Secrecy (14 page)

‘I think it’s time,’ she said.

They rose to their feet.

Mimmo lifted his arms out sideways, as if to test his new powers. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

‘It’s subtle,’ she told him. ‘Light as air.’

She felt slightly sick; she tried not to think about the spiders’ legs and the priest’s greasy hair.

‘Shall I go first?’ she said.

‘No, me.’ He jumped up and down, making the loose tiles clack. ‘Me first.’

She put an upright finger to her lips.

He scrambled up to the apex of the roof. Still on all fours, he turned his back on the chimney and began to make his way down to the far end. From there, it was a sheer drop to the ground. He stood up. He was facing away from her, his arms held at right-angles to his body. He appeared to be looking out into the heat-haze that shimmered above the land.

Then he stepped off the roof.

For a moment he seemed to remain quite motionless. He hung in the air, the back of his head outlined against the flawless sky, and she thought he was about to veer sideways and soar up over the track and on towards the village.

Why hadn’t she stopped him?

Why hadn’t she gone first?

He had insisted, though, and there had been no mistaking his eagerness as he scurried over the tiles. He had believed in the potion to such an extent that she had begun to think it
might actually work.
Like Mimmo, she had
wanted
it to work. For those few seconds, his faith had converted her.

Then the air let go of him, and he vanished from sight, and there was a dull, ugly sound, like something collapsing. She rushed to the edge of the roof and peered over. Mimmo lay crumpled in the yellow grass. One of his legs had twisted back on itself; the skin had broken, and a piece of bone was showing.

She coughed twice and almost vomited, then she hurried back across the tiles. Down the ladder. Round the house. Out of the shadow, into the sun. Mimmo was still lying on the ground. His eyes were closed, and the fingers of his left hand were moving slowly, almost numbly, like insect feelers.

‘Did it work?’ His grey face made his lips look mauve. ‘Did I fly?’

‘I think so.’ She glanced over her shoulder. The roof was higher than she remembered. Above the tiled edge the blue sky seemed to lurch and tilt. ‘Yes. Just for a moment.’

His head moved sideways, and he was sick in the grass. Dark specks floated in the viscous fluid. Spiders’ legs. Rose dust. A rustle came from behind her. Looking round, she let out a cry. An old woman stood at her elbow. Her black clothes were so faded that they had gone brown, and her face was as cracked as a dropped plate. On her bald head she wore a hat made from a cabbage leaf. She began to speak, but Faustina couldn’t
understand
a word. The sounds were shapeless and morose. Like groans. She told Mimmo she would fetch help, then she turned and ran.

She made for Vespi’s house. He would know what to do. She talked to God the whole time she was running. Strange gabbled prayers.
I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
Then:
It’s not true. It can’t be. I must have imagined it.
And then:
You could have let him fly. Just once. Would that have been so difficult?
And finally:
He’s not going to die, is he? Please say he isn’t.
She ran so fast she tasted blood.

Mimmo didn’t die, but he lost his leg. They cut it off, just above the knee.

A few days later, she called at the Righetti house. Mimmo’s father came to the door. Mimmo was still in hospital, he said, but they thought he would pull through.

She burst into tears. ‘It was all my fault.’

Mimmo’s father placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘He told me what happened. You were on the roof, and he was showing off. He went too near the edge.’

Mimmo had lied in order to protect her.

‘You’ve always been a good friend to him,’ Mimmo’s father said. ‘He looks up to you.’ He turned his eyes on her. Burst veins in the whites. Sagging lids. ‘He would never blame you.’

Her heart thumped. Did he know? Had he guessed? There was nothing worse than the feeling of being found out.

Before she left, he showed her the strap the barber-surgeon had wedged between Mimmo’s teeth before he operated. Mimmo had bitten clean through the leather.

Though Mimmo’s father told her that she was always welcome, she couldn’t bring herself to visit again. From that day on, she always turned right when she left her house, even if it meant going out of her way. If she saw Mimmo from a distance, stumping along on crutches his father must have made for him, she would duck down a side street, or else she would double back. And he, too, kept himself to himself. She could have said she was sorry, she supposed, but the longer her silence lasted the harder it became – and besides, he wasn’t the sort of person who would have expected an apology. Given that he had covered for her, it might even have offended him.

