Sosia? thought Bruno, Sosia, meaning double-image? No Italian mother would give a child that name. Of course she’s not from Italy. He wondered if Sosia herself knew the sinister meaning of her name in Italian. She spoke the language fluently, it seemed, so she must. Why had she not changed it to something more acceptable?
Sosia stepped closer to him. She emerged, still wreathed in golden motes, from her cocoon of light.
‘Can you help me then?’
‘But of course,’ said Bruno, bowing. Of course I can. It’s not my kind of work, but I know how it’s done, and there’s no one else here to be of service to the lady at the moment. This request is entirely reasonable, the idea is good even though it is a new one, and her presence here is a mere coincidence of fate, as happens in any town, as happens so often in Venice, he told himself, squirming at the facility of the internal lies. He did not address the question of why she should be there at seven in the morning, when any respectable woman would be indoors.
It had started from there. Bruno persuaded Wendelin that they might accommodate her needs, as an experiment in a possible new market, though the press itself was enormously oversized for the tiny sheets she wanted.
For all their minuteness, the sheets required substantial deliberation. There were many consultations early in the dawn hours, when Bruno, she had ascertained, was often alone in the office. A proof was to be made first, and then rearranged to suit the Signorina’s very creative ideas. She was most intriguingly concerned about the mixture of majuscule and minuscule characters and the choice of paper. Bruno had never met a man, let alone a woman, sensitive to such nuances before. Even his colleagues showed less interest in their typeface. It was necessary for her to stand very close to Bruno while he adjusted the letterforms himself with hands made suddenly clumsy by her presence. It was close enough for him to smell her.
He noticed, in the course of their deliberations, how quickly Sosia did everything: how swiftly she moved, spoke and thought.
‘You are Venetian, yes?’ she had asked early on and then changed the subject without a break in the flow of her words.
She was like himself, who, since his schooldays, had always sped through everything, leaving his dearest schoolfriend, Morto, stumbling behind. Felice was always urging him, ‘Slow down, Bruno. Savour. Slowly.’ He could not bear it. Venice herself was too slow for him, some days. She always seemed to be dragging at him, as if pulling at his ankles when he hurried through the city. It was impossible to run; she would trip him up. He watched the bird tracks fading slowly in the mud with an impatience no one else could understand. This confluence of their rhythm made him feel closer to Sosia. There were so few people who shared his compulsive fleetness.
But regarding Sosia, Bruno hung back, afraid. His imagination fought his good manners; there were questions he longed to ask which had no place in a purely commercial relationship. Only after ten days did Bruno dare to enquire in oblique terms about her relationship with the doctor Rabino Simeon whose printed sheet he was preparing. Bruno knew of the doctor, of course, and his great reputation for skill and kindness, though he had never met him and knew nothing of his family circumstances.
‘Does your father prefer …?’ he stammered.
‘My husband,’ said Sosia shortly. ‘Though of course he’s much older than me.’
She considered him, reading the tragedy unfurling in Bruno’s eyes with the precision of a soothsayer perusing entrails. Ah, she thought, seeing the hot pain written there, it’s gone jar, further even than I had hoped. He is nice, this hoy. Help him, I will.
She said: ‘I hardly know what he prefers; I hardly know the man, really. It was – is – a marriage of …’ she lowered her eyes, as if in pain and then appeared to recover herself bravely. She shrugged defiantly. ‘I would far rather have your judgement and advice on such an important thing as this paper. After all, you are a sensitive man who understands the printed word and its effect on people. My husband only consorts with sick and dying people and he uses his hands.’ She shuddered delicately.
Those hands he lays on you, thought Bruno, scarcely able to support the obscenity of the thought. This time he could not wait for her to leave. It was too much. When she was gone he slid to the floor and laid his cheek on the cool marble there. A vein throbbed uncontrollably in his forehead. A hot skewer seemed to be pushing through his bowels. When he closed his eyes he saw yellow haloes and green lights pulsing; they were still there when he opened them. He lay there for many minutes, until the thud of feet on the stairs announced the arrival of his colleagues.
