The Blind Contessa's New Machine (22 page)

This was how the first weeks of summer passed: nights that began when she met Turri in the servants’ yard, warm days crowded with waking dreams that slipped seamlessly into sleep and back again. Turri took to discovering the secrets of her body with all the passion of a great explorer. His curiosity was endless and his concentration complete. It excluded everything. If she let him, he would begin with a stray kiss at the back of her neck as he guided her through the forest and end with the two of them tangled in the loamy pine needles beside the path. Every night was a new experiment. He unworked the buttons of her dress, pushed it from her shoulders, but stayed a step away, tracing her lips, her jaw, her breasts to see where she resonated, when she drew a breath. When they lay curled together he covered her face with his hands, learning her features by touch as if he were the blind one. He returned to the same curves and hollows again and again, to hear her make the same sound, or, turning his hand, to discover something he’d missed. Pietro’s touch had confused her with heat and surprised her with pleasure, but he had never studied her like this.

The price she paid was high. Since the blindness had erased her world, reconstructing the rooms around her in her imagination had been a constant struggle. Now, with her days and nights inverted, sleeping only in broken fits, it became impossible. A gust of wind turned to Turri’s breath on her skin and suddenly the piano, the divan, the staircase that she had set so carefully in place, were knocked away by memories that left her in total darkness when they faded. Without constant vigilance, she forgot where certain trinkets stood, what tables she had asked the servants to move. Vases seemed to vanish in thin air. Chairs seemed to appear out of nowhere. The real world became just as unpredictable as her dreams had been.

Her dreams themselves deserted her. They had been her one refuge from the blindness, but now they came to her only in scraps and fragments, like her sleep. At best, they lasted just moments, and the moments were nightmarish. In one, she stood in a long hall of statues: each one was blind like her, but she was frozen just like them. In another, she rose in flight, but as soon as her feet left the ground, darkness rushed in and ate up the whole scene. The loss of the freedom she’d won in her dreams left her with nothing but disintegrating memories to furnish the rooms in her mind, and to fend off the fears and doubts that followed her now like a flock of hungry birds.

Turri used the word
love
and she returned it to him like a student repeating a lesson in a new language, but during the daylight hours it seemed like too slight a word to bear all its meanings: her childish hope in Pietro, the promises she had made the priest, her father’s shy gifts, Turri’s skin on hers and his extravagant schemes. The only thing she knew for certain was that her mind cleared and the fears scattered when she was with Turri. But she didn’t know how to explain any of this to him. For his part, Turri was still in the thrall of the dream he’d stepped into when she first turned to kiss him, willing to take all risks, full of tender nonsense.

“I can see in my dreams,” she began one night, a few weeks after he had given her the machine.

Turri had been tracing lines on her skin with a feather quill, but now he laid his palm flat on her breastbone. “What do you see?” he asked.

“The valley,” she said. “Our houses. The lake.”

“Do you see me?” Turri asked.

“I see you,” Carolina said. “But we don’t meet.”

“You should speak to me,” Turri said. “I’m sure I’m much smarter in your dreams. I should give you questions to pose to me in your sleep.”

Somehow, the conversation had drifted from what she meant to say. His joke made her frown in frustration.

Turri’s knuckles passed gently over her cheek, as if trying to brush the expression away. “What is it?” he asked.

“I don’t dream anymore,” Carolina told him in a rush. “I wake up and I don’t know where I am.” Her voice rose as she spoke, dissolving into tears. Surprised by them, she hid her face against his shoulder.

Turri stroked her hair in silence. Carolina held her breath, but she couldn’t keep the tears from leaking onto his skin. When they passed, she lifted her face to kiss his neck.

“Well, then you could be anywhere,” he said gently.

“I know,” Carolina said. “I hate it.”

“No,” Turri said. “The rest of us can’t help seeing where we are. But you can be wherever you want. Where are we now?”

“The lake house,” she answered.

“No,” he said. “Where do you want to be?”

He turned his head to kiss her temple. Carolina closed her eyes. A wave of sleep rolled over her and receded, leaving behind the fragments of a dream: a palace abandoned in the desert, the roof now rubble on the marble floor, the columns still intact. The memorized lines of the lake house she had constructed in her mind shivered, then vanished. In its place rose weathered marble walls. Someone had hung lengths of colored fabric above them to block the harsh desert sun.

“A palace in the sand,” she said. “With scarves for a ceiling.”

“There,” Turri said. “See?”

“There is a man coming up the walk,” Liza announced. The chair she had dragged out to the terrace earlier that afternoon scraped on the stone as she turned to get a better look. “An
old
man.”

Carolina laughed, imagining Turri’s yelp when she conveyed this insult. She turned her face toward the break in the line of oaks that any visitor must pass through to reach the house.

“Now he’s stopped,” Liza announced.

Carolina smiled, and waved.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Liza said. “He looks like he’s seen a ghost.”

Carolina grinned wider, enjoying the effect of her trick, and dropped her hand.

“Here he comes,” Liza said. “He brought you flowers.”

An instant later, faint footsteps sounded on the gravel, maybe a dozen yards away. Carolina knew the gait instantly.

