“I like the lake and the garden,” Carolina told him, listening to herself speak with the same curiosity with which she might eavesdrop on a couple whispering beside her at a dance, and with the same lack of certainty about what she might say next.
Pietro sat down beside her on the bench. He studied her face carefully for a moment. Then he took her hand. The warmth of it surprised her, as it had the first time they danced, when she had also been surprised to realize that, like other men, he needed to breathe. He smiled. “I thought of you all night,” he told her. “I didn’t fall asleep until dawn, and when I woke up I came straight here.”
“Sometimes I can’t sleep,” Carolina agreed.
“But I can always sleep,” Pietro said eagerly, and proceeded to tell her the story of a raucous brawl during which his friends had turned a chair to kindling and shattered two windows and one of their noses while he slept like a child on a couch in the center of the melee. When she smiled at this, he launched into another, apparently following the theme of brawls, in which a friend of his had taken a wild shot at another and accidentally killed a horse outside in the street, a fact that they discovered only hours later, when they stepped outside to find the poor beast lying dead in the rain.
Over the next week, he told her any number of stories and secrets. The stories he always told as if he were speaking to a small crowd, even when Carolina was the only one there: his voice a little too loud, his gestures a little too broad, glancing away from her face from time to time as if trying to catch another pair of eyes. Some of these stories she knew already, since they had long since passed into local legend: the Rossi fire, the marzipan feasts, the night he had hung Ricardo Bianchi, hog-tied, from the cleft of a fig tree.
The story of his outlandish grief over his mother’s death was also well traveled in the valley: instead of throwing the handful of petals onto his mother’s casket as he had been instructed, the five-year-old Pietro had leapt into the grave with her, and when Pietro refused to take the many hands that were held out to pull him back up, a groom had been forced to climb down and retrieve him. Every step the boy or the man had taken in the course of the struggle had resounded with a horrible echo on the wooden box, a sound nobody in attendance had yet forgotten. But now Pietro confessed to Carolina that his grief hadn’t left him in the floods of angry tears he cried in the weeks after his mother’s death: it had been his constant childhood companion. In fact, his gardener still kept his trowels and shovels under lock and key out of habit from Pietro’s boyhood, when, at any chance, Pietro would sneak into the gardener’s shed to steal the tools and mount another assault on the earth that covered his mother’s grave.
“I never told another girl this,” he told her, looking into her eyes with surprise and a certain curious expectation, as if waiting for her to explain to him why he had chosen her.
But it was a mystery to Carolina as well. She had never asked for his secrets, and she wasn’t sure she wanted them. They seemed like confessions to her, not the pretty trinkets she had thought a new lover would confide. She felt their weight, and her own inability to heal or absolve, and it frightened her. She found herself wishing for the Pietro her heart had constructed over the previous years: sure-footed, understanding, and fearless, to come rescue her from Pietro himself as he rambled on at her side. The wish made her dizzy.
Still, Pietro didn’t seem to tire of their conversations, or of her. At her mother’s invitation, he returned for dinner the night after his first visit, and from then the pattern was set. Each day, he arrived at Carolina’s home on some pretext: bearing a brace of bloodied rabbits he had killed that morning because her father admitted to a fondness for them; carrying a bottle of his father’s best wine, which he hoped might alleviate the headache her mother had complained of the previous day; or insisting, to her father’s delight, that the shade of her garden was simply much more pleasant than the bright sunlight in his, so that he couldn’t help but prefer to spend his time in it.
Carolina lived through those first days with Pietro half believing that it was all a dream from which she might awake at any moment, and she moved through her days as if even the slightest sound or movement might cause the whole world to dissolve. It was the end of the week before she remembered that she had not seen her lake for days, a realization that came to her as she watched a hard summer rain beat down on her father’s drive, cutting slender streams through the gravel. It was Sunday. The night before, at the Rosetti gala, Pietro had danced over half the dances with her and spent most of the rest at her side under one of the enormous goose-feather fans Silvia Rosetti had ordered affixed to her ballroom walls, large enough that, in an emergency, they might also serve as wings for a grown man. During one of the more sentimental waltzes, Pietro had nodded at a dancer in a military jacket and repeated a story that he had told her only days before: “When I was a young man,” he murmured, with all the urgency of a new secret, “my only dream was to die in battle. I never thought I would live to be this old.”
