Palimpsest (30 page)

“I was born as the children of St. Folquet are born, you must have guessed. It is not possible that I should be otherwise, as our family has within it more wealth than Palimpsest can imagine. We have long thrived on adoption, but my mother could not give me up. The brothers and sisters of that school are not alone in their skill.

“The story they tell of how I came to be in possession of my house is ridiculous—when I was eight years old I was blank as a page, and my mother had to lift my hand to the door knocker, as I could not even do that of my own will. I stood dumbly and mutely in this very hall for a week, neither eating nor moving, so stupid are the unmolded Brauria. Finally the house overcame his shyness and cared for me, as best he knew. He taught me all the languages a house can know, and all the calculations required for its construction, and all the dancing performed and poetry recited upon its floors. It was a good education. And though I cannot think how he came to imagine such a thing, one day he set about licking me into shape, with the smallest tongue and the greatest patience.”

“I talked to the other houses,” the boy says shyly, hiding his face in Casimira’s arm. “They knew where the rich little boys and girls went, and St. Folquet’s School, the school itself, you know, the building, she knows how to wake them up.”

Casimira strokes his hair like a fond cat’s. “I woke up under his mouth, and we have never separated since. That is often the way of it, I understand. And so I alone of my family was able to be both born and live as Casimira, to take my place at the center of the factory and open my ears to all of the small things made in my vats and presses. I daresay I am better at it than any Casimira before me, for I was educated by a house, and this has taught me to think strange enough things to tolerate the secret dreams of the ants in my heart.”

November traces circles on the polished cedar floor. “I thank you for the secret, and for … for the bees, but I can’t think why I should ever need to know this,” she said.

Casimira holds her house to her, his fingers tangled up in her long, green hair. Her voice is thick and hard when she speaks, and November understands by now that this means the great lady does not wish her to know that her words mean worlds to her.

“So that you will know, my love. So that you will know that you can be happy here with me. That you can live. That you can have a child in my house and it will not be taken from you. That I was given grace, and you may have it also. So that you will stay until you are old, and close your eyes with me, listening to all our bees and rats and starlings dream, and you will lose nothing by it.”

“Your love is a terrible thing,” November says. “It sits heavy. It stings. It cuts.”

She shrugs. “I am Casimira.”

“I don’t know if I can bear it.”

“I would not have chosen you if you could not. You will get stronger. You will grow calluses.”

The house crawls over to her, his eyes bright blue and as dashing as he can make them. “I will lick your babies alive, I promise,” he says. The love of this one, this small thing inside a big thing, that she can bear. November holds him and rocks him, and she can feel in his little body, which is not exactly flesh, and not exactly plaster, that whatever comprises his heart is thundering in exultation.

“There is a man here,” he whispers finally, as though he does not wish to admit it, to interrupt his time with this new and wonderful toy he has found. “He is waiting for you.”

November starts. She looks at Casimira with alarm—she has had no warning from the bee-minds that hover around hers.

“I think,” Casimira laughs, “they wanted to make you a surprise. They can be like that.”

The boy frowns. “He cannot come in, mistress. He is not allowed. The bees brought him as far as they could, but he is … stuck. In the back, on Shuttlecock Street.”

The trio make their way through the yawning lower floor of the house, and November’s heart hammers against her ribs, intent on creating some new chamber for itself. She closes her eyes and tries to feel him, as she has so many times, but the bees drown out his presence with their pleas that she be proud of them. She is proud, so very proud, and she calms them with her heartbeat. They buzz sleepily, content. She is ready. They have done as she asked. She has earned the secret Clara longs for, and Xiaohui, and her nameless brother, and the green-coated stranger. Not from a book or from guessing, but by bearing up under venom like love. Would she tell Clara? Would she open up to that poor redheaded girl, like a friend, like a lover? To Xiaohui?

She would not. November knew she would not.
Because it is a
sacred place
, she thinks.
I owe it, I owe it protection. I owe it my
soul.
And perhaps she ought to feel guilty for this less than honorable intent, but she does not.