But the images he had manufactured in those minutes, of Sosia in the arms of her old Jewish doctor, would not be shaken loose from his mind.
* * *
Again and again, the sheets were set and revised. Just before the resolution of each infinitesimal variation, just as they reached the end of each blind alley, Sosia would change direction. It was not just the work in hand that altered in style and mood; every day Sosia herself was different. Sometimes she came drooping with a kind of pathetic submission. In these encounters, Bruno felt that she was about to fall into the arms he was too frightened to hold out to her; it was as if she felt his unexpressed desire for her as a cruel oppression on her fragile shoulders. Other times she came in flames: demanding, arrogant, exciting. She drummed her fingers on the table and spoke quickly, from the corner of her mouth. Once, drawing the edge of a fine vellum violently across the table, she left a long red gash on his wrist. He was sure that it was deliberate, and he treasured the weal, stroking it for days until it puckered up.
One morning, while snatching samples from racks of paper, she appeared to trip on the hem of her cloak and strike her head a glancing blow against the wooden shelving. She staggered, seemed dazed and about to fall. Bruno, at her side, opened his arms to catch her. Somehow she collapsed with her mouth pressed on his, and that mouth slack so that the tongue fell out upon his lips. She might have been unconscious, for all the movement in that tongue, and Bruno, breathing into her open mouth, felt its wet heat invade him. His hands fluttered around her back, her hair, not knowing where to rest, where to support her. It seemed that he took her entire weight, slight as it was, upon his lips.
So they stood still like this, mouth to mouth, for long moments until Sosia slowly slid to her knees, sliding her lips down his chin, throat and breast, till they came to rest at his groin. Her nose stabbed his pubic bone. He whispered dear God! for surely she would rouse in a moment and feel for herself the effect of her intimate proximity upon him.
Quickly, he knelt down too, taking her shoulders in his hands and holding her, just a little way from him, so that he could see her face. Her head hung like a heavy grape on its stalk. With one hand, he tilted her face up to him. He could hear the tread of feet on the lower stairs. Any moment, the door would open and the apprentices would arrive thudding and groaning for their morning’s work.
‘Sosia! Signora Simeon!’ he whispered, desperately. She murmured under her breath, in her own language, something incomprehensible. Her eyes remained closed; the lashes rested trembling on her cheek. With one finger, Bruno stroked her face. At this first contact with her skin, he shivered and hunched up his shoulders like a child.
‘Wake up!’ he urged her. ‘They’re coming.’
His eyes darted from her face to the door.
But Sosia was recovered now, looking into his eyes with her own yellowish ones.
‘Where do you live, Bruno Uguccione?’ she asked throatily. It was the first time she had spoken his name. ‘It is alone, I think?’
Chapter Seven
But the fact that you don’t lie lonely by night’s
proclaimed by your bed, reeking out loud of
Eastern unguents and garlanded with flowers,
not to mention the pillow and mattress dented evenly
both your side and the other one and the
creaks and trembles of the poor old bedframe
as it perambul
ates the room.
While their country cousins practised their wedding nights in copses and hedges, the Venetians – as always, forsaking Nature or improving on her – took to their gondolas, each a tree cut, carved, painted, cushioned, curtained, perfected. Rich lovers could be distinguished by their slender boats, gracefully rocking both ways at once. Those too poor to buy an hour of passion afloat pursued their pedestrian loves in slithering corners on moonless nights.
Or invited them home, and opened their hearts.
Bruno knew that Sosia would hurt him, but he opened the door to her anyway. A single knock, and there she was, with one hand on her hip, looking over his shoulder to appraise the size and comfort of his accommodations. Her cloak was dusted with snow that she shook off briskly. Flakes of it spattered on his face, the coldness sharp as needles.
Until he opened the door, he had almost felt safe, with his feelings for her contained in the stone walls of his rooms, battened together and sealed in with layers of paint to enclose him. But willingly he went to the door at the sound of her sharp rap, and willingly he let her into his life. He knew that from this moment on his life would be lived as an art form, an exhilarating nightmare like a ride on a seabird’s back through the dead hours of the night. He would be as alive as he could be without being nearly dead. He would at last know for himself what it was the poets wrote of.
