Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  I turned from the window. As I got back into bed, a man began to talk somewhere close by, his voice lowered to a growl, and though I couldn’t make out any of the words, I thought I heard defiance and regret. In the morning, when I mentioned the episode to the signora, she told me it sounded like her husband, though he had died a long time ago, the year the ostrich escaped from the Grand Duke’s menagerie and ran over the Ponte Vecchio, a crowd of people following behind and copying its jerky movements. She was smiling at the memory and shaking her head, and it was too late by then to offer my condolences. Actually, she went on, it might have been Ambrose Cuif, the Frenchman, whom I had heard. He lived above me, on the top floor, and suffered from insomnia – though, come to think of it, his voice was light and high-pitched, almost like a girl’s. Perhaps, in the end, I had been dreaming.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

  During that first week I was woken one morning by a tapping on my door. When I asked who it was, there was no reply. I opened the door. Looked out. The stairwell was empty; voices floated up from the tavern far below. On the floor only inches from my toes was something long and papery, fragile as a strip of worn grey silk. Bending down, I saw it was a skin shed by a snake. Somehow I knew the signora’s daughter, Fiore, was responsible, and when I saw her next, in the parlour by the front entrance, I thanked her for the gift. She blushed and ran from the room, knocking a small table with her hip on the way out. A vase rocked on its base, but didn’t topple.

  The signora glanced up from her accounts. ‘She seems to have taken a shine to you.’

  That afternoon, I asked Fiore if she would consider showing me the city. She bit her bottom lip, then turned and moved towards to the window. Outside, a drizzle fell, as fine as pins. There might be a couple of places, she said at last, which she could take me to.

  By the following day, the weather had cleared, and we set out beneath a hot blue sky. Fiore led the way. Her lumbering walk, her oddly decorated hair. But she had a queenly air about her – she was flattered, I thought, to have been put in charge – and several shopkeepers bowed ironically as she passed by. Outside Santissima Annunziata, I told her that until recently the church had housed wax effigies, some propped in niches in the walls, others suspended from the ceiling. Sometimes the ropes would snap, and figures would plummet feet first on to the congregation worshipping below. People had been killed by people who were already dead.

  Fiore put both hands on her hips. ‘Who is showing who the city?’

  I was quiet after that.

  Our first stop was the Duomo, or Santa Maria del Fiore – named after her, obviously – then we climbed steep steps to a tower belonging to the Guazzi twins. Simone and Doffo Guazzi made fireworks, and their enthusiasm was childlike, infectious. After exploring an abandoned fulling mill, we crossed the river and visited another church, Santa Felicità. Halfway down the aisle, Fiore turned her back on the altar and pointed to a metal grille set high in the wall above the entrance. This was the passageway the Grand Duke used when he wanted to move through the city unobserved. She had seen him once, she said, peering down into the nave. Lastly, she took me to an ornate but grimy building in the Jewish ghetto. It was here that a countess had been stabbed to death by one of her many lovers.

  Dusk fell. As we walked back to the House of Shells, through the labyrinth of streets that encircled the ghetto, Fiore went into more detail about the murder. The lover’s knife had severed both the woman’s throat and the necklace she had been wearing, and on certain nights, if you listened carefully enough, you could hear the click-click-click of loose pearls bouncing down the stairs. Though Fiore was still talking, I had become distracted. Most of the shops near the Mercato Vecchio were hung with sheets of oiled paper or sealed with a single wooden shutter, but I had stopped, by chance, outside an establishment whose window was made of panes of glass. Judging by the many jars and bottles on display, it was an apothecary, though it didn’t appear to have a name, or even a sign. I moved nearer. As a boy, I had spent hours in apothecaries. Whenever my mother was taken ill, which happened much more often after my father’s death, one of my duties was to collect her medicines. While waiting, I would listen to the men who gathered in the shop – they talked about their families, their careers, and about religion and politics as well – and I soon realized that if you wanted to take the pulse of a city and learn the shape of its secrets, there was no better place to be. As I bent close to the glass to examine an array of herbs used against pregnancy – I recognized mugwort and juniper – a slender hand reached down and placed a new jar in the window. Looking up, my eyes met those of a young woman. Perhaps it was the pane of glass between us that gave me licence, or perhaps it was the unlikely marriage of her black hair and pale green eyes, but I remained quite still and stared at her until, at last, with the suggestion of a smile, she lowered her gaze and withdrew into the dark interior, and I was left to turn away and walk light-headed along the damp, shadowy gorge of an alley whose air in that moment, unaccountably, had filled with the seed-heads from dandelions, fragile, transparent, and whirling downwards in their thousands, like insubstantial, half-imagined snow. It wasn’t until I reached the corner that I remembered Fiore. I looked over my shoulder and saw her hurrying after me in her derelict, ill-fitting shoes.

