The Blind Contessa's New Machine

Table of Contents

 

 

 

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

Copyright © Carey Wallace, 2010

All rights reserved

 

A Pamela Dorman Book / Viking

 

Excerpt from “Elegy” from
Collected Poems 1957-1982
by Wendell Berry.
Copyright © 2005 by Wendell Berry. Published by Counterpoint.

 

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Wallace, Carey

The blind contessa’s new machine / Carey Wallace.

p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-19025-8

1. Blind women—Fiction. 2. Inventors—Fiction. 3. Italy—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3623.A44295B57 2010

813’.6—dc22 2010003332

 

 

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—Wendell Berry, “Elegy”

O
N THE DAY Contessa Carolina Fantoni was married, only one other living person knew that she was going blind, and he was not her groom.

This was not because she had failed to warn them.

“I am going blind,” she had blurted to her mother, in the welcome dimness of the family coach, her eyes still bright with tears from the searing winter sun. By this time, her peripheral vision was already gone. Carolina could feel her mother take her hand, but she had to turn to see her face. When she did, her mother kissed her, her own eyes full of pity.

“I have been in love, too,” she said, and looked away.

“Papa,” Carolina had said.

Her father had laid his magnifying glass down on the map unrolled before him. A mournful sea monster loomed below the lens. Although it was the middle of the day, the blindness shrouded the bookshelves that rose behind him in false dusk. Only the large window over his head and the desk itself were still bright and clear.

“Nonna was blind when she died,” Carolina said.

Her father nodded. “And for years before that,” he said. “But I only half believed it. It was like she had another pair of eyes hidden in a box. She knew everything.”

“Did she ever tell you how it happened?” Carolina asked.

Her father shook his head. “I was very young then.”

“I think maybe I am going blind,” Carolina told him.

Her father frowned. After considering this for a moment, he waved his hand before his face. When her eyes followed it, he broke into a wide grin.

“Ah, but you haven’t yet!” he said.

She had told Pietro in the garden, when her mother had left them alone for a few moments under a sky full of stars that Carolina could snuff out or call back into existence simply by turning her head.

Pietro had laughed and laughed.

“What are you going to tell me next?” he had asked her, between kisses. “I suppose you can fly as well? And turn into a cat?”

“Already I can’t see things,” she insisted. “Around the edges.”

“Next you will tell me you have forgotten how to kiss,” Pietro said, and kissed her again.

In those first days, Carolina measured her losses by the size of her lake. Her father had dammed a length of the small river that wandered their property as a present to her mother on their fifth anniversary. But as an amateur in these things, he had only clumsily dredged the surrounding marsh. The resulting body of water, thirty paces long and half again as wide, was in no place deep enough for a man to stand fully submerged. His young wife, still homesick for the sea, had tramped loyally across the soggy ground with him on the day of her anniversary but never returned voluntarily, so when Carolina turned seven, her father had scattered stone benches on the grassy shore, filled the lake’s surface with lantern-lit boats, and made a new present of it to his daughter.