Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘Not bad,’ he said, ‘if you can overlook the missing eye.’

  I thought this was one of the funniest things I had ever heard. Slightly hurt, but with a half-smile on his face, the barber-surgeon waited until I had finished laughing. Then, in an attempt to get his own back, perhaps, he asked if I had been seeing anyone. No, I said. I’d been too busy, working.

  ‘Not even a little fling with that Spanish woman?’

  ‘No – and anyway, she’s not Spanish. It was her husband who was Spanish.’

  ‘But she’s a widow …’

  ‘So?’

  ‘You know what she wants, don’t you?’ He eyed me across the table. ‘Old chickens make good soup.’

  I looked down, smiled. Shook my head.

  ‘Are you sure you haven’t?’ he said. ‘You’ve been living there for long enough.’

  Two more grappas appeared.

  ‘I saw this girl once,’ I said, ‘in a shop window –’

  But Pampolini wouldn’t let go of the Spanish theme. ‘Did you hear what happened to the husband?’

  I repeated what Bassetti had told me.

  ‘That’s only the half of it,’ Pampolini said.

  Signore de la Mar had become dejected and violent. He had taken to beating his wife. That was how she’d lost her front tooth. Then he died. It was thought to be an accident – death by misadventure – but they had quite a reputation as poisoners, the Florentines …

  I stared at Pampolini. ‘You mean she killed him?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  The conversation lurched, veered sideways, and he began to discuss anatomy. He described a dissection which he had performed in front of an audience that included Francesco Redi – it was how they had met – and which he had conceived of as a homage to the anatomy lesson given by Dr Pieter Pauw in Leiden in 1615. Had I seen de Gheyn’s engraving of the event, with skulls circling the base of the operating table, and a couple of dogs waiting patiently for scraps? This was a subject for which we both had an inexhaustible appetite, and it was five o’clock before I managed to tear myself away.

  Once outside, I found myself wandering in the maze of streets on the south side of the ghetto. Every now and then, in the gap between two buildings, or at the end of a dark alley, I would catch a glimpse of the rust-coloured dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, disproportionately large, like a grown-up playing a child’s game. Where, I wondered, was the girl I had mentioned to Pampolini, the girl I had seen only twice in my life, the girl whose existence was so vivid and yet so tenuous that I sometimes felt as if I had made her up?

  I turned the corner and nearly jumped out of my skin, for there she was, no more than fifty yards away. Her wrists were thin, her black hair shone. There was an urgency about the way she moved. Something clear-cut too. Defined. To see her on the street, with people all around her, was like seeing a knife in a drawer of spoons. I had long since come to a standstill, and I was smiling, not just at her beauty, but at the beauty of coincidence. Who was it who wrote that chance provides us with exactly what we need?

  When she noticed me, she slowed down, adjusting the basket she was carrying. She seemed startled, even a little bewildered, as though the possibility that I might appear had not occurred to her.

  ‘I didn’t expect it to happen like this,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Her voice, which I had just heard for the first time, was low and smoky. What would it sound like if she said my name? Or if she said she loved me? But what was I thinking? Was I drunk? Well, yes. Obviously.

  ‘To be honest, I didn’t expect it to happen at all,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere, but I’d just about given up.’

  ‘So how did you find me?’

  ‘Pure luck – though, oddly enough, I was thinking about you when you appeared.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re imagining things. Perhaps I’m not really here.’ She seemed wistful, as if what she was saying might actually be true.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Faustina.’

  We moved on along the street, past a place known for its fried fish. We crossed the Mercato Vecchio. The setting sun threw our shadows down in front of us, hers touching mine, though we were still strangers to each other.

  ‘You sent me a gift,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve never done anything like that before.’ She kept her face turned away from me, her eyes on the stalls. Spiky stacks of artichokes. A row of glossy aubergines.

  ‘You didn’t sign it.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I liked the mystery of that.’

  ‘I didn’t need to sign it. I knew you’d know who it was from.’

  ‘How could you be certain?’

  ‘I just knew.’

  I looked at her sidelong.

  ‘You say you like mystery.’ She had stopped at the edge of the square. The buzz and clatter of the market packing up – special offers, knock-down prices, dozens of last-minute deals being done. ‘I’ve got more mystery in me than –’ and she spun round, turning a full circle – ‘than all these people put together.’

  ‘We all have our secrets,’ I said gently, ‘don’t we?’

  Her face tightened, and she lowered her voice until I could barely hear what she was saying. ‘Something happens, and in that moment you make a new person, another you, so there are two of you suddenly, and you believe in that new person with every fibre of your being, and you pretend that the other person, the person you left behind, you pretend she doesn’t exist, even though she might tug at your sleeve sometimes, and talk to you at night, and make surprise appearances in your dreams –’

  I stepped in front of her. ‘You’re describing me. Here. Now. And for the last fifteen years.’

  She didn’t understand. How could she?

  ‘Can you ride a horse?’ I said.

  She looked at the ground and laughed. I asked if I had said something funny. She shook her head, and then apologized.

  I was thinking of visiting a potter who lived in the country outside Florence, I told her. I wanted to see his work. If I borrowed two horses, she could come with me.

  ‘He makes animals.’ I tried to remember what Jack Towne had told me. ‘Wolves,’ I said uncertainly.

  ‘Wolves?’

  ‘Pigs too, I think.’

  She was laughing again, more openly this time. She could probably be free on Friday, she said. I told her I would come for her. It would be early, just after dawn. Though it was reckless, even risky, I took her hand and kissed the inside of her wrist. Then, before she could change her mind, I whirled off up the street.

