Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘What,’ I said, ‘like the truffle?’

  But I went ahead and ordered the liqueur. No wonder my head ached. That odd thumping, though – it had come from the floor above.

  I left my room and climbed the stairs, which coiled skywards in a tight spiral. The air felt motionless, unbreathed, as if nobody had been up there in years. I stepped out on to the landing. Standing with his back to me, and dressed in a colourless, close-fitting garment, a sort of undersuit, was a figure with the thin hips and narrow shoulders of a young boy, though his face, when glimpsed in quarter profile, was that of a man, lines fanning outwards at the corner of his eye, his sallow cheek unshaven. I was about to speak when he raised his arms in front of him, palms facing out, and launched into a series of fluid, connecting somersaults that took him off into the darkness. He seemed to disappear, in fact, and when I called out, ‘Who are you?’ there was no reply, only a click that might have been a door gently closing.

  Perhaps I ought to have left it at that, but my curiosity got the better of me, and I picked my way along the landing. I found a door at the far end. Putting my ear to the wood, I heard noises I recognized. They had the same rhythm as before. The first three thumps came close together. Then a gap. Then a fourth thump, which sounded final, emphatic, like a full stop. I tried the door handle, which creaked loudly. Like the stairs, it didn’t seem to have been much in use.

  ‘No, no,’ came a querulous voice. ‘Not now.’

  It was too late. I had already opened the door an inch, and I was peering through the crack. The man spun past, at head-height. Thump! I opened the door wider and stood on the threshold.

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I said?’ The man’s voice was reedy, petulant. This was Cuif, I realized. The insomniac.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You woke me up.’

  ‘I’m practising.’

  ‘But it’s the middle of the night.’

  Cuif shrugged.

  ‘Are you an acrobat?’ I asked.

  His eyebrows lifted, and his mouth curved downwards. ‘I’m a jester,’ he said. ‘A jester. Well, I used to be.’

  Barefoot, he crossed the room and looked through a window that was covered on the outside by a rusting iron grille. We were so high up that only the sky was visible. All the asperity left him, and when he spoke again he sounded pensive, nostalgic.

  ‘There was a time,’ he said, ‘when I owned more than a hundred costumes. I needed an entire room just for my costumes. Can you imagine? But we’re living in an age of austerity now, and there’s no place for people like me. Jesters are frivolous. Redundant.’

  ‘But I’ve seen them,’ I said, ‘in the market-place –’

  Cuif snorted. ‘Those fools haven’t realized it’s over. What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a sculptor.’

  ‘So you’re probably redundant as well.’ He seemed to hope this was true.

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Why? Is your work popular?’ He gave the last word a scathing twist.

  ‘I’m interested in corruption and decay.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, then,’ he said bitterly. ‘You’ll probably go far.’

  I looked around. He had two rooms, both of which were narrow, with scabby, mouse-grey walls. The room I was standing in was bare except for a strip of matting. On a shelf near the window were half a dozen books that leaned haphazardly against each other like men who had been drinking for a long time and were now very tired.

  Without any warning, the small and seemingly ageless Frenchman sprang into the centre of the room. ‘Would you like to see a somersault?’

  ‘By all means.’

  He stood before me, feet together, hands pressed against the outside of his thighs. His face was drained of all expression. He took a quick breath, his birdcage of a chest expanding. Suddenly his head was inches from the floor, and his legs, bent at the knee, were on a level with my face. This was so unexpected that I laughed out loud. Somehow, he managed to hold the position for a moment. Upside-down. In mid-air. When he landed, puffs of dust swirled around his ankles, as if he had been performing underwater, on the seabed, and had disturbed the sediment. He threw his arms out sideways, and his mouth split open in a theatrical grin, revealing teeth that were long and ridged, like a donkey’s.

  While I was still applauding, his grin faded. ‘I didn’t get that quite right,’ he muttered.

  ‘It was wonderful.’

  He shook his head, then winced. ‘I think I hurt myself.’ He sat down on the floor and rubbed his right knee. In the window, the sky was beginning to change colour.

  ‘I should go,’ I said.

