I came so close, so close to finding out about something which we are, it appears, not allowed to know. I consider the facts and memories every day and I will go to my grave without ever knowing the answer… but the fact that I came so close bothers me more than you can know.
A novel I admire, and which I'm always boring everyone to tears about at any opportunity, is Peter Straub's
Ghost Story. This book has had a massive influence on me and on my (amateurish) writing; for me, it encapsulates supernatural tales from the earliest, ancient 'campfire stories' to the age of cinema.
In
Ghost Story, there are several elements similar to the 'Nicola' account:
* A great, yet terrible, beauty those background is only suggested. To those men who find themselves intoxicated by her overwhelming presence, her air of mystery, she somehow seems timeless and even her true and sinister nature has a dark glamour; for all her surface charm, she is strangely frightening. She may be the shapeshifter of ageless renown. She may be essentially unknowable, but her mystery beguiles us. For all this, it is implied, the men should examine themselves for the key to this enigma (admittedly, this is in line with one of my crackpot theories: that the ghosts & such that we see may be emblematic of our deeper and perhaps secret selves).
* The novel's antagonist, Eva, also has a fierce guardian who is only human on the surface.
* Eva's chosen guise - one of a string of names she adopts - has an air of the name Nicola: both have associations with old, Italian nobility. Though of course this might mean nothing, and is perhaps merely intended to make a protagonist lose themselves in endless speculation about her/their true origins. Men being very eager to learn the names of those women who enchant them is nothing new, and its arguably of a piece with the age-old notion of names being magical; and to know somebody's true name is to have power over them (all these 'traditions' seem morally problematical to me).
* The hint, as exemplified in the quote above, that by knowing them one is on the brink of the revelation of a great mystery: in this, as well as the more obvious way, Eva/Nicola could be said to haunt those who are beguiled and bedazzled. They are left forlorn, enchanted, but tainted; not for nothing is Keats'
La Belle Dame sans Merci mentioned in the novel.
There's much more - including my tedious rumination on the irony of men, in their imaginations, casting women as either angelic or demonic - but the gist of my post is this: I'm not claiming that the Nicola story is fiction but only that it, for all its tantalising inscrutability, is actually typical of human contact with such creatures...timeless tales that Straub drew upon not only because such encounters make for a gripping story but because these experiences are familiar to our human kind; because our kind have
always experienced them.
In passing, this also seems apt:
'He understands only the women he
invents – the others, not at all.'
(Quoted from a letter written by the first wife of the novelist Thomas Hardy)