Some hopes, some sorties, and the game of the reciprocal destruction of tunnels: thus the indolent siege progressed.
While waiting for the negotiations or for the relief army, the bellicose spirits grew calmer. Some Casalesi decided to go outside of the walls to harvest those fields of wheat spared by horses and wagons, heedless of the weary musket fire from the distant Spaniards. But not all were unarmed: Roberto saw a young peasant woman, tall and tawny, who at intervals interrupted her work with the sickle, crouched among the rows of grain, and raised a culiver, holding it like a veteran soldier, pressing the butt against her red cheek, to fire at the troublemakers.
The Spaniards, irked by the shots of that warrior Ceres, returned fire, and a ball grazed the girl’s wrist. Bleeding now, she fell back, but did not cease firing or shouting at the enemy. When she was finally almost below the walls, some Spaniards apostrophized her: “Puta de los franceses!” To which she replied, “Yes, I’m the Frenchmen’s whore, but I’m not yours!”
That virginal figure, that quintessence of ripe beauty and martial fury, joined to the hint of shamelessness with which the insult had crowned her, kindled the boy’s senses.
That day he combed the streets of Casale, eager to renew the vision: he questioned the peasants, learned that the girl’s name according to some was Anna Maria Novarese, according to others Francesca, and in one tavern they told him she was twenty, she came from the country, and was carrying on with a French soldier. “She’s a good girl, that Francesca, a very good girl,” they said with a knowing leer, and to Roberto his beloved seemed all the more desirable as she was again praised in licentious tones.
A few evenings later, passing a house, he glimpsed her in a dark room on the ground floor. To enjoy the faint breeze that barely mitigated the Monferrino sultriness, she was seated at the window, in the light of an unseen lamp placed near the sill. At first he failed to recognize her because her lovely hair was wound around her head; just two locks escaped, falling over her ears. Only her face could be seen: bent slightly, a single, pure oval beaded with a few drops of sweat, it seemed the real lamp in that penumbra.
At a little low table she was occupied with some sewing, on which her intent gaze rested, so she did not notice the youth, who stepped back to peer at her from a corner, crouching against the wall. His heart pounding in his breast, Roberto noticed that her lip was shaded by blond down. Suddenly she raised a hand even more luminous than her face, to hold a length of dark thread to her mouth: placing it between her red lips, she bared her white teeth, severing it with one bite, the act of a gentle animal happily smiling in her domestic cruelty.
Roberto could have remained there all night; he barely breathed, in his fear of being discovered and in the ardor that froze him. But after a while the girl blew out the lamp, and the vision was dissolved.
He passed along that street in the days that followed, not seeing her again, save once, and even then he was not sure, because she, if it was she, sat with her head bowed, her nape bare and rosy, a cascade of hair covering her face. An older woman stood behind her, navigating through those leonine waves with a shepherdess’s comb, which she sometimes laid aside to seize with her fingers a little fleeing creature, which her nails snapped with a sharp click.
Roberto, no novice to the rites of delousing, discovered however its beauty for the first time, and he imagined being able to plunge his hands into those silken waves, to kiss those furrows, being himself the destroyer of those bands of infesting myrmidons.
He had to move away from the enchantment because of the arrival of some noisy rabble in that street, and this was the last time that window offered him an amorous tableau.
On other afternoons and other evenings he saw the older woman there, and another girl, but not his. He concluded this was not her house, but the woman’s, a relative, to whom she went occasionally to perform some chore. Where she was for days, he no longer knew.
An amorous yearning is a liquor that becomes stronger when decanted into a friend’s ear. While he fruitlessly scoured Casale and became thin in his search, Roberto was unable to hide his condition from Saint-Savin. He revealed it out of vanity, for every lover bedecks himself with the beauty of his beloved—and of this beauty Roberto was certain.
“Love her, then,” Saint-Savin responded negligently. “It is nothing new. It seems humans derive pleasure from it, unlike animals.”