  He climbed slowly to his feet. ‘Don’t tell anyone you were here.’

  ‘All right, I won’t.’

  I moved across the room. At the door, though, I turned back. ‘You’re Cuif,’ I said.

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘I’m Zummo.’

  ‘You live here?’

  ‘For now.’

  ‘You may visit me again.’

  I closed the door behind me. The light spilling through the scuttle where the landing ended was a sticky cobweb-grey. As I walked back to the head of the stairs, I was struck by the grandness of the Frenchman’s words, and the plea lying just beneath.

  I hadn’t been entirely honest with the Grand Duke. In fact, I hadn’t been honest at all. Though it was true that Siracusa was idyllic, my childhood and adolescence had been anything but, and in the end, only a few weeks before my twentieth birthday, I had made my escape. With every mile I travelled, my heart seemed to diminish, as if it were not blood or muscle but a ball of scarlet wool unravelling. I had been driven from the place I loved, the people I most cared for. I kept thinking I heard footsteps behind me. Voices. My neck ached from looking over my shoulder. I was frightened, but I was also furious. Furious because my life was about to change for ever. Furious because no one had defended me. Furious most of all because I was innocent.

  My brother, Jacopo, had taken against me from the very beginning. Seven years older than me, he was tall, fair-haired, and athletic – less like a brother than a reverse image. With my olive complexion and my dark-brown curls, I was always told I resembled my father’s father, who had been a cloth merchant in the south of Spain – like most surnames that begin with Z, Zummo was probably Arabic in origin – but Jacopo had inherited my mother’s looks. Her parents, both light-skinned, had been born in the Piedmont.

  One of my earliest memories was being woken by Jacopo in the middle of the night. I couldn’t have been more than four at the time. Come on, Gaetano, he said. We’re going for a walk. He made it sound like an adventure. As soon as we were out of sight of the house, though, he began to call me names. I was a shrimp and a weevil. I was a darkie. I was the bastard son of a servant, and Jacopo’s parents – his stupid, soft-hearted parents – had taken me in and given me their name. When we reached the Maniace fortress, where the sea wall was at its highest, he hoisted me on to the parapet, then gripped my ankles and lowered me over the edge. I was upside-down, the black waves lurching below. You’re heavier than I thought, he said. I’m not sure I can hold on any longer. The clouds hung between my feet like chunks of dented metal. Oh, no, he said. I think I’m going to drop you. The urine ran up my body and into my hair. Jacopo just laughed. Saves me pissing on you, I suppose, he said.

  Two years later, our father died suddenly. An accident in the shipyard, we were told. By then, Jacopo’s voice had broken, and he had fuzz on his upper lip; he was already a man – to me, at least. You killed my father, he would tell me when I was on my own with him. He would throw a blanket over my head and hit me, and his fists were hard as horses’ hooves. Once, he buried me up to my neck in sand and left me there all day. When he dug me out, my face was burnt. Darkie, he said. I was so numb I couldn’t stand. He watched me cry out as the feeling crept back into my body. You killed him, he said. It was you. Our mother didn’t notice. She was too busy grieving.

  On
e December evening, not long after my fifteenth birthday, Jacopo came and sat beside my bed, his head lowered, his hands dangling between his thighs. It was during the annual festival that marked the decapitation of our patron saint, Lucia. Ill at the time, I hadn’t joined the procession that moved in silence through the city to the sepulchre beyond the gates. If I stared at Jacopo that night, it was because I had never seen him look vulnerable before. All he could talk about was the girl who had walked next to the statue of the murdered saint, and how her yellow hair had gleamed, and how her lips had parted, as if in expectation of a kiss. Her name was Ornella Camilleri, and her father was a barber-surgeon from Valletta. What skin she had! Like moonlight. No, moonlight wasn’t rare enough. His hands clenched. In any case, he hoped he had caught her eye. Being Jacopo, he was accustomed to getting what he wanted. Imagine his astonishment, then – imagine his outrage – when Ornella failed to reciprocate his feelings. He began to rail against her stuck-up ways. Who did she think she was?

