Ideas of Heaven Read online

  They cannot be contained in human heart.

  I had not expected to be so overtaken by what I felt. I did see that sometimes he was silent when I was very talkative, and once when I ran across a courtyard because I was glad to see him, he stepped back and called out, “Slow, slow, Gasparina.” His nature was firmer, cooler, less fluid than mine was. I knew that.

  After our first few months he had to go back to his family’s estates in Treviso. I had not known how hard it would be to be separated from him. It was at this stage that I began writing poems. He didn’t send word by writing and I suffered a great deal. I was not ashamed to suffer openly. The acuteness of my own pain astonished and humbled me. Burning, piercing, binding, pressing: all those phrases were exactly true, exactly apt. They were not metaphors, they were precisely what the heart in my chest was subjected to. It was an education to know myself in this form.

  When Collaltino came back, he was glad enough to have me jubilant at the sight of him, and not interested in reports of tears. How vivid he looked to me, so much more present than the figure I’d had in my mind. The particulars can never really be held and saved, even by a lover. When I went home from our reunion in bed, exhausted and victorious, I thought of Petrarch, how he suffered, and how for twenty years he longed for Laura without ever living out that love. He made his home in the perfection of that yearning. I would rather (I was thinking) have what I just had. I would rather live in the particulars.

  But I had these thoughts when I was happy. Collaltino kept going back and forth to the mainland, and when he was in Venice, he could no longer be counted on to be eager to see me. Once he summoned me to his house and was not there when I came. He had gone out to play chess with a friend and forgotten that he’d asked for me. I stayed in his room for hours, waiting, and then I had to summon his gondolier to take me home. The note I left was full of outrage and complaint and piteous begging, but nothing made any difference. “You could have waited a little longer for me,” he said. I saw then (although I did not believe it) that I was going to become one of those who loved at a severe disadvantage. I had not thought I would be one of those people.

  We quarreled bitterly when Collaltino told me (and he must have known for some time) that he was leaving for France, to be there with his captain if fighting broke out with the English. France! He had to join his company—anyone, he said, could understand that. He was ashamed of me for speaking against his obligation and he scolded me for crying in the street. He wouldn’t tell me when he was leaving, and he was gone from the city before I knew it.

  If it should happen, one far day, that Love

  Should give me back myself, setting me free,

  From this harsh lord—I fear, rather than wish it,

  Such joy, it seems, my heart takes from its pain—

  You will in vain call on my unsurpassed

  Fidelity and love, immense, unbounded,

  Repenting of your cruelty and error

  Too late, when you shall find no one to listen.

  What the poems did was make my lot plain to me. I had the sense (whether I wanted it or not) that whatever I was carrying had by now become a great love. It was embedded in me. I was past being horrified and was in a state of some awe.

  I slept very poorly after Collaltino left. He wrote to me a few times, but then I had no word from him, week after week, and I could only think of him wounded in battle and dying in anguish, or in bed with another woman. I did not discriminate in my terrors—they ran from the frivolous to the very grave.

  It was easy enough to set any sonnet to music, and at night when we went out to people’s houses, I began to sing my poems. What I sang was what any lover knows: you’ll be sorry later, I hope you feel one thousandth of the pain I feel, why are you so cruel. The stubbornness of these feelings seemed suddenly remarkable to me—an entire species beset by the same torturing wishes. The Platonists said we had an instinct for what could not be acted out fully in this world. People liked best the most mournful and complaining of my songs.

  In the daytime I used to go out to the roof terrace to write. My mother had set out pots of lilies in the warm weather, and I thought of my cousin the nun sitting in her convent garden. When we first came to Venice, after my father died, I could not believe the city had almost no trees or greenery. My cousin’s abbey outside Milan was cool and mossy, and the garden, which I had once seen, was at the center of a cross of pathways. I was trying to pretend I was in such a place.

