Against the Day (110 page)

“According
to one version,” said Luca, “he ended up sailing to America, where he got
married, had kids, started a line of descendants, including us, though no more
Zombinis ever went into the mirror business—we were everything else,
stoneworkers, saloonkeepers, cowboys, gamblers, heck, down south before the
Civil War? a couple of us were Negroes.”

   
“Huh?”

“What,
you never saw the family tree? Here, look, Elijah Zombini, master chef, first
lasagna south of the MasonDixon, used grits instead of ricotta, you never heard
of him?” And as had been happening since Bria was a baby, Luca went off into
another one of his stories, and one by one the children fell asleep
. . . .

Isola
degli Specchi appeared on some maps and was absent from others. It had seemed
to depend how high the water was in the Lagoon from day to day. Also, perhaps,
on a species of faith, for there were otherwiseknowledgeable Venetians who
denied its existence categorically. On the day Luca and Bria visited, it seemed
like a normal enough island, reached by normal vaporetto, a normal mirrorworks,
casting rooms, batch crucibles, grinding workshops, the only peculiar element an
entire wing that visitors were discouraged from entering, whose door read
terapia
.

Professore
Svegli was in the factory archives surrounded by documents written on ancient
paper and parchment. “Your ancestor’s records,” he greeted them, “are as hard
to track down as the man himself was.”

   
“Surprised
they just didn’t destroy all the records they could find.”

“It
would not have occurred to them. Today we are used to thinking of identity as
no more than the contents of one’s dossier. Back then one man might have
multiple identities, ‘documents’ might easily be forged or fictional. For
Niccolo dei Zombini it was especially tricky, because at some point he also
went crazy, a common occupational risk among these perfectionist mirrormakers.
He should have ended up in the madhouse on San Servólo, but for some mysterious
reason—was he pretending insanity as part of a plan to escape? did he
have friends in the Palazzo Ducale?—he got away with behavior that would
have had anyone else sent to the
manicomio,
and was allowed to keep on
working. As things turned out, he might’ve been the only one who ever
understood why.”

The
Professore carefully picked up a sheet of nearlytransparent vellum and laid it
on a flat surface of white celluloid. “This is believed to be a master drawing
of the socalled
paramorfico,
it’s on uterine vellum, very rare and
expensive, and not meant to see much of the light of day. There do appear also
to have been working templates inked on cheaper grades of parchment, but most
of those were ruined by use, as well as by the grinding materials, pitch,

rouge, and so forth. Niccolo escaped
from here apparently around 1660, taking a
paramorfico
with him, and
neither was heard from again.”

“What does it do?” Luca asked
Vincenzo Miserere. “Does anybody still make them? Could I use one in my act?”

Miserere looked at him over the top
of his pincenez. “You ordered something like it last year,” thumbing through a
stack of invoice copies. “Glass, calcite, custom silvering. We call it La
Doppiatrice.”

“Right. Right. Now we’re on the
topic, I might need to talk to your fieldsupport people.” Proceeding to
acquaint Miserere with the unaccountable malfunction that had produced a small
population of optically sawedinhalf subjects walking around New York, while
Bria tried not to roll her eyes too obviously.

The rep picked up a telephone on his
desk, had a short conversation in Venetian dialect, and a few minutes later
Ettore Sananzolo, who had in fact designed the apparatus, came in with a sheaf
of engineering drawings under his arm.

“It’s only a variation on the classic
Maskelyne cabinet of forty years ago,” he explained, “where you put a mirror
edgewise into an empty cabinet at a fortyfivedegree angle, so that it splits
one of the back corners perfectly in half. With a good enough mirror and velvet
lining, the audience thinks they’re still looking straight back at the rear
wall of an empty cabinet, when what they’re really seeing is a reflection of
one of the side walls. To disappear, the subject simply climbs into the cabinet
and hides in the fortyfivedegree angle behind the mirror.

