The great tragedy of La Belladonna, Luciano used to say (Luciano was in the habit of calling even minor imperfections tragedies, detracting as they did from a divine perfection), was that it was a weapon ill-suited for its form. "Imagine, that slip of a girl wielding it in a swordfight," he would pontificate, once his guests had retired to the parlor for postprandial refreshment. "It is a romantic notion, granted, to imagine her bloodied, outmatched, barely able to keep fighting, as I stand above her brandishing my sword, triumphant. And yet! Unbeknownst to me - the thin line of blood beading across my cheek. A dark smile grows on her face. Ah! The fatal wound."
Here, he would accept consolations for his imminent demise, lips pursed in mock solemnity, before continuing: "Alas, these mythical glancing blows - a nick here, a scrape there - are these wounds befitting of a sword? La Belladonna is a hermaphrodite of sorts, a woman's curse on a man's weapon. A discreet cut, a nick, all duplicitousness and subterfuge, to insinuate the death unobtrusively. This, on an obtrusive three-foot blade whose stroke would be more than lethal enough in itself!
"If she had brains," he would continue, "she'd shatter that sword into fragments and instead make of it a dart, a stiletto, some dainty little implement scarcely larger than a nail file. Imagine her brushing past me on the street, bundled up incognito, scraping me so lightly across the back of the hand that I fail to notice. The wound, insignificant as it is, has been planted. You have doubtless heard the stories of the Marquis de Carre, its previous owner, that idiot fop who while examining his new purchase nicked his thumb on the blade. The scratch did not heal. It simply grew, winding its way across his hand and up his arm, as shallow as ever, even as they swaddled his arm in dressing to try and stanch it." Here Luciano would bare his teeth in the delighted shudder of one enjoying a good ghost story. "They say that by the time infection finally took him, his body was more than forty percent wound."
Here, a shadow would fall over the party, the assembled guests sinking for a moment into unease, before Luciano would banish the gloom with a roar of boisterous laughter. "But quite fortunately for us, the signorina is as stubbornly incongruous as her weapon, and insists on wielding it as a sword, no matter how unbefitting it or she may be for the role. So, I say, bring on La Belladonna!" and here he would raise his glass in toast. "Let her attempt to graze me with her sword while I attempt to run her through with mine. I think, once she is dead, I will display the sword in my study. See which guests succumb to the temptation to examine it, and run their fingers over the blade." Luciano tended to lapse into an unseemly sadism on occasion, a cruelty that had for some reason overshot his would-be assassin and was now an attraction on its own. "La Belladonna must be a seductress, not a fighter. On display, at least, she might have a chance to do her work."
What Luciano failed to realize - what none of us could have known at the time - was that from the moment he had learned of its legend, La Belladonna had already left its mark on him. What must have been a mere pinprick of dissatisfaction at first soon deepened into an obsession. He would trot out his dissertation at every party and social gathering, forever iterating and elaborating upon it. Ceaseless tirades over the incompatible natures of La Belladonna, the soul of a dagger in the body of a sword, and how it should broken down to be one thing or another, et cetera, the wound consuming everything until it was all he could talk about by the end. When the anatomists autopsied Luciano, they found his brain riddled with lesions, each chained to the last as if they had ruptured in sequence.
Of our social circle, I count three among us who have undoubtedly succumbed to the curse of La Belladonna, and at least half a dozen more who are showing symptoms of the disease. As for myself, I consider myself lucky that I never gave much credence to any of Luciano's rantings, and absorbed his grievances only shallowly. The sword of La Belladonna causes me no distress, nor should it, as long as its blade remains far removed from my flesh. And yet in my indifference, I find myself returning to the image of a shallow cut across the ridges of a fingertip, just a pale white line, no deeper, wearing away the furrows and whorls and creases until only a smooth white expanse is left.
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