by Rose Tremain
‘And your clock is broken, Signorina?’ asked Salvatore. He said this with great tenderness. His fear of the young woman had left him and only his longing remained.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it says twenty-seven minutes past one. It’s paused there. The god still holds up the dial proudly, so it’s possible that either he’s showing me the time of the end of the world or else he hasn’t noticed that his world has stopped. What do you think?’
Salvatore found much of this difficult to understand. He recognised a way of talking somewhat different from that of many young women, a kind of self-mockery in the speech, which he found seductive and he knew that she had asked him a question, but he really hadn’t the least idea how to answer it. She looked at him expectantly for a moment, then smiled and hurried on: ‘Take no notice of me! My mind is like a cloud, my father says, always drifting. And I expect it’s because of my drifting mind that I’ve done what I’ve done. But it has upset me so much.’
‘What have you done?’ asked Salvatore, moving a step nearer to the young woman and snatching at the air with his nostrils to inhale more deeply a sweet perfume, which was either the smell of her body or the smell of the roses in her hat or a mingling of the two. She lowered her eyes. ‘I’ve lost the winder key,’ she said. ‘I’ve ransacked the house for it. I’ve looked inside the grand piano – everywhere . . .’
Salvatore’s eyes now rested on her small gloved hand holding up the fan. He wanted to take the hand and hold it against his face.
‘. . . in every one of my shoes . . . in my father’s pockets . . . under my bed . . .’
‘But it has departed?’
‘I believe it must be there, in the house, but no one can see it. There are certain things, of course, that are there and cannot be seen, but a winder key isn’t usually one of them, is it? You come from Italy, I suppose?’
‘Yes.’
‘Italy is one of countless places that I’ve never seen, despite the fact that they exist and are there. But I have no doubt that Italy is more beautiful than almost anywhere on earth. Is it?’
Salvatore thought: I would like to go up into the sky with her, in a hot-air balloon, and float down on Piedmont, onto my parents’ roof . . .
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘because I do not know the earth.’
At this moment, a church clock struck the hour of four and the young woman hurried to the door, saying that because her ‘dear Dutch clock’ had stopped she’d lost the race with time and was late for all her social engagements. She said she would come back the following day, with her servant to carry the clock, and Salvatore would manufacture a new key, adding before she left: ‘Then all will be well again.’ And after this, she was gone, adjusting her hat as she moved away down the street.
Salvatore sat down. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. He knew beyond any possible doubt – and indeed this knowledge seemed to be the only thing that was truly his since his arrival in England – that the young woman with the fan was his future. ‘I shall marry her or die,’ he said aloud.
She didn’t return the next day as promised.
Salvatore had risen early, dressed himself with care, polished the glass of the engraving of Galileo Galilei and waited, but there was no sign of her.
After six days of waiting – during which he went out several times a day and walked up and down the street, searching among the heads of the people for the white roses of her hat – Salvatore told himself that he had misunderstood her. His grasp of English was still shaky, after all. She had not said ‘tomorrow’, she had said ‘this time next week’. And he felt relieved and calmed.
So certain was Salvatore that she would come on this new tomorrow, that again he took extra care with his appearance, dusted the sandglasses and bought lilies from a flower seller to scent the green world of his workshop.
That same morning, he received a letter from his father. ‘My dear son,’ wrote Roberto Cavalli, ‘by leaving the family, you have yourself tampered with time and continuity. Now, your mother and I feel cheated of our rightful futures and to console herself my beloved Magnifica is eating without ceasing and could die of this terrible habit, while I have no appetite for anything at all . . .’
Salvatore wanted to write back at once to say that, when his future arrived, when – through his new idea of a marriage – he was fully able to inhabit his new life, then he would return to Piedmont, defying the King’s edict by becoming responsible for the repairing of time, a skill for which he had now discovered himself well suited. But he didn’t write. He sat at his workbench, waiting.
‘Today, she will come,’ he told himself, as the hours succeeded one another faster and faster. ‘Today, she will come.’
Night came, that was all. And then another tomorrow and another.
Salvatore told himself: ‘You are so stupid! Why didn’t you ask for her name? Then you could find her. You could pay a respectful call, informing her that you’d come to collect the Huygens clock, to save her and her servant the trouble of the expedition. It would be perfectly proper. And then the key that you would make for her! What a key! Just to put it into the heart of the mechanism would be to experience a deep frisson of pleasure. And then to turn it! To set the escapement in motion! To know that time was beginning again . . .’ Salvatore knew that his thoughts were carrying him away, but he also believed that if he could only have the clock in his possession he could win the heart of the woman he now thought of as his future beloved.
He began work on designs for keys. Their heads had different emblems: a lyre, a rose, a pair of folded wings. He neglected other work to perfect them. And then, in the middle of the rose design, a realisation arrived in his mind like a canker in the flower: she has found the original key!
It was so simple, so obvious. She had opened the mahogany drawer where she kept her fans and there it lay. And so she had rewound the clock, set the pointers at the right time and given the matter no further thought. She would never come into his shop again. She was lost.
