Dally ducked her head and looked up through her eyelashes. “Boys . . .”
“Boys, men, what’s the difference, I’m supposed to ignore all the attention, ma via, you know what they’re like over here.” Bria grinning so like the young rogue Dally remembered that she caught the smile too, and before they knew it their foreheads were together, stray hair wisps intermingling, third eyes touching, and they were laughing quietly together, for no good reason either could see.
“Well. What do I tell them, you gonna be a remittance girl?”
Dally’s laugh faded. “Oh . . . think not.”
“Why not? Papa thought you might want to stay. He says he can afford it.”
“That’s not it.”
“Ahh? Some gentleman friend, I should’ve known. This Spongiatosta address.”
“Not exactly.”
“Nothing, uhm—” Wiggling both hands expressively.
“Ha. Fat chance.”
“Eh, enjoy it while you can, you’re still a kid.”
“I wish I was. . . .”
Bria didn’t think too long about opening her arms, and Dally was right there, sniffling. After a while, “Well, come on, you don’t look a day over thirty.”
“Need a cigarette’s what it is, you happen to, uh . . .”
“Comin right up.”
“Say, nice case there.”
“Swiss insurance salesman. Wolf. No, Putzi.”
“Yeah, Wolf’d be the one with the wife and kids.”
“Thanks.” They lit up.
ONE DAY HUNTER showed up in sunglasses, broad-brimmed straw hat, and fisherman’s smock. “Feel like getting out on the water?”
“Let me borrow a hat and I’ll be right there.”
Some artist friends had a topo for the day. The water in the canals was an opaque green. At the point of the Dogana, where the Grand Canal and the Lagoon meet, the color became blue. “It never does that,” said Hunter.
“Today it did,” said a fierce young man sitting at the tiller.
His name was Andrea Tancredi. Hunter knew him, had run into him around town at the fringes of Anarchist gatherings, in cafés at exhibitions of experimental painting. After having been to Paris and seen the works of Seurat and Signac, Tancredi had converted to Divisionism. He sympathized with Marinetti and those around him who were beginning to describe themselves as “Futurists,” but failed to share their attraction to the varieties of American brutalism. Americans, in fact, seemed greatly to annoy him, particularly the millionaires lately dedicated to coming over and looting Italian art. Dally decided not to mention where she was from.
They picnicked on Torcello in a deserted pomegranate orchard, drank primitivo, and Dally found herself looking at Andrea Tancredi more than she could account for, and when he happened to catch her looking, he stared back, not angry but not what she’d have called fascinated either. Coming back in the evening, sailing into the pealing of the bells, the swept green-and-lavender sky, the upside-down city just beneath the waves, her heart taken as always forever by this unexpected home, she was aware of Tancredi next to her, scowling at Venice.
“Look at it. Someday we’ll tear the place down, and use the rubble to fill in those canals. Take apart the churches, salvage the gold, sell off what’s left to collectors. The new religion will be public hygiene, whose temples will be waterworks and sewage-treatment plants. The deadly sins will be cholera and decadence.” She would have said something, likely harsh, but he had rushed on. “All these islands will be linked by motorways. Electricity everywhere, anyone who still wants Venetian moonlight will have to visit a museum. Colossal gates out here, all around the Lagoon, for the wind, to keep out sirocco and bora alike.”
“Oh I don’t know.” Hunter, who had seen Dally in a temper, had slid quietly between them. “I was always here for the ghosts, myself.”
“The past,” sneered Tancredi. “San Michele.”
“Not exactly.” Hunter found he could not explain.
Through God’s blind mercy, as he told it to Dally a few days later, on their way over to Tancredi’s studio in Cannareggio, after escapes from destruction and war in places he could no longer remember clearly, he had found asylum in Venice, only to happen one day upon these visions of Tancredi’s, and recognize the futuristic vehicle which had borne him to safety from the devastated City so long ago, and the subterranean counter-City it took him through, and the chill, comfortless faith in science and rationality that had kept all his fellow refugees then so steady in their flight, and his own desolate certainty of having failed in his remit, one of those mascottes who had brought only bad luck to those who trusted him, destined to end up in cheap rooms down at the ends of suburban streets, eventually indifferent to their own fates, legends of balefulness, banned from accompanying all but the most disreputable and suicidal of voyagers. But lately—was it Venice? was it Dahlia?—he was beginning to feel less comfortable as one of the lost.
