Il Piacere, The Pleasure

Andrea Sperelli was waiting in his room for a lover. Everything around revealed a special care of love. The Juniper wood blazed in the fireplace and the tea table was ready with cups and saucers, Majolica of Castel Durante decorated with mythological stories of Luzio Dolci, antique forms of imitable graces, where, underneath the figures were written in cursive writing, Ovid's hexameters. Light entered from the red and pomegranate brocatelle blinds. As the afternoon sun struck the glass, the flowered designs were playing on the rug.

The clock of the Trinita dei Monti struck three-thirty.

There was still a half hour. Andrea Sperelli rose from the divan and went to open a window, then walked a few paces, then opened a book, read a few lines; closed it; then looked around. The anxiety of waiting was so acute that he had a need to move around, to distract the internal pain with doing something. He kneeled at the fireplace, stirred the burning wood, placed a new piece of wood on the fire. The wood crumbled, the flying embers rose, touching the metal fan that protected the carpet; the flames broke up into little bluish tongues which appeared and disappeared; the coals smoked.

There arose in his mind a memory. Exactly in front of this fire, Elena loved to linger before redressing after an hour of intimacy. She had a way of piling big pieces of wood on the andirons. She took the heavy tongs with both hands and leaned backwards to avoid the sparks. Her body on the carpet in this more difficult task - difficult because of the movement of the muscles, seemed to laugh at all the junctions, all the folds, suffused by an amber color which recalled the thought of the Correggio 'Danae'. And she had the right extremities, little hands and feet almost like the statue of Daphne.

As soon as she had finished, the wood burned and gave off a beautiful glimmer of light. In the room, the warm glowing light and the crisp cold coming from the windows tossed about. The odors of the juniper burning gave off a light daze. Elena seemed to have been seized by an infantile craze by the light of the fire. She had the habit, a bit cruel, to defoliate, on the carpet, all the flowers that were in the vases, after every session of love. When she returned to the room after dressing, and putting on her gloves or closing a brooch, she laughed at the devastation of the flowers, and nothing equaled the grace of the act every time she lifted her skirt a bit, bringing forth one foot, then the other so that her lover would bend to tie the ribbons (laces) of the shoes.