The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  “They are going to think I am beating you!” Pietro joked, when he discovered a new bruise. “But you are much too pretty for that.”

  To keep from losing her lake to the darkness, Carolina took planting sticks from the gardener to stake out the safest path. Over a period of days, she tied lengths of thick twine between them to lead her along, until her soft hands were nicked and chafed.

  “You look like you have been doing small-work for the devil,” Pietro said.

  Then, one night, Carolina knocked a clock from its place as Pietro led her from the dining room to the stairs.

  The clock sat on a shelf just about the height of her elbow. The hall was wide enough that she should have been able to avoid it easily. But her vision had constricted so that it was impossible for her to see all the ornaments displayed in the hall and still find her own way.

  The clock fell with an angry jangle of chimes. Springs and gears scattered everywhere. The beautiful white ceramic face with its hand-painted daisies seemed to be in one piece until she knelt to retrieve it, when it came apart as shards in her hands.

  “Carolina!” Pietro said. “This was my grandmama’s!”

  There was no anger in his voice, only surprise and hurt. When he knelt beside her and began to scrabble helplessly among the pieces, he avoided her eyes. She realized with a deep pang that he believed she had broken the piece deliberately.

  “No, no!” she said, catching his arm. Awkwardly, his powerful body yielded and turned toward her. Both of them crouched, balanced on the balls of their feet, unable to settle their knees amid the glass and machinery. “I couldn’t see it, Pietro,” she said, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. “I can’t see!”

  This was the first time he had ever seen her weep. The unstoppable river of his thoughts diverted for a moment around this new branch fallen into its path. He rose, lifting her with him.

  “But it was right there,” he said, reasoning slowly.

  Carolina held her hands to each side of her face. “I cannot see my hands,” she said. “I cannot see beyond them. It is worse every week.”

  “You cannot see,” Pietro repeated.

  “I told you,” she said, begging. “I told you before we married.”

  After a moment, recognition sprang up in his eyes. “But you were joking!” he exclaimed.

  When she didn’t speak, he wrapped his arms around her, covering her eyes with one strong hand as he pressed her face to his chest.

  The next morning, she awoke to find him leaning over her, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with his hand. The following evening, he scooped her up from her chair and carried her upstairs. “But there is nothing wrong with my feet!” she insisted.

  For some reason, her blindness rekindled the fire in him that had begun to flicker after their return from the shore. Instead of retreating to his own rooms each night as he had been, he stayed with her or carried her to his. “Who is it?” he would whisper, covering her eyes with his hands, as if she had to guess. Or, “But I am a blind man!” he would protest, tangled in her garments as he searched for her flesh.

  This lasted for a week. Around the lake, the trees gave up their last leaves. When their branches were black and bare, Pietro’s ardor began to fade. He still reached for her when they met by chance, but he rarely sought her out.

  Carolina, for her part, didn’t miss him. Serving as the only audience for a man raised by crowds of admirers exhausted her. Soothing his distress over her blindness, while the darkness inched inexorably forward in her own eyes, was beyond her strength. The buried thought that he might have found comfort elsewhere was almost a comfort to her.

  The night itself had become her favorite companion, the only one who seemed to understand what blindness meant. She no longer lit lamps or candles to hold it off: every night, she unfastened her buttons and clasps in full darkness. Especially after breaking the clock she didn’t dare roam Pietro’s unfamiliar house, but there was nothing to stop her from padding around the confines of her own room, searching out new mysteries: the sharp ceramic lace on a figurine’s dress, the smooth bellies of a bowl of shells, the long, slick curves of her twin wardrobes.

  When she did creep into her bed, she often pulled the sheets and blankets free and reversed them, with her pillows at the foot. If she tilted her chin from this position, what was left to her of the night sky filled her vision, the stars as bright as she could ever remember them, the borders of the moon still untouched by her collapsing sight.

