The gentlemen would, he felt sure, forgive him this late and somewhat lengthy statement, said Mastemann’s driver at the crack of dawn next day when having woken the staff he sounded his horn to gather the passengers together at one of the tables at the inn, but if something could serve to make his master’s journey unbearable, that is beside the terrible quality of the Venetian roads which made his master feel as though his kidneys were being shaken out of his body, as though his bones were being cracked, his head split wide open and his circulation so poor that he feared to lose both his legs, that is on top of the tribulations already mentioned, it was the impossibility of talking, socializing, indeed of merely existing, so it was unusual for his master to commit himself in this way, and he had undertaken the exercise only because he felt it his duty to do so, said the driver, on account of the news, the good news he should emphasize, of which he had been instructed to speak this dawn, for what had happened, he said, drawing a piece of paper from an inner pocket, was that having arrived last night, Signor Mastemann — and they might not be aware of this — did not ask for a bed to be prepared for him, but ordered a comfortable armchair complete with blankets to be set opposite an open window with a footstool, for it was well known that when he was utterly exhausted and could not bear even to think of bed, it was only like this that he could get any rest at all, and so it was that once the servants found such an armchair for him, Signor Mastemann was escorted to his room, undertook certain elementary ablutions, consumed a meal, and immediately occupied it, then after three hours or so of light sleep, that is to say about four o’clock or so, woke and called him in, him alone, his driver, who by his master’s grace was literate and could write, and honored him by effectively raising him to the rank of secretary, dictating a whole page of notes that amounted to a message, a message whose written contents, the driver explained, he had this dawn to pass on in its entirety and what was more in a manner that was clear and capable of withstanding any enquiry, so that he should be prepared to answer any questions they might have, and this was precisely what he would now like to do, to carry out his orders to a T by attending to them in full, and therefore he requested them, if they found any expression, any word, any idea less than clear the first time round, that they should say so immediately and ask him for elucidation, and having said all this by way of preamble, the driver extended the piece of paper toward them in a general kind of way so that no one actually attempted to take it from him at first, and only once he had offered it more directly to Kasser, who did not take it from him, did Bengazza accept it, seek out its beginning and start to read the single side of text that had been inscribed in the driver’s finest hand, then having done so he passed the sheet on to Falke who also read it, and so the message circulated among them until it was returned to Bengazza once more, at which point they fell very silent and could only gradually bring themselves to ask any questions at all, for there was no point in asking questions, nor was there any point in the driver answering them, however patiently and conscientiously, for any answer would have failed entirely to touch on the meaning of the letter, if letter—letter—it might be called, added Korin to the woman, since the whole thing really consisted of thirteen apparently unconnected statements, some longer, some shorter and that was alclass="underline" things like DO NOT FEAR FOSCARI and when they enquired after its significance the driver merely told them that as concerned this part of the message Signor Mastemann had merely instructed him as to the correct stressing of the words, telling him that the word FEAR was the one to be most heavily stressed, as indeed he had just done, and that was all the explanation they received, further probing of the driver being useless, as was the case with another statement, THE SPIRIT OF HUMANITY IS THE SPIRIT OF WAR, for here the driver started a recitation in praise of war, about the glory of war, saying that men were ennobled by great deeds, that they longed for glory but that the true condition required for glory was not simply a capacity to undertake glorious deeds but the glorious deed itself, a deed that might be attempted, planned and carried out only under circumstances of great personal danger, and furthermore, the driver continued, clearly not in his own words, a person’s life was in continuous and extended peril only under the conditions of war, and Kasser stared at the driver in astonishment, at an utter loss, then glanced across at his companions who were just as astonished and at an equal loss, before running his eyes over the third statement saying VICTORY IS TRUTH, asking the driver if he had something to add to this subject too, the driver then replying that the election committee, as far as Signor Mastemann was aware, had sat in the election chamber for ten days in the course of which they had come to the conclusion that Cavallo was too old and incapable, that Barbaro was too crippled and vain, that Contarini was dangerous as he had autocratic tendencies, and that Loredan was required to be at the head of a fleet, not at the Palazzo Ducale, in other words that there was only one candidate worth discussing, the one man able to help Venice maintain her honor, the one man capable of victory, the one man chosen by twenty-six clear votes after ten days of debate to be the Doge of Venice, and that man, naturally, was the great Foscari, in response to which Kasser could only repeat the name: Foscari? are you sure? and the driver nodded and pointed to the bottom of the sheet where it was stated, and twice underlined, that Francesco Foscari, the noble procurator of San Marco, had been elected by twenty-six clear votes.
