The Blind Contessa's New Machine (8 page)

“I never told another girl this,” he told her, looking into her eyes with surprise and a certain curious expectation, as if waiting for her to explain to him why he had chosen her.

But it was a mystery to Carolina as well. She had never asked for his secrets, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them. They seemed like confessions to her, not the pretty trinkets she had thought a new lover would confide. She felt their weight, and her own inability to heal or absolve, and it frightened her. She found herself wishing for the Pietro her heart had constructed over the previous years: sure-footed, understanding, and fearless, to come rescue her from Pietro himself as he rambled on at her side. The wish made her dizzy.

Still, Pietro didn’t seem to tire of their conversations, or of her. At her mother’s invitation, he returned for dinner the night after his first visit, and from then the pattern was set. Each day, he arrived at Carolina’s home on some pretext: bearing a brace of bloodied rabbits he had killed that morning because her father admitted to a fondness for them; carrying a bottle of his father’s best wine, which he hoped might alleviate the headache her mother had complained of the previous day; or insisting, to her father’s delight, that the shade of her garden was simply much more pleasant than the bright sunlight in his, so that he couldn’t help but prefer to spend his time in it.

Carolina lived through those first days with Pietro half believing that it was all a dream from which she might awake at any moment, and she moved through her days as if even the slightest sound or movement might cause the whole world to dissolve. It was the end of the week before she remembered that she had not seen her lake for days, a realization that came to her as she watched a hard summer rain beat down on her father’s drive, cutting slender streams through the gravel. It was Sunday. The night before, at the Rosetti gala, Pietro had danced over half the dances with her and spent most of the rest at her side under one of the enormous goose-feather fans Silvia Rosetti had ordered affixed to her ballroom walls, large enough that, in an emergency, they might also serve as wings for a grown man. During one of the more sentimental waltzes, Pietro had nodded at a dancer in a military jacket and repeated a story that he had told her only days before: “When I was a young man,” he murmured, with all the urgency of a new secret, “my only dream was to die in battle. I never thought I would live to be this old.”

Carolina had felt the gaze of a pair of girls on the other side of the room. When her eyes met theirs, they quickly turned away. She looked back at Pietro, struggling to compose her face into an expression of surprise and sympathy. “I am so glad you were wrong,” she said, as she had the first time he had told her.

With great emotion, he had taken her hand in both of his.

No word had come yet from him today. The little storm soon blew itself out. When the slim rivers in the driveway had grown still, reflecting the white sky, Carolina rose and went out.

Turri stood at the water’s edge, soaking wet, his thin shirt sticking to his skin in large patches.

“You could have gone inside,” Carolina called.

Turri glanced back at her and grinned.

“Have you been swimming?” she asked when she reached him.

He shook his head. “I was studying the rain.”

“What did you learn?” she asked.

The sun was still hidden by a thin haze that covered the whole visible sky, but even from there it burned bright enough to make the water on his temples shine.

“I was sleeping on the bank,” he said. “I woke up when it started to rain. I sat up to go to the house, but then I thought, I wonder what I’ll see if I just lie here and look up?”

“What did you see?” she asked.

“Rain,” he said, grinning again. “And then it gets in your eyes, and you can’t see anything.”

Turri didn’t ask about her absence, and she didn’t mention Pietro to him, although it was impossible that he hadn’t heard the rumors. Instead, they flipped her rowboat upright and pushed out onto the lake together, Carolina at the oars and Turri sprawled in the bow. His damp clothes dried as the sunlight burned off the remaining clouds. Carolina let the oars drift, hypnotized by the thousand ways the forest changed each time the boat swung a breath to the right or a breath to the left. Finally the sun broke free from the clouds completely. As she raised her hand to shield her eyes, she realized she had no sense of how much time had passed. Suddenly wide awake with worry, she rowed the few strokes back to land and then, at Turri’s request, pushed him back out onto the water again.

When she returned to the house, a servant told her that Pietro had already arrived, and that her mother had taken him to the greenhouse. Her father had built the glass structure on the back lawn when Carolina was seven, again over the objections of his exasperated gardener, so that her mother could always have the southern blossoms she remembered from her youth. Today, the glass panels were still fogged from the rain.