So Dally thought she ought to have a look.
TANCREDI’S PAINTINGS WERE like explosions. He favored the palette of fire and explosion. He worked quickly. Preliminary Studies Toward an Infernal Machine.
“It would actually work?” Dally wanted to know.
“Of course,” Tancredi a bit impatiently.
“He’s a sort of infernal-machine specialist,” Hunter pointed out. But Tancredi showed a curious reluctance to speak of what the design might actually do. What chain of events could lead to the “effect.”
“The term ‘infernal’ is not applied lightly or even metaphorically. One must begin by accepting Hell—by understanding that Hell is real and that there move through this tidy surface world a silent army of operatives who have sworn allegiance to it as to a beloved homeland.”
Dally nodded. “Christers talk like this.”
“Oh, the born-again. Always with us. But what of the died-again who have gone to Hell from a condition of ordinary death, imagining that the worst has happened and that nothing can now terrify them?”
“You’re talking about an explosive device, vero?”
“Not in Venice, never. Fire here would be suicidal insanity. I would not bring fire. But I would bring Hell in a small bounded space.”
“And . . . that would be . . .”
Tancredi laughed grimly. “You’re American, you think you have to know everything. Others would prefer not to know. Some define Hell as the absence of God, and that is the least we may expect of the infernal machine—that the bourgeoisie be deprived of what most sustains them, their personal problem-solver sitting at his celestial bureau, correcting defects in the everyday world below. . . . But the finite space would rapidly expand. To reveal the Future, we must get around the inertia of paint. Paint wishes to remain as it is. We desire transformation. So this is not so much a painting as a dialectical argument.”
“Do you understand what he’s talking about?” she asked Hunter.
He raised his eyebrows, angled his head as if in thought. “Sometimes.”
It came to remind her in a way of Merle, and his brotherhood of crazy inventors whose collegial mysteries-of-science discussions had escorted her to the doors of sleep in lieu of lullabies.
“Of course it’s to do with Time,” Tancredi frowning and intense, aroused despite himself at the possibility that she might really have been thinking about the subject, “everything that we imagine is real, living and still, thought and hallucinated, is all on the way from being one thing to being another, from past to Future, the challenge to us is to show as much of the passage as we can, given the damnable stillness of paint. This is why—” Using his thumb against a brushful of orpiment yellow, he aimed a controlled spatter of paint at his canvas, followed by another brushful of scarlet vermilion and a third of Nürnberg violet—the target patch seemed to light up like a birthday cake, and before any of it could dry he was at it with an impossibly narrow brush, no more than a bristle or two, stabbing tiny dots among larger ones. “The energies of motion, the grammatic
al tyrannies of becoming, in divisionismo we discover how to break them apart into their component frequencies . . . we define a smallest picture element, a dot of color which becomes the basic unit of reality. . . .”
“It isn’t Seurat,” it seemed to Hunter, “none of that cool static calm, somehow you’ve got these dots behaving dynamically, violent ensembles of energystates, Brownian movement. . . .”
And in fact the next time she visited Tancredi, Dally thought she could see emerging from the glowing field of particles, like towers from the foschetta, a city, a contra-Venezia, the almost previsual reality behind what everyone else was agreeing to define as “Venice.”
“Not like Marinetti and his circle,” Tancredi confessed. “I really love the old dump. Here.” He led her to a stack of canvases in a corner she hadn’t noticed before. They were all nocturnes, saturated with fog.
“In Venice we have a couple of thousand words for fog—nebbia, nebbietta, foschia, caligo, sfumato—and the speed of sound being a function of the density is different in each. In Venice, space and time, being more dependent on hearing than sight, are actually modulated by fog. So this is a related sequence here. La Velocità del Suono. What are you thinking?”
