Secrecy (22 page)

Then, one sultry morning towards the end of that month, I discovered that my gnawing sense of the unrepeatability of things had been justified, and even, to some extent, prophetic, though not at all in the way I had imagined. I was in my
workshop
, with the doors open to the stable yard, when Vespasiano Schwarz appeared. Sweat had blackened his armpits, and he was panting. The Grand Duke wanted to see me at once, he said. I asked if something was wrong. He didn’t know.

The shutters were closed in the Grand Duke’s apartment, and it was much cooler than outside. After consulting with a Dutch engineer, he had built a number of circular recesses into the floor, which could be packed with ice and covered with iron lids. It was one of his more ingenious initiatives. Before my eyes could properly adjust, though, he was in front of me, and
gripping
my right hand in both of his.

‘Oh, it’s awful, just awful.’ He peered into my bewildered face. ‘You haven’t heard?’

There had been reports of a catastrophic earthquake in Sicily, he told me. The south-east, in particular, had suffered enormous devastation; whole towns had been razed to the ground. He had no details as yet, but he understood that the death toll was high.

‘It’s where you come from, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Your family are there.’

Objects swam slowly up out of the gloom. A moon-shaped marble table, a porcelain vase. A sprawling lead-grey hunting dog.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The earthquake wasn’t recent, he told me. It had happened some time ago; news had taken a while to filter through. Spanish troops had just arrived in the city, on their way from Messina to Milan. They would have the most up-to-date information. In the meantime, he insisted that I go to the chapel and pray with him.

Later that day, I walked down to the barracks where the Spaniards were billeted, but it was almost sunset before I could find a soldier who could tell me about Siracusa. He was drinking on his own in a tavern by the river. His wife’s family came from Noto, he said, and he confirmed what the Grand Duke had told me. Large sections of my city had been destroyed, and at least three quarters of the population had been killed. As for Noto, it had been flattened. Wiped out. There were no survivors. Augusta and Catania had disappeared too. Of the dead that had been recovered, most had been shovelled into vast holes in the ground. The fear of contagion was such that there had been no time for niceties. Blessings had only been said once the mass graves had been sealed.

‘I don’t suppose you know what happened to my family?’ I said.

I gave him my name, then told him where I was from.

Keeping his eyes on the table, he said that the part of Siracusa where I had grown up had been reduced to rubble.

‘My mother lived there,’ I said. ‘My aunt as well.’

The Spaniard rubbed at his whiskery cheeks with both hands, then shook his head. ‘I didn’t hear anything about them.’

‘And my brother, Jacopo? Any news of him?’

Was my brother was a military type? I nodded. If the Jacopo he was thinking of was the right one, the Spaniard said, he had built himself a villa out of town, on Plemmirio. During the earthquake, the sea had swept inland, annihilating everything in its path. Jacopo, his wife, and his three children were all missing, presumed dead.

‘Three children,’ I murmured.

‘Did your brother have children?’

‘I don’t know.’ I took a gulp of wine. ‘His wife was blonde. Ornella.’

The Spaniard looked at me steadily. ‘Is there anyone else you want to know about?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Nobody else.’

No matter how often I had imagined my return, it had never quite felt real. There had been a silvery, liquid edge to everything I saw, a heightened, almost supernatural quality, as if, deep down, I knew I was picturing a scene that could not occur. At the same time, I felt involved or even implicated in what had taken place: some kind of payment had been exacted on my behalf – some strange, disproportionate revenge …

‘I’m sorry,’ the Spanish soldier said.

‘Did you lose people too?’

He was staring down into his wine. ‘Everyone. Like you.’

It was after midnight. Though I was sure no one had seen me smuggle Faustina through the gate that led to my workshop – we had waited until the guards were off duty – I thought it safest if we sat in the dark. Faustina faced the open door, her bare arm stretched along the back of the chair, her hand dangling.

I had written her a note about the earthquake, and she had offered to come and keep me company. It seemed likely, I told her, that everybody in my family was dead. What I was saying sounded grandiose and hollow; though I was telling the truth, I had the odd feeling that I was exaggerating. Actually, I went on, the news made no sense to me. I had become so accustomed to the idea of never seeing my family again that it was hard to believe anything had changed.

