Secrecy (16 page)

I hear you’re making something special for the Grand Duke …

Stufa’s words.

That night in the carriage, I had thought at first that he was taking an interest. How naïve of me! All too soon, he had become dismissive, if not openly contemptuous. What had he called my work?
Histrionic. Gratuitous.
And it didn’t bother him if he upset me. Not in the slightest. In fact, he seemed to
want
to upset me.

Did I scare you?

His cheekbones sticking out like knuckles, a sharpness to his mouth, his tongue. That black flower again, its petals opening and closing …

My eyes grew heavy. I let my head rest on my arm and found myself returning to Siracusa. I was on horseback, the volcano behind me, its slopes the colour of a pigeon’s wing. I passed white convent walls, the air keen with ripe lemon and wild sage. Below me, far below, the soothing lap and flop of waves. The sea.

I came round a bend in the road and the town appeared ahead of me, the pink dome of my old college rising out of the clustered buildings, the wide bay of the Porto Grande glittering beyond.

My throat tightened.

I rode across the shallow harbour, then past a group of fishermen and up Via Dione, high-sided, sunk in shadow. I stopped outside our house. Someone had dropped a melon, and it had split open, a gash of crimson showing in the dark-green rind. I climbed the steps and went inside. The smell of dried roses, beeswax, flaking plaster. The tiles earth-brown, vein-blue. The doors ajar, the rooms peaceful, cool.

And then an image that seemed lifted from my memory. My father in his study, bars of gold light laid out on the floor. The nobleman he worked for – Gargallo – was standing close to him and talking in a low but forceful voice. Gargallo with his lavish clothes, his head of dark-brown curls …

I saw my father’s mouth twist. He turned his back on his employer and spoke to me without so much as a glance in my direction.

Go and find your mother.

As I backed out of the room, Gargallo looked round, and his expression, which had been affronted, softened into a smile I neither understood nor trusted.

Come here a moment, he said.

I ran for it.

Then I was downstairs, under the pear tree. From a distance, my mother looked the same, but when I stepped forwards, into the sun, I saw how she had changed, and it was hard not to burst into tears, thinking of all the moments I had lost, all the time I had used in other ways. And I had aged as well. There were lines on my forehead, around my mouth. I had no grey hair as yet, but the whites of my eyes were muddy, no longer the pure egg white of a child’s. I told her what Jacopo had been saying. I had wormed my way into the family. I was a leech, a misfit. I didn’t belong. He said all that? she murmured. I do belong, I said, don’t I? Of course you do, she said. He’s wrong, then? Yes, he’s wrong. But I’d had to prompt her, lead her, and I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me, something she couldn’t say. I held her close, and the years since we had last seen each other unrolled before me like a wave breaking, the years kept unrolling, over and over, the ache I had thought I was used to, the wound I carried no matter where I went …

The waves grew louder, and I lifted my head and looked around. Earhole was asleep on the divan, his knees drawn up towards his chest, one hand beneath his cheek. The night was quiet but for the push and pull of his breathing; it was his breathing I had heard inside my dream. I stood up and crossed the room. His fretful face, his poor mank relic of an ear. I fetched a blanket. Drew it over him.

The flames of the candles paled and then became invisible as the window high above me brightened. The moulds for the legs and feet were finished, and I was working on the girl’s right arm. The casting of her right hand alone had taken more than an hour, requiring seven interlocking piece-moulds. As I
straightened
up and stretched, I heard Earhole shift behind me.

‘I’ve been asleep!’

He sounded amazed, as if sleep was a feat he had attempted many times, but had never quite achieved.

The ice had melted, I told him. Could he fetch another load?

I began to mix a new batch of plaster.

