Pulse

have desired such a meeting. Maria Theresia lived on in darkness, usefully, celebratedly, until her death in 182–.
    M— had died nine years previously, at the age of eighty-one, his intellectual powers and musical enthusiasm both undiminished. As he lay dying at Meersburg, on the shores of Lake Constance, he sent for his young friend F—, a seminarist, to play for him on the glass armonica whichhad accompanied him through all his travels since he left 261 Landstrasse. According to one account, the pangs of his dying were soothed by listening a final time to the music of the spheres. According to another, the young seminarist was delayed, and M— died before F— could touch his chalky fingers to the rotating glass.

Carcassonne
    IN THE SUMMER of 1839, a man puts a telescope to his eye and inspects the Brazilian coastal town of Laguna. He is a foreign guerrilla leader whose recent success has brought the surrender of the imperial fleet. The liberator is on board its captured flagship, a seven-gun topsail schooner called the Itaparica , now at anchor in the lagoon from which the town gets its name. The telescope offers a view of a hilly quarter known as the Barra, containing a few simple but picturesque buildings. Outside one of them sits a woman. At the sight of her, the man, as he later put it, ‘forthwith gave orders for the boat to be got out, as I wished to go ashore’.
    Anita Riberas was eighteen, of mixed Portuguese and Indian descent, with dark hair, large breasts, ‘a virile carriage and determined face’. She would have known the guerrilla’s name, since he had helped free her native town. But his search for both the young woman and her house was in vain, until he chanced upon a shopkeeper of his acquaintance who invited him in for coffee. And there, as if waiting for him, she was. ‘We both remained enraptured and silent, gazing on one another like two people who meet not for the first time, and seek in each other’s faces something which makes it easier to recall the forgotten past.’ That’s how he put it, many years later, in his autobiography, where he mentions an additional reason for their enraptured silence: he had very little Portuguese, and she no Italian. So he spoke his eventual greeting in his own language: ‘ Tu devi esser mia .’ You must be mine. His words transcended the problem of immediateunderstanding: ‘I had formed a tie, pronounced a decree, which death alone can annul.’
    Is there a more romantic encounter than this? And since Garibaldi was one of the last romantic heroes of European history, let’s not quibble over circumstantial detail. For instance, he must have been able to speak passable Portuguese, since he’d been fighting in Brazil for years; for instance, Anita, despite her age, was no shy maiden but a woman already married for several years to a local cobbler. Let’s also forget about a husband’s heart and a family’s honour, about whether violence occurred or money was exchanged when, a few nights later, Garibaldi came ashore and carried Anita off. Instead, let’s just agree that it was what both parties deeply and instantly desired, and that in places and times where justice is approximate, possession is usually nine points of the law.
    They were married in Montevideo three years later, having heard reports that the cobbler might be dead. According to the historian G. M. Trevelyan, they ‘spent their honeymoon in amphibious warfare along the coast and in the lagoon, fighting at close quarters against desperate odds’. As good on a horse as he, and as brave, she was his companion in war and marriage for ten years; to his troops she was mascot, invigorator, nurse. The birth of four children did not impede her devotion to the republican cause, first in Brazil, then Uruguay, and, finally, Europe. She was with Garibaldi in the defence of the Roman Republic, and, after its defeat, in his retreat across the Papal States to the Adriatic coast. During their flight she fell mortally ill. Garibaldi, though urged to flee by himself, stayed with his wife; together they dodged the Austrian white-coats in the marshes around Ravenna. In her final days, Anita held resolutely to ‘the undogmatic religion of her husband’, a fact which draws from Trevelyan a tremendous romantic flourish: ‘Dying on the breast of Garibaldi, she needed no priest.’
    Some years ago, at a booksellers conference in Glasgow, I found myself talking to two Australian women, a novelist