Carolina had felt the gaze of a pair of girls on the other side of the room. When her eyes met theirs, they quickly turned away. She looked back at Pietro, struggling to compose her face into an expression of surprise and sympathy. “I am so glad you were wrong,” she said, as she had the first time he had told her.
With great emotion, he had taken her hand in both of his.
No word had come yet from him today. The little storm soon blew itself out. When the slim rivers in the driveway had grown still, reflecting the white sky, Carolina rose and went out.
Turri stood at the water’s edge, soaking wet, his thin shirt sticking to his skin in large patches.
“You could have gone inside,” Carolina called.
Turri glanced back at her and grinned.
“Have you been swimming?” she asked when she reached him.
He shook his head. “I was studying the rain.”
“What did you learn?” she asked.
The sun was still hidden by a thin haze that covered the whole visible sky, but even from there it burned bright enough to make the water on his temples shine.
“I was sleeping on the bank,” he said. “I woke up when it started to rain. I sat up to go to the house, but then I thought, I wonder what I’ll see if I just lie here and look up?”
“What did you see?” she asked.
“Rain,” he said, grinning again. “And then it gets in your eyes, and you can’t see anything.”
Turri didn’t ask about her absence, and she didn’t mention Pietro to him, although it was impossible that he hadn’t heard the rumors. Instead, they flipped her rowboat upright and pushed out onto the lake together, Carolina at the oars and Turri sprawled in the bow. His damp clothes dried as the sunlight burned off the remaining clouds. Carolina let the oars drift, hypnotized by the thousand ways the forest changed each time the boat swung a breath to the right or a breath to the left. Finally the sun broke free from the clouds completely. As she raised her hand to shield her eyes, she realized she had no sense of how much time had passed. Suddenly wide awake with worry, she rowed the few strokes back to land and then, at Turri’s request, pushed him back out onto the water again.
When she returned to the house, a servant told her that Pietro had already arrived, and that her mother had taken him to the greenhouse. Her father had built the glass structure on the back lawn when Carolina was seven, again over the objections of his exasperated gardener, so that her mother could always have the southern blossoms she remembered from her youth. Today, the glass panels were still fogged from the rain.
“Carolina!” Pietro exclaimed, as if she were a ship returning from an indefinite journey.
“Where have you been?” her mother asked, a note of warning in her voice.
Carolina paused in the door of the humid room. On their damp wooden tables, lilies, freesia, and a gang of waxy orchids waited for her answer. “I went to the lake,” she said. “Turri has been investigating the rain.”
&nbs
p; “Turri?” Pietro said broadly, as if helping a friend to set up the punch line of a well known joke.
“They have been friends since she was a child,” Carolina’s mother added quickly.
“So have I!” Pietro said, soldiering through the joke himself since nobody else had chimed in. “He filled the river with soap bubbles when we were boys. All the reeds were choked with foam. I saw a red finch fly off with a bit hanging from his beak, just like an old man with a beard.”
He paused, listening for laughter, and seemed surprised, as he so often did, to find that the crowd he had been speaking to had dwindled again to just the two women who had been in the room with him when he began. When neither Carolina nor her mother spoke, his face clouded. Then an explanation seemed to come to him. He strode quickly through the plants, took Carolina’s hand, and kissed it. “When will you take me to your lake?” he asked.
Because she could not imagine this, Carolina did not answer.
After a moment, Pietro smiled indulgently. “That’s all right,” he said. “It is better if sweethearts keep some secrets.”
