Pleasure (12 page)

Neither had any reservations about the reciprocal prodigality of flesh and spirit. They felt an unspeakable joy in tearing every veil, uncovering all secrets, violating all mysteries, possessing each other right to the very depths, penetrating each other, fusing with each other, becoming one being.

—What a strange love! said Elena, remembering the very first days, her illness, her swift surrender. —I would have given myself to you the same evening that I met you.

She felt a kind of pride in this fact. And her lover would say:

—That evening when I heard my name announced alongside yours, on the threshold, I had the certainty, I don't know why, that my life would be bound to yours forever!

They believed what they said. They reread Goethe's
⁵
Roman elegy together: “
Laß dich, Geliebte, nicht reun, daß du mir so schnell dich ergeben! . . .
Don't regret, O beloved, having yielded yourself so promptly! Believe me, I harbor no base or impure thought of you. Love's arrows have varying effects: some barely scratch, and the heart suffers for many years from the poison that seeps into it; others, well feathered and armed with a sharp and piercing tip, penetrate into the spine and instantly inflame the blood. In heroic times, when gods and goddesses loved, desire followed the gaze; and pleasure followed desire. Do you believe that the goddess of love pondered for a long time when below the thickets of Mount Ida, she saw Anchises one day and became enamored of him? And the Moon? If she had hesitated, jealous Aurora would soon have awoken the beautiful shepherd! Hero sees Leander in the midst of a festival, and the inflamed lover throws himself into the nocturnal waves. Rhea Silvia, the royal virgin, goes to draw water from the Tiber and is seized by the god . . .”
⁶

Just as it had been for Faustina's divine elegiac poet,
⁷
Rome was illuminated for them by a new voice. Wherever they went, they left a memory of love.
⁸
The remote churches of the Aventine: Saint Sabina on the beautiful columns made of Pario marble, the pleasant garden of Santa Maria del Priorato, the bell tower of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, like a sharp rosy stem in the blue sky, were witnesses to their love. The villas of cardinals and princes: Villa Pamphily, where one gazes at its fountains and its lake, graceful and soft, where every grove seems to harbor a noble idyll and where the stone balusters and woody trunks vie with one another in number; Villa Albani, as cold and mute as a cloister, a forest of marble effigies and a museum of centuries-old boxwoods, where from the vestibules and the porticoes, through the granite columns, caryatids,
⁹
and herms,
¹⁰
symbols of immobility, contemplate the unchanging symmetry of the greenery; and Villa Medici, which resembles a forest of branching emerald in a supernatural light; and Villa Ludovisi, somewhat wild, scented with violets, consecrated by the presence of Juno, whom Wolfgang adored,
¹¹
where at that time the plane trees from the Orient and the cypresses of Aurora, which seemed immortal, shivered in the presentiment of the market and of death;
¹²
all the ancestral villas, sovereign glory of Rome, were witness to their love. The galleries of paintings and statues: the room in the Borghese Gallery with the
Danaë,
before which Elena smiled, almost in revelation, and the hall of mirrors where her image passed among the cherubs by Ciro Ferri and the garlands by Mario de' Fiori; the chamber of Heliodorus, masterfully animated by the most vigorous pulsation of life that the painter Sanzio could ever have infused into the inertia of a wall, and the Borgias' apartment, where Pinturicchio's great imagination transforms itself into a miraculous fabric of frescoes, fables, dreams, whims, artifices, and impudences; the Galatea room, from which emanates a sense of pure freshness and an inextinguishable serenity of light, and the room of Hermaphrodite, where the wondrous monster, born from the lust of a nymph and a demigod, reclines her ambiguous form amid the radiance of fine stones; all the solitary places of Beauty were witness to their love.

They understood the great call of the poet: “
Eine Welt zwar bist Du, o Rom!
You are a world, O Rome! But without love the world would not be the world, Rome itself would not be Rome.” And the staircase of the Trinità, glorified by the slow ascension of Day, was the staircase of Happiness, due to the ascension of the beautiful Elena Muti.

