The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  and hung it in a tree

  Carolina measured the lines and judged them original. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Shall I call Giovanni?” Liza asked.

  “Yes,” Carolina said. “And leave me the letter.” She held out her hand. Liza seemed to deliberate for a moment, then complied.

  When Carolina heard Liza’s light step on the stair outside, she settled the folded page in a drawer and turned to the writing machine. Quickly, she tapped out a time and meeting place. Giovanni mounted the steps with a great clatter as she blew out the sealing wick. He reached her room as she pressed the metal signet into the wax.

  “Giovanni,” she said, extending the new letter. “This is for Signor Turri. Can you read letters?”

  “I can sing like an angel!” he answered.

  This was how the first weeks of summer passed: nights that began when she met Turri in the servants’ yard, warm days crowded with waking dreams that slipped seamlessly into sleep and back again. Turri took to discovering the secrets of her body with all the passion of a great explorer. His curiosity was endless and his concentration complete. It excluded everything. If she let him, he would begin with a stray kiss at the back of her neck as he guided her through the forest and end with the two of them tangled in the loamy pine needles beside the path. Every night was a new experiment. He unworked the buttons of her dress, pushed it from her shoulders, but stayed a step away, tracing her lips, her jaw, her breasts to see where she resonated, when she drew a breath. When they lay curled together he covered her face with his hands, learning her features by touch as if he were the blind one. He returned to the same curves and hollows again and again, to hear her make the same sound, or, turning his hand, to discover something he’d missed. Pietro’s touch had confused her with heat and surprised her with pleasure, but he had never studied her like this.

  The price she paid was high. Since the blindness had erased her world, reconstructing the rooms around her in her imagination had been a constant struggle. Now, with her days and nights inverted, sleeping only in broken fits, it became impossible. A gust of wind turned to Turri’s breath on her skin and suddenly the piano, the divan, the staircase that she had set so carefully in place, were knocked away by memories that left her in total darkness when they faded. Without constant vigilance, she forgot where certain trinkets stood, what tables she had asked the servants to move. Vases seemed to vanish in thin air. Chairs seemed to appear out of nowhere. The real world became just as unpredictable as her dreams had been.

  Her dreams themselves deserted her. They had been her one refuge from the blindness, but now they came to her only in scraps and fragments, like her sleep. At best, they lasted just moments, and the moments were nightmarish. In one, she stood in a long hall of statues: each one was blind like her, but she was frozen just like them. In another, she rose in flight, but as soon as her feet left the ground, darkness rushed in and ate up the whole scene. The loss of the freedom she’d won in her dreams left her with nothing but disintegrating memories to furnish the rooms in her mind, and to fend off the fears and doubts that followed her now like a flock of hungry birds.

  Turri used the word love and she returned it to him like a student repeating a lesson in a new language, but during the daylight hours it seemed like too slight a word to bear all its meanings: her childish hope in Pietro, the promises she had made the priest, her father’s shy gifts, Turri’s skin on hers and his extravagant schemes. The only thing she knew for certain was that her mind cleared and the fears scattered when she was with Turri. But she didn’t know how to explain any of this to him. For his part, Turri was still in the thrall of the dream he’d stepped into when she first turned to kiss him, willing to take all risks, full of tender nonsense.

  “I can see in my dreams,” she began one night, a few weeks after he had given her the machine.

  Turri had been tracing lines on her skin with a feather quill, but now he laid his palm flat on her breastbone. “What do you see?” he asked.

  “The valley,” she said. “Our houses. The lake.”

  “Do you see me?” Turri asked.

  “I see you,” Carolina said. “But we don’t meet.”

  “You should speak to me,” Turri said. “I’m sure I’m much smarter in your dreams. I should give you questions to pose to me in your sleep.”

  Somehow, the conversation had drifted from what she meant to say. His joke made her frown in frustration.

  Turri’s knuckles passed gently over her cheek, as if trying to brush the expression away. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I don’t dream anymore,” Carolina told him in a rush. “I wake up and I don’t know where I am.” Her voice rose as she spoke, dissolving into tears. Surprised by them, she hid her face against his shoulder.

  Turri stroked her hair in silence. Carolina held her breath, but she couldn’t keep the tears from leaking onto his skin. When they passed, she lifted her face to kiss his neck.

  “Well, then you could be anywhere,” he said gently.

  “I know,” Carolina said. “I hate it.”

  “No,” Turri said. “The rest of us can’t help seeing where we are. But you can be wherever you want. Where are we now?”

  “The lake house,” she answered.

  “No,” he said. “Where do you want to be?”

  He turned his head to kiss her temple. Carolina closed her eyes. A wave of sleep rolled over her and receded, leaving behind the fragments of a dream: a palace abandoned in the desert, the roof now rubble on the marble floor, the columns still intact. The memorized lines of the lake house she had constructed in her mind shivered, then vanished. In its place rose weathered marble walls. Someone had hung lengths of colored fabric above them to block the harsh desert sun.

  “A palace in the sand,” she said. “With scarves for a ceiling.”

  “There,” Turri said. “See?”

