Old Acquaintance by David Stacton

milord probably, who suffers from a secret sorrow and so sees nobody but Consul Smith. Among other things I am a Rosicrucian, and one of the few people ever to have slept with Cagliostro’s wife for free. This is not because she liked me, or even because I liked her, but because he liked me. The setting is one half Berman and one half James Pryde, but the music is better, and there is no orange peel in the Grand Canal. The air smells of eau de Bengale and meat sauce. The young man beside me, though he looks like Paul, is actuallyas good company as Thomas Gray, and I have not quarreled with him yet. He writes sestinas, so he may be Alfieri instead.
    Into the square flounces a woman known as La Gazza La dra . She has stepped from a gondola. Her maid holds a parasol over her head. Both maid and mistress wear white masks, but the parasols have a black lace fringe. If you really want to see what they are like, look at a sketch by Domenico. He is not so good as Gianbattista, but he has his points. Or do I mean Gian Lorenzo?
    Or do I mean Longhi?
    No, I do not think so, Longhi’s women are not this robust. She is more like a Crespi, or a Piazzetta slimmed down.
    At any rate it is only an operetta, so who did the scenery doesn’t matter. La Gazza Ladra is the celebrated singer. She has made even the castrati look to their laurels, and not to their laurels alone. She is a little past her prime now, but not much. Dr. Burney, who was through here last year, admired her shakes, and she is great friends with Michael Kelly, and other people like that. They admire her professionalism. What most of the world, including me, admires, is her.
    Ten or twelve years ago, when we were in the full springtime of life, or at any rate, when I was only forty and she had not yet gotten immortal about our ages, we had a brief affair in Rome; continued it in Naples; followed it up in Vienna; had it talked about in London; heard with pleasure that it had been spoken of favorably in Madrid, and was considered le tonnerre in Lisbon. Neither one of us has ever found anybody else with whom we were ever able to repeat those few golden moments.
    Now, at last, we are together again.
    “ Là ci darem la mano ,” she sings (it was a flop in Vienna, but a big success in Prague. It is Prague that counts). “How are you, darling? ”
    I get up, narrowly avoiding Hemingway’s Major, who doesnot belong here yet, but is here anyway and trying to get back to his hotel.
    “Mimi,” I cry.
    We are together again. We allow those golden moments to steep in the teapot of our affections, until I am greatly afraid they are much too strong. Never mind: before sending off Thomas Gray, a long-distance gondolier I retain in my employ, to tiddle her maid in an alley, I made sure the tea was sent up with lemon. So we have lemonade instead.
    “There was never anybody else but you,” she cries in my arms, while down below we hear the plaintive cries of the friendly neighborhood pistachio seller. “Of course there have been other men, but they were never real.”
    From our separate beds we admire each other, dreaming together of a warmth we never had, but not making the mistake of bumping into the night table in our pajamas, either.
    La Femme aura Gomorrhe et l’Homme aura Sodome,
    Et‚ se jetant de loin un regard irrité,
    Les deux sexes mourront chacun de son côté,
    as Alfred de Vigny put it.
    “But, oh, darling, I have an engagement in Vienna on Thursday, and the communications are vile,” says she. “Do you suppose I should change horses at the border, or can I just ride Miss Campendonck?”
    *
    The trouble with that kind of nonsense is that one never wakes up from it. One always believes it just remotely to be possible. So Charlie sensibly went to sleep, where nothing is possible. He had never so much as kissed Lotte, except in public, for the photographers. He hated that kind of insincere affection.
    But the last thing he remembered, before he went to sleep, was the