It often pleased Elena to walk up those stairs to the
buen retiro
of Palazzo Zuccari. She walked up slowly, following the shade; but her soul raced rapidly to the top. Very many happy hours were measured by the small ivory skull dedicated to Ippolita, which Elena sometimes held to her ear with a childish gesture, while pressing her other cheek to her lover's chest, to listen to the fleeting seconds and the beating of that heart at the same time. Andrea seemed ever new to her. Sometimes, she was almost astonished by the untiring vitality of that spirit and that body. Sometimes, his caresses drew from her a cry that expressed all the terrible spasm of her being, overcome by the violence of the sensation. Sometimes, in his arms, a kind of torpor overcame her, almost, one could say, clairvoyant, in which she believed she was becoming, by the transfusion of another life, a diaphanous, light, fluid creature, penetrated by an immaterial, supremely pure element; while all the pulsations in their great multitude brought to her mind the image of the infinite trembling of a calm sea in summer. Also, sometimes, in his arms, on his chest, after the caresses, she felt the sensual pleasure quiet inside herself, level out, come to rest, like an effervescent water that slowly settles; but if her lover breathed more deeply or moved just a tiny bit, she felt once again an ineffable wave course through her entire body, from her head to her feet, vibrate ever more gently, and finally die. This “spiritualization” of fleshly enjoyment, caused by the perfect affinity of their two bodies, was perhaps the most notable among the phenomena of their passion. Elena, sometimes, had tears that were sweeter than kisses.

And in the kisses, what deep sweetness! There are women's mouths that seem to ignite with love the breath that opens them. Whether they are reddened by blood richer than purple, or frozen by the pallor of agony, whether they are illuminated by the goodness of consent or darkened by the shadow of disdain, whether they are opened in pleasure or twisted by suffering, they always carry within them an enigma that disturbs men of intellect, and attracts them and captivates them. A constant discord between the expression of the lips and that of the eyes generates the mystery; it seems as if a duplicitous soul reveals itself there with a different beauty, happy and sad, cold and passionate, cruel and merciful, humble and proud, laughing and mocking; and the ambiguity arouses discomfort in the spirit that takes pleasure in dark things. Two meditative fifteenth-century artists, untiring pursuers of a rare and celestial Ideal, perspicacious psychologists to whom one owes perhaps the most subtle analyses of human physiognomy, continuously immersed in their studies and in the search for the most arduous difficulties and the most occult secrets, Botticelli and da Vinci, understood and rendered in various ways all the indefinable seduction of such mouths in their art.

In Elena's kisses there was, in truth, the most sublime elixir, for her beloved. Of all the carnal couplings, that one seemed to them to be the most complete, the most satisfying. They believed, sometimes, that the living flower of their souls broke apart, pressed open by their lips, seeping a juice of delight through every vein all the way to their hearts; and sometimes, in their hearts they had the illusory sensation as of a soft and dewy fruit dissolving there. So perfect was their union that the one form seemed the natural complement of the other. Drinking each other in, to make it last longer they held their breaths until they felt themselves to be dying of distress, while the hands of the one trembled on the temples of the other, dazed. A kiss prostrated them more than the sexual act. Once separate, they looked at each other with eyes floating in a torpid mist. And she said, with her voice slightly hoarse, without smiling: —We shall die.

Sometimes, lying facedown, he closed his eyes, waiting. She, knowing that trick, bent over him with deliberate slowness to kiss him. In his voluntary blindness, the lover did not know where that vaguely anticipated kiss would land. In that moment of waiting and uncertainty, an indescribable anxiety shook all his limbs, similar in its intensity to the shivering of a blindfolded man who is being threatened with a fiery branding iron. When finally those lips touched him, he could barely stifle a yell. And he enjoyed the torture of that moment; because not infrequently, physical suffering in love is more enticing than caresses. Elena, too, because of that singular imitative spirit that compels lovers to reproduce a caress exactly, wanted to try.

—It seems to me—she said with closed eyes—that all the pores of my skin are like a million tiny mouths all craving yours, in spasms of desire to be chosen, the one envious of the other . . .

And he therefore, to be fair, would start covering her with rapid close kisses, covering her entire body, not leaving the tiniest space intact, never slowing down what he was doing. She laughed, happy, feeling herself surrounded as by an invisible garment; she laughed and moaned, maddened, feeling his passion growing; she laughed and cried, lost, no longer able to withstand the devouring ardor. Then, with a sudden effort, she would imprison his neck between her arms, ensnare him with her hair, holding him, palpitating like a quarry. Tired, he was happy to cede and to rest, thus trapped in those bonds. Looking at him, she would exclaim:

—How young you are! How young you are!

