Mirror Mirror (25 page)

“So the Doge has the supposed relic of Eden.”

He said, “I left one Apple from the branch. I retained two of them for bargaining with.”

“Is that so? Let me see it.”

“I'll remind you, respectfully, that I went on Cesare's bidding.”

“I am his sister and his widow and his heir. Let me see it.”

“You don't even believe it exists.”

“Convert me.”

From his traveling sack he withdrew the few items of clothes he had acquired on his return journey. Within them, settled as lightly and safely as a walnut meat in a shell, reposed the sacred bough. He took it and lifted it with both hands. The stem shone as brightly silver as if a servant had only just finished buffing it, and the silver leaves shimmered delicately in an invisible wind from another climate. The two
Apples remaining smelled of rosy sweetness, though from where the third had been plucked, a blemish of black tarnish knobbed.

Lucrezia Borgia lowered herself to her knees and made the Sign of the Cross. “Upon the wood of this same tree was our Lord crucified,” she said.

“The tree is silver,” said Vicente.

“That is its aspect to our sight. It's not silver, though; how could a silver tree support Apples in an eternal state of perfect ripeness? This is no artifact, but proof adequate for the revival of a failing faith.”

“One has to have faith first in order for it to be revived,” he said. “I am through with this thing, whatever it is. I want no more to do with it. How did Cesare die?”

“I wish his body were here,” she said. “He is buried in Navarre, they tell me. He was looking for the de Nevada family to raise up an army on his behalf.”

“There is no de Nevada family in Navarre, or none that would recognize this wandering cousin,” said Vicente coldly.

“You wrote to Fra Ludovico—?”

“I wrote lies for the purpose of protecting my daughter. Apparently it wasn't enough. Now you must tell me, Donna Borgia. I don't have any interest in sacred matters. I want to know how my daughter died.”

“She went off into the woods on her own and she never returned,” said Lucrezia. “Primavera's grandson found her body at the foot of a cliff. He buried her in an unmarked grave in the forest.”

“I will see him now. Ranuccio, is that it? Do I remember? Ranuccio. Where is he?”

“You may not see him,” said Lucrezia. “He disappeared from the region shortly thereafter. I believe he was caught poaching a pig from the barns of Don Mercutio down the valley, and rumor has it he was done in as a pig might be done in.” After a pause. “I mean, on a spit.”

Vicente said, “Why was my daughter wandering alone in the woods? She was a timid sort.”

“She changed,” said Lucrezia. “She became brazen and feckless. I
couldn't stop her, though I did my best. I hope you appreciate my efforts. Primavera was no use at all, you know, and Fra Ludovico has become a simpleton. His spiritual warnings made no difference. As best I could, with the obligations of my marriage and my life at the court of Ferrara, I have stood in your stead as a parent, Vicente.” She raised herself to her feet and held the bough in her arm as if cradling an infant. “I've done what you asked of me, what you begged of me. But I couldn't wander into her soul and make her love me or respect me. In the end she was a willful child, like most. Her ending was likely inevitable.”

Vicente de Nevada stood too. He had to crush an inclination to beg pardon and leave the room, as the room was his, the house was his, even the sad history of what had happened to his daughter, whatever it was, belonged to him, not to Lucrezia Borgia. But unless she walked out of the room first, he would be ceding to her the right to the house, and this he was unwilling to do.

“Tell me about your dog,” she said, smiling at him. She put down the sacred bough and picked up a small pearl-handled knife.

“The dog doesn't figure in this story of grief. It has no name,” he said.

“It?” she said. “Not he or she? Poor thing. Come here, poor deformed thing.”

The creature came forward warily.

Lucrezia turned and neatly sliced from one of the Apples a clean wedge. The juice beaded up on the knife. The moon-white flesh was flushed with pink and pale green and yellow. She held the knife down with the Apple slice on it, and for this supreme honor the beast found reason and means to develop a mouth. A hole in its top opened, more or less mouthlike, and a helpful tongue leaped out and gathered the Apple.

“I adore feeding the hungry, just as the Scriptures tell us.” Her words were tender but their delivery flat: she displayed an alchemist's skeptical curiosity over a trial of elements.

The creature sat back and looked up at Lucrezia. It occurred to
Vicente that it now had eyes, and lids that could blink. It blinked its stony lids. One dry tear broke from each duct and rolled to the terrazzo floor, there to shatter into a clot of dust and gravel. An improbable smell of rue.

“It would seem you are telling the truth,” she said. “This really is the Apple of knowledge. It will give tongue even to the rock.”

The beast turned to Vicente and put its head between Vicente's knees. With its new tongue it licked Vicente's hands.

Then the thing straightened up, like a little monkey, its forelimbs pivoting outward. On its hind legs it took a step or two. Lucrezia said, “Honor to God, the thing is walking.” She backed up a step, and picked up the knife again. “Vicente.”

The beast paid her no attention. With one of its forelimbs it reached forward and the stubby hoof was cloven in three. It helped itself to the rest of the Apple that Lucrezia Borgia had offered it. “Vicente,” she said, “what license.”

Vicente made no move. Confident as a three-year-old and about as tall, the stone beast walked on its hind legs, up to the hearth. Today's fire was laid but unlit. The beast knocked the brush aside and shuffled through yesterday's ashes to the back wall of the fireplace. It leaned its head and its shoulders—there was no denying they were now shoulders—into the wall. It disappeared into the stone as neatly as a corpse is swallowed by a flooded quarry.