If he were to describe their reaction, Korin ventured, simply as indescribable, it would be only an overused, hackneyed form of speech that the young lady should not take literally, for the manuscript was particularly sensitive and precise on the subject of Kasser’s disappointment, dealing with it in great detail, and not only with that but with the whole morning after the exchange with the driver, at the conclusion of which they understood, not without considerable difficulty, that one purpose of the dawn message was to let them know that Mastemann did not envisage continuing the journey with them — and this was the point, explained Korin, this sensitivity, this refined eye, this proliferation of precise detail, the way the manuscript had suddenly become extremely precise, as a result of which an even stranger situation confronted him, for now, because of the valedictory at the end of the third chapter, it wasn’t events at the inn at Padua following the appearance of the peculiarly well-prepared driver with his peculiar mission that he wanted to tell her about, but the description and its extraordinary quality, in other words not about how, having understood the matter, Kasser and his companions themselves considered the idea of continuing their journey with Mastemann to be out of the question, since according to the thirteenth part of the message the road to Venice that they had so desired to take, either with Mastemann or with anyone else, meant nothing to them now, not about that but about all those apparently insignificant events and movements that had now become extremely important, or to put it as simply as he could, said Korin to the woman in an effort to clear the matter up, it was as if the manuscript had suddenly recoiled in shock, surveyed the scene and registered every person, object, condition, relationship and circumstance individually while utterly blurring the distinction between significance and insignificance, dissolving it, annihilating it: for while events of obvious significance continued to pile up, such as that Kasser and his companions continued to sit at the table facing the driver until he rose, bowed and left to start preparations for the departure of the carriage, to secure the luggage, to check the straps and examine the axles, following this, if such a thing was at all possible, the narration focused entirely on minute particulars of utter apparent insignificance such as the effect of the sunlight as it poured through the window, the objects it illuminated and the objects it left in shadow, the sound of the dogs and the quality of their barking, their appearance, their numbers and how they fell silent, on what the servants were doing in the rooms upstairs and throughout the whole house right down to the cellars, on what the wine left in the jug from the previous night tasted like, all this, the important and the unimportant, the essential and the inessential, catalogued indiscriminately together, next to each other, one above another, the lot building up into a single mass whose task it was to represent a condition, the essence of which was that there was literally nothing negligible in the facts that comprised it — and this, basically, was the only way that he could give her some idea, said Korin, of the fundamental change that overcame the manuscript, while all the time the reader, Korin raised his voice, carried on without noticing how he had come to accept and realize Kasser’s disappointment and bitterness, though it was only by registering this disappointment and bitterness that he could foresee what still lay ahead, for of course, much still did lie ahead, he said, the chapter leading to Venice would not abandon its readers at this point, only once Mastemann himself appeared at the turn of the stairs wearing a long dark-blue velvet cloak, his face stiff and ashen, and marched down to the ground floor, dropped a few ducats in the palm of the bowing landlord, then, without casting a glance at the travelers’ table, left the building, got into the carriage and galloped off along the bank of the Brenta while they remained at the table, and once the innkeeper came and placed a small white canvas package in front of them, explaining that the noble gentleman from Trento had commanded him to pass this on, after his departure, to the man they said was wounded, and once they opened the package and established the fact that what it contained was the finest powdered zinc for the healing of wounds, only once that had been recounted did the third chapter end, said Korin standing up, preparing to return to his room, with this mysterious gesture of Mastemann’s, then with their own settling of bills with the landlord, and, he hesitated in the doorway, with their farewells to him as they stepped through the gate into the brilliant morning light.