Part 2

The lady, who was seated at Francesco's left, remained silent for a time, as if she had needed to recollect herself and to master, before she spoke, some involuntary emotion. Then she undid the ties of her mask, threw it back upon her shoulder, and gazed at Francesco with that gentle and serious assurance that self-consciousness gives to elevated souls. It was Polia. Francesco trembled and felt a sudden shiver pass through all his veins, for he had expected nothing like this. Then he leaned his head and covered his eyes with his hand in the fear that it might be a kind of defilement for her to look at Polia so closely.

"This mask is useless," said Polia. "There is no reason for me to take advantage of the custom which allows me to keep it. Our friendship does not need it and its feelings are too pure for it to blush to express them. Do not be surprised, Francesco," she continued after a moment of silence, "to hear me speak of my friendship for you after so many days of rigorous constraint in which I may have given you grounds to doubt it. My sex is subject to certain laws of decorum which do not permit it to manifest its most legitimate sympathies to the interpretations of the crowd, and there is nothing more difficult than to feign to a correct extent an indifference one does not feel. Today I shall leave Venice, and although I am destined to live very near to you, it is quite probable that we will never see each other again. Henceforth there is no longer any possible way for us to communicate with each other than by memory, and I did not want to leave you with a false idea of me, or to take away of you an anxious and painful idea that would trouble my peace of mind. I have provided for the first eventuality by giving you an explanation that I thought I owed you. I expect from your sincerity that you will reassure me as to the second point by confiding in me, which is something that you owe to me perhaps. Don't be alarmed, Francesco. You yourself shall be the sole judge of whether my questions are appropriate or not."

Just before she had said this Francesco had opened his downcast eyes. He dared to look at Polia. He drank in her words avidly. "Ah!" he cried. "As God is my witness, my soul has no secret that does not belong to you."

"Your soul has a secret," replied Polia, "a secret that besets your friends and that certain people among those you love best may find it of use to fathom. Endowed with all the advantages that augur for a happy future: youth, ingenio, knowledge and already glory, you nonetheless abandon yourself to the languor of a mysterious sadness, you are consumed by a secret care, you neglect the works on which your reputation is based, you flee from a world that seeks you out in order to hide in almost opaque solitude days that so much success should make resplendent and, finally, if the rumours that are circulating are worthy of credence, you are on the point of breaking entirely with human society and retiring to a monastery. Is what I have just said to you true?"

Francesco seemed agitated by a thousand conflicting emotions. He needed a few moments to gather his strength. "Yes," he replied, "that is true. At least, all of it was true this morning. An event which has happened since has changed the course of my ideas without changing my resolutions. I will go to a monastery and my commitment is irrevocable, but I will go with a mind that is fully consoled and joyful, for my existence is complete and I cannot conceive of any other one so happy on earth that it would render me jealous. Born into obscurity and poverty, but stronger than my fate, I had only measured my unhappiness by the immensity of the void into which my heart had plunged. This void has been filled by the most delightful of hopes: you will remember me!"

Polia looked at him sweetly. "I want," she said, "not to see in your words a simple game of the imagination or one of those flattering condescensions of courtesy with which people think to have repaid friendship. It seems to me that this artificial language of the cold should not be applied to us. I therefore think that I begin to grasp a fraction of the things that you have said to me, with the exception of your resolve, but," she added smiling, "I do not understand them sufficiently."

"You shall understand them better," said Francesco, encouraged, "for I shall tell you everything. Forgive however the troubled nature and the lack of resolution in my words, for, of all the vicissitudes in my life, this is the most unexpected. The strange position into which I was born, without parents, without a guardian, almost without a friend, fallen from a great name and an independent fortune, would doubtless be enough to explain my natural melancholy. It's a cruel thing to say to yourself that your unhappiness started in the cradle and stayed with you the rest of your life. But that idea was the first I was able to be aware of. I had to acquit myself of the material debt of gratitude before I could think for a single moment of myself, and I do not need to tell you that I succeeded in that. From that time on my courage grew. I had few regrets for the grandeur and the opulence that had faded away forever. I went further. I congratulated myself sometimes, in my childish pride, on owing all my illustriousness to myself, and on being able one day to force the family that had rejected me to envy the celebrity of my once repudiated name. Such are the illusions of inexperience and vanity. One day was to destroy all and to recall me to misfortune and oblivion. Alas!" Francesco went on, "this is the mystery your overly benevolent curiosity has expressed the desire to know, and which reason made for me a law of keeping hidden in my breast. But how can I dare to reveal to you those sad and deep secrets of sick hearts that wisdom and philosophy regard as a puerile infirmity of the mind, and over which the elevation of your character keeps you too high for you to deign to bestow on them any other feeling apart from pity? I fell in love..."

