“According to one version,” said Luca, “he ended up sailing to America, where he got married, had kids, started a line of descendants, including us, though no more Zombinis ever went into the mirror business—we were everything else, stoneworkers, saloonkeepers, cowboys, gamblers, heck, down south before the Civil War? a couple of us were Negroes.”
“Huh?”
“What, you never saw the family tree? Here, look, Elijah Zombini, master chef, first lasagna south of the Mason-Dixon, used grits instead of ricotta, you never heard of him?” And as had been happening since Bria was a baby, Luca went off into another one of his stories, and one by one the children fell asleep. . . .
Isola degli Specchi appeared on some maps and was absent from others. It had seemed to depend how high the water was in the Lagoon from day to day. Also, perhaps, on a species of faith, for there were otherwise-knowledgeable Venetians who denied its existence categorically. On the day Luca and Bria visited, it seemed like a normal enough island, reached by normal vaporetto, a normal mirror-works, casting rooms, batch crucibles, grinding workshops, the only peculiar element an entire wing that visitors were discouraged from entering, whose door read TERAPIA.
Professore Svegli was in the factory archives surrounded by documents written on ancient paper and parchment. “Your ancestor’s records,” he greeted them, “are as hard to track down as the man himself was.”
“Surprised they just didn’t destroy all the records they could find.”
“It would not have occurred to them. Today we are used to thinking of identity as no more than the contents of one’s dossier. Back then one man might have multiple identities, ‘documents’ might easily be forged or fictional. For Niccolò dei Zombini it was especially tricky, because at some point he also went crazy, a common occupational risk among these perfectionist mirror-makers. He should have ended up in the madhouse on San Servolo, but for some mysterious reason—was he pretending insanity as part of a plan to escape? did he have friends in the Palazzo Ducale?—he got away with behavior that would have had anyone else sent to the manicomio, and was allowed to keep on working. As things turned out, he might’ve been the only one who ever understood why.”
The Professore carefully picked up a sheet of nearly-transparent vellum and laid it on a flat surface of white celluloid. “This is believed to be a master drawing of the so-called paramorfico, it’s on uterine vellum, very rare and expensive, and not meant to see much of the light of day. There do appear also to have been working templates inked on cheaper grades of parchment, but most of those were ruined by use, as well as by the grinding materials, pitch, rouge, and so forth. Niccolò escaped from here apparently around 1660, taking a paramorfico with him, and neither was heard from again.”
“What does it do?” Luca asked Vincenzo Miserere. “Does anybody still make them? Could I use one in my act?”
Miserere looked at him over the top of his pince-nez. “You ordered something like it last year,” thumbing through a stack of invoice copies. “Glass, calcite, custom silvering. We call it La Doppiatrice.”
“Right. Right. Now we’re on the topic, I might need to talk to your fieldsupport people.” Proceeding to acquaint Miserere with the unaccountable malfunction that had produced a small population of optically sawed-in-half subjects walking around New York, while Bria tried not to roll her eyes too obviously.
The rep picked up a telephone on his desk, had a short conversation in Venetian dialect, and a few minutes later Ettore Sananzolo, who had in fact designed the apparatus, came in with a sheaf of engineering drawings under his arm.
“It’s only a variation on the classic Maskelyne cabinet of forty years ago,” he explained, “where you put a mirror edgewise into an empty cabinet at a forty-five-degree angle, so that it splits one of the back corners perfectly in half. With a good enough mirror and velvet lining, the audience thinks they’re still looking straight back at the rear wall of an empty cabinet, when what they’re really seeing is a reflection of one of the side walls. To disappear, the subject simply climbs into the cabinet and hides in the forty-five-degree angle behind the mirror.
“For the analogous trick in four-space, we had to go from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional mirror, which is where the paramorfico comes in. Instead of the simple ninety-degree rotation when one plane represents another in three-space, we now have to replace one volume—the cabinet interior—with another one, in four-space. We pass from a system of three purely spatial axes to one with four—space plus time. In this way time enters the effect. The doubles you report having produced are actually the original subjects themselves, slightly displaced in time.”
