The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  She could have lain like that for days, hands clenched around folds of velvet until hunger or fatigue pulled her down into a different sleep. But moments later footsteps padded up the stairs. They paused at the door, then entered without knocking. As their sound moved around the room, familiar shapes began to emerge from the gloom. Silk whispered as it rose from her floor and sighed faintly when put to rest in her wardrobe. Cut-glass bottles of perfumes and cream clanked gently. The panels of her curtains brushed the floor as they were drawn open. Wind poured through the window, bringing with it the memory of the long green slope of the yard. The wind was bitingly cold; Carolina’s mind instantly stripped the summer trees of their leaves and blanketed the gardens with snow.

  A terra-cotta jar scudded along the floor. Leaves and petals brushed together. Water splashed onto the roof beyond the open window, and new water poured evenly into the vase.

  Then the footsteps ceased, only a few feet from Carolina’s bed. The room went quiet. In the silence, the darkness rushed in again and stopped, seething, in the open door. Her bed, the clock, her familiar silken things held steady against it for the moment. But the other figure in her room was elusive: a pair of cloth slippers, an apron, a pale hand, fading into nothing where the person should have been.

  “Who is it?” Carolina asked.

  The footsteps turned and left the room without giving an answer.

  “I will carry you,” Pietro said.

  Carolina shook her head.

  “But it’s been weeks since you’ve been downstairs.”

  “I can’t see any difference.”

  “We’ll make a fire. You’ll feel the heat.”

  Carolina was seated on the damask stool before her vanity, where two mirrors flanked a greater one, reflecting her lost image at endless angles. For days—it might have been weeks—she had navigated the small room in perfect darkness, reclaiming its elements from the shadows one by one. Now she could sink onto her bed without first groping blindly for it. She could open the window, or close it. She could reach for a perfume as surely as if she could see. But she was not willing yet to go downstairs, where everything would be strange to her, to endure Pietro’s sympathy and the curiosity of the servants.

  Her eyes, although they couldn’t see, still obeyed her in other ways. Now she lifted them to the mirror, near where Pietro’s reflection should be.

  Behind her, Pietro shifted uneasily.

  “I would like to help you,” he said.

  Carolina rose, crossed the foot of her bed, and turned accurately to meet him by her night table. She lifted a rose from the glass, found his hand, and folded his fingers around the stem.

  “Carolina—” he began.

  “I am glad you came,” she said.

  Every day, Liza came to comb out Carolina’s hair and pin it up again. One morning, long after Carolina had lost track of the days, she asked the girl, “Are you needed in the afternoons?”

  “By who, ma’am?” Liza asked.

  Carolina didn’t know. “In the kitchen, or the—other rooms.”

  “Isobel serves in the evenings,” Liza told her. “I usually go at noon.”

  A twist, a pin, a twist, a clip. Liza separated another length of hair from the rest and began to brush it.

  “I would like you to bring me some books,” Carolina said.

  “What books?”

  “The ones Signor Turri brought,” Carolina said.

  Liza pinned the final piece into place, exposing Carolina’s bare neck.

  “And I’ll want you to stay with them,” Carolina added.

  When Liza returned that afternoon, Carolina was seated in one of the wing chairs that stood by the window at the foot of her bed. She had looked out of the same window a hundred times before, and she had a hundred memories of the line of pines that bounded the forest beyond it. But as she had tried to call them up to replace her lost sight, the memories had changed and faded. The strong trunks of the individual trees vanished. Their long needles softened into a haze. Sometimes an aspen, yellow with autumn, sprang up among them uninvited. Sometimes the entire line of pines was replaced by the trees that faced her father’s property, which had had years to root in her memory before she had ever seen Pietro’s land. The harder she concentrated, the faster the forest in her mind shifted and was lost.

  “I have brought the books,” Liza said.

  “Thank you,” said Carolina.

  In the doorway, Liza took a step back under Carolina’s blind gaze.

  “You may bring them here,” Carolina told her.

  For a moment there was silence. Then Liza crossed the room and came to a stop beside the chair opposite Carolina.

  “Please, sit,” Carolina said.

  Liza obeyed.

  “Which ones did you bring?” Carolina asked.

  Leather brushed against binding fabric, and a book fell open.

  “Maps,” Liza answered.

  “No,” Carolina said. “What else?”

  One set of pages slapped together. Another opened. “Birds,” Liza said.

  Carolina shook her head.

  “Flowers and strange fruits,” said Liza.

  “Of Africa,” Carolina said, naming the title from memory. “Flora and vegetation. Open that.”

  “There is a tree like a monster,” Liza said.

  “Good,” Carolina said. “What else do you see?”

  “Trees with monkeys.”

  “What kind of trees?”

  “They have leaves like a fan, as long as my arm. They are shiny like varnish. This tree grows up and down. It has a hundred trunks. There is a man inside, between the trunks, standing up and looking out. This one is a flower.”

  “Like one of our flowers?”

  “No,” Liza said. “Like a lion roaring, with feathers for teeth. But his face is red, and his stripes are white. Here is a lily as tall as a child. It is yellow. The child is white.”

