The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  In mid-December a deep freeze set in, closing the last small patch of open water where the black ducks had swum melancholy circles as the rest of the lake was lost to them. When the cold hadn’t broken after a week, Turri began to harvest ice from the edges of the lake just beyond the reeds, sawing out over a thousand brick-sized blocks to build a castle on the heart of the lake: four modest walls with a pair of turrets facing the small house on shore. The day before he completed it, the weather changed. The temperature climbed so high it felt like spring, and in the forest it rained all morning as ice melted from the grateful branches and dropped down into the thick mud below. The cloudy walls of the castle began to shine as the scuffs of Turri’s saw melted away. All morning, he fought a losing battle with the sun, packing wet snow around the foundation and arranging and rearranging insufficient groups of tarps. But when the thick layer of ice that covered the whole lake began to creak and moan in the early afternoon, Carolina came out of her house and insisted that he come back to shore. Less than an hour later, the entire structure crashed through into the frigid water, resurfacing as a jumble of jagged icebergs. When night fell, the bobbing chunks of ice froze into a spiky wound that marked the smooth surface for the rest of the winter.

  Christmas Day, Carolina made her way to the lake through the new fall of powdery snow on the forest floor, clutching a box of marzipan and oranges. When she arrived at her house, she could see the unsteady light of a fire within already casting blue shadows on the snow outside. Turri was waiting with his overcoat still on, although he’d clearly been there for so long that the bright color that cold always called up in his face had faded away. On the table beside him stood a small elephant in blue enamel, about as tall as Carolina’s thumb, its legs joined to its body at strange angles. A wheel like a captain might use to guide a ship protruded from the creature’s right side.

  Carolina set her box down on the desk and lifted the top to reveal the hand-painted pastries and oranges.

  “Would you like a piece?” she said.

  Turri shook his head. “I just lost a marzipan- eating contest with Antonio,” he told her.

  Carolina selected a bunch of sugar-coated grapes for herself and closed the box.

  “I don’t know why elephants always seem so sad,” she said, looking at the little figure.

  “Wind it up,” Turri said.

  Carolina set the creature on her palm and lifted it to her face so that they could see eye to eye.

  “The wheel,” Turri said. “You turn it.”

  Carolina twisted the wheel. Slowly, the enameled feet began to move. First both right legs took a step, then both the left.

  Turri broke into a proud grin. “Put it on the table,” he said. “Watch it!”

  Carolina set the toy down carefully on the desk. It marched gamely over an entire field of writing paper and came to a stop just before the marzipan box, regarding it with all the wonder and respect with which an explorer might confront a new mountain.

  “I made it for you,” Turri said with barely contained excitement.

  “Thank you,” Carolina said, gazing down at the gift.

  Turri took her hand.

  Surprised, Carolina looked at him.

  “You know that I love you,” he said.

  The words rang in her mind like an alarm bell.

  “I know,” she said, and took her hand away.

  The following spring, when Carolina was seventeen, Pietro marked his twenty-fourth birthday, which meant that he stood just one year shy of the age of majority his father had stipulated in his will. But for Pietro to receive full control of his lands and property, his father had also dictated that he should be married. Pietro confronted this requirement with his customary goodwill. “I guess the old man knew what was best for me!” he said at party after party, shrugging with a mixture of mischief and ruefulness that made the girls shiver with hope and their parents nod in approval.

  Carolina received this news with a terror so sweet she could barely distinguish it from thrill. It was impossible that he should choose her, but: he must choose somebody. Like a child with a lottery ticket, she understood the slimness of her chance, but until another name was called, while her paper ticket melted in her damp hand, she had just as much right to dream of stepping up to receive the prize as anyone. Her fantasies focused and became simple. She returned the pirates and invisible ink of her youthful dreams to the prop boxes in her mind, and began to construct realistic prayers: he might find her on the road during a cloudburst and give her a ride home. He might catch her glance across a crowded room, and smile. These new dreams were so modest that they never lasted any longer than a moment. Carolina never knew what might happen after she smiled back, or he lifted her onto his mare.

  Nobody, including Carolina and perhaps Pietro himself, ever knew why he began to single her out halfway through that season. Her mother was a remarkable beauty, which is what had led Carolina’s father to pick her from the crowd of local girls on his two-week holiday to a seaside town so many years ago. Carolina, though slightly taller than her mother, had inherited her thick dark hair, small waist, and pale, perfect face. But her eyes were her father’s, dark under a strong brow, rather than her mother’s delicate blue. The effect was so compelling that it struck many boys speechless and made the rest want to torment her in revenge, a project they embarked on so early in her memory that she never even thought to resent their taunts, but simply navigated them as she would any feature of her small landscape: a river to be crossed, or a hole to step around.