She understood, she said. As a child, she had spent whole days trying to visualize her father. He would scale the village walls under cover of darkness. He would wear outlandish disguises. He would bring her presents from exotic places. His visits would be magical, and utterly compelling. So much so that on the rare occasions when he appeared in person he could never quite compete. It would all seem awkward. Understated. What was different about her story, though, was that she had wanted to see him.
Longed
to see him.

I rose to my feet and stood in the doorway. Outside the air shifted slowly, but with a kind of determination, like someone turning in a bed. I looked up into the sky. The soft summer
darkness
. The chalk dust of the stars.

‘Strange, isn’t it,’ I said, ‘how we’ve spent our lives imagining things that other people never even have to think about?’

‘I brought something to show you.’ Faustina reached for her goatskin bag and took out a notebook with a faded red cover. Dating from the years when Mimmo Righetti was her friend, it was a record of all the charms and potions she had invented. She leafed through page after page of spells that had been designed to conjure up her father. ‘None of them worked, of course.’

‘But he came. You told me.’

‘That was just coincidence.’

She turned the page again, and there was the flying spell. She had even drawn the ingredients – the rose-and-silver clove of garlic, the crooked splinters of the spider’s legs, the grey hair discovered by the altar. The book was detailed, conscientious, almost as though she had known she would one day work in an apothecary.

Later, when we were half-sitting, half-lying on the divan, her head against my shoulder, I asked if she had ever seen Mimmo again.

‘Two years ago,’ she said.

Since moving to Florence, she had only returned to the village once, and that was to visit Sabatino Vespi, who still worked the land below Ginevra’s house. One morning, Faustina had emerged from La Cura, the church Ginevra used to attend, and had run straight into her old friend coming up the street.

‘Mimmo! How are you?’ Her delight sounded shallow,
artificial
, but he had caught her unawares.

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you know …’

He steadied himself on his crutches and looked at her, and all she could see in his face was a kind of slow pleasure. His gaze, though direct, made her feel valuable, and she found it far easier to be with him than she had imagined it would be, and suddenly regretted having avoided him for so many years.

‘You’re pretty good on those crutches,’ she said. ‘You almost knocked me over.’

‘Lucky escape.’ He smiled faintly.

‘I think you’re even quicker than I am.’

‘I’m used to them now. It gets sore, though. Under my arms.’

‘Is your leg sore too?’

He glanced down at the place where his leg once was. ‘Not too bad. It sort of aches sometimes.’

‘I’m sorry I never came to see you.’

‘You’re seeing me now.’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘You didn’t want to upset yourself. I would have done the same.’

She didn’t believe him. He would have perched on the end of her bed, and told her stories about what was happening in the village. He would have brought apricots and figs. He would have cared for her. She stared at the ground.

‘I did something no one else has ever done,’ Mimmo said in a low voice. ‘I flew.’ He looked off up the street, and his tongue moistened one corner of his mouth, something he used to do as a boy when he was unsure of himself. ‘Well, just for a moment, anyway.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I was there, remember?’

‘So,’ he said, and he was still looking past her, back into the village, ‘are you a witch yet?’

Their eyes met, and they began to laugh.

Not long afterwards, he told her he had to be going, and she understood that he was releasing her from an embarrassing
situation
, one she wouldn’t necessarily have known how to resolve. She also saw it as yet another example of his selflessness, his grace.

She watched as he laboured through the small piazza and up the slope to the castello. He wasn’t quick on his crutches, as she had claimed, or even particularly competent. His progress was awkward, and in the end she had to turn away.

For years she had asked herself why he had leapt off the roof. She knew the answer, of course. Because he had faith. Because he trusted her. Because he would have done anything for her. But even though she knew the answer, it seemed
important
to keep asking the question.

She fell silent.

‘He loved you,’ I said. ‘He probably still does.’

‘He lost his leg.’

‘You were just children –’

‘I ruined his life.’ She lowered her head. A tear spilled down her cheek. ‘I ruined it.’

‘It’s all right,’ I murmured.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘This is ridiculous. You’re the one who should be crying.’

