CAN'T WE GIVE LOVE ONE MORE CHANCE?

CAN'T WE GIVE LOVE ONE MORE CHANCE?

One could not tell how old is she; the strands of frost on her auburn chignon stand obviously out and lend her a slight air of maturity, mahogany streaked with silver thread. Now that she's older and better fed, her physique has outright gone from twiggy to pear-shaped, like those tiny ancient Venuses that sometimes peasant crop-growers unearth and take for images of the Virgin Mary.

As golden sunlight filters in through gaps in the black mourning curtains, he just hobble-clops into the room, sees her reclining in an armchair -- though his carriage is no longer immaculate, he is tall, young, good-looking, and clear of eye, with his long limbs and broad shoulders and slender waistline; the very model of a gentleman officer... yet so lilywhite that his pallor betrays his state of health; still, that heart-shaped face is framed in a mane of dark curls, and his eyes sparkle with youth. He would make for a fine doll, a bisque lieutenant, although one with a broken leg, kept in a glass case just as a keepsake, propped up against a stick for support.

"Emi?"

"There is no need to be so endearing to me, Ser Governor General." Eyelids flutter and a glazed, broken look, like a doll's or a sacred image's, glosses hazel orbs like unripe hazelnuts to left and right of the bridge of a slightly aquiline nose. And yet she is still alive, though her breathing rattles inside her throat and chest. The sunburn has faded utterly; the freckles that it usually burned over stand starkly out on her catlike cheekbones - and all over her skin, he presumes.

"I see your husband left you nothing more than his silver tongue. Though he tried to hush your voice for evermore, he never left you speechless."

"Do you mean...?" the auburnette's eyes widen and she closes in on the tall, broad-chested young governor, seizing his shoulders with all strength she can muster. Still his shoulders hurt.

"We have just pronounced him dead, as dead as a doornail, after combing the castle town and its environs, without a single trace of hair or hide of that scoundrel."

"..." No response on her part, knowing him inside and out and knowing that maybe this disappearance may only be temporary. Will he ever return? What is there to fear if he is still alive? There is a certain kind of insanity for which the healing arts do not have a name yet, and which is renowned and infamous for masquerading as sanity. And such people will do anything to get their will done; seeing others as playthings they can actually control at will, by knowing their soft spots - what they wish and what they fear. She's known him for decades; she is one of the few lucky ones to be enough inured to have become immune to that person's seeming and scheming.

"You believed you would die singing, Emi, but in the end you awakened in a sickbed, after a fortnight with the faintest signs of life.


Face to face and eye to eye, on adjacent reed chairs, sat both of them, though in full recovery, still pale from their wounds, awakened to an uncertain second chance.

The blood has dried on the bandages over the shot in her side -- a punctured lung -- and the bodily pain has subsided; she can speak at last, after, but it still hurts a little, like a dagger pressed against her side on the inside of her ribcage.

"Fine, though still a little sore; I can breathe with a little pressure inside my chest but speech requires a little more effort and makes my inside sore... now how's your left knee, Ser?"

"Equally tricky; getting used to the knee joint of the new wooden leg" - he strips his trouser on one side - now he'll nevermore tread on a dancefloor and fully embrace his studies, as a scholar once more, maybe even more well-read than he was as an adolescent student.

"Desdemona and you were the loved ones I couldn't have due to my husband's... eh, preferences."

"That bed for two felt so icy cold, especially when he moved in with a certain young lieutenant; but who kept you warm in the winter nights?"

Kept her warm, of course. But his youthful hot blood and surprisingly gentle handling of her could never, nevermore soften the scars on her back, as callous as her feet and hands, due to the cat-of-nine-tails; his lithe lily fingers tracing and recoiling at the touch - the thought chafed, like sackcloth against silk.
Maybe it was his own being straight, long before the first drink, that triggered it all?

