The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  Then Carolina looked back at the altar where a hundred candles wavered, pale in the strong afternoon light, dropping hot wax onto the faces of the uncomplaining crowd of asters and blue phlox massed at their feet. Pietro stood beside the priest, the light bending all around him: handsome, certain, grinning.

  “You’re like a bird,” Pietro complained. “Hold still. The ocean can’t run away.”

  Carolina, who had been turning her head swiftly from side to side in the vain hope of capturing the entire shoreline in a single glance, did as he said. The vast expanse of white sand and the blue band of ocean that stretched beyond it to the sky vanished, replaced by the sea in cameo, a glimmering oval fragment small enough to dangle from a woman’s neck, surrounded by darkness.

  Pietro turned her face to his and kissed it.

  “You are so beautiful,” he whispered. “Maybe I will never love you more than this.”

  Darkness had never frightened Carolina, but during the blazing seaside days of her honeymoon, it became a friend. The bright ocean was a real torment to her, with all the light from a thousand waves streaming into her limited eyes, but when night came, she was again equal: the whole world had also gone blind. In fact, she had the advantage. The blindness had cured her of superstition about the secret qualities of darkness, the dread that things shifted and became strange when not governed by a human eye. Through long association, she had learned that the darkness had no power to alter what it hid. Her hairbrush or pen might be obscured by the blindness, but when she reached for them, they were the same as they had always been. As a result, shadows no longer held any magic for her. Her confidence remained even as the evening sky sank from blue to black. By night, she was even more sure-footed than Pietro, whose dependence on the sunlight made him clumsy in the dark. So she was the one who led him through the unlit corners of the seaside town after the shops had closed and the restaurants had emptied out, as the waiters poured buckets of water onto the stones to wash away the evidence of that evening’s feasts, and gypsy music began to drift through certain open windows.

  Pietro loved these rambles, willing to bear with his young wife’s caprices for the opportunity they offered him to catch at the dim curves of her retreating figure in a close alley, or press her against the walls of some back street. He was an ardent but gentle lover, most tender with her when freed from the impossible task of forcing his deepest feelings to the surface as words. Carolina was half thrilled and half terrified by the way he changed in the dark: shocked by the places his hands sought out and by the way her own body rose and burned under them, amazed to find that her own touch could make him flinch or groan, but most of all grateful for a world in which only taste and touch, sound and smell, mattered, where, even if she did open her eyes, the horizon had shrunk to just what she could still take in: Pietro’s eyes, the back of his neck, her finger caught in his teeth.

  Each day, however, was a new mystery. Rising from their shared bed, they dressed quickly, like the first man and woman, newly naked and ashamed. Their meals were passed in long silences, punctuated by half-remembered pleasantries. At a loss, Pietro returned again and again to the theme of her beauty, which he earnestly believed must please her as much as it pleased him.

  “I think the angels were God’s practice,” he would say, reaching out to catch a handful of her hair. “To make this pretty head.”

  Carolina could not think of what to say to this. The angels of her catechism were fearsome men and she was terrified to speak of God, in case he might remember her and speed the curse he had chosen. Furthermore, Pietro didn’t seem to want his compliments returned. In the first days of the honeymoon, confused by the praise, she had retreated into basic etiquette.

  “Your eyes are beautiful as well,” she said.

  For an instant, he had smiled like a petted child, but just as quickly the light of pride was lost in a frown. “Beauty is a blind guide in a man,” he told her, probably in the same stern tones it had been told to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she ventured.

  “There is no need,” he said, more gently.

  Carolina couldn’t remember this restraint in the months of their courtship, but the moments they had spent alone together before their marriage amounted to mere hours, spent in breathless snatches behind hedges and in hallways, exchanging burning kisses, groping blindly for whatever might be hidden beneath the lace at her breast or in the hollow of his hand. Beyond that, under the watchful eye of her family, they had only flirted and teased until the day, as her mother wept quietly, Carolina had raised him from his knees.

  “Would you like to go dancing tonight?” Pietro asked one evening, joining Carolina on the balcony. “They are building a pavilion on the beach.”

  The lengths of white gauze that shut out the morning light twisted around them like the tethered ghosts of ocean breezes. The sun had just vanished into the horizon and in the gloaming below lights had begun to appear, marking the path of the streets, the entrances of restaurants, the stands where night vendors peddled wine and fruit to lovers and young families at the water’s edge.

  When she didn’t answer immediately, he nuzzled her neck like a favored horse.

  “We don’t have to dance,” he said. “You give me a command.”

  Carolina turned in the circle of his arms and looked up at him. Surrounded by darkness, his handsome face was as frank and hopeful as a child’s.

  In despair, she closed her eyes.

  Pietro kissed them.

  Her husband’s property bounded her father’s. In fact, the river that fed her lake flowed into it from Pietro’s land. A bend in the water was visible from Pietro’s house, at the foot of a gentle slope that rolled down to a landing area where a pair of old boats dozed in the sun.

