‘Creature’: that word was a gift from Elisabetta. It was not the friendly ‘creature’ of the Irish, a word uttered in universal sympathy or commiseration. Elisabetta’s was the ‘creature’ of bestiality and baseness. Elisabetta had defined it, but Alexander had allowed it into his mouth. And she had even wanted him to lie with me, the hair creature, underneath him, but this time it was to be with the intention of proving just how base I was. Instead of showing him pride, or anger, I had been compliant, adoring his skin on mine. By taking him into my bed, without hesitation, I had shown myself again a creature of flesh, not of character.
Another tremor made the cupboard door swing open. Saverio’s letter fell from the top shelf. Alexander eyed the paper without curiosity. Instead, he looked at himself, for the mirror inside the armadio door showed us lying together, Alexander sitting hunched, me on my stomach. I followed his gaze. My body was covered almost entirely by my hair, with only my ankles peeping through. I looked like a pelted animal. I asked Alexander if he thought I should cut it off.
‘I have no opinion,’ he said. ‘You show it to strangers. You subject it to scabrous innuendo that you write yourself. I’ve never been impressed by your hair. And it’s your business, in every sense.’
In my inner eye, the lovely nymph Elisabetta had grinned down on me, silently mouthing the words he had spoken and flapping her iridescent wings at me.
‘Business,’ I echoed. ‘Is it a coincidence that this business of not loving me arose exactly when Darcy told you that my fortune is tied up in a contract? That your eyes suddenly cleared, and you saw my baseness just exactly at the moment when you knew that I had no money to call my own?’
The relief of saying those words died as they skidded off my tongue.
‘Insult me,’ he said coldly, ‘as someone of your kind would. I came here prepared for it, knowing what you are.’
I picked up his ringed hand and kissed it, wanting to end this bitter talk with the sweetness, at least, of nostalgia. He could not deny me that.
‘Remember this?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he smiled cynically, shaking me off. ‘I remember.’
That was my own weakness that hurt me there, I told myself, taking my hand back for comfort into the warmth under my arm. Of course he must deny the past to square up the present.
‘We have a useful proverb in Ireland,’ I said aloud, ‘which advises that though the honey be heavenly sweet, one should not lick it off a briar.’
‘You know why I came here—’ he began, but I cut him off with my scorned hand held up.
Wordlessly, he rose and dressed with his back to me, steadying himself against the wall when the room shook with yet another earth tremor. I watched him leave in the silence I had carved with the hand I still held up against him. He kicked Saverio’s small pictorial philosophies of love, his careful worded photographs, out of his way as he passed. I wanted to call after him, ‘No! Take that letter and read it for yourself!’ but there was no hope of that sentence making its way out of my mouth.
Next door, Berenice sighed loudly in her sleep. The tears came at last, as I thought of her, lying lonely in her bed, even her twin’s ghost preferred by Mr Rainfleury. However, unlike Berenice, I would never again be allowed anywhere near my rival. I had no business in the same rooms he frequented. A circus freak, a joke of nature, would never be admitted through Elisabetta’s noble portone.
I had a sudden vision of myself erecting a small tent in the centre of San Polo, and charging people a paltry sum for a look at my creatureness. My hair grew visibly as they came to stare at me. Even from my eyelids it grew, like hundreds of horned tears rushing to the ground with their own weight in misery.
Chapter 46
My eyes, swollen and sealed by tears, were opened by a shower of stucco on my face. The rounded doors of my cupboards were swinging open and shut. The chandelier tinkled like the percussion section’s moment of glory in a symphony, dispersing light and shadows on the marble floor, and soon flakes of coloured glass too. Oona was screaming in her deep bass voice from her room on one side of me; Berenice shrieked on the other. My bed, the floor, the whole palazzo shifted and shuddered.
The roar and grind of living and unliving things lasted perhaps a minute. When it stopped, my sisters were still howling. Darcy stumped into my room, her hair terrifyingly askew, her horns visible. She rapped the floor reprovingly with a parasol tip, saying, ‘And now I suppose we’ll be sinking into the mud and all our things destroyed, and all the steamers sunk so there’ll be no escape. And—’
I was not listening.