Hereupon Francesco stopped for a time, but reassured by a look from Polia, he continued as follows:

"I loved without having thought about it, without appreciating the consequences of my extravagant passion, without fearing them for the future, for I lived completely in the impressions of the present. I loved a woman who would be universally recognizable were I to depict the rare qualities that she is clothed with, combining with beauty all the perfections of intelligence and soul, and that heaven seems only to have entrusted to earth to remind us of the ineffable joy of the condition we have lost. I loved her without remembering that she was, of all aristocrats, the noblest, of all the affluent, the most affluent and that I was only Francesco Colonna, the unknown pupil of Bellini, and that all my efforts to be happy in my work would only ever lead me to the acquisition of a sterile reputation. Such is the effect of that passion that dazzles, that blinds, that kills. When reflection had restored me to myself, when I had sounded with a frightened eye, with the bitter laughter of despair, the chasm towards which I had made so much headway without even knowing it, it was too late to go back: I was lost. The first thought of a wretch is to die. That thought is as commodious as it is natural because it answers all questions and remedies all inconveniences. But might not this desperate death, far from hastening to bring about the day when I may draw nearer to her in a better world, separate me from her forever? It was a totally new idea that held back my arm when it was ready to strike; I took in the future that my inability to endure a few days without her was going to deprive me of. I was painfully condemned to live without hope, but without fear, to reach that moment when two souls, freed from all the ties that have weighed down on them, look for each other, recognize each other and are then brought together for all time. I made of her I loved an object of worship my whole life long. I raised to her an inviolable altar in my heart and dedicated myself to her as an everlasting sacrifice. Can I say that, under my invincible sadness, this plan, once decided upon, was mingled with some joy? I grasped that this marriage, which started with widowhood to end up having, was perhaps preferable to ordinary marriages, which shatter on bad days. I no longer saw in the years that remained to me to spend among men anything other than a long engagement that death would crown with an eternal felicity. I felt the need to isolate myself from the world to recollect myself in a nevertheless delightful feeling of austerity that I would not have to share, and that is why I embraced the duties of the would-be monk. May God pardon his creature's weakness! The oath that will bind me to Him in three days' time is the oath that will bind me indissolubly to her I love and that will only give me rights over her in heaven. Allow me to repeat, by way of conclusion, that the accomplishment of this plan will now cost nothing to my resignation since a generous compassion has let me conceive of the hope of not being forgotten."

"In only three days!" exclaimed Polia. "In effect," she went on, "I have had too little time to reflect on the secret you have just confided in me to dare to form an opinion and even less a judgement, but it seems to me that if the woman for whom you resolved to do such things does not remain in ignorance of them as I was ignorant of them before now, she did not deserve to inspire them."

"She is ignorant of them," replied Francesco, "because she does not know that I love her. Oh! Without a doubt, my heart could have found ineffable consolations in the idea that my love was known to her, that she was not entirely insensitive to it, and that she might, at the very least, remember it with pity! Of all the torments of love, the most cruel perhaps is to remain an unknown quantity to the person one loves; of all the feelings one inspires that dull feeling of indifference for a stranger is perhaps the most painful that love has to fear. But why throw into a heart that is peaceful and happy pains that one is hardly capable of bearing oneself? Either my passion will be rejected, as I suppose, and what will I have gained from having this sad intuition confirmed, or it will be mutual and I will have to suffer for both of us. What am I saying: suffer for both of us? My despair is my life since I have found in myself enough strength to live with it. Hers would have killed me already."

"You take your suppositions too far, Francesco," Polia replied buoyantly. "Who can know if she does not feel the same sorrows and the same anguish as you do? Who can know if she does not aspire to find a moment to tell you that? What would you say if this noble and rich female whose shine dazzles you, but whose soul is probably no calmer than yours, what would you say, Francesco, if she came to offer you her hand freely, if, subject to a sway both respectable and inflexible, she came to promise it you in marriage?"

"What would I say, Polia?" Francesco answered with cold dignity, "I would refuse it. In order to dare love her I love, one needs to be to a certain extent worthy of her, and my most constant application has been to ennoble my soul so that it would be closer to hers. What right would I have to accept the perks of a high position that society denies me? With what impudence could I take my seat at the banquet of fortune, I who have only obscurity and misery as my prerogatives? Oh! I would a thousand times rather have the horrid sorrow that consumes me than the shameful reputation of an adventurer rebuffed by the world and made rich by love!"