“Animals do not love?”
“No, simple machines do not love. The wheels of a wagon, what is it they do along a slope? They roll towards the bottom. The machine is a weight, and the weight hangs, dependent on the blind need that impels it downwards. So it is with an animal: it is weighted towards intercourse and is not appeased until it has had it.”
“But did you not tell me yesterday that men are machines?”
“True, but the human machine is more complex than the mineral and the animal, and it enjoys an oscillatory motion.”
“So?”
“So you love, and therefore you desire and do not desire. Love makes us the enemy of ourselves. You fear that attaining your end will disappoint you. You have pleasure in limine, as the theologians put it, you enjoy delay.”
“That’s not so. I … I want her at once!”
“If that were the case, you would be still only a rustic. But you have wit. If you wanted her, you would already have taken her—and you would be a beast. No, you want your desire to be set aflame, and you want hers to be stirred as well. If her desire were to blaze to such a degree that she was impelled to surrender herself to you at once, probably you would no longer want her. Love flourishes in expectation. Expectation strolls through the spacious fields of Time towards Opportunity.”
“But what am I to do in the meantime?”
“Court her.”
“But … she knows nothing yet, and I must confess I have difficulty approaching her….”
“Write her a letter and tell her of your love.”
“But I have never written a love-letter! Indeed, I am ashamed to say, I have never written any letter.”
“When nature fails, we turn to art. I will dictate to you. A gentleman often enjoys writing letters to a lady he has never seen, and I am equal to the task. As I do not love, I can speak of love better than you, who are struck dumb by love.”
“But I believe each person loves in a different way…. It would be artificial.”
“If you revealed your love to her in tones of sincerity, you would seem awkward.”
“But I would tell her the truth….”
“The truth is a young maiden as modest as she is beautiful, and therefore she is always seen cloaked.”
“But I want to tell her of my love, not of the love you would describe!”
“Well, if you would be believed, feign. There is no perfection without the splendor of machination.”
“But she would understand that the letter is not speaking of her.”
“Never fear. She will believe that what I dictate to you was made to her measure. Come now, sit down and write. Just allow me to summon my inspiration.”
Saint-Savin moved about the room as if, Roberto tells us, he were imitating the flight of a bee returning to the honeycomb. He was almost dancing, his eyes restless; he seemed to read in the air the message that did not yet exist.
Then he began: “My lady…”
“Lady?”
“Well, how would you address her? Perhaps: Holà, little hussy of
Casale?”
“Puta de los franceses,” Roberto couldn’t help murmuring, alarmed as Saint-Savin had in jest come so close, if not to the truth, at least to the insult.
“What did you say?”
“Nothing. Very well. Lady. Then what?”
“My lady, in the wondrous architecture of the Universe, it has been written since the natal day of Creation that I would encounter you and love you. But with the first line of this letter, I feel that my soul has already so poured forth that it will abandon my lips and my pen before this is concluded.”
“…concluded. But I don’t know if that will be comprehensible to a—”
“The truth is all the more appreciated when it is barbed with difficulties, and a revelation is more respected if it has cost us dearly. Let us raise the tone, in fact. Let us say then: My lady…”
“Again?”
“Yes. Lady. For a woman beautiful as Alcidiana, an unassailable dwelling is without doubt necessary, as it was for that Heroine. And I believe that by enchantment you have been transported elsewhere and that your province has become a second Floating Island that the wind of my sighs causes to retreat as I attempt to advance, the province of the Antipodes, a land where ice-floes bar my approach. You look puzzled, La Grive: does it still seem commonplace to you?”
“No, the fact is … I would say quite the contrary.”
“Have no fear,” Saint-Savin said, misunderstanding, “there will be no lack of the counterpoint of contradictions. Let us proceed: Perhaps your charms entitle you to remain distant as is proper for the gods. But do you not know that the gods receive with favor at least the fumes of incense we burn to them here below?