“More or less how Professor Vanderjuice of Yale sees the problem. So now, how do we fix it?”
“Unfortunately, you will first have to find each pair and somehow convince them to climb back into the cabinet again.”
Over in the corner of his eye, he saw Bria grabbing herself by the head and trying not to comment, but Luca now curiously was feeling the first stirrings of hope. What Ettore asked was clearly impossible. By now these subjects had gone on for too long with their lives, no longer twinned so much as divergent, inevitably so in a city as gigantic as New York—they would have gone on to meet attractive strangers, court, marry, have babies, change jobs, move to other places, it would be like trying to put smoke back into a cigar even to find them anymore, let alone expect any pair of them to re-enter La Doppiatrice willingly. It was sort of like fathering a large number of real children, he supposed, twins, except that these came into the world already grownups, and chances were that none of them would ever visit. Not everybody would find this comforting, but Luca tried to.
Ettore pointed out on the drawings where adjustments would have to be made, as well as new parts installed, to prevent a recurrence of the problem.
“You’ve set my mind at rest,” murmured Luca, “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Money?” Ettore suggested. Vincenzo Miserere lit up one of those hard-as-a-rock black cigars and winked. Bria was peering at her father as if he had gone insane.
They went thumping back to Venice in a vaporetto, among the unquiet ghosts of all the crazy mirror-makers riding the salso in from the Lagoon and back out again, in and out of the city, attaching themselves to night-fishing boats, steamers, sandoli, out to the lost chance, the lost home . . . slipping beneath the surface to browse among the ancient workrooms and even sometimes terribly catch sight of themselves in some fragment of ancient mirror, for the silvering down here, surviving the corrosions of the sea and of time, had always been particularly tuned to the long-homeless dead. . . . Sometimes they were also visible at the edges of the screen in the movies that showed at the Malibran in between live stage acts. Back in New York the Zombini kids had been used to sneaking off downtown to watch the nickelodeon, they thought they were pretty wised up, but here somehow they found themselves grabbing each other so as not to fall into the collective dream and run screaming down the aisles away from trains pulling in to the Santa Lucia Station, or throw objects at especially monstrous villainies in the short melodramas, or make sure they were in their seats and not aboard a boat out in the Grand Canal.
That night at the theatre, after the show, Dally stayed behind in the abrupt swell of absence and echo to help stow props and equipment and set up some of the effects for the next night’s performance. Erlys, who had lately been looking into thought-reading as a specialty and might have felt more than usually intuitive, kept throwing her these glances, each as thoughtfully directed as one of Bria’s knives. At some point they were face-to-face across a cage of doves. “What is it,” they both said at the same time. While Dally was figuring how to begin, Erlys added, “Never mind, I know what it is.”
“I know I’m supposed to explain,” Dally said. “Wish I could. You know how you’ll pass through a place, after a long string of places you’d never want to stop in, let alone live, or could understand anybody else wanting to, and maybe it’s th
e time of day, the weather, what you just ate, no way to tell, but you don’t ride into it, it comes out to surround you, and you know it’s where you belong. There’s nothing else like this place anywhere, and I know it’s where I belong.”
Several dozen objections elbowed each other in Erlys’s mind for precedence. She knew Dally had already examined and dismissed them all. She nodded, slowly, a couple of times. “Let me talk to Luca.”
“SO NOW I have to let her go,” Erlys said. “I don’t know how I can.” They were in their hotel on the edge of San Polo, looking across the canal at Cannareggio, the sun behind them warping itself down into one of those melancholy mixtures of light and nebulosity that happened only here. “Finally, the payback for what I did. I find her, I lose her again.”
“None of that was ever your fault,” Luca said, “it was me. I was crazy.”
