The Blind Contessa's New Machine (4 page)

Completely unsuited for each other, Turri and Sophia were also each other’s only hope for a suitable match within their small circle. Their union was practical and abrupt: they married within weeks of their fathers’ negotiations, when Turri was twenty-five and Sophia twenty. Her child, Antonio, was born less than a year later, and the question of whether he was also Turri’s son was widely, and almost openly, debated.

But there was no question of Turri’s devotion to the boy. Even before the child was old enough to walk, neighbors were surprised to discover Turri carrying him on his shoulders along the side of the road or tramping down the riverbank, expounding seriously on new thinking on theology or modern controversies about the stars.

“He wanted to bring Antonio,” Sophia joked bitterly at a party the year after her son’s birth. “But he has only taught him Latin yet, not how to dance.”

Unsurprisingly, when Antonio did begin to speak, he was a strange child. His first word was
pomegranate;
his second,
telescope;
and to his mother’s chagrin, he didn’t speak her name until months after he began to say
Papa,
a word he applied indiscriminately to Turri, his nurse, the gardener, the groom and stable boy, as well as the huge flocks of crows that settled from time to time on the lawns that surrounded the Turri villa.

Carolina was sixteen and Turri had been married for less than a year when she emerged from her lake house on a cold spring morning to discover him standing at the water’s edge. His back was to her. On the lake, clouds of the mist that rose from the water in the night towered over his head.

Barefoot on the top step, Carolina pulled the velvet blanket closer around her shoulders. The door behind her clattered shut.

Turri twirled, eyes blazing.

The sight of her seemed to throw him off balance. He staggered a few steps on the dewy grass before he regained his footing. When he did, he was laughing.

“I thought you were a bear,” he said. “My plan was to smash your nose with that rock.” He pointed to a small gray stone on the bank, worn smooth and forgotten by the river.

“It’s not very big,” Carolina said doubtfully.

“Bears have extremely sensitive noses,” Turri told her. “It’s your one weakness. My other guess was that you were a gigantic insect. On some southern islands they have butterflies the size of eagles.”

“But this is Italy,” Carolina said.

“I had forgotten that,” said Turri. “I was trying to think how to capture you without destroying your wings.”

“But where would you keep a creature that size?”

“In my laboratory,” Turri said without hesitation. “In a frame stretched with a mosquito net, hung from the ceiling.”

Carolina considered this for a moment. Then she hit on another problem. “What do butterflies eat?” she asked.

“It would never come to that,” Turri said. “I’d build the frame and put you in it. You’d turn around once and flap your wings unhappily, and I’d climb right back up, give you my arm for a perch, and carry you to the window to set you free.”

Carolina’s stomach dropped as she imagined the long fall from the top story of the Turri house, before her phantom wings caught her and carried her up.

Turri shrugged. “But chances are there’s no such thing. You can’t believe everything you read. The old drunks who first surveyed America claimed the lakes in Virginia were full of mermaids.”

As he said this, he glanced at her lake with something suspiciously like hope. The white mist brooded over the water, impenetrable.

“I’m sorry,” he said when he looked back. “I’ve intruded.” The flame of his story extinguished, he suddenly seemed much younger to Carolina. His face was pale, his eyes unnaturally bright, the skin below them blue, like a man who hasn’t slept all night. A wave of pity rolled through her.

“My father says it’s impossible for a neighbor to intrude,” she said gently.

Turri took in the curves of her body and the angles of her elbows under the velvet with something more than the desire she had begun to recognize in the eyes of the older boys. He followed the lines of her figure as if they obscured a secret, some meaning inscribed by an unseen hand, if he could only read it. Then his gaze returned to her eyes.

Carolina lowered them in confusion.

“That’s very kind of you,” he said.

Turri took her at her word. From that day, he was a regular visitor to the lake. Even when their paths didn’t cross, he left traces. Most often, she found his footprints in the mud on the banks, but some days she arrived in the first hours of the morning to find coals still orange in the ash of her fireplace. Sometimes he had rearranged this or that: he might lay several pens in a neat row on her desk, all their sharp nibs pointing west, or push a china doll into the arms of a glass monkey, so that they seemed to dance. Now and then they met when Turri wandered out on a twilight walk, or surprised her sleeping in her boat as it drifted on the black water through a humid afternoon.

He was curious about everything, and his curiosity was flattering. Carolina had discovered already that people rarely wanted answers to the questions they asked, but eventually she realized that, on the subjects that interested him, Turri would listen almost indefinitely, interrupting only to ask another question. He wanted to know about lemons: how long the blossoms held to the branch; the time it took a bud to grow to fruit; any strange shapes the fruit might take; and whether she had seen these oddities or just heard of them. He was curious about the fish and the birds, which were already half tame because of Carolina’s habit of carrying a napkin full of bread with her to scatter when she arrived. The fish in particular were beggars. Whenever they caught sight of a human shadow on the water, they crowded together at the boat landing and waited for bread to fall from the sky.

