The Blind Contessa's New Machine

by Carey Wallace

  “How many boats do we have?” Pietro broke in. He sat beside Carolina on the divan. That afternoon, without precedent, he had taken to smoothing down the curls that fell over her shoulder as an idle game. With one stroke, a curl would lie flat under his palm, until he released the lock and it sprang back into a dark wave. The unfamiliar gesture worried her, but the action was also calming, like water breaking on sand.

  “Perhaps a dozen,” Contessa Rossi said. “The servants can row them back upstream after each group lands.”

  “Fine,” Pietro said. “I’ll provide the wine. All our servants can set and serve.”

  “Wonderful,” said Contessa Rossi. “And as for the invitations, my dear, I don’t want you to go to any trouble. If you’ll just have the machine sent around, I’m sure I can learn to use it myself.” Her attempt at warmth was grating, like a singer reaching for notes far beyond her range.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Carolina told her.

  Carolina didn’t like walking through Pietro’s house in her dreams. The replica in her mind was full of traps and secrets: she would cross the dining room to the kitchen door, step through it, and find herself back in the dining room again, or climb the stairs to find the second floor had disappeared and a flock of birds now rested, single file, on the narrow ledges formed by the walls of the rooms below. Closets were filled with clouds of black moths. Candles were liable to set fresh bouquets on fire. Handles turned round and round but never moved a latch. There was even a child who roamed, like her, from room to room: a little girl so pale that some days her lips seemed blue, with thick black hair that fell past the white apron tied at her waist. The child was always carrying something, a cup or a twig or book, and as soon as Carolina appeared, she always hurried to leave the room.

  After Carolina had learned to fly, she made a habit of leaving the house as quickly as possible when she found herself in it—usually through the nearest window. In tonight’s dream, the one by the foot of her bed was already open. She padded over to the low sill and crouched to climb out.

  Dawn was breaking. The fading stars hung in unfamiliar patterns: the spoons and the hunter were gone, but she picked out a bird, wings lifted to land; a boat in full sail; a crouching man.

  She stepped off the roof and soared over the yard. When she reached the forest, she dipped into the crowns of the trees, and came to rest on the crest of a small hill that had sprung up beside her lake.

  Turri was already there, tying off a complicated web of red rope that held together a filigree of broad sheets of parchment in the general shape of wings. The wings were supported by a skeleton of sticks he had constructed on either side of a pair of ordinary armchairs, nailed down to a small wooden platform. Between them on the platform sat a bucket of lemons that looked as though they had been rolled in soot.

  “What did you do to those poor lemons?” Carolina asked, stepping closer.

  “Don’t touch them!” Turri said. “They’re full of gunpowder.”

  Carolina crossed her arms.

  Turri circled his machine, rattling the parchment, flicking at the sticks, and tightening a few of the ropes. “They’re fuel,” he offered in explanation when he emerged again on the other side. “Are you ready?”

  Carolina nodded. He indicated one of the chairs, and she sat down in it. Turri took the seat beside her, selected a lemon from the silver pail, and dropped it into an evil-smelling black tube positioned just behind his chair.

  With a sound like distant thunder, the contraption lurched about three feet off the ground and hung there, shuddering. Turri looked at her with delight, then selected another pair of lemons and flung them down the tube. This gave their conveyance the courage it needed to make its break with gravity. It lifted them steadily into the sky, cresting over the tops of the trees in the time it took Carolina to take in and let out a single breath. Their valley spread out below them, the shadows of all the trees and buildings enormously long in the early light.

  “Look at that!” Turri exclaimed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

  Before Carolina could answer, the dark tube behind them coughed, then gagged. Turri quickly dropped another lemon into it, but an instant later the long-suffering yellow fruit shot back out again, in flames, and punched a hole the size of a man’s fist in the unlucky parchment that arced over it. Their little platform rocked like a boat on a rough ocean. Turri twisted to drop another lemon into the tube. The machine groaned, then began to hum again. The platform steadied. He took her hand.