  It was hard for me when the season turned again and I had to go indoors. Then a letter came from Collaltino to tell me he was coming home. I had stopped thinking he was mine in any way, and the letter was startling proof that I had not dreamt him. Gaspara, he wrote, it has been much too long since you were in my bed. He wrote that: to me.

  Oh, but the next week my sister heard from one of the Doge’s advisers that Collaltino had done something very brave in battle (we didn’t know what) and that his ship was not going to come back so soon as he’d said. When was it coming? No one could say. I had been patient for so long, and my punishment was not over. I didn’t know that he was ever coming back. My sister and my mother kept telling me to be more sensible, but I thought they wanted me to be a lesser person.

  The valor of my lord, who steals the honors

  From every other gentleman of valor

  Is conquered by the sorrow of my heart—

  A sorrow that outlasts all other griefs.

  As much as he excels all other knights

  In handsome form, nobility, and courage,

  He is surpassed by my undying faith—

  A miracle unheard-of save in love,

  A grief no one believes who has not felt it—

  Thus, I alone defeat infinity!

  The one merit of this kind of waiting is that it can make whatever follows a wilder and more unbelievable pleasure. On a bluff day in November a man came with a note to tell me that Collaltino had just docked from the mainland with his regiment. I was not to go down to meet him, but he would send for me tomorrow, after he had seen his family. He would send for me, he said, as soon as he could.

  The note did come the next day, and when I rode in the gondola to his house I felt that I was crossing the waters at the bottom of the earth, instead of simply going over the Rio di San Trovaso and along the Grand Canal. His palazzo, with the tall pointed arches of its windows and the wooden balconies, looked more sharply outlined than it had in all the times I had passed it without him.

  When I saw him on the stairway, I tried not to rush at him, which he never liked, but I put my face against his neck. He asked if I had missed him, a selfish question with an obvious answer. I had a bad opinion of the war, and I didn’t want all the bloody stories, and I was impatient to be in bed with him. But I asked how everything had gone in France, and then he began to tell me at length, which was not what I wanted.

  We were sitting together on a cushioned bench in the central hallway. He spoke without much expression, and he listed places where his troops had surged or been cut off, places that meant nothing to me. I wanted him to say he had been thinking of me when the horror was at its worst, as I would have thought of him in any moment of extremity, but this was not part of his account. It was unspeakably small of me to be jealous of a war, but I was.

  I got him talking about other things—things he had looked forward to being home for. I imitated our least favorite host, I half-recited someone’s new poem, I listed what someone had served for supper. He was cheerful then, as he must have wanted to be, and we did go off to bed.

  And once we began, his hunger for me was really very strong. If he had been with other women at the French court, and he probably had been, they had not drawn his deepest attention. He reached for me now like a man in a purposeful trance, and he did not seem to need to rest very long before his desire rose again. I did what I had not done before, I stayed the night. Before either of us could think of getting up from the bed, it was too late for me to leave;
blue darkness was showing at the windows, and we were far out on our own sea anyway. We were awake still when the tint of daylight was seeping into the room, and Collaltino was very loving and playful.

  When I came home, my sister said I looked just like the painting of St. Ursula where she is pale and leached of color from dreaming of her own death. “Saint? I would say not,” I said.

  “Stop laughing,” she said. “You used to be so much calmer.”

  “I hate the calm I knew,” I said.

  O night, more glorious and more blest to me. I sang the poem about our night without any worry at all over what anyone said. Collaltino liked his tributes, and this might have been our best season, except that I knew he might go back to the war at any time. To cannon and gunpowder and danger. Collaltino didn’t like it when I bothered him about my fears. He thought that I was unreasonable and shrill and unpleasant. Once I was sulky with him during a gathering at someone’s house, and he wouldn’t see me for a week.