Vicente was stirred by the audacity of the stone dog. Its disappearance after all these weeks was a bracing shock. Whatever had rescued him from the dungeon in Agion Oros had exacted its price and gone away. Had it been traveling beside him, invisible, incognito, in the Greek fishing vessel? Its stone weight interfering with the boat's maneuverability? No proof of that. Who knows how long the stone had been with him, and in how many guises. Now it was gone.

He was bereaved further, this time for a stone.

The world seemed a punishing sleeve of bright changing lights and dark moods. Flawed and regrettable, the presence of it nonetheless clawed at one, claiming one's attention. “Get out,” he said to the
Duchessa de Ferrara, hardly believing his temerity. “Get out of my house at once.”

If Lucrezia Borgia was shaken, she didn't show it. She put her white knuckles against the desktop and leaned across to him. “In my own time and in my own way, and not before. I owe you nothing.”

“You owe me my daughter's life,” he said. “Will you pay me with your own?” He pushed the table with his hip, ineffectually; his hands strangled air.

She was frightened, though, and fell back. The bough with one remaining Apple slipped from her grasp and rolled along the hem of her garment. “If you kill me you'll never even learn where your daughter's body is buried. You won't know where to have Fra Ludovico sing her the last rites, which I could tell you even now.”

“No one will sing you last rites. No one in Italy will weep when you die, and the name Lucrezia will fall out of a fashion for a thousand years.” But her parry had worked. His hands, hungry for resis-tance to overcome, paused.

“You are a father without a child,” she said. “I am a child without a father. Surely we can understand each other's grief? In days to come it will not seem so hard.”

He looked at her as if the concept of
days to come
was impossible to decipher. Then his hands opened, palms outward. “There is no way to live without her,” he said.

“You must make your confession to Fra Ludovico,” she replied. “Custom says God can speak even through the flute of a madman when forgiveness is required. Don't presume to know what your life may become now until you have yourself absolved of your sins.”

He spat at her display of piety. She made a wincing smile and said, “I am as practiced at accepting absolution as I am at sinning with ever greater relish the next time. If you're going to murder me, Don Vicente de Nevada, do it in a state of grace, anyway, for a more illustrious contrast of effects. Cesare always mentioned the satisfaction of it.”

He looked sideways at her. She had dismissed him, and now faced the mirror. “I must see to my hair,” she spoke, almost to herself, in the
way of certain women. She scooped up the single fruit on its silvery bough and held it alongside her face. It was such a feminine gesture, it brought back to him María Inés, and his child, Bianca, who would never become a woman. He turned to shutter his eyes, and followed the empty passage out into the empty world.

Mirror mirror

O
UT OF
our need we patronize our artists, we flirt with our poets, we petition our architects: Give us your lusty colorful world. Signal to us a state of being more richly steeped in purpose and satisfaction than our own.

Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep
impasti
of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can't create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don't in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

The holy find this some mincing proof of God. Damn them.

There was de Nevada, mourning the death of his daughter, and why shouldn't he? But he came into the room and brought back the treasure we never believed he could achieve—that I doubted the existence of—and he also brought back to me the brusque male fact of my brother, and how dead he is. How I can never walk into the room again and have him mean something to me, even in his drunken lechery with other women; I can never even suffer the pain of knowing I've not quite caught his attention. There is no longer a Cesare Borgia with attention to catch. Don Vicente's return brings it all up to me again; the phlegmatic humor rises in me and slashes hotly in my windpipe.

I lay the remaining Apple on its silver branch and turn to the mirror. The light has shifted somewhat and I almost feel visited—beside myself. It's no doubt the effect of seeing that stone creature dissolve into the stonework of the fireplace, like a louse burrowing into the skin. It makes me feel that any wall or floor could shift its reliable shape and blurt forth into a creature again, as if the house were possessed of a stone ghoul. Uncomfortable. One would never be alone again, even in one's boudoir.

“Mirror, mirror,” I spoke aloud, to steady my nerves, “who is the fairest of us all?”

I thought of my father, the great Pope Alexander VI, and how he had played at being the prelate of the Church of Rome. How he had had testicles of the sons of his enemies removed and gilded and returned to their owners in caskets beautifully inscribed with erotic carvings, to mock them. Yet he had also had baskets of overflow from our banquets brought out to those suffering from plague and famine on the banks of the Tiber just below Rome. What was fair in the use of power? Cesare's friend Niccolò Machiavelli would have sharp praise for the man who used power to his best advantage. But Machiavelli didn't consider the moral fairness in a ruler to be worthy of mention.

And who asks women to be fair, anyway, unless they do ask themselves?

I had sent Bianca away to be murdered, those long years ago. It seemed hard to remember. But my Cesare had cast his attention her way—he who had so little time left—and indeed, that was the last time we met in this life. A cock to every hen who staggered into his house, whether she was his equal or no. I couldn't have that happen. Not for his sake; not for hers. Was murder the right alternative? Ah well, too late to decide otherwise now.

I looked upon myself the way I did when I was an adolescent. When life beckoned from the horizon. I could only imagine growing more beautiful, more powerful, more responsive to life's beneficence and squalor. Back then, the figure who would look back at me in the looking glass was potent with mystery, more arresting than I could imagine actually seeming to anyone.

Now, the venerable Apple nodded perfectly against my cheek. Beside its immortal perfection I looked wan, a fishwife, a sister to old Primavera. I could see the thin struts of my shoulders making a yoke under my skin, and my neck arose from a shallow well. My eyes had fallen prey to a snare of webbed lines, too fine to be visible to anyone across the room—but what do we ever want but for someone to come nearer? And then all our imperfections are magnified.