Sandor Marai - Casanova in Bolzano

The man lying on the bed asleep, his arms and legs spread-eagled, was not handsome. Teresa compared him to Giuseppe the barber: now Giuseppe was clearly handsome, rosy cheeked, with soft lips and blue eyes like a girl. He often called at The Stag and always closed his eyes and blushed when Teresa addressed him. And the Viennese captain who spent the summers here: he was handsome too with his wavy, pomaded hair and the moustache he twisted into sharp points. He wore a fine satchel beside his broad sword, stomped about in boots, and spoke an unintelligible language that sounded utterly alien and savage to her ears. Later somebody told her that this savage tongue spoken by the captain was Hungarian or possibly Turkish. Teresa couldn’t remember. And the prelate was a handsome man, too, with his white hair and yellow hands, with that scarlet sash around his waist and the lilac cap on his pale head. Teresa had, she thought, a working appreciation of male beauty. This man was most certainly not beautiful, no, rather ugly in fact, quite different from other men who normally appealed to ladies. The lines on the sleeping stranger’s unshaved face looked hard and contemptuous, confirming an impression she had formed the previous evening. The cramps and tugs of indignation had tightened the muscles around his mouth. Suddenly he grunted in his sleep, and Teresa leaped away from the door, moved to the window, opened the shutters, and gave a signal with her mop.

It was because the women wanted to see him, those women in the fruit market, just in front of The Stag, and Teresa had promised the flower girls, Lucia and Gretel, old Helena the fruit vendor, and the melancholy widow Nanette, who sold crocheted stockings, that she would, if she could, let them into the room and allow them to look through the keyhole at him. They wanted to see him at all costs. The fruit market was particularly busy this morning and the apothecary stood in the doorway of his shop opposite The Stag holding a long conversation with Balbi the secretary, plying him with spirits flambé in the hope of discovering ever more details of the escape. The mayor, the doctor, the tax collector, and the captain of the town all dropped in at the apothecary’s that morning to listen to Balbi, glancing up at the shuttered windows on the first floor of The Stag, all excited and more than a little confused in their behavior, as if unable to decide whether to celebrate the advent of the stranger with torchlight processions and night music or to send him packing, the way the dogcatcher grabs and dispatches hounds suspected of mange or rabies. They could come to no conclusion on this matter, either that morning or in the following days. And so they waited at the apothecary’s, chattering and listening to Balbi, who was literally swelling with pride and passion as he gave a series of wildly different accounts of the great exploit, which hourly was being furnished with the ever-new apparatus and detail of heroic verse; and all the while they stood, their eyes darting toward The Stag with its closed shutters, or walked up and down among the fruit stalls and delicacies of the surrounding shops, acting, on the whole, in a somewhat nervous fashion, displaying as much anxiety and confusion as might be expected of respectable citizens who are responsible for the security of the town gates, for putting out fires, for the maintenance of water supplies, and for the defense of the town in case of attack by hostile forces, not knowing, all the while, whether to gag with laughter or to call the police. And so they walked and talked till noon, still lost for a plan. Then the women began to pack their stalls away and respectable citizens went off to lunch.

It was now that the stranger woke. Teresa had let the women into the darkened parlor. “Show us… what is he like?” the women whispered, screwing up the corners of their aprons and cramming their fists in their mouths; and so they stood in a half circle by the door that led into the bedchamber. They were pleasantly frightened, some on the point of screeching with laughter, as if someone were tickling their waists. Teresa put her finger to her lips. First she took the hand of Lucia, the hazel-eyed, plump Venus of the marketplace, and led her to the door. Lucia squatted down, her skirt billowing out like a bell on the floor, put her left eye to the keyhole, then, blushing, gave a faint scream and crossed herself. “What did you see?” they asked her, whispering, and gathered round her with a peculiar flapping like rooks settling on a branch.

The hazel-eyed beauty thought about it.

“A man,” she said in a faint and nervous voice.

