The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  But they didn’t speak again until Carolina was ten, when she discovered him standing in the hard sun on the side of that same road, glaring down at what seemed to be a tangle of women’s dresses and sticks, embellished here and there by lengths of the same twine she’d seen the gardener use to tie sweet peas to their leafy towers.

  Carolina had been engaged that day in her own explorations. It had recently come to her attention that many of the things adults had told her about the world were not true. Her mother was rarely tired, as she claimed: it was just that she preferred spending her days in her own rooms to speaking with Carolina or her father. This realization led Carolina to begin testing other claims. She unleashed an entire stream of overheard curses at a stand of undeserving daffodils and discovered that her tongue did not, in fact, turn black. She slept with a coin her father had given her under her pillow for a week, then carried it carefully to the lake and threw it in, but a swan boat did not emerge from the rings inside of rings that spread on the dark water, as she had wished.

  As a result, Carolina had decided to test the limits of her more immediate surroundings. She knew that the road led over the hill to the Turri villa, which she had passed a hundred times. But in the opposite direction, the path forked. One branch led to the small town she sometimes visited with her mother to buy books or cloth. The other turned into her father’s forest, but their carriage had never gone down it in Carolina’s memory. From the carriage window, she could only catch a short glimpse of treetops brushing over a shady lane. Then the mysterious road turned sharply and vanished in the woods.

  “Where does it go?” Carolina had asked a few weeks before, holding back the carriage’s thick curtains.

  “Nowhere, darling,” her mother had told her. “It may have gone to the river once. There’s nothing there now.”

  This answer only inflamed Carolina’s suspicions. Carolina’s mother had told her there was nothing in the old gardener’s shed, but on investigation, Carolina had discovered that it was crammed with treasure: jars full of colored glass, brown paper packets decorated with drawings of flowers and vegetables, enough burlap to make a wedding dress, and spiderwebs spun so large they could catch a child.

  Determined to see for herself where the road led, Carolina struck out across her father’s lawn and tramped through the forest that claimed that corner of his property, using a system she had developed for not walking in circles in the woods, a fate she knew often befell less clever travelers. Quite simply, she walked from tree to tree, always choosing one slightly to the east, which was where she judged that the road must run. But despite her new system and some admirable self-control in resisting the blandishments of a number of intriguing flowers that beckoned from beyond her chosen path, she emerged from the brambles still in sight of her own gate.

  Her disappointment was interrupted almost immediately by the sight of Turri and his machine.

  “What does it do?” she called, picking her way through the stubble of yearling trees that had bravely taken root in the parched grass between the road and the forest.

  Turri glanced up at her for a moment and then resumed glaring at the wreckage. “It’s a trap for angels,” he said.

  Before Carolina could decide whether this was a joke, a lie, or some new category, the pile of silk and sticks burst into flames.

  For one long breath, pale blue and gold fire swept over the delicate folds, caressing the cloth without consuming it. Then the sticks began to crack, and the twine charred and curled.

  Carolina leapt onto the pile, stamping madly. After just a few measures of her strange dance, the fire was vanquished. She stood in the ruins of the machine, the ghost of the fire rising as faint smoke around her bare knees, and looked at Turri.

  He looked back at her with the sudden keen interest of a scientist whose specimen has been unwise enough to reveal some extraordinary trait: a bird repeating the name he had mumbled in his sleep, a mouse struggling to rise on two feet, a fish that lights up as the sun drops into the sea.

  Troubled by his gaze, Carolina extracted herself from the wreckage. “I hope I didn’t break anything,” she said, retreating into politeness in this completely unmapped territory.

  Turri laughed.

  Carolina’s eyes narrowed. The inexplicable laughter of adults always filled her with rage.

  At the change in her expression, Turri composed himself immediately. “I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “I wouldn’t dare. You might strike me with lightning.”

  With this, he knelt and began to roll the remains of his experiment into a bundle, as thick as a man and nearly as tall. When he rose to his feet he pulled it with him, propping it upright in the road. The jumble of sticks and fabrics gave the overall effect of a beloved scarecrow, brightly adorned for burial.

  He seemed slightly surprised to discover that Carolina had not disappeared from the scene. “Do I know your name?” he asked.

  “Carolina,” she said.

  “Carolina,” he repeated. Then he tilted his head with all the dignity of one grown man acknowledging a debt to another. “Thank you.”

  Carolina tilted her head in return.

  As Turri turned away, she stepped back into the shade. Nothing broke the silence of the bright afternoon except the crunch of Turri’s boots. A strip of turquoise silk, escaped from the bundle, trailed in the road, raising a thin plume of golden dust behind him.

  Turri, when the time to marry came, had been widely considered an unsuitable husband by the girls his age. For years, he had tormented them with his questions, pranks, and inventions. Most famously, he had trapped a pair of local beauties in the upper reaches of a plane tree for the better part of a day when the primitive pulley elevator they were helping him test failed under the weight of two strapping young men who had hoped to join them in the seclusion of the leaves. As the girls told it, they had only barely survived the ordeal. While Turri worked feverishly to replace the broken boards and repair the twisted mechanism, the lunch hour passed. Now dizzy from hunger, the girls had survived only by catching the wild apples and handkerchief full of cherries their suitors heroically tossed to them in the high branches.