Salvatore put away his designs. He felt sick and sweat began to creep over his head. He remembered his father’s letter and its terrible last sentence: ‘I have no appetite for anything at all . . .’
III
A feebleness of spirit overtook Salvatore from this moment. It was as if the King’s edict had reached out to him, far away as he was, and annihilated him.
On the shop door, he put up a sign: Repair suspended owing to illness. From his bedroom window he watched the London summer glare at him and depart. He heard men rioting in the street below. They were shouting about the price of bread. Salvatore felt indifferent towards the price of anything.
In his more optimistic moments, he decided his extreme weakness was due only to exhaustion, to the difficulties he had had to endure since his arrival in London and his struggles with language. On other days, he felt certain that this new disappointment had dealt him a fatal blow. He noticed that his hair was starting to fall out. At twenty-seven, he hadn’t expected this, just as he hadn’t predicted that time could be wiped from the calendar. The capriciousness of the world was too much for the individual. However hard he fought to order his life, the random and the unforeseen lay in wait for him always.
He remained in his bed and didn’t move. He ate nothing. He began to be prey to visions. He saw his lost beloved come into his room, naked except for her fan, which she held in front of her private parts. Then he woke one morning to the sound of someone eating. He saw his mother, sitting at his night table, spooning veal stew into a mouth that was much more fleshy than it had been, and he saw that all her flesh had magnified itself so grossly that her body almost filled the small room. He wanted to ask her why she had let this happen to her, but before he could frame the question, she said with her mouth full: ‘It’s my name. Magnifica. Why aren’t you quicker to understand things?’
Salvatore tried to get out of bed. He wanted to lay his head in her enormous lap and ask her to forgive him. As he struggled towards
her, he fainted and woke up lying on his floor, quite alone.
After this, he tried to eat. He nibbled at biscuits, felt deafened by the sound of them being broken against his teeth.
He put some pomade on his thinning hair. His scalp felt frozen, but he found that, under this ice, new thoughts were beginning to surface in his exhausted mind. The successful man, he decided, the man capable of a happy life, defies the random by his ability to foresee what is going to happen. He doesn’t – as I have tried to do – feebly repair the past; his mind is attuned to what will become necessary. He acts in advance to prevent (as far as is humanly possible) the random from occurring. Such a man would have foreseen the possibility of the rediscovery of his beloved’s winder key and asked discreetly for her name and address long before that possibility became a fact. Such a man, aware of the vanity of princes, would have predicted that the King of Piedmont was likely to attempt some wanton comedy with time and schooled himself as to how best to come to terms with it, so that he didn’t have to feel as if his life had been cancelled. The random will still, of course, occur, but the damage caused to a life by the unforeseen will be less severe.
If only, if only, thought Salvatore, I were descended from a line of such men – men who possessed some cunning, not merely with the moment-by-moment measurement of the present, but also with the computation of the future – then I wouldn’t be lying in this room in mourning for my lost love; I would be holding in my hands a Dutch clock. I would be working every hour of the day and night to make myself worthy of the woman I’ve chosen as my bride and who would one day be a bridge to Piedmont and the past. I would be happy.
The clarity of these thoughts consoled Salvatore for a time and then began to torment him. For why hadn’t he had them sooner? They were no use to him now. They could only tantalise him with what might have been and now never would be.
He moved his bed. He put it under the window, so that he had a view of the street. He thought it would cheer him to watch the people hurrying by, each to his or her personal labyrinth of the unforeseen. He stared at the faces, so intent upon some destination, so certain of arrival. But instead of being cheered, Salvatore felt more and more sorrowful and ill. He experienced spasms of violent hiccups that hurt and exhausted him. After one of these, he had a vision of a fiery balloon floating down on London and so enthralled by this was he (was it there? was it not there except in his mind?) that he stopped looking at the street and began the habit of watching the sky.
The sky in England, he soon realised, was the most changeful and unpredictable thing of all. In Piedmont, a day that began fair stayed fair, or, if it didn’t, the clouds gathered slowly in an orderly mass like an army and then marched in line towards the sun. Here, a morning could be fine for half an hour and then the sky could darken to night and a drenching rain start to fall and the temperature drop by several degrees. The poor English, thought Salvatore, they never know what’s going to happen next in the sky. No wonder they’re a brawling nation. They’re venting a national rage against the utterly unfaithful seasons.
He became preoccupied with the weather. It was autumn now – two months since he had found and lost his beloved – and the sky was in a state of perpetual movement. He remembered sunny October evenings in Piedmont, sitting under a mulberry tree in Magnifica’s garden when not a leaf moved and the day proceeded so calmly towards the night that it disturbed no one and no one noticed it go until it was gone. Here, the October dusk came flying in like a poltergeist, setting the shop signs swinging, rustling the leaves, sending smoke billowing back down the chimney in Salvatore’s room, where he still lay in an enfeebled and pitiful state, his pillow darkened by his falling hair. With his mind swinging like a pendulum between the distant past in Piedmont (a past of long duration until it was obliterated by an external hand) and the recent past of his meeting with the only woman in his life who had ever truly moved him (a past of fleeting duration and obliterated by his own inadequacy), he felt himself begin to lose hold of earthly things. It was as if the air itself were snatching at him and wouldn’t rest until it had whirled him up into the sky.