Against all corruptions, against all dispersions, his youth resisted, persisted, like an untarnishable metal, an indestructible aroma. The pure splendor of youth was, indeed, his most precious quality. In the great flames of his passion everything in him that was falsest, most wretched, most artificial, most frivolous, burned up as on a pyre. After the depletion of his strength, as a result of too much analysis and of the
separate
action of all his interior spheres, he now returned to the unity of strength, of action, of life; he regained his confidence and his spontaneity; he gave love and took pleasure in a youthful way. Some of the impulses to which he yielded seemed to be those of a young, unwitting boy; some of his fantasies were full of grace, of freshness, of impudence.

—Sometimes—Elena would say to him—my tenderness for you becomes more delicate than that of a lover. I don't know . . . It almost becomes maternal.

Andrea would laugh, because she was barely three years older than he.

—Sometimes—he would say to her—the communion of my soul with yours seems to me so chaste that I would call you “sister,” kissing your hands.

These fallacious purifications and elevations of sentiment always occurred in the languid intervals of their pleasure, when the flesh being at rest, the soul felt some indistinct need for ideality. Then, too, there arose once more in the young man the ideality of the art he loved; and in his intellect tossed and turned all the forms he had once sought and contemplated, demanding to be released, and the words of the Goethean monologue incited him. “Of what use is blazing nature, before your eyes? What use is the form of art around you, if the passionate creative force does not fill your soul and flow to your fingertips, incessantly, to reproduce?”
¹³
The thought of bringing joy to his lover with a rhythmical verse or noble design encouraged him to create. He wrote
La Simona;
and made two etchings, of the
Zodiac
and of
Alexander's Goblet.

He chose, when carrying out his art, difficult, exact, perfect, incorruptible instruments: meter and incision; and he intended to continue and renew the traditional Italian forms, with strict criteria, reconnecting with the poets of the
stil novo
¹⁴
and the painters who were the forerunners of the Renaissance. His spirit was essentially
formal
. More than thought, he loved expression. His literary assays were exercises, diversions, studies, research, technical experiments, curiosities. He believed, along with Henri Taine,
¹⁵
that it was more difficult to compose six beautiful lines of poetry than to win a battle on the field. His
Fable of Hermaphrodite
imitated in structure the
Fable of Orpheus
by Poliziano; and had stanzas that were extraordinarily exquisite, powerful and musical, especially in the choruses sung by dual-natured monsters: Centaurs, Sirens, and Sphinxes. His new tragedy,
La Simona,
brief in extent, was of a decidedly original nature. Although it was rhymed in the ancient Tuscan manner, it seemed to have been created by an English poet of the Elizabethan age, inspired by a story from the
Decameron;
it possessed something of the sweet and strange enchantment that may be found in certain of William Shakespeare's minor plays.

The poet signed his works thus, in the frontispiece of the Sole Exemplar: A.S.
CALCOGRAPHUS AQUA FORTI SIBI TIBI FECIT.
¹⁶

Copper attracted him more than paper; nitric acid more than ink; the burin more than the pen. One of his forebears, Giusto Sperelli, had previously experimented with incision. Some of his prints, produced around 1520, manifestly revealed the influence of Antonio Pollajuolo, for the depth and almost acerbity of its mark. Andrea followed the style of Rembrandt,
a tratti liberi,
¹⁷
and the
maniera nera
¹⁸
technique favored by English engravers of the school of Green, Dixon, Earlom. He had shaped his education on all models, had separately studied the research of each engraver, had learned from Albrecht Dürer and from Parmigianino, Marcantonio Raimondi and Holbein, from Annibale Caracci and James MacArdell, from Guido and Callot, from Toschi and Gérard Audran; but the understanding that he had acquired of copper was this: how to illuminate with Rembrandt's effects of light the elegance of design of second-generation fifteenth-century Florentines such as Sandro Botticelli, Domenico Ghirlandajo, and Filippino Lippi.
¹⁹