The Everlasting

by Katy Simpson Smith

  So Giulia dutifully ate, and though no letters were written, she read a canto of Orlando, skimming past her beloved Bradamante and lingering on fair Ginevra, condemned to death for taking a lover. She read aloud to Paola: “‘If like desire, and if an equal flame / Move one and the other sex, who warmly press / To that soft end of love (their goal the same) . . . / Say why shall woman—merit scathe or blame, / Though lovers, one or more, she may caress; / While man to sin with whom he will is free, / And meets with praise, not mere impunity?’”

  Paola, whose mouth was full of cold pasta, stopped her chewing.

  Giulia closed the book on her lap and stared at her servant’s shoulder.

  “You wouldn’t mind a walk,” Paola said finally.

  She put her hand on her stomach, where the rooster was mingling with some internal scuffle of nerves and blood.

  Paola dumped out the baskets in order to brush away the crumbs and repack the bits to be saved—the wine was only half-drunk—and out of Giulia’s shawl, brought in case of a chill, the cardinal’s fishhook tumbled. “Oh,” Paola said, “did you fancy fishing?” She pulled the blanket from beneath the chairs and began to fold it. “There’s a river down the valley that must have something this time of year—the baker said so when I told him where we’d be taking his loaves, though I said we ladies weren’t much for fishing, and were more in the mind of reading and contemplation. And I was referring to you, of course, but he thought I was speaking of myself and looked somewhat enchanted, so I didn’t put him straight. But we can use the twine from the wrapped tart if you’d like and find a stick along the way and have ourselves a nice setup.”

  Giulia tossed Orlando on the grass. She wanted Paola to divine her anguish and dive in, not swim for shore, dragging her mistress to the bank along with her.

  “It’s from Santa Prisca,” she said. “An old Christian thing. One of the apostles used it, or it healed a blind man. Have you heard of the prisca theologia? Do you believe heaven will take the old Greeks, or the pagans, or sinners like me?”

  Paola, who’d spit on it in an attempt to shine it up, looked aghast. “This oughtn’t to be in a dinner basket, ma’am.”

  Giulia reached for it and put it in her bodice, which only added to Paola’s scandal. Their things were replaced in the carriage, and Giulia agreed that a walk was what she wanted. The women turned west from the tomb and climbed the soft inclines of the valley, through the vineyards of the Caffarelli, one footman keeping a cautious distance. The point of the fishhook dug into Giulia’s breast.

  She had one letter from Allori, delivered to their apartments in Rome four days after the wedding, the exhaustion of the postmarital blur still preventing Bernardetto from pressing his point. The first night they’d been surrounded by the party of their own nuptials till dawn. The second night she’d looked in on him after she finished her reading in the library; her candle showed her new husband sprawled out in one of their guest rooms—the one they called the Green Room, not because of wallpaper or views onto the garden, but because it was where the Medici hid the unrulier guests, the men who were more likely to lose themselves in their cups, who were supplied with an extra basin next to their chamber pot should they also lose their stomachs. Bernardetto had not made it beneath the covers. She removed his cap because it seemed like a wifely gesture. But his snoring, which rattled as though hazelnuts were caught in the grinder of his throat, sent her back to the safety of her own girlhood room.

  The third night was their final one in Florence, and both had spent the day packing their trunks and sending last-minute instructions to friends: Bernardetto to his hunting companions, asking them to ready the country estate for an early fall chase, and Giulia to Leonor, warning her that if the young bride should fail to write regularly, she’d been taken hostage and was being tortured by Arabs, so the duchess should send an armed guard posthaste. After the grown people had left the evening parlors, the newlyweds stood in the hall outside the Green Room.

  “You must be awfully tired,” she said.

  “Not incapacitated,” he said. “But you said you slept poorly last night.”

  “We’ve been up to our elbows in the trunks,” she said, and angled her body away from the door, her shoulder pointing down the hall to where the children’s rooms were.

  He puckered one corner of his mouth, as if he couldn’t put his finger on why this wasn’t entirely satisfactory, but by the time Giulia had taken two tentative steps away, it must’ve seemed impossible to call her back.

