Evangelista's Fan (4 page)

Salvatore was silent. The two cousins smiled at him, smiled and smiled. These could have been the smiles of time-tampering kings.

‘If I were to accept your offer,' he said at last, ‘what would be my first name? What does “E” stand for?'

‘Ah,' said Mr Simpkins, ‘there our imaginations faltered and so we went straight to the originator of the Torricellian Experiment of 1643. It is, of course, Evangelista.'

After his sleep in the chair, Salvatore's mind felt a little more clear. I must lay out all the arguments in plain words, he thought. I must look at everything in a logical way and then make my decision.

He made coffee. He rekindled his fire and knelt in front of it, warming his hands on his coffee bowl.

He talked to himself as if he were no longer Salvatore Cavalli, but some disinterested third party. ‘First,' he said, ‘if you agree to become Fantino, E., you will also have the right to Fantino, E.'s constructed past as a maker of barometers. Your name is engraved on every instrument. The name, therefore, carries with it some years of prior existence that could go some way to redressing the balance of years lost as Cavalli, S. This is perhaps the most important point in the argument and one that should incline you to accept the proposal.

‘Secondly, there is the name itself: Evangelista. This takes you yet further back, to a time of Italian greatness, to a time which acknowledged the vast importance of
prediction
in human life and addressed it scientifically. There is no more perfect assumed name for you, therefore, than Evangelista. Already you can feel the attraction, like a magnet, of this name.

‘But then there is this third question of the disappearance. This disappearance means relinquishing for ever and always the possibility of your beloved's reappearance in your life. And, despite all your despair and suffering, you
have
, in some corner of your being, kept this possibility alive. You have said to yourself: suppose the winder key has
not
reappeared in the fan drawer? Suppose, simply, the bewitching owner of the Huygens clock (and don't forget that it was this very Huygens who perfected Galileo's escapement!) has temporarily become reconciled to the pausing of time at twenty-seven minutes past one? And suppose the day should come when this starts to irritate her once more? What will she do then? She will put on a grey dress (a winter dress this time). She will sew some silk roses to a hat. She will set out with her servant for Percy Street. And you will no longer be there. Worse, there will be no trace of you and no means whatsoever of finding you. She will take the clock to another repairer and that will be the end – the indisputable end – of any version of your future in which she is included.'

Salvatore sighed deeply. He put down his coffee bowl. He lifted his head and saw pale sunlight coming into the room. He realised that he could remember with extraordinary clarity the face, voice and gestures of the young woman he so yearned to love. She was as visible to him now as she had ever been. Nothing about her had faded or become spoiled. Her perfection remained intact, had imprinted itself indelibly on his mind. All she lacked was a name.

Thinking only of her and no longer of Fantino, E., Salvatore went to bed and slept away the morning. He dreamed he was walking arm-in-arm with his love in a field of string beans. The low bean plants touched his legs seductively. He woke in a state of frustration and fury. Come on, Salvatore, he instructed himself, you must put an end to this! Mr Sydney and Mr Simpkins have made you the most remarkable offer of your life and you must find the means to accept it. You must become Evangelista. You must make yourself relinquish love.

But how can perfection, once seen, be relinquished? It can't, Salvatore decided, it can't, because the mind will always and always return to it and all that follows will be measured by it – to the end of life.

Unless
. . .

And here, Salvatore tried to remember how Sydney and Simpkins had described their creation of Fantino, E. They had called it trickery. They had said: ‘It's men's
devices
that shape the world.' And this, of course, was what he needed now – a device. He had to behave not only like Sydney and Simpkins but also like the King of Piedmont: he had to invent a contrivance which, from the perfect sum of his love's whole, would take away a crucial part.

Some days passed.

Salvatore got out pen and paper. He stared at the paper for long hours at a time, absent-mindedly drawing designs for winder keys. Nothing in the way of any device would come into his mind.