  But her beauty alone was not sufficient to explain Pietro’s interest. There were other beautiful girls who were not nearly as strange or difficult. They had gold hair as smooth as coiled wheat, rounder figures, pale hands that had not grown chapped from plucking at things in the forest. And that spring, every charm was on display, every gem and flower arranged to capture Pietro’s heart. Carolina could hardly have won it by outshining them.

  In fact, it might have been her terror that originally caught his attention.

  In early June, after a blur of spring parties during which nobody, including those who considered themselves his closest friends, was able to penetrate the mystery of Pietro’s intentions, Carolina turned her head as she walked up the stairs to the Ricci ballroom and found Pietro on the step beside her. When she had seen him last, he was halfway across the great hall below, where the servants had constructed a fragile canopy of twine from which a thousand votive candles dangled in colored glasses just above the heads of the guests. Carolina wasn’t actually hoping to dance: during all of the dozen parties since the season opened, Pietro hadn’t asked her once, and with the fierce, foolish loyalty of first love, she had turned away all other requests. Her plan was to stop on the landing and look down through the lights as everyone else looked up at them, something like the way God must peer down at the earth through the stars.

  But before she reached the landing, Pietro had bounded up the stairs behind her, two at a time. He wasn’t coming after her—he made that clear enough by leaping another two steps past her before he halted mid-stride, perhaps distracted from his goal by her pretty face.

  “Carolina!” he said.

  Carolina was always somewhat bewildered when confronted with Pietro in the flesh, who spoke and acted so differently than the Pietro of her daydreams. In this emergency, she could only stare back at him, thrilled but speechless.

  Pietro raised his eyebrows. “They are playing a monferrina later,” he said. “You will save it for me?” He grinned, certain that he was offering a gift that would please them both.

  Fear froze Carolina’s hands to fists in the folds of her dress. The monferrina was a complicated courting dance, new to their valley that year, and she still didn’t know it. There was no way she could dance one as Pietro’s partner, with all eyes on her. She looked down at the blue carpet, then glanced over the marble balustrade at the canopy of flames in their colored glass. “No, thank you,” she said.

&nbs
p; Pietro’s grin widened. This was a tactic he was familiar with, and easily enough disposed of. He laid a hand on his chest, mocking real agony. “But you will break my heart!” he said.

  His refusal to let her go with grace woke anger in Carolina, warm enough to melt the fear that froze her fingers. She gathered her skirts and climbed the next step. “I don’t think so,” she said, and swept past him.

  At the top of the stairs, she hesitated. She had arrived at a long balcony that overlooked the grand staircase and the hall below. Directly in front of her, several sets of doors opened into the ballroom. To her right, at the far end of the balcony, was a window at least three times her height, turned mirror by the night. At the other end of the balcony, to her left, was a door. She hurried toward it, passing through the few guests scattered along the way without a glance or a greeting. The knob turned easily under her hand. The room inside was completely dark, except for faint traces of stars distorted by towering windows.

  Turri laughed.

  His shape pulled itself free from the mass of shadows below the nearest window. A dark volume waved in his hand.

  “I’m reading about steam engines by moonlight,” he said. “I can only make out about half of it, so it’s become a kind of experiment. Everything I can’t see, I have to invent.”

  Comforted by his voice, Carolina took a few steps into the darkness.

  “Be careful,” he said. “I banged my shins on half a dozen end tables on my way over here.”

  She paused in the dark and reached out. Her hands described the diameter of an awkward half circle but found nothing.

  “Actually, there are only two tables,” Turri amended. “And then a statue of a girl, presented among the other furniture on a low stand instead of a pedestal, so that an unsuspecting man might find himself suddenly face-to-face with her.”

  As Carolina’s eyes adjusted to the low light, tall shelves began to emerge between the windows. She could pick out the shapes of two tables nearby, but no white stone glimmered in the gloom.

  “Really?” she said.

  “You don’t see her?” he asked.

  A knock sounded on the door.

  Carefully, Carolina turned in the dark. The knock sounded again.

  She pulled the door open. A narrow triangle of yellow light split the room. Pietro stood outside, his hands clasped behind him like an unhappy child. “Carolina!” he exclaimed, with all the emotion of a shipwrecked sailor who could scarcely believe that his rescuers had arrived. Then he paused, trying to read her face. After a moment, he gave up and plunged on.

  “They have sent some of the musicians to the garden with lanterns,” he said. “Would you care to join me there?”

  Behind Carolina, a book closed in the darkness. Carolina glanced back, but Turri remained silent, his shadow dissolved among the rest.

  Pietro shuffled uncertainly, all his brashness forgotten.

  For the first time, she pitied him.

  “Thank you,” she said, and took his arm.

