And I watched Fiesole through the bushes. She was not so indifferent to
me as she pretended. She was playacting to rouse my jealousy; she
was purposely scourging me into madness. I alone of the public was
sufficiently near to see clearly what she was doing. She was luring her
poet to recklessness, taking no notice of what was in process about her.
Did I catch her eye, she looked past me without recognition. But him she
enticed by her gentleness. The man was drunk with her favor and beauty.
He trembled to put the thoughts of a lover into action; she challenged
him with her eyes, warning him from her and beckoning him to her.
Stooping over her, so low that his lips were in her hair, he whispered;
but she shook her head. She rested her hand lightly on his shoulder,
as though to steady him and to soften the unkindness of her refusal.
Quickly he caught it in his own and bent over it, running his lips
along her fingers and up her arm’s smooth curves. She looked down on
him unmoved, disdainful at his breach of manners, yet superbly amorous.
Clutching her hotly to him, he kissed her on the throat.
Blind anger shook me--lust for violence such as I had never felt.
Breaking into the toy arbor where they sat, I remember standing over
him, dragging him backward by the collar, so that his face glared up at
mine empurpled. His friends rushed forward, beating me about the head
and shoulders, tearing at my hands, trying to make me release my hold.
Fiesole had risen like a fury. The table went down with a crash. Her
face was deadly pale and her green eyes blazed with indignation. Her
hands were clenched as if she also were about to strike me. And I was
pouring out a torrent of words, telling her swiftly how I loved her and
all that she had made me suffer.
Her rage died away as she listened and her expression became
inscrutable. Quickly she darted back her head, laughing without
happiness, mockingly. “You are very English, my friend. If you make so
much noise, these messieurs will think we are married.”
I caught her by the wrists, so that she backed away from me. “I wish to
God we were.”
“Oh, la, la, la!”
She went off into a peal of merriment, pointing her finger at me. The
crowd gathered round us uncertain, asking in half-a-dozen languages what
had been the provocation and what we were saying.
Her look changed. It was as though a mask had fallen. The temptress and
witch were gone. I seemed to see in her melancholy eyes all the longing
for tenderness and loyalty that I thought had been killed years ago in
Venice.
She advanced her face to mine and stared at me timidly, as though
fearful she had been mistaken.
“Take me out of this,” she whispered hoarsely.
Her companions tried to intercept us, gesticulating and protesting. She
brushed them aside, explaining that I was not myself and did not
know what I was doing. For her sake they let me go without further
molestation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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