  “What is on the next page?”

  “Next is a bird, with the face of a monkey.”

  This was a lie. The book had been one of Carolina’s favorites, and boasted no such creature.

  “No,” Carolina said. “It is a jacaranda tree. It is silver with purple flowers, and it lines every street in the city.”

  Liza was silent.

  “Go ahead,” Carolina said, after a moment.

  “It is a fruit,” Liza said, finally. “With thorns like a rose.”

  For those first several weeks, the darkness was complete. But then Carolina began to see again, in her dreams.

  At first the glimpses were so slim they might only have been memories: the sun blazing through the new spring leaves, which seemed to be in danger of disintegrating in its rays; a box her mother kept by her bed, red cloth, embroidered with a white parrot; a silver bowl full of lemons. But then the stray images began to form themselves into events she knew had never happened. Her father lifted the lid from a basket of plums to find it guarded by a white asp with pink eyes. Pietro bounded out the front door and, with a laugh, rose into the sky.

  It took her perhaps a week to sort the fragments of sleep from memory and recognize that she could see again in her dreams. As soon as she was certain, she began to make attempts to exert her will in the unreal world. Pietro could fly. Why shouldn’t she? But flight didn’t come to her instantly. She began simply by turning around. If she found herself walking up the stairs in a dream, she stopped, pivoted, and started down. Maybe she discovered herself in the midst of a game, but that didn’t mean she had to play. As the men rolled the wooden balls over the grass, she slipped away and disappeared into the lemon grove, or lost herself in the forest. She might emerge from the woods again on a shell-paved road, or discover a new ocean lapping at the other side of the grove.

  At dream parties in unfamiliar homes, she began to open doors, step backward through them, and close them behind herself before any of the other guests noticed. One door led her into a room filled with hundreds of white statues of hum
an figures, no bigger than doves, set on small shelves in the high walls. Another opened into a clearing at the foot of a giant tree with the smooth skin of an elephant. Pale blue flowers had somehow found a way to blossom on its bark like moss. One time she stepped backward, not into a new room, but into a cold galaxy that she fell through endlessly, her heart seasick, her lungs aching with fear until at last she awoke, grateful for the moment to find herself in simple darkness.

  Someone knocked on her door again, as implacable as the angel of death.

  Carolina extricated herself from the embrace of sleep. She had no idea what time it was, or even what season. She pulled her covers over her chest and sat up.

  “Yes?” she said.

  The door opened.

  “Your father is downstairs,” Liza said. “It is three o’clock in the afternoon.”

  Carolina shook her head. She had not seen her father since her sight left her, and he had not sent any warning in advance.

  “I am not dressed,” Carolina said.

  “They are waiting in the conservatory,” Liza added.

  Carolina bowed her head and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.

  “I will help you,” Liza said.

  Carolina nodded and pushed the covers back.

  In a few minutes, they had buttoned Carolina into a pale gold day dress and Liza had twisted and pinned Carolina’s hair into place. A pair of pearl teardrops dangled from her ears, and a strand of pearls lay heavy on her throat.

  “There you are,” Liza said. Enamel scraped on glass as she set the brush down on the vanity.

  Carolina rose and crossed to the door, where she stood for a moment, both hands pressed flat against her rib cage, as if holding it shut after a flock of birds had already flown out.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She made her way quickly down the main stairs. A few steps from the bottom, she caught the sound of voices from the conservatory, and stopped.

  “Of course you could never have known,” Pietro said gently.

  “No,” her father insisted, his voice wavering with tears. “God would not do this without warning. There was something I didn’t see.”

  At the sound of her father’s grief, Carolina turned and rushed back up the stairs. On the first landing, she collided with Liza. Carolina caught the girl by the wrist and pushed her back into the far corner, where they were hidden from view.

  “Tell them you could not wake me,” Carolina whispered fiercely.

  Then, biting back her own tears, she caught her skirts together and slipped back up to her room.

  In her dreams, Carolina tried to do two things: fly, and find her lake. The lake should have been easy to reach, especially from familiar terrain like Pietro’s home or her father’s lemon groves, where her dreams often began. But again and again, the lake was gone when she reached its location, replaced by a field of orange lilies, a grassy hill, a stand of ancient trees. Her house became a wind-burnt shell, or a woodsman’s hut, or, once, a shop selling lace and candy.

  She tried to fly a hundred different ways: jumping down a staircase; throwing herself from roofs, windows, and trees; flapping her arms and her skirts; running and leaping from the hard-packed dirt where the servants’ children held their races. But finally she began to fly when she wasn’t trying. Deep in a forest carpeted with black violets, she discovered herself rising from the path. She was already ten feet from the ground before she believed what was happening, and another story higher before she realized she couldn’t stop rising. She caught the branches of a tree to keep from ascending helplessly into space and worked her way back down its trunk hand over hand. After a few experiments in its shelter, she learned enough of the new mechanics to sail between the sturdy trunks in fits and starts and to rise and dive as she wanted.