Bruno had rehearsed this scene in his mind for hours. He imagined her falling into his arms on arriving at the door, trembling at her own audacity. He imagined soothing her hair, kissing the top of each of her fingers, then laying her hands together as if in prayer, and playing to her a melody from his father’s flute in the candlelight, watching her eyes dissolve with tenderness as his mother’s had done in response to the same melody. He had lain sleepless for hours planning just how to kiss her eyes: he had finally decided upon three soft slow kisses for each lid. He would lay her down on the pallet, kneel beside her at a reverent distance, gazing on her in a calm, loving way to inspire confidence. He would lie beside her, and cover them both with a blanket to warm their trembling limbs. Gradually he would steal a hand around her, and then another, laying his palms flat against her sides without rifling with vulgar haste among her clothing. Then he would talk to her, mingling the words of the poets with his own specially composed declarations. In each of these visions, Sosia lay sweet and passive in his arms, while he, subtly and gradually, convinced her of the purity of his passion, to which she would finally and blushingly submit, barely able to raise her eyes to his as he lowered his lips to her mouth.
It was not like that.
On the day she came to him, she pushed past him into the room and walked directly to the carefully groomed straw pallet on the floor. She looked down on it with a smile, and turned back to him, reaching out an arm. She took his head in the palm of her right hand, ran her tongue down the groove between his nose and his lips, while reaching with her left hand inside his stockings. Her hand was cold and somewhat moist as if it had been boiled and then plunged in brackish water.
‘Nice,’ she said, closing her fingers around him. ‘Bed, now, Mister Editor.’
She drew him down to the pallet.
* * *
Sosia was used to all kinds of beds, from greasy rugs on cellar floors to the bed of the nobleman Nicolò Malipiero, which was notable for the great luxury of two mattresses covered in crimson satin, one on top of the other. That bed was seven feet long and six feet wide, and its canopy of green brocade lay upon eight veils of such sensitive gauzy fabric that it billowed with their every breath. The valance was in cloth of silver, figured with velvet and lined in changeable taffeta with a deep silk fringe. It was caught up with long gold hoops and buttons of bullion. The headpiece was also of crimson satin, and sprouted six ample plumes, each containing two dozen ostrich feathers of varying hues, garnished with a festoon of spangles. This masterpiece reposed on a dais with panelled head and footboards, painted images, gilding and carving. The counterpane, in the summer, was of tangerine coloured silk, quilted, and lined with sarcenet of a hue just a shadow darker than itself. For the winter there was a velvet and silk coverlet lined with three kinds of fur.
Other men had other beds. Sosia had become a cataloguer of the prevailing styles – the discreet Lit à Alcôve, the Lit en Baldaquin with its canopy against the wall, the Lit en Baignoire, with its integral bath and small linen chest. She particularly liked the Lit Bâtard with all the accessories and grandiosities of a grand bed, but everything executed on a smaller scale. The owner of that bed, a dwarfish merchant from the Castello quarter, had looked a man of normal dimensions inside it. Indeed, he was nothing less than a man, she remembered. She had once pleasured a Golden-Book Cornaro in a Lit en Dôme, looking up at the gilded stars studding the canopy, and had tumbled, dishevelled from an encounter with a Dandolo on a Lit à Deux Dossiers, a kind of sofa without a back.
Sosia, pulling Bruno on top of her, noted the smell of cheap tallow soap sighing from his tired sheets.
She looked up at him, noting the smoothness of his cheeks and the curls and the clarity of his eyes and the fullness of his lips.
But Sosia also thought, in that first moment with Bruno, of straw beds rumpled and sour as old nests, curtained beds stately as galleons, dark creaking beds like prison hulks moored at wharves. She thought of a kitchen floor near Rialto, among the egg baskets, and remembered the meat ants marching in and out of the addled eggs. That reminded her of a hectic dawn in a gondola, the rising sun orange as a pigeon’s eye, and the gondolier’s skin salty in her mouth.
She turned to face Bruno, her eyes filmed with memories.