  Some days later, Signora de la Mar called through my door. ‘You have a visitor.’

  I didn’t answer. I was working on a sketch of the girl I had seen, and didn’t want to be disturbed.

  The door opened. ‘He’s from the palace.’

  I looked round. The signora’s face was flushed, and not, I thought, because she had just climbed five flights of stairs.

  She shrugged. ‘I can tell him you’re busy if you like.’

  ‘Perhaps I’d better see what it’s about.’

  I followed her down to the parlour.

  Standing with his back to the window was a man in opulent dark robes. He was heavily built, with a greying moustache. I put his age at about sixty.

  ‘The House of Shells,’ he said. ‘It’s some years since I was here.’ His voice was rich and succulent, a voice that was used to being listened to. ‘You know the story, I take it?’

  I shook my head.

  The signora’s husband came from Salamanca, he said, which was famous for pies filled with scallops. There was a house in the city that was tiled with scallop shells, apparently, and it had been the Spaniard’s dream to recreate the house in Florence. The winters were too wet, though, and the shells kept coming loose. Or else people would steal them. Little by little, he lost his strength, his sense of purpose.

  ‘And it was shellfish, oddly, that killed him in the end.’ He fingered his moustache. ‘You’re from Sicily, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long since you were there?’

  ‘Sixteen years.’

  ‘You don’t miss it?’

  ‘I miss it, yes.’ Why did his gentle probing unnerve me so? He was probably just being polite. ‘And you, sir? Where are you from?’

  ‘You don’t know who I am?’

  ‘You haven’t told me.’

  Though my visitor remained quite motionless, he appeared, in that moment, to writhe or undulate, reminding me of something I had seen in the market in Palermo once – a snake rising, charmed, out of a basket. It only lasted a second. I pinched my eyes.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I’m the Grand Duke’s private secretary. My name is Apollonio Bassetti.’ He rolled the syllables on his tongue like pieces of soft fruit. ‘His Highness has been asking for you.’

  I watched Bassetti carefully. He seemed to be taking an interest in the dust that had gathered at the edges of the room.

  ‘So far, though,’ he said, ‘you have failed to present yourself.’

  I had known full well that I was expected at the palace, and yet, for reasons I could not explain, I had found myself delaying the moment. I had been sleeping late, and walking the streets, sometimes with Fiore, sometimes
on my own. I had spent evenings in the tavern, drinking the local wine – red by all accounts, though it had blackened my lips as if poured straight from an inkwell. While there, I had fallen into conversation with men who earned their living in any number of strange and desperate ways. One sold unguents door-to-door and occasionally wrestled bears. His name was Quilichini. Another – Belbo – oversaw the execution of criminals on a piece of waste ground beyond the eastern gate. A third collected dead animals and dumped them in a boneyard called Sardigna.

  ‘I was settling in,’ I said.

  ‘You were settling in …’

  I didn’t think Bassetti was being sarcastic or disparaging. If he had repeated my words, it was in the hope of understanding them.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘His Highness will see you at noon tomorrow.’ He moved past me, out of the room. Then, by the front entrance, he swung round, one hand foraging in the folds of his robes. ‘I almost forgot.’ He produced a small glass jar with a cork stopper and held it up to the light as if it were a jewel. ‘Something to welcome you to Florence. A local speciality.’