I held her in my arms and stroked her hair. Her breathing deepened. She drifted off to sleep. Her book of spells and potions lay open on the floor. A draught from outside flipped a page, revealing a drawing of the crow’s feather. Above it, she had written a single word:
featherspoon
. I saw her crouching in the yellow grass, stirring the contents of the jar. Mimmo beside her, mesmerized. Her mother had given her up. So had her father. She had no idea of her true value. She even doubted her
existence
. Was it any wonder if she had looked for people who would believe in her? Was it any wonder if she had then felt compelled to test that belief, to push it as far as it would go?

She took a quick breath, as if she was about to dive beneath a wave, then turned over and laid her cheek against my chest.

The delicate, delicious weight of her.

‘Do you love me?’ she murmured.

She was talking in her sleep, or on the edge of sleep, but I answered anyway.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I love you.’

On returning to the House of Shells one evening, I found Signora de la Mar bent almost double outside my room. When she heard my footsteps, she straightened up. A letter had arrived for me, she said; she had been about to slip it beneath my door. I took it from her eagerly. I had been corresponding with van Leeuwenhoek about his microscopes, and also with a certain Mr Salmon, who had opened a wax museum in London, and I was expecting replies from both men, but when I had the letter in my hands I saw that it was discoloured – yellow in some places, brown in others – and that there were several diagonal slashes in the paper, all signs that it had been heated and then fumigated as a precaution against the spreading of disease. Looking more closely, I saw that it had been addressed to me care of the Grand Duke’s palace, and franked in both Naples and Palermo. My heart staggered; my face felt hot.

‘Is something wrong?’ the signora asked.

‘I think it’s from Sicily.’

I broke the seal. The letter was dated March the
twenty-seventh
, more than two months after the earthquake, and it was signed by my mother.

I began to read.

She assumed I had heard of the dreadful catastrophe that had devastated Sicily. By a miracle, she and her sister Flaminia had escaped with their lives, she said, but God in his wisdom had taken Jacopo, Ornella, and their three beautiful sons. Her own house – and much of Siracusa – had been severely damaged, and she could not have stayed there, even if she had wanted to. She had found refuge in Palermo, which had survived more or less intact. While there, word had reached her that I was living in Florence, and that I had done well for myself. She was writing to tell me that Sicily was ruined for her, and that she was on her way to join me. She trusted I could find it in my heart to welcome her. She hoped she wouldn’t be too much of a burden.

Though I had often imagined people surfacing from the past, they were shadowy presences – strangers who knew my story, and wished me harm. I had imagined Jacopo as well, of course, brimming with self-righteousness and anger. Not once, though, not in all these years, had I imagined my mother.

The letter rambled, and the handwriting was so shaky it might have been written during the earthquake itself. My mother had been thirty-three when she gave birth to me. She would now be seventy. How would she manage the journey from Palermo? What would I do with her when she arrived? I lifted the letter to my nose, as if for guidance. It smelled of ash and vinegar.

‘Well?’ The signora’s dark eyes showed above her orange shawl.

‘My mother’s coming,’ I said. ‘I’m going to need a place of my own.’

I called on Lorenzo Borucher. Once I had listened to him boasting about his latest exploits – he had done this person’s hair, that person’s hair; the names rarely meant anything to me – I told him I had decided to take his advice and look for a
property
to rent. My timing was impeccable, he said. He happened to know of a four-storey palazzo just off Via de’ Serragli, only a short walk from the Grand Duke’s palace.

‘It’s not what you’d call ostentatious,’ he went on. ‘In fact, it’s rather plain. You’ll probably like it.’ His cheeks dimpled. ‘But what about the signora?’

Like Pampolini, Borucher thought there was more to my relationship with Signora de la Mar than I was letting on, and I had done nothing to disabuse him. Since arriving in Florence, I had been mindful of what Gracián had written – namely, that one should always try and transform one’s defects into
ornaments
. Throughout my life I had been dogged by rumours, but only recently had I realized that the trick was not to deny them or rail against them but to add to them. The more talk that surrounded me, the less credence any of it would have. It might even help to conceal the truth.