  “Maybe you are wrong about the New Year,” Carolina said. She closed one eye and then the other, trying to recall which of the lake trees had stood at the limits of her vision the previous Sunday. “I don’t think it is any different this week.”

  Turri skipped another silver disk across the lake’s bright surface. Carolina turned her head quickly to keep it in sight before it skidded one final time and dropped into the depths.

  “What are those?” she said, holding out her hand.

  “They are blanks,” he said, pressing one into her upturned palm. “For my mint.”

  “Your mint?”

  “Last year I invented my own currency,” he told her, a hint of derision in his voice.

  “Because ours was not working?”

  “Currency is the foundation of any new civilization,” Turri said, as she imagined a professor might. “That, or an army. But coins are easier to produce in a laboratory.”

  “May I keep it?” she asked.

  Turri flung another disk out into the lake without answering. Carolina dropped her head to work the unstamped coin into the slash of red satin at the waist of her dress. Then she looked up again to inspect the bare trees on the far banks. Their reflections shuddered in the wake from Turri’s game.

  “Or perhaps the trees are moving,” she suggested.

  “No, they are not,” he said gently.

  When the winter nights grew longer than the pale days, Carolina came downstairs to find Dr. Clementi standing alone in the front hall, nervously stroking the scuffed leather of his medicine bag. She had always liked the old man: unlike the other doctors in town, he had a strong sense of his own helplessness. In some acute cases, when he had reached the limits of his knowledge, he had been known to refuse to give diagnosis or treatment, despite the pleas of the patient, when his colleagues would cheerfully have tortured them to death.

  Pietro, who hadn’t informed her of the appointment in advance, was nowhere in sight.

  “Dr. Clementi,” Carolina said, greeting him midway down the stairs.

  The old man squinted up through a pair of wire spectacles. When he recognized her, his face broke into a smile. “Hello, child.”

  “You’re not here to see Pietro,” she guessed, alighting from the last step.

  He shook his head. “He’s healthy as a horse.”

  “I think he’s healthier than some horses,” Carolina said, and gestured for him to follow her into the conservatory.

  After some hesitation, the doctor settled on a prim, straight-backed chair, upholstered in red brocade. Carolina sank down on a divan near him. The doctor gazed at her in a visible agony over how to begin. His sympathy caused her more pain than any of her own thoughts had.

  When it became clear that he couldn’t bring himself to speak, she said, “I am going blind.”

  The doctor nodded, gratitude and sorrow struggling in the lines of his tired face.

  At this moment, Pietro strode into the salon. “Doctor!” he said heartily. “I see you have discovered my wife. Thank you for coming.”

  The doctor held up bravely as Pietro thumped him on the back. Then Pietro sat down beside Carolina and took her hand without glancing at her. “Carolina is having some trouble,” he said, confidentially.

  “I see,” the doctor said.

  “I am going blind,” Carolina repeated.

  “It’s like the darkness is closing in,” Pietro elaborated. “She runs into things.”

  Dr. Clementi looked at Carolina with
compassion, shadows threatening him from every side. “We thought you might have some medicine,” Pietro said, prompting him. “Or a machine.”

  Dr. Clementi shook his head. “There is no medicine for it,” he said.

  “Or opium,” Pietro insisted. “For the pain.”

  “There is no pain,” Carolina said, laying her free hand over his.

  “But there are remedies for weak eyes,” Pietro said. “I have seen them.”

  Dr. Clementi, who now recognized his true patient, watched Pietro with pity. “I’m sorry,” he said, and rose. “No doctor has ever arrested the progress of blindness.”

  “Thank you,” Carolina said.

  At the door, the doctor paused. “You have spoken with your parents?”

  Carolina nodded. Even from that distance, and despite her failing sight, she could see he knew this was a lie.

  “Cara mia,” her father said. He looked into her eyes for a moment, then glanced aside, as someone might avert his gaze from the body of a bird fallen in the woods. Carolina closed her eyes in his embrace, comforted by the familiar smells of lemon and tobacco. When he released her, he turned to look out the large window, down the hill, where the glossy leaves of his groves glistened under the thin dusting of the first snow. Her mother watched her steadily.

