Senso (and other stories) E-Book

Camillo Boito

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 1993

Beschreibung

Decadence, demonic, macabre, Milan, sensual. Visconti's film of Senso captured the life of Boito's depraved female heroine

Das E-Book Senso (and other stories) wird angeboten von Dedalus und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Contents

TITLE

INTRODUCTION

SENSO

A BODY

CHRISTMAS EVE

VADE RETRO, SATANA

THE GREY BLOTCH

BUDDHA’S COLLAR

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

by Roderick Conway Morris

I

‘I have often been spoken of as decadent,’ said Luchino Visconti. ‘But I have a very high opinion of decadence, just as Thomas Mann did, for example. I am imbued with its spirit … What has always interested me is to analyse a sick society.’

Hardly surprising, therefore, that Visconti should have fallen under the spell of the Contessa Livia, the literal femme fatale of Camillo Boito’s ‘Senso’, that paradigm of cruel voluptuousness, self-absorption and wanton depravity, who, by the end of the story has coolly engineered the destruction of five men (four of whom she has never even met) purely to assuage her slighted amour propre – emerging ‘serene in the self-respect that came from having fulfilled a difficult duty.’

But then Livia’s amour propre is not so much a character defect as the driving force behind her entire personality. Like Conrad’s Nostromo, Livia is the possessor of ‘enormous vanity, that finest form of egoism which can take on the aspect of every virtue’, and like Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the flawless exterior hides a dismal sump of internal baseness. Her vanity is indeed a source of almost onanistic pleasure:

‘In Venice, I was reborn. My beauty came into full bloom. Men’s eyes would light up with a gleam of desire whenever they looked at me. Even without seeing them looking, I could feel their burning gaze on my body. The women, too, would openly stare at me, then admiringly examine me from head to toe. I would smile like a queen, like a goddess. In the gratification of my vanity, I became kind, indulgent, natural, carefree, witty: the greatness of my triumph made me appear almost modest.’

Visconti’s ‘Senso’ was released in 1954, won no prizes at the Venice Film Festival (possibly because of pressure from Italy’s Christian Democrat government, which found the film unpatriotic), was a considerable success with the public, and, in due course, was followed by two other captivating depictions of 19th-century Italy – based on Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (1961) and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s L’Innocente (1975).

Visconti considered changing the name ‘Senso’ – which embraces implications of sense, sensation and sensuality – but finally stuck to Boito’s original title. The director’s first choices for the Contessa Livia and the handsome, cowardly and degenerate Austrian officer she takes as a lover whilst on her honeymoon in Venice were Ingrid Bergman and Marlon Brando. Bergman declined and Brando was rejected by the producers after a screen test in Rome. Farley Granger was then cast as the lover, and brought a suitably creepy pusillanimity to the part. The Italian actress Alida Valli played the Contessa with verve, style and subtlety. And yet, though this is one of a great director’s greatest films, which explores facets of Boito’s story only touched upon in the original text, there is a dimension missing that ultimately confirms the masterly quality of Boito’s first-person narrative on the page. For in the celluloid version we are deprived of the singular experience of seeing events as they unfold through Livia’s own eyes, and are denied entry to the narcissistic, hair-raising hall of mirrors that is her mind – as readers of this extraordinary tour de force will discover for themselves.

II

Camillo Boito was born on 30 October 1836. His mother was a Polish countess, Giuseppina Radolinska, his father Silvestro an adept but never outstandingly successful painter of portraits and miniatures. Silvestro came from Polpet, a mountain village near Belluno, in the Dolomites to the north of Venice, on the banks of the river Piave. At the time, indeed until the 1930s, when the Piave’s course was interrupted by dams for irrigation and hydro-electricity, the principal occupation of the riverside villages in this area was the felling and cutting of timber, built into rafts to convey the wood to Venice for the construction of buildings, ships and boats. Hundreds of rafts made the journey every year, and guiding them through the river’s shifting shoals and rapids was a skilful and perilous task. The immediacy with which Boito wrote about the hardships of life and evoked the majestic beauty of mountain landscapes is reflected in two of the stories translated here. ‘Vade Retro, Satana’ is set in a poor village in the Trentino, and opens with a wonderfully observed description of a spectacular storm boiling in the valley below. ‘The Grey Blotch’ takes place among the peaks to the west of Lake Garda, and contains a daring extended description of a rushing river – in which it may not be fanciful to detect an echo of that centuries-old battle the rafters of his grandparents’ village fought with the treacherous waters of the Piave to wrest a livelihood from the river.