Usually, when you had a votive image made, you chose the part of the body that was injured or diseased. You reproduced the part you wanted cured. In this case, though, her whole body had become a votive image. Whether her death had been
accidental
, self-inflicted, or the result of an assault, she would almost certainly have suffered. In recreating her, I wasn’t seeking a cure – obviously it was too late for that – but I
was
restoring her to her former self, before whatever happened, happened. I would be preserving the dog’s head, though, so I would be capturing the moment of violation too. There was that hidden hint of a dark future. When the time came to cast the back of her neck, I would blow on the wet plaster to make sure it absorbed every detail, no matter how minute. Later, I would brush a glistening scarlet wax into the cuts and scratches I had so faithfully recorded. Since the girl would be lying on her back, the dog’s head would remain a secret. At the very least, it would constitute a homage to her anonymous existence. At best, it would act as evidence. If the girl was an object of beauty, she was an object of violence as well. She was youth, but she was also death. Perhaps the piece would have more in common with my other work than the Grand Duke had imagined: it would be a vision of what lay ahead, even though, on the surface, it appeared to be the opposite. Would it be enough to protect me? Would it really be enough? I had to hope so.

By mid-morning, I had cast the limbs. Out in the stable yard, I plunged my head into a bucket of water to jolt myself awake, then went for a walk in the gardens.

October. A crisp blue sky, a heap of leaves smouldering nearby. Such a stillness after the wind of the night before. I thought once again of the man I had killed. His stink in my nostrils, the blood seeping from the wound …

I began to tremble.

The narrow street, the shadows swooping. Then the knife. It had all happened so fast. What else could I have done, though? I shook my head, then crossed myself.

I remembered looking at my father after he was dead. Jacopo had insisted on it. My father’s body had been laid out in a back room in our house. He was uncovered, perhaps because he had just been washed. I tried to turn away, but Jacopo wouldn’t let me.
No, look.
He forced me closer.
Smell.
It was a hot day, and my father’s belly had begun to bloat. A fly stood on the white of his left eye. He didn’t blink. I watched as the fly rubbed one leg against the other, unhurried, finicky. My father stared past it, at the ceiling, intent on something only he could see. Jacopo was breathing noisily behind me.
You did it,
he whispered.
It was you.

Smoke floated past, a blue shawl in the air.

Though I barely had the stomach for it, I had decided to dismember the girl. I was under no illusions about how difficult it was going to be. What’s more, I didn’t feel she deserved further mutilation. As a rule, I worked with the bodies of criminals, and there was the feeling that dissection formed part of the
punishment
. But this girl was innocent – a victim even before I set eyes on her. And anyway, was it strictly necessary to dismember her? Could I cast the torso
without
removing the limbs? I had no time to think it through. She had been dead for at least fifteen hours. In twenty-one hours – or less – her body would begin to
decompose
. I had to make a decision, and then stick to it. Any hint of vacillation would be fatal.

As I stood on the grass, I heard a cry. Turning, I saw a vulture scramble across the path with the zookeeper, Crevalcuore, in pursuit. He was about to close his gloved hands round the
creature
when it spread its wings, hauled itself into the air, and flapped away across the gardens. When Crevalcuore noticed me, he lifted his arms out sideways as if to say, What can you do? In the meantime, the vulture had settled in a distant ilex tree. It looked like a broken black umbrella, blown high into the branches by last night’s wind.

I felt Faustina pass behind me, touching the nape of my neck with cool fingers. She asked me how I was.

I’m all right, I said.

You must be exhausted. Don’t you want to come to bed?

I smiled.

Then Earhole called me. The water had boiled, and he had laid out all the tools.

I picked up a boning knife and cut into the upper thigh. Though soft, the tissue was surprisingly tough. On I went, into the layer of fat. A shocking yellow-orange. Who would have thought such vivid colours could be hidden inside our bodies? I sliced through one of the main veins. Out seeped a thin, transparent liquid, a sort of serum. This was followed by a dark-red jelly, which oozed lazily across the dissecting table’s chilly marble top. Hip joints were always a test of both technique and stamina. Wrapped in a weave of muscles and tendons, and sealed in a capsule made from the most resilient type of membrane, the bones dovetailed in a tightly fitting ball-and-socket construction. Once I had broken into the capsule, I would need a mallet and chisel to disarticulate the two component parts. As I stepped back, wiping my forehead on the inside of my arm, a bolt of pure exhilaration surged through me. In that moment I
somehow
knew I was going to produce a piece of work that would exceed my capabilities. A contradiction in terms, perhaps. But that was how it felt.