  Carolina had known the instant she opened their invitation for dinner that the old doctor had paid them a visit. Now she looked back at her mother, who seemed in danger of being snuffed out at any moment by the dark clouds that surrounded her. For the first time, she saw the fine lines in her mother’s pale face, the lace at her neck, the shape of her dark eyes, instead of looking for an answer in them.

  After a moment, her mother looked away. “After all, there is not really so much to see,” she said.

  “Can you see me?” Pietro whispered.

  Thick winter clouds had hidden the sun all day, and now they blotted out the moon and stars. Since the cloud- bound night sky held nothing but more darkness, Carolina had pulled the curtains shut and settled into her bed as the maid had made it up, without turning the blankets and pillows so she could see the stars. Pietro’s voice came from the doorway, but without the help of moonlight, Carolina couldn’t distinguish his shadow from the general darkness. His question had woken her from a dream: a house had caught on fire in the snow, and the heat of the flames was melting the ice from the branches of the surrounding trees.

  “No,” she said, aloud.

  Pietro stepped into her room, fumbled for the edge of her bed, and sat down on it. Blindly, his hand found the hollow of her neck, brushed her chin, and settled, open, on her cheek. With this as his guide, he kissed her deeply. He reeked of wine.

  Then he laid his head on her chest, like a child. “I am so sorry,” he said, his voice thick with tears, as if he were confessing some wrong against her.

  As Christmas approached, the blindness advanced again, erasing all but the faces of her family and servants and the perfect circle of the full moon, tiny with distance. Her lake was reduced to bright patches of snow on the banks, a flash of silver reflected on the black surface, a rootless tangle of branches. She could no longer see enough of the sky to make out the weather by sight, and she found her way to and from the lake only with the help of the stakes and string she had tied together to guide her as autumn died.

  “We’re having a hailstorm,” Turri told her, standing beside her on the banks of the lake. During the night, it had glazed over with a thin layer of clear ice, which shrieked and snapped now as it broke up under the weak sun. “The hail is as big as walnuts.”

  Carolina laughed. “I think I would feel that.”

  “Yes,” Turri agreed. “But what you can’t see is that I have erected, with the silence of a cat, a sturdy shelter over our heads. Surely you can hear the storm as it batters.” A thunderous drumming accompanied this.

  Carolina turned her head this way and that, scanning for a clue to the false hail as it echoed through the clearing. She saw the fabric of his walking-jacket, a window of her house, grass trampled in the clear slush under their feet, but he was too quick for her to catch.

  At last, her gaze did settle on something she recognized: his blue eyes, laughing, the white sky overhead.

  By the day of her father’s Christmas party, the world was left to Carolina only in unreliable pieces. The darkness had completely overrun its borders. Now she could barely take in a whole face with a single glance. If she looked at their eyes, she lost the plaits and pearls in the hair of the girls, and even as they spoke, a shadow might pass over their features, obscuring their nose or mouth. From time to time, one glance might still be achingly sharp: the reflection of a bird, flying high over the water; the fire of an emerald on an old woman’s hand. But more frequently the shadows crowded into even the brightest scenes, so that Carolina lived now in a permanent twilight that grew more like night each day.

  Since before she was born, her father’s family had hosted a feast in the week between Christmas and the New Year. This year, as always, the house was crowded with evergreen boughs, studded with lemons and fluted red flowers from her mother’s hothouse. Garlands were fastened to the mantels, the doorways, the stairway railings with yards of shining gold ribbon. Wicks blazed in every chandelier and lamp. Maids circulated through the crowd with great trays of marzipan, fashioned into the shape of lemons, grapes, apples, roses, tomatoes, lions, lambs.

  Carolina stood against the wall in the ballroom, catching glimpses of her friends and neighbors as they danced through clouds of black smoke.

