Authors: William Alexander Percy
Deposed, his honor gone, and Thaddeus slain,
There seemed no residue of misery
That he need blench at. Yet the worst impended.
This incarnator of uncarnate dreams
Had left for fate to pierce only his heart,
And men had thought that was invulnerable.
Men thought so: we knew better. But your eyes
Were spared the sight of it red-riven, smoking —
Would mine had been! They’d have less fear of sleep
Had not his sickness called me to Cremona.
He ailed, and none could find the seat of ailment,
So he exchanged a captive we had got
Of Parma for Pietro’s own physician who
Was there, a prisoner — the mutual gift
Made at da Vigna’s counsel, nay, his urgence.
I had not seen him since he spoke so clearly.
He’d been too late to speak out at the Conclave,
But heard the sentence, with some horror doubtless.
When his physician came and saw my father
Feeble with fever, twitching on the bedclothes,
Da Vigna was solicitous, but asked
Leave to depart the city that same day
About the empire’s business. Leave was granted,
For I was there to act in his behalf.
When he had gone, and with him the physician
To brew a sleeping potion for the night,
An Arab burst into the room, tottered,
Fell at my father’s bedside, gripped his shoulder,
And while swift tears of misery smeared his cheeks
Whispered in Arabic some broken message.
My father roused up with a choking cry,
Struck him across the face, and as he fell
Called for the guards to gag him and imprison;
Then fell back on his bed, sweat-cold and shaking.
“Let not da Vigna leave tonight,” he gasped.
“Be here with him at dark, and nothing said.”
The night came soon, though slowlier than night comes,
And found da Vigna, me, the Arab guards
Assembled in his chamber. It reeked of fever.
But, saying that his health was mended somewhat,
He sat half-dressed, though haggard as I thought,
And calm, except his eyes, blue-bright, unpausing.
Beside him was a table with his papers,
A rush-light, and his ruby-hilted broad-sword.
He was midway in giving us instructions
As to provisioning the eastern army,
When Pietro’s good physician padded in,
His hands about a bowl of sleeping draught.
My father smiled: “All sleep is good, but one
Is best. You mean me well?” “Master, with this,”
The leech replied, “you will sleep well till morning.”
“Which will break, doubtless, with a trumpet blast,”
My father sneered. “ ’Twill take as much to sain me.”
Then carelessly to Pietro, “We can trust him?”
Who was as careless in his clear-voiced answer,
“My life is almost hourly in his hands:
I’ve never found a cause to think him faithless.”
My father’s snake-arm struck and bit his sword-hilt,
His voice snarled through his nostrils at the leech:
“Then drink it half yourself.” The man shrank back,
Sick-green and speechless, horrible with fear.
The drink splashed in his hands, had fallen but
My father clutched it up half-full and called,
“Bring now the prisoner that prays for sleep,”
And instantly from some near room there walked
A blank-eyed prisoner between two Arabs.
My father held the bowl to him and said,
“Drink this, my friend; my hope is you will sleep.”
The man said not a word, but drank it down.
“Sirs,” my father turned to us, “sit down.
There’s patient waiting here for all of us.”
So we sat down; the man, too, that had drunk.
Bound in a common cataleptic coil,
Speechless, transfixed, we watched his poor meek face —
Our separate terrors wrestling with our wills
To burst out in a scream and break the nightmare.
At last his eyelids flickered, lowered, closed.
Our senses strained, each one an ear, to catch
The rustle of his breathing. His body slackened,
Wavered and lurched, and toppled to the floor.
He lay there twisted, still, so unreposeful
One longed to make him easy, but none stirred.
And our own spell of hideous quietude
Seemed part of his eternal sprawled discomfort.
The emperor broke it with a voice as dead
As were his eyes and they were tombs: “Pietro,
Lean down and lay your head upon his heart
And tell me if it beats.” And Pietro reeled
And sounds clawed in his throat and choked away
And all his body wrinkled back with horror.
But he knelt down and leaned and pressed his ear
Upon the spot where that man’s heart had beat.
His eyes grew wide and wider, no more wings
Hovering, then they shut, and when his voice
Rasped through an opening in his throat, it had
No old-time clearness. “It beats no more,” he said.
The emperor staggered — thunder might have struck him,
Instead of words just heard. He took one step,
Lunged through the leech’s body with his sword,
Who belched up blood, crumpled and fell, stone dead.
The smoking huddle lay across his feet —
He spurned it off and spoke: “Take out the dung.”
Then tottered, stayed him on his bleeding sword,
And closed his eyes, and held his hand upon them,
As if gone blind of infinite despair,
But opened them and plunged them into Pietro’s
And held them there, as though for all his grief
There must be comfort in those once friendly depths.
But Pietro flung himself face down and clasped
His feet and cried, “Pardon, Imperial Master,
Pardon!” The sword dropped from my father’s hand
And both his hands groped upward to his throat
And worried there and tore his collar back:
His eyes closed in their hollows, his features worked.
He strangled so before he could groan out:
“Another word — not that — another word!”
And then his reason reeled and stumbled back,
Calling one word as if there were no other:
“Confessed, confessed, confessed, confessed — O God!”
Da Vigna crushed his face against his arm,
Shuddered, then lay quite still, so did not see
The emperor stoop above him, gaze, recoil,
And draw his foot back with a snarl of loathing.
Berard, Berard, I would forget his change
From agony to rage and hate, though just!
He said no more than it was true to say,
Pouring the words like acid over Pietro,
Words you can guess, deserved — oh, well deserved —
And yet, when heard, unworthy of my father.
Let me not think of that! O God! O God!