When the earthquake struck, Alexander had only just left, or so it seemed. It was dawn. I had been dozing stickily, pretending he was still there – as the person he had once been – to accompany the haze of him on my own skin.
I rolled over and sat upright.
If he had only just left, Alexander would not yet have reached Elisabetta’s house in the Corte de la Vida. He would not even be at Mr Neville’s iron bridge near the Accademia.
As I wrenched on my clothes, I was struck, like a sword in the ribs, with a sense of a new species of loss to add to all the other things carved out of me that night. For a moment I paused, thinking to delay the moment of too painful certainty.
Let the news come to me, when it is ready. Why should I rush towards it?
I twisted my hair into a loose topknot like the Venetian women wore. I slammed through the servants’ corridor to the main hallway, pausing to look at the ruin of our blue sky fresco. The sky had fallen in, and presently lay on the banisters in cakes and crumbs of mocking azure. Behind me, in the dining room, the seashell lamp still rocked crazily from the rafters.
I ran down the stairs, tugging the ropes from the green lion heads, through the androne, the garden and the front gates, down the calle and left towards San Polo, just as Alexander must have done.
Was it really ten minutes ago he left me?
The quake was over but its depredations continued. Bricks were still leaping like live things out of walls and tiles shearing off undulating roofs. A stone grazed my wrist. The bridge of the Madonetta had taken a fearful blow. Its humped centre had fallen away into the water. I skirted the edges, threw myself into the sotoportego of the Madonna and reached Campo San Polo, where terrified residents in their nightshirts were milling about, pointing to fissures in their walls, drunken lamp-posts and water spouting from broken pipes. A man powdered with dust was sobbing on his wife’s shoulder. He cried out loud to everyone that he had escaped death by the black of his nail.
I ran through the square, mouthing Alexander’s name, my cries mingling with those of the Venetians. I fell silent when I saw the cairn that had once been the bell tower of the church of San Polo, and the people crawling over it. A man called shrilly, ‘I can hear screaming. There’s someone alive under this!’
‘For a moment,’ mumbled an old woman beside me. ‘No one can survive that. If he has a leg or an arm left, it’ll be done for by gangrene and—’
I borrowed one of Darcy’s looks for her, and threw myself to the ground at the foot of the cairn.
‘Alexander?’ I called.
‘Manticory.’ His voice came faintly from deep within the rocks.
In the silence that followed, I was remembering how I had once imagined him mortally wounded on his way home to his wife.
Alexander was just two feet from the surface, both legs crushed under a beam and only one arm unbroken. He could still talk from time to time.
‘My right arm is gone,’ he told me. ‘I can move my left hand. It’s by my head. My legs, I think they are on the other side of the beam. There is a shaft of sunlight above my right eye. It almost blinds me.’
The stones and beams were stacked in such a way that to move one would force the others to give way and crush him. An engineer had been summoned from the mainland. Meanwhile, the air rang with a sound like a swordfight: narrow iron bars were being sharpened for a perilous game of fiddlesticks.
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‘You are to move away now,’ I was told by a man holding a slender pole. ‘We shall care for your friend.’
The rescuers started by inserting laudanum-soaked sponges on long-handled tongs into the precious fissure that connected Alexander to the world. A sponge soaked dark with water followed, and then, after some whispering at the crevice mouth, another sponge soaked with brandy.
‘For the pain,’ people whispered. ‘Poverino.’ A crowd had gathered now, having run out of other tragedies and ruins to remark on. They had settled on Alexander as the most spectacular victim of the earthquake.
‘Chi è? Chi è?’ they asked one another. ‘Il vittima?’
Then there was an earnest conversation among the men who had taken charge of the ruin. Mouths were held over the small crack that gave access to Alexander. A slender pipe was inched through the crack. Through it they passed more laudanum-sopped sponges on sticks. News filtered back: it seemed his hip was broken, and another beam rested on his breastbone.