"I had not finished," Polia broke in. "You are overscrupulous, but I understand your scruple and share it. The world as it goes demands odd sacrifices and one would perhaps be asked of you by reason of your character, but a character of the same calibre as yours might answer with a different sort of denial. Greatness and fortune are accidents of fate one can get rid of if one wants to. The artist and the poet are everywhere the same. Everywhere they have success and glory, but beyond an arm of the sea the woman who is rich and titled who has known how to shake off these vain privileges of birth is no more than a woman. If this woman came to say to you: I renounce my greatness, I abandon my fortune, I am ready to become even humbler and poorer than you, and to commit to your charge, as to my sole source of support, the whole of my life's destiny, what would you say to that, Francesco?"

"I would fall at her knees," said Francesco, "and answer thus: Heavenly angel, keep the rank and the advantages that heaven has conferred on you; you must be and stay what you are, and the wretch who would be capable of letting himself be carried along by this tender and sublime urge of your heart would never have deserved to occupy a place in it. He can no longer raise himself up to you except by constant resignation, easy for one who hopes, and especially for one who is loved. It is not I who would make you come down from the position in which God did not put you without a motive, in order to submit you to the varying fortunes of an anxious existence, poisoned by needs incessantly renewed, and perhaps one day by incurable regrets. My happiness is complete now. It exceeds all my hopes since you have granted to me all that you could take from the duties that your name imposes on you. You love me, I'd add, and you will always love me since you have not recoiled from resolving to give your life to mine. Your life, my beloved, I accept and take as a sacred pledge for which I will render an account before my Lord and Judge, for life is short, even for those who suffer, whatever weak hearts have to say about it. This earth is just a place of transit where souls come to be tested, and if your soul, as faithful as it is devoted, stays married to mine during the years that time still allows us, the whole of eternity is ours..."

Polia was silent for a time. "Yes! Yes!" she exclaimed exaltedly. "God has not instituted a holier or more inviolable sacrament. It is in this way that a love such as yours must have reconciled its hopes and its duties in a marriage of the heart that the rest of mankind does not know, and your heavenly spouse would speak to you as I speak to you if she had heard you."

"She has heard me, Polia," Francesco replied, letting his head at that moment fall into his hands with a torrent of tears.

"So," Polia went on, as if she had not understood the last words he had spoken, "you will assume in three days the habit of one of the religious orders to be found in Venice?"

"In Treviso," said Francesco. "I have not gone as far as to forbid myself the happiness of still seeing her sometimes."

"In Treviso, Francesco? There you only know me..."

"Only you!" said Francesco.

At that moment the hand of the young princess found itself joined to that of the young painter and the princess spoke. "We did not notice," she said smiling, "that the gondola was stopping and that it has already returned to the palazzo of the Pisani. Now we have nothing further to say to each other on earth. Our final farewell, however, is not without sweetness if we have understood each other correctly, and our first heavenly meeting will be even sweeter."

"Goodbye forever!" said Francesco.

"Goodbye for always!" said Polia. Then she re-attached her mask and got down from the gondola.

The following day Polia was in Treviso. Three days later they tolled at the monastery of the Dominicans that symbolic funeral knell which announces the profession of faith of a new postulant and his death to the world. Polia spent the day in her oratory.

Francesco acquiesced easily to his new destiny. Sometimes he looked back on his talk with Polia as a dream, but, more often, he went over the finest details of it with a childlike enthusiasm, and he went as far as to pat himself on the back for having given rise to, in his misery, a love that was oblivious to the ups and downs of fortune and of age. He accustomed himself after only a few days to divide his time between the duties of a religious and the leisured labour of an artist, at times painting those pure and naive frescos which may still be admired in the monastery of the Dominicans, though the cavalier arrogance of modern art has let them deteriorate, at times writing down in a book, the favourite object of his studies, all the impressions susceptible to him because of his talent and above all of his love. He had taken as the frame for this vast and bizarre work, in which he hoped to live again in his entirety, the somewhat vague form of a dream, and there could be nothing more apt, according to him, to represent, in its apparent disorder, the haphazard ideas of a solitary. We know that, due to one of the rare moments in which he was allowed to have a tender exchange of words with Polia, she had assured him that she would accept his dedication to her of this strange poem, and he tells us himself that she helped him with advice. So it was that he gave up completely the use of the vernacular Italian in which he had first thought out his plan and started it, and 'lasciando il princiniato stilo', he gave himself over to that scholarly language where there were neither models nor imitators for him and the words of which were furnished to his flowing quill by his erudite interest in ancient matters. A year went by in these sweet works mixed with sweet illusions, and Francesco had just put the finishing touches to his work, when the most distressing and heartbreaking news came through the walls where the Dominicans were. The young Antonio Grimani, later admiral and doge of Venice, but already the most brilliant of its nobles and its highest hope, had just asked for the hand of Polia in marriage, and, it was added, the hand of Polia had been granted to him.

