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I knew. I knew in the moment I realized that dear Robin, the sweet little girl who had fluttered so happily about the garden in our childhood games, the perfect picture of her namesake bird, was gone forever. She had transformed into Roxanne, a creature of such beguiling beauty that the stars were nothing next to her loveliness. Yes, in that instant when I realized she was a woman and not a child, I knew I was lost.
I am many things. Brilliant? Yes! Courageous? Beyond any doubt! A poet? Indubitably so! Droll? I could make the very clouds laugh until rain poured down their cheeks if I so chose! Modest? Well, perhaps heaven has not vouchsafed me that particular virtue, but what virtue is there truly in taking a great thing and making it appear paltry, as though one were perpetually looking through the wrong end of a spyglass? It shows nothing but an absence of a firm grasp on reality.
Yes, many, many things make up the great Cyrano, grandest of the great band of the Gascoynes, but one thing I am not and I shall never be is a lover. Mother Nature, granting so many of her gifts to one man, an over-abundance of them one might say, also donated to me an over-abundance of nose. I suppose it was meant to balance things out, but in truth, this bizarre deformity was too great a price for those talents. It has guaranteed I shall never find the means to pass them on to another generation, for what woman, even the foulest hag, could ever love one such as I?
Yet Cupid, in one of his more impish moods, did see fit to blast my heart not with an arrow on which was writ the name of one of my ilk, perhaps a lady blessed with feet like barges or an ear nigh unto a pumpkin in size. No, he did not even scrawl across its shaft the name of a lady of but ordinary grace and beauty, a face amongst hundreds in a crowd, unremarkable and thus, perhaps, attainable. That brat of a bow-boy saw fit to write the name of Roxanne in golden ink, the script flowing in sinuous lines from tufted feather to cruelly sharpened point, and let the arrow fly from the string as though Heracles had pulled it taut.
It found its mark, and of that wound I sometimes fear I shall die.
She is not mine, shall never be so, and to think otherwise is but madness, sweet, beautiful madness, but painful in its impossibility. It does, of course, make me a much better poet, this suffering. I had never before spoken with such passion as when I dared to whisper to Roxanne my words of love in the guise of her Christian. When I write to her, always in his name, always with the understanding that no one will ever know I use him as my puppet, I find leave to let words flow from my pen to her eyes, words that would otherwise remain forever locked in my heart.
Yes, poor Christian, who I will admit is not without some spirit, has no idea that the words that charm his beloved are truer than he would dream, that I love her in faith so deeply that I must give her a present of them even if they are written with my heart's blood and credited to another. But perhaps it is fortune's gift to give me such a one as he to act as a conduit for my own desires. He is indeed beautiful. His form is lovely to gaze upon, and the pair of them match like two perfect roses held in a posy. There is something of a sameness about them. If she were born a male, she should have been Christian, and as a female his name would have been Roxanne. It is only just that they should have one another.
I suppose it is also only natural that my adoration of her should lead me to think of him in strange ways. I know that the hand that grasps his sword hilt has also held her slim fingers, and this is what leads me to wish I might touch them, hoping some perfume of her presence would transfer to me. His eyes, bright as sapphires, have looked into hers and received adoration in return, so it is not so strange that I might worship his face as well, the shadow of her own setting it alight. Once, just once, I clasped him to me, the other half of me, the body to my soul, the one who allowed me to win my angel without soiling her with my hideous presence. I felt his heart beat as rapidly as that of any captured thrush, color springing to his cheeks. It was but the embrace of war comrades, of course. Nothing more. And yet, I did hold it but a moment too long, my hand ending in a caress against his cheek that was perhaps not as it should have been, but he never spoke of it, and that was kind.
I was meant to love from afar, never to know the warmth of love in return, lonely as my old friend, the man in the moon. But I notice he smiles in his solitude, taking joy in the love he sees beneath him on this dusty, faraway world that he will never know, and for that reason, I smile too.
---
I knew. I've always known. I have never been a scholar, and while I thought some love poems were pretty enough, I never attempted writing one. I was never capable of using words except as plain words. When I see a beautiful woman, I think to myself, "That is a beautiful woman." I don't find comparisons with Greek goddesses. Honestly, I could never keep them straight. In a fit of passion, I once accidentally told a girl that she had all the beauty of Medusa. I ended up wearing half a bottle of Bordeaux as a result. I'm still not exactly sure where I went wrong, although when I told Cyrano about it, he laughed fit to burst.
When I saw Roxanne the first time, I was stunned. I stood there for a very long time, staring at her and thinking, "That is a beautiful woman." I repeated it to myself at least a hundred times. Even I was bored with it, but I meant every word, and I thought about her all the time. That has to count for something. I loved her; I just wasn't very good at saying I loved her with any style. She believed that someone who truly did love her would have those pretty words come to him with no trouble at all, and that if I did not have the ability to speak to her that way, then my love wasn't real.
It was annoying. Perhaps you were hoping I would come up with some wild, apt comparison, like saying I toiled like Perseus forever rolling his stone up a hill in Xanadu or that I was sweating like an incontinent pig on a hot day or some other such flowery phrasing. But, as you can see, I am not being modest when I say I do not have that gift. I really don't. I thought she was beautiful, and I loved her. The statements were true, but they simply weren't enough. She wanted much more. Honestly, so did I, and I knew I wasn't going to get it unless I did find some way of being more poetic.