“For the analogous trick in
fourspace, we had to go from a twodimensional to a threedimensional mirror,
which is where the
paramorfico
comes in. Instead of the simple
ninetydegree rotation when one plane represents another in threespace, we now
have to replace one volume—the cabinet interior—with another one,
in fourspace. We pass from a system of three purely spatial axes to one with
four—space plus time. In this way time enters the effect. The doubles you
report having produced are actually the original subjects themselves, slightly
displaced in time.”

“More or less how Professor
Vanderjuice of Yale sees the problem. So now, how do we fix it?”

“Unfortunately, you will first have
to find each pair and somehow convince them to climb back into the cabinet
again.”

Over in the corner of his eye, he saw
Bria grabbing herself by the head and trying not to comment, but Luca now
curiously was feeling the first stirrings

of hope. What Ettore asked was clearly impossible. By now
these subjects had gone on for too long with their lives, no longer twinned so
much as divergent,

inevitably so in a city as gigantic as New York—they
would have gone on to meet attractive strangers, court, marry, have babies, change
jobs, move to other places, it would be like trying to put smoke back into a
cigar even to find them anymore, let alone expect any pair of them to reenter
La Doppiatrice willingly. It was sort of like fathering a large number of real
children, he supposed, twins, except that these came into the world already
grownups, and chances were that none of them would ever visit. Not everybody
would find this comforting, but Luca tried to.

Ettore pointed out on the drawings
where adjustments would have to be made, as well as new parts installed, to
prevent a recurrence of the problem.

“You’ve set my mind at rest,”
murmured Luca, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

“Money?” Ettore suggested. Vincenzo
Miserere lit up one of those hardasarock black cigars and winked. Bria was
peering at her father as if he had gone insane.

They went thumping back to Venice in
a vaporetto, among the unquiet ghosts of all the crazy mirrormakers riding the
salso
in from the Lagoon and back out again, in and out of the city, attaching
themselves to nightfishing boats, steamers,
sandoli,
out to the lost
chance, the lost home
. . .
slipping
beneath the surface to browse among the ancient workrooms and even sometimes
terribly catch sight of themselves in some fragment of ancient mirror, for the
silvering down here, surviving the corrosions of the sea and of time, had
always been particularly tuned to the longhomeless dead
. . . .
Sometimes they were also visible at the edges of the
screen in the movies that showed at the Malibran in between live stage acts.
Back in New York the Zombini kids had been used to sneaking off downtown to
watch the nickelodeon, they thought they were pretty wised up, but here somehow
they found themselves grabbing each other so as not to fall into the collective
dream and run screaming down the aisles away from trains pulling in to the
Santa Lucia Station, or throw objects at especially monstrous villainies in the
short melodramas, or make sure they were in their seats and not aboard a boat
out in the Grand Canal.

That night at the theatre, after the
show, Dally stayed behind in the abrupt swell of absence and echo to help stow
props and equipment and set up some of the effects for the next night’s
performance. Erlys, who had lately been looking into thoughtreading as a specialty
and might have felt more than usually intuitive, kept throwing her these
glances, each as thoughtfully directed as one of Bria’s knives. At some point
they were facetoface across a cage of doves. “What is it,” they both said at
the same time. While Dally was figuring how to begin, Erlys added, “Never mind,
I know what it is.”

“I know I’m supposed to explain,”
Dally said. “Wish I could. You know how you’ll pass through a place, after a
long string of places you’d never want to stop in, let alone live, or could
understand anybody else wanting to, and maybe it’s the time of day, the
weather, what you just ate, no way to tell, but you don’t ride into it, it
comes out to surround you, and you know it’s where you belong. There’s nothing
else like this place anywhere, and I know it’s where I belong.”

Several
dozen objections elbowed each other in Erlys’s mind for precedence. She knew
Dally had already examined and dismissed them all. She nodded, slowly, a couple
of times. “Let me talk to Luca.”