The following weekend, as a small choir of violins wavered in unison about some great disappointment in their distant past, Pietro kissed her for the first time. They stood in the shelter of a grotto below the verandah of the Conti house. Above them, all their neighbors spun in circles under torches that burned at the borders of the makeshift dance floor.
His kiss was gentle, but urgent. When he released her, she dropped her head onto his chest, her face hot and her breath fast. No one had ever kissed her before, and nothing she had heard or seen had prepared her for the insistent warmth that spread through her limbs.
He laughed, stroking her thick hair.
Carolina held fistfuls of his jacket in both hands, waiting for the heat to pass. Instead, it grew stronger, singing louder than the violins.
She lifted her face. “Again,” she said.
A month later, as August’s last blossoms began to fade, Pietro dropped to one knee as her father watched from his post by the fireplace’s empty grate and her mother half rose from the couch where she lay. He extracted a small piece of crumpled paper from his pocket and unwrapped it to reveal his mother’s diamond ring, which glittered like a piece of ice melted down to almost nothing by the morning sun.
Refusing him was impossible.
Carolina was never sure when the blindness had first set in. Looking back through the dim and crowded closets of her mind, she found half a dozen days, spread over a decade: the time when, as a child, she had rubbed her eyes so hard that the world had been dappled for hours with red and green shadows; the way that everyone else seemed to get used to the dark long before her eyes could pick shapes out; a day when she hit her head falling out of a tree and woke to find the whole world unmoored, turning as gently as a leaf might turn on the surface of her lake. Every trick her eyes had ever played came back to her: birds that proved to be only flowers blooming on a branch; flowers that suddenly awoke, spread their wings, and proved themselves birds.
But it was the autumn after Pietro’s proposal, when she was eighteen years old, that the blindness became undeniable. Later she realized that it must have begun at the borders of her vision and worked its way in like twilight: so slowly that no change was noticeable from one moment to the next, but so steadily that by the time she recognized evening setting in, true night seemed to be only a breath away. As the trees released their leaves, she grew uneasy. She could hear the ringing splash of a loon landing on the lake, but the corner of her eye wouldn’t catch its motion. Squirrels teased her from the trees, but by the time she turned her head to see them, they had vanished.
When that season’s last leaves sank to the bottom of the lake, leaving the forest bare, Carolina gazed across the black water at the line of seven trees that her father had allowed to stand when he first cleared the land: a generous old willow, a wild apple, a junk tree with smooth gray bark, an oak, a sapling and a pair of slim birch rooted like twins or lovers, so close that their branches rattled together in the wind. Counting them all had been a favorite game when she was a child, and was still a comfort as she grew. But now her vision could not take them all in. She could see the willow, or the twins: never both in the same glance. For the first time, she understood that she was going blind.
The realization came to her with all the force of a conversion. Like a new believer, she could never see the world the same way again, whether she kept her faith or lost it. But the shape of the new world, the tempo of its liturgy, the properties of its angels and demons, was still a mystery.
For most of the winter, Carolina tested her blindness. For instance: how fast did it move? Perhaps, having taken all her life to reach this point, it might take another twenty years to claim another fraction of her sight. With scientific precision that would have made Turri proud, she sketched the trees on the opposite bank and marked off what she could see when she faced them dead on from the top step of her house. In November she could take in five trees, bounded by the willow and the sapling. By the New Year, the sapling had vanished. When darkness began to swallow up the willow as well, she tried to tell her mother and father. When the willow was extinguished, she told Pietro.
By this time, Pietro had learned enough about her habits to recognize that she was not like the other young ladies of his acquaintance, and had taken to calling her “my stranger.” Her announcement seemed to him to be just another piece of happy nonsense, like her affection for her poorly conceived lake with its muddy banks, or her inexplicable patience with Turri’s experiments.