  I thanked him.

  As I examined the jar, which contained a root or tuber that was round and mud-coloured, about the size of an apricot, I was aware of a movement to my right, in the gloom at the far end of the hall. A man came down the stairs, huge but silent, passing me as if I were not there, and though I didn’t see his face properly I registered a certain gauntness, and a mouth that was like a razor-cut – that still, shocked moment before the blood wells up into the wound. Bassetti followed the man into a waiting carriage. Then they were gone.

  The signora appeared at my elbow. ‘Is that a truffle?’

  I removed the cork from the jar. The smell was acrid, medicinal; it reminded me of gas.

  People who knew my plague pieces were often wrong-footed when they met me for the first time, and judging by the way the Grand Duke stared at me the following day, he was no exception. He had probably assumed I would be a morbid, saturnine character, or even that I might exhibit signs of physical corruption – a livid rash, a scattering of glossy boils – yet there I was, soberly but immaculately dressed, and with a smile on my face. And why shouldn’t I be smiling? He had invited me to his city, and would now provide for me financially. Despite my initial impressions of Florence, I felt a paradoxical lightness of spirit, almost a kind of mischief; like a shade-loving plant, I tended to flourish in dark places.

  He was eating, of course. He was almost always eating. Aside from his reputation for piety – his knees had the consistency of leather, apparently, owing to the many hours he spent in prayer – he was famed for his voracious appetite, but as I approached I noticed there was no meat on the table. No fish either. All I could see, heaped in extravagant profusion, were vegetables.

  The Grand Duke eyed me. ‘Are you hungry?’

  I told him I’d already eaten.

  ‘And even if you hadn’t,’ he said glumly, ‘I doubt you’d be interested. It’s a Pythagorean diet, in case you wondered. My physician, Redi, is a tyrant.’

  The previous night, he went on, he had dreamed that he was hunting in the Cascine, west of the city. Afterwards, there had been a banquet. Roast venison had been served, and suckling pig, and duck. Tripe too, a favourite of his. His mouth was watering; he had to dab it with a napkin.

  ‘I’m tormented even when I’m sleeping.’ He shook his head. ‘Thirteen years I’ve been eating vegetables. Thirteen years!’ He sighed. ‘How about some wine?’

  To this I agreed.

  ‘Signor Zummo,’ he said, when I was seated opposite him, ‘you can’t imagine how much I have looked forward to this moment.’

  In the green light that streamed in from the palace gardens, the Grand Duke’s face had the sponginess and pallor of the mushrooms that lay untouched near his elbow.

  ‘Your work is fascinating,’ he went on. ‘You have a vision that is not unlike my own.’ He turned his bulbous eyes to the window. A breeze pushed at the myrtle trees; a distant fountain glittered. ‘It’s as if you’ve gained access to the inside of my head. My innermost thoughts, my anxieties – my fears.’ He began to dismantle an artichoke, setting each leaf aside, intent, it seemed, on arriving at the heart. ‘You’re sure you won’t join me?’

  I realized that if I continued to refuse the offer he might take offence. Leaning over the table, I studied a dish containing a pile of brittle black strands that reminded me of filigree at first, and then, more disturbingly, of pubic hair.

  ‘Good choice,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘Fried seaweed.’

  As the seaweed was spooned, tinkling, on to my plate, he told me he knew nothing about my origins.

  I was born in Siracusa, I said, in the south-east of Sicily. For centuries, the town had been a military stronghold and an important trading post, but it was also a beautiful place, with a warm, dry climate and sea views on three sides. My father, a shipbuilder, had been employed by the Gargallo family. Sadly, he had died when I was six. As the second of two sons, I had been educated at the Jesuit College, though my passion for sculpting in wax had led me away from a career in the church.

  The Grand Duke interrupted. ‘If the town is as idyllic as you make it sound, why did you leave?’