  That year, I would often row across the shallow bay to the Embarcadero, then climb the hill to the ancient limestone quarries where I would sit at the cool mouth of a cave and lose myself in Vesalius or Baltasar Gracián or whoever I happened to be reading at the time. One afternoon, as I walked back down to the harbour, I sensed something behind me. I whirled round. A man in rags. Bloodshot eyes, fist raised. There was a burst of light in my brain, and then a smell of burning.

  A woman’s face was slowly tipped out of the dark bowl of the sky. She seemed placid, capable; I didn’t know her. Above her, and far smaller, far more pale, was another face, that of a girl. She was staring down, her hair the colour of the pears that grew in our courtyard at home, and I felt I was one of the strangers who had gathered, and a stab of envy went through me because I wanted to be the object of her gaze. Then the whole scene shifted or revolved. When I realized I was the person on the ground, I was filled with relief and gratitude, and all I could think of was to close my eyes and drift away.

  ‘No, don’t go to sleep,’ the woman said.

  Only after they had dropped me at my house did it occur to me that the girl with the pear-blond hair must have been Ornella.

  That night, Jacopo looked in on me.

  ‘A tramp?’ he said when I told him what had happened. ‘I would have flattened him.’

  ‘Always the hero,’ I murmured.

  He thrust his face so close to mine that I could smell the grappa on his breath. Since his rejection by the Camilleri girl, as he called her, he had started spending time on the waterfront in Graziella, arm-wrestling fishermen and pinching the fat on the hips of the innkeeper’s daughter.

  ‘Look at you,’ he said, grabbing a handful of my dark-brown curls and twisting. ‘You wormed your way into this family. You fucking worm –’

  ‘Language, Jacopo.’

  Our mother had appeared in the doorway.

  Jacopo draped a heavy, careless arm around her shoulders. ‘You’re quite right, mother. Worm was a bit strong.’

  A few days later, I called at the Camilleri residence, a tall grey-white house at the southern tip of Ortigia, not far from the fortress. As chance would have it, it was Ornella herself who answered the door.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Much better, thanks.’

  ‘You have a bruise.’ She put her fingers to the equivalent place on her own forehead, a gesture so intimate that she might have touched me after all.

  In the parlour she stood by the shutters, which were half-closed against the heat. If she gave the impression of aloofness, it had to do with the angle at which she carried her head, I decided, and with the tilt of her top lip. In other words, it was something she had no say over, and might not even have been aware of. I wanted to thank her, I said, for saving me.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said. ‘It was all Laura’s doing. My governess. I’m hopeless in emergencies, not practical at all.’ She turned from the window, her eyes grey as the sea on an October morning. ‘Something strange. You were lying on the footpath, dazed and bleeding, but when you noticed me, you smiled …’

  Yes, it had been strange. That rush of gratitude, the feeling of well-being. The sudden, irresistible desire for oblivion. As if all my living had been done now that I had seen her face.

  ‘Maybe I was happy to be rescued,’ I said.

  She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that kind of smile.’

  A brief silence followed, during which we both appeared to be thinking. Not long afterwards, I said I had to leave.

  As I reached the end of the hall, another thought occurred to me, and I swung round. Ornella must have been stepping forwards, ready to shut the door behind me, because she was suddenly so close that I could see the gold spokes in her cool grey eyes. If she ran into my brother, I said, it might be best not to tell him I had visited her house. In fact, it might be best not to mention me at all.

  She looked startled.

  ‘You don’t know him,’ I went on. ‘If he finds out we’ve spoken –’

  ‘I know him a little. He frightens me.’

  ‘He frightens me too – and I have to live with him.’

  ‘I won’t mention you,’ she said. ‘I promise.’

  ‘You’ve never seen me. You’ve never even heard of me.’ I had become giddy, perhaps because I had inadvertently found a way of making her my ally. ‘You don’t know I exist.’

