The Blind Contessa's New Machine (12 page)

“
Cara mia,
” her father said. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then glanced aside, as someone might avert his gaze from the body of a bird fallen in the woods. Carolina closed her eyes in his embrace, comforted by the familiar smells of lemon and tobacco. When he released her, he turned to look out the large window, down the hill, where the glossy leaves of his groves glistened under the thin dusting of the first snow. Her mother watched her steadily.

Carolina had known the instant she opened their invitation for dinner that the old doctor had paid them a visit. Now she looked back at her mother, who seemed in danger of being snuffed out at any moment by the dark clouds that surrounded her. For the first time, she saw the fine lines in her mother’s pale face, the lace at her neck, the shape of her dark eyes, instead of looking for an answer in them.

After a moment, her mother looked away. “After all, there is not really so much to see,” she said.

“Can you see me?” Pietro whispered.

Thick winter clouds had hidden the sun all day, and now they blotted out the moon and stars. Since the cloud- bound night sky held nothing but more darkness, Carolina had pulled the curtains shut and settled into her bed as the maid had made it up, without turning the blankets and pillows so she could see the stars. Pietro’s voice came from the doorway, but without the help of moonlight, Carolina couldn’t distinguish his shadow from the general darkness. His question had woken her from a dream: a house had caught on fire in the snow, and the heat of the flames was melting the ice from the branches of the surrounding trees.

“No,” she said, aloud.

Pietro stepped into her room, fumbled for the edge of her bed, and sat down on it. Blindly, his hand found the hollow of her neck, brushed her chin, and settled, open, on her cheek. With this as his guide, he kissed her deeply. He reeked of wine.

Then he laid his head on her chest, like a child. “I am so sorry,” he said, his voice thick with tears, as if he were confessing some wrong against her.

As Christmas approached, the blindness advanced again, erasing all but the faces of her family and servants and the perfect circle of the full moon, tiny with distance. Her lake was reduced to bright patches of snow on the banks, a flash of silver reflected on the black surface, a rootless tangle of branches. She could no longer see enough of the sky to make out the weather by sight, and she found her way to and from the lake only with the help of the stakes and string she had tied together to guide her as autumn died.

“We’re having a hailstorm,” Turri told her, standing beside her on the banks of the lake. During the night, it had glazed over with a thin layer of clear ice, which shrieked and snapped now as it broke up under the weak sun. “The hail is as big as walnuts.”

Carolina laughed. “I think I would feel that.”

“Yes,” Turri agreed. “But what you can’t see is that I have erected, with the silence of a cat, a sturdy shelter over our heads. Surely you can hear the storm as it batters.” A thunderous drumming accompanied this.

Carolina turned her head this way and that, scanning for a clue to the false hail as it echoed through the clearing. She saw the fabric of his walking-jacket, a window of her house, grass trampled in the clear slush under their feet, but he was too quick for her to catch.

At last, her gaze did settle on something she recognized: his blue eyes, laughing, the white sky overhead.

By the day of her father’s Christmas party, the world was left to Carolina only in unreliable pieces. The darkness had completely overrun its borders. Now she could barely take in a whole face with a single glance. If she looked at their eyes, she lost the plaits and pearls in the hair of the girls, and even as they spoke, a shadow might pass over their features, obscuring their nose or mouth. From time to time, one glance might still be achingly sharp: the reflection of a bird, flying high over the water; the fire of an emerald on an old woman’s hand. But more frequently the shadows crowded into even the brightest scenes, so that Carolina lived now in a permanent twilight that grew more like night each day.

Since before she was born, her father’s family had hosted a feast in the week between Christmas and the New Year. This year, as always, the house was crowded with evergreen boughs, studded with lemons and fluted red flowers from her mother’s hothouse. Garlands were fastened to the mantels, the doorways, the stairway railings with yards of shining gold ribbon. Wicks blazed in every chandelier and lamp. Maids circulated through the crowd with great trays of marzipan, fashioned into the shape of lemons, grapes, apples, roses, tomatoes, lions, lambs.

