revealed shock-headed servitors of the
Renaissance, their black tunics stamped in vermilion, front and back,
with a device of the Manzecca. By the steps glittered the spear-points
of a clump of men-at-arms whose swarthy and rugged faces remained
impassive under flattened helmets. But as we dismounted a grey-hound
came leaping from the castle, and in the doorway hovered an old
maid-servant. To her Antonio ran straightway, his cape whipping out
behind him.
"Speak, Nuta! Is she well?" he demanded.
We followed him into the castle.
It was a spacious hall, paved with stone, its limits shadowy, its core
illuminated brilliantly with candles. From the rafters dangled some
banners, tattered and queerly designed. Below these, in the midst of the
hall--in a mellow refulgence that she herself seemed to give
forth--there awaited us a woman glorified by youth and happiness, who
pressed her hand to her heart.
She wore a gown of violet-colored silk, the sleeves puffed at the
shoulders, the bodice tight across the breast and swelling at the waist,
the skirt voluminous. On either side of her bosom, sheer linen, puckered
by golden rosettes, mounted to form behind her neck a little ruff. Over
her golden hair, every strand of which had been drawn back strictly from
her brow, a white veil was clasped, behind her ears, by a band of pearls
and amethysts cut in cabuchon.
Still, she was remarkable less for her costume than for the singularity
of her charms.
To what was this singularity due? To the intense emotions that she
seemed to be harboring? Or to the arrangement of her lovely features,
to-day unique, which made one think of backgrounds composed of brocade
and armor, the freshly painted canvases of Titian and the dazzling
newness of statues by Michael Angelo? As she approached that singularity
of hers became still more disquieting, as though the fragrance that
enveloped her were not a woman's chosen perfume, but the very aroma of
the magnificent past.
Antonio regarded her with his soul in his eyes, then greedily kissed her
hands. When the others had saluted her, each of them as much moved as
though she were an image in a shrine, Antonio said in a hoarse voice to
me:
"I present you to Madonna Fiammetta di Foscone, my affianced bride.
Madonna, this gentleman comes from a distant country to pay you homage."
"He is welcome," she answered, in a voice that accorded with her
peculiar beauty.
And my bewilderment deepened as I realized that they were speaking not
modern Italian, but what I gathered to be the Italian of the sixteenth
century.
* * * * *
I found myself with Antonio in a tower-room, whither he had brought me
on the ladies' retirement to prepare themselves for supper.
The wind, howling round the tower, pressed against the narrow windows
covered with oiled linen. The cypress forest, which on all sides
descended from our peak into the valleys, gave forth a continuous moan.
Every instant the candle-light threatened to go out. The very tower
seemed to be trembling, like Antonio, in awe of the secret about to be
revealed. For a while my poor friend could say nothing. Seated in his
rich disguise on a bench worn smooth by men whose tombs were crumbling,
he leaned forward beneath the burden of his thoughts, and the long locks
of his wig hung down as if to veil the disorder of his features.
Finally he began:
"In the year fifteen hundred my family still called this place their
home. There were only two of them left, two brothers, the older bearing
the title Lord of Manzecca. The younger brother was that Antonio di
Manzecca whose portrait you saw on the wall of my apartment in the city.
It is to him, as you observed, that I bear so close a resemblance.
"In a hill-castle not far away lived another family, the Foscone.
"The Lord of Foscone, a widower, had only one child left, a daughter
seventeen years old. Her name was Fiammetta. Even in Florence it was
said that to the north, amid the wilderness of cypress-trees, there
dwelt a maiden whose beauty surrounded her with golden rays like a
nimbus."
I remembered our entrance into this castle, my first glimpse of the
woman awaiting us in the middle of the hall, and the glow of light
around her that appeared to be a radiance expanding from her person.
But my friend continued:
"Between the two castles there was friendly intercourse. It was presumed
that the Lord of Foscone would presently give his daughter in marriage
to the Lord of Manzecca. Fate, however, determined that Fiammetta and
Antonio di Manzecca, the younger brother, should fall in love with each
other.