One early morning, waking restless and confused, he put on his coat and walked through two rain showers and one deluge of hail to High Holborn and stood at the window of Fantino, E. The shop was not yet open. Salvatore remained there for several minutes staring at the instruments inscribed with his future name. Though not, as he had remarked before, as fine as many Italian pieces, the beauty of the barometers struck him more forcefully than it had at first. The face-work, done by Benedict Simpkins, was elegant, rather plain but nevertheless perfectly balanced, the word ‘Fair' being particularly finely wrought. And Salvatore imagined himself returning to Piedmont at some future time with the gift of a barometer for Roberto and Magnifica. He saw the scene: Roberto would put on his spectacles and Magnifica would get up from the dinner table and they would both gather round and stare at the instrument and touch it and caress it and one of them would say at last: ‘Well, son, the weaknesses you had as a clockmaker you have eradicated in this new profession of yours.'

These tender imaginings about his parents calmed Salvatore a little. If love could not make the bridge back to Piedmont, then perhaps the barometers would, in time.

He was able to set out on his return journey to Percy Street with a relatively tranquil mind. And then, on the way, something happened to him.

He passed a fan shop. Without really knowing why, he stopped in front of it and let his eye wander over the variety of fans displayed in the window. He was searching for a fan of decorated black lacquer, similar to the one his beloved had carried. There was nothing quite like it in the shop and Salvatore, beginning to muse on its singularity, suddenly understood that he had stumbled upon the device that would destroy his beloved's perfection. The device was her fan.

He remembered the encounter with her in every detail. And one of these details now struck him as immensely significant. Although the day had been warm, very warm, in fact, and the air muggy in his repair shop, the young woman had held the fan strangely still. One would have expected her to be fanning herself vigorously, but she was not doing so. In other words, despite the heat and humidity,
she had not used her fan like a fan
.

‘And so,' said Salvatore, standing absolutely still at the fan shop window, ‘she was not
using
the fan as a fan; she was using the fan as a device. It was a device of concealment, no less significant than that of Sydney and Simpkins and the invented Fantino, E. And what the fan concealed was a hole. In an otherwise ravishingly perfect oval face, there was a missing part. It was where a dimple might have been. It was a hole so deep, it had sucked in part of the cheek and all the skin at its rim was brown and puckered. It was a hole like an anus.'

Salvatore covered his eyes with his hands. A shower had come on while he had been standing at the window and he was now shivering with cold.

It took Salvatore two years (a year longer than Mr Sydney had anticipated) to re-emerge into the world as Evangelista. Mr Simpkins and Mr Sydney put this down to the young man's obsession with perfection. At first, this had exasperated them, but then they began to pay more and more attention to the quality of their own work, and the barometers made by the firm of Fantino, E. dating from the year 1818 surpassed in beauty and accuracy anything previously manufactured by them.

Their enterprise blossomed. Money was made. It was decided, in order to bind Evangelista more closely to the family, that he would marry Benedict Simpkins' daughter, Jane. She and any children born to her would take the name Fantino.

In the summer of 1820, after a protracted and happy visit to Piedmont, Evangelista was walking with his wife Jane in St James's Park when he saw, coming towards him, wearing a coral-coloured gown and a matching hat, the owner of the Huygens clock. It was a very warm day, but she carried no fan. She held her head high, seeming to smile at the fresh green of the park and the soft blue of the sky.

Her face was as beautiful and as untroubled by any imperfection as it had once been in Evangelista's Percy Street shop, and in his mind.

Evangelista noted this fact; then he reached for his wife's hand and walked on. Under his breath, he said his old name: ‘Salvatore'.

The Candle Maker

  

For twenty-seven years, Mercedes Dubois worked in a laundry.

The laundry stood on a west-facing precipice in the hilltop town of Leclos. It was one of the few laundries in Corsica with a view of the sea.

On fine evenings, ironing at sunset was a pleasant – almost marvellous – occupation and for twenty-seven years Mercedes Dubois considered herself fortunate in her work. To her sister, Honorine, who made paper flowers, she remarked many times over the years: ‘In my work, at least, I'm a fortunate woman.' And Honorine, twisting wire, holding petals in her mouth, always muttered: ‘I don't know why you have to put it like that.'