  On the first morning after their return from the ocean, Carolina awoke to find herself alone. Pietro’s sheets were thrown back, already cold. Slightly giddy with the sudden freedom from his constant company, she dressed and found her way down the front stairs and out the door, moving toward her lake with the compulsion of a migrating bird that follows a map buried deeper in his mind than his own thoughts. She spent the day staring at the black water. Her sight had dwindled now so that her field of vision was almost completely overtaken by shadow, with two small bright spots through which she could still see the world, as if through windows on the other side of a room. Through them, she watched the mist burn away and the white sky appear in reflection on the lake. Mirrored clouds drifted across the surface and vanished in the weeds. Waterbirds landed with a rush of back-beating wings and threw the whole world into chaos.

  As evening fell, she thrashed back through the waist-high grass that grew along the river, to Pietro’s house.

  She found him in the kitchen, eating a cold chicken.

  “Where have you been hiding?” he asked.

  “Where do you think?” she said.

  This wasn’t a joke, but on another day he might have taken it for one and smiled. When he didn’t, Carolina crossed to where he sat, leaned over him, and pressed her face against his. He smelled as if he had just come in from riding—traces of new sweat and the sweet, dusty smell of feed from the barn.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  Pietro planted a greasy kiss on her cheek. “I bet you were out there all day dreaming without anything to eat,” he said. He lifted a piece of chicken from the cloth on the table. “Well? Aren’t you hungry?”

  Because there was no path from her new home to her lake, Carolina went by a different route each day: through the pines that faced Pietro’s house just beyond the great lawn, or tramping down waist-high swamp grass along the river. In her new rooms, the trunks and boxes of her things, carefully packed by her mother’s maids, stood untouched by her until, in exasperation, a pair of Pietro’s servants broke them open, hung her dresses in the wardrobes, and set her combs and vases on the vanity and tables, executing all these tasks with flawless precision to underscore their disapproval of Carol
ina’s lack of interest in both her own things and her new home.

  Three days after her return, Turri had still failed to appear.

  The following morning, Carolina opened her window to watch the children of the servants in the side yard. Each figure flared up from the shadows of her blindness only when she looked directly down on them, almost as though she were spying through a glass. A pair of small girls gleefully flung feed at a crowd of white geese, as if their aim was to blind rather than feed the birds, who remained imperturbably greedy despite the hail of hard corn. Boys carried buckets of water from the well to the kitchen, shouting jokes and threats at the older girls, who went right on pinning up the morning linens as though they were deaf. The only exception was a tall girl of perhaps thirteen or fourteen who gave one boy an answer sharp enough that it seemed to freeze him in place for a long moment before he frowned in confusion and ran away. The girl’s features were delicate, framed by a long fall of glossy black hair. She might have passed for an artist’s angel at a distance, but the anger in her eyes was unmistakably of this world.

  When one of the maids arrived with her morning pitcher of water, Carolina tapped on the glass. “Who is that?” she asked, pointing to the girl.

  “Liza,” the maid said.

  “Send her to me, please,” Carolina said.

  A few minutes later, the girl stood in Carolina’s room, taking in all the rich details with furtive, eager glances she seemed to believe she took too quickly for Carolina to notice.

  “Do you know where the Turri house is?” Carolina asked.

  “It is the house on the hill, with the lions,” the girl answered.

  “Good,” Carolina said, and pressed a letter into the girl’s hand.

  That afternoon, Carolina cut through the heart of the pine forest. The sunlight that filtered down through the needles melded into a bright halo at the limits of her vision, giving the trees and lake the aspect of a sacred painting.

  Turri had arrived before her. He stood on the bank near her house and watched her make her way along the far side of the lake. As she approached, her vision split his face in two and interposed flashes of black water. Uneasy under his searching gaze, frustrated by her own sight, she went up to the house without a greeting. He followed.

  “It is the same?” he asked, before she was even seated.

  Hearing him speak the truth aloud, after keeping it in silence for so long, Carolina was seized with a sudden urge to deny everything and retreat with her parents and Pietro to the refuge of delusion for as long as it would shelter them. But the sound of Turri’s voice also seemed to shake something loose: cut a weight free from her shoulders, throw a window open in the room.

  She nodded and sank down on the couch. “The same,” she said. “Maybe a little worse. It’s hard to measure. It’s worse with bright light. At night it’s better.”

  “It will be easier for you if you stay away from bright light,” Turri said, and turned the chair backward to straddle it. He must have come straight there on receiving her message: he still wore the scarred leather pants and loose workman’s shirt he dressed in for the laboratory.

  “It won’t move as fast?” she asked quickly. “Can I stop it?”

  Turri shook his head. “It will just be easier,” he said.

  While she was gone, some summer storm had torn apart one of her window scarves. A large brown moth struggled through the remaining pink and violet threads. Gaining the narrow sill, it steadied itself, then began to walk the length of unvarnished wood, bearing its beautiful wings like an unfamiliar burden. When Carolina turned her head to see him, Turri was also gazing up at the insect.

  “And you,” Carolina asked, half from habit and half as a dash back to the safety of familiar shadows, “what have you been doing these past weeks?”

