Page 260 - Revelation

Svetlana de Rohan-Levashova. Revelation

"Love!!!" He did not say – "loved"! And that meant that my father was still alive!
I tried not to show my joy and said as calmly as possible:

– What is the difference, Holiness? You will kill him anyway! And it already does
not matter, whether it happens sooner or later...
– Oh, you are so wrong, dear Isidora! It matters very much for anybody who gets
into the basements of the Inquisition! You don’t even imagine how much...

Caraffa was again the "Caraffa", in other words – an ingenious tormentor which
for the sake of achieving his aims was ready to watch the most atrocious human
tortures and most frightful suffering of others with the greatest pleasure.
And now, with the interest of a gambler, he tried to find any breach in my
consciousness whipped by pain to the highest degree, no matter what it could be – fear,
malice or even love. He just wished to inflict a blow using whatever feeling could open
a "door"...
But I resisted and did not yield. Probably it was my famous endless patience,
which had amused everybody around me since I was very little, that helped me. My
father once told me that I had been the most patient child that he and my mother ever
saw and that it was extremely difficult, almost impossible, to find something that could
drive me out of my wits. When others lost patience I still continued to say: "Never mind.
Everything will be all right. We just have to wait a little bit." I believed in the positive
outcome even when nobody did. Obviously Caraffa was unaware of exactly this
feature of mine, despite being magnificently informed. Therefore my incomprehensible
calmness which in fact was not calmness at all, but only my inexhaustible patience,
grossly enraged him. I just could not allow his enjoyment of our deep and sincere pain,
on having harmed us in so inhumanly wicked ways.

Although, frankly speaking, I could not explain to myself some of Caraffa’s
behaviour which still remained a complete mystery to me.
On one hand, he seemed to be sincerely entranced by my unusual "talents", as if
it truly mattered for him. And also he was always sincerely delighted by my "famous"
natural beauty which the delight in his eyes confirmed every time we met. And at the
same time Caraffa was strongly disappointed when he saw any defect or even the least
imperfection which he discovered in me and any of my weaknesses or even the least
mistake which I happened to make from time to time, like any other vivid human being,
sincerely enraged him. Sometimes it even seemed to me that I unwittingly destroyed a
non-existent ideal which he had created in his mind.

If I did not know him so well, I would be even inclined to believe that this
incomprehensible and wicked man loved me in his own and very strange way.
But every time my exhausted brain came to such an absurd conclusion, I reminded
myself that the matter concerned Caraffa! He did not have any pure or sincere feelings
at all, let alone Love. It was rather his sense of ownership which found an expensive
toy and wished to see in it no more and no less than perfection, the way he understood
it. And if a tiny defect appeared in this toy, he was ready to throw it right into the fire.

– Can your spirit leave your body while you are alive, Isidora? – Caraffa’s
next unusual question interrupted my sad thoughts.

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