It was a moment before they could take this in. There was something idiotic, strange, and fearsome in the answer. “A man, dear God!” they thought and cast their eyes to the ceiling, not knowing whether to laugh or run away. “A man, well, would you believe it!” said Gretel. The ancient Helena clapped her hands together in a faintly pious gesture and mumbled meekly through her toothless gums: “A man!” And the widow Nanette stared at the floor as if recalling something, and solemnly echoed: “A man.” So they mused, then started giggling, and one by one took their turn to kneel at the keyhole and take a peek into the room, and felt unaccountably good about it all. Ideally, they would have brewed up some decent coffee and sat down round the gilt-legged table with coffee mugs in their laps, waiting in a ceremonial and gently impudent manner for the foreign gentleman to walk in. Their hearts beat fast: they felt proud of having seen the stranger and of having something to talk about in town, at the market, round the well, and at home. They were proud but a touch anxious, particularly the widow Nanette and the inquisitive Lucia, and even the proud, somewhat dim Gretel felt a little nervous, as if there were something miraculous and extraordinary about the arrival in town of “a man.” They knew there was something foolish and irrational about their heightened, coltish curiosity, but, at the same time, they sensed that this improper curiosity did not account for the whole feeling of excitement. It was as if finally, albeit only through the keyhole, they had actually seen a man, and that husbands, lovers, and all the strange men they had ever met, had, in that moment of glimpsing the sleeping figure, undergone a peculiar reappraisal. It was as if it were utterly unusual and somehow freakish to find a man that was ugly rather than handsome, whose features were unrefined, whose body was unheroic, about whom they knew nothing except that he was a rogue, a frequenter of inns and gambling dens, that he was without luggage and that there was something dubious even about his name, as if it were not really or entirely his own; a man about whom it was said, as of many a womanizer, that he was bold, impudent, and relaxed in the company of women: as if all this, despite all appearances, was in some way extraordinary. They were women: they felt something. Faced, as they were, with the mysterious stranger, it was as if the men they had known were coming out in their true colors. “A man,” whispered Lucia, faint, anxious, and devout, and they felt the news taking wing across the market in Bolzano to the drawing rooms of Triente, through the greenrooms of theaters, through confessional booths, quickening heartbeats, telling all and sundry that he was on his way, that at this very moment a man was waking, stretching, and scratching in a room of The Stag Inn in Bolzano. “Can a man be such an extraordinary phenomenon?” asked the ladies of Bolzano in the depths of their hearts. They did not say as much, of course, but they felt it. And a single heartbeat, a heartbeat impossible to misconstrue, answered: “Yes. Most extraordinary.”

For men — or so, in that moment, however mysteriously, their beating hearts told them — were fathers, husbands, and lovers who enjoyed behaving in a manly fashion: they jangled their swords like gallants and paraded their titles, rank, and wealth, chasing every skirt in sight; this was the way they were in Bolzano and elsewhere, too, if stories were to be believed. But this man’s reputation was different. Men liked to act in a superior manner, bragging, sometimes almost crowing with vanity: they were as ridiculous as roosters. Under their display, though, most of them were melancholy and childish, now simple, now greedy, now dull and insensitive. What Lucia had said was true, the women felt: here was a man who was genuinely, most resolutely a man, just that and no more, the way an oak tree is just an oak tree and a rock is simply a rock. They understood this and stared at each other wide-eyed, their mouths half-open, their thoughts troubled. They understood because Lucia had said it, because they had seen it with their own eyes, and because the room, the house, and the whole town were tense with an excitement that emanated from the stranger; they understood, in short, that a genuine man was as unusual a phenomenon as a genuine woman. A man who is not trying to prove anything by raising his voice or rattling his sword, who does not crow, who asks no favors except those he himself can grant, who does not look to women for either friendship or maternal comfort, who has no wish to hide in love’s embrace or behind women’s skirts; a man who is only interested in buying and selling, without hustling or greed, because every atom of his being, every nerve, every spark of his spirit and every muscle of his body, is devoted to the power that is life: that kind of man is indeed the rarest of creatures. For there were mummy’s boys and men with soft hands, and there were loud and boastful men whose voices had grown hoarse declaiming their feelings to women, and there were vulgar, oafish, and panting kinds of men — none of whom were as real as this. There were the handsome, who cared less for women than for their own beauty and success. And there were the merciless, who stalked women as though they were enemies, their smiles sticky as honey, who carried knives beneath cloaks wide and capacious enough to hide a pig. And then occasionally, very occasionally, there was just a man. And now they understood the reputation that preceded him and the anxiety that had spread through town: they rubbed their eyes, they sighed, their breath came in shallow gasps, and their hands flew to their breasts. Then Lucia gave a scream and they all backed away from the door. For the door had opened and behind the great white panels stood the low, tousled, unshaven, slightly stiff figure of the stranger, his eyes blinking, somewhat inflamed in the strong light, his whole body bent over as if exhausted but ready to leap.