Some three hours later, in the early afternoon, I loaded the severed limbs into the handcart, then asked Earhole to take them to the lazaretto, where the bodies of the diseased and derelict were burned. Left over from the plague years, the building was south of the city walls, about half a mile beyond the Porta Romana. When I last visited, I had been greeted by a man I recognized, but could not place. We had met last spring he told me, in a tavern. I had bought him wine. Back then, he had earned his living at the Campo della Morte. Belbo was his name. I told Earhole to ask for Belbo, and be sure to treat him with respect. The man had an easy-going manner and a slice-of-melon smile. In his time, though, he had worked as an executioner.

That evening, as I lifted the mould away from the girl’s neck, I was confronted once again by the image of the dog, the scratched lines white with plaster now, and a fierce anger crackled through me, like a stack of pine needles catching fire. All of a sudden I was back in our house again, in the turret room. My mother stood with her back to me, staring out over the harbour, the long blue ridge of Monti Climiti in the distance.

Not a word from you in years, she said.

There was a crash three floors below. Boots struck sparks off the tiles in the hall, then grated on the smooth stone of the stairs. Jacopo came striding down the corridor. His complexion had coarsened, and his hair had thinned, but the old antagonism was perfectly intact.

I heard you were here. He was panting from the climb. I can’t believe you had the nerve.

Why not? I said. It’s my home.

His laughter was an abrupt and violent displacement of the air, less like a sound than a blow. He went and stood at the window, and when he spoke to our mother his back was turned, and his voice was hard and cold. You shouldn’t have let him in.

He’s my son, she said.

Is he? Is he
really
?

Yes.

Because there are stories –

Jacopo … She was reproaching him.

What’s wrong with everyone today? He was still gazing out over the rooftops. Your
son
, as you insist on calling him, has brought nothing but shame on this family.

That was a long time ago, she said. And besides, we’re not even sure what happened.

Nothing, I said. Nothing happened.

Jacopo swung round. You keep quiet.

You haven’t changed, have you? I said. Still throwing your –

He seized me by the collar and whirled me, one-handed, along the corridor and down the stairs. Though I struggled, I knew I had no chance of freeing myself; it was his fury, I thought, that kept him strong. He hurled me down the front steps with such force that I landed on my back and bit my tongue.

Get out of my house, he said, and stay out.

Your
house? It was difficult to speak through the blood that was welling up in my mouth. It’s not your house, it’s our mother’s, and you have no right to –

I have every right, he said. I’m head of the family, and I know what’s best. What’s best is that you’re not here, not ever. What’s best is that you’re far away – or, preferably, dead.

Is this about Ornella?

His face flushed. Don’t bring my wife into this.

It’s because I knew her first.

He began to stroll, loose-shouldered, down the steps, a swagger he had perfected at his military academy. I scrambled backwards, towards my horse. Reaching sideways, I pulled an arquebus out of its holster. I had just noticed it was there. Or perhaps, as in a dream, it had only materialized when it was needed.

Jacopo stopped in his tracks and smiled – partly, I suspected, out of shock, but partly, knowing Jacopo, with a kind of relish. It was as if I had just raised the stakes in a game he was
confident
of winning. Put that thing away, he said.

I aimed at his legs and fired.

Jacopo’s head flew backwards, and he dropped to the ground so heavily that the paving stones appeared to shudder. Blood soaked the right leg of his breeches.

Coward! he yelled.

No, Jacopo, I said calmly. You’re the coward.

The colour left his face. Sodomite, he muttered. Degenerate. Then, almost as an after-thought, Necrophiliac.

These were no longer accusations. These were facts.

I slid the gun back into its holster and vaulted up on to my horse. My mother was standing at the top of the steps, by the front door. Her mouth opened, then closed again. I said I was sorry for what had happened, and that I loved her, but she was shaking her head. I’m glad your father isn’t here to see this.