  “Have we met before?” Turri asked, taking advantage of the social requirements to kiss her hand.

  “I don’t know,” Carolina said. “Maybe you can refresh my memory.”

  “It was at least a hundred years ago,” Turri said. “I had been wandering in the forest for days. You were, as I recall, a little stream unmarked on any map. I didn’t mark you on my own, thinking to keep you my secret, but then I could never find my way back.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Carolina said.

  “Or perhaps I was a sailor,” Turri continued. “On the boat you took to Spain.”

  “I have never been to Spain,” Carolina said.

  “You have,” Turri said. “You used to lash yourself to the mast, so you could watch the storms. I was the one who untied you each morning.”

  “I do like storms,” Carolina conceded.

  The heavy scent of almond mixed with the notes of a dozen perfumes: cinnamon, gardenia, orange and musk. Turri’s fingertips alighted on the small of her back. “Would you like to dance?” he asked.

  Carolina looked at him. “I can see only your face,” she told him. “No dancers, no chandeliers.”

  “That’s perfect,” Turri said, pressing his palm flat against her back to lead her to the floor. When she resisted, he released her.

  “Pietro,” she said.

  For a moment, Turri’s face disappeared, replaced by the crescent of his ear as he turned his head. On the far wall beyond him, a lamp burned, interrupted by the shapes of dancers in their red and turquoise and furs. Then Turri’s eyes, again.

  “He is dancing,” he said.

  “With whom?” she asked.

  Without answering, he led her into the crowd.

  Carolina traced the ember as it rose into the sky and exploded, white sparks spinning far beyond the borders of her vision.

  “You see it?” her father asked eagerly. “Cara mia?”

  Carolina nodded at the sky.

  “Yes?” her father asked. “That is a yes?”

  “Yes,” Carolina said.

  At midnight, all their hardiest guests had assembled on the banks of her lake, where, from the opposite side, a pair of gypsies were shooting off a small fortune’s worth of fireworks the seller claimed had traveled all the way from China.

  Another firework: blue, dripping down the sky in long arcs like the branches of a willow. Red rockets reflected in the black surface of her lake, which r
ocked gently with the ripples some guest had made, throwing in a small stone or a last piece of marzipan. Yellow bursts seemed to turn to scattered gold on the snow below. Carolina caught all of this only in fragments, half seen, half imagined.

  “Are you cold?” Pietro asked. Before Carolina could answer, he engulfed her in the folds of his own cloak, so that both of them were wrapped in the thick lengths of wool. Caught in his arms, she watched every temporary constellation blaze up and die out, even as the other guests began to drift back to the house for a bit of warmth or another glass of wine.

  As the last one died, she continued to gaze up, her sight temporarily seared by the memory of the falling sparks even after the night sky went dark again, with the exception of the few remaining stars.

  As Turri had promised, the New Year brought her complete darkness. The few scraps she had been able to see—the eyes of the servants, a fragment of horizon beyond her window—all dwindled down to unreadable points of light. Then one morning, she awoke to find that even those lights had gone out.

  At first she believed she had simply woken early, and would have to wait for the sun to rise. But then she realized the house was alive with midday sounds: footsteps on the stairs and tramping on the roof overhead, perhaps removing a heavy snowfall so that the ceiling would not cave in. Outside children screamed and laughed.

  Where am I? she thought, suddenly awash with horror. Immediately, her hands closed around the familiar covers of her bed, the pillows beneath her head, and, as she fumbled farther, the corner of her nightstand, the soft faces of her flowers, the sharp gilt flourishes that encased her clock.

  She had not been able to see any of these things clearly for weeks, but with all light now lost, they suddenly seemed to be the only objects left to her in a living darkness that might well have consumed the rest of the world. For all she knew, she might be floating through dead stars far above an exploded world, and this might be the last moment her fingers would touch the table’s smooth varnish before it drifted out of reach forever. She didn’t dare call out: if she did, whatever had wreaked this disaster might turn back and finish the job by extinguishing her.