  And in a few months he did go back to France. It would have been easy for him to send word to me, but he rarely did. I prayed a great deal. That was all I could think to do. My mother teased me about praying to Collaltino—she said I had him confused with at least the Holy Ghost—but that was not my error. My sister used to tell me there were saints who described God in terms of carnal joy, and I had heard both my lovers call out the names of Christ when they were beside themselves. But I didn’t make those mistakes. I kept the two realms of supplication as separate as I could.

  What I wanted from prayer was consolation. I wanted God to come into the gap left by Collaltino. I thought that was the one thing I could ask of Him. Pour balm on my wounds, give me a space where thoughts of him won’t enter. I was not offering repentance. I didn’t see why any battle had to be fought over the field of my self, although I expected God to edge back when Collaltino arrived again.

  There were poets who believed that the love of Collaltino might lead me to God, and it was true that I had some practice now in dedication. I might have gone further out of myself. I might have been a fool for Christ the way I was a fool for this man, but I didn’t do it. I never did.

  I dreamed, more than once, that Collaltino was with another woman in France. In one dream I had to watch him undressing for her. In another I waded into a swamp to reach him on the other side, but the bottom of the swamp was too deep and soft and the waters closed over my head. I woke up wanting to die.

  I went on as I had. A count whose sonnets I’d heard at the salons asked me to join a poets’ group, an academy where we read each other. I was pleased to be asked. We all took pen names, and I took the name Anassilla, for the river that flowed through the Collalto estates. My sister said I had made a costume out of my heartbreak.

  This time when he came back he didn’t send word to me, and my mother heard the news before I did. He went home to Treviso, and I lived on in a state of inflamed absence. A few weeks passed before he wrote in the friendliest way for me to come to him. How could I be so pleased and humiliated at the same time? But I went to him, to the family’s castle at San Salvatore. His carriage took me, and I was tired when I arrived, but excited to see the stone fortress of his home, rising out of the hills, the woods all around it thick with pines and beeches. I had not really thought of him in the country. His brother Vinciguerra, whom I knew from town, came out with the servant to greet me. He said Collaltino was out hunting, he had planned to be back before now, did I want to rest and wait for him in the room upstairs?

  My waiting in that room was like all of my time with Collaltino, a terrible compounding of delectable hope and enraged despair. I had fallen asleep in my clothes by the time he arrived. “Drowsy girl,” he said. “Wake up, I’m here.” Part of me had already given up on seeing him ever, and so the phantasmal sight of him caught me off guard, and I didn’t even scold him. It seemed like such a stroke of luck to have him appear.

  He kissed me tenderly for a long time, but stopped before we went further, and took me downstairs to have a light supper with his brother. For a little while I felt that we were really friends. We sat at the table, eating hot, savory dishes, and talking about whether it was natural to live in a city like Venice and whether a person who had never been outside it could imagine the peace of heaven properly. Or was a full idea of peace given to us at baptism? Collaltino said he had told his brother what an artful arguer I was. I thought that perhaps he and I had come through all our strife to be veterans of each other, familiar and fond.

  He got up very early the next day to hunt for boar, and he had me get up with him, to breakfast downstairs before it was fully light. Why a man would come home from war to chase a wild animal with a spear was not something I could understand, and I didn’t want to understand it. He was gone until sunset and by the third day of this I asked why he had wanted me to come to him, and he asked what good my education had done me if I was so unfit to amuse myself in solitude, and I shouted in outrage, and he imitated me, and then I really did pack to leave, but later he called me back so sweetly (“Why are you always leaving me?” he said) that I stayed for another week, and we quarreled through all of it. What did he want of me?

  “You spoil everything by being indignant,” he said. “You’re making a joke of yourself, Gasparina.”

  He no longer even liked me much of the time, and I didn’t exactly like him. This did not lighten my anguish. Other men had praised me while he was away, but what I wanted was Collaltino, why was that? An arrow shot at random had pierced my heart: this seemed perfectly true to me. I knew what he was, but my opinion made no difference at all. I was still waiting (how could I not wait?) for him to become something I could have.