“Carolina!” Pietro exclaimed, as if she were a ship returning from an indefinite journey.

“Where have you been?” her mother asked, a note of warning in her voice.

Carolina paused in the door of the humid room. On their damp wooden tables, lilies, freesia, and a gang of waxy orchids waited for her answer. “I went to the lake,” she said. “Turri has been investigating the rain.”

“Turri?” Pietro said broadly, as if helping a friend to set up the punch line of a well known joke.

“They have been friends since she was a child,” Carolina’s mother added quickly.

“So have I!” Pietro said, soldiering through the joke himself since nobody else had chimed in. “He filled the river with soap bubbles when we were boys. All the reeds were choked with foam. I saw a red finch fly off with a bit hanging from his beak, just like an old man with a beard.”

He paused, listening for laughter, and seemed surprised, as he so often did, to find that the crowd he had been speaking to had dwindled again to just the two women who had been in the room with him when he began. When neither Carolina nor her mother spoke, his face clouded. Then an explanation seemed to come to him. He strode quickly through the plants, took Carolina’s hand, and kissed it. “When will you take me to your lake?” he asked.

Because she could not imagine this, Carolina did not answer.

After a moment, Pietro smiled indulgently. “That’s all right,” he said. “It is better if sweethearts keep some secrets.”

The following weekend, as a small choir of violins wavered in unison about some great disappointment in their distant past, Pietro kissed her for the first time. They stood in the shelter of a grotto below the verandah of the Conti house. Above them, all their neighbors spun in circles under torches that burned at the borders of the makeshift dance floor.

His kiss was gentle, but urgent. When he released her, she dropped her head onto his chest, her face hot and her breath fast. No one had ever kissed her before, and nothing she had heard or seen had prepared her for the insistent warmth that spread through her limbs.

He laughed, stroking her thick hair.

Carolina held fistfuls of his jacket in both hands, waiting for the heat to pass. Instead, it grew stronger, singing louder than the violins.

She lifted her face. “Again,” she said.

A month later, as August’s last blossoms began to fade, Pietro dropped to one knee as her father watched from his post by the fireplace’s empty grate and her mother half rose from the couch where she lay. He extracted a small piece of crumpled paper from his pocket and unwrapped it to reveal his mother’s diamond ring, which glittered like a piece of ice melted down to almost nothing by the morning sun.

Refusing him was impossible.

Carolina was never sure when the blindness had first set in. Looking back through the dim and crowded closets of her mind, she found half a dozen days, spread over a decade: the time when, as a child, she had rubbed her eyes so hard that the world had been dappled for hours with red and green shadows; the way that everyone else seemed to get used to the dark long before her eyes could pick shapes out; a day when she hit her head falling out of a tree and woke to find the whole world unmoored, turning as gently as a leaf might turn on the surface of her lake. Every trick her eyes had ever played came back to her: birds that proved to be only flowers blooming on a branch; flowers that suddenly awoke, spread their wings, and proved themselves birds.

But it was the autumn after Pietro’s proposal, when she was eighteen years old, that the blindness became undeniable. Later she realized that it must have begun at the borders of her vision and worked its way in like twilight: so slowly that no change was noticeable from one moment to the next, but so steadily that by the time she recognized evening setting in, true night seemed to be only a breath away. As the trees released their leaves, she grew uneasy. She could hear the ringing splash of a loon landing on the lake, but the corner of her eye wouldn’t catch its motion. Squirrels teased her from the trees, but by the time she turned her head to see them, they had vanished.

When that season’s last leaves sank to the bottom of the lake, leaving the forest bare, Carolina gazed across the black water at the line of seven trees that her father had allowed to stand when he first cleared the land: a generous old willow, a wild apple, a junk tree with smooth gray bark, an oak, a sapling and a pair of slim birch rooted like twins or lovers, so close that their branches rattled together in the wind. Counting them all had been a favorite game when she was a child, and was still a comfort as she grew. But now her vision could not take them all in. She could see the willow, or the twins: never both in the same glance. For the first time, she understood that she was going blind.

The realization came to her with all the force of a conversion. Like a new believer, she could never see the world the same way again, whether she kept her faith or lost it. But the shape of the new world, the tempo of its liturgy, the properties of its angels and demons, was still a mystery.