It was her first visit here without Hunter. What she was thinking was that Tancredi had better kiss her, and soon.
Smells like a tannery,” it seemed to Kit.
“Perhaps . . . because Göttingen a tannery is.” Gottlob pointed out.
“Particularly the mathematics department,” added Humfried. “Remember, they have preserved Gauss’s brain here. What, after all, is the cortex of anyone’s brain but one more piece of animal hide? Ja? at Göttingen they will pickle yours for you, stain it, process it into some altogether different form, impervious to the wind, to carnal decay, to minor insults, both physical and social. A cloak of immortality . . . a future pursued in the present tense—” He stopped and gaped at the doorway. “Heiliger Bimbam!”
“Say Humfried, you’re about to drop your monocle there.”
“It is she, she!”
“Well, ‘à la mode’ maybe, with that tortoise-shell rim onto it, but—”
“Not ‘chichi,’ idiot,” said Gottlob. “He refers to our ‘Göttingen Kovalevskaia,’ who has just now, however improbably, found this degenerate swamp of ours. If you would ever sit facing the door, you would miss far fewer of these wonderful events.”
“Look at that, serene as a swan.”
“Something, huh?”
“Even in Russia this never occurs.”
“She’s Russian?”
“That is the rumor.”
“Those eyes—”
“Those legs.”
“How can one know that?”
“Roentgen-ray spectacles, natürlich.”
“Those curves are everywhere continuous but nowhere differentiable,” sighed Humfried. “Noli me tangere, don’t you know. Held to stronger criteria, like a function of a complex variable.”
“She’s complex, all right,” said Gottlob.
“And variable.”
The lads collapsed into laughter, before whose loudness and puerility any young woman of the day might have been excused at least a dip in confidence. But not the self-possessed beauty who now approached. No, though being openly stared at—more in wonder, mind you, than indignation—Yashmeen Halfcourt continued to glide, through the Turkish smoke and beer-fumes, directly toward them, in her bearing a suggestion that she might, with or without a partner, begin to dance a polka. And that hat! Draped velvet toques had always been Kit’s undoing.
“Swell that you’re all on such close terms with her—so! who’ll introduce me?”
Amid a great creak and scrape of beer-house furniture, Kit’s companions had swiftly vanished.
“Converging to zero,” he mumbled, “what a surprise. . . . Good evening, miss, were you looking for one of those boys that suddenly ain’t here anymore?”
She sat down, took a look at him. The Eastern eyes, the tension of whose lower lids had found a perfect balance between heat and appraisal, certainly were promissory of heartbreak.
“You are not English.” Her voice unexpectedly just a little screechy.
“American.”
“And is that a revolver you’re carrying?”
“This? No, no this is the, what they call the Hausknochen? Get in off the street and up the staircase with.” He produced a gigantic key whose transgression of scale, beyond all parameters of the tasteful, had in its time provoked unease even in the most collected of spirits. “Everybody around here packs one of these.”
“Not everybody. All they’ve given me is this.” She held up and jingled at him a silvery ring with a little pair of latchkeys. “Feminine, yes? This, plus of course a set of signs and countersigns before I’m even allowed to use them, as I am chaperoned without mercy. How is a person expected to prove Riemann’s Hypothesis when half her time is taken up getting in and out of rooms?”
“Another one of them Zetamaniacs, eh? Sure are a lot of you folks pouring in to town, is it’s like a silver camp in Colorado here, eternal renown in em hills, so forth.”
Yashmeen lit up an Austrian cigarette, held it between her teeth, grinned. “Where have you been? This has been going on everywhere, since Hadamard—or Poussin, if you like—proved the Prime Number Theorem. The first nugget out of the ground, as you’d say. Is it the problem that offends you, or those of us trying to solve it?”
“Neither one, it’s an honorable pursuit, just kind of obvious, is all.”
“Don’t patronize me.” She waited for a protest, but he only smiled. “‘Obvious’?”