  “I am building Sophia a new machine,” he said.

  “What does it do?”

  “It boils an egg,” he said. “She only needs to light a candle, and it will heat the water, deposit the egg for the required time, and lift it out again.”

  “But how does it know the time?” Carolina asked.

  “I spent the week after your wedding crafting candles that burn an identical length each minute.”

  Carolina laughed. “Why don’t you just give her a watch?” she asked. “Couldn’t she keep the time herself?”

  “She could,” Turri said. “But she doesn’t like eggs.”

  Perhaps frightened by Carolina’s laughter, the moth chose this moment to dive from its ledge, over Carolina’s head. She buried her face in the pillows. When she raised it again, the moth had settled on the scarf in the opposite window, pressed flat, revealing wide, pale blue eyes on each wing.

  “We can’t kill it,” Carolina said.

  “No,” Turri agreed, rising.

  “You’ll have to carry it out.”

  “I know.” Deftly, Turri unfastened the pins that held the scarf in place and caught the moth in the folds of fabric. Through the thin cloth, Carolina could see its great wings quiver. At the door, Turri let the scarf fall. The moth hesitated for a moment on his palm, then gathered its courage and lurched away.

  “How long do I have?” Carolina asked.

  Turri turned back to her like a shadow, his clothing and features erased by the bright light that streamed past him from the surface of her lake.

  “You said it was like looking through rolled paper,” he said, taking his seat again.

  She nodded.

  “Like opera glasses?” he asked. “Or even less, like a spy glass?”

  “Like opera glasses,” she said. “But as if someone is always folding them too close together, so you can’t quite see through.”

  Turri frowned and looked down at the thick rug beside her bed.

  “Turri,” she said.

  She could no longer see clearly enough to know whether the tears she thought she glimpsed in his blue eyes were real.

  “Around the New Year,” he said. “At the latest.”

  Several days later, Liza struggled out onto the verandah, where Carolina was reclining inside a fortress of screens she had erected against the light with the hope that she might still feel the afternoon breeze. The girl’s thin arms were weighed down with half a dozen large leather-bound volumes. Pietro trailed behind her.

  “They’re from Turri!” he announced. “It’s not winter yet! What does he think we want with books?”

  Liza set her load carefully beside Carolina’s couch and straightened. “Shall I bring the rest?” she asked.

  “Of course!” Pietro said, waving impatiently. “Go ahead!”

  Carolina reached for the first volume, then sat up and opened it at random. An extraordinary butterfly, fully five times life size, spread across the page, hand-tinted blue and black with flecks of gilt flaking from the tips of its wings.

  “A moth!” Pietro said. “I’ll be damned.”

  Carolina turned the page. A pair of butterflies balanced on a branch. A chrysalis hung below them. Inside the translucent casing, she could make out the large eyes and cramped legs of the altered insect, its wings folded like lengths of brocade on its back. The adults above it were faint blue, paler than the sky, their lacy wing tips fading to a rich cream, broken here and there by irregular bits of black, as if their maker had flicked a paintbrush after them as they escaped.

  With an air of capitulation, Pietro sank down beside her and lifted the next volume. “Birds,” he said. The next: “Chinese dress.”

  Carolina picked up another. “These are drawings of America,” she said.

  Liza soldiered out of the house with another seven volumes and laid them at Carolina’s feet with enormous delicacy and suspicion, as if the books were both highly fragile and packed with explosives.

  “Liza,” Carolina said as the girl withdrew.

  Liza turned, her hands deep in the pockets of her gray dress.

  “Thank you,” Carolina said. “Ask for a chocolate in the kitchen.”


  Without answer or thanks, Liza turned away again.

  “These are maps,” Pietro said. “But they are too old to be accurate.” He laughed. “Look at this!” His strong fingers pointed to a school of bare-breasted mermaids frolicking in a green sea, blissfully unaware of their proximity to the precipice of a great waterfall labeled Finisterra.

  Pietro threw his arm around her and kissed her cheek, her mouth, her neck. Then he stood up, shaking his head. “Turri is a marvel!”

  “He’s a mystery,” Carolina said.

  Turri’s collection of illustrations was vast and far ranging. She thumbed through the lives of the saints, illuminated in heavy gold, blue, and red. She learned the types of American plants and vegetables, their blossoms precisely rendered, their roots perfectly free of earth. She traced the riggings of fifty renowned Spanish ships. She observed Africa’s fantastic wildlife: lions, zebras, and giraffes. She furrowed her brow over chemicals and their combinations, and laughed at the constellations.

  As the leaves turned bright and fell into the lake, the blindness pressed in. Now, looking out over the still water, she could see neither bank, only an ever-closing oval that contained the white faces of the last water lilies between the red bellies of the lily pads, curling up against the cold. Even in broad daylight she now moved in perpetual darkness. She could still see into the distance of her shrinking field of vision, but close at hand it was as if she carried only a small lantern, just powerful enough to reveal things directly in front of her.

  Half blind, she became clumsy, bruising her white shins on Pietro’s unfamiliar furniture.