A man impatient with the delicacy of the operation ran to the rubble, reaching to lift a heavy block with both arms.
‘Don’t stand in his light!’ I shrieked.
‘He has no more light, signorina.’ An old lady tugged at my sleeve, and handed me her rosary. ‘He was given to the light by his mother and God. Now he must go back to the light.’
My stomach sang with pain. As every daughter of Annora knew, the Virgin Mary gave birth painlessly while kneeling in prayer. Yet she suffered searing birth pangs when she watched Christ dying on the Cross. Those pains rent my stomach now, so that I bent over and retched. The old lady patted my back. ‘You are young. When you are older, you will accept it as God’s will.’
An ominous shifting of stones and wood announced a new settling of the masonry. The crowd groaned. This was surely the end for Alexander.
A man pressed his ear to the tube and listened intently.
I saw him recoil. Then he rose and whispered to a grave-looking man, who flinched, then nodded and departed. The crowd divided to let him pass.
‘He has one at home,’ said the old lady. I could not form the words to ask what he had at home, but I was beginning to suspect.
‘Is the pharmacist still here?’ called the man. ‘With his bag?’
Another sponge on a stick was pushed down the tube.
When the grave-looking man returned it was with a small burlap bag slung over his shoulder. From it he drew something small swaddled in a red cotton cloth.
‘Please let it not be that,’ I whispered.
But it was.
He bent to the tube and spoke into it. Then he nodded. He put the tiny gun to the mouth of the tube, angling it so that it would slide down into the narrow void that led to Alexander. I could not keep still any more. I threw myself towards the rescuers, searching for the wrist of the grave-faced man, trying to force him to withdraw the gun from its passage towards Alexander’s one functioning hand.
‘You know him?’ asked the man. ‘La Signorina Manticoree?’
I nodded.
‘Vi voleva.’ He wanted you. ‘He just said so.’
‘Non è morto!’ I protested. ‘Do not use the past tense, sir!’
‘Vi voleva, ma ora vuole la pistola.’ He wanted you but now he wants the gun.
‘Dovrebbe capire, signorina, non c’è più speranza, salve che . . . solo dolore e una lenta morte.’ You have to understand, miss, there isn’t any more hope, unless . . . only pain and slow death.
‘Sweet Jesus, I am killed,’ I told the crowd.
‘No, signorina,’ said the man in English, ‘It is he who is killed.’
As he spoke, the report of a bullet brought down a new shower of purifying, scarifying raw white dust.
Chapter 47
The he who was killed lay yards from me.
I stood in the square. It had always been a cosy place, but suddenly, with its bell tower gone, it had a dangerous edge. Now the jutting corners of the buildings looked like the shoulders of bullies, blocking out the light, moving in for the kill.
I hurried away towards the sotoportego, only to meet Darcy and Oona rushing through it. Oona took my hand.
‘Alexander?’ she murmured into my hair.
‘He is dead.’
Darcy said, ‘He was already dead to Manticory.’
Oona pushed herself between us and wrapped her arms around me.
It would be two more days before they could excavate Alexander’s body, and I was not allowed to attend although I haunted the fringes of the screened-off site, sitting on the torso of one of the two stone beasts that used to crouch at eye level on a cornice of the fallen tower. Each of them nursed a human head in its front paws.
Gossip in the square told me that Alexander’s widow was away in Paris, and had only just received the news.
That would explain his timing, I thought, in coming to see me when he did, and his passing the whole night with me.
The men excavating the site had handed me Alexander’s ring but I did not want it without his hand. I put it in my pocket, anyway, and left. I did not wish to see his body carried away.
A week after Alexander died, I realised that I had been rehearsing his loss ever since I met him. I had never been in true possession of him. The loss of Alexander was larger than Alexander had been because he had never taken the full role in my life that I had desired for him. There was as much potential lost as reality, as much longing curtailed as fulfilled.
