The Blind Contessa's New Machine (7 page)

At the top of the stairs, she hesitated. She had arrived at a long balcony that overlooked the grand staircase and the hall below. Directly in front of her, several sets of doors opened into the ballroom. To her right, at the far end of the balcony, was a window at least three times her height, turned mirror by the night. At the other end of the balcony, to her left, was a door. She hurried toward it, passing through the few guests scattered along the way without a glance or a greeting. The knob turned easily under her hand. The room inside was completely dark, except for faint traces of stars distorted by towering windows.

Turri laughed.

His shape pulled itself free from the mass of shadows below the nearest window. A dark volume waved in his hand.

“I’m reading about steam engines by moonlight,” he said. “I can only make out about half of it, so it’s become a kind of experiment. Everything I can’t see, I have to invent.”

Comforted by his voice, Carolina took a few steps into the darkness.

“Be careful,” he said. “I banged my shins on half a dozen end tables on my way over here.”

She paused in the dark and reached out. Her hands described the diameter of an awkward half circle but found nothing.

“Actually, there are only two tables,” Turri amended. “And then a statue of a girl, presented among the other furniture on a low stand instead of a pedestal, so that an unsuspecting man might find himself suddenly face-to-face with her.”

As Carolina’s eyes adjusted to the low light, tall shelves began to emerge between the windows. She could pick out the shapes of two tables nearby, but no white stone glimmered in the gloom.

“Really?” she said.

“You don’t see her?” he asked.

A knock sounded on the door.

Carefully, Carolina turned in the dark. The knock sounded again.

She pulled the door open. A narrow triangle of yellow light split the room. Pietro stood outside, his hands clasped behind him like an unhappy child. “Carolina!” he exclaimed, with all the emotion of a shipwrecked sailor who could scarcely believe that his rescuers had arrived. Then he paused, trying to read her face. After a moment, he gave up and plunged on.

“They have sent some of the musicians to the garden with lanterns,” he said. “Would you care to join me there?”

Behind Carolina, a book closed in the darkness. Carolina glanced back, but Turri remained silent, his shadow dissolved among the rest.

Pietro shuffled uncertainly, all his brashness forgotten.

For the first time, she pitied him.

“Thank you,” she said, and took his arm.

Their conversation that evening was of no consequence. Pietro misidentified several constellations and praised the quality of the wine, speaking with unnatural stiffness, as if struggling to remember a lesson a tutor had tried to teach him years ago, when he hadn’t seen any reason yet to learn it. Carolina began to breathe almost naturally after the first several quartets. By the end of the evening, she had confided to him that she wasn’t convinced that there really
were
constellations: every time she looked at the sky, it seemed to have changed slightly from the last time, although she could never pick out exactly which of the thousands of lights had shifted, to prove her point. “Everyone says the stars are fixed,” she told him. “But no one ever says what holds them there.”

“But how could we know that?” Pietro asked somewhat plaintively.

As the evening wore on, they were interrupted several times by the greetings of his friends, as well as a steady stream of young ladies who approached their garden bench and spoke to Pietro as if he were the only one sitting there. But Pietro didn’t leave Carolina’s side. Finally the faint clatter of departing carriages began to drift over the garden wall. The musicians played their final piece, collected their instruments, and departed after a minor scuffle when the cello ran aground in the dark on a bed of lilies.

“Carolina,” Pietro said. His tone was urgent, the prelude to a confession or an announcement. But when she turned to him, he seemed to be looking to her for some answer. Confused, she dropped her gaze.

“It’s so late,” she said. “They’ll think we’ve been captured by gypsies.”

This was a joke, but Pietro shook his head earnestly. “They could never take you from me,” he promised.

He rose and offered her his arm. Carolina stood to take it, then let him lead her across the garden to the house, concentrating with all her might on the difficult task of walking and breathing at the same time.

The following week, Pietro managed to coax Carolina onto the dance floor for a string of more familiar dances, and the other girls ceased to greet her in the halls, as if she had turned invisible. A few days later, Pietro sent a servant to Carolina’s home with an enormous bundle of roses that the old man asserted Pietro had cut from the garden himself, a claim borne out by the fact that the massive jumble of thorns included what seemed to be several entire rosebushes, lopped off just above the root. Pietro would be honored, the old man added, if Carolina would allow him the pleasure of paying her a visit.

This was unprecedented.

From time to time, Pietro had seemed to have favorites among the local girls, picking one as his partner for a long string of dances, or even seeking a particular young lady out over the course of several events before he lost interest. He was able to do this with impunity because he never embarrassed the girls or their families by taking even the smallest steps into the realm of formal courtship: afternoon visits or family dinners. Carolina was the first girl in the valley to receive this attention.