  An enormous thunderclap exploded overhead, followed by what sounded like a hail of pebbles dropping onto the wings that supported them in the air. Then burning bits of rind began to fall through the parchment, which curled away from the heat of the flames as they grew in strength.

  As they hurtled toward the earth, Turri kissed her, very gently, as if he didn’t know whether he meant to wake her or not.

  Turri kissed her again.

  Carolina opened her eyes.

  “There she is,” Turri said gently. “What have you been dreaming about?”

  Carolina sighed and turned her head in the curve of his neck.

  “You built me a flying machine,” she said.

  “I’m very resourceful in your dreams,” said Turri. “Under no circumstances should you ever agree to leave the ground in anything I build in real life. Was it a success?”

  Carolina only hesitated for a moment. “Yes,” she told him. “It was shaped like a swan, with a walking deck and a captain’s cabin, and it ran on lemons.”

  Turri laughed and kissed the side of her face. He stroked her hair.

  “It didn’t work, did it?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Here we are,” Turri whispered when they reached the kitchen garden. “This is the door.”

  “I know,” Carolina whispered back.

  “You don’t,” Turri said. “I could have brought you to the gate of some fantastic palace.”

  “No,” Carolina insisted. “I can smell the roses, and the knob always rattles in my hand.” The latch came free now with a gentle clank. She pulled away from his final kiss and slipped in.

  As she always did, she paused one step past the threshold, leaned back against the door, and listened, just like another woman might have waited for her eyes to begin to pick shapes out of the darkness. The house was silent. The scents of garlic and coffee still lingered in the air from dinner. She crossed through the small room to the kitchen.

  From here, as long as she didn’t panic, she was safe. There was no reason that she, as the lady of the house, shouldn’t have wandered down for a cake or something to drink. She steadied herself against the door frame and bent to remove her telltale damp shoes. Then she glided quickly across the kitchen and paused on the verge of the dining room.

  Outside in the yard, a dove cooed sleepily, which meant that Turri had been wrong, or had lied to her, about how close they’d come to morning. She struck out across the dining room, caressing the backs of the chairs that told her the way, and ducked into the hall.

  At the far end, by the front door, someone took a step and stopped.

  Carolina buried her shoes in the folds of her skirt and froze.

  “Carolina?” Pietro asked after a moment, startled. “Are you all right?”

  Carolina’s hand flew to the throat of her dress. With relief, she found she had remembered to fasten it. “You frightened me!” she said.

  Pietro laughed. “You don’t have to be afraid of bandits in our valley,” he said. “All they could steal are books and lemons.”

  Slowly, with none of her usual sure-footedness, Carolina made her way down the hall toward him. Each step she took felt like a risk, as if the sound of his voice had torn holes in the unseen walls, or opened up new gaps in the floor.

  When she reached him, he kissed the side of her face tenderly. “You couldn’t sleep?”

  Carolina wondered how much light had broken through the tall, narrow wind
ows that flanked the door, and if it was enough to betray her bare feet.

  “It doesn’t matter when I sleep,” she told him. “Sometimes I like to walk around the house when no one can see me.”

  “Shall I take you to your room?” he asked.

  “Thank you,” she said, her chest tight with fear. “I know where it is.”

  As she turned away, she swept her shoes over the folds of her dress and pressed them tight against her belly, so her slim back blocked them from his view as she climbed the stairs. It wasn’t until she swung the door of her room shut behind her that she realized she hadn’t asked him where he had been.

  That afternoon, the cello seemed to be missing the home of its youth. It waxed eloquent about the long days it had spent wandering beloved roads, thought of the way light had glinted off the river that ran by its house, and remembered a chorus of familiar voices. Then it mourned, searching the streets of a new city for comfort, finding none.

