The Blind Contessa's New Machine (14 page)

At the sound of her father’s grief, Carolina turned and rushed back up the stairs. On the first landing, she collided with Liza. Carolina caught the girl by the wrist and pushed her back into the far corner, where they were hidden from view.

“Tell them you could not wake me,” Carolina whispered fiercely.

Then, biting back her own tears, she caught her skirts together and slipped back up to her room.

In her dreams, Carolina tried to do two things: fly, and find her lake. The lake should have been easy to reach, especially from familiar terrain like Pietro’s home or her father’s lemon groves, where her dreams often began. But again and again, the lake was gone when she reached its location, replaced by a field of orange lilies, a grassy hill, a stand of ancient trees. Her house became a wind-burnt shell, or a woodsman’s hut, or, once, a shop selling lace and candy.

She tried to fly a hundred different ways: jumping down a staircase; throwing herself from roofs, windows, and trees; flapping her arms and her skirts; running and leaping from the hard-packed dirt where the servants’ children held their races. But finally she began to fly when she wasn’t trying. Deep in a forest carpeted with black violets, she discovered herself rising from the path. She was already ten feet from the ground before she believed what was happening, and another story higher before she realized she couldn’t stop rising. She caught the branches of a tree to keep from ascending helplessly into space and worked her way back down its trunk hand over hand. After a few experiments in its shelter, she learned enough of the new mechanics to sail between the sturdy trunks in fits and starts and to rise and dive as she wanted.

Those woods were real. She had visited them often as a child to gather flowers to throw into her lake so she could tell her fortune by the way they floated or sank. If her dream behaved, the lake should be only a short flight away. Trembling, Carolina let herself rise between the branches until she broke out of the canopy into the strong Italian sun. She dipped to prove to herself that she could return to earth, snatched one of the high leaves, and let it drop from her fingers as she rose higher, taking in a sweep of the fields and homes in her valley that was wider than anything she had ever seen.

Her father’s house was as it should be, red tile and white stucco, flashes of statues in the garden, groves running down the slope in even rows. Pietro’s house was there as well, with the long road leading by the pines. The Turri home shone on the next hill. She rose higher and caught sight of the river that fed her lake. The silver band cut a clear path between the trees, then disappeared just where it should have widened into the clearing.

Carolina glided lower, glancing over the countryside in case the lake had slipped in space, as things so often did in dreams. But it wasn’t lurking beyond the next hill or lost in Pietro’s back acres. She swooped down to the river and skimmed along the bright stream until the trees closed over her head.

There, just where it should have been, was her lake, hidden from the sky by a stand of massive plane trees that had taken root in the shallow water. Amid them, his face lost in the shadows, was a man. In water up to his waist, he swung a heavy axe against one tree’s broad base.

In the yard, a crash and a shout, and she was awake.

It was the dead of night when Carolina ventured downstairs for the first time after going blind. She stood for some uncountable time in her open door, listening for any sign that everything beyond had not been erased by darkness. It was the scratching and cooing of the birds on the roof that gave her the courage to step out onto the soft carpet. From there, she simply turned and reached, as she had done a hundred times before, for the smooth support of the thick banister. It led her faithfully down the wide stairs and deposited her on another carpet in Pietro’s main hall. Here, separated from the sound of the birds, her own steps muffled by the wool, the silence was so deep that the darkness rushed in, threatening to consume her. Instead of cowering before it, she threw her hand out and caught the knob of the front door. At this proof of the world’s existence, the darkness retreated. She began to feel her way through the house.

She started at the borders of the rooms, her fingers trailing over smooth walls broken by cold windows. She spread her palms flat on brocade upholstery, trying to remember whether it was green or gold. She tangled with potted palms in the corners. The rough faces of the various portraits had nothing to say to her, but their frames were such a symphony for her fingertips that she wondered if the elaborate fashion hadn’t been started, perhaps, by an unnamed artist for his blind wife, now long forgotten.

A few things had changed. All around the house unfamiliar candles had been scattered to hold back the winter gloom. For whatever reason, Pietro had ordered the piano dragged across the conservatory and the case propped open, even though neither of them played. “What are you doing here?” she whispered, touching the silent keys. Here and there, she found new figurines: a pair of tiny elephants, one’s trunk relaxed, the other trumpeting; a new globe with raised continents; a small piece on the salon mantel, ceramic, full of spikes and smooth patches, which remained a mystery despite repeated visits.