  Their conversation that evening was of no consequence. Pietro misidentified several constellations and praised the quality of the wine, speaking with unnatural stiffness, as if struggling to remember a lesson a tutor had tried to teach him years ago, when he hadn’t seen any reason yet to learn it. Carolina began to breathe almost naturally after the first several quartets. By the end of the evening, she had confided to him that she wasn’t convinced that there really were constellations: every time she looked at the sky, it seemed to have changed slightly from the last time, although she could never pick out exactly which of the thousands of lights had shifted, to prove her point. “Everyone says the stars are fixed,” she told him. “But no one ever says what holds them there.”

  “But how could we know that?” Pietro asked somewhat plaintively.

  As the evening wore on, they were interrupted several times by the greetings of his friends, as well as a steady stream of young ladies who approached their garden bench and spoke to Pietro as if he were the only one sitting there. But Pietro didn’t leave Carolina’s side. Finally the faint clatter of departing carriages began to drift over the garden wall. The musicians played their final piece, collected their instruments, and departed after a minor scuffle when the cello ran aground in the dark on a bed of lilies.

  “Carolina,” Pietro said. His tone was urgent, the prelude to a confession or an announcement. But when she turned to him, he seemed to be looking to her for some answer. Confused, she dropped her gaze.

  “It’s so late,” she said. “They’ll think we’ve been captured by gypsies.”

  This was a joke, but Pietro shook his head earnestly. “They could never take you from me,” he promised.

  He rose and offered her his arm. Carolina stood to take it, then let him lead her across the garden to the house, concentrating with all her might on the difficult task of walking and breathing at the same time.

  The following week, Pietro managed to coax Carolina onto the dance floor for a string of more familiar dances, and the other girls ceased to greet her in the halls, as if she had turned invisible. A few days later, Pietro sent a servant to Carolina’s home with an enormous bundle of roses that the old man asserted Pietro had cut from the garden himself, a claim borne out by the fact that the massive jumble of thorns included what seemed to be several entire rosebushes, lopped off just above the root. Pietro would be honored, the old man added, if Carolina would allow him the pleasure of paying her a visit.

  This was unprecedented.

  From time to time, Pietro had seemed to have favorites among the local girls, picking one as his partner for a long string of dances, or even seeking a particular young lady out over the course of several events before he lost interest. He was able to do this with impunity because he never embarrassed the girls or their families by taking even the smallest steps into the realm of formal courtship: afternoon visits or family dinners. Carolina was the first girl in the valley to receive this attention.

  Her father, a sporadic but deeply sentimental gardener, was shocked by the brutalization of Pietro’s rosebushes and unimpressed with his request to see Carolina.

  “I feel like I ought to send these outside and have them planted again,” he said, glowering down at the heap of branches and blossoms that trembled on their hall table.

  “No, no!” Carolina gasped. She thrust her hands among the red-green leaves, choked off a cry as thorns dug into her palms and fingers, and drew them back.

  At the open door, the old man waited in the strong noon light.

  “Tomorrow?” Carolina asked, pleading.

  Her father shook his head at the tangle of roses. Then he nodded.

  With the racing heart and finely tuned bravado of a young queen addressing her subjects for the first time, Carolina turned to the old man. “He may come tomorrow,” she told him.

  Lemon trees were Carolina’s father’s inheritance, but his love for them was real: as a boy, he had insisted that the gardener plant half a dozen lemon saplings in the family garden so that when he was a man he would not have to walk all the way down to the groves to pick a flower or a piece of fruit. These young trees now shaded the whole Fantoni garden. Their gardener constantly complained that he was the only man in the valley asked to coax flowers from their beds each year without the help of sunlight, to which Carolina’s father invariably replied that great obstacles were the tutors of great men.

  The day of Pietro’s first visit, spring’s blossoms had fallen from the lemon tree branches, but their leaves still glowed like new growth, not yet touched by the heat that would darken them to evergreen. Carolina sat beneath them breathless but perfectly still, ready to believe anything. If it was true, as his note claimed, that Pietro would arrive at any moment to pass an hour with her in the garden, then any number of her other most outlandish fantasies were possible as well. The sky might suddenly roll up as the priest sometimes threatened, revealing the other world that men could only glimpse now in shadows and mirages, a wo
rld Carolina had suspected the existence of long before her haphazard introduction to theology because of an intermittent but deeply felt sense that even the most solid things lacked real weight, and that, if she only knew the trick, it would be a simple thing to see through them.

  The shadows on the new grass wavered, but didn’t give way.

  “Carolina?” Pietro’s voice was as unfamiliar as a stranger’s.

  Carolina froze like a creature startled in the forest. Before her reason really returned, Pietro had spotted her through the trees. He strode toward her, grinning.

  “Your mother said I would find you here,” he called, pushing through the young branches. Then he stood over her, so handsome that she simply stared back up at him, all her thoughts vanquished.

  “She says she can’t keep you in the house, summer or winter,” Pietro teased.