And there is a man, at the great window behind the house. He cannot even quite get to the window, the lineaments of his permitted transience appear to be the borders of the broad avenue behind Casimira’s enormous house. He tries to push toward it, but he has not known a girl named Clara with a piercing in her tongue, and the amber shadows push back. He is forty or so, his curly hair thinning lightly, a long, pointed nose holding up old-fashioned spectacles. His clothes are wrinkled and plain, his eyes mild and watery.

November throws open the window.

“You can’t!” the house cries. And it is true, the golden half-mist will not let her climb out, resisting gently, even apologetically, but resisting nonetheless. She closes her eyes. The bees trumpet triumph with a million horns. She makes a guess and cries out:

“Ludovico!”

He starts, stares boggle-eyed at her, at her dress, at her ruined, blistered, vaguely glowing skin, so full of poison and honey. A vague expression of recognition crosses his shy face. But November stands in her surety, and she smiles though it hurts so much, blisters stretching and tearing on her face.

“Ludovico,” she says calmly, boldly, the deep hum of the hive in her voice. “My name is November Aguilar. I live in Benicia, which is in California. You have to find me.”

“What?” he finally sputters. “You’re right here.”

“Close your eyes and remember, Ludovico. Remember me. In the frog’s shop. Remember the bee sting on my face … well, yes, I suppose there is more than one sting now. But remember. I was there, with you, that first night. I held your hand.”

Ludovico covers his mouth with his hand. “I felt it … oh, God, the bees, I felt them when they did that to you … ”

“I’m sorry. I felt the people in the church, too. I think … it’s to make it easier to find each other. It doesn’t help that much, really.”

“No.” Ludovico seems to be calculating, weighing something precious in his mind. “You said California?”

“Yes! You have to find me in the real world. You have to find me.”

“I know! I mean … I know how this works.”

November blinks—she is stung. She had thought it was her secret. “Remember this,” she says, “don’t forget when you wake up, no matter what. Tell me where to meet you. Tell me where you live.”

He shakes his head, beset by her own bees, who float lazily, happily, around his hair in a black-gold corona. “Italy, I live in Italy. Rome.”

“Okay. Tomorrow, I’m going to call you. Give me your telephone number.”

He does, stuttering, and she repeats the numbers to herself over and over until she is sure she can remember.

“There’s something else, though. And it’s important, please, please remember.” She cocks her head, listening to the bees’ confused report. “We have to get to them, too. The next time you come, you have to find him, the other one, Oleg Sadakov. He keeps running away from the bees, but he’s … by the river, he’s under a black bridge with stone cockerels on either side. The bees will help you get there, it’s far, and we’re too new to have access to much of anything. That’s why you can’t come in. Unless you meet a girl with red hair called Clara. Or find Oleg. And I’ll find Amaya Sei.”

Slowly, as though speaking underwater, Ludovico says: “The one with blue hair?”

“Yes. She’s on the train, but I knew that anyway. I smelled it.”

“Yes, I did, too!”

“Ludovico, tell me where to meet you. Tell me where to go.”

He says nothing for a long time, staring at her. She thinks for a moment that he does not want to come, that he is like Clara, and does not want more than he has.

“The bees sought you out,” he says. “I don’t know what that means. But I think it means you are virtuous.”

November is laughing, her body bright, full of certainty all at once. “There is a list, Ludovico! A list of the things necessary for happiness, and the list is us! Ludovico Conti. Oleg Sadakov. Amaya Sei. November Aguilar.”

Ludovico tries to cross the street to her and is quietly repulsed by the amber air.

“Caracalla,” he says finally. “Meet me at Caracalla. I’ll remember.”

TWO

T
HE
B
USINESS OF
H
UMAN
P
URITY

N
ovember woke laughing. She put her hand over her mouth, but the laughter would have none of it. Her hand ached—the blisters were still golden and painful, but they were not so swollen. She thought that when they had healed, she would be an entirely different color. She did not pull a brown book from the cabinet, though her hand strayed to it. She breathed deeply. It would wait. It would wait.

I am an ill-tempered and irascible child. The kind the Green Wind wants,
she told herself.