This attractive, charming fop never wanted to be a career officer in the first place - it was just so that an expelled student found himself by chance serving in some sleepy garrison before turning eighteen. The lieutenancy came at twenty, not long ago. Nevertheless, it all feels like a dream instead of reality - especially the lapse of his short life lasting from the drunken brawl that saw him expelled from University to the second drunken brawl that led to him losing his general's trust and right-hand position. How could he had ever fallen twice into the same trap? The memories of both evenings are still hazy, yet he has a few pieces which have fallen into place (though the puzzles remain not finished). I'm no longer thirsty; I've had one glass and that one on ice, and still what a revolution it's sparked in here! Put the glass to his lips, and even wet them, after that single quencher. Then all it took was some coaxing - the faces of the coaxers still hazy.
This attractive, charming fop never wanted to be a career officer in the first place - it was just so that an expelled student found himself by chance serving in some sleepy garrison before turning eighteen. Not Hussif, but some distant mainland fortress, though ostensibly not that different. Wrote a text or two on military strategies, paying the typical perfectionist's attention to detail - even at one point foretelling that someday steam-powered railway trains and steamboats would turn the tide of war! -, then the higher-ups at headquarters got word of this youthful prodigy, and a star was born then trod the dance floors of society once more. Still unaware that stars can fall. That even the most disciplined officer, like the most disciplined student, can let his hair down and find himself picking up the pieces at the end of the day. To the point that both role models and childhood friends, both fighting and dancing, would be left memories as painful, as bloody, and as unable to mend back into place as shattered glass.

And all due to being straight, long before the first drink. "The fact that Iago stalked... well, once he confided in me and asked what it was like when he was wide awake sharing a bed with yours truly. Even showing the stain on my nightshirt. The star of my wet dream was female - although we all get the details that don't stand out hazy when we awake, so not sure if it was you, Bianca, Desdemona - whom I gave up just to see her happy - or a fourth party... still, I told him that while Iago wistfully looked on - and that look turned from wistful to forlorn to the usual icy in a matter of instants. I wish I could read people, especially military men, as easily as I read books. That would have saved me and those I love the most. Still, I thought I had to keep you warm in his absence - desk jobs are so tiresome and army wives with husbands on the field so lonely. Until most of the truth came to light that fateful midnight, and the shock of reality finally gave, at the greatest and most painful price, resolve to stand on my own one foot - at least till I got the replacement, of course."

She identifies with his choice to keep her warm. Keep her warm, yet as a friend with the right to do so. And with his new-found resolve, that she herself developed within decades.
"I never knew no parents, no friends, no home to speak of; and he took me in. Never had any other choice. So from early on in our lives I became his secret-keeper, the only one allowed to know his true colours. It came as no surprise that the two of us tied the knot; there was no other way outside his reach. Queer or straight, old or young or in between, I was bound to him by law and custom, inured to all of his knavish tricks and darkest secrets. It just made me stronger, hardened my heart and soul and spine, crystallised all of my resolve. Called him 'Lieutenant Iago' out of flattery... bared myself from the waist upwards whenever he brought the cat to discharge a little rage... He saw as little of my real face as you have seen of his own. He could read me as much as you could read him. Two can play at any strategy game, Ser; you know by heart it takes two. Even to play never-wear-heart-upon-sleeve. I think, myself, that the end result of that long-term game with Iago is still a draw, one that probably will never be broken. My husband and I were and still are equals..."

If so, then - a question burning on his lips, crossing his dashing features, comes out on impulse -... does she have at least the slightest feeling on the answer to the Iago riddle, what lays underneath all those layers?

"Everything concerning Iago is... something too complex to put into words, Ser Governor." No mention of surname either this time. She'd fallen out of love, long before her younger counterpart could.

"And what comes next, after all this scandalous débâcle has unfurled ... ?"

Her eyes shining with unexpected hope, she replies: "As sure as we are facing each other, I shall stay here in Hussif until the next governor general comes, and maybe settle down on the spot as a madame (the old madame of the pleasure house Cytherea is about to retire); caring for and mentoring wayward young girls is something I have always felt drawn towards - I hope they never share Desdemona's fate -- did I hurt a soft spot, Ser? - but I mean I knew I would die childless by flesh, so they will be the daughters I have never given birth to..."

His surprisingly long lashes flutter as he blinks the tears away to restrain them. After a quarter of an hour that seemed to last an eternity, the governor finally explains his intentions: "I shall wait for the next governor's arrival and then leave for Belmont with Bianca my fiancée - pardon me, Emi, but those dice are already cast."

"Really...? Then, there is another question burning on my lips... so what do you see in that waif, that wench, far below the two of us in rank?"