Carolina stood against the wall in the ballroom, catching glimpses of her friends and neighbors as they danced through clouds of black smoke.

“Have we met before?” Turri asked, taking advantage of the social requirements to kiss her hand.

“I don’t know,” Carolina said. “Maybe you can refresh my memory.”

“It was at least a hundred years ago,” Turri said. “I had been wandering in the forest for days. You were, as I recall, a little stream unmarked on any map. I didn’t mark you on my own, thinking to keep you my secret, but then I could never find my way back.”

“I don’t remember that,” Carolina said.

“Or perhaps I was a sailor,” Turri continued. “On the boat you took to Spain.”

“I have never been to Spain,” Carolina said.

“You have,” Turri said. “You used to lash yourself to the mast, so you could watch the storms. I was the one who untied you each morning.”

“I do like storms,” Carolina conceded.

The heavy scent of almond mixed with the notes of a dozen perfumes: cinnamon, gardenia, orange and musk. Turri’s fingertips alighted on the small of her back. “Would you like to dance?” he asked.

Carolina looked at him. “I can see only your face,” she told him. “No dancers, no chandeliers.”

“That’s perfect,” Turri said, pressing his palm flat against her back to lead her to the floor. When she resisted, he released her.

“Pietro,” she said.

For a moment, Turri’s face disappeared, replaced by the crescent of his ear as he turned his head. On the far wall beyond him, a lamp burned, interrupted by the shapes of dancers in their red and turquoise and furs. Then Turri’s eyes, again.

“He is dancing,” he said.

“With whom?” she asked.

Without answering, he led her into the crowd.

Carolina traced the ember as it rose into the sky and exploded, white sparks spinning far beyond the borders of her vision.

“You see it?” her father asked eagerly. “
Cara mia?”

Carolina nodded at the sky.

“Yes?” her father asked. “That is a yes?”

“Yes,” Carolina said.

At midnight, all their hardiest guests had assembled on the banks of her lake, where, from the opposite side, a pair of gypsies were shooting off a small fortune’s worth of fireworks the seller claimed had traveled all the way from China.

Another firework: blue, dripping down the sky in long arcs like the branches of a willow. Red rockets reflected in the black surface of her lake, which rocked gently with the ripples some guest had made, throwing in a small stone or a last piece of marzipan. Yellow bursts seemed to turn to scattered gold on the snow below. Carolina caught all of this only in fragments, half seen, half imagined.

“Are you cold?” Pietro asked. Before Carolina could answer, he engulfed her in the folds of his own cloak, so that both of them were wrapped in the thick lengths of wool. Caught in his arms, she watched every temporary constellation blaze up and die out, even as the other guests began to drift back to the house for a bit of warmth or another glass of wine.

As the last one died, she continued to gaze up, her sight temporarily seared by the memory of the falling sparks even after the night sky went dark again, with the exception of the few remaining stars.

As Turri had promised, the New Year brought her complete darkness. The few scraps she had been able to see—the eyes of the servants, a fragment of horizon beyond her window—all dwindled down to unreadable points of light. Then one morning, she awoke to find that even those lights had gone out.

At first she believed she had simply woken early, and would have to wait for the sun to rise. But then she realized the house was alive with midday sounds: footsteps on the stairs and tramping on the roof overhead, perhaps removing a heavy snowfall so that the ceiling would not cave in. Outside children screamed and laughed.

Where am I?
she thought, suddenly awash with horror. Immediately, her hands closed around the familiar covers of her bed, the pillows beneath her head, and, as she fumbled farther, the corner of her nightstand, the soft faces of her flowers, the sharp gilt flourishes that encased her clock.

She had not been able to see any of these things clearly for weeks, but with all light now lost, they suddenly seemed to be the only objects left to her in a living darkness that might well have consumed the rest of the world. For all she knew, she might be floating through dead stars far above an exploded world, and this might be the last moment her fingers would touch the table’s smooth varnish before it drifted out of reach forever. She didn’t dare call out: if she did, whatever had wreaked this disaster might turn back and finish the job by extinguishing her.