  Out on the street again, I walked without noticing where I was going. Before long, I found myself above the Porto Grande. The sea was smooth that day, and paler than the sky – more like light than water. I rested my forearms on the warm stone of the wall. Since Jacopo had all the perceived advantages – a classically proportioned face, a warrior’s physique – he had no grounds for jealousy or hatred, yet I had spent most of my life trying to avoid the blows he aimed at me. As I looked south towards Egg Rock and the low green headland of Plemmirio, I realized that if he learned of my encounter with Ornella he would have all the grounds he needed. We had been alone together. I had seen the gold in her grey eyes. That would be enough, more than enough.

  *

  I came back from Mass one day to find that a consignment of wax had been delivered to my room. I cut the cord that held the wrapping in place, and there it was, a brownish-yellow block, about the size of a child’s torso. Running my hand over the surface, which was pockmarked and granular, like certain cheeses, I leaned down and breathed it in. Such a delicious, complex smell.

  I lit a small fire in the grate, then shaved a wedge off the block and began to heat it in a copper-bottomed pan.

  ‘Are you cooking?’

  I had been so absorbed that I hadn’t heard Fiore enter. She was over by the door, chewing on her lower lip.

  ‘In a way.’ I tilted the pan, and we both watched the wax spill across the copper, faster than water. ‘Some sculptors make things out of wood or marble, but this is what I use.’

  ‘It smells like church.’

  I took the pan off the fire and stood it on a metal trivet. ‘You know why?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘This is what candles are made of,’ I said. ‘The more expensive candles, anyway. But you can make other things as well. Arms and legs. Heads. You can make whole people. Wax is the closest thing we have to skin and bone. Sometimes you can hardly tell the difference.’

  ‘When you talk about wax,’ Fiore said, ‘your voice changes completely.’

  ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

  She grinned.

  Her mother had been with us the last time we were together, and I hadn’t had a chance to ask her the question that had been on my mind for several days. I had been unable to forget the girl I had seen in the apothecary window, and how she had stepped back into the shop’s interior with just the suggestion of a smile. I didn’t think that I’d imagined it. I had tried drawing her from memory – without success. I had also spent an entire afternoon doing my best to retrace Fiore�
�s route. Since she had been in charge, though, I hadn’t paid much attention to the sequence of the streets, let alone their names – I hadn’t known it was going to be so important – and while I had the feeling, more than once, that I was close – the iron studs on a front door, the fall of bleak light into a courtyard – I had failed to find the place.

  ‘On our tour of the city,’ I said, ‘we stopped outside an apothecary …’

  Fiore’s eyes seemed to lose their focus.

  ‘It was in a narrow street,’ I said. ‘Quite dark.’

  ‘Most of the streets are like that.’

  ‘But I stopped, remember? I looked through the window.’

  ‘You looked through lots of windows.’

  I tried to be patient. ‘This one was made of glass. Small glass panes.’

  Fiore shrugged.

  ‘The shop was closed up for the night,’ I said, ‘so all I did was stand outside, and when I walked on there were dandelions floating in the air – thousands of dandelions –’

  ‘Dandelions?’ She wound a tangled strand of hair around her forefinger.

  I was making her feel awkward, stupid – the way other people made her feel – but I had to keep probing.

  ‘You got left behind,’ I said. ‘You had to run to catch up. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  It was no good. And if Fiore couldn’t help me, no one could. I would have to forget about the girl. I let out a sigh, then looked towards the window. Having to forget: I was used to that.

  As Fiore turned to leave, the loose sole of her shoe caught on the uneven floorboards, and she almost fell.

  ‘I’m so clumsy,’ she wailed.

  ‘It’s not you,’ I said. ‘It’s those terrible shoes. How long have you had them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You know what? Tomorrow, I’m going to buy you a new pair.’

  I saw excitement in her face, and disbelief, but most of all I saw a kind of longing, and I realized, in that moment, just how little she got by on, how little she was given.

  I had taken the Grand Duke up on his offer of the disused stables as a place to work, but there were walls to knock down and windows to install, and while the outbuildings were being converted I put in an appearance at court. Since everyone had their own carefully calibrated and highly symbolic position in the room, I had no way of approaching him, not unless he summoned me himself, and he was preoccupied that day, showing off a relic he had recently acquired, so I hung about on the fringes of the crowd, finding the whole experience stilted and strangely enervating. Then Bassetti came over.