The Blind Contessa's New Machine (10 page)

Her husband’s property bounded her father’s. In fact, the river that fed her lake flowed into it from Pietro’s land. A bend in the water was visible from Pietro’s house, at the foot of a gentle slope that rolled down to a landing area where a pair of old boats dozed in the sun.

On the first morning after their return from the ocean, Carolina awoke to find herself alone. Pietro’s sheets were thrown back, already cold. Slightly giddy with the sudden freedom from his constant company, she dressed and found her way down the front stairs and out the door, moving toward her lake with the compulsion of a migrating bird that follows a map buried deeper in his mind than his own thoughts. She spent the day staring at the black water. Her sight had dwindled now so that her field of vision was almost completely overtaken by shadow, with two small bright spots through which she could still see the world, as if through windows on the other side of a room. Through them, she watched the mist burn away and the white sky appear in reflection on the lake. Mirrored clouds drifted across the surface and vanished in the weeds. Waterbirds landed with a rush of back-beating wings and threw the whole world into chaos.

As evening fell, she thrashed back through the waist-high grass that grew along the river, to Pietro’s house.

She found him in the kitchen, eating a cold chicken.

“Where have you been hiding?” he asked.

“Where do you think?” she said.

This wasn’t a joke, but on another day he might have taken it for one and smiled. When he didn’t, Carolina crossed to where he sat, leaned over him, and pressed her face against his. He smelled as if he had just come in from riding—traces of new sweat and the sweet, dusty smell of feed from the barn.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

Pietro planted a greasy kiss on her cheek. “I bet you were out there all day dreaming without anything to eat,” he said. He lifted a piece of chicken from the cloth on the table. “Well? Aren’t you hungry?”

Because there was no path from her new home to her lake, Carolina went by a different route each day: through the pines that faced Pietro’s house just beyond the great lawn, or tramping down waist-high swamp grass along the river. In her new rooms, the trunks and boxes of her things, carefully packed by her mother’s maids, stood untouched by her until, in exasperation, a pair of Pietro’s servants broke them open, hung her dresses in the wardrobes, and set her combs and vases on the vanity and tables, executing all these tasks with flawless precision to underscore their disapproval of Carolina’s lack of interest in both her own things and her new home.

Three days after her return, Turri had still failed to appear.

The following morning, Carolina opened her window to watch the children of the servants in the side yard. Each figure flared up from the shadows of her blindness only when she looked directly down on them, almost as though she were spying through a glass. A pair of small girls gleefully flung feed at a crowd of white geese, as if their aim was to blind rather than feed the birds, who remained imperturbably greedy despite the hail of hard corn. Boys carried buckets of water from the well to the kitchen, shouting jokes and threats at the older girls, who went right on pinning up the morning linens as though they were deaf. The only exception was a tall girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen who gave one boy an answer sharp enough that it seemed to freeze him in place for a long moment before he frowned in confusion and ran away. The girl’s features were delicate, framed by a long fall of glossy black hair. She might have passed for an artist’s angel at a distance, but the anger in her eyes was unmistakably of this world.

When one of the maids arrived with her morning pitcher of water, Carolina tapped on the glass. “Who is that?” she asked, pointing to the girl.

“Liza,” the maid said.

“Send her to me, please,” Carolina said.

A few minutes later, the girl stood in Carolina’s room, taking in all the rich details with furtive, eager glances she seemed to believe she took too quickly for Carolina to notice.

“Do you know where the Turri house is?” Carolina asked.

“It is the house on the hill, with the lions,” the girl answered.

“Good,” Carolina said, and pressed a letter into the girl’s hand.

That afternoon, Carolina cut through the heart of the pine forest. The sunlight that filtered down through the needles melded into a bright halo at the limits of her vision, giving the trees and lake the aspect of a sacred painting.

Turri had arrived before her. He stood on the bank near her house and watched her make her way along the far side of the lake. As she approached, her vision split his face in two and interposed flashes of black water. Uneasy under his searching gaze, frustrated by her own sight, she went up to the house without a greeting. He followed.

“It is the same?” he asked, before she was even seated.

Hearing him speak the truth aloud, after keeping it in silence for so long, Carolina was seized with a sudden urge to deny everything and retreat with her parents and Pietro to the refuge of delusion for as long as it would shelter them. But the sound of Turri’s voice also seemed to shake something loose: cut a weight free from her shoulders, throw a window open in the room.

She nodded and sank down on the couch. “The same,” she said. “Maybe a little worse. It’s hard to measure. It’s worse with bright light. At night it’s better.”

“It will be easier for you if you stay away from bright light,” Turri said, and turned the chair backward to straddle it. He must have come straight there on receiving her message: he still wore the scarred leather pants and loose workman’s shirt he dressed in for the laboratory.