Kit shrugged. “I could show you.”
“Oh please do. While we’re at it, you can also show me how your Hausknochen works. . . .”
He guessed he was hearing things, but before long, having translated themselves without inconvenience out the door, down the street and up the stairs, here they were, actually up in his room with two bottles of beer he’d located in the patent Kühlbox. He sat just taking in her image for a bit, presently venturing,
“They tell me you’re kind of famous?”
“Women at Göttingen form a somewhat beleaguered subset.” She looked around. “And what is it you do here again?”
“Drink beer, work on my sleep allowance, the usual.”
“I took you for a mathematician.”
“Well . . . maybe not your kind. . . .”
“Yes? Come, don’t be too clever.”
“All right, then.” He squared his shoulders, brushed imaginary beer foam off his almost-matured mustache, and, expecting her to disappear just as quick as beer-foam, winced in apology. “I’m a sort of, hm . . . Vectorist?”
Despite the shadow of an intent to flinch, she surprised him instead with a smile which, for all its resemblance to the smiles one gives the afflicted, was still able to turn Kit’s extremities to stone. That is, is it was some smile. “They teach vectors in America? I’m amazed.”
“Nothing like what they offer here.”
“Isn’t England where you ought to be now?” as to a naughty child one expected to become, in a short while, naughtier.
“Nothing but Quaternions over there.”
“Oh dear, not the Quaternion Wars again. That is so all rather fading into history now, not to mention folklore. . . . Why should any of you keep at it this way?”
“They believe—the Quaternionists do—that Hamilton didn’t so much figure the system out as receive it from somewhere beyond? Sort of like Mormons only different?”
She couldn’t tell how serious he was being, but after a decent interval she stepped closer. “Excuse me? It’s a vectorial system, Mr. Traverse, it’s something for engineers, to help the poor prats visualize what they obviously can’t grasp as real maths.”
“Such as your Riemann problem.”
“Die Nullstellen der ζ-Funktion,” saying it the way some other girl might say “Paris” or “Richard Harding Davis,” b
ut with a note as well warning that though she might possess an active sense of humor, it did not extend to Riemann. Kit had seldom, if ever, in those years up and down the New York–New Haven Trail, from debutantes to nymphs of the Tenderloin, run into anything as passionate as this stretching of spine-top and untilting of face. Her neck so uncommonly slender and long.
“Hate to tell you, but it’s not all that hard to prove.”
“Oh, a Vectorist proof, no doubt. And only excessive modesty has kept you from publishing.”
Rummaging through the domestic clutter for a piece of paper with some blank space still on it, “Actually, I’ve been looking for a way, not to solve the Riemann problem so much as to apply the ζ-function to vector-type situations, for instance taking a certain set of vectorial possibilities as if it was map-pable into the set of complex numbers, and investigating properties and so forth, beginning with vector systems in the prime-numbered dimensions—the well-known two and three of course, but then five, seven, eleven, so forth, as well.”
“Only primes. Skipping the fourth dimension, then.”
“Skipping four, sorry. Hard to imagine a less-interesting number.”
“Unless you’re—”
“What?”
“Sorry. I was only thinking out loud.”
“Aw.” Was this amazing girl flirting? How come he couldn’t tell?
“Death to reveal, I’m afraid.”
“Really?”
“Well . . .”
Which is how Kit first heard about the T.W.I.T. back in London, and of the ghostly neo-Pythagorean cult of tetralatry or worship of the number four, currently the rage in certain European circles, “not to mention ellipses and hyperbolæ,”—loosely allied, in fact, as a sort of correspondent group, with the T.W.I.T. These days, among those inclined to studies of the mystical, the fourth dimension, owing to the works of Mr. C. Howard Hinton, Professor Johann K. F. Zöllner, and others, was enjoying a certain vogue, “or should I say ‘vague’?” remarked Yashmeen.
“O.K. Here’s the Riemann proof—” He wrote down, without pausing, no more than a dozen lines. “Leaving out all the obvious transitions, of course. . . .”
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