“Didn’t know any better myself, only a kid at the time, but that’s no excuse, is it? I left her. I left her. Something I can never go back and change. Those Snidell sisters back in Cleveland, they had my number all the time. They still search me out in my dreams and tell me I don’t deserve to live. How could I be that selfish?”
“Hey. Not like you abandoned her,” he protested. “You knew the safest place you could’ve left her was with Merle, you knew she’d be warm, and loved, and never hungry.”
She nodded, miserable. “I knew. Made it that much easier to leave.”
“We tried to find them again. Couple years as I recall.”
“Still not hard enough.”
“We had to keep working too. Couldn’t just stop everything to go chasing Merle all over the map. And he could’ve tried to find us, too, couldn’t he?”
“He must’ve felt so betrayed. He didn’t want to see me again, he didn’t want me near her either.”
“You don’t know.”
“Are we fighting?”
He reached to push some hair off her face. “I was afraid. I thought one day you’d just go off looking for her on your own, and I’d be left with the ordinary day again, without you. I got so desperate I thought about locks and chains, except you learned all those escapes.”
“I was never about to go disappear on you Luca, it wasn’t Merle I loved, it was you.”
They sat side by side on the bed feeling thirty years older than they were. Light seeped out of the room. “I came back to the apartment that day,” Luca said, “and here was this—I don’t know, I thought she’d flown in from a star.”
“It’s how I felt when she was born.”
He never carried handkerchiefs but knew how to produce from nowhere a silk scarf of any desired color. This one was violet. He handed it to her with a flourish. “Let me use it when you’re through.”
She touched her eyes with it and when she passed it back, the scarf had changed color to duck green. “Stronzo. You don’t want her to go any more than I do.”
“But we have no say anymore. Part of the deal.”
“Can we just leave her in Venice? How do we know this time she’ll be safe?”
“Listen, if she was helpless, foolish in the head, it’d be one thing, but this kid has walked through tong wars without a scratch. She’s played the Bowery. We’ve both seen her in action, if she was able to handle New York before she even met us, she can do Venezia in her sleep. Maybe a couple francs in her name at the Banca Veneta wouldn’t hurt, you know, just in case. And there’s people here I can ask to discreetly keep an eye on her.”
So that was how Dally got to be on her own in Venice. One day the vaporetto pulled away from the San Marco stop, and there were so many Zombinis at the rail calling good-bye that the boat was tilting. Later for some reason it would be Bria that Dally remembered, slim, steady, waving her hat at full arm’s length, hair blown in a tangle, calling out, “Show’s on, ragazza. In bocc’ al lupo!”
SHE WAS EARNING a living before she knew it, putting to use the many light-handed and quick-fingered skills and the fast talk that went with them she had started learning from Merle before she learned to walk, and from the dealers and sharpers who’d come tumbleweeding through the different towns ever since her hands were big enough to palm bridge-size cards, and later learning from Luca Zombini to expand into juggling and magic tricks.
She was most comfortable performing in little campielli whose churches held only minor paintings, and which were scaled perfectly to gatherings of children and tourists on the way to better-known landmarks around town. Quite soon she had grown to hate tourists and what she saw them doing to Venice, changing it from a real city to a hollow and now and then outrightfailed impersonation of itself, all the centuries of that irregular seethe of history reduced to a few simple ideas, and a seasonal human inundation just able to grasp them.
As summer went along, she settled in. She watched the American girls, breezing along the Riva without a care, so clean, starched, sunlit, and blithe, in their middy blouses and boating skirts and eyes luminous beneath the brims of straw hats, pretending to ignore the covetous gazes of naval officers, guides, and waiters, laughing and talking incessantly, and she wondered if she had ever stood a chance of becoming one of them. By now she was brown from the sun, lean and agile, hair cropped into a drift of curls short enough to fit under a red knit fisherman’s cap which also served for her night’s only pillow—she dressed these days as a boy and escaped all male attention but the sort directed at boys, though such birds of passage, usually in for the night or two, were quickly set straight.
