To cheer his rare moments of repose, he had commerce only with married prostitutes, incontinent widows, shameless maids. But this always in great moderation, as in his machinations, Ferrante sometimes forewent an immediate reward if he felt attracted by another machination, for his villainy never gave him respite.
He lived, in short, day by day, like a murderer in motionless ambush behind an arras, where daggers’ blades do not glint. He knew that the first rule of success was to await opportunity, but he suffered because opportunity seemed still far off.
This grim, stubborn ambition deprived him of all inner peace. As he believed Roberto had usurped the place which was his by right, no success could appease him, and the only form that happiness and well-being could assume in the eyes of his spirit was his brother’s misfortune, and the day when he could be its author. Hazy, embattled giants swarmed in his head, for him there was no sea or land or sky that could afford him relief and calm. Everything that had offended him, everything he desired was a source of torment.
He never laughed if not in the tavern to urge drink on some unwitting accomplice. But in the secret of his room he examined himself every day in the glass, to see if the way he moved revealed his impatience, if his eye looked too insolent, if his head was inclined more than was proper, if it did not betray hesitation, or if the wrinkles, too deep on his brow, did not make him seem envenomed.
When he interrupted these exercises and, weary, laid aside his masks late in the night, he saw himself as he really was—ah, and then Roberto could not refrain from murmuring some verses he had read a few years earlier:
In those eyes where sadness dwells and death
Flaming light flares murky and bold scarlet,
Sidelong glances and averted eyes are comets; The lashes, lamps, wrathful, proud and desperate While thunder are the moans; and lightning, breath.
Inasmuch as no one is perfect, not even in evil, and Ferrante was not totally able to control the excess of his own villainy, he could not avoid making a misstep. Charged by his master to organize the abduction of a chaste maiden of high degree who was betrothed to a noble gentleman, Ferrante began by writing her love letters signed with the name of his employer. Then, when she drew back, he penetrated to her bedchamber, and made her the prey of a violent seduction and ravishment. In a single blow he had deceived her, her betrothed, and the man who had ordered the abduction.
After the crime was reported, Ferrante’s master was found guilty, then killed in a duel with the betrothed; but by this time Ferrante was on his way to France.
In a moment of good humor, Roberto caused Ferrante to attempt, on a January night, the crossing of the Pyrenees astride a stolen mule, which must have taken the vows of some order of reformist tertiaries, considering the monkish qualities it evinced, being so wise, sober, abstinent, and of upright life, that to emphasize the mortification of the flesh, clearly visible in the boniness of its ribs, it knelt down at every step and kissed the earth.
The steep mountainsides seemed laden with clotted milk, or plastered over with whitewash. The few trees not completely buried under the snow looked so white that they seemed to have stripped off their bark and were shaking more because of the cold than because of the wind. The sun was locked inside its palace and dared not even peer out on the balcony. And if it did show its face for an instant, it hid its nose in a cowl of clouds.
The few wayfarers encountered on that path seemed so many Monteoliveto friars in procession singing Lavabis me et super nivem dealbabor…. And Ferrante, seeing himself so white, felt transformed into one dusted by the Divine Baker with the flour of virtue.
One night, tufts of cotton fell from Heaven, so thick and big that, as someone else once became a pillar of salt, Ferrante suspected he had become a pillar of snow. The owls, bats, grasshoppers, and moths made arabesques around him as if they wanted to catch him. In the end he struck his head against the feet of a hanged man who, swaying from a tree, made of himself a grisaille grotesque.
But Ferrante—though a Romance must be decked out with pleasant descriptions—could not be a figure in a comedy. He had to head for his goal, imagining to his own measure the Paris he was approaching.
Whence he yearned: “O Paris, boundless gulf in which whales shrink to dolphins, land of sirens, emporium of vanities, garden of satisfactions, maze of intrigues, Nile of courtiers, and ocean of deception!”
Here, wishing to invent a passage that no author of novels had yet conceived, to portray the feelings of that greedy youth preparing to conquer the city that was a compendium of Europe’s civility, Asia’s profusion, Africa’s extravagance, and America’s riches, where novelty had its realm, deceit its palace, luxury its center, courage its arena, beauty its hemicycle, fashion its cradle, and virtue its grave, Roberto put into Ferrante’s mouth an arrogant cry: “Paris, a nous deux!”
From Gascony to Poitou, beyond the lie de France, Ferrante had occasion to carry out a few bold strokes that allowed him to transfer a modest capital from the pockets of some gulls into his own, and thus he arrived at the capital in the garb of a young gentleman, reserved and pleasant, Signor del Pozzo. Since no news had reached there of his knaveries in Madrid, he presented himself to some Spaniards close to the Queen, who immediately appreciated his ability to render discreet services for a sovereign who, while faithful to her husband and apparently respectful of the Cardinal, maintained relations with the enemy court.
His reputation as a reliable executant reached the ears of Richelieu, who, a profound scholar of the human spirit, decided that a man without scruples who served the Queen and was notoriously short of money, if offered a richer reward, would serve him, and he began employing Ferrante, so secretly that not even the Cardinal’s intimates were aware of that young agent’s existence.
Apart from his long practice in Madrid, Ferrante had the rare gift of learning languages easily and imitating accents. It was not his habit to boast of his talents, but one day when Richelieu received, in his presence, an English spy, Ferrante demonstrated that he could converse with the traitor. Whereupon Richelieu, in one of the most difficult moments in the relations between France and England, sent the youth to London, where he was to pretend he was a Maltese merchant while gathering information about the movement of ships in the ports.
Now Ferrante had made a part of his dream come true: he was a spy, no longer in the pay of just any gentleman but of a Biblical Leviathan whose arms extended everywhere.
Espionage (Roberto was shocked and terrified), the most contagious plague of courts, harpy that swoops down on the royal table with rouged face and hooked claws, flying on bat-wings and listening with ears endowed with great tympana, an owl that sees only in the dark, a viper among roses, cockroach on flowers converting into venom the juice it sips at its sweetest, spider of antechambers weaving the strands of its subtle talk to catch every passing fly, parrot with curved beak reporting everything it hears, transforming truth into falsehood and falsehood into truth, chameleon that receives every color and dresses in all save the one that is its true garb. All qualities of which anyone would be ashamed, save the one who by divine (or infernal) decree is born to the service of evil.
But Ferrante was not content simply to be a spy and have in his power those whose thoughts he reported; he wanted to be, as they said at that time, a double spy, who like the monster of legend could walk in two opposing directions. If the arena where the Powers contend can be a maze of intrigues, who in that maze is the Minotaur who represents the union of both combatant natures? The double spy. If the field on which the battle between Courts is played out can be called an Inferno where in the bed of Ingratitude flows with rapid flood the Phlegethon of oblivion, and where the murky water of Passion boils, who is the three-throated Cerberus who barks after discovering and sniffing those who enter there to be torn apart? The double spy…
Once arrived in England, while spying for Richelieu, Ferrante decided to enrich himself by also doing the English some service. Wresting information from hirelings and petty functionaries over great mugs of beer in rooms smoky with mutton grease, he introduced himself into ecclesiastical circles as a Spanish priest determined to abandon the Roman Church, whose foul deeds he could bear no longer.
Music to the ears of the antipapists eager for any opportunity to document the turpitude of the Catholic clergy. And there was no need even for Ferrante to confess what he did not know. The English already had in their hands the anonymous confession, presumed or real, of another priest. Ferrante then confirmed