  This was a question I had been asked many times over the years, and in replying I always chose the lie that was most suited to the circumstances, the one that would be believed.

  ‘I needed inspiration,’ I said.

  Siracusa was a small town – a fortress, really – inhabited almost exclusively by soldiers and clerics. I saw paintings by Caravaggio – he was my first real influence – but not much else; life could be suffocating, especially for an artist. In Naples, though, I knew I would be able to breathe, and it was in that exciting, chaotic city that my vision began to crystallize. The art I was exposed to had a profound effect on me. Religious works by Luca Giordano, obviously, but also Mattia Preti’s frescoes and the plague paintings of Jean Baron. And I had spent hours in front of Gargiulo’s masterpiece, ‘Piazza Mercatello’.

  ‘I hope you brought a sample of your own work,’ the Grand Duke said.

  I signalled to a servant, who fetched a large, square package from the next room. This was a piece I had completed while in Naples. The Grand Duke’s eyes, already bulging, seemed to protrude still further as I undid the string. The wrapping fell away, and he let out a sigh. Inside the wooden cabinet were wax figures in varying stages of decay, the degree of putrefaction indicated by the pigments I had used. A half-naked woman sprawled in the foreground, her flesh a shade of yellow that suggested that her death was recent. Nearby was a baby who had been dead for some time, its face and body a dark soil-brown. The grotto in which the figures lay was filled with crumbling stonework and shattered columns, also made of wax, and the atmosphere of desolation was heightened by the rats I had placed strategically throughout, some perched on the bodies of the deceased, others busily tugging at their entrails. Presiding over the scene was an elaborately winged and muscled male figure with a scythe. The Grand Duke bent closer, his nose only inches from the surface, as if he wanted to plunge into that rotting world and feast on the corruption.

  ‘Exquisite,’ he murmured.

  I showed him the hole I had carved in the roof of the cabinet, which allowed a spectral light to angle down on to the scene. I also drew his attention to the landscape at the back, which I had painted in such stark, pale colours that viewers would feel they too were in the grotto with the victims of the plague, they too were being afforded a last glimpse of the land of the living – the bright, brief moment that was life on earth. He asked if the piece had a title. I told him I called it ‘The Triumph of Time’. He nodded, then sat back. To hear people speak of my work was one thing, he said, but to see it for himself – in the flesh, as it were – was a revelation.

  Not long afterwards, Bassetti swept into the room with a formal offer of patronage, his expression complacent, replete, as if he had just devoured
the sort of meal his employer fantasized about. Studying the document, I saw that the Grand Duke was proposing a stipend of twenty-five scudi a month. I had never been paid so handsomely.

  Before I left, the Grand Duke mentioned some outbuildings on the western edge of the palace gardens, which could, if I wished, be converted into workshops. There had been a time when they were used as stables, he said in a slightly strangled voice. Then his cheeks flushed and, looking away from me, towards the window, he added that he no longer found it pleasing to keep horses.

  I woke suddenly, my throat dry. Soft sounds were coming through the ceiling, sounds I could make no sense of. Thump-thump-thump … thump. And then again: Thump-thump-thump … thump.

  That evening Signora de la Mar and Fiore had decided to celebrate my successful encounter with the Grand Duke by cooking a supper that made use of the truffle Bassetti had given me. The signora had suggested a risotto. When I cut into the truffle, though, it seemed to come alive. Threaded through the crumbly dark interior were dozens of frenzied white worms. I sprang back, almost knocking Fiore to the floor.

  ‘What a shame,’ the signora said. She thought the truffle must have spent too long in the ground.

  I remembered how Bassetti had held the jar up to the light, as if it contained a precious stone. ‘Could he have known?’

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘So it’s not deliberate.’

  The signora gave me a curious look. Such an idea would never have occurred to her.

  Abandoning the idea of a risotto, we went to a tavern near the Arno that was known for its fresh fish. I drank more wine than I was used to. Worse still, I let the signora talk me into sampling a tar-coloured liqueur that was made from artichokes and was, so she assured me, a speciality of the region.