After leaving Polpet at the age of eighteen to seek his fortune as a painter, Silvestro embarked on a peripatetic life in search of commissions, spending time in Padua, Venice, and Vienna, wandering as far as St Petersburg. On one of these journeys he met Giuseppina Radolinska. Not least of her attractions was her fairly substantial means, and the formalization of their relationship was no doubt hastened by her pregnancy – Camillo being born in Rome less than five months after the couple’s marriage in Florence.

After some success at winning the patronage of Pope Gregory XVI, who also came from the Belluno region and whose portrait Silvestro painted more than once, the Boito couple resumed their travels. Camillo’s younger brother Arrigo was born in Padua in February 1842.

The family then settled in Venice, where in 1848–9, during the short-lived revival of the Venetian Republic, Silvestro fought alongside the revolutionaries. By 1851 Giuseppina’s fortune had been exhausted, the marriage had broken down, and she had gone back to Poland. Silvestro, who lived apart from his sons after this, died in 1856, leaving the family more or less destitute. Meanwhile, Giuseppina returned to Milan to be with Arrigo, before dying in 1859.

Despite the vicissitudes of their early life, both Camillo and Arrigo received a good education, the lack of a stable domestic background being compensated for by the interest shown in them by family friends, who did much to nurture their clearly exceptional intellectual and artistic talents. Camillo found a dedicated mentor in the art historian Pietro Selvatico. After studying under him at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, Camillo succeeded Selvatico as Professor of Architecture at the Accademia at the remarkable age of nineteen. Arrigo went to study violin, piano and composition at the Conservatory in Milan. In 1860 Camillo joined his brother in Lombardy, having been appointed Professor of Architecture at Milan’s Accademia di Brera, a prestigious post he was to occupy continuously until 1909. The move was a timely one, since by then Camillo was under imminent threat of arrest by the Austrians, who ruled Venice until 1866.

When Camillo arrived in Milan, Arrigo’s studies were drawing to a close and he was preparing to launch himself on his career as a poet and composer, which would eventually lead to the collaboration with Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) as the librettist of Otello and Falstaff that won him lasting fame.

The Boito brothers remained intellectually and emotionally close throughout their lives, and shared the same house in Milan after Camillo’s second wife died, until his own death on 28 June 1914. The tenderness of this fraternal bond, strengthened no doubt by the travails of their younger days, is well caught in a letter by Camillo to Arrigo, written in April 1862: ‘You know how much I love you, and how every honour and every eulogy you receive brings me greater comfort, greater indeed than if I were receiving them myself.’

Camillo Boito’s professional life was devoted almost entirely to the practice and teaching of architecture and the study of architectural history. His first major · commission on reaching Milan was the restoration of the city’s 12th-century Porta Ticinese. Numerous other works of restoration followed on palazzi and churches in Milan, Padua and Venice. He became a noted theorist on the principals of restoration, and was one of the first to advocate more sensitive and less interventionist approaches (though he seems not always to have put his own arguments into practice). His original designs included schools, hospitals, the Verdi Musicians’ Home in Milan, sepulchral monuments and the bronze doors of the Basilica of St Antony in Padua. His writings on Italian medieval architecture – out of which he sought to create a new style for modern Italy – were particularly influential. He was also one of the first Italian scholars to take a special interest in minor and applied arts and industrial architecture.