Then the laundry burned down.

The stone walls didn't burn, but everything inside them turned to black iron and black oil and ash. The cause was electrical, so the firemen said. Electricians in Leclos, they said, didn't know how to earth things properly.

The burning down of the laundry was the second tragedy in the life of Mercedes Dubois. She didn't know how to cope with it. She sat in her basement apartment and stared at her furniture. It was a cold December and Mercedes was wearing her old red anorak. She sat with her hands in her anorak pockets, wondering what she could do. She knew that in Leclos, once a thing was lost, it never returned. There had been a bicycle shop once, and a library and a lacemaker's. There had been fifty children and three teachers at the school; now, there were twenty children and one teacher. Mercedes pitied the lonely teacher, just as she pitied the mothers and fathers of all the schoolchildren who had grown up and gone away. But there was nothing to be done about any of it. Certainly nothing one woman, single all her life, could do. Better not to remember the variety there had been. And better, now, not to remember the sunset ironing or the camaraderie of the mornings, making coffee, folding sheets. Mercedes Dubois knew that the laundry would never reopen because it had never been insured. Sitting with her hands in her anorak pockets, staring at her sideboard, was all there was to be done about it.

But after a while she stood up. She went over to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of anisette. She put it on the small table where she ate her meals and sat down again and looked at it. She thought: I can drink the damned anisette. I can do that at least.

She had always considered her surname right for her. She was as hard as wood. Wood, not stone. She could be pliant. And once, long ago, a set of initials had been carved on her heart of wood. It was after the carving of these initials that she understood how wrong for her her first name was. She had been christened after a Spanish saint, Maria de las Mercedes – Mary of the Mercies – but she had been unable to show mercy. On the contrary, what had consumed her was despair and malevolence. She had lain in her iron bed and consoled herself with thoughts of murder.

Mercedes Dubois: stoical but without forgiveness; a woman who once planned to drown her lover and his new bride and instead took a job in a laundry; what could she do, now that the laundry was gone?

Of her sister, Honorine, she asked the question: ‘What can anyone do in so terrible a world?'

And Honorine replied: ‘I've been wondering about that, because, look at my hands. I've got the beginnings of arthritis, see? I'm losing my touch with the paper flowers.'

‘There you are,' said Mercedes. ‘I don't know what anyone can do except drink.'

But Honorine, who was married to a sensible man, a plasterer, shook a swollen finger at her sister and warned: ‘Don't go down that road. There's always something. That's what we've been taught to believe. Why don't you go and sit in the church and think about it?'

‘Have
you
gone and sat in the church and thought about it?' asked Mercedes.

‘Yes.'

‘And?'

‘I noticed all the flowers in there are plastic these days. It's more durable than paper. We're going to save up and buy the kind of machinery you need to make a plastic flower.'

Mercedes left Honorine and walked down the dark, steep street, going towards home and the anisette bottle. She was fifty-four years old. The arrival of this second catastrophe in her life had brought back her memories of the first one.

The following day, obedient to Honorine, she went into the Church of St Vida, patron saint of lemon growers, and walked all around it very slowly, wondering where best to sit and think about her life. Nowhere seemed best. To Mercedes the child, this church had smelled of satin; now it smelled of dry rot. Nobody cared for it. Like the laundry, it wasn't insured against calamity. And the stench of calamity was here. St Vida's chipped plaster nostrils could detect it. She stood in her niche, holding a lemon branch to her breast, staring pitifully down at her broken foot. Mercedes thought: poor Vida, what a wreck, and no lemon growers left in Leclos. What can either Vida or I do in so desolate a world?

She sat in a creaking pew. She shivered. She felt a simple longing, now, for something to warm her while she thought about her life. So she went to where the votive candles flickered on their iron sconces – fourteen of them on the little unsteady rack – and warmed her hands there.