It was not quite the Venice older folks remembered. The Campanile had collapsed a few years before and had not yet been rebuilt, and stories about its fall had multiplied. There were reports of an encounter in the sky, described by some as angelic. Street urchins and lucciole told of seeing, in a population of visitors not noted for its strangeness, young men in uniforms of no nation anybody could agree on, moving among the ancient water-mazes like ghosts of earlier times or, some speculated, times not yet upon us. “You’ve seen the old paintings. This has always been a town for seeing angels in. The battle in heaven didn’t end when Lucifer was banished to Hell. It kept going, it’s still going.”
This according to an English painter type, maybe even the genuine article, named Hunter Penhallow, who had begun showing up every morning on her fondamenta with an easel and a kit full of paint-tubes and brushes, and while the daylight allowed, with breaks only for ombreta and coffee, worked at getting Venice “down,” as he put it. “You have miles of streets and canals here, mister,” she sought to instruct him, “tens of thousands of people, each one more interesting to look at than the last, why limit it to this one little corner of town?”
“The light’s good here.”
“But—”
“All right.” A minute or two of pencil work. “It wouldn’t matter. Imagine that inside this labyrinth you see is another one, but on a smaller scale, reserved only, say, for cats, dogs, and mice—and then, inside that, one for ants and flies, then microbes and the whole invisible world—down and down the scale, for once the labyrinthine principle is allowed, don’t you see, why stop at any scale in particular? It’s self-repeating. Exactly the spot where we are now is a microcosm of all Venice.”
He spoke calmly, as if she would understand what all this meant, and in fact, because Merle used to talk like this, she wasn’t totally puzzled, and was even able to refrain from rolling her eyes. Inhaling deeply on her cigarette stub, flicking it expressively into the rio, “That go for Venetians, too?”
Sure enough, it got her the once-over. “Take off that cap, let’s have a look.” When she shook out her ringlets, “You’re a girl.”
“More like young woman, but don’t let’s argue.”
“And you’ve been passing—marvelously—as a rough little street-urchin.”
“Simplifies life, up to a point anyway.”
“You must pose for me.”
“In England—signore—so it is said, a model can earn a shilling an hour.”
He s
hrugged. “I can’t pay that much.”
“Half, then.”
“That’s twelve soldi. I’d be lucky to get as much as a franc for one painting.”
Despite Hunter’s young, almost adolescent face, what she could see of his hair was gray, nearly white, covered with a straw hat elegantly pinched and twisted out of its original shape Santos-Dumont style, suggesting at least some previous residence in Paris. How long had this jasper been in Venice, she wondered. She pretended to squint at his canvases in a professional way. “You’re no Canaletto, but don’t sell yourself short, I’ve seen stuff worse than this going for ten francs, on good tourist days maybe even more.”
Finally he smiled, a fragile moment, like a patch of fog gliding past. “I might afford sixpence the hour, if . . . you’d act as my sales agent?”
“Sure. Ten percent?”
“What’s your name?”
“Most folks call me Beppo.”
They set up their pitch near the Bauer-Grünwald, in the narrow passage that ran between San Moise and the Piazza, because every visitor to the city sooner or later passed through here. Meantime at the fondamenta, he was sketching or painting her in a variety of poses, doing cartwheels down the canalside, eating a bleeding-red slice of watermelon, pretending to sleep in the sun with a cat in her lap, a scrawl of scarlet creeper on a bone-white wall behind her, sitting back in a doorway, face illuminated only from sunlight off the paving, dreaming among pink walls, redbrick walls, green waterways, gazing up at windows facing across calli so close you felt you could stretch and touch but didn’t, flowers in front of it spilling over wrought-iron balconies, posing for him both as a boy and presently, in some borrowed costumes, as a girl. “You’re not too uncomfortable in skirts, I hope.”
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