  Large streams of liquid, scintillating sparks

  Burning and drowning me in fire and water,

  Till not one grain of me is left

  That is not turned to oceans and to flames—

  Make him at least feel one among the thousand

  Of these sharp pains that drown me and inflame me,

  At least one flake of all the fire that burns me,

  Or one small drop of water from his eyes.

  When I came back to Venice from San Salvatore, I was tired and feeling frail, and within a day I was in bed with a fever. I couldn’t go out to sing at the house of a man who wanted to be our patron, and Cassandra had to go without me. At home they fed me a white diet of delicate foods, pale grains and milky soups, but I couldn’t eat. Collaltino was heard to say that he knew how I liked to play the sufferer so he wasn’t too worried about my health. I was really very ill and the report of this brought me low.

  In the night I was sick enough so that my family was frightened, and my mother and my sister kept watch over my bed. Who else but them? Collaltino had never visited our house and was not likely to. I lay shivering in my bedclothes, while Cassandra rubbed my arms and my mother gave me sips of water. I felt so sorry then for my brother, who had died in Padua without us. How terrible for him to be alone when his body was starting not to be his. My own body shuddered and pitched, as if it wanted to shake me off. The kindness of everyone was very moving to me, and yet I was lonely the whole time for Collaltino. I was weak and sometimes tearful, and I didn’t even know which trouble I was crying for when I cried.

  Then the fever broke, and I came to myself again. I was so glad to be in my own room, with the light falling onto the colors of the carpet. To sit up and take a cup of broth put me in a kind of rapture. I saw that I couldn’t go back to the way I had lived, always suffering for Collaltino. What was the use of that anymore?

  Collaltino wrote me a little note, to congratulate me on my recovery, and then he was genuinely surprised when I was angry with him. “Why are you so hard on me?” he wrote back. “What is it that you want me to be?” I said that he had never been anything but a rock of oblivion. A stone, a cliff. And then we did break it off between us. We were tired of our struggle, both of us.

  I wanted only to be quiet, in the weeks right
after. I was trying to remember my old life, when I had been reasonable and had taken a passing interest in all sorts of things around me. After I was well enough to be outside, I walked along the Zattere in the wintry light and studied the glints in the canal, and I did feel freer and lighter. But at night when we went out, people talked about Collaltino to me, and there was a rumor for a while that he might be marrying a viscount’s daughter, but this turned out to be untrue. I still had my anguish in thinking of him, and a longing that stayed with me, like a secret faith.

  IN THE BLEAKEST weeks in January, my mother took me and Cassandra to a very large and lavish party. Someone was reciting when we got there, and the play of pattern in the room—the brocaded taffeta hangings and the carved marble fireplace and the gilded and coffered ceiling—distracted me with a lovely giddiness. I felt a little drunk, walking into that splendor. We had our lutes with us, but we didn’t have to play until later. “How much I envy those souls chosen now,” the host read, “to have her sweet and holy company.” It was one of the poems Petrarch wrote after Laura’s death. Why do we like to hear this? I thought. A man envying the dead. But I too liked it; it was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  We had just barely finished supper when people started playing the Game of the Blind Men, a good game, really, and popular with this group. Each of the players had to tell how he had lost his sight because of love. The idea was to make the story as tricky as possible, full of obstacles and unflinching sacrifice, a set of tests. Rescuing the beloved from a fire, climbing the spikes of a fortress, crossing the Alps through the glare of snow. Lover after lover was struck in the eyes. Oh, why do we like to hear this? I thought, as we applauded the Alpine saga. We were all smiling, as if love’s wreckage were a shared joke, which I suppose it was.

  I went to congratulate the player who’d used snow and frostbite for his lover’s trials. He shook his head and said, “The others were better.” I wasn’t accustomed to modesty in men. He was Bartolomeo Zen, quite high in the patrician lineage to be this affable.