  The fourth night they spent at a count’s villa on the road to Rome, where no one expected anything of them.

  In Rome, Paola had gone ahead with orders to prepare separate bedrooms for husband and wife. She’d been told to give the excuse that Giulia had caught one of the younger Medici’s fevers. But the butlers in Rome were accustomed to any permutation of sleeping arrangements; one had served a pope who’d requested a room stripped of any furniture or ornament except a stack of exotic furs and a chain in the corner, to which he or his boy of the hour would affix himself. A young bride afraid of her husband was nothing new.

  It was standing in this separate bedroom, in her half skirts and armed for imaginary battle, that Giulia had been presented with the painter’s letter on a silver tray. She took the letter to the window. He’d written her few notes; they weren’t lovers who could afford a correspondence. His script was distinctively long, the M of her name reaching up the envelope like the Alps. She smelled the paper, turned it over to smell the wax of the seal, brushed her lips along the red sheen. It appeared to contain only a single page. Holding it up to the light revealed nothing.

  She could guess what was inside—protestations, confirmations, an appeal, a denial. A call, or a farewell. She wasn’t in a position to respond to either. What would be the point? [To know! Didn’t I teach you at the very beginning of time that the only purpose to this cut-short life given you by the brute above is to grab greedily at any scrap of knowledge you can, learning everything about everything because the only lasting damnation is ignorance? It’s not just geometry, my tender chicken, it’s gossip too; it’s eavesdropping and snooping and asking rude questions and opening all letters, no matter the address, because the world is a book yearning to be read. Thank Eve, who felt obedience was a poor shadow of independence, may she be blessed for her scorn of unanswered questions. All I can say is this was written by your lover, and if you don’t want to know his heart, you’re closing the door of your own.]

  She couldn’t. She could imagine no pleasure from that paper that would outweigh the inevitable smack of loss. She only wanted to hear him say that anyone who’d ever judged her had been slaughtered and he was galloping to Rome, galloping, and he would kick down the door and rip the armor from her chest and take her womb in his hands and shout the word she couldn’t bring herself to whisper, which was baby.

  There was no fire to burn it with, so she slid the letter under her mattress, as far as her arm could reach, and kept pushing till it left her fingertips.

  The two women tramped across private farms and down hillsides to the right of way, passing horses at rest and sheep nipping their lambs. A young couple was perched on the stout limb of an oak, feet swinging free. She pretended not to see their arms entwined. Whatever was chugging along in her heart was beginning to slow, to grow cold.

  She was more often tired these days, her organs now with divided attention. The sun chastised the back of her neck. Nature was foiling her: burning her skin, swelling her ankles, flipping her stomach. Even the wind through the windows at night fell flat when it reached her bed, as if it could see inside her and recoiled. Weeks of blocking out his face, his tender fingers, and now she was left with a traitorous amalgam. It was him and her now, always, alchemical. Get out, she wanted to say. I said I was done. But the squeezing continued, the heavy eyelids and the back twinge, and now every time she reached for the chamber pot, which was incessant, she silently hoped she’d piss out the little seed.


  There was an afternoon at the blazing end of July when she wrapped herself in veils and visited without Paola one of the narrower streets of Florence, where she’d heard a healer stayed. She sat long enough in the crone’s front room to grow dizzy from the scent of saffron and melissa, and when the woman touched her knee with sympathy, Giulia flinched. Her skin was as coppery as the princess’s own, though her skirts were clean and her salty hair tied neatly back. Giulia despised her. She offered a pouch of powdered juniper and was starting to show her where to place it when Giulia jumped from her chair and said, “I lied! I do not have it!”

  But here on these open fields, her hips aching, she was older. Bodies were controlled not by God but by will. If she wanted the seed out, her hands would have to extract it. She felt the hook pressing again at her breast. There’d been only one night when she was up in the starry hours with pains so desperate she wanted to call Leonor. Wanted to confess. But women she knew didn’t do what she’d done. She sat on the last small pillar of innocence, all the paths before her extending into darkness. The arithmetic hurt. Erasing this would require only one sin. Birthing it would demand more: lasting lies, a reminder of his face, his loss, and covering the deception with a single marital act. A sanctioned, blessed union between two bodies in the sight of God. One body already ripe with transgression, the other unbeloved.

