A Dancer in Darkness Read Free Page A

inconvenient, and so he had spent the decade in the galleys. The Dominicans arrived once a week to haul their charnel cart from the galley barracks to potter’s field. He had escaped in that.
    He was no longer young. He no longer had that fire. He had become a dancer in darkness, a man who is free only when the lights are out and the audience has gone. He had been burnt to a cinder. But grace he had, and style. He would still be a gentleman, if he could. He meant to clamber back to that position, despite the galleys of Puteoli.
    In the back streets of Naples he struck down a lazzarone ,one of the colourful rabble of that town, and switched clothes with him. Ten minutes later, dressed in skin-tight yellow hose, soft leather boots, and a jerkin, with a stocking cap on his head, and even a little money, he sauntered about in the belief that he was a free man. And perhaps he was right. His boots rang against the cobbles, and he liked the sound. He had learned his lesson. A poor gentleman is down for good. It is the poor themselves, in a bad age, who have the art of growing rich. And that is freedom.
    As for his sister, she was a dancer in light, and meant to stay there. She had a horror of the dark. Therefore blackmail would appeal to her more than a plea to her goodness. She passed these days for a future saint, but she knew best by what means she had achieved that sanctity, and so goodness seemed to her irrelevant.

II
    His sister was Sor Juana, the famous Sor Juana, that Sor Juana whom all the world, so said part of it, except himself, conspired to adore. But in ten years she, too, had had the time to grow tired.
    She paused now at the top of the landing, slightly out of breath, and glad to reach her own rooms, for her fellow nuns fatigued her, as they always did these days. Often, in her heart, she had wanted to laugh at them. But that she dared to do only at night, over her writing desk.
    It was the writing desk that had made her a nun. And even to reach the writing desk, she had had to come a long way.
    Over fifteen years ago, one dusty morning in 1584, a barefoot girl of nine had come down from a village behind Sorrento. The shores of Vesuvius were then an arid plain. In the distance lay Naples, and Naples was her goal.
    Her name was Juana dal Nagro. Her face had an almost transparent beauty, but beauty, after all, is not so rare. The one quality that really set her apart was genius.
    Knowledge she absorbed as a blotter does ink. When she was saturated with it, she poured it all out again in a flood of clever, pious, erotic, or sophisticated verse. At the inquiry attendant upon her subsequent canonization, it was claimed that no child could be so brilliant without God’s grace. But God’s grace had nothing to do with it. You could tell that instantly, from the way she held her tongue between her teeth.
    The Court took her up. Dwarfs they had had. The Spanish always have dwarfs. But children of genius were something new. She charmed them. She amused them. She was a novelty. And so she prospered.
    At ten she knew Latin, Greek, three modern languages, and a smattering of Hebrew. Her portraits show a girlish face, but a girlish face without a hint of innocence. It is a face that willed to be pre-eminent at any price, a professional face, the face of a woman whose profession was herself.
    She knew she was nothing better than a clever animal in the eyes of those who petted her. She had not the family or the dotto make a good marriage. Only one course was open to her. She became a nun, at the cloister of San Severo.
    Now, on this May morning of 1611, she had been a nun for fifteen years. Her cell was fitted up as a library and the view from her window was excellent. It was rather like having a desirable chair at the University of Bologna, except that she could not leave. She received the fashionable and the great every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. The mother superior hated her. She was being taken up by the Cardinal. Her