Her father, a sporadic but deeply sentimental gardener, was shocked by the brutalization of Pietro’s rosebushes and unimpressed with his request to see Carolina.

“I feel like I ought to send these outside and have them planted again,” he said, glowering down at the heap of branches and blossoms that trembled on their hall table.

“No, no!” Carolina gasped. She thrust her hands among the red-green leaves, choked off a cry as thorns dug into her palms and fingers, and drew them back.

At the open door, the old man waited in the strong noon light.

“Tomorrow?” Carolina asked, pleading.

Her father shook his head at the tangle of roses. Then he nodded.

With the racing heart and finely tuned bravado of a young queen addressing her subjects for the first time, Carolina turned to the old man. “He may come tomorrow,” she told him.

Lemon trees were Carolina’s father’s inheritance, but his love for them was real: as a boy, he had insisted that the gardener plant half a dozen lemon saplings in the family garden so that when he was a man he would not have to walk all the way down to the groves to pick a flower or a piece of fruit. These young trees now shaded the whole Fantoni garden. Their gardener constantly complained that he was the only man in the valley asked to coax flowers from their beds each year without the help of sunlight, to which Carolina’s father invariably replied that great obstacles were the tutors of great men.

The day of Pietro’s first visit, spring’s blossoms had fallen from the lemon tree branches, but their leaves still glowed like new growth, not yet touched by the heat that would darken them to evergreen. Carolina sat beneath them breathless but perfectly still, ready to believe anything. If it was true, as his note claimed, that Pietro would arrive at any moment to pass an hour with her in the garden, then any number of her other most outlandish fantasies were possible as well. The sky might suddenly roll up as the priest sometimes threatened, revealing the other world that men could only glimpse now in shadows and mirages, a world Carolina had suspected the existence of long before her haphazard introduction to theology because of an intermittent but deeply felt sense that even the most solid things lacked real weight, and that, if she only knew the trick, it would be a simple thing to see through them.

The shadows on the new grass wavered, but didn’t give way.

“Carolina?” Pietro’s voice was as unfamiliar as a stranger’s.

Carolina froze like a creature startled in the forest. Before her reason really returned, Pietro had spotted her through the trees. He strode toward her, grinning.

“Your mother said I would find you here,” he called, pushing through the young branches. Then he stood over her, so handsome that she simply stared back up at him, all her thoughts vanquished.

“She says she can’t keep you in the house, summer or winter,” Pietro teased.

“I like the lake and the garden,” Carolina told him, listening to herself speak with the same curiosity with which she might eavesdrop on a couple whispering beside her at a dance, and with the same lack of certainty about what she might say next.

Pietro sat down beside her on the bench. He studied her face carefully for a moment. Then he took her hand. The warmth of it surprised her, as it had the first time they danced, when she had also been surprised to realize that, like other men, he needed to breathe. He smiled. “I thought of you all night,” he told her. “I didn’t fall asleep until dawn, and when I woke up I came straight here.”

“Sometimes I can’t sleep,” Carolina agreed.

“But I can always sleep,” Pietro said eagerly, and proceeded to tell her the story of a raucous brawl during which his friends had turned a chair to kindling and shattered two windows and one of their noses while he slept like a child on a couch in the center of the melee. When she smiled at this, he launched into another, apparently following the theme of brawls, in which a friend of his had taken a wild shot at another and accidentally killed a horse outside in the street, a fact that they discovered only hours later, when they stepped outside to find the poor beast lying dead in the rain.

Over the next week, he told her any number of stories and secrets. The stories he always told as if he were speaking to a small crowd, even when Carolina was the only one there: his voice a little too loud, his gestures a little too broad, glancing away from her face from time to time as if trying to catch another pair of eyes. Some of these stories she knew already, since they had long since passed into local legend: the Rossi fire, the marzipan feasts, the night he had hung Ricardo Bianchi, hog-tied, from the cleft of a fig tree.

The story of his outlandish grief over his mother’s death was also well traveled in the valley: instead of throwing the handful of petals onto his mother’s casket as he had been instructed, the five-year-old Pietro had leapt into the grave with her, and when Pietro refused to take the many hands that were held out to pull him back up, a groom had been forced to climb down and retrieve him. Every step the boy or the man had taken in the course of the struggle had resounded with a horrible echo on the wooden box, a sound nobody in attendance had yet forgotten. But now Pietro confessed to Carolina that his grief hadn’t left him in the floods of angry tears he cried in the weeks after his mother’s death: it had been his constant childhood companion. In fact, his gardener still kept his trowels and shovels under lock and key out of habit from Pietro’s boyhood, when, at any chance, Pietro would sneak into the gardener’s shed to steal the tools and mount another assault on the earth that covered his mother’s grave.