  With Paola ten steps ahead, she turned and loosed her stomach into a bank of thistle and broom.

  Could she shed her clothes for Bernardetto and crawl with all naïveté into his bed and make the sounds of surprise, followed by the dewy eyes, one hand lightly on his arm so he would sleep quiet, with the sense of possession, and a mere six months later present him with a creature that he didn’t quite resemble, while finding some excuse to avoid his bed ever after? [Could you not picture my face on his, my horns on his little horn?] Was she no longer herself, but this other thing too? [You’re always, always yourself. One day machines will fly people across the atmosphere and sometimes masks will pop out of them, like ropes thrown from boats, and they will tell you to grab the rope first before you give it to your child. Because if you are not always, always yourself, you will lose the ability to breathe.]

  Easier to take the hook now, lash it to a stiff reed, and scrape the error out of her. Not a soul would know but Christ and the Devil.

  A bend in the stream revealed the nymphaeum, the old grotto where the second king of Rome was said to have his trysts with Egeria. The Vestal Virgins were his bright idea. Only they were allowed to drink from this fountain, and only as long as they kept their legs closed. Despite some collapse, the grotto held on to its grandeur, and water finding its way over rocks and into troughs sounded like a mother rubbing her back. Had she been a handmaid to Vesta, she would’ve worn her chastity like a white blaze of superiority, would’ve pitied her sisters who succumbed to the magnetism of another body and were buried alive in a field, down in a hole with a bench and a plate of chicken, because burying alive was forbidden by law; these women were merely being introduced to a new apartment, which would be filled in with dirt. She would’ve stood by the hole and crowed.

  She had the hook in her hands now and ran its rusty stem through her fingers, waiting for some jolt of sanctity. The cardinal had lied, or had been lied to. If it had belonged to the girl martyr, she wouldn’t have known how to use it any more than Giulia did. If martyrdom wasn’t strictly suicide, wasn’t it a kind of giving up? Hadn’t Giulia thought of it on a dozen dark nights? Can’t a broken heart—not a broken heart: an emptying, a desertion, an incapacity of the brain to self-fathom—can’t it be a warrant for cleaving back to the one who made you? [He didn’t make you. You ripped yourself from Adam’s rib. You struck out of the form of man and went plunging into exploration. Earth is yours. This is where the blood runs red and the soul is layered: hope on top of sin on top of sweetness swirled with rot. Heaven is a blank; God is less than a plane, He’s a line. Creation is your genius.] The Leviathan was still writhing inside her.

  Paola dipped her hands in the water, running fresh over slick moss, as if the nymphaeum were any common basin. “You should put your feet in, ma’am; I’ve seen you limping.”

  It wasn’t limping but the awkward shifting of weight as Giulia tried to find the new center of her body. She wanted to test herself; she wanted signs. If the water was icy, she’d deal with her womb herself. If it was warm as the air, she’d take her consequences like a grown woman: seduce her husband, lie to his face, keep a secret her whole life long. Raise a child. Her hands showed a tremor as she began to peel her stockings.

  “When I was a wee thing,” Paola said, her thick ankles already plunged in the sacred water, “my mother told me I shouldn’t let boys near because if they came within so much as a foot, they’d run tell all the other boys they’d snatched my dugs. And the only way I remembered is she spoke of one of the Vestals—Turcia was her name, or Tuccia, something like that—and a boy swore he’d been with her, robes off and all, and they tried to bury her, like you said. But she was a good girl, and to prove it she took a sieve and went down to the Tiber and scooped up a great quantity of water and carried it all the way back to her temple, without a drop going missing.”

  “In a sieve?” Giulia’s feet were bare now and she inched toward the marshy edge, trying to see if Paola’s calves had hen flesh from the cold. The hook was in her left hand now, which had its own symbolism, but she couldn’t bring herself to shift it to the right.

  “Sometimes it’s enough to know you’re a decent sort, and sometimes Jesus has to prove it. It was Tuccia I thought of when my first kiss was stolen from me, and Tuccia when I first grabbed at a boy’s nethers. Oh Lord, I thought, I won’t be able to carry that sieve now. Come, get your toes wet.”

