The Blind Contessa's New Machine (9 page)

For most of the winter, Carolina tested her blindness. For instance: how fast did it move? Perhaps, having taken all her life to reach this point, it might take another twenty years to claim another fraction of her sight. With scientific precision that would have made Turri proud, she sketched the trees on the opposite bank and marked off what she could see when she faced them dead on from the top step of her house. In November she could take in five trees, bounded by the willow and the sapling. By the New Year, the sapling had vanished. When darkness began to swallow up the willow as well, she tried to tell her mother and father. When the willow was extinguished, she told Pietro.

By this time, Pietro had learned enough about her habits to recognize that she was not like the other young ladies of his acquaintance, and had taken to calling her “my stranger.” Her announcement seemed to him to be just another piece of happy nonsense, like her affection for her poorly conceived lake with its muddy banks, or her inexplicable patience with Turri’s experiments.

Her parents had long since forgotten her attempts to warn them. Her father was engaged in a war of attrition with the gardener, who insisted that, if he were to cut all the flowers her father demanded for Carolina’s wedding, the garden itself, where the reception was to be held, would have all the charm of a desert—to which her father replied that all men of genius are mocked by their own servants. Carolina’s mother still left her room infrequently, but a steady stream of servants and delivery boys now came and went, bearing fruit, chocolates, china, silver, silks, brocade and lace, and a parade of gifts sent ahead by the hundreds of invited guests.

Carolina always opened these gifts in her mother’s company, so as her sight was leaving her she handled some of the most beautiful things she had ever seen: an enameled box, robin’s egg blue, wavy like watered silk, lined in rose velvet; a spiral shell the size of her fist, with a silver lid, for holding salt; sheets embroidered with lemon blossoms and vines; a glass candy dish the color of blood; a serving tray of silver beaten into the shape of a giant grape leaf, with a life-size bunch of cold silver grapes clustered under the curve of the handle and a small bird perched on the opposite rim, gazing at the metal fruit with longing.

At first, Carolina tried to memorize these things. She began a careful catalog in her mind, closed her eyes, and quizzed herself. But she quickly discovered that each time she called up an object in her memory, it eroded or changed. The bird on the tray, which had seemed so hopeful at her first glance, grew melancholy in her mind and developed jeweled eyes: now onyx, now sapphire, so that each time she looked at the actual tray again she had the sense that it was not quite as beautiful as it had been. The enameled box opened in her unreliable memory to reveal white and brown speckled eggs, pale gray stones worn smooth by the river, loose diamonds. Eventually she gave up the project of memorization, but she continued to try to soak up as much of the world as she could take in: the candlelight in her mother’s room, waterbirds landing on her lake, the folds of her white dress as the seamstress fitted it, added a hundred yards of lace, and fitted it again. The world had trouble withstanding her searching gaze. The blindness at the corners of her vision and the black water of her lake melded into a thick shadow that threatened to swallow up the sky and trees she could still see. The forest seemed to lose its depth and flatten, as if it were only painted on a scrim hung by some traveling theater company. Everything gave the impression that it was in danger of giving way to reveal whatever horror or wonder the seen world now obscured.

But the blindness never relented. The week before her wedding she lost the oak, leaving only the junk tree and the wild apple, which overnight had burst into full bloom, like a breathless bride adorned in white, trembling with joy over the slightest breeze.

This was when she had told Turri.

The spring that Carolina was born, her mother had planted rows and rows of white rosebushes in anticipation of her daughter’s wedding day. Today, their branches graced the arch of the church door, held in place with swags of cheesecloth, varied here and there by the clouds of white blossoms Carolina’s maid called starlight, or by long tufts of river grass. Roses littered the tables the servants had arranged the evening before on the lawn, where two kitchen maids now stood guard against further attempts by a strapping black crow who had neatly stolen a pair of forks and a shining knife in the small hours of the morning, before a stable boy, defending his own honor in the matter, discovered the true thief and surprised the bird into dropping the spoon that would have completed his setting. Roses lay in heaps on Carolina’s dressing table as her maid helped her into her dress and her mother toyed with her hair. The blindness had advanced so far that she saw the world now as if peering through a sheet of rolled paper—a few sentences on a page, a single face. It made the whole thought of marrying Pietro, which had always seemed to her like a strange dream she might wake from at any moment, seem even more unreal.

At the church, her failing eyes reduced the blossoms that wound over the church door to a haze of white and green, and her gathered neighbors and relatives to a murmuring mist. She made her way down the aisle by memory and guesswork, taking small steps to avoid stumbling over her yards of silk and lace, catching her balance from time to time when she trod on one of the unfortunate roses that had been scattered in her honor on the worn stones. About halfway down, she caught the sound of a familiar voice and turned to see Turri. He gazed back at her as if it were any other day, and he was only waiting for an answer or her next move in a game. Beside him, Sophia stared up at her with the unreasoned but unerring cunning of a cat, taking in every detail of her dress with greed and suspicion.