"Need I describe to you the fervor of that passion in the Italian
springtime, at a period of our history when all the emotions were
terrific in their force?
"At night, Antonio di Manzecca would slip away to the Castle of Foscone.
She would be waiting for him on the platform outside her chamber, above
the ramparts, overlooking the path across the hills. It chanced that by
the aid of vines and fissures in the masonry he could climb the castle
wall almost to that platform--almost near enough, indeed, to touch her
finger-tips. Unhappily, there was nothing there to which she could
attach a twisted sheet. So thus they made love--she bending down toward
him, he clutching with toes and hands at the wall, her whispers making
him dizzier than his perilous posture, her tears falling upon his lips
through a space so little, yet greater than the distance between two
stars.
"But almost everything is discovered. Antonio's meetings with Fiammetta
became known to his elder brother.
"One evening Fiammetta, from the high platform, saw Antonio approaching
while it was still twilight. All at once he was surrounded by servants
of his own house, who had been waiting for him in ambush. Before he
could move, half a dozen daggers sank into his body. Amid the thorns and
nettles he sprawled lifeless, under the eyes of his beloved. As the
assassins dragged his body away, there burst from the platform a
prolonged peal of laughter.
"Fiammetta di Foscone had gone mad."
* * * * *
At that tragedy, at least, I was not surprised. The Italy of the
Renaissance was full of such episodes--the murderous jealousy of
brothers, the obedient cruelty of retainers, the wreckage of women's
sanity by the fall of horrors much more ingeniously contrived than this.
What froze my blood was the anticipation gradually shaping in my mind. I
felt that this was the prelude to something monstrous, incredible, which
I should be forced to believe.
"She had gone mad," my friend repeated, staring before him. "She had, in
other words, lost contact with what we call reality. To her that state
of madness had become reality, its delusions truth, and everything
beyond those delusions misty, unreal, or non-existent."
His voice died away as he looked at his hands with an expression of
disbelief. He even reached forward to touch my knee, then sighed:
"You will soon understand why I am sometimes possessed with the idea
that I am dreaming."
And he resumed his tale:
"Antonio di Manzecca was buried. His elder brother found a wife
elsewhere. The Lord of Foscone married again, and by that marriage had
other children. But still his daughter Fiammetta stood nightly on the
platform of the Castle of Foscone, gazing down at the hill path, waiting
for her Antonio to climb the wall and whisper his love.
"Now she only lived in that state of ardent expectancy. The days and
weeks and months were but one hour, the hour preceding his last approach
to her. Every moment, in her delusion, she expected him to end that hour
by coming to her as young as ever, to find her as winsome as before. In
consequence, time vanished from her thought. And in vanishing from her
thought, time lost its power over her.
"Her father died; but Fiammetta still kept her vigil, in appearance the
same as on the evening of that tragedy. A new generation of the Foscone
grew old in their turn, but Fiammetta's loveliness was still perfect. In
her madness there seemed to be a sanity surpassing the sanity of other
mortals. For by becoming insensible to time she had attained an earthly
immortality, an uncorrupted physical beauty, in which she constantly
looked forward to the delight of loving.
"So she went on and on----"
The tower shook in terror of the gale, and we shook with it, in terror
of this revelation. My thoughts turned toward the woman below, who had
smiled at us from that aura of physical resplendency. I felt my hair
rising, and heard a voice, my own, cry out: "No, no!"
"Yes!" Antonio shouted, fixing his hands upon my arms. We were both
standing, and our leaping shadows on the wall resembled a combat in
which one was struggling to force insanity upon the other. He went on
speaking, but his words were drowned in a screaming of vast forces that
clutched at the tower as if in fury because the normal processes of
nature had been defied. Would those forces attain their revenge? Was the
tower about to thunder down upon the Castle of Manzecca, annihilating
her and us, the secret and its possessors? For a moment I would have
welcomed even that escape from thinking.
"Yes," he repeated, releasing my arms and sitting down limply on the
bench. "As you anticipate, so it turned out."