"Pardon me and my honest intentions if this decision is a source of heartbreak; still, star-crossed young love feels far better than a... May-September marriage? Besides, she's clever, brighter than anyone expected. Read poems and saucy tales for me out loud in the infirmary, from the books she has in her room. Also sings her songs at home; drinking songs, barrack-room songs, but her favourite was that murder ballad that runs: 'As I was walking home alone, I heard two crows making a moan...' Like you, she can read and write. Self-sufficient, with a wealth of grit beneath her fingernails. No one could tell she was the reserved younger sister of Katherine the Shrew - our lecturer, bless his soul, had twin daughters as different as night is from day and died of a sudden stroke leaving the firstborn just married to an eccentric stranger and the other still single, still young - when I was expelled, that was the state of affairs. She doubtless left for Hussif searching for a way to find herself, or something like that - the adolescent Bianca of my university years was a lifesize wind-up doll set up on a pedestal out of everyone's reach; left on her own devices in a men's world and crashed down from the alcove to the dust around the pleasure house door, she's fiery, funny, sometimes coquettish. Standing on her own two feet, she makes for a lovely crutch for my own ones. Now I know whose red string has its other end tied to my own. Pardon me, Emi, but concerning your feelings and mine towards you - is this what it feels like to fall out of love?"

And, to his surprise, she agrees: "Of course you're someone I could only take to as a lover, but never as a husband -- a widowed lady in her forties and a stripling lieutenant suddenly risen to a higher position than he ever could aspire -- the very thought of it hurts... Sharing a bed feels like solace, but the thought of this remarriage makes me wince. I'd be the talk of Hussif for a while; the merry widow of honest Iago, now with a paramour!"

"So you agree, and we're both sure that maybe our common story could only be true in another reality; the time has come for our ways to part and to wish one another the best of luck, right, Emi?"

"I am not the gamine I was three or four decades ago; and lots of bitter experience have come in between. One has always wondered what it is now to stand on her own two feet, no longer bound to a man... hard to do after coping with this emptiness. Yet this decision will surely be worth the sacrifice that it entails."

Though the military stage of his life is definitely past and closed, he is still trying to find the missing pieces of that puzzle - a green liquid which was definitely not brandy, and the taste of which made him wince and the inside of his mouth tingle... didn't it sear all the way down his throat?

The same old guilt on the side of both? There is; decisions they made actually ruined and ended the lives of their loved ones. Sipping a drink or snatching a handkerchief is the proverbial flap of wings of a butterfly that turns out to leave a wake of ruins at the ends of the Earth and changes the fates of several innocents...

The two of them share the same old emptiness inside - both of them agree; as well as that they cannot use one another to fill that emptiness, now that their paths have diverged for good. Still, he admires her as much as she admires him:
"You are a fighter, Madame Emilia. A real warrior in apron and petticoats; there is no doubt that you will make it through. After all, you bested one of those dangerous madmen in sane men's clothing, or at least it turned out a draw in your confrontation; you were there to reassure us youngsters whenever our feelings were down, whenever self-loathing came into our minds... Experience has hardened your skin and your resolve, yet it never will harden your heart, that is for sure. And you were even willing to die singing out the truth, even if that would mean the bitter end; "
She smooths her auburn ringlets, knowing that this praise is true, straightforward, not an "honest Iago's," and her riposte comes equally naturally:
"And you are still more of the scholar than the fighter, but nevertheless a worthy true noble, Governor Cassio. One with his heart stark red and throbbing upon his sleeve; there is no doubt you'll make it through. Realising that you have as much to blame for the recent catastrophe as both yours truly and actually everyone else. In saying you were slight and indiscrete, not only did you acknowledge your flaws, but also willed yourself to set things right, no matter the consequence. Even though your very innocence is shattered, even though the friends you loved and admired are gone, returning to that estate with a new bride and starting anew, returning to your studies, is enough for such a bright and well-read fellow - and I'm sure the late Governor and his lady wife, bless their souls, would approve as well."

In counterpoint, all the two of them can think upon hearing one another's honest, straightforward praise is a short sentence that encapsulates all their feelings just when they've ceased to reel from the shock of reality: "We will never again be the same."




AFTERWORD.

This bunny is pretty recent - it came from a re-read of "Belmont Revisited" and I, Iago vis-à-vis The Serpent of Venice. It came from my decision of whom to pick as Cassio's wife post-tragedy vis-à-vis Moore's (I married him off to Bianca - Moore, to Emilia); so please read it as an interquel between the tragedy finale and my own headcanon "Belmont Revisited." An Emissio marriage just felt like either Colette's Chéri or the Hippolytus mytheme in any of its forms... and besides Cassio already had a fiancée in Bianca - but still, Emi, you're one shero, a real warrior in apron and petticoats as Cassio himself puts it here -- and this is my umpteenth open love letter to you.

And oui, the title is from the climax of Queen's Under Pressure, where Freddie and Bowie give some of the most intense defenses of love ever heard in lyrical history. Also one that the leads in this little rite-of-passage story deserve.