“Look at that,” Turri said. “I wonder if you could train them?” He threw a shred of a leaf onto the water. It landed on the heart of his own shadow and turned there for a moment before one of the fish, small but quick, darted up to claim it.

“To do what?” Carolina asked.

“Swim in formation,” Turri said. “Jump in arches.”

Safe below the surface, the fish tasted its prize. Disappointed, it released the scrap. The unwanted leaf dropped slowly through the water and disappeared into the gloom that shrouded the bottom of the lake.

At the end of that summer, Turri began to court a bold red sparrow who, judging by the depth of color in his still-perfect feathers, might have been too young to know better. Turri’s technique was simple. The birds were already accustomed to snatching up bits of bread from Carolina’s feet, and in the course of a single day, they grew used to Turri and his crumbs as well. Then Turri began to sit on the grass at the water’s edge, scattering the crumbs incrementally closer and closer to him. More conservative birds took flight each time the crumbs moved toward Turri, but the brightest one matched him inch for inch, finally pecking a bit of crust from Turri’s open palm. By September, the sparrow would land on his hand, and when Turri was absent, Carolina sometimes believed she glimpsed the bird hopping from twig to twig, whistling impatiently, with all the heart-pricked irritation of a lover who has been made to wait.

“Do you think he’ll remember us next year?” Carolina asked.

“I don’t know,” Turri said. The bird was perched on the slope of the back of his hand, pecking experimentally at one of his knuckles. “This kind is supposed to be impossible to tame.”

For her part, Carolina treated Turri something like the fish and the birds: part of the perfectly familiar but ever-changing landscape of her lake. If she found him on the bank when she awoke, she was liable to greet him briefly and then retreat back into the house to sleep or read for another hour. She sometimes climbed into her boat and pushed out onto the water in the middle of one of his stories, or fell asleep while he was explaining something, as if his voice were not much more than the sound of wind in the leaves, pleasant but unimportant. When he was gone for a spread of days, she might wonder about him for a moment, but she didn’t miss him and he played no part in her dreams.

Those, at the moment, were filled with Pietro, the only son of the distinguished family whose lands lay upriver from Carolina’s lake, bordering her father’s property. Pietro’s mother had died during the birth of his younger sister, when he was only five. At that time, his father’s oft-noted long silences had become permanent, and his neighbors would have happily arrived at the diagnosis of madness due to grief had he not continued to produce wines of such excellent quality. His stubborn insistence on retaining his claim on such a small corner of reality, while he seemed to bid the rest of it to ride merrily on to hell, agitated people. The idea of a sane mind working on among them in silence for years without ever revealing itself frightened some and infuriated others. In retaliation, they both pitied and spoiled his son.

Pietro was invited to every child’s party, every wedding, baptism, and confirmation, and later, every dance and most dinners. Even as a boy, he was handsome: taller than the other children by a few inches and later by an entire head, with dark curls over dark eyes and a fine mouth most often spread in an easy laugh. He had a weakness for marzipan, so the maids were asked to make the treat for his visits even when it was not Christmas or Easter. A song he praised would be requested by someone at every event for the rest of the season. Caught up by both Pietro’s charisma and the general competition among the local boys to outdo one another in catering to him, one of his young friends, on receiving a magnificent colt as a birthday present, actually insisted that Pietro be the first to ride the animal around the courtyard, instead of him.

Pietro’s delight in these things was infectious, and his gratitude outsized. With perfect sincerity, he told every family in the area that their maid made unquestionably the best pastries for miles. After taking the first ride on his friend’s new colt, he declared it the finest animal in Italy. All the mothers he spoke with understood him like no one else, all the boys he knew were brave, all the girls he met were pretty, and all the men he knew were wise. With this charm, and with a carelessness about his own person that stemmed perhaps from the lack of a mother’s warning hand, or perhaps from his father’s inattention, he easily rose to leadership among the boys his age. He was always the first to climb a tree, peer into a window, wade across the river, or ride a kidnapped mare out of a neighbor’s stable on any given escapade.

Among the girls, of course, he was an object of devotion more fervently worshipped than any of the cold statues of the saints. A girl could live for weeks on a single glance from him. His small compliments and offhand remarks formed a new scripture, and in breathless conversations and lonely, dream-drunk nights they built whole theologies from them. Any real attention paid to one girl—two dances in an evening, a flower broken from a bush to decorate her dress—was liable to elicit tears or bitter jealousy from the others, and in one case, a fit of fainting, although Pietro seemed blissfully unaware of the reason for the scuffle even as the unfortunate girl’s father and brother carried her from the party. He thereby revealed a lack of self-consciousness about his own powers that only further endeared him to both the ladies and his friends.