Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann by Peter Wortsman

Author:Peter Wortsman [Wortsman, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141198811
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-11-04T16:00:00+00:00

The man suddenly interrupted his singing upon spotting the stranger rushing towards him, pale-faced and with dishevelled hair. Bewildered, Florio asked after Donati. But the gardener had never heard the name and seemed to take Florio for a lunatic. His daughter leant across the threshold, invigorated with a breath of the cool morning air, and studied the stranger with a wide-eyed look of surprise. ‘My God! Where have I been all this time!’ Florio muttered, half to himself, and flew in a great haste back through the gates and down the still-empty streets towards his inn.

Here he locked himself in his room and gave himself over completely and utterly to a contemplative reflection. The lady’s indescribable beauty, the way she slowly paled and sank her ravishing eyes, stirred up such boundless longing in his heart of hearts that he felt an irresistible yearning to die then and there.

He kept on morbidly brooding and daydreaming all that day and into the following night.

At the crack of dawn he was back in the saddle before the gates of the city. The tireless urging of his faithful servant had finally convinced him to leave this region for ever. Slowly now and lost in thought, he travelled along the lovely road that led from Lucca out into the countryside, past darkening shrubs and flowers in which the birds still slept. Just outside the city he was joined by three other riders. Not without a hidden dread he recognized one of them as the singer Fortunato. The second was Miss Bianca’s uncle, in whose country house he had danced on that fateful evening. The latter was accompanied by a lad who rode beside him in silence and without looking up. The three had resolved to visit all of Italy, and graciously invited Florio to join them. To which, however, he replied with a silent bow of the head, neither accepting nor declining the offer, and hardly took part in their conversations.

The rosy tint of dawn, meanwhile, spread its cool lustre over the splendid landscape, which prompted the merry Pietro to remark to Fortunato: ‘Look how strangely the faint rays of daybreak play up there amongst the stones of the old ruin on the mountain! How many times, as a young boy, did I climb around those stones with stunned amazement, curiosity and a secret trepidation! You know so many old legends, can you not enlighten us as to the origin and the fall of that castle, concerning which such strange rumours have spread hereabouts?’

Florio looked up at the mountain. Ringed in solitude stood an old collapsed rampart, lovely, half-sunken columns and a heap of hand-hewn stones, the whole overgrown with a lush green tangle of tendrils, hedges and tall weeds. There was a pond beside it, over which rose a partially damaged marble statue brightly lit in the rising dawn. It was clearly the same region, the same spot where he had ambled in the enchanting garden and seen the lady. Florio shuddered in secret at the sight of it.

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