Secrecy

He came on a November day, a cold wind blowing, the fields soaked with rain. The year was 1701. From my private lodge I watched his carriage creak to a halt, a spindly, spidery thing, black against the smoke-blue of the paving stones. The door opened a few inches. Closed again. Then opened wide. He climbed out, his foot tentative, almost fastidious, as it reached for the ground. In that moment, I realized he was dying. The
knowledge
took me by surprise, and made me watch him still more closely. A slight figure in a dark coat buttoned to the neck, he stared up at the dripping convent walls. My window was on the top floor; he didn’t notice me.

The month before, he had written me a letter.
You don’t know me,
it began,
but I have something of great interest to tell you, which can only be relayed in person, face to face.
His handwriting was as dense and wiry as a hawthorn hedge, and he had used more words than were strictly necessary. Was that nervousness? A lack of
education
? I couldn’t tell. I saw him speak to the gatekeeper, who looked beyond him at the driver of the carriage. There was resignation on their faces, and just a hint of mockery. Had they sensed what I had sensed? Perhaps there comes a time in your life when you lose the ability to command attention, when the world starts to ignore you because it no longer believes you can have much of an effect on it. With a shiver, I turned back into the room.

I sat down, thinking to prepare myself. Apart from the opal ring I wore on my left hand, the dressing table was my only concession to vanity, but there was precious little pleasure in it. The mirror showed me wrinkles, pouches, jowls – the random fretwork that years of recklessness and disappointment leave behind. Still, at least I’d lived. Fifty-six though … And the plain, shapeless robes of an abbess – me, Marguerite-Louise of Orléans! Who would have thought it? Not the dancing master, though he would probably have found the outfit entertaining. Not the cook, or the poet, or the groom. None of my many lovers, in fact – except, perhaps, for the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Though I couldn’t pretend I’d ever thought of
him
as a lover. Husband, yes. Not lover. His half-hearted performances didn’t merit the word. But I was sure he had approved of the French king’s decision to have me dis patched to a convent. Best place for her, I could hear him saying. May his bones be ground to dust in hell. Amen.

I rouged my cheeks and pencilled in the haughty arches of my eyebrows. My lips, which had grown less generous with age, were also in need of some embellishment. Halfway through, I was interrupted by a novice, who blushed and looked away when she saw what I was doing.

She told me I had a visitor.

‘I know,’ I said.

By the time she showed him in, I was standing by the window in my drawing room. Bare walls, hard chairs. A fireplace heaped with logs that were struggling to burn.

‘Zumbo,’ I said.

He bowed. ‘Reverend Mother.’

Judging by his coat, which was foreign and far from new, he wasn’t a flamboyant man, or even one who was aware of current fashions. Tucked under one arm was a well-worn brown
portfolio
.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I wasn’t sure how to address you …’

‘Reverend Mother will do.’

He looked at me steadily, with an odd mixture of curiosity and fondness. The skin around his eyes was puffy, almost bruised, as if he hadn’t slept.

I turned to the novice. ‘You can go.’ When she had left the room, I moved closer to my visitor. ‘You’re not well, are you?’

‘May I sit down?’

I showed him to a chair by the fire.

That summer, he told me, while in Marseilles, he had suffered a headache so abrupt and violent that it had thrown him to the ground. He had been taken to a hostel by the port. The air stank of fish guts and squid ink; he was sick the moment he came round. The woman who ran the place had bright red hair, and he believed, in his delirium, that she was on fire; he had asked for water, not because he was thirsty, but because he wanted to put out the flames. His lips twisted in a brief, wry smile, then he went on. The landlady sent for a barber-surgeon who told him his liver was failing, and that he wouldn’t last the month. But he did last the month. On his arrival in Paris, however, the king’s
physician
had confirmed the diagnosis.

‘I knew you were ill,’ I said. ‘Something about the way you stepped out of your carriage.’

Zumbo reached up and rubbed at the side of his head with the flat of his hand.

‘I found your letter intriguing,’ I went on. ‘But that was your intention, wasn’t it? You told me just enough to secure yourself an audience.’ The wind moaned in the chimney; smoke from the fire stole into the room. ‘I’m afraid I’d never heard of you, though. I had to make enquiries.’

He gave me a hunted look. ‘What did you discover?’

‘There’s some dispute about your name.’

‘I was born Zummo,’ he said, ‘and I’ve been called Zummo for most of my life. I added the ‘b’ when I started having
dealings
with the French. They found it easier.’

This seemed suspicious, but I let it pass.

‘You make things,’ I said. ‘Out of wax.’

‘Yes.’

‘Some see you as a master craftsman. Others say you’re a sorcerer. You’re mysterious, obsessive. Controversial.’

Eyes lowered, Zumbo nodded.

‘At first I thought your coming here was my husband’s idea,’ I said, ‘and when I learned that you used to work for him – that he had been your patron, in fact – well, you can imagine.’

‘Why did you agree to see me, then?’

‘Oh, I was curious, and bored, and not even a man as naïve as the Grand Duke would think of sending an
artist
to plead on his behalf.’

Zumbo smiled to himself.

‘So anyway,’ I said, impatient suddenly, ‘what’s this news that I’m supposed to find so interesting?’