  This was the stuff of legend, but Turri also had a string of lesser crimes to his name. For Loretta Ricci’s fifteenth birthday, he had created strange black candles that burned with green flame. They were the sensation of the evening, until they began to stutter and spark, singeing the hair and dresses of half a dozen young ladies before a resourceful maid drowned the remaining tapers in the punch. He had taught Contessa Santini’s bird to count to one hundred, after which the creature became so proud he refused to sing. Contessa Santini, unable to bear the bird’s constant tally of each second of her life, finally threw the window open and shook the poor thing out of its cage, condemning it to a freedom in which, everyone agreed, its intellectual accomplishments could not be expected to protect it from the wind and the rain. Worse, Turri had no discernible ambition, and beautiful manners that he chose to use only as the spirit moved him, making his frequent social blunders all the more unforgivable.

  But young women’s warm hearts can forgive far more than rude words, and while these were the reasons the girls whispered among themselves or presented tearfully to their parents, the roots of their reluctance to marry Turri sprang from a hundred smaller impressions that the girls themselves could barely name, in part because they were hardly worth mentioning. Sometimes his eyes lit up when speaking with a girl, not at a tender revelation or a witty turn of phrase, but with curiosity about a crystal in her jewelry, or an exotic flower in a nearby vase. His face often remained blank as everyone around him burst into laughter. Most unnerving, he often seemed to hang on a girl’s every word only to reveal under questioning, just moments later, that he hadn’t heard a thing.

  And though he couldn’t seem to hold the thread of conversation in polite society, when a girl, by pure coincidence, stumbled on a subject that was of interest to him, she was lost for the evening. He wa
s capable of ruining an entire dance, talking for hours about salt mines, constellations, metallurgy, lizards, with the innocent confidence of a child convinced that everyone else found the world as strange and fascinating as he did.

  This posed a problem for Turri’s parents, but not one the family was unfamiliar with. The Turri line was known for producing two distinct kinds of men. The majority were careful stewards who had turned the Turri lands into some of the richest in the region through judicious innovation and a remarkable talent for numbers. Turri’s father was a prime specimen of this type: well-respected despite his noticeable shyness, he personally inspected his vast plantings of grain instead of leaving the task in the hands of overseers, and was also responsible for upgrading and expanding the meticulously planned irrigation system his grandfather had introduced to the property half a century before.

  But in a memorable minority of Turri men, this bent toward innovation produced full-blown dreamers of the very worst sort: those with the energy, resources, and intellect to inflict their fancies on the rest of the world. These were the Turri ancestors who had cut a quarter mile of terraces into the hill the Turri home stood on, leading all the way down to the river at its foot, and who, in a later generation, had designed the most elaborate waterworks the area had ever seen, not to provide for any crops, but to draw water from the river up to the top of the hill, so it could cascade down the terraces to the river again. These dreamers tore up fields of wheat to plant saffron or rubber trees, stabled their horses side by side with peacocks and llamas, and even convinced one of Carolina’s patient forebears to allow apples, plums, and even a spray of roses to be grafted into the branches of his innocent lemon trees. But Turri, his father’s only child, had the worst case of this malady the Turri line had ever produced, and the nearby families could see it.

  So his parents were forced to strike a bargain. Like Turri, Sophia Conti came from a good home, and she was undeniably pretty. But her mother had been an invalid since Sophia was a child, and there was no denying that she had grown up wild. Even before the boys her age paid her any mind, she preferred the company of men, hovering behind her father’s chair as he and his friends argued the merits of their favorite horses or shouted about politics. Although her father ignored her caresses and the childish thoughts she whispered to him, she discovered that her pretty smile quickly won her the affection of many of the other men, who petted her when she stopped at their knee. By the time she blossomed into womanhood, she was well acquainted with the mind of a man and how to manage it. At just fourteen, she was rumored to be the reason for Regina Mancini’s broken engagement, when the Mancini family could no longer turn a blind eye to the flagrant public attentions Regina’s fiancé paid Sophia. There was no way for Sophia to emerge from the scandal unscathed. To marry the man would have been an admission that she had encouraged his defection from Regina. But her refusal of his desperate entreaties branded her, even at that tender age, as a dangerous creature, lacking the natural respect a young woman should hold for the sacred bond of marriage.

  Not that Sophia made any attempts to correct this impression. If anything, her command over men grew more complete after the incident. They thronged her at parties and scuffled when they met at her door to pay their respects. At any given time, half a dozen of them claimed to be her favorite, presenting various trinkets as proof of her devotion: a lace handkerchief, a crushed flower, black ribbon. But twice as many stories also circulated about her indiscretions. She disappeared with men onto rooftops and into closets. She emerged from the trees with them, her jewelry askew. By the time she was seventeen, she had received nine sincere proposals, but none of them had survived the scrutiny of the families of the young men in question.

