The Duchess at Prayer

Have you ever questioned the long shuttered front of an old Italian house,
that motionless mask, smooth, mute, equivocal as the face of a priest
behind which buzz the secrets of the confessional? Other houses declare the
activities they shelter; they are the clear expressive cuticle of a life
flowing close to the surface; but the old palace in its narrow street, the
villa on its cypress-hooded hill, are as impenetrable as death. The tall
windows are like blind eyes, the great door is a shut mouth. Inside there
may be sunshine, the scent of myrtles, and a pulse of life through all the
arteries of the huge frame; or a mortal solitude, where bats lodge in the
disjointed stones and the keys rust in unused doors....

II

From the loggia, with its vanishing frescoes, I looked down an avenue
barred by a ladder of cypress-shadows to the ducal escutcheon and mutilated
vases of the gate. Flat noon lay on the gardens, on fountains, porticoes
and grottoes. Below the terrace, where a chrome-colored lichen had sheeted
the balustrade as with fine _laminae_ of gold, vineyards stooped to
the rich valley clasped in hills. The lower slopes were strewn with white
villages like stars spangling a summer dusk; and beyond these, fold on
fold of blue mountain, clear as gauze against the sky. The August air was
lifeless, but it seemed light and vivifying after the atmosphere of the
shrouded rooms through which I had been led. Their chill was on me and I
hugged the sunshine.

"The Duchess's apartments are beyond," said the old man.

He was the oldest man I had ever seen; so sucked back into the past that he
seemed more like a memory than a living being. The one trait linking him
with the actual was the fixity with which his small saurian eye held the
pocket that, as I entered, had yielded a _lira_ to the gate-keeper's
child. He went on, without removing his eye:

"For two hundred years nothing has been changed in the apartments of the
Duchess."

"And no one lives here now?"

"No one, sir. The Duke, goes to Como for the summer season."

I had moved to the other end of the loggia. Below me, through hanging
groves, white roofs and domes flashed like a smile.

"And that's Vicenza?"

"_Proprio_!" The old man extended fingers as lean as the hands fading
from the walls behind us. "You see the palace roof over there, just to the
left of the Basilica? The one with the row of statues like birds taking
flight? That's the Duke's town palace, built by Palladio."

"And does the Duke come there?"

"Never. In winter he goes to Rome."

"And the palace and the villa are always closed?"