Each night, she went a little farther. Eventually she began to strike out into the center of the rooms, navigating around remembered buffets and carts, sofas and tables. Pietro didn’t have a library to speak of, but she pulled books down from his few shelves and sat with them on her knees, imagining the unseen pages now filled with heroic tales, now with verse, now with the histories of lost cities. She learned to enter the dining room and stride across it to her own chair. She found the cook’s chocolate and flour, her onions, her vinegar. She entered the salon and threw the curtains wide to the night sky, then pulled them closed again.

For weeks, her explorations went on in perfect silence. Then, one night, she heard footsteps in the next room.

She froze. One hand closed on the heavy candlestick she had been examining. The footsteps had fallen in the main hall. She stood in the salon. When Carolina went still, the footsteps also stopped.

Carolina crossed the wide room and darted across the hall, into the conservatory. A quick touch revealed that the piano had not been moved from its new place, and that the case was still raised, forming a huge shadow that would hide her from the rest of the room. She took up a position beyond it and froze again, but the footsteps didn’t follow. The house breathed normally. Then, rooms away, she heard a creak and a thud as a door swung open, and shut.

A few nights later, as Carolina was investigating the ever-changing fruits and vegetables on the kitchen counter, she caught the sound of the footsteps again when they stumbled into a chair in the dining room. Instantly, Carolina crossed to the swinging kitchen door and threw it open. She stood on the threshold between the rooms and held her breath so as not to miss the smallest sound. This time, the footsteps’ escape was almost clean, except for a rustle of crumpled paper in the pantry where the girls trimmed and arranged the garden flowers.

The next night, the footsteps found Carolina in the conservatory, where she stood at the window fingering the neck of a violin that was naked of strings. Immediately, she set the instrument back into its case.

The footsteps ceased.

Carolina strode toward the last sound she’d heard, stepping neatly around the piano, a divan, and a low table.

The footsteps were not so lucky. In great confusion, they crashed into the door, dived through it, and stumbled into Pietro’s office, a small room dominated by a pair of great desks whose surfaces were completely obscured by letters, contracts and circulars, tobacco plugs, bits of pencil, pots of ink, and brutalized pens.

Relentless, Carolina circled the close space, her open palms brushing the walls, the chairs, the faces of the desks. But from mercy or fear, she didn’t pull the chairs away to reach under them.

Instead, she waited.

One by one, the dark minutes rolled after one another. Then the faintest of sounds: a scrape, a breath.

“I can hear you,” Carolina said.

Then she turned and left.

Spring arrived by water. Rain tapped at her windows and capered on the roof. Ice melted into streams that trickled down the face of the house or dropped in long falls from the window ledges. The yard, which had been silent all winter, was suddenly alive with voices. The cook scolded the laundress, the boys, and the geese. The young men sang obscene songs that seemed to have hundreds of verses. The gardener chuckled at the children’s clumsy attempts at cruelty.

Through the window, Carolina could feel the sun on her skin and mark its progress as the light climbed from the floor onto her bed, toyed with her fingers, brushed a cheek, then fell with its full weight over her body before it crept away each afternoon. All winter, the weak sun and the moon had been one and the same to her. Neither was strong enough to dispel her sense that she always moved through the same long night. But now the sunlight divided her life back into days, and the constant sound of other human voices proved to her again and again that she was not, as her blindness sometimes whispered, the first person in the world.

And her heart, which she could have believed had been snuffed out along with her sight, began to stir. Still stiff with loss, it flinched from the threat of love, retreating immediately at the thought of her father’s voice, Turri’s questioning gaze, or the visits Pietro still made to her room each day. He arrived in the mornings, sometimes carrying her breakfast tray, and rattled on with idle gossip or small emergencies around the house until his limited collection of topics ran out. Finally, he would lapse into silence while Carolina searched for something to add, unnerved by the fact that he could be looking at her hands, or her face, or out the window, and she had no way to know it. Almost immediately, though, that unease would be overcome by her new and constant fear—that anything she could not hear might have disappeared. The fear was so strong that when Pietro fell silent for too long, she imagined him swallowed up by the same shadows that had taken her sight. At these moments, filled with remorse, she reached for him with an urgency that only confused and disturbed him. Love, in this uncharted darkness, was too much to ask. But under the touch of the spring sun, her heart did begin to yearn for old comforts.