III

It may seem surprising that such a mainstream academic figure as Boito should have taken to writing fantastic, bizarre and often risqué tales peopled by an assortment of odd-balls, misfits and perverts. But Boito, having grown up during the Risorgimento – Italy’s forty-year-long struggle for unification and self-determination, with its countless setbacks and disappointments – was perhaps not unlike many of his contemporaries who felt a strong sense of disillusionment at its outcome and continued to dream of a more radical transformation of Italian art and society.

One of the primary manifestations of this unabated revolutionary tendency was beginning to flower in Milan at the very time that Boito arrived there from Venice. Dubbed the Scapigliatura (from scapigliato, meaning ‘dishevelled, unkempt, loose-living, profligate’), this was partly inspired by French bohemianism and earlier Romantic rebels. Its proponents were anti the bougeoisie, the Church, the Establishment, and tradition, and pro individualism, hedonism, sexual freedom, drunkenness and general degeneracy. They argued for the superiority of the unruly, unfettered artist over the wealthy, privileged and conventional. Among the principal scapigliati were the writers Carlo Righetti (who invented the term), Giuseppe Rovani, Igino Ugo Tarchetti, Carlo Dossi, and the poet-painters Emilio Praga and Giovanni Camerana. Praga and Tarchetti lived out the movement’s manifesto to the letter, dying prematurely of drink and syphilis, and Camerana killed himself.

Arrigo Boito fully aligned himself with the Scapigliatura, and became one of its leading lights, writing poetry about ghosts, graveyards, ruined castles, a mummy waiting to burst out of a glass case, light and darkness, dualistic angst, and other subjects dear to the movement. In 1863 Arrigo published ‘All’ Arte Italiana’ (To Italian Art), subtitled ‘A Sapphic Ode with Glass in Hand’, in which he drinks to the health of Italian art, newly liberated from ‘the blindness of the old and the cretinous’, whom he excoriates for having besmirched the altar of art ‘like the wall of a brothel.’ Unhappily, Giuseppe Verdi interpreted the verses as including himself among the geriatric vandals, and subsequently resolutely refused to work with Arrigo – thus postponing for two decades what turned out to be such a fruitful partnership.

It was against the backdrop of the Scapigliatura’s most active period that, in 1867, Camillo Boito began to write his novellas and short stories. Yet Boito never seems to have considered himself a card-carrying member of the movement, as it were, nor to have been thought of as such by his contemporaries, and to try to force his work into that mould would be to ignore its distinctive qualities.

Three stories, nonetheless, included in this selection do have scapigliatura flavours. ‘Christmas Eve’ relates how a brother’s incestuous passion for his saintly dead twin sister leads to his infatuation with a coarse shop-girl who resembles her. ‘The Grey Blotch’ is about a man tormented by an inexplicable patch in his vision, after he has seduced and debauched a country girl, only to desert her, repelled by her voracious sexual appetite and feral physicality.

The novella ‘A Body’, first published in a periodical in 1870, is especially interesting in that his brother, Arrigo, based a poem (written in 1865, but not published until 1874) on a similar scenario, and revolving around some of the same questions of the conflict between art and science. Arrigo’s ‘Lezione D’Anatomia’ (An Anatomy Lesson) is set in a chilly morgue, where the corpse of a consumptive young girl is to be dissected:

Ed era giovane!

Ed era bionda!

Ed era bella!

(And she was young!/And she was blonde!/And she was beautiful!)

As the dissection proceeds the observer falls into a reverie as he imagines the girl in life, recoiling from the pathologist’s booming voice and brutal exposure of her internal organs.

Scienza, vattene

Co’ tuoi conforti!

Ridammi i mondi

Del sogno e l’anima!

Sia pace ai morti

E ai moribondi.

(Science, be off/with your proofs!/Give back to me the world/of dreams, of the spirit!/Peace be to the dead,/and to the dying.)

*

Characteristically, the verses end with a twist, when the poet’s ‘pious, sweet, purest’ of virgins is revealed to have in her womb the month-old foetus of a child.