  Those woods were real. She had visited them often as a child to gather flowers to throw into her lake so she could tell her fortune by the way they floated or sank. If her dream behaved, the lake should be only a short flight away. Trembling, Carolina let herself rise between the branches until she broke out of the canopy into the strong Italian sun. She dipped to prove to herself that she could return to earth, snatched one of the high leaves, and let it drop from her fingers as she rose higher, taking in a sweep of the fields and homes in her valley that was wider than anything she had ever seen.

  Her father’s house was as it should be, red tile and white stucco, flashes of statues in the garden, groves running down the slope in even rows. Pietro’s house was there as well, with the long road leading by the pines. The Turri home shone on the next hill. She rose higher and caught sight of the river that fed her lake. The silver band cut a clear path between the trees, then disappeared just where it should have widened into the clearing.

  Carolina glided lower, glancing over the countryside in case the lake had slipped in space, as things so often did in dreams. But it wasn’t lurking beyond the next hill or lost in Pietro’s back acres. She swooped down to the river and skimmed along the bright stream until the trees closed over her head.

  There, just where it should have been, was her lake, hidden from the sky by a stand of massive plane trees that had taken root in the shallow water. Amid them, his face lost in the shadows, was a man. In water up to his waist, he swung a heavy axe against one tree’s broad base.

  In the yard, a crash and a shout, and she was awake.

  It was the dead of night when Carolina ventured downstairs for the first time after going blind. She stood for some uncountable time in her open door, listening for any sign that everything beyond had not been erased by darkness. It was the scratching and cooing of the birds on the roof that gave her the courage to step out onto the soft carpet. From there, she simply turned and reached, as she had done a hundred times before, for the smooth support of the thick banister. It led her faithfully down the wide stairs and deposited her on another carpet in Pietro’s main hall. Here, separated from the sound of the birds, her own steps muffled by the wool, the silence was so deep that the darkness rushed in, threatening to consume her. Instead of cowering before it, she threw her hand out and caught the knob of the front door. At this proof of the world’s existence, the darkness retreated. She began to feel her way through the house.

  She started at the borders of the rooms, her fingers trailing over smooth walls broken by cold windows. She spread her palms flat on brocade upholstery, trying to remember whether it was green or gold. She tangled with potted palms in the corners. The rough faces of the various portraits had nothing to say to her, but their frames were such a symphony for her fingertips that she wondered if the elaborate fashion hadn’t been started, perhaps, by an unnamed artist for his blind wife, now long forgotten.

  A few things had changed. All around the house unfamiliar candles had been scattered to hold back the winter gloom. For whatever reason, Pietro had ordered the piano dragged across the conservatory and the case propped open, even though neither of them played. “What are you doing here?” she whispered, touching the silent keys. Here and there, she found new figurines: a pair of tiny elephants, one’s trunk relaxed, the other trumpeting; a new globe with raised continents; a small piece on the salon mantel, ceramic, full of spikes and smooth patches, which remained a mystery despite repeated visits.

  Each night, she went a little farther. Eventually she began to strike out into the center of the rooms, navigating around remembered buffets and carts, sofas and tables. Pietro didn’t have a library to speak of, but she pulled books down from his few shelves and sat with them on her knees, imagining the unseen pages now filled with heroic tales, now with verse, now with the histories of lost cities. She learned to enter the dining room and stride across it to her own chair. She found the cook’s chocolate and flour, her onions, her vinegar. She entered the salon and threw the curtains wide to the night sky, then pulled them closed again.

  For weeks, her explorations went on in perfect silence. Then, one night, she heard footsteps in the next room.
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br />   She froze. One hand closed on the heavy candlestick she had been examining. The footsteps had fallen in the main hall. She stood in the salon. When Carolina went still, the footsteps also stopped.

  Carolina crossed the wide room and darted across the hall, into the conservatory. A quick touch revealed that the piano had not been moved from its new place, and that the case was still raised, forming a huge shadow that would hide her from the rest of the room. She took up a position beyond it and froze again, but the footsteps didn’t follow. The house breathed normally. Then, rooms away, she heard a creak and a thud as a door swung open, and shut.

  A few nights later, as Carolina was investigating the ever-changing fruits and vegetables on the kitchen counter, she caught the sound of the footsteps again when they stumbled into a chair in the dining room. Instantly, Carolina crossed to the swinging kitchen door and threw it open. She stood on the threshold between the rooms and held her breath so as not to miss the smallest sound. This time, the footsteps’ escape was almost clean, except for a rustle of crumpled paper in the pantry where the girls trimmed and arranged the garden flowers.

  The next night, the footsteps found Carolina in the conservatory, where she stood at the window fingering the neck of a violin that was naked of strings. Immediately, she set the instrument back into its case.

  The footsteps ceased.

  Carolina strode toward the last sound she’d heard, stepping neatly around the piano, a divan, and a low table.

  The footsteps were not so lucky. In great confusion, they crashed into the door, dived through it, and stumbled into Pietro’s office, a small room dominated by a pair of great desks whose surfaces were completely obscured by letters, contracts and circulars, tobacco plugs, bits of pencil, pots of ink, and brutalized pens.