A Woman In The Shadows

The tears choked the words in my throat, I tried to swallow them to take control of my emotions again - “Please, go away, I want to be alone.

Leopold remained in silence listening to my bitter outburst.

- “Calm down” - he murmured - “and forgive me. I repeat that I don’t want to force you against your will. You accuse me of not being able to forget, but not even your heart is really as free as you want to make it look. I don’t want us to start our life together so badly. It has been a terrible month, this last one, and I must still take back the reins of myself. I only wanted to talk with you for a bit.”

He took one of my hands and with the other dried the tears which were running down my face. He made me sit down again in the armchair in which I had sunk on his arrival. He sat at my feet and indicated the book he had in his hand.

- “What were you reading, may I know?”

- “Poetry”.

- “Yes, if I remember well you are very poetical, especially when you talk of the sea and the starry skies. We haven’t had much sun lately, have we? But I believe we will find it soon, when we are far from here, in Italy, you and I alone.”

- “Do you think so?”

- “Certainly, trust me and be my friend. I need it.”

I looked at him and saw that he was sincere.

- “Would you like to read me one of those poems?”

- “They are in Spanish; do you understand it?”

- “Just a little, but it’s not too different from Italian, if I remember well, and I understand that perfectly. At the Florence court, we will speak Italian obviously and I am fully committed to learn it properly. You naturally have an advantage, seeing that you were born in Italy.”

- ”But I have a Neapolitan accent you could cut with a knife and, according to my teachers, this was not good. They despaired about it.”

- “You will learn also Florentine. We will learn it together, if you wish” - he added.

I smiled at the idea of the two of us, like little schoolchildren, appling ourselves in the evenings to studying the Tuscan dialect.

- “What are you smiling about?” - he asked

- “The two of us doing our homework in the evenings to show off our good Italian in the morning!”

- “Ah, certainly, we’ll talk about it. How about that poem then?

I chose the poem that I loved most and which talked of the perfume of orange and jasmine flowers which, on the starry nights of the Alhambra, rose up to the open windows of the beloved. And she sighed from her pain at not being able to join her cavalier and run away with him. A prisoner in a palace that was gilded, but for her darker than a prison.

Leopold listened in silence, then asked me for explanations about the words that he had not understood and, finally, he wanted me to read it again.

- “It’s very beautiful even though sad. It’s a bit like you”.

- “No, your Highness, I would say that that it’s more like you.”

- “And you, do you feel like a prisoner?”

- “A little, I was rather spoilt at my father’s court and I felt like the mistress of the world. Now - I’m afraid.”

- “Of what?”

- “Of facing up to the real world and not having any friend to help me do it.”

- “I’ll be there.”

- “You?

- “You insist on not trusting my words. It’s my fault, I know, and I ask your forgiveness. But I’m sincere when I tell you that we will be friends. Give me time, I beg you, for all the rest.”

- “Time heals, time destroys. Time does not give love that the heart does not feel.”

- “Who said that?”

- “My Neapolitan governess said it. It must be an Italian saying.”

- “Perhaps it’s wrong, don’t you think?”

- “It could be” - I admitted.

- “Do you hope so?

- “Yes” - I confessed - “I believe in“ - I shook my head and did not finish.

Leopold hid his face in my hands, kissing them tenderly:

- “What? Tell me, please.”

- “That you’re in love with me. For that reason, I’ve hated you so much for your coldness these last few days, when I would have wanted warmth and affection.”

Leopold whispered: “For me you’re like the sun after the winter. I can’t promise you that I will forget, but I swear to you that I will always respect you and always be near you. You can count on me every minute of your life.”

He held me tight and kissed me. I returned his kiss and, for the first time since my departure from Spain, I felt at home.

We remained chatting about a piece of poetry, Tuscany, the sea of Naples and the Alhambra gardens, the snow-covered Alps and the parks of Vienna.

Leopold laughed at my Neapolitan witty remarks and I was spellbound to hear his political projects, remaining amazed by his maturity and soundly judgement, unusual for such a young boy. He wanted my opinion about things of which I was totally ignorant.

When I apologised he observed: “Don’t worry, I will teach you myself. Do you know that in my family they call me “The Professor”, because of my obsession with explaining everything that they do not know?

He was ironic and sometimes really nice.

It was getting late and Leopold said that it was time for him to go.

- “I have disturbed you too much and you must be very tired.”

- “You haven’t disturbed me, I am pleased that you came.”

- “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 -”

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