  When the song ended, Carolina lifted her head from the divan. She had never spoken with the old cellist before except to thank him or ask him to continue with another song, but now she wanted, suddenly, to talk with him as a friend. The desire to lay her burdens down at someone else’s feet surprised her with its strength.

  Almost as quickly, she realized how complete a stranger he was to her.

  “I don’t know where you come from,” she said.

  The old man was silent. The silence was so deep that the darkness in Carolina’s mind began to eat up the walls and windows of the room. Involuntarily, she threw her hands out, searching for something to prove that vision wrong.

  When the old man saw this, he answered, “Florence.”

  “Like the poets,” Carolina said. Her hands had found the table of trinkets that sat beside the divan. She lifted a metal soldier from his place, explored the crisp lines of his uniform with her fingers, and put him back.

  “Where did you learn to play these songs?” she asked.

  The old man didn’t reply. Carolina settled her hands in her lap and turned her gaze toward him, like a believer staring blindly through the screen at confession.

  “Child,” the old man said, “I don’t want to know your secrets.”

  “The king is riding an elephant,” Liza said. “That is like a cow, with a lion’s mane.”

  She was narrating the life of an unnamed Caesar, told in illustrations. Liza was an able liar, but she was rarely inaccurate, sticking, with a liar’s instinct, to topics she knew well, or ones that no one could know. Today, however, she was taking wild guesses.

  “How frightening,” Carolina said. She thought she caught a faint trace of a new scent in the room: lily and musk, some kind of perfume. When Liza turned the next page, the scent came to Carolina again.

  “Now he has built a great tower out of sticks, and set it on fire. It’s so hot that the sparks turn into stars.”

  “Liza,” Carolina interrupted. “Is that perfume you’re wearing?”

  The book snapped shut. Liza said nothing.

  Carolina laughed, delighted. “Is it a secret!” she said. “A present from a sweetheart?”

  Stony silence answered her.

  “Liza!” Carolina teased. “Are you having a romance?”

  Fabric rustled, wafting the scent to Carolina again as Liza stood and dropped the book on her chair.

  “Are we finished then?” Liza asked. “I am wanted in the kitchen.”

  “He seems to think we built this whole place just for him,” Pietro said, bemused.

  Babolo twittered for silence, then waited to make sure he had his audience’s full attention before bursting into a song that Carolina had begun to recognize as his waking exultation. It was full of boasts, war stories, and rash promises, and Babolo reserved it exclusively for sunny mornings. On gray days, he was apt to fall into reverie, with missed chances, distant shores, and unspoken love as his themes.

  “I really think you brought me a little king,” Carolina said. “Or at least the king’s singer.”

  At the sound of her voice, Babolo broke off. He shuffled pointedly on his perch, his feelings extravagantly wounded.

  “Oh, Babolo,” Carolina said. “That was a compliment.”

  “Musicians are sensitive,” Pietro said.

  Carolina laughed.

  Pietro had brought her an orange as a morning snack. Holding half of it in the palm of one hand, she traced the outlines of a single section, pulled it free from the others, and held it out to him. The touch of his fingers was warm on her hand, which had turned cold from the chilled fruit.

  “And Liza!” she said. “Have you seen her in the yard with any of the boys? I teased her for having a sweetheart yesterday, and she stalked out of the room and won’t come back.”

  Babolo trilled up and down a pair of scales, to remind them what they were missing.

  “The cook even sent Giovanni up with breakfast,” Carolina said. “Liza never lets him bring breakfast. I think it’s because she steals half the fruit. There was twice as much this morning.”

  “Well, women are mysteries,” Pietro said carefully. “Even when they’re young.”

  “Yes, but you must watch for me,” Carolina said. “In the kitchen, or the yard. She’ll never tell me herself.”

  “I will,” Pietro promised.

  “Where are we?” Turri said.

  They stood just inside the door of the lake house, slightly out of breath from the walk through the forest. Turri’s head was bowed so that his forehead touched hers. His hands toyed with the clasp of the cloak at her neck. She understood the question: a request for her to invent another location in their ongoing game.