Camillo Boito’s ‘The Body’ is a tale full of suspense set against the gay, heady bohemianism of Vienna’s pleasure gardens in spring. A brilliant new artist is engaged in immortalizing his exquisitely lovely and vivacious mistress on canvas, whilst the ambitious and sinister young anatomist Professor Gulz (whose limitless faith in the primacy of science chillingly presages the demonic monomania of Hitler’s medical establishment) shadows her, convinced that she will soon yield up the true mysteries of her beauty beneath his scalpel on the mortuary slab.

The medical profession appears again in ‘Buddha’s Collar’, the final story of the present selection. This macabre but comic tale is of a timid and naive Venetian bank clerk, who becomes entangled with a pretty young prostitute. After being bitten by the girl, he is consumed by the fear that he might contract rabies, and is unlucky to find himself the centre of an animated debate in the backroom of a pharmacy, where some off-duty medics are passing the time. The young man is far from comforted by the view of a senior practitioner, in whom long experience has bred a humane humility alien to the fanatical certainties of Professor Gulz: ‘The conclusion to be drawn is this,’ said the old doctor. ‘That we know nothing about it.’

All of Boito’s seventeen novellas and stories were written between 1867 and 1895, and most were initially published in periodicals. When they appeared in book form, they were well received critically, the lucidity of the author’s style, the vividness of his descriptive powers and the liveliness of his imagination being generally praised. Boito also proved popular with the public. The first volume, Storielle Vane (Vain Tales), published in Milan in 1876, went through seven editions by 1895. The second, Senso: Nuove Storielle Vane (Senso: New Vain Tales), brought out in 1883, was reprinted five times by 1899.

We may only regret, along with the critic Navarro della Miraglia reviewing Storielle Vane in the literary journal Fanfulla, that the author did not produce more of his strange and engaging tales: ‘I read them with eagerness and pleasure. I do not know why the author of this book writes so rarely and so little. He has all the qualities needed to be in the front rank of that little vanguard of our writers of fiction. He has the imagination, clarity, colour. He has the simplicity and truth of expression, those two supreme merits that bring things to life.’

A Bibliographical Note

‘The Body’ (‘Il Corpo’) and ‘Christmas Eve’ (‘Notte di Natale’) are translated from Storielle Vane (Milan, 1913); ‘Senso’, ‘Vade Retro, Satana’, ‘The Grey Blotch’ (‘Macchia Grigia’) and ‘Buddha’s Collar’ (‘Il Collare di Budda’) from Senso: Nuove Storielle Vane (Milan, 1883). The most readily available Italian edition of the stories is presently Senso: Storielle Vane (edited with an introduction and bibliography by Raffaella Bertazzoli), published in paperback by Garzanti (Milan, 1990).

SENSO

FROM CONTESSA LIVIA’S SECRET NOTEBOOK

Yesterday in my yellow drawing-room, the young lawyer Gino, his voice thick with long-repressed passion, was whispering in my ear, ‘Contessa, take pity on me. Drive me away, instruct the servants not to let me in any more, but in God’s name release me from this deadly uncertainty. Tell me whether there’s any hope for me, or not …’ The poor boy threw himself at my feet, while I stood there, unperturbed, looking at myself in the mirror.

I was examining my face in search of a wrinkle. My forehead, framed with pretty little curls, is smooth and clear as a baby’s. There is not a line to be seen on either side of my flared nostrils, or above my rather full, red lips. I have never found a single white strand in my long hair, which, when loose, falls in lovely glossy waves, blacker than ink, over my snow-white shoulders.

Thirty-nine! I shudder as I write this horrible figure.

I gave a light slap with my tapering fingers to the hot hand groping towards me, and was on my way out of the room. I do not know what prompted me – surely some laudable sense of compassion or friendship – but on the threshold I turned and whispered, I think, these words: ‘There’s hope …’

I must curb my vanity. The anxiety that gnaws at my mind, leaving virtually no trace on my body, alternates with overconfidence in my beauty, leaving me no other comfort but this: my mirror.

