The Blind Contessa's New Machine (11 page)

Turri’s collection of illustrations was vast and far ranging. She thumbed through the lives of the saints, illuminated in heavy gold, blue, and red. She learned the types of American plants and vegetables, their blossoms precisely rendered, their roots perfectly free of earth. She traced the riggings of fifty renowned Spanish ships. She observed Africa’s fantastic wildlife: lions, zebras, and giraffes. She furrowed her brow over chemicals and their combinations, and laughed at the constellations.

As the leaves turned bright and fell into the lake, the blindness pressed in. Now, looking out over the still water, she could see neither bank, only an ever-closing oval that contained the white faces of the last water lilies between the red bellies of the lily pads, curling up against the cold. Even in broad daylight she now moved in perpetual darkness. She could still see into the distance of her shrinking field of vision, but close at hand it was as if she carried only a small lantern, just powerful enough to reveal things directly in front of her.

Half blind, she became clumsy, bruising her white shins on Pietro’s unfamiliar furniture.

“They are going to think I am beating you!” Pietro joked, when he discovered a new bruise. “But you are much too pretty for that.”

To keep from losing her lake to the darkness, Carolina took planting sticks from the gardener to stake out the safest path. Over a period of days, she tied lengths of thick twine between them to lead her along, until her soft hands were nicked and chafed.

“You look like you have been doing small-work for the devil,” Pietro said.

Then, one night, Carolina knocked a clock from its place as Pietro led her from the dining room to the stairs.

The clock sat on a shelf just about the height of her elbow. The hall was wide enough that she should have been able to avoid it easily. But her vision had constricted so that it was impossible for her to see all the ornaments displayed in the hall and still find her own way.

The clock fell with an angry jangle of chimes. Springs and gears scattered everywhere. The beautiful white ceramic face with its hand-painted daisies seemed to be in one piece until she knelt to retrieve it, when it came apart as shards in her hands.

“Carolina!” Pietro said. “This was my grandmama’s!”

There was no anger in his voice, only surprise and hurt. When he knelt beside her and began to scrabble helplessly among the pieces, he avoided her eyes. She realized with a deep pang that he believed she had broken the piece deliberately.

“No, no!” she said, catching his arm. Awkwardly, his powerful body yielded and turned toward her. Both of them crouched, balanced on the balls of their feet, unable to settle their knees amid the glass and machinery. “I couldn’t see it, Pietro,” she said, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I can’t see!”

This was the first time he had ever seen her weep. The unstoppable river of his thoughts diverted for a moment around this new branch fallen into its path. He rose, lifting her with him.

“But it was right there,” he said, reasoning slowly.

Carolina held her hands to each side of her face. “I cannot see my hands,” she said. “I cannot see beyond them. It is worse every week.”

“You cannot see,” Pietro repeated.

“I told you,” she said, begging. “I told you before we married.”

After a moment, recognition sprang up in his eyes. “But you were joking!” he exclaimed.

When she didn’t speak, he wrapped his arms around her, covering her eyes with one strong hand as he pressed her face to his chest.

The next morning, she awoke to find him leaning over her, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with his hand. The following evening, he scooped her up from her chair and carried her upstairs. “But there is nothing wrong with my feet!” she insisted.

For some reason, her blindness rekindled the fire in him that had begun to flicker after their return from the shore. Instead of retreating to his own rooms each night as he had been, he stayed with her or carried her to his. “Who is it?” he would whisper, covering her eyes with his hands, as if she had to guess. Or, “But I am a blind man!” he would protest, tangled in her garments as he searched for her flesh.

This lasted for a week. Around the lake, the trees gave up their last leaves. When their branches were black and bare, Pietro’s ardor began to fade. He still reached for her when they met by chance, but he rarely sought her out.

Carolina, for her part, didn’t miss him. Serving as the only audience for a man raised by crowds of admirers exhausted her. Soothing his distress over her blindness, while the darkness inched inexorably forward in her own eyes, was beyond her strength. The buried thought that he might have found comfort elsewhere was almost a comfort to her.