His head came up slowly, his whole face tightening in such a way that I could sense the bones beneath the skin. ‘It’s about your daughter.’

‘Anna Maria? What a disappointment that girl was. A fright, really. But no wonder, with a father like –’

‘Not her. The other one.’

Though I was sitting still, I felt I was whirling backwards. The walls of the present gave, and the past flowed in – turbulent, irrepressible, choked with debris. ‘How do you know about that? No one knows about that.’

He didn’t reply.

Still giddy, I rose from my chair and moved to the window. Outside, the rain was slanting down like vicious pencil strokes, as if the bleak landscape east of Paris was a mistake that
somebody
was crossing out.

‘Tell me,’ I said at last, affecting a nonchalance I didn’t feel. ‘It’s not as if I have anything better to do.’

‘All right,’ he said.

It ought to have been one of the most exciting moments of my life. There I was, high on a ridge, looking down on Florence for the first time. Late afternoon. April the eighteenth, 1691. A burnt-orange sun dropped, trembling, from behind a bank of cloud, like something being born. No more than an hour of daylight left. Gazing at the buildings clustered below me, the jutting, crenellated towers veiled by the mist rising off the river, I felt a piece of paper crackle in my pocket, a letter of invitation from Cosimo III, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, and yet – and yet what?

Even as my eye was caught by the tilt and swirl of birds above the rooftops, I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder. Nothing there, of course. Nothing there. Only the quiet grass, and the pines, austere and dense, and the mauve vault of the sky, soaring, vast … More than fifteen years had passed, and still I couldn’t forget what lay behind me, what followed in my tracks. I had always feared there would come a time when, as in a dream, I would discover I was unable to run, or even move, as though I were up to my waist in sand, and then it would be upon me, and all would be lost.

I had left my hometown of Siracusa in 1675, the rumours
snapping
at my heels like a pack of dogs. I was only nineteen, but I knew there would be no turning back. I passed through Catania and on along the coast, Etna looming in the western sky, Etna with its fertile slopes, its luscious fruits and flowers, its promise of destruction. From Messina I sailed westwards. It was late July, and the night was stifling. A dull red moon, clouds edged in rust and copper. Though the air was motionless, the sea heaved and strained, as if struggling to free itself, and there were moments when I thought the boat was going down. That would have been the death of me, and there were those who would have rejoiced to hear the news. Rejoiced!
Porco dio.

I was in Palermo for a year or two, then I boarded a ship again and travelled north-east, to Naples. I hadn’t done what they said I’d done, but there’s a kind of truth in a well-told lie, and that truth can cling to you like the taste of raw garlic or the smell of smoke. People are always ready to believe the worst. Sometimes, in the viscous, fumbling hours before dawn, as I was forced once again to leave my lodgings for fear of being
discovered
or denounced, such a bitterness would seize me that if I happened to pass a mirror I would scarcely recognize myself. Other times I would laugh in the face of what pursued me. Let them twist the facts. Assassinate my character. Let them rake their muck. I would carve a path for myself, something elaborate and glorious, beyond their wildest imaginings. I would count on no one. Have no one count on me. I was in many places, but I had my work and I believed that it would save me. All the same, I lived close to the surface of my skin, as men do in a war, and I carried a knife on me at all times, even though, in most towns, it was forbidden, and every now and then I would go back over the past, touching cautious fingers to the damage. It was in this frame of mind, always watchful, often sleepless, that I made my way, finally, to Florence.

I gazed down on the city once again. Set among the palaces and tenements was the russet dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, like half a pomegranate lying face-down on a cluttered dining table, its thick rind hollowed out, its jewelled fruit long gone. I could hear no cries, no bustle, but perhaps that shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me. I thought of the land I had travelled through, the farmhouses unpeopled, roofless, the highways and footpaths overgrown, the unpicked olives staring like blown pupils from their branches.

Ghost country.

Up on that ridge, I dropped to my knees, not in reverence or wonder, but because I wanted to contemplate the world I was about to enter, to give myself a few moments to prepare.

By the time I passed through the southern gate, a bell was tolling the night hour, its notes insistent and forlorn. The gatekeeper said I was lucky. Another minute, and I’d have had to sleep outside the walls. He seemed resentful; maybe I had deprived him of one of the clandestine pleasures of his job. I showed my papers to a guard. He yawned and waved me through. I found myself on Via Romana. Buildings crowded in on either side, the high grey-and-yellow façades bristling with barred windows, the eaves so exaggerated they almost met above my head. A thin dark ribbon of sky. I heard the gate crash shut, and a woman swearing. Locked out, presumably. The gatekeeper would be enjoying that.

I came to the Ponte Vecchio, its jewellery shops closed up for the night. Halfway across, I stopped and leaned on the
parapet
. The breeze lifting off the river smelled of duckweed and wet mud. Sixteen years of tentative arrivals and sudden,
improvised
departures, all my pleasures snatched, all my promises overlooked or broken. I remembered an afternoon spent with a young widow during my last visit to Rome. Her eyelids pulsed and fluttered as she lay beneath me, and her neck glistened with sweat, and I had been reminded of Maderno’s daring, exquisite sculpture of St Cecilia.
Stay with me
, the woman murmured.
We’re so well suited
… But here I was again, with everything before me, everything unknown.