Mirror Mirror (33 page)

T
HERE WAS
no Apple left, for when she fell, the Apple rolled into the door behind her. I didn't think to try to reclaim it until I was thirty or forty feet away, hustling that sluggish goose of a gooseboy up the slope. When I turned back, uncertain, I saw that the house had disappeared. There was simply a tumulus in a glade. Shadows of blue and granite. Traces of winter's snow lingered in long striations, like the thin fingers of ancient women who refuse to clasp their hands in prayer and decently die. There was no door, no smoking chimney, and all I could smell was leaf rot and mold, and the wet earth waking up again.

Michelotto, small miracle of contradictions, was chattier as we came closer to Montefiore, and began to ask about the cottage in the forest. I hadn't thought he noticed it, or remembered it at all if he did notice it, but he seemed clarified in mind. As if his
episode in a coma had given his feeble mind a better rest than it was used to getting. “A girl lived there,” he said. “And I spoke to her.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I'm sure there was. When you were little you used to speak to the geese, and you claimed they spoke to you too.”

“They did,” he said. “They told me many things that I didn't understand.”

“Fascinating and marvelous. What secrets do geese know?”

“Who they like and who they dislike. Among the other geese, I mean.”

“I see. A hierarchy among the gaggle. I'm sure that was spellbinding to listen to. Look sharp, you clot, you're trampling in the mud.”

“They also mentioned who they liked among the humans. They didn't care much for you, for instance.”

“Well, I cared for them dearly, especially when braised with red wine and currants from Corinth.”

“They said you will listen to no one but yourself.”

“Well, you listen to the geese and the wind and the farting of frogs; you do the hard work for me.”

“They said you would listen to them someday.”

“Have they anything interesting to tell me?”

“I don't know,” he said, but in a complicated tone, as if he might have meant
I don't know if they do,
but he might also have meant
I don't know whether you will find it interesting, but others would.

“It was Bianca,” he then said. “Bianca de Nevada, who used to live with us.”

“Is that so.” But I didn't care to speak about Bianca, nor to allow the memory to take hold in his usually incurious shell of a mind. So I took his hand, and I let my middle finger trail across the center of his palm, as faintly as I could manage given we were lighting out cross-country. He took a swig of breath, being startled in a new direction, and my efforts were fruitful. I turned to smile at him and said, “You have grown to such a man, my Michelotto. If we knew each other better I might be a better mother to you.”

In this light vein I dragged him away from the subject of Bianca and turned several keys in that ill-regulated apparatus of a human being that had not been turned before. Raising a child is hard work, I've found; and this is why I've seldom kept myself to the task. But moment by moment, as a responsible parent is able, one must help the young fledgling to encounter more adult arenas of engagement.

The house was still empty. The pagan rites that attended the sowing of the fields were well under way and, I understood, would last into the night, when a bonfire of last year's rubbish would announce the satisfactory preparation of this year's crops. I pulled Michelotto into the house and tutted him for the barnyard smell. “You are old enough to perfume yourself with something more redolent than goose shit,” I said. “Oh, it falls to me, I see, to teach you how to clean yourself up for a woman. Take off those filthy clothes and throw them out the window to be burned. Your days as a gooseboy are over, my dear.”

I was busy watching him, though he seemed wary enough—and that was a good thing; it suggested he hadn't been initiated into the holy mysteries of sex by the sluts and bored soldiers' widows in the hamlet below.

I have always liked to watch a man remove his clothes. The faint modesty that all men evince—once or twice in one's career with them anyway—makes their bodies the more beautiful to behold, when at last the tunic is hauled over the shoulders and the loin wrapping is untucked and kicked away. I made to give him a semblance of privacy, and turned to fuss over the heating water. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don't lie about men, only women.

It was then that I saw the mirror was gone. Michelotto's emergence from the clothes of his childhood had distracted me. I wailed from a rage I didn't understand. Maybe it was simply that I'd been denied the right to hear from the mirror that she was dead. It was all I would have wanted, to look at the mirror and see nothing but myself.

Michelotto worried himself over me, and came forward to calm me in my distress. I suppose I was keening, and it made him uncomfortable. He didn't know what he was doing. Anyway, there was no mirror to see.

Vigil

H
E WAS
out in the forest, higher up than usual, and the plains of Umbria stretched below in their pulsing washes of green and gold, brown and blue, beyond. He looked to the west, to see if he could find the roofs of Montefiore glinting in the noon sun, but the trees, on the slopes where he guessed his house should be, had come into the full leaf of late spring.

He came upon the casket first. Its top was clear as water. He looked down at it, and wiped away a scattering of spring pollen. The smeared powder gave the glass a greenish tinge, and for a minute he felt he was looking into a box of ice, or the clearest river water, for the figure inside seemed to float in a current. Then he realized this was merely a trick of the glass, the way that glass plays with and distorts light.