Her parents had long since forgotten her attempts to warn them. Her father was engaged in a war of attrition with the gardener, who insisted that, if he were to cut all the flowers her father demanded for Carolina’s wedding, the garden itself, where the reception was to be held, would have all the charm of a desert—to which her father replied that all men of genius are mocked by their own servants. Carolina’s mother still left her room infrequently, but a steady stream of servants and delivery boys now came and went, bearing fruit, chocolates, china, silver, silks, brocade and lace, and a parade of gifts sent ahead by the hundreds of invited guests.
Carolina always opened these gifts in her mother’s company, so as her sight was leaving her she handled some of the most beautiful things she had ever seen: an enameled box, robin’s egg blue, wavy like watered silk, lined in rose velvet; a spiral shell the size of her fist, with a silver lid, for holding salt; sheets embroidered with lemon blossoms and vines; a glass candy dish the color of blood; a serving tray of silver beaten into the shape of a giant grape leaf, with a life-size bunch of cold silver grapes clustered under the curve of the handle and a small bird perched on the opposite rim, gazing at the metal fruit with longing.
At first, Carolina tried to memorize these things. She began a careful catalog in her mind, closed her eyes, and quizzed herself. But she quickly discovered that each time she called up an object in her memory, it eroded or changed. The bird on the tray, which had seemed so hopeful at her first glance, grew melancholy in her mind and developed jeweled eyes: now onyx, now sapphire, so that each time she looked at the actual tray again she had the sense that it was not quite as beautiful as it had been. The enameled box opened in her unreliable memory to reveal white and brown speckled eggs, pale gray stones worn smooth by the river, loose diamonds. Eventually she gave up the project of memorization, but she continued to try to soak up as much of the world as she could take in: the candlelight in her mother’s room, waterbirds landing on her lake, the folds of her white dress as the seamstress fitted it, added a hundred yards of lace, and fitted it again. The world had trouble withstanding her searching gaze. The blindness at the corners of her vision and the black water of her lake melded into a thick shadow that threatened to swallow up the sky and trees she could still see. The forest seemed to lose its depth and flatten, as if it were only painted on a scrim hung by some traveling theater company. Everything gave the impress
ion that it was in danger of giving way to reveal whatever horror or wonder the seen world now obscured.
But the blindness never relented. The week before her wedding she lost the oak, leaving only the junk tree and the wild apple, which overnight had burst into full bloom, like a breathless bride adorned in white, trembling with joy over the slightest breeze.
This was when she had told Turri.
The spring that Carolina was born, her mother had planted rows and rows of white rosebushes in anticipation of her daughter’s wedding day. Today, their branches graced the arch of the church door, held in place with swags of cheesecloth, varied here and there by the clouds of white blossoms Carolina’s maid called starlight, or by long tufts of river grass. Roses littered the tables the servants had arranged the evening before on the lawn, where two kitchen maids now stood guard against further attempts by a strapping black crow who had neatly stolen a pair of forks and a shining knife in the small hours of the morning, before a stable boy, defending his own honor in the matter, discovered the true thief and surprised the bird into dropping the spoon that would have completed his setting. Roses lay in heaps on Carolina’s dressing table as her maid helped her into her dress and her mother toyed with her hair. The blindness had advanced so far that she saw the world now as if peering through a sheet of rolled paper—a few sentences on a page, a single face. It made the whole thought of marrying Pietro, which had always seemed to her like a strange dream she might wake from at any moment, seem even more unreal.
At the church, her failing eyes reduced the blossoms that wound over the church door to a haze of white and green, and her gathered neighbors and relatives to a murmuring mist. She made her way down the aisle by memory and guesswork, taking small steps to avoid stumbling over her yards of silk and lace, catching her balance from time to time when she trod on one of the unfortunate roses that had been scattered in her honor on the worn stones. About halfway down, she caught the sound of a familiar voice and turned to see Turri. He gazed back at her as if it were any other day, and he was only waiting for an answer or her next move in a game. Beside him, Sophia stared up at her with the unreasoned but unerring cunning of a cat, taking in every detail of her dress with greed and suspicion.
The Blind Contessa's New Machine Page 5