I hope to find further comfort in writing of what happened to me sixteen years ago, an experience I look back on with bitter delight. This notebook, which I keep triple-locked in my secret safe, away from all prying eyes, and as soon as I have reached the end of my story I shall throw it on the fire, dispersing the ashes, but confiding my old memories to paper should help to abate their persistently caustic edge. Every word and deed, and above all every humiliation, of that feverish period in my past remains etched in my mind. And I am always testing and probing the lesions of this unhealed wound, not really knowing whether what I feel is actually pain or an itch of pleasure.

What a joy it is, to confide in no one but yourself, free from scruples, hypocrisy and reserve, respecting the truth in your recollections, even with regard to what ridiculous social conventions make it most difficult to speak of publicly: the depths to which you have sunk! I have read of holy anchorites who lived in the midst of vermin and putrefaction (filth, that is), but who believed that the more they wallowed in the mire, the higher they elevated themselves. So my spirit exalts in self-humiliation. I take pride in the sense of being utterly different from other women. There is no sight whatsoever that daunts me. There is, in my weakness, a daring strength: I am like the women of ancient Rome who gave the thumbs-down, those women that Parini mentions in one of his odes – I don’t remember it exactly, but I know that when I read it I really thought that the poet could have been referring to me.

Were it not for the feverishness of vivid memories on the one hand and dread of old age on the other, I should be a happy woman. My husband, who is old and infirm, and utterly dependent on me, allows me to spend as much as I want and to do as I please. I am one of the first ladies of Trento. I have no lack of admirers, and, far from lessening, the kind envy of my dear women friends is ever mounting.

I was of course more beautiful at the age of twenty. Not that my features have changed, or that my body seems any less slender and supple, but there was in my eyes a flame, which now, alas, is dying. The very blackness of my pupils seems to me on close inspection a little less intense. They say that the purpose of philosophy is to know yourself. I have studied myself with so much trepidation for so many years, hour by hour, minute by minute, that I believe I know myself through and through, and can declare myself an excellent philosopher.

I would say that I was at my most beautiful (there is always in a woman’s blossoming a brief period of consummate loveliness), when I had just turned twenty-two, in Venice. It was July of the year 1865. I had been married for only a few days and was on my honeymoon. For my husband, who could have been my grandfather, I felt indifference mingled with pity and contempt. He bore his sixty-two years and his ample paunch with seeming vigour. He dyed his sparse hair and thick moustaches with a rank ointment that stained his pillows with big yellowish blotches. Otherwise, he was an amiable man, in his own way full of attentions for his young wife, inclined to gluttony, an occasional blasphemer, an indefatigable smoker, a haughty aristocrat, a bully towards the meek and himself timorous in the face of aggression, a lively raconteur of lewd stories that he would tell at every opportunity, neither tight-fisted nor a spendthrift. He would strut like a peacock when holding me on his arm, yet eyed with a smile of lascivious connivance the women of easy virtue who passed us in Piazza San Marco. And from one point of view I was pleased by this, since I would happily have banished him into the arms of any other woman, just to be rid of him; and from another, it vexed me.