‘Actually, that’s nonsense,’ she said. ‘I was just a coward.’

Though there was still light in the sky, the shade in the garden had deepened. I stroked her arm, and all the tiny hairs stood up. She looked into my face.

‘I was a coward,’ she said again.

My hand moved to the smooth groove at the back of her neck. The colour of her eyes intensified, like embers when you blow on them, and my mouth found her mouth, my tongue was touching hers, and I thought I could taste salt, the almonds she had eaten earlier.

A sudden roar. The football match in Santa Croce.

We slid from the bench to the ground. She lay on her back, and I faced her, my cock against her hip. I reached under her skirts. Her breath caught on her teeth, and her eyelids lowered, her dark lashes resting lightly on the lavender skin beneath her eyes. I was seeing her in minute detail, as if through a
magnifying
glass. I ran my finger slowly from her perineum to her clitoris. I was hardly touching her at all, but the liquid inside her rose to meet my fingertip, her cunt a cup full to the brim. I could delay no longer. Her cries, though uttered next to my ear, sounded as faint and distant as birds flying high up in the air, birds not visible to the naked eye. Afterwards, we lay side by side, and stared up into a sky that seemed limitless.

‘That wasn’t the first time, was it?’ I said.

‘Yes. Well, no –’

I looked at her.

‘I was attacked once,’ she said. ‘When I was fourteen.’

There was a shifty-looking man who came through Torremagna every few months with a mule-drawn cart and a grindstone. He would always blow the same three haunting notes on his flute to let people know that he had arrived.

‘A knife-sharpener,’ I said.

Faustina nodded. ‘He didn’t used to stop at our house. Ginevra didn’t trust him.’

One day she was south of the village, in the hollow where the mill house was, when she heard him coming. He lifted his flute to his lips as he approached and played a set of notes she didn’t recognize. She asked him why the tune had changed. He would show her why, he said, and seized her by the wrist. He would cut her throat if she didn’t let him show her. He was grinning. His teeth were brown, but his shoulder-length hair was oddly clean and shiny. He pinned her to the back of his cart, her head jammed against the grindstone, and stuck his thing in her. Before he could finish, though, he cried out and dropped to the ground. Vespi stood behind him, wielding an axe-handle.

‘I didn’t know he was capable of something like that,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘He was so upset. I think he suffered more than I did.’

Darker now, almost black, the sky appeared to have a surface to it, like water. It was deep too, and for a few giddy moments I felt I was falling upwards, and that the stars would bounce off me as I passed, no heavier than hail-stones, and that I could fall like that for ever.

‘He would have been a good father to you,’ I said.

‘You think so? I never thought of it like that.’ She leaned on one elbow and looked down at me with a sudden earnestness. ‘If I asked you to take me away from here, would you do it?’

‘From Florence?’

‘Yes.’

‘But my work is here,’ I said, ‘and I’m being paid so well.’

‘What if I said I was in danger?’

‘What kind of danger?’

She lay back. ‘It’s all right. It was just an idea.’

‘No, really. Tell me.’

‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. We hardly know each other –’

The flatness in her voice told me I had missed a chance to prove something to her, and just then, as I looked at her, I would have promised her anything – anything at all.

‘Where would we go?’

I was desperately trying to regain the ground I had occupied only seconds earlier. It was like the moment in her story where she ran up the track with a head full of frantic, fractured prayers. But there was no way back. There never is. I realized that what she had called ‘an idea’ meant something incalculable to her. It had cost her an effort to put the question, and she had done so against her better judgement. My lukewarm response had
disappointed
her all the more because she had, at some deep level, predicted it. It was too late now to talk of Genoa or Paris.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘Do you?’ She looked startled, and no wonder: I had
surprised
myself. I suddenly felt younger than she was, even though I was almost twice her age.

‘It’s true,’ I said stubbornly. ‘One day you’ll realize.’

A clock tolled the hour. The air was motionless. The sky seemed lower than before, and heavier.

She rose to her feet and looked around. ‘I should be going.’