‘What about her?’ I said.

‘Is it over?’

I smiled, but made no comment.

He was right when he said I would like the palazzo, though. Its rooms were modest and austere, just as he had suggested, and there was a paved courtyard in the middle that recalled the one in the house where I had grown up. Situated on a dead-end street – in Siracusa we would have called it a ‘ronco’ – it was quiet too. If I missed the House of Shells – I had become so accustomed to Cuif’s nocturnal somersaults that I found it difficult to sleep at first – I also relished my new privacy.

Not long after the move, Fiore took me to the firework factory again. The biggest festival of the year – San Giovanni – was looming, and the Guazzi twins were rushed off their feet. Doffo explained how they had combined spirit of nitre with oil extracted from caraway seeds to create what they called ‘liquid gunpowder’. The dragon they were in the process of building would swoop across the river, he told me, on an invisible, greased wire. Once it had dived beneath the surface, spitting flame – that was where the liquid gunpowder came in – it would soar into the air again, to a great height, and then explode. Ambitious, I said. The two brothers looked at each other and burst out laughing. That’s us, they said.

On our way back through the city, a dreary, insistent rain began to fall, a rain more typical of January or February than June, and by the time we reached my workshop we were drenched. I lit a wood fire and hung our wet clothes over a rail. To keep Fiore happy while they dried, I gave her one of the smocks I wore when I was casting, a small lump of beeswax, and a few of my old tools. Some time later, I heard footsteps in the stable yard, and Stufa walked in.

I straightened up. ‘This is a surprise.’

Stufa wiped the rain off his face, then began to inspect the shelves that lined the walls.

‘I didn’t think you had any time for art,’ I said.

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘Obsession fascinates me, though.’

He had stopped in front of my pigments, but I doubted it was the pots of mercuric sulphide and chrysocolla that had caught his eye. On the same shelf, at head-height, was the thick glass jar that contained the dead girl’s skin. In a desperate attempt to distract him I asked if he wanted me to show him round. Either he didn’t hear me, though, or he ignored the offer.

‘People tell me you’ve been working night and day,’ he said, his eyes still fastened on the floating piece of skin.

Fiore spoke from the corner of the room. ‘What’s obsession mean?’

Stufa glanced round. He had assumed we were alone,
perhaps
. Also, clearly, he wasn’t used to being interrupted, least of all by a child.

‘This, Fiore, is Padre Stufa,’ I said. ‘He’s a very important man.’

Fiore stared at him, her mouth ajar.

‘She doesn’t appear to have any manners,’ Stufa observed.

‘She’s shy,’ I said.

‘Witless too, by the look of it.’

I felt my stomach knot with fury. ‘If you’ve seen enough,’ I said, ‘maybe you’d be good enough to let us get on with our work.’

Fiore had edged closer, and was gazing up at Stufa, as if some aspect of his appearance mystified her. Brought up short by my dismissive tone, however, he hadn’t noticed. I watched as Fiore arrived at a conclusion.

‘You’re not very important,’ she said. ‘You’re not important at all.’

Stufa lashed out with the back of his hand and knocked her to the floor. She was so shocked that she forgot to cry. Instead, she stared at him, wide-eyed, as if he had just swallowed a sword or pulled a white dove from his sleeve. Then her mouth opened, and she let out a piteous wail. I crouched down. Put my arms round her.

‘I don’t think it’ll do her any harm.’ Stufa calmly adjusted the emerald he was wearing. ‘Actually, I’m more concerned about my ring. It was a gift from the Grand Duchess. It’s rather
valuable
.’ He held his hand away from his body, the better to admire the stone, then turned and walked out into the drizzle.

‘My face feels different,’ Fiore said.

A sharp-edged dark-blue mark had appeared on her right cheek, below her eye.

‘You’ll have a bruise,’ I said.

‘For ever?’

‘No. Just for a few days.’ I stood up. ‘Wait here.’

I ran across the stable yard and out into the gardens. Stufa was ahead of me, on a path that led back to the palace. He was moving at a slow, almost ceremonial pace, like somebody in church.