I had taken him of my own free will. Indeed, I had actually wanted him. My family were opposed to so ill-assorted a match. Nor, if truth be told, was the poor man ardently seeking my hand. But I was bored with my position as an unmarried woman. I wanted to have my own carriages, jewels, velvet gowns, a title, and above all my freedom. It took a few flirtatious glances to inflame the desire of the pot-bellied Count, but once inflamed, he could not rest until I was his, neither did he mind about the small dowry, nor give any thought to the future. Before the priest, I answered with a firm and resounding ‘I do’. I was pleased with what I had done, and I do not regret it now, after all these years. Even in those days, when I suddenly lost my heart and surrendered myself to the frenzy of a first blind passion, I did not really think I had anything to regret. Until the age of twenty-two, my heart had remained impervious. My women friends, who weakened when confronted with the allurements of romantic love, envied and respected me. To them, my coolness, in my disdainful indifference to fond words and languishing glances showed common sense and strength of character. I had already established my reputation at sixteen, by trifling with the affections of a good-looking young fellow from my home town, and then afterwards spurning him, with the result that the poor boy tried to kill himself. And when he had recovered, he left Trento and ran away to Piedmont to join up as a volunteer. He died in one of the battles of ’59 – I don’t remember which. I was too young then to feel any remorse. And besides, my parents, relatives and acquaintances, all of them devoted to the Austrian government, which they served loyally as soldiers and administrators, had nothing else to say about the young hot-head’s death but, ‘Serves him right!’

In Venice, I was reborn. My beauty came into full bloom. Men’s eyes would light up with a gleam of desire whenever they looked at me. Even without seeing them looking, I could feel their burning gaze on my body. The women, too, would openly stare at me, then admiringly examine me from head to toe. I would smile like a queen, like a goddess. In the gratification of my vanity, I became kind, indulgent, natural, carefree, witty: the greatness of my triumph made me appear almost modest.

I was invited with my husband, a representative of the Tyrolese nobility at the Diet of Innsbruck, to the Imperial Lord-Lieutenant’s dinners and soirées. Whenever I entered a room, with my arms bare, in a décolleté gown of velvet and lace with a very long train, wearing a great flower of rubies with leaves of emeralds in my hair, I would sense a murmur running all around me. A blush of satisfaction would colour my cheeks. I would unassumingly take a few slow, solemn steps, without looking at anybody, and as the hostess came towards me and invited me to sit next to her, I would wave my fan in front of my face as if to hide modestly from the eyes of the astonished guests.

I never missed an occasion for a gondola-ride on the Grand Canal, in the cool of a summer’s evening, when serenades were sung. At Quadri’s café in Piazza San Marco I was surrounded by a host of satellites, as if I were the sun of a new planetary system. I would laugh, mock and tease those who tried to win me with their sighs or verses. I gave the impression of being an impregnable fortress, yet I did not try too hard to appear truly impregnable lest I discouraged anyone. My court of admirers consisted largely of junior officers and Tyrolese officials who were rather dull and very self-satisfied, which meant that the most fun were the most irresponsible; those who from their dissolute life had acquired, if nothing else, the insolent boldness of their own follies. There was one I knew who stood out from the crowd for two reasons. According to his own friends, he combined reckless profligacy with such a cynical lack of moral principles that nothing in this world seemed to him worthy of respect, save the penal code and military regulations. Besides which, he really was extremely handsome and extraordinarily strong: a cross between Adonis and Alcides. His complexion was white and rosy, he had blond curly hair, a beardless chin, ears so small they were like a girl’s, and big restless-looking eyes of sky-blue. The expression on his face was sometimes mild, and sometimes fierce, but of a fierceness and mildness tempered by signs of a constant, almost cruel, irony. His head was set magnificently on his sturdy neck. His shoulders were not square and heavy, but sloped down gracefully. A close-fitting, white uniform of an Austrian officer showed off to perfection his muscular physique, which brought to mind those Roman statues of gladiators.

This infantry lieutenant, who was only twenty-four, two years older than me, had already succeeded in squandering the large estate inherited from his father, and still he continued to gamble, and whore, and to live like a lord – nobody could understand how he managed it. Yet no one excelled him in swimming, gymnastics, or physical strength. He had never had occasion to take part in battle, and he did not care for duelling. In fact, two young officers told me one evening that rather than fight, he had more than once swallowed the most appalling insults. Strong, handsome, degenerate, reprobate – I was attracted by him. I did not let him know it, because I took delight in teasing and riling this latter-day Hercules.