“Father!” she exclaimed.

The footsteps stopped again.

“Ah,” Liza said under her breath, as if she had just untangled some kind of knot.

Carolina rose and took several steps in the direction the footsteps had last sounded.

“
Cara mia!
” her father said. He swallowed her up in his embrace, his jacket rich with the smells of tobacco and lemon. The cool blooms of a bouquet pressed against the back of her neck, their stems diagonal between her shoulders. Her father didn’t remember them until she began to struggle gently. Then he released her and pressed the flowers into her hands.

“They are yellow and red,” he said. “The best we have. I chose them by their scent.”

“They’re beautiful,” Carolina said, from habit. Liza touched her elbow, and Carolina relinquished the bound stems. A moment later, the door to the house thudded closed.

“Will you sit?” Carolina asked.

“Of course!” her father said heartily, taking the chair where Liza had been. Carolina worried briefly if the maid’s chair would be fine enough for her father, then realized that Liza had undoubtedly chosen herself the best one she could find. Carolina sank down on her divan, worrying another detail: her father was not an old man.

“I got your letter,” her father said.

“I’m so glad,” said Carolina.

“Where did Pietro ever find you such a wonderful machine?” her father asked.

“It wasn’t Pietro,” Carolina said. “Turri made it for me.”

“Turri,” her father repeated.

Carolina nodded. When her father didn’t speak, she added: “I think he was sorry that I couldn’t see.”

Her father still didn’t answer.

The heat of shame rose from Carolina’s heart into her throat. Her chest tightened. She searched through the shadows that crowded into her mind, trying to think of another topic to turn to, but found nothing. Finally, she simply reached for him. Her guess was wild, but her father caught her hand and settled it between both of his on his knee.

“You must miss your lake,” he said finally.

“I do,” Carolina said.

“Shall I take you there?” he asked.

Her father held her hand as if she were still a little girl, with all her fingers pressed side by side like pastels in a box. He tramped along in the low brush beside the trail so that she could have the clear path. A few times he stumbled, or seemed to work for his breath, and Carolina worried about what Liza had said: if the strong, florid figure she remembered was being bowed to an old man. But there was no way to ask.

In broad daylight, with a good guide, reaching the lake took only minutes. Carolina could tell they were near it by the sound of the frogs and locusts, and the smell of fresh water. But when they emerged from the shade of the forest into the cleared land that surrounded the lake, her father stopped.

“Yes, look at this,” he muttered.

“What?” she asked.

“Hello!” Turri called from the far bank. A moment later, with less enthusiasm, a second “Hello!” followed. A child’s voice—Antonio.

“Your friend is here,” her father told her.

“And his son,” she added.

Her father crooked his arm and lifted her hand. She threaded her arm through his and he led her around the bank without speaking.

“We have reared a crop of pollywogs,” Turri called as they approached. “They’ve been growing in jars on Antonio’s windowsills, living on oatmeal. Today we set them free.”

A few feet from Turri’s voice, Carolina’s father halted. They stood near the forest that bordered the Turri land, on the opposite side of the lake from her cottage.

“They’re almost frogs now,” Antonio explained.

“Did you already let them go?” Carolina asked.

“Yes,” Antonio said. “The little fish came around to look at them, but one of our tadpoles chased them off.”

“Where are they now?” her father asked, genuinely curious.

Someone must have pointed, because her father leaned over the water. “Look at that!” he said.

Carolina tried to pull her arm from his so he could move more freely, but he straightened and drew her closer. “You’ve raised some very brave pollywogs,” he told Antonio with great seriousness.

“They learned all their bravery from Antonio,” Turri said.

“And your father has built my daughter a writing machine,” Carolina’s father added. “Did you help him make it?”

“I saw it,” Antonio said, unimpressed. “I can make prettier letters by hand.”

Turri laughed. “That’s true,” he said. “Antonio writes with all the flair of a great contessa.”

“Well,” Carolina’s father said, “I have you to thank for my daughter’s letters.”

A brief silence fell. Carolina strained to hear, but she could catch no clue to what passed between them.

“I’m glad for that,” Turri said, after a moment.

“There are flowers in the water,” Antonio noted.

“They have their roots in the bottom of the lake,” Turri said. “Like an anchor to hold a boat in its place.”

“Would he like to pick one?” Carolina asked.

“I could take one to Mama,” Antonio suggested.

“You’re very thoughtful,” said Carolina.

There was a small splash as Antonio pulled one of the lilies from among the rest. “It’s very pretty,” he said. “I think it may be the prettiest.” He sounded worried by this. “Is it all right if I take it?”

“Of course,” Carolina said. “You should bring your mother the best one you can find.”

“Are you a friend of Mama’s?” he asked.

“They were girls together,” Turri said, when Carolina didn’t answer.

“You mother was a very pretty little girl,” Carolina’s father said. “She used to steal my lemons and try to feed them to the horses. Have you ever seen a horse eat a lemon?”

Antonio listened in rapt silence.

“At Carolina’s tenth birthday party, your mother gave a lemon to a horse who was waiting in the yard, and when he tasted it, he spit it so far it broke the window in our library.”