He wasn't surprised to see that the figure resembled his daughter, Bianca, for in the months and years since his escape from Agion Oros, most of the people of the world reminded him of her one way or
another, either by startling contrast or by painful similarity. He had never seen a corpse in a glass-topped coffin, and that was surprise enough for the day. That the corpse should imitate his daughter seemed only fitting; what other more crucial business had a corpse to attend to, when you come right down to it?

He hauled part of a fallen tree trunk to a convenient place and settled himself upon it. He had nothing better to do; he had been able to decide no other course for his life to take. He hadn't been able to return for any length of time to a Montefiore without Bianca, and the rest of the world lacked savor. So he came and went, an itinerant on a quest without shape. He didn't mind resting for a while, keeping an eye on the figure in a coffin.

He rested, and couldn't decide to move on. In the hours or days that followed, he began, slowly, to realize that he wasn't alone. Seven small men and a rather large dog began to be seen about the coffin. He couldn't always tell when they came or went, but he had a sense that even when he couldn't see them, one of them was always present. They didn't talk to him, but from time to time they bowed and shuffled in his direction.

The dog came up and put its head in Vicente's lap. He scratched it behind the ears, courteously enough, but in time he shooed the mongrel away. He had never liked dogs much.

•
1519
•

Thaïs

T
HE YEARS
had shunted past, and life had never resumed in the way it ought to have done. When she was thirty-three, Lucrezia Borgia d'Este ordered an inventory of her ornaments. Rosaries, enameled buckles, hundreds of pearls, broaches of finely wrought silver, clasps and combs beyond figuring. And a single stem as if from an apple tree, made in what appeared to be the finest silver, though in three places where rubies as large as apples might once have hung, dots of black tarnish proved resistant to any means of removal.

In 1514 Lucrezia suffered terrible wounds with the birth of Alessandro, who entered the world with a huge head. It was a mercy that he died a year or so later. Anyway, he was survived by his new sister, Eleonora, and was replaced by another son a year later. Lucrezia paid a call on one of her favorite lovers, Francesco Gonzaga, to find him supine and withered, attended by several greyhounds and a pet
dwarf upholstered in brocade. She showed him her new baby—named Francesco—but she wondered if she had named the baby precipitously, for Francesco Gonzaga was troubled by the French pox. Though he was being treated with mercury, taken internally, he seemed in danger of losing his handsome nose to rot. He wasn't interested in her new baby. She didn't visit the sick man again.

Another new pope was elevated, in time. This one cast his lot with the resurgent Medici. The campaigns in northern and central Italy swept back and forth with the usual shifting of allegiances, granting of concessions, revocations of treaty, accusations of betrayal. The winds from the north, the
tramontana
and the
sirocco,
had anyone the nose to detect it, carried the first whiffs of Protestant objection to papal vice and corruption. In 1517 Martin Luther nailed the ninety-five theses on the door of Wittenberg Castle Church. Strong stuff.

In Lucrezia's repose at the Belvedere on an island in the Po near the Castel Tedaldo, intimates and prospective lovers and her husband discussed these matters over the fine strong broth known as chocolate, the beans for which the Genoese navigator had discovered fifteen years earlier in the spice islands in the seas weeks west of Lisbon. The sun seemed as secure in the sky as ever. It wasn't, though.

Lucrezia became qualmish about everlasting life, which, as her energies began to fail her, was of increasing concern. How had her obsession with an ignorant farm girl brought her to such grief? How had she squandered the very Apples of Eden—if such, indeed, they were—on an act of revenge and hatred? The convents and hospitals she had founded, the pious works tediously entered into and sometimes completed—these works of mercy seemed insufficient when posted against her crimes. Acedia chief among them.

Pregnant for the eleventh time in 1518, she spent her autumn nourishing the fetus with pastries, sugared fruits, honey by the spoonful, roasted nuts seasoned with salt from the Venetian suppliers at Cervia. She grew plumper than usual and feared that the next baby would have the same large head as Alessandro, or even larger, and that the force of its passage would split her asunder.

Within a matter of months she lost not only Francesco Gonzaga, as expected, but also her mother. Lucrezia had never been close to Vannozza Cattanei, and so the shock she experienced at the news of her mother's death was unexpected. She found herself lighting candles in chapels whose adornments she had commissioned but whose doors she had seldom darkened. She remembered leaving her mawkish mother when she was only eleven, and the mean-spirited glee she'd felt about it. She recalled succumbing to the lure of Vatican Rome, the mobs, the ceremonial parades, the glints of color, the pageantry of power—how drab all that seemed, considered now against the tears her mother had bothered to shed at Lucrezia's breezy departure.