  Cool when she first stepped in, like the breeze that dries the sweat on one’s face, but soon the water was an extension of her skin; she was only aware of it when she moved and the liquid ring around her ankle broke and re-formed. She could draw no conclusions. The algae slicked beneath her feet, and a tadpole—as alone as she’d ever seen one—hovered near her smallest toe, too timid to make a dart, to see if she was edible. She dragged one foot back, furrowing the muck.

  Paola said, “My mother always said the rich think too much.”

  It wasn’t the rich who thought too much, but those who were born with the capacity to circle a bone for days, refusing to touch it lest it turn out to be a snake. And so the ruminants perish, and the women of blithe spirit inherit the earth.

  “If I’d a daughter like you, ma’am, and you’ll pardon me for saying, a few good slaps when you were younger, to teach you what the present looks like, and then I wouldn’t have married you off till I’d combed out all your moods. You were still just a mushy thing, though you won’t admit it, and being handled that way, you lost any chance at love.”

  “You don’t really think that’s true,” Giulia said.

  Paola crawled back from the edge of the grotto and began wiping her feet on the tall grass. “It needs a simplicity. Bless your sweet heart, but you haven’t got it.”

  She could not bear to be classified; this too, Paola would’ve said, is a privilege of the rich. “Can you really look at me and swear I’ve never been in love?”

  “We’ve got to get back before the footman drinks the wine. The other one’s having a good deal of fun watching us scamper around barefooted.”

  “Answer me.”

  “Oh, babes,” she said, buckling her shoe, “that’s between you and God and the child.” She set out not toward the main road, but toward the footpath that led onward, as if she knew of sights that were not to be missed. Her hip flick was meant for the footman.

  The painter had made no plea. She had left, verging on love, believing her sacrifice was hers entire; she believed in grand gestures, and the romance of renunciation seemed more poignant to her than indulgence. Indulgence she could not abide. So she’d waited for word from him. A note with a time and place. A sonnet. On th
e second day she imagined him melancholy in bed, a washed-up rag of seaweed, his body as drained and directionless as hers. The third day he’d be up with pen and paper, begging her reconsideration. But the fourth day no footman came. The fifth day she thought he might’ve taken his own life, and when Leonor mentioned a body dragged from the Arno, she dug her fingernails into her palms to keep from shrieking. “Old woman,” Leonor had said, “drunk.” The sixth day she looked in a mirror at her sallow features, her too-dark eyes, and reminded herself of her own inconsequence; what had she expected? [Damn you for not expecting everything. Whoever you believe first fashioned your brain from oxygen and carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen and calcium and phosphorus, may He be double damned to hell, may He and His army of sanctimonious angels be hauled to my fires so I may tear from them their ankle-deep hearts. In a few months you’ll name your son Alessandro.] And on the seventh day she put on her crown of pearls and was formally introduced to Bernardetto de’ Medici.

  Her body wasn’t Allori’s any more than it was her husband’s. The fist in her womb was her own. There was no duty. It was just her flesh and her flesh.

  She dropped the hook in the water.

  Once they’d crossed the trickling Almone and climbed from the low green valley into the banks of oak and cork, the summer sun peeled back its cloud and fell through the branches, as if no path should be darkened for these women. A squirrel chased them across the latticed trees, chattering for them to stop, or to keep moving, or to go faster. Paola was recalling the walk she’d once taken through the sorcerer’s woods with Nino—she showed Giulia with her hands how ferocious the night spirits had been, and how Nino’s father had given him a right smack across the face when the two children had been found. She kept looking behind her to make sure the footman was within sight.

  The path curved and descended into a sparser forest, and Paola pointed to the mausoleum on their right. This one was smaller, looked more like a house than a castle; the bereft husband must’ve wanted his wife kept in a cottage, that passersby might not even know she was dead. Giulia understood this impulse: nothing to see here; all is as it was before. She knew nothing about Annia Regilla, but her servant had been raised on every legend from Tuscany to Naples; sometimes it seemed she’d been given stories as a child instead of bread.