  “There is a man coming up the walk,” Liza announced. The chair she had dragged out to the terrace earlier that afternoon scraped on the stone as she turned to get a better look. “An old man.”

  Carolina laughed, imagining Turri’s yelp when she conveyed this insult. She turned her face toward the break in the line of oaks that any visitor must pass through to reach the house.

  “Now he’s stopped,” Liza announced.

  Carolina smiled, and waved.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Liza said. “He looks like he’s seen a ghost.”

  Carolina grinned wider, enjoying the effect of her trick, and dropped her hand.

  “Here he comes,” Liza said. “He brought you flowers.”

  An instant later, faint footsteps sounded on the gravel, maybe a dozen yards away. Carolina knew the gait instantly.

  “Father!” she exclaimed.

  The footsteps stopped again.

  “Ah,” Liza said under her breath, as if she had just untangled some kind of knot.

  Carolina rose and took several steps in the direction the footsteps had last sounded.

  “Cara mia!” her father said. He swallowed her up in his embrace, his jacket rich with the smells of tobacco and lemon. The cool blooms of a bouquet pressed against the back of her neck, their stems diagonal between her shoulders. Her father didn’t remember them until she began to struggle gently. Then he released her and pressed the flowers into her hands.

  “They are yellow and red,” he said. “The best we have. I chose them by their scent.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Carolina said, from habit. Liza touched her elbow, and Carolina relinquished the bound stems. A moment later, the door to the house thudded closed.

  “Will you sit?” Carolina asked.

  “Of course!” her father said heartily, taking the chair where Liza had been. Carolina worried briefly if the maid’s chair would be fine enough for her father, then realized that Liza had undoubtedly chosen herself the best one she could find. Carolina sank down on her divan, worrying another detail: her father was not an old man.

/>   “I got your letter,” her father said.

  “I’m so glad,” said Carolina.

  “Where did Pietro ever find you such a wonderful machine?” her father asked.

  “It wasn’t Pietro,” Carolina said. “Turri made it for me.”

  “Turri,” her father repeated.

  Carolina nodded. When her father didn’t speak, she added: “I think he was sorry that I couldn’t see.”

  Her father still didn’t answer.

  The heat of shame rose from Carolina’s heart into her throat. Her chest tightened. She searched through the shadows that crowded into her mind, trying to think of another topic to turn to, but found nothing. Finally, she simply reached for him. Her guess was wild, but her father caught her hand and settled it between both of his on his knee.

  “You must miss your lake,” he said finally.

  “I do,” Carolina said.

  “Shall I take you there?” he asked.

  Her father held her hand as if she were still a little girl, with all her fingers pressed side by side like pastels in a box. He tramped along in the low brush beside the trail so that she could have the clear path. A few times he stumbled, or seemed to work for his breath, and Carolina worried about what Liza had said: if the strong, florid figure she remembered was being bowed to an old man. But there was no way to ask.

  In broad daylight, with a good guide, reaching the lake took only minutes. Carolina could tell they were near it by the sound of the frogs and locusts, and the smell of fresh water. But when they emerged from the shade of the forest into the cleared land that surrounded the lake, her father stopped.

  “Yes, look at this,” he muttered.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Hello!” Turri called from the far bank. A moment later, with less enthusiasm, a second “Hello!” followed. A child’s voice—Antonio.

  “Your friend is here,” her father told her.

  “And his son,” she added.

  Her father crooked his arm and lifted her hand. She threaded her arm through his and he led her around the bank without speaking.

  “We have reared a crop of pollywogs,” Turri called as they approached. “They’ve been growing in jars on Antonio’s windowsills, living on oatmeal. Today we set them free.”

  A few feet from Turri’s voice, Carolina’s father halted. They stood near the forest that bordered the Turri land, on the opposite side of the lake from her cottage.

  “They’re almost frogs now,” Antonio explained.

  “Did you already let them go?” Carolina asked.

  “Yes,” Antonio said. “The little fish came around to look at them, but one of our tadpoles chased them off.”

  “Where are they now?” her father asked, genuinely curious.

  Someone must have pointed, because her father leaned over the water. “Look at that!” he said.

  Carolina tried to pull her arm from his so he could move more freely, but he straightened and drew her closer. “You’ve raised some very brave pollywogs,” he told Antonio with great seriousness.

  “They learned all their bravery from Antonio,” Turri said.

  “And your father has built my daughter a writing machine,” Carolina’s father added. “Did you help him make it?”

  “I saw it,” Antonio said, unimpressed. “I can make prettier letters by hand.”

  Turri laughed. “That’s true,” he said. “Antonio writes with all the flair of a great contessa.”

  “Well,” Carolina’s father said, “I have you to thank for my daughter’s letters.”

  A brief silence fell. Carolina strained to hear, but she could catch no clue to what passed between them.

  “I’m glad for that,” Turri said, after a moment.

  “There are flowers in the water,” Antonio noted.

  “They have their roots in the bottom of the lake,” Turri said. “Like an anchor to hold a boat in its place.”

  “Would he like to pick one?” Carolina asked.

  “I could take one to Mama,” Antonio suggested.

  “You’re very thoughtful,” said Carolina.

