To love in the Land of Romances does not mean experiencing any jealousy at all: there, that which is not ours is still somehow ours, and that which in this world was ours and was stolen from us, there does not exist— even if what does exist there resembles what in existence we lost or did not lose.
So, then, Roberto would write (or conceive) the story of Ferrante and of his loves with Lilia, and only by constructing that fictional world would Roberto forget the gnawing of his jealousy in the real world.
Further, he reasoned, to understand what happened to me and how I fell into the trap set by Mazarin, I must reconstruct the History of those events, finding the causes, the secret motives. But is there anything more uncertain than the Histories we read, wherein if two authors tell of the same battle, such are the incongruities revealed that we are inclined to think they write of two different conflicts? On the other hand, is there anything more certain than a work of fiction, where at the end every Enigma finds its explanation according to the laws of the Realistic? The Romance perhaps tells of things that did not really happen, but they could very well have happened. To explain my misadventures in the form of a Novel means assuring myself that in all the muddle there exists at least one way of untangling the knot, and therefore I am not the victim of a nightmare. An Idea insidiously antithetical to the first, for in this way the invented story will be superimposed on the true story.
And finally, Roberto continued to argue, mine is the tale of love for a woman: now, only stories, and surely not History, deal with questions of Love, and only stories (never History) are concerned with explaining the thoughts and feelings of those daughters of Eve who from the days of the Earthly Paradise to the Inferno of the Courts of our time have always so influenced the events of our species.
All reasonable arguments when considered individually, but not when taken together. In fact, there is a difference between a man who writes a story and one who suffers jealousy. A jealous man enjoys picturing what he wishes would not happen—but at the same time he refuses to believe that it can happen—whereas a storyteller resorts to every artifice to see not only that the reader enjoys imagining what has not happened but also that at a certain point he forgets that he is reading and believes it really did happen. It is a source of the most intense suffering for a jealous man to read a story written by another, because whatever is said seems to refer to his personal story. So imagine a jealous man who pretends to invent the story that is his own. Is it not said of the jealous that they give body to shadows? So, however shadowy the creatures of a romance may be, as the Romance is a full brother to History, those shadows appear too corporeal to the jealous man, and even more so if they are his own.
On the other hand, for all their virtues, romances have their defects, which Roberto should have known. As medicine teaches also about poisons, metaphysics disturbs with inopportune subtleties the dogmata of religion, ethics recommends magnificence (which is not of help to everyone), astrology fosters superstition, optics deceives, music rouses lust, geometry encourages unjust dominion, and mathematics avarice—so the Art of the Romance, though warning us that it is providing fictions, opens a door into the Palace of Absurdity, and when we have lightly stepped inside, slams it shut behind us.
But it is not in our power to keep Roberto from taking this step, since we know for sure that he took it.
CHAPTER 29, The Soul of Ferrante
AT WHAT POINT should he take up the story of Ferrante? Roberto considered it best to begin from that day when Ferrante, having betrayed the French, on whose side he was pretending to fight at Casale, passing himself off as Captain Gambero, sought refuge in the Spanish camp.
Perhaps he was received with enthusiasm there by some great gentleman who had promised to take him, at the war’s end, to Madrid. And in that city Ferrante’s rise began, at the outer edge of the Spanish court, where he learned that the virtue of sovereigns is their caprice, and Power is an insatiable monster, to be served with slavish devotion in order to snatch every crumb falling from that table. Ferrante was able to make a slow and rough ascent—first as henchman, assassin, and confidant, then as a bogus gentleman.
He could not help but be of lively intelligence, even when constrained to villainy, and in that environment he immediately learned how to behave. He therefore heard (or guessed) those principles of courtesan education in which Senor de Salazar had tried to catechize Roberto.
Ferrante cultivated his own mediocrity (the baseness of his bastard origins), not fearing to be eminent in mediocre things, so as to avoid one day being mediocre in eminent things.
He understood that when you cannot wear the skin of the lion, you wear that of the fox, for after the Flood more foxes were saved than lions. Every creature has its own wisdom, and from the fox he learned that playing openly achieves neither the useful nor the pleasurable.
If he was invited to spread a slander among the domestics so that gradually it would reach the ears of their master, and he enjoyed the favors of a chambermaid, he would promptly say that he would plant the lie at the tavern with the coachman; or, if the coachman was his companion in debauchery at the tavern, he would affirm with a smile of complicity that he knew how to win the ear of a certain chambermaid. Ignorant of how he acted or how he would act, his master lost a point to him, for Ferrante knew that the man who does not show his cards leaves his adversary in suspense, and that such mystery inspires respect in others.
In eliminating his enemies, who at the beginning were pages and grooms, then gentlemen who believed him their peer, he understood that he had to aim obliquely, never directly: wisdom fights with carefully studied subterfuges and never acts in the predictable fashion. If he hinted at a movement, it was only to deceive; if he dextrously sketched a gesture in the air, he then behaved in a manner that contradicted the displayed intention. He never attacked when his adversary was at the peak of his strength (he made a show, instead, of friendship and respect for him), but only at the moment when the man appeared helpless. Ferrante then led him to the precipice with the air of one rushing to his aid.
He lied often but never pointlessly. He knew that to be believed he had to make everyone see that sometimes he told the truth to his own disadvantage, and kept silent when the truth might win him praise. On the other hand, he tried to gain the reputation of a man sincere with his inferiors, so that their words would reach the ears of the powerful. He became convinced that to simulate with one’s equals is a fault, but not to simulate with one’s superiors is foolhardiness.
Still he did not act too frankly, and in any case not always frankly, fearing that others would become aware of his patterns and one day anticipate him. Nor did he exaggerate in his duplicity, lest it be discovered a second time.
To become wise he trained himself to tolerate the foolish, and he surrounded himself with them. He was not so imprudent as to attribute to them all his errors, but when the stakes were high, he made sure that beside him there was always a straw man (impelled by vain ambition to be seen always in front, while Ferrante remained in the background), whom not Ferrante but others would then hold responsible for any misdeed. In short, he appeared to do everything that could redound to his credit, but arranged for another hand to do whatever might earn him a grudge.
In displaying his own virtues (which we would better call diabolical talents) he knew that a half displayed and a half barely glimpsed are worth more than a whole openly asserted. At times he made ostentation consist of mute eloquence, in a heedless show of his own excellences, and he had the ability never to reveal all of himself at once.
As his position gradually rose and he had to measure himself against those of superior station, he became very able in mimicking their gestures and their language, but he did so only before persons of inferior condition whom he had to charm for some illicit end; with his betters he took care to make his ignorance evident, while seeming to admire in them what he already knew.
He carried out every unsavory mission that his patrons entrusted to him, but only if the evil he did was not of such dimensions as to inspire their revulsion; if they asked of him crimes too great, he refused, first to prevent their thinking he might one day be capable of doing as much to them, and secondly (if the sin cried to Heaven for vengeance) so as not to become the undesired witness of their remorse.
In public he openly manifested