The night itself had become her favorite companion, the only one who seemed to understand what blindness meant. She no longer lit lamps or candles to hold it off: every night, she unfastened her buttons and clasps in full darkness. Especially after breaking the clock she didn’t dare roam Pietro’s unfamiliar house, but there was nothing to stop her from padding around the confines of her own room, searching out new mysteries: the sharp ceramic lace on a figurine’s dress, the smooth bellies of a bowl of shells, the long, slick curves of her twin wardrobes.

When she did creep into her bed, she often pulled the sheets and blankets free and reversed them, with her pillows at the foot. If she tilted her chin from this position, what was left to her of the night sky filled her vision, the stars as bright as she could ever remember them, the borders of the moon still untouched by her collapsing sight.

“Maybe you are wrong about the New Year,” Carolina said. She closed one eye and then the other, trying to recall which of the lake trees had stood at the limits of her vision the previous Sunday. “I don’t think it is any different this week.”

Turri skipped another silver disk across the lake’s bright surface. Carolina turned her head quickly to keep it in sight before it skidded one final time and dropped into the depths.

“What are those?” she said, holding out her hand.

“They are blanks,” he said, pressing one into her upturned palm. “For my mint.”

“Your mint?”

“Last year I invented my own currency,” he told her, a hint of derision in his voice.

“Because ours was not working?”

“Currency is the foundation of any new civilization,” Turri said, as she imagined a professor might. “That, or an army. But coins are easier to produce in a laboratory.”

“May I keep it?” she asked.

Turri flung another disk out into the lake without answering. Carolina dropped her head to work the unstamped coin into the slash of red satin at the waist of her dress. Then she looked up again to inspect the bare trees on the far banks. Their reflections shuddered in the wake from Turri’s game.

“Or perhaps the trees are moving,” she suggested.

“No, they are not,” he said gently.

When the winter nights grew longer than the pale days, Carolina came downstairs to find Dr. Clementi standing alone in the front hall, nervously stroking the scuffed leather of his medicine bag. She had always liked the old man: unlike the other doctors in town, he had a strong sense of his own helplessness. In some acute cases, when he had reached the limits of his knowledge, he had been known to refuse to give diagnosis or treatment, despite the pleas of the patient, when his colleagues would cheerfully have tortured them to death.

Pietro, who hadn’t informed her of the appointment in advance, was nowhere in sight.

“Dr. Clementi,” Carolina said, greeting him midway down the stairs.

The old man squinted up through a pair of wire spectacles. When he recognized her, his face broke into a smile. “Hello, child.”

“You’re not here to see Pietro,” she guessed, alighting from the last step.

He shook his head. “He’s healthy as a horse.”

“I think he’s healthier than some horses,” Carolina said, and gestured for him to follow her into the conservatory.

After some hesitation, the doctor settled on a prim, straight-backed chair, upholstered in red brocade. Carolina sank down on a divan near him. The doctor gazed at her in a visible agony over how to begin. His sympathy caused her more pain than any of her own thoughts had.

When it became clear that he couldn’t bring himself to speak, she said, “I am going blind.”

The doctor nodded, gratitude and sorrow struggling in the lines of his tired face.

At this moment, Pietro strode into the salon. “Doctor!” he said heartily. “I see you have discovered my wife. Thank you for coming.”

The doctor held up bravely as Pietro thumped him on the back. Then Pietro sat down beside Carolina and took her hand without glancing at her. “Carolina is having some trouble,” he said, confidentially.

“I see,” the doctor said.

“I am going blind,” Carolina repeated.

“It’s like the darkness is closing in,” Pietro elaborated. “She runs into things.”

Dr. Clementi looked at Carolina with compassion, shadows threatening him from every side. “We thought you might have some medicine,” Pietro said, prompting him. “Or a machine.”

Dr. Clementi shook his head. “There is no medicine for it,” he said.

“Or opium,” Pietro insisted. “For the pain.”

“There is no pain,” Carolina said, laying her free hand over his.

“But there are remedies for weak eyes,” Pietro said. “I have seen them.”

Dr. Clementi, who now recognized his true patient, watched Pietro with pity. “I’m sorry,” he said, and rose. “No doctor has ever arrested the progress of blindness.”

“Thank you,” Carolina said.

At the door, the doctor paused. “You have spoken with your parents?”

Carolina nodded. Even from that distance, and despite her failing sight, she could see he knew this was a lie.