* * *
Bruno was also thinking about eggs.
On his straw pallet, the thin covering was soon untucked. The bald straws pierced their skins. Sosia was Bruno’s first full experience of physical love. He had never concentrated on anything quite so hard in all his life, but even so there was something he could never quite forget amid the mingling of their hair and fingers, toes and elbows, the sheets driven into coils and ridges, the imprints of her teeth on his shoulders and the emptying of the desire inside him, inside her.
The image of an egg was always in Bruno’s mind. Felice had told him once that in Albania, when a child was born, visitors to the new mother and infant bring a white egg, with which they rub the face of the new arrival, saying ‘Pashi bar, Pashi bar’, ‘May it be always white!’ They meant this: that the child’s growing face should never have cause to blush for its actions.
As Sosia slid around him, breathed against his teeth, and rubbed her face against his, the white Albanian egg hung in Bruno’s mind, glowing faintly in the red-black of his squeezed-shut eyelids.
He was only half-awake when Sosia prepared to leave, rising naked from the pallet with no self-consciousness, as if he were not there. His first thought was of his old enemies, the slugs. He feared more than anything that one of them might slime Sosia’s naked foot and make her feel disgusted. When he heard her walk to the window, he covertly scanned the floor for their silver trails. Finding none, he quickly closed his eyes. She looked down at him briefly, seemed satisfied with his comatose state. He knew instinctively that it would be wrong to reach a hand out to her; that this first encounter should end, as it began, without words. He also knew, though not why, that this would not be the last time Sosia came to his bed. So he feigned sleep, watching her dress through lowered lids. He restrained himself from exclaiming when he saw the ‘S’ carved into her back.
But he had not fooled her. She paused, finally, with her hand on the door handle, and asked him in a neutral tone of voice: ‘Do you see Felice Feliciano today?’
He shook his head. He knew it would cause damage to ask why she wished to know, or how she knew Felice, so he gave a brave impression of caring not at all. But he did not wish Sosia to leave with another man’s name on her lips, the echo of that man left hanging in the air, so he said: ‘Shall you feel safe, walking home alone? Shall I accompan
y you?’
She laughed: ‘There’s nothing more dangerous than me in Venice!’
As the door slammed, he whispered to the thrumming wood: ‘No, no, no.’
He sniffed the scent of her saliva on his arm, where she had fastened her teeth in a bruising kiss some time in the course of their lovemaking. He lay back, treasuring each moment of memory, of her long dark eyes closing in on his, her golden skin lambent in the shadows of the afternoon. She had shown him such passion he was sure that she had meant love by it.
* * *
And so Bruno was transformed into a dishonest man. Sosia made him a person of the shadows, a person afraid to be seen. A person who could no longer find contentment, anywhere, for all his pleasures were concentrated in her, and had thereby become compromised and complicated. He accepted Sosia’s apparent valuation of him, and marked himself down to a remnant of his former worth.
He became solitary, for now he lacked confidence to offer his company to friends and colleagues. His altered state, sometimes wretched, sometimes euphoric, was obvious to all. The translucent paleness of his complexion had taken on the desperate sheen of the gallows. Many were the solicitous enquiries, the gentle offers of a shoulder to cry on. Blushing, he waved them away and changed the subject. But he could not bring himself to confide in anyone, not even his oldest friend Morto, and most particularly not the fastidious Felice Feliciano.
Now that he nursed an unclean secret, Bruno suffered a sense of being cast out of his old quotidian world, of losing acquaintanceship, of even fleeting intimacies, as with the bird-seed merchant, slipping away. Exhausted with thoughts of Sosia, he no longer found smiles for them.
Conversely he found that he had a softening of heart stealing over him. He was absurdly vulnerable. Now that he no longer transacted love on a small, gentle scale, he had lost the impermeability that had once stopped him breaking down in tears at the sight of a grieving young widow or a lame beggar. He noticed the profound sadness of ageing waiters and the empty eyes of widowed grandmothers gazing down from fourth-floor garrets. His eyes were drawn to the blackness of unlit windows, profound as the eyeholes of a skull.
The Floating Book Page 6