Venice, which I had never seen and so longed to see, spoke more to my senses than my intellect: I cared less for its monuments, whose history I did not know and beauty I did not understand, than for its green waters, starry skies, silvery moon, golden sunsets, and above all the black gondola in which I would recline, abandoning myself to the most voluptuous caprices of my imagination. In the intense heat of July, after a blazing-hot day, the fresh breeze would caress my brow as I travelled by boat from the Piazzetta to the island of Sant’Elena, or beyond, to Sant’Elisabetta and San Nicolo on the Lido: that west wind impregnated with a sharp salty tang would revive my limbs and my spirits, and seemed to whisper in my ears the passionate secrets of true love. I would trail my bare arm up to the elbow in the water, letting the lace trim on my short sleeve get wet; and then I watched the drops of water falling from my fingernails one by one, like the purest diamonds. One evening I took a ring from my finger – a ring my husband had given me, set with a big sparkling solitaire – and threw it far from the boat into the lagoon: I felt I had married the sea.

One day the Lord-Lieutenant’s wife insisted on taking me to see the Accademia Gallery: I understood next to nothing. Since then, from travelling, and from talking to artists (there was one, as handsome as Raphael, who desperately wanted to teach me to paint), I have learned a few things; but at the time, although I did not know anything, the brightness of those colours, the richness of those reds, yellows, greens, blues, and whites – like painted music, rendered with such sensual passion – seemed to me not art but a Venetian aspect of Nature. And in the presence of Titian’s golden Assumption, Paolo Veronese’s magnificent Feast, or Bonifazio’s fleshy, carnal, gleaming faces, I would be put in mind of the uninhibited songs I had heard the common people singing.

My husband smoked, snored, spoke ill of Piedmont, and bought himself cosmetics; I needed someone to love.

Now, this is how my terrible passion began for the Alcides, the white-uniformed Adonis with a name not much to my liking: Remigio. I was in the habit of going to Rima’s floating baths, situated between the gardens of the Royal Palace and the Customs House Point. I had hired for one hour, from seven till eight, the Sirena, one of the two women’s baths big enough to swim around in a little, and my maid came along to undress and dress me. But since no one else could enter, I did not bother to put on bathing clothes. The bath was screened round with wooden panels and covered with a grey awning with broad red stripes. The slated bottom was fixed at a depth to allow women of small stature to stand with their heads above the water, which did not even cover my shoulders.

O that lovely, clear, emerald-green water, in which I could see the shape of my body gracefully undulating, right down to my slender feet! And a few tiny, silvery fish darted around me. I swam the length of the Sirena; I beat the water with the flat of my hand until that diaphanous green was covered with white spray; I lay on my back, letting my long hair soak in the water, and trying to keep afloat for a moment without moving; I splashed my maid, who ran away; I laughed like a child.

A number of large openings, just below the surface, let the water flow in and out freely, and if you put your eye to the gaps in the ill-fitted screens you could see something of what was outside: the red campanile of San Giorgio, a stretch of the lagoon with boats swiftly sailing past, a thin strip of the military baths floating a little way off from my Sirena.

I knew that Lieutenant Remigio went swimming there. He cut such an heroic figure in the water: he would dive in head first, pick up a bottle from the bottom, and emerge from the bathing area by swimming out underneath the dressing rooms. I found his strength and agility so alluring, I would have given anything to be able to see him.

One morning while I was examining a bluish mark on my right thigh, probably a slight bruise, which marred a little the rosy whiteness of my skin, I heard a noise outside that sounded like someone swimming very fast. The disturbance of the water made cool waves that sent a shiver down my limbs, and all of a sudden, through one of the large gaps between the bottom of the pool and the screens, a man came into the Sirena. I did not cry out; I was not afraid. He was so white and handsome, he looked as if he were made of marble, but his broad chest rose and fell as he took deep breaths, and his blue eyes shone, and drops of water fell from his fair hair like a shower of lustrous pearls. He stood upright, half covered by the still unsettled water, and raised his limber, muscular arms aloft; he seemed to be rendering thanks to the gods, and saying, ‘At last!’