Some part of him, however, resisted. It refuted insanity, rebelled at the idea. It forced him to get out of bed, to shave his face, to comb his thinning hair. It dressed him in a black coat and sent him downstairs into the shop, where the dust was thick on every surface and now clogged the workings of the unfinished watches that still sat in the window.
Salvatore stared at all this. Pushed under his door were notes from customers demanding the return of their unmended goods, the notes themselves curled and discoloured already by the passage of all the days since they’d been delivered.
Everything Salvatore could see appeared futile to him. He wanted nothing more to do with the reparation of time. His sign (he’d been so pleased with the wording on the sign, so proud of the little conceit!) now seemed to him a particularly stupid thing. He wished the wind had blown it down. Time could not be repaired. A sublime moment came and went and that was all. He was in a useless profession.
He ate a little food. He thought that to eat might help anchor him to the earth. All he had were some dried plums, but the taste of them was sweet and reviving.
To still his mind, he now fought to glimpse some small particle of his future. What in this world, he asked himself, can I do that will console me with its usefulness? What is there that is not futile?
He took his box of plums and went and sat by the mantel and looked up at Galileo. He tried to remember what the great man had done in his hours of adversity, in the last years of his life, when he was being overtaken by a terrible event beyond his control – his blindness. He had worked, with his son Vincenzo, on the pendulum-drive escapement. Salvatore imagined drawings discarded, half finished, covering his desk and Galileo’s milky eyes so near the paper that he could use his long nose as a paperweight. He had fought his blindness to the last day and just three months before his death had been experimenting with mercury – a substance as volatile as time itself.
Salvatore ate another plum. He could feel his warm blood flowing in and out of his heart. Why mercury? What was Galileo doing – at terrible risk to himself because of his eyesight – with mercury?
The plums (a gift from a lawyer with a broken travelling clock) had some magical property. They seemed to revive in Salvatore a worm of optimism. They and Galileo’s example. He sat there smiling, his mind tuned once more to answer its own questions.
He said out loud to the dusty shop: ‘Galileo was working, in his mercury experiments, with Evangelista Torricelli. Three years later, Evangelista Torricelli designed the first barometer. The barometer remains one of the few scientific devices man has perfected that tell what is going to happen, not what is or what has been.’
At this point, Salvatore got up and took the engraving of Galileo from the wall and held it against his thin chest. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is where a possible future might lie, then – with the barometer.’
IV
After his eating of the plums, Salvatore decided that, as soon as he was strong enough, he would go and talk to one of the numerous barometer-makers, whose premises he had often passed in his neighbourhood. Most of them had Italian names, but, afraid perhaps to discover that he had not been uniquely bold in coming to London, that London was in fact quite densely populated by refugees from Napoleon’s wars, he had never visited any of them.
He eventually chose a shop in High Holborn. In the small window hung several wheel barometers. They were well-made pieces, but they were not the finest examples he’d seen. They demonstrated good craftsmanship rather than artistic delicacy and therefore mirrored Salvatore’s assessment of his own skills. The name engraved on these instruments and over the door of the shop was FANTINO, E.
Salvatore entered the premises nervously. He hadn’t worked out quite what he was going to say and he still looked pale and thin. He feared he would be mistaken for a student or a poet.
The interior of FANTINO
, E. was dark. It smelled consolingly of resin and was warm. Salvatore felt as if he’d arrived in a place that he’d known long ago but had never had the words to describe.
A small, wiry man, wearing very thick spectacles, came out of an inner room. He stood at a tilted angle, peering at Salvatore. He said: ‘I was about to say “good morning”, sir, but I realise it may already be afternoon. When one is hard at work, one is apt to lose all sense of time.’
Salvatore nodded and gave the man an awkward smile. ‘E vero, Signore,’ he said. ‘Si. E molto vero.’
‘Ah!’ said the tilted man, ‘Italian! You are Italian!’ And Salvatore noticed that a look of inexpressible joy passed over his small face.
‘Si,’ said Salvatore. ‘And I have the honour, perhaps, to talk to Signor Fantino?’
‘Oh no. No, I’m afraid not. I am Signor Fantino’s partner in business, Mr Edwin Sydney. Signor Fantino is at present away, in Switzerland. But how may I be of assistance to you? We are always very glad to welcome your countrymen in our premises.’
The darkness and warmth of the shop, together with the friendly manner of Mr Sydney, gave Salvatore courage. He began at once to reconstruct, for the English partner of FANTINO, E., the tortuous excursions with time that had brought him to the barometer-maker’s door. And the story, though long, seemed to enrapture the little Englishman. He stood with his eyes fixed on Salvatore’s face, nodding, clasping his hands at intervals, as if filled with excitement. The tilt of his body became more and more profound and, at the point in Salvatore’s narrative where he described the sudden entry into his memory of the name Evangelista Torricelli, Salvatore was afraid Mr Sydney was going to fall sideways onto the floor, just as the Tower of Pisa would one day.