Enter Cyrano, stage left, gifted in his verses and with an uncanny knack for knowing precisely what words would woo Roxanne best. Granted, he was ridiculously ugly, so I never truly feared him as a rival, but I was never quite as stupid as he might have thought. I knew he loved Roxanne. I knew that the words he sent to her were real. No one could write like that and not mean it. For a moment, I understood why she wanted those words so much that she believed love was nothing without them.
I knew she had fallen in love with his words, not with me. But sometimes, when I read his declarations of passion, I was so moved by them that I almost wished they were for me. Anyone beloved by Cyrano would be lucky indeed. Once in a while, I would see him looking at me, staring, as though he were seeing his Roxanne when he saw me, and the look was intense. I cannot describe it properly except to say that it was a look usually reserved for lovers. I found it surprisingly pleasant.
I was never good with words. I can say only that she is beautiful and I love her, yet he is ugly and I think perhaps I may love him as well.
---
I knew. For all that I have not led the most exciting of lives thanks to the constant scrutiny of my dear, mostly devoted Duenna, I am very far from stupid. Nor am I deaf or blind. I had known for many months that dear Cyrano was in love with me. It was a look I was quite accustomed to seeing in the faces of various men by that point. I know the symptoms very well, and even in my bold, strong-willed cousin the same maladies of a flushed face, darting eyes, trembling hands, and strange pauses in the speech were fully manifest. My heart sank when I saw that he was infected by me.
I do love my darling Cyrano. He has never been anything but kind to me, but I must admit that his deformity meant that it simply never occurred to me to love him in that wise. It saddened me when I knew I must break his heart, for I had already seen my beautiful Christian, and I knew that his face was the one that must always be the idol of my soul.
But it was Christian's face, his form, his grace and beauty that mastered me. These are the outer trappings of a man, and in him they were enough to make any modest maiden dream of things she knows she should not lest her soul be put at risk for burning. And, oh, he made me warm enough to burn. When I looked upon him, I could not help but imagine his hands softly touching me, his lips against mine, the warmth of flesh against flesh, bare and writhing.
It was the sin of lust, I suppose. He called forth in me something dark and secret, desires I could not name, but even nameless they were stronger than anything I had ever felt before. I wanted him for his beauty. Ironic, is it not, that one called Christian could so make me forget my chaste virtue.
When first I read his letters to me, I was swept away in joy over his words, the rhapsody he had created of his love for me, and I felt my heart be at peace. Any man who could so adore me must love me not merely in body but in soul as well. If it were so, then I could love his soul too. I fell deeper in love with him with each line, and the love I felt was complete, both lust and love, the two twined together like lovers themselves. Happiness broke over me, and I thanked Venus for her kindness in granting me a man who was all things.
It was not so, of course. My lover was fractured between two bodies, and I knew this at once as I stood on my balcony on the night I would take Christian as my husband through my own cunning. I knew my cousin's voice from of old. I knew then, as though I had been dropped into a frozen sea, that those words had not been Christian's. I berated myself, realizing I should have recognized Cyrano's hand in all of this, that only a besotted fool would think poor Christian, simple boy that he is, could possibly have climbed so close to paradise in his verses. He was like an ornate opera house, covered with every possible rich carving, inlaid with the rarest gold and marble, an edifice of perfection. Upon opening the door, though, one was met with not with the glorious notes of Monteverdi or Peri but a few drunkards singing bawdy songs off key and out of measure.
Yet, as Cyrano continued his soliloquy, his face hidden from my eyes, I heard the purest music, housed though it might be in a ramshackle, ugly dwelling. But I closed my eyes, and I listened. This was the one my soul had recognized as its mate, and the beauty of his feeling filled the night air like perfume from the jasmine hanging from the balcony. I felt as though I had drunk too much wine, unsure of reality and floating in a dream.
When Christian interrupted to beg a kiss, I was brought back to this world at once. Any fool with two working ears would have noticed the change in voice, and yet somehow they deluded themselves that I was indeed worse than a fool. In that moment, I knew what I wanted, what must be. I wanted Christian's kiss, but I also wanted Cyrano's love. I took Christian for my rougher, baser, animal self, the one that longed for his heat above me in the darkness of my bed. I married him so that I might not damn us both to hell for my lust. More the fool I was, as we never touched save on that night, and though I became a widow, I was yet a virgin.
But I took Cyrano as my lover in thought to please the parts of me that wanted more than what Christian could offer me. I never read the letters of my husband without picturing Cyrano's voice coming from Christian's mouth. The two of them together formed a whole, completing one another, each nullifying the other's defects to create perfection.
I have never told Cyrano of my discovery, though I fear someday on one of his visits one of us will say too much, and then we will find it impossible to pretend anymore. I dearly love to pretend. It is the one comfort I offer myself in my cloistered life. I still have half my lover, though he never now speaks words of love to me, only the gossip of our weekly gazette. But when I close my eyes and listen to the sound of his voice, it is years ago, and I remember other words, sweeter and more passionately spoken. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps I am a fool, locking myself in a nunnery and taking vows so that I could never be tempted to marry once more for but half of a man.
But I know, and even now in the chill of my convent cell, knowing is enough.