A Woman In The Shadows

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- “All right. See you in the morning.”

- “Yes”.

He bent down and kissed my hand with his usual formal composure. He went towards the door, then thought again and turned towards me. He embraced me almost convulsively and murmured: - “Don’t you want to let me stay with you tonight?”

I felt an explosion of joy in my heart - “I want it more than anything else in the world.”

He loosened my hair and I undid his shirt. Our hands joined and our mouths searched for each other greedily.

He took me in his arms, notwithstanding that I protested that he should not make that effort, and placed me on the big bed that saw us finally become husband and wife.

Shortly after dawn, he woke me up and he said to me that he had to return to his apartments to get ready for our departure.

I, still half asleep, could not immediately comprehend the situation and I had to look at him with the rather dazed air of someone seeing a ghost, because he kissed me and said: “Don’t you remember any more that I’m now your husband?”

I smiled: “Yes, I remember.”

- “And did you not like it?”

- “I did, and -” I blushed, interrupting myself, I did not yet have enough confidence to ask him what he had felt in making love with me, much less did I dare to venture onto that slippery ground which was an investigation of his fantasies. If he had been thinking about her while he was with me or, instead, I had finally become in his eyes a real person with the feelings, fears, joys and expectations of every being and not of an ideal woman, for something else unreachable, who shone with their own light like a sun, without blemishes or weaknesses.

- “Yes” - he said simply - “It was very pleasant also for me. And - I didn’t think about her, if that’s what you wanted to know. I was really with you, only with you. Now I must go.

- “Stay a little longer, it’s not yet morning, that was the song of the nightingale, not the skylark.”

- “Don’t tell me that you know about Elizabethan theatre.”

- “Yes, enough, there are works that I adore, even though some of my teachers considered it inappropriate for modern times, too full of passion and dark tragedies.”

- “I like it too, even though I had to read it almost hidden from my mother. Well now, my beloved, it’s time to go, even though I have more desire to stay. We’ll meet again later.

Suddenly a flash of pain crossed my soul and I held his arm tight with force, he looked at me surprised:

- “What is it?”

- “Don’t go, I don’t want to end up like Juliet.”

- “Romeo, if I’m not wrong, loved her up until death. What are you referring to?”

- “Nothing, it’s just that, suddenly, I don’t know how I’ve seen clearly that I could not in any case survive you and that my life will end with you.”

- “What dark thoughts! They don’t go well in such a young girl. And just after the first night with your husband. Aren’t you calm?”

- “I am, but it’s difficult to explain what happens to me every so often. Irrational feelings, inexplicable intuitions, which however then happen always exactly how I have suddenly seen them, in a flash which brightens the darkness of the future.”

- “I fear that your teachers were right, Shakespeare’s theatre is not suitable for you.”

- “Don’t split hairs with me, I can’t bear it.”

- “Oh, oh, are you so decisive notwithstanding your sweet and submissive look?”

- “It’s for you to discover, my lord.”

He laughed and went away without adding anything else.

I lied down again with a sigh of happiness waiting to call the maids who should dress me and prepare me for the journey that awaited me that day.

I brushed my hand over the pillow on which until a little while ago his head was resting and swore to myself that I would have won him over to such a point that I would have made him forget for ever his adolescent love affairs.

I didn’t yet know that I would have had instead to fight all my life against the ghosts of other, many other, women, whilst remaining for him the woman to whom he would always return, as to a safe haven, the friend who supported and encouraged him in his incessant work, consoled him in his sorrows and looked after him in his moments of physical and psychological weakness.

Chapter 4

Travelling again towards the south over the Padova plain, I found a completely different climate from the one I had encountered going towards Austria. The suffocating heat and the cloak of stagnant humidity had broken with the August rains and now the sky was clearer, the temperature pleasant.

The days of travel were long and exhausting, but Leopold seemed to be fully recovered and did not give any signs of particular tiredness, unlike me who often felt awful.

Travelling with Leopold was a unique experience. He usually did not talk much, but he had his way of explaining things, observing the countryside that we were crossing through, which was fascinating for its acuteness, concreteness and at the same time for his capacity to give to his knowledge a logical and amazingly rational substrate. I listened to him interested and fascinated, but I realised more every day my cultural inadequacy compared with him. He seemed happy to have me next to him and our nights together were proving to be ever more pleasant and exciting. He had not returned to that distressing argument addressed in his letter; I expected it to be him to talk to me about it spontaneously, he was perhaps hoping that I had forgotten and was content with what life now offered me.

Furthermore, could a woman desire more than what I had?

Honestly, no.

And yet my heart, insatiable and perhaps deep down rather jealous, wanted, or would have wanted, something different from that albeit beautiful friendship, which was really growing between us, from those marital relations in which there was a lot of passion, but perhaps little love.

One day, we had just left and we were heading towards Bologna on a road made rather difficult by some recent storms, when suddenly, for no good reason, my husband whispered in my ear:- “I can’t wait to arrive tonight to come into your bed -”