Then Carolina looked back at the altar where a hundred candles wavered, pale in the strong afternoon light, dropping hot wax onto the faces of the uncomplaining crowd of asters and blue phlox massed at their feet. Pietro stood beside the priest, the light bending all around him: handsome, certain, grinning.

“You’re like a bird,” Pietro complained. “Hold still. The ocean can’t run away.”

Carolina, who had been turning her head swiftly from side to side in the vain hope of capturing the entire shoreline in a single glance, did as he said. The vast expanse of white sand and the blue band of ocean that stretched beyond it to the sky vanished, replaced by the sea in cameo, a glimmering oval fragment small enough to dangle from a woman’s neck, surrounded by darkness.

Pietro turned her face to his and kissed it.

“You are so beautiful,” he whispered. “Maybe I will never love you more than this.”

Darkness had never frightened Carolina, but during the blazing seaside days of her honeymoon, it became a friend. The bright ocean was a real torment to her, with all the light from a thousand waves streaming into her limited eyes, but when night came, she was again equal: the whole world had also gone blind. In fact, she had the advantage. The blindness had cured her of superstition about the secret qualities of darkness, the dread that things shifted and became strange when not governed by a human eye. Through long association, she had learned that the darkness had no power to alter what it hid. Her hairbrush or pen might be obscured by the blindness, but when she reached for them, they were the same as they had always been. As a result, shadows no longer held any magic for her. Her confidence remained even as the evening sky sank from blue to black. By night, she was even more sure-footed than Pietro, whose dependence on the sunlight made him clumsy in the dark. So she was the one who led him through the unlit corners of the seaside town after the shops had closed and the restaurants had emptied out, as the waiters poured buckets of water onto the stones to wash away the evidence of that evening’s feasts, and gypsy music began to drift through certain open windows.

Pietro loved these rambles, willing to bear with his young wife’s caprices for the opportunity they offered him to catch at the dim curves of her retreating figure in a close alley, or press her against the walls of some back street. He was an ardent but gentle lover, most tender with her when freed from the impossible task of forcing his deepest feelings to the surface as words. Carolina was half thrilled and half terrified by the way he changed in the dark: shocked by the places his hands sought out and by the way her own body rose and burned under them, amazed to find that her own touch could make him flinch or groan, but most of all grateful for a world in which only taste and touch, sound and smell, mattered, where, even if she did open her eyes, the horizon had shrunk to just what she could still take in: Pietro’s eyes, the back of his neck, her finger caught in his teeth.

Each day, however, was a new mystery. Rising from their shared bed, they dressed quickly, like the first man and woman, newly naked and ashamed. Their meals were passed in long silences, punctuated by half-remembered pleasantries. At a loss, Pietro returned again and again to the theme of her beauty, which he earnestly believed must please her as much as it pleased him.

“I think the angels were God’s practice,” he would say, reaching out to catch a handful of her hair. “To make this pretty head.”

Carolina could not think of what to say to this. The angels of her catechism were fearsome men and she was terrified to speak of God, in case he might remember her and speed the curse he had chosen. Furthermore, Pietro didn’t seem to want his compliments returned. In the first days of the honeymoon, confused by the praise, she had retreated into basic etiquette.

“Your eyes are beautiful as well,” she said.

For an instant, he had smiled like a petted child, but just as quickly the light of pride was lost in a frown. “Beauty is a blind guide in a man,” he told her, probably in the same stern tones it had been told to him.

“I’m sorry,” she ventured.

“There is no need,” he said, more gently.

Carolina couldn’t remember this restraint in the months of their courtship, but the moments they had spent alone together before their marriage amounted to mere hours, spent in breathless snatches behind hedges and in hallways, exchanging burning kisses, groping blindly for whatever might be hidden beneath the lace at her breast or in the hollow of his hand. Beyond that, under the watchful eye of her family, they had only flirted and teased until the day, as her mother wept quietly, Carolina had raised him from his knees.

“Would you like to go dancing tonight?” Pietro asked one evening, joining Carolina on the balcony. “They are building a pavilion on the beach.”

The lengths of white gauze that shut out the morning light twisted around them like the tethered ghosts of ocean breezes. The sun had just vanished into the horizon and in the gloaming below lights had begun to appear, marking the path of the streets, the entrances of restaurants, the stands where night vendors peddled wine and fruit to lovers and young families at the water’s edge.

When she didn’t answer immediately, he nuzzled her neck like a favored horse.

“We don’t have to dance,” he said. “You give me a command.”

Carolina turned in the circle of his arms and looked up at him. Surrounded by darkness, his handsome face was as frank and hopeful as a child’s.

In despair, she closed her eyes.

Pietro kissed them.