  Turri kissed her. The lake house in her mind rose gently from its foundation and floated away into the sky. For a moment, shadows surrounded them. Then stone walls began to emerge from the darkness, glossy with mist. The two of them stood on a walk between pools of green water, under a low arched ceiling. The water was lit from below. Where the lights shone up through it, it glowed gold. The cloak slipped from her shoulders.

  “A grotto,” she said. “There are lights under the water.”

  Turri had been working down the buttons at the back of her neck, his fingers brushing the thin skin over her spine as he went. When he reached her waist, he unfastened the final clasp. The dress dropped to the floor. Turri’s breath left him in a rush. For a long moment, he didn’t touch her. Then he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her again. She searched for the skin beneath his shirt. One of his hands flattened over the wing of her shoulder blade, and pulled her to him.

  Outside, a twig snapped in the dark.

  The two of them froze.

  “It’s nothing,” he said, speaking low. “Some animal. Listen.”

  This time it was not only a twig, but dry leaves crackling and shuffling as something walked through them, making no attempt to disguise its presence.

  “The ghost,” Carolina whispered.

  “No,” Turri said. “A dog, or a fawn.” He stroked her hair gently, as if she were a worried child.

  The sound from the woods stopped. Turri lifted her chin with his thumb. “See?” he said.

  A step fell on the stairs of the house. Carolina shrank against Turri, her bare skin cold with fear. The visitor hesitated for a moment, then ascended to the door. Turri crossed his arms behind Carolina’s back as if bracing against a high wind.

  It was a child’s voice, thin with fright. “Papa?” he asked.

  The next instant, Carolina was alone.

  The door thudded shut and Turri’s step sounded on the stair outside. “Antonio,” he said, his own voice changed by fear. “What’s the matter?”

  Carolina crouched, searching the dusty floor for her dress. When she found a handful of lace, she pulled it close.

  “I went to find Mama,” Antonio said. “But she was gone.”

  Carolina could hear the stairs creak as Turri lifted Antonio in his arms. Still crouching, she scrambled into the dress.
She managed to thread her arms through the sleeves, but when she tried to straighten, she discovered she was standing on the skirt, forcing her to bow.

  “You weren’t in the library or the laboratory,” Antonio said, working through the possibilities with scientific precision.

  “So you came here,” Turri concluded. “That was very brave.”

  At this praise from his father, Antonio’s courage finally failed. “I was afraid!” he said. His voice rose and choked with tears.

  “It’s all right,” Turri said. “All right. I’m going to take you home.”

  His familiar footsteps, heavy under Antonio’s weight, descended the stairs.

  Carolina untangled herself from her skirts and rose. For a few more moments, she could hear him passing through the grass. Then even that sound vanished.

  Inexpertly, she fastened as many of the buttons of her dress as she could reach. She found her cloak and threw it over her shoulders. Darkness roiled at the windows and drank up whole swaths of the lake in her mind, but the prospect of being discovered by sunlight in the same place was even more frightening.

  She slipped out of the house to the lake’s edge, where she knew a few of the stakes she had planted the previous summer still stood, the twine she’d tied lax between them. Swiping at the reeds, she managed to find one stake that led her along a twisted string studded by broken wood to another stake still standing halfway down the bank. With countless false starts and missteps, she followed her half-ruined path around the lake and through the forest. When the strings and stakes ran out among the pines, she followed the rise of the hill to the road, then struck into the yard until she reached the stucco face of her home. She traced its walls back to the kitchen door and slipped through the house to her room. Her fingers clumsy with cold, she unfastened her dress and let it fall to the floor again. When she crawled into bed, the darkness consumed everything: the lake, the road, the house, her hands, stopping only at the threshold of her heart. For the first time, she welcomed it as it pulled her down into dreamless sleep.