Walking home, I went over some of what she had told me in the weeks since I had met her. Mimmo’s friendship, Vespi’s courtship – both had foundered, come to nothing. These weren’t stories she had dredged up at random. No, they illustrated
something
fundamental, something she believed – or feared – might be true. How had she put it?
Love lost out – as always
… Had she turned to me, hoping that I would prove her wrong? Had I squandered the only opportunity I would ever be given?

Back in my lodgings, I was overtaken by a gloom such as I hadn’t known since the early days in Naples, when I received that letter from Ornella. After everything she had said, how could she possibly have fallen for Jacopo? And yet, at the same time, I knew how insistent and bloody-minded he could be. I sat down on my bed. A sinister new reading of the events had just occurred to me. Since I had worked closely with Ornella’s father, he would have been implicated in the charges brought against me. What if Jacopo had cast the Maltese surgeon in the role of my accomplice, and had then blackmailed him?
Give me
your daughter’s hand in marriage or I’ll ruin you
. Was that how the wedding had come about? A sourness around my heart, I lay on my side and sank into a troubled sleep.

I was woken some time later by a constant banging. The wind had got up, and a loose shutter on the building opposite was being blown repeatedly against a wall. I could stay in my room no longer. Thinking I might pay another visit to the dingy tavern in San Frediano, I threw on my coat and hurried downstairs.

As I stepped out on to Via del Corno, a boy seemed to detach himself from the wall.

‘Signore?’

The boy’s face was pale and dogged, but he looked
respectable
enough, in a serge jacket and a pair of sturdy leather shoes.

‘Dr Pampolini sent me,’ he said. ‘He wants to see you.’

‘Now?’

‘Oh, yes. It’s urgent.’ His hands twitched. ‘It’s very urgent.’

I looked past him, towards the river. There was no one around, only the clammy, windswept canyon of the street, and the scuttle of leaves and vermin.

‘Why didn’t you try the door?’ I said.

‘I was about to.’ He sensed my disbelief. ‘I was. Honest.’

If somebody was dispatched to put an end to me, this, surely, was how it would feel – an innocent face, a few words intended to reassure, a short walk in the dark …

‘Don’t you recognize me, sir?’ The boy went and stood on the street corner, beneath a lit image of the Virgin. ‘I work with Dr Pampolini. My name’s Earhole.’ He shot me a rueful grin. ‘That’s what
he
calls me, anyway.’

I saw the livid, ragged fringe of skin where his right ear used to be. Earhole. I nodded slowly.

‘I remember.’

My sudden plunge into sleep had muddled me; I felt only loosely connected to my surroundings.

‘Please hurry,’ the boy said. ‘The doctor said it couldn’t wait.’

He led me north, through streets that were pinched between high walls. It was a short cut to the hospital, he told me.

I asked him how old he was.

‘My mother thinks I’m probably about twelve,’ he said.

Though he wasn’t tall, he walked with long strides, his upper body turning constantly to check that I was keeping up.

‘She’s not entirely sure,’ he said. ‘She drinks, you see.’

We passed a candle factory, the stench of boiling cow fat left over from the day. To the west, I glimpsed the Duomo, which hung above the rooftops like an upended cauldron. There was a distant, shimmery peal of bells, but the sound was blown to pieces by a gust of wind.

The boy leaned forwards from the waist, as if straining at a leash. ‘I hope Dr Pampolini isn’t angry. I said I’d –’

A shout stopped his sentence short, and dark shapes sprang from beneath an archway. My knife was out before I knew it. I lunged, and felt the blade sink in. There was a kind of yelp. My hand jarred; I must have hit a bone. The nearest shadow
crumpled
. The others fled.

I knelt on my assailant’s chest and held my knife to his throat. An awful reek lifted off him. Old sweat, raw garlic. Dried sperm. He looked to be a man of about thirty, with more hair on his cheeks than on his head.

‘Who are you?’ I bent down, into the smell, but kept my blade against his gullet. ‘Who sent you?’

His head moved from side to side, as if he were trying to lull himself to sleep. What he was doing didn’t seem to relate to my questions, but to some internal matter that he found far weightier and more pressing. The wind dropped. I thought I heard the blood leak out of him.