“It won’t move as fast?” she asked quickly. “Can I stop it?”

Turri shook his head. “It will just be easier,” he said.

While she was gone, some summer storm had torn apart one of her window scarves. A large brown moth struggled through the remaining pink and violet threads. Gaining the narrow sill, it steadied itself, then began to walk the length of unvarnished wood, bearing its beautiful wings like an unfamiliar burden. When Carolina turned her head to see him, Turri was also gazing up at the insect.

“And you,” Carolina asked, half from habit and half as a dash back to the safety of familiar shadows, “what have you been doing these past weeks?”

“I am building Sophia a new machine,” he said.

“What does it do?”

“It boils an egg,” he said. “She only needs to light a candle, and it will heat the water, deposit the egg for the required time, and lift it out again.”

“But how does it know the time?” Carolina asked.

“I spent the week after your wedding crafting candles that burn an identical length each minute.”

Carolina laughed. “Why don’t you just give her a watch?” she asked. “Couldn’t she keep the time herself?”

“She could,” Turri said. “But she doesn’t like eggs.”

Perhaps frightened by Carolina’s laughter, the moth chose this moment to dive from its ledge, over Carolina’s head. She buried her face in the pillows. When she raised it again, the moth had settled on the scarf in the opposite window, pressed flat, revealing wide, pale blue eyes on each wing.

“We can’t kill it,” Carolina said.

“No,” Turri agreed, rising.

“You’ll have to carry it out.”

“I know.” Deftly, Turri unfastened the pins that held the scarf in place and caught the moth in the folds of fabric. Through the thin cloth, Carolina could see its great wings quiver. At the door, Turri let the scarf fall. The moth hesitated for a moment on his palm, then gathered its courage and lurched away.

“How long do I have?” Carolina asked.

Turri turned back to her like a shadow, his clothing and features erased by the bright light that streamed past him from the surface of her lake.

“You said it was like looking through rolled paper,” he said, taking his seat again.

She nodded.

“Like opera glasses?” he asked. “Or even less, like a spy glass?”

“Like opera glasses,” she said. “But as if someone is always folding them too close together, so you can’t quite see through.”

Turri frowned and looked down at the thick rug beside her bed.

“Turri,” she said.

She could no longer see clearly enough to know whether the tears she thought she glimpsed in his blue eyes were real.

“Around the New Year,” he said. “At the latest.”

Several days later, Liza struggled out onto the verandah, where Carolina was reclining inside a fortress of screens she had erected against the light with the hope that she might still feel the afternoon breeze. The girl’s thin arms were weighed down with half a dozen large leather-bound volumes. Pietro trailed behind her.

“They’re from Turri!” he announced. “It’s not winter yet! What does he think we want with books?”

Liza set her load carefully beside Carolina’s couch and straightened. “Shall I bring the rest?” she asked.

“Of course!” Pietro said, waving impatiently. “Go ahead!”

Carolina reached for the first volume, then sat up and opened it at random. An extraordinary butterfly, fully five times life size, spread across the page, hand-tinted blue and black with flecks of gilt flaking from the tips of its wings.

“A moth!” Pietro said. “I’ll be damned.”

Carolina turned the page. A pair of butterflies balanced on a branch. A chrysalis hung below them. Inside the translucent casing, she could make out the large eyes and cramped legs of the altered insect, its wings folded like lengths of brocade on its back. The adults above it were faint blue, paler than the sky, their lacy wing tips fading to a rich cream, broken here and there by irregular bits of black, as if their maker had flicked a paintbrush after them as they escaped.

With an air of capitulation, Pietro sank down beside her and lifted the next volume. “Birds,” he said. The next: “Chinese dress.”

Carolina picked up another. “These are drawings of America,” she said.

Liza soldiered out of the house with another seven volumes and laid them at Carolina’s feet with enormous delicacy and suspicion, as if the books were both highly fragile and packed with explosives.

“Liza,” Carolina said as the girl withdrew.

Liza turned, her hands deep in the pockets of her gray dress.

“Thank you,” Carolina said. “Ask for a chocolate in the kitchen.”

Without answer or thanks, Liza turned away again.

“These are maps,” Pietro said. “But they are too old to be accurate.” He laughed. “Look at this!” His strong fingers pointed to a school of bare-breasted mermaids frolicking in a green sea, blissfully unaware of their proximity to the precipice of a great waterfall labeled
Finisterra
.

Pietro threw his arm around her and kissed her cheek, her mouth, her neck. Then he stood up, shaking his head. “Turri is a marvel!”

“He’s a mystery,” Carolina said.