“Why do you weep, Pino?” asked Angelo.
“Oh, my friend, weep with me,” Pino answered. “I have loved since last we met.”
“Loved?” Angelo repeated, slowly and with astonishment, as if he were repeating a word of a foreign tongue.
“Oh, loved, loved!” cried Pino. “Life’s sorest pain has penetrated and torn asunder even this heart of mine. A woman, radiant, triumphant like a song, smiled upon me—and went away again!”
“Life’s sorest pain?” Angelo repeated as before.
“She was a great lady traveling from England,” said Pino. “Three years ago, in Venice, as she got into her gondola, she gave me such a deep, friendly, animated glance, such a goddess glance, that thereby heaven came down and walked on earth! I followed her, we met again, and each time her eyes gave me the same greeting out of her soul’s inexhaustible riches. Once she spoke to me. She was tall like a statue, she wore a silk robe that rustled gently, her hair was like red-golden silk!”
Pizzuti raised his right hand to the sky. “But I,” he cried out, “I lack these my three fingers, and will nevermore make my puppets dance! When she had gone away, the world was a void—and yet how full of pain! I had just one thing left to me in my infinite destitution: to talk with somebody who might possibly, just once in the course of the day, speak her name. I remained in Venice for two years, solely to sit with her gondolier, a plebeian who could neither sing nor play, hoping for this: that he would pronounce her name, as if waiting for sweet music to come from his lips. But he married, and his wife forbade me her house. O Angelo Santasilia—all life that I have in me consumes itself!”
Pino let his head fall onto his breast; tears poured down his face onto his greasy black cloak.
“You must not let that worry you,” said Angelo. “It is a good thing to have a great sorrow. Or should human beings allow Christ to have died on the cross for the sake of our toothaches?”
After a while he continued: “Tell me her name, Pino. Then you will stay on in my house, and I will speak it once a day.”
Pino closed his eyes, made two attempts to speak, but remained silent. He whispered, “I cannot.”
Lucrezia’s red-cheeked maid came from the house, smiling, with a tray containing wine, cheese and bread, and a cold chicken. Angelo poured out wine to his friend and to himself. The old wanderer was obviously hungry, yet he ate and drank slowly, as now he did everything.
“And you, Angelo,” he said, “how have things gone with you?”
It was now Angelo’s turn to report on his life in the seven years that had gone. He told Pino of the works he had completed since they had seen each other, and of the large orders he received from princes and cardinals, of the pupils who flocked to his school and of his children. When he stopped, Pino’s gaze met his, and for some time they sat thus in silence. It seemed strange to Angelo to be sitting again with Pizzuti.
“Yes, you see, Pino,” he at length said slowly. “All this—art, a lovely wife, beautiful children, renown, friends, wealth—all this will constitute a man’s happiness, my happy life. But you know that there be rivers which at one place in their course disappear into the ground and run beneath it for a couple of miles. Woods and rose gardens grow in this ground, but beneath them runs the river. In that same way a river is running beneath my happiness, and only to you can I speak of it. That river is the secret which Lucrezia bears and keeps from me. For I do not know what happened on the night when I was hostage for Leonidas Allori in prison.
“She has never spoken of it. Many times I have waited for a word from her lips which would solve the riddle. On our wedding night I waited for it—and the river ran deep below our bridal bed. One day when we walked together along the seashore, and there was an offshore wind, and she gazed at me, I waited for it. But she has never spoken, her full sweet lips have always been sealed over the secret. While I was still young, I felt that I might have to kill her if she continued to keep silent.
“But I have reflected,” he went on, “that I have no claims on her. For the entire being of a woman is a secret, which should be kept. And one more deep secret to her becomes part of it, one charm more, a hidden treasure. It is said that the tree under which a murderer buries his victim will die, but the apple tree under which a girl buries her murdered child does blossom more richly and does give more perfect fruit than others—the tree transforms the hidden crime into white and rosy, and into delicious flavor. I must not expect her to part with this secret either.”
He gazed out over the valley.
“And I have further thought,” he said, “that in the moment when at last I should be asking Lucrezia, ‘Tell me, for I suffer, what happened that night that Leonidas Allori came to you, in the house of the vintager, in the mountains? Did the master learn, then, that you and I had betrayed him?’ she would turn her face toward me, her clear eyes dark with sorrow, and answer me: ‘So you have known that your master went to the vintager’s house in the mountains, and you have never told me that you knew! For seven years, day and night, you have hidden your knowledge from me, and even my kisses have not been able to make you speak!’ Maybe, after that, she would leave me forever. Or again, maybe she would still stay with me for the sake of the children, and because my great fame gives her pleasure. But she would never again be my happy, smiling wife.
“And I have come to understand that she would be in the right. For in the mind and nature of a man a secret is an ugly thing, like a hidden physical defect. And thus,” he finished, “the river runs beneath my life.”
Pino remained silent for a while, glanced at his friend and then gazed at the mountains. “And how goes it?” he asked. “Can you sleep now?”
“Sleep?” Angelo repeated, as before, as if from its sound he was repeating a word from another language, “Aye, do you remember when I could not sleep? Yes, thanks, now I can sleep.”
Again there was a silence.
“No,” Pino said suddenly, “you are mistaken, and things are not as you imagine. I happen to know. A person who—because of you—did have this matter at heart, might—for your sake—ask Lucrezia, ‘What happened the night your lover pledged his life for your husband? Did the great artist then get to know that you two, whom he had held dearest of all, and whose hearts and fates he had directed as by strings on his fingers, had betrayed him? Did the blow then break his great heart? Or did he stand up to it, even if staggering, trusting to the law of the golden section?’ She would then look up at the inquirer, her eyes so clear that he would be ashamed to doubt even for a moment the truth of her words, and answer him, ‘I am very sorry that I cannot tell you. But I do not remember. I have forgotten.’”
“Do you mean to tell me,” Angelo asked in a low voice, “that you have asked her?”
“I have seen your wife for the first time today,” answered Pino. “But you forget that I have once written marionette plays. I had then a lovely puppet, the jeune première of my theater, with rosy cheeks and white bosom, and with eyes of clear dark glass, who resembled Lucrezia.”
When after a pause the old man again looked at Angelo, he noticed that he was smiling a little. “What are you thinking of, Angelo?” he asked.
“I was thinking of those small instruments that we call words, and by which we have to manage in this life of ours. I was thinking of how, by interchanging two everyday words in an everyday sentence, we alter our world. For when you had spoken, I first thought, ‘Is that possible?’—then secondly, after a moment, ‘That is possible.’”
They now for some time talked of other things, and to give Giuseppino pleasure, Angelo made him tell of his marionette theater. But from time to time the smile left the face of the old theater director, and he sank back into melancholy.
“But listen now, Pino,” said his friend. “Today your