  There was a small splash as Antonio pulled one of the lilies from among the rest. “It’s very pretty,” he said. “I think it may be the prettiest.” He sounded worried by this. “Is it all right if I take it?”

  “Of course,” Carolina said. “You should bring your mother the best one you can find.”

  “Are you a friend of Mama’s?” he asked.

  “They were girls together,” Turri said, when Carolina didn’t answer.

  “You mother was a very pretty little girl,” Carolina’s father said. “She used to steal my lemons and try to feed them to the horses. Have you ever seen a horse eat a lemon?”

  Antonio listened in rapt silence.

  “At Carolina’s tenth birthday party, your mother gave a lemon to a horse who was waiting in the yard, and when he tasted it, he spit it so far it broke the window in our library.”

  Another boy might have laughed, but Antonio waited.

  Carolina’s father chuckled. “But no one could be angry with her,” he said. “She was too pretty.”

  “She’s still pretty,” Antonio offered.

  “That’s right,” Turri said, as if his son had looked to him for confirmation.

  A hand seemed to close on Carolina’s heart. The pang echoed through her body. She struggled to keep her face still. But almost immediately Turri must have extended his hand, because her father leaned away from her to shake it.

  “We certainly didn’t mean to interrupt your visit,” Turri said. “We ought to be getting back now. Thank you.”

  “Thank you,” Antonio repeated.

  “You’re very welcome,” Carolina’s father told the boy. “Come and explore anytime.”

  “Thank you,” Antonio said again.

  “Contessa,” Turri said, in parting.

  Carolina nodded.

  Their footsteps faded on the soft grass.

  “Would you like me to take you to the cottage?” her father asked.

  Hot fear washed over Carolina. She had no idea how she and Turri had left the house or what evidence it might contain. She shook her head. “This is enough,” she said.

  Her father drew her closer. His hand covered hers. “There’s so little I can do for you,” he said.

  Tears sprang to Carolina’s eyes. She caught her breath but when she let it out the tears escaped down her face.

  “No, no,” her father said. He folded her into his arms as if settling the extended wing of a frightened bird back against its own chest. “And now I’ve made you cry,” he said.

  “An island,” Carolina told Turri. “The sand is white and the moon is out.”

  As the summer wore on, Turri had developed the habit of asking her where they were each time they met. At the question, a vision always sprang up in her mind’s eye: hidden waterfalls, new gardens, unknown shores. Perhaps lured by these imaginings, her dreams had begun to return as well. They still came to her in fragments, but they didn’t wink out as soon as they began. In them, doors that had been locked now opened under her hand. When she rose in flight, it was over familiar lands. The flock of fears and doubts still interfered with her thoughts, but she had learned to keep them at bay by never letting her mind settle too long on certain topics. The result was not peace, but an uneasy truce under which she was barred from inspecting the corners of her heart for fear the darkness would rise up and strip her of her dreams again.

  The island was an invention, but the moonlight was real. Since she had gone blind, she’d suspected she could feel the faint weight of it on her skin on clear nights, and she felt it now, falling through the window of the lake house.

  “I can feel the moon on my skin,” she told Turri. “Like sunlight, but lighter.”

  “And it is cold, where the sun is hot?” he teased.

  “No,” Carolina said stubbornly, and laid a finger on her shoulder. “Here, see?”

  “You’re
right!” Turri said, surprised. “Try again.”

  “Scientist,” Carolina said, and touched her belly, high, just below her breast.

  “How did you know that?” Turri asked.

  “I can feel it!” Carolina insisted, and touched the hollow of her throat where the bones that supported her shoulders met.

  This time, Turri kissed it.

  “You know why they have invited us?” Pietro said.

  Carolina laid down the heavy linen notepaper, which he had handed to her despite the fact that she couldn’t read the message, and shook her head.

  “They want a line from your machine,” he told her. “All the ladies in the valley you’ve sent one to have been lording it over the ones you haven’t. They’re worth more this season than a dress from Milan.”

  Over the past weeks, Carolina had sent out a handful of thanks and greetings as politeness dictated, using the machine. None of them had seemed especially noteworthy to her. “Who have I sent them to?” she asked.

  “To Princess Bianchi, in exchange for a box of oranges,” Pietro began. “Alessa Puccini, regretting that you could not join her for a ride in the country. Ser Rossi, when he offered you a quartet for the afternoon.”

  “I already have your cellist,” Carolina said.

  “Princess Bianchi has actually pinned your reply to an arrangement of ivy on her mantel,” Pietro said. “She thinks it’s very Oriental.”

  Carolina had never heard a trace of bitterness in his voice before, and it didn’t suit him. She rose and carried the invitation to where he stood. He lifted the paper from her hand. She curled her arm through his and laid her head on his shoulder. She had planned to speak, but when her face touched the fabric of his jacket, she simply closed her eyes.

  “It’s true,” Turri told her later that night. “They’ve got bits of your writing displayed in every house you’ve sent it. You should be a poet.”

  “Do they really?” Carolina asked.

  “Sometimes they set it up right on the mantel,” he said. “The more tasteful ones only leave it scattered about where you can’t help seeing.”