November pulled her telephone from its cradle instead, and dialed the number still glowing in her head before it could fade, before she could forget. Her heart was her own again—the bees were gone, but she felt their absence lurch and sway in her. She missed them. Her tangled brown hair fell over her face, and her sheets were a disaster of folds and creases, and in the sheets was the disaster of her, fingerless, her face a nightmare, half-healed welts reddening her skin and sure to scar, but she could not feel them, could not care about them. She could not even risk breakfast before this, before this act she could not bear to delay, to risk losing the fire in her to speak through five thousand miles of wire to a sad-looking man with hair like fitful sunshine.

The phone rang on the other end, that strange European tone. A man’s voice, bleary, tired, slurry, answered.

“Ciao?”

“Ludovico, it’s me, it’s me,” she cried, laughing again, unable to stop.

“
Chi e questo?
”

“November, Ludovico, it’s November Aguilar. Do you remember?”

His voice sharpened immediately, tightening into panic. “
Oh, Christo, Christo, non parlo Inglese! Sono un tal sciocco!
”

Oh, God
, November thought.
Of course it’s easy there, of course all
those people, from all those places, they have to speak to each other, somehow,
it’s managed there, but here …

“Ludovico,” she said slowly, sure it wouldn’t help, “You said Caracalla. Caracalla. Just tell me when. Just say a day. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Thursday, Friday. Saturday. Sunday. Say one.”

There was a long pause, and November thought she could feel him struggle to push himself through the telephone line as she did, under the Atlantic, with all the bony, luminous deepwater fish.

Finally, his tortured voice escaped into the ether: “
Domenica. Domenica.
Sunday.
Mezzogiorno. Mi dispiace.
I am sorry. Sunday. Caracalla.”

_______

A plane, in the end, was as easy as a raft. November wore a green dress, though she could not decide if she meant it as a gesture aimed at distant Casimira or the nearby Green Wind, bundled against the frozen cities past the clouds. She did not see the shanties of the Six Winds outside her little submarine-small window, no spires of cirrus sunsets or broad pavilions of blue ice, but she allowed herself, considering everything, to think that perhaps they really were there, invisible, bustling, raucous. Like bees, little winds, little breezes in a great pearly hive. After all, Weckweet had been there. Must have been there. Casimira knew the name. Her father had been right. He had pulled out a card from a catalogue and—chance beyond chance—he had been right. Everything in the world had its place. Even November.

She had opened the hives that morning, and the bees had not flown out, but stayed sleepily in their droning, buzzing palaces. They would go when they pleased, they were not hers. Her bees waited for her, and she flew toward them, as fast as she could.

Of course people stared at her. The stewardess was careful not to touch her, and she was questioned as to her communicability. She had almost laughed at that, it seemed richly hilarious to her. But she was really and truly demoniac these days, her body scored with healing stings, her fingers gone, her face a swollen black mass. She kept the hood of her jacket up and smiled apologetically at the children who were jealously herded away from her.
Don’t worry
, she wanted to say,
it’s not catching, not
like that, anyway.
But she remained silent.

_______

Caracalla was a bathhouse. Or had been. A stately ruin, old brick and long grass now, crumbled arches, stairs fallen into walls and mushroomy hillocks. It was on the outskirts of Rome, a city November had never seen till now, a city full of light that seemed palpable, that seemed flesh. Everything in Rome had taken on the color of that sunlight, everything was half-golden, one half or the other, a pervasive gold quietly conquering all, having learned lessons from the stones. Everything was so old, so old, torn down and rebuilt and renamed a dozen times. She had read on a tourist’s plaque that the cold, courteous marble of St. Peter’s Basilica was quarried from the old Forum, and it had made her inexplicably sad, that she had looked at the mammoth church the day before and known nothing of where it had come from, what it had been before. Cities built out of cities. All of them, built out of each other. Torn down, etched out, and built over again, without revealing a whisper of their old selves. Palimpsests. Manuscripts scratched away and rewritten, over and over. November smiled to herself, walking through the stony streets.