  Completely unsuited for each other, Turri and Sophia were also each other’s only hope for a suitable match within their small circle. Their union was practical and abrupt: they married within weeks of their fathers’ negotiations, when Turri was twenty-five and Sophia twenty. Her child, Antonio, was born less than a year later, and the question of whether he was also Turri’s son was widely, and almost openly, debated.

  But there was no question of Turri’s devotion to the boy. Even before the child was old enough to walk, neighbors were surprised to discover Turri carrying him on his shoulders along the side of the road or tramping down the riverbank, expounding seriously on new thinking on theology or modern controversies about the stars.

  “He wanted to bring Antonio,” Sophia joked bitterly at a party the year after her son’s birth. “But he has only taught him Latin yet, not how to dance.”

  Unsurprisingly, when Antonio did begin to speak, he was a strange child. His first word was pomegranate; his second, telescope; and to his mother’s chagrin, he didn’t speak her name until months after he began to say Papa, a word he applied indiscriminately to Turri, his nurse, the gardener, the groom and stable boy, as well as the huge flocks of crows that settled from time to time on the lawns that surrounded the Turri villa.

  Carolina was sixteen and Turri had been married for less than a year when she emerged from her lake house on a cold spring morning to discover him standing at the water’s edge. His back was to her. On the lake, clouds of the mist that rose from the water in the night towered over his head.

  Barefoot on the top step, Carolina pulled the velvet blanket closer around her shoulders. The door behind her clattered shut.

  Turri twirled, eyes blazing.

  The sight of her seemed to throw him off balance. He staggered a few steps on the dewy grass before he regained his footing. When he did, he was laughing.

  “I thought you were a bear,” he said. “My plan was to smash your nose with that rock.” He pointed to a small gray stone on the bank, worn smooth and forgotten by the river.

  “It’s not very big,” Carolina said doubtfully.

  “Bears have extremely sensitive noses,” Turri told her. “It’s your one weakness. My other guess was that you were a gigantic insect. On some southern islands they have butterflies the size of eagles.”

  “But this is Italy,” Carolina said.

  “I had forgotten that,” said Turri. “I was trying to think how to capture you without destroying your wings.”

  “But where would you keep a creature that size?”

  “In my laboratory,” Turri said without hesitation. “In a frame stretched with a mosquito net, hung from the ceiling.”

  Carolina considered this for a moment. Then she hit on another problem. “What do butterflies eat?” she asked.

  “It would never come to that,” Turri said. “I’d build the frame and put you in it. You’d turn around once and flap your wings unhappily, and I’d climb right back up, give you my arm for a perch, and carry you to the window to set you free.”

  Carolina’s stomach dropped as she imagined the long fall from the top story of the Turri house, before her phantom wings caught her and carried her up.

  Turri shrugged. “But chances are there’s no such thing. You can’t believe everything you read. The old drunks who first surveyed America claimed the lakes in Virginia were full of mermaids.”

  As he said this, he glanced at her lake with something suspiciously like hope. The white mist brooded over the water, impenetrable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said when he looked back. “I’ve intruded.” The flame of his story extinguished, he suddenly seemed much younger to Carolina. His face was pale, his eyes unnaturally bright, the skin below them blue, like a man who hasn’t slept all night. A wave of pity rolled through her.

  “My father says it’s impossible for a neighbor to intrude,” she said gently.

  Turri took in the curves of her body and the angles of her elbows under the velvet with something more than the desire she had begun to recognize in the eyes of the older boys. He followed the lines of her figure as if they obscured a secret, some meaning inscribed by an unseen hand, if he could only read it. Then his gaze returned to her eyes.

  Carolina lowered them in conf
usion.

  “That’s very kind of you,” he said.

  Turri took her at her word. From that day, he was a regular visitor to the lake. Even when their paths didn’t cross, he left traces. Most often, she found his footprints in the mud on the banks, but some days she arrived in the first hours of the morning to find coals still orange in the ash of her fireplace. Sometimes he had rearranged this or that: he might lay several pens in a neat row on her desk, all their sharp nibs pointing west, or push a china doll into the arms of a glass monkey, so that they seemed to dance. Now and then they met when Turri wandered out on a twilight walk, or surprised her sleeping in her boat as it drifted on the black water through a humid afternoon.

  He was curious about everything, and his curiosity was flattering. Carolina had discovered already that people rarely wanted answers to the questions they asked, but eventually she realized that, on the subjects that interested him, Turri would listen almost indefinitely, interrupting only to ask another question. He wanted to know about lemons: how long the blossoms held to the branch; the time it took a bud to grow to fruit; any strange shapes the fruit might take; and whether she had seen these oddities or just heard of them. He was curious about the fish and the birds, which were already half tame because of Carolina’s habit of carrying a napkin full of bread with her to scatter when she arrived. The fish in particular were beggars. Whenever they caught sight of a human shadow on the water, they crowded together at the boat landing and waited for bread to fall from the sky.