It was the day that Francesco was to present his book to Polia. He stood up to the blow that had just struck him, went to her palazzo and stopped on the threshold of her apartment. "Come, my brother," said Polia when she saw him. "Come to communicate to us these secret wonders of your art, a true treasure that Christian humility refuses to the world, and which is to be confided only to us." At the same time she shooed away her women and her servants, and Francesco was alone with her.

His legs gave way under him, a cold sweat broke out on his brow, his arteries beat violently, his breast swelled fit to burst.

Polia raised her eyes from the manuscript to look at the monk. Francesco's pallor, the bloody halo girding his eyes worn out with crying, the shaking of his livid hands hanging loosely, revealed to her what was happening in the heart of her lover. She smiled proudly.

"You have heard," she said, "of my forthcoming marriage with prince Antonio Grimani?"

"Yes, madam," replied Francesco.

"And what did you think, Francesco, of this alliance?"

"That no man is worthy to contract such an alliance with you, but that the prince Antonio had more rights than anyone, and that the marriage appeared to be what Venice wanted... and what you yourself wanted. May it always bring you happiness!"

"I refused it this morning," said Polia.

Francesco looked at her as if to seek in Polia's eyes if her mouth had not betrayed her thought.

"You know better than anyone," Polia went on, "that I have pledged my troth elsewhere and that my decision to do so is irrevocable. But I must forgive your suspicions for yours is guaranteed by the oath that binds you to an altar and I have never given you a guarantee like that. Listen, Francesco. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the day you made your first vows, and it will be during the last morning mass that you will render them even more binding and more sacred by renewing them before the Lord. Have you, now a year has passed, changed your way of thinking about the nature of this sacrifice and the need for it?"

"No, no, Polia!" cried Francesco, falling to his knees.

"It is enough," continued Polia. "My thinking has not changed either. I shall be present tomorrow at the last morning mass, and I shall support with all the strength of my soul the vow that you will repeat then, so that henceforth you will know, Francesco, that between the heart of Polia and inconstancy there are also perjury and sacrilege."

Francesco tried to reply, but when the words came to his lips, Polia had disappeared.

The young monk found it almost as difficult to bear his joy as he did his misfortune. He felt that he no longer had enough strength to be happy, for the mainspring of his life, worn by so many conflicting emotions, had almost reached breaking point.

The following morning, at the final mass, when the monks entered the choir, Polia was sitting in her usual place, in the first row of benches set aside for the nobility. She got up and went to kneel in the middle of the pavement of the central nave.

Francesco had noticed her. He renewed his vows with an assured voice, went back down the altar steps, and prostrated himself on the floor. At the moment of the elevation of the host, he stretched out completely, throwing his crossed hands before his head.

Once mass was over, Polia left the church. The monks passed, one after the other, before the sanctuary, genuflecting deeply. But Francesco did not leave his position, and no-one was taken aback, for he had often been seen to prolong like this, in a motionless ecstasy, the duration of his prayer.

When the evening service came, Francesco had not changed his posture. A young friar came out of the choir stalls, approached him, bent down to him and took one of his hands in his, pulling his body towards him to recall it to its accustomed duties. Then he got up again, and, turning towards the assembled monks, said: "He's dead!"

This event, one of those which are so swiftly effaced in the collective memory of a new generation, had happened more than thirty-one years before when, on a winter evening in 1498, a gondola stopped in front of the shop of Aldo Pio Manucci, whom we refer to as the Elder. A moment later a visit from the princess Hippolita Polia of Treviso was announced in the study of the scholarly printer. Aldo ran to meet her, ushered her in, made her sit down, and was struck by admiration and respect for this celebrated beauty, whom half a century of life and sorrows had rendered more solemn, without taking anything away from her brilliance.