My heart was a fist. There was a sourness snapping around my teeth. My sinuses were burdened with salt. Alexander’s death, juxtaposed with the passion and cruelty of our last night together, left me homeless; nothing inside me was at home any more, I could not be comfortable with the separate organs jostling under my skin and my skin felt unequal to its statutory task of assembling and containing all the parts of me in their proper order.
I left my apricot room where I had passed those last hours with Alexander. I moved to Enda’s forsaken apartment and found an anonymous bed, with no memories scribbled on the sheets, to lie on at night, with my eyes open, burning, sometimes widening in disbelief, sometimes narrowing with anger.
Days passed and I was not able to tell anyone about what I felt. My sisters knew not to mention it, for they had seen what happened if they did. I couldn’t talk about it, because it felt as if I was killing Alexander each time I acknowledged his absence. Flowers arrived from Saverio, making me black angry. I tore up those roses, muttering, ‘You have no idea of the enormity of the thing. It cannot be contained inside a rose, you imbecile.’
And then I went to my bedroom and tore his long letter in half, and then quarters, and strewed the pieces in the Grand Canal along with the mutilated roses.
I did not return to the quiet discipline of Saverio’s studio. I had no need of his coffee or his kindness. Accepting his sympathy would denote believing in Alexander’s death, and that was not acceptable to me. And I feared my rage would cause his glass plates to explode if they caught my reflection in the sun.
Whenever Oona or Berenice pressed platitudes about time healing, I wished sudden, multiple and cruel bereavements on them. I did this silently. They would never guess that my eyes glittered with the acid of hate and not the softness of tears. I refused to light candles for Alexander or mutter prayers in memory. It was a sight too fierce and dirty for that, what I felt. This was a rubbishing, roustabout, rabid, untidy kind of grief. It was more like what I remembered from the Famined days in Ireland, when those about to perish from their hunger had laid themselves down in the street to be walked over, so that someone could witness them dying. I too felt that my grief required acknowledgement, but I did not know whose – I just knew that it was not that of the tourists, nor of the quiet-eyed Venetians, nor of my sisters. I strode the streets, my eyes scanning the people I passed as if one of them might provide the witness I needed.
Whenever Pertilly or Oona gently asked me how I was, I couldn’t very well answer the truth: I h
ate everyone who is alive who is not Alexander, and that includes myself. And nor can I escape the fact that Darcy is right and I was dead to him before he died himself.
So I murmured that I was doing well and soon hoped to be better.
‘Why don’t you take yourself back to the studio, Manticory?’ Oona asked. ‘It would do you some good, honey. Signor Bon has been asking for you.’
‘I’ll eat less, if you need the money,’ I snapped.
We Swiney Godivas had once made a pretty thing of mourning, piously picturesque around Darcy’s coffin and stuffed black cat; decorative and expensive with Ida’s hair and mourning jewellery. Enda’s ugly death had emptied these things of decency. The image of her last fall and of Alexander pointing the little pistol at his brain intertwined in my mind with the memory of Ida waiting for love at the railway station and her abrupt removal from us. If Ida were with us, I thought, she would understand the simple butchery of my feelings. She would understand that death had little to do with the songs that the Swiney Godivas had warbled in our day. It had no business with delicate jet earrings, or willows or wreaths, or weeping angels. There was nothing pretty about it, or gentle. Death was like a kick in the belly from a vicious horse, its withers dripping with yellow dung. Death was the ugliest brute in the bar, the one with his wife’s blood on his knuckles, the most stinking clot of sawdust on the butcher’s floor. Death was someone taking your hair and tearing off your scalp without a blade to ease its passage.
I suddenly saw the point of wine, and brandy, and even beer, or any liquid that would help the pain flow out of my brain in long dribbles of tears. After some days, Pertilly said mildly, ‘Will you have a morsel of food with your supper, Manticory?’
‘You were snoring like bagpipes last night,’ reported Darcy. ‘It floated right across the garden like a bear roaring. I put it in my black book.’
‘Will you have a tint of feeling, Darcy honey?’ reproved Oona. ‘Or at least pretend.’
The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters Page 38