I was only a few yards away when he sensed my presence behind him. Startled, he backed up against a high laurel hedge.

‘You think you can do something like that and walk away?’ I said.

Stufa laughed, his laughter no louder than exhaled breath. ‘Of course.’

‘She’s a child –’

I had been about to say that she was backward, but Stufa interrupted.

‘She’s meaningless,’ he said.

My knife was in my hand before I knew it, the sharp point probing the underside of Stufa’s chin. That flimsy membrane would offer little or no resistance. One swift upward thrust and the knife would pierce the soft tissue of the palate, then pass through the maxilla, or the nasal passages. After severing both the facial artery and the optic nerve, it would penetrate the spongy frontal matter of the brain. I could imagine the precise path that it would take. I could predict the damage it would do. Not without foundation was it sometimes said of me that I had studied anatomy in more detail than was strictly necessary for a sculptor.

‘You dare to threaten me?’ Stufa barely moved his lips, not wanting to disturb the tip of the blade.

‘If you ever do anything like that again,’ I said, ‘I’ll strip the skin off your body while you’re still alive and hang it on the back of your door like an old coat.’

He gasped. The air that came out of him had a fermented smell, like compost.

Stepping back, I put away my knife.

Stufa touched his chin, then looked at his fingers, which were delicately smeared with blood.

‘It’s only a scratch,’ I said.

His dark eyes lifted until they locked on mine. ‘I’m looking at a dead man.’

‘Then you must be looking in the mirror.’

As I walked back to my workshop, I realized I was trembling, not with rage or fear but with a kind of wild hilarity. Probably it had not been wise to draw a knife on Stufa, but I had had just about enough of his needless provocations.

It was the day after San Giovanni, and the sky was scorched and smoky. Doffo and Simone Guazzi had excelled themselves: the appearance of the dragon, an interlude they had called ‘The Defeat of Satan’, had been the high point of the firework display. I felt restless that morning, and slightly sick. Instead of making for the palace, I set off along the river, heading east. The air smelled of gunpowder, and also of burnt sugar, and I could hear a constant, thin whining, as if a mosquito were trapped inside my skull. Every now and then, I saw Stufa’s ring connect with Fiore’s cheek, or I remembered how the hilt of the knife had warmed in my hand as I held it to his throat, but beyond that, nothing. I couldn’t seem to think even one straight thought.

I crossed the river by the Ponte Rubaconte, then followed the road that ran along the inside of the city walls. Irises had flowered on the stonework, their fleshy petals mauve and purple. Near the Porta a Pinti, I stopped to watch a man throwing buckets of water over a horse. Its coat gleamed like glass in the summer sun. Further on, I saw people lying in rows under the mulberry trees at the edge of the road. These would be peasant families who had travelled in from the countryside for the
festivities
. I made sketches of a mother and her baby. They were asleep, but they could just as easily have been dead.

By the time I returned to Via de’ Serragli, it was past midday, and my feet hurt – I must have walked ten miles – but at least my head was clear. Then I heard iron-bound wheels behind me, and I understood why I had been feeling so unsettled. I stepped aside to let the carriage pass. It turned into my street, as I had known it would. Just before I reached the corner, I stopped and rested my forehead against the wall. I was thirty-seven years old, but, like a child, I wanted to make her wait. It even crossed my mind to walk away.

Dressed in a derelict black gown with a high collar and frayed cuffs, she was peering up at my house. Her hair was the stained yellow-white of old ivory, and she wore a pair of dark lenses held in place by weighted cords that looped over her ears and dangled on either side of her thin neck. Here she was, my mother, yet she seemed a hastily assembled and eccentric version of the woman I had visited so often in my head. Like the figures I had seen in the processions for San Giovanni the day before, she appeared to have been knocked together out of sticks and cloth.

Her maid spoke to her, and she turned and looked in my direction.

‘Gaetano …’

My name sounded fragile, wounded.

I took her in my arms. I couldn’t feel her hands on my back, and I suddenly remembered how she would never hold us when we were children – not me, not even Jacopo. She would only ever hold the air that surrounded us.

‘It’s a nice house,’ she said. ‘A bit gloomy, but nice. Do you live alone?’