I shrank from him, he did not seem my father,
But some gross beast that had gone beastly mad —
His flaccid mouth too weak to hold its water,
And all his face a pouch of flesh that glistened!
And, oh, the beastly cry that ended it:
“Burn out his eyes and bind him to a mule
And drive him, socket-empty, through the world —
An epigram of Frederick’s love turned hate!” …
Justice, indeed, but who is ripe for justice?
Pietro had fainted when the Arabs touched him.
The emperor watched him heaved out like a corpse,
Then blindly motioned us to leave the room —
And I left gladly, left him palsied, shrunken;
So even I was dimmed with treachery
And let my spirit falter in its love.
My bed was in a chamber close to his,
A bed that night no sleep had tucked and pillowed.
I lay and killed the horror in my soul,
And reckoned up his measureless misery.
I saw what I had never seen before,
That he was young no longer. He had looked
Almost an old man when they lifted Pietro —
Slack and uncertain, creased and gray with strain.
I had not thought he’d ever not be hale
Or wear the taint of time in any crevice.
Not death, but mind and body’s stealthy crumble
Before they slough and fall is nature’s worst.
And nothing twitches so the heart as seeing
In one we love the wall’s first visible crack.
I wept for him, Berard, and as I wept
His great voice suddenly burst across the stillness
And he was calling, “Enzio, Enzio, Enzio!”
As hell’s poor damned must call on their first night.
I rushed into his chamber. He was sitting
Upon the bedside, clutching it for prop,
His mighty shoulders stooping, and his head
Bowed on his breast. I ran to him, dropped down,
And saw his eyes — my father’s eyes, Berard! —
Smoking with terror! He seized my hands, my arms,
Felt up my face, across my hair — oh, blindly —
Whispering “Is it you, Enzio? Is it you?”
I slipped my arm around him, steadied him.
But still he shook, and whispered huskily:
“He knew me. My heart lay beating in his hand.
He was the faithful Peter of our Kingdom.
He did not hate me: could he love, he loved me;
But he was overborne by the turned tide.
There was no anchor to his intellect:
Truth he saw, but could not hook its grapples
Under his heart. The long time that I prospered,
Their outcry moved him not: but at the end
The universal condemnation shook him,
And when the filthy world cried out ‘Unclean’
He could not feel me clean, although he knew it,
So slackened in his faith, doubting, doubting,
And at my ebb of fortune did — what he did!
If Pietro can desert me, who will stay?
If he can be untrue, where look for faith?
There’re daggers in each doorway, in each aisle
Spears, and each window has drawn arrows. Oh,
No cup but reeks with poison and no heart
But rears with viper hate and treachery!
No way to turn — no going back or forward —
And none to wade the blood and darkness with me!
Enzio, Enzio, we are alone, and you —
Will you be going too? Will you? Will you?
The way I walk leads to a ghastly nowhere,
But, oh, beseech you, leave me not alone!
Be pitiful, for all the love I bear you —
My son, my son!”
Berard, the noblest of all emperors
Lay sobbing in my arms like some poor child,
And I was healing him of dreadful tears
With words my own would hardly let me utter —
Mere words, though weak in wisdom, strong in love.
No night of mine can ever be as choked
With misery and helplessness again.
So wounded mortally, he still could live
Because I clove to him. Then I was taken.…
All that his son could do I did in that
Last battle: more than any but his son
Could dream of doing. The Modanese betrayed us.
There was no help. Their dead lay tiered around me
And ours had left me friendless by the evening.
I could not tell my blood from blood I’d emptied
And I had fainted when they captured me.
There was no help. Fate meant to break him so
With the one cruelty unused, but hoarded.
I knew he threatened and implored, and vainly,
For I was brag and safeguard of Bologna:
Assaulted, she would tear me limb from limb
Before his maddened eyes, and there’s not gold
Sufficient in the earth to ransom me.
And, after that, I knew he could not stay
And fight the fight out in the north alone,
But would drag back like some great wounded beast
Into the Kingdom’s lair and sanctuary.…
Yet, all his heart was homesick for had gone,
Vanished in cloud-dust, dust of death, or prison:
His kingdom was a boundary, bounding nothing.
He died because he had no heart to live:
Life was unworthy of his presence in it.…
I’m glad he died away from the loud world,
With twilight woods around him, in your arms;
And glad his mind was steady to the end
And he knew Death.… It was a kingly meeting —
Death and my father.… You say he had his bed
Borne to that window of the hunting lodge
That faces west, and lay there open-eyed,
In some great revery beyond your ken,
Watching the wintry sunset winnow out
From red to gray behind the keen still trees;
And then his eyes called to you and you stooped,
And heard his words, but two: “Tell Enzio.”
He closed his lids, regretless that no strength
Would open them again.… When he walked through
The portals of Death’s purple-raftered house,
I know the other guests arose and stood.…
My words have bridged the two walls of the night.
The far one crumbles now.… Come, look, Berard.
Aldebaran has gone with his companions.
An old moon, blue with cold, limps up the east,
Thin as the new. He will be overtaken,
And halfway up his mountain die, in the sun …
A beggar’s death … an old man’s death, alone.…
Old age which should be but a hill’s descent,
May be an ever-upward mountain toil,
By night, through empty cold, in loneliness.…
By count, Berard, my years are thirty: but
My living days ahead are all old age.
Here is a crass unthoughtedness, a waste,
A mere continuing that is not life,
Miserable to me, to no man helpful.…
Our utmost is a stave of noble song
Scrawled blindly on the scrap of page allowed
And tossed into the sea — unlearned, unpraised,
Of no avail. Yet it could be ignoble:
I’ll not have mine default in fortitude
By ending it. I’ll let the stave be rounded,
As if my father were my listener.…