“
So
now
I have
to let her go,” Erlys said. “I don’t know how I can.” They were in their hotel
on the edge of San Polo, looking across the canal at Cannareggio, the sun
behind them warping itself down into one of those melancholy mixtures of light
and nebulosity that happened only here. “Finally, the payback for what I did. I
find her, I lose her again.”

   
“None
of that was ever your fault,” Luca said, “it was me. I was crazy.”

“Didn’t
know any better myself, only a kid at the time, but that’s no excuse, is it? I
left her. I left her. Something I can never go back and change. Those Snidell
sisters back in Cleveland, they had my number all the time. They still search
me out in my dreams and tell me I don’t deserve to live. How could I be that
selfish?”

“Hey.
Not like you abandoned her,” he protested. “You knew the safest place you
could’ve left her was with Merle, you knew she’d be warm, and loved, and never
hungry.”

   
She
nodded, miserable. “I knew. Made it that much easier to leave.”

   
“We
tried to find them again. Couple years as I recall.”

   
“Still
not hard enough.”

“We
had to keep working too. Couldn’t just stop everything to go chasing Merle all
over the map. And he could’ve tried to find us, too, couldn’t he?”

   
“He
must’ve felt so betrayed. He didn’t want to see me again, he didn’t want me
near her either.”

   
“You
don’t know.”

   
“Are
we fighting?”

He reached to push some hair off her
face. “I was afraid. I thought one day you’d just go off looking for her on
your own, and I’d be left with the ordinary day again, without you. I got so
desperate I thought about locks and chains, except you learned all those
escapes.”

“I
was never about to go disappear on you Luca, it wasn’t Merle I loved, it was
you.”

They sat side by side on the bed
feeling thirty years older than they were. Light seeped out of the room. “I
came back to the apartment that day,” Luca said, “and here was this—I
don’t know, I thought she’d flown in from a star.”

   
“It’s
how I felt when she was born.”

He never carried handkerchiefs but
knew how to produce from nowhere a silk scarf of any desired color. This one
was violet. He handed it to her with a flourish. “Let me use it when you’re
through.”

She touched her eyes with it and when
she passed it back, the scarf had changed color to duck green. “Stronzo. You don’t
want her to go any more than I do.”

   
“But
we have no say anymore. Part of the deal.”

   
“Can
we just leave her in Venice? How do we know this time she’ll be safe?”

“Listen, if she was helpless, foolish
in the head, it’d be one thing, but this kid has walked through tong wars
without a scratch. She’s played the Bowery. We’ve both seen her in action, if
she was able to handle New York before she even met us, she can do Venezia in
her sleep. Maybe a couple francs in her name at the Banca Veneta wouldn’t hurt,
you know, just in case. And there’s people here I can ask to discreetly keep an
eye on her.”

So
that was how Dally got to be on her own in Venice. One day the vaporetto pulled
away from the San Marco stop, and there were so many Zombinis at the rail calling
goodbye that the boat was tilting. Later for some reason it would be Bria that
Dally remembered, slim, steady, waving her hat at full arm’s length, hair blown
in a tangle, calling out, “Show’s on,
ragazza. In bocc’ al lupo!
”

She was earning
a living before she knew it, putting
to use the many lighthanded and quickfingered skills and the fast talk that
went with them she had started learning from Merle before she learned to walk,
and from the dealers and sharpers who’d come tumbleweeding through the different
towns ever since her hands were big enough to palm bridgesize cards, and later
learning from Luca Zombini to expand into juggling and magic tricks. She was
most comfortable performing in little
campielli
whose churches held only
minor paintings, and which were scaled perfectly to gatherings of children and
tourists on the way to betterknown landmarks around town. Quite soon she had
grown to hate tourists and what she saw them doing to Venice, changing it from
a real city to a hollow and now and then outrightfailed impersonation of
itself, all the centuries of that irregular seethe of history reduced to a few
simple ideas, and a seasonal human inundation just able to grasp them.