  ‘Wait!’

  I turned round.

  She was standing where I had left her, but the low sun edged her face in gold, which made her difficult to see.

  ‘You don’t know where I live,’ she said. ‘How can you come for me if you don’t know where I live?’

  In June, while exploring the wax workshops on Via de’ Servi, I had met a man who made votive images. During our conversation he had mentioned a type of gypsum that was quarried in the hills around Volterra. He claimed it produced a plaster that was more pliant and sensitive than any other. Thinking of the Grand Duke’s commission, I had put in an order for half a hundredweight.

  The day after my coincidental encounter with Faustina, the sacks of gypsum were delivered to my workshop. I had been wondering how to get through the week. Now, all of a sudden, I had something to occupy me. I baked the gypsum for several hours, heating the rocks to a high temperature. Once I had purged them of all their moisture I let them cool, then I ground them into a fine powder. When the gypsum was ready, I sent for Fiore. I needed her for an experiment, I said. She arrived in the shoes I had bought her the year before, and a precarious fontange involving seagull feathers, a small rodent’s skull, and half a dozen bulrushes.

  ‘The height of fashion,’ I said, ‘as always.’

  She grinned.

  I rubbed hemp oil into her hands
to prevent the wet plaster sticking to her skin, then I coated two short lengths of string in pig fat and attached them to her right hand so they started on either side of her wrist and met at the end of her longest finger. Once her hand was covered in plaster, I would take hold of the string, first one piece, then the other, and gently pull them sideways, cutting through the plaster as a cheese-wire cuts through cheese. Later, when the plaster had set, I would be able to lift the mould away in two neat halves.

  I mixed tepid water into the kevelled gypsum. When it had achieved the correct consistency, I began to apply it to her hands.

  ‘It feels warm,’ she said.

  ‘It’s supposed to,’ I told her. ‘If it didn’t heat up, it wouldn’t harden.’

  As I worked, the image of Faustina came to me, Faustina with the last rays of the setting sun behind her, Faustina edged in bright flame like a descending angel. I’ve found you, I thought. I’ve finally found you.

  I glanced up to see Fiore staring at me.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ she said.

  Friday came. We left the city not long after dawn, and soon found ourselves on a sunken track that headed east. The grass-covered banks were planted with olive trees, their trunks stunted and flaky, silver-grey, while ahead of us sprawled a range of sun-bleached hills whose tops were concealed by cloud. It was the end of September, and the weather was humid; every once in a while, I had to take a deep breath so as to shift the air at the bottom of my lungs. We passed an abandoned farmhouse. A single peach tree stood on the land, a few reddish-orange globes clustered in its branches like a mocking variation on the Grand Duke’s coat of arms.

  I had set out from my lodgings when it was still dark, afraid I would be unable to locate the apothecary, but when I led the two horses up the needle-narrow alley off Via Lontanmorti, I had the feeling I had been there before, and not just on the day of Fiore’s tour either. I was sure I had walked beneath its blackened arches, past its ulcerated walls, over its uneven, pitted paving stones. How could that be, though? I knocked on the apothecary door. A twitchy, dark-haired man let me in. Faustina was still upstairs, he said, but she would be down soon. When I told him his establishment was almost impossible to find, he nodded with a curious, modest complacency, as if I had paid him a compliment. There was no name, I said. There wasn’t even a sign.

  ‘If I might correct you.’ The man led me outside and indicated a number of stones set into the masonry some distance above the door. ‘That’s our sign. Over the years, it has become our name as well.’ He waited until I saw how the eight stones formed the rough shape of a question mark, then excused himself and withdrew into a dim back room, where he bent over a wooden box, sorting seeds with darting fingers.

  As we rode eastwards, I turned to Faustina and asked who the man was.

  ‘My uncle,’ she said. ‘Giuseppe.’

  ‘I thought you must be related. You have the same quickness about you.’

  She looked at me as if she thought I might be finding fault.

  ‘It’s a good quality,’ I said. ‘It makes you seem more alive than other people.’

  ‘You’ve got an odd way of talking.’

  ‘You mean my accent?’

  ‘No, the things you say.’ She hesitated. ‘Though your accent isn’t one I’ve heard before.’

  I smiled. ‘That present you sent me …’

  ‘The oil or the fruit?’

  ‘The oil.’

  ‘Have you used it yet?’

  I looked at her. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘It will keep your hands really supple – not just the skin, the joints as well –’

  ‘My hands?’

  When I told Faustina what Beanpole had said, she covered her mouth.

  Then, out of embarrassment, perhaps, she suggested I race her to a line of cypresses about a mile ahead. Without waiting for a response, she touched her heels to her horse’s flanks. I galloped after her, but she was already disappearing into the distance. By the time I caught up, she had dismounted, and her horse was drinking from a nearby stream.

  ‘You ride beautifully,’ I told her. ‘I didn’t stand a chance.’

  ‘I cheated – and anyway, I’ve got the faster animal.’

  I had sensed this tendency in her before, when we first met on the street. She would invent half-truths that were detrimental to her. She ducked praise as others ducked blows.

  I asked her how she’d learned.

  ‘A man called Sabatino Vespi taught me,’ she said. ‘My father worked with horses, though, so maybe it’s in the blood.’

  She told me that when her father rode he seemed to float above the saddle, only connected to the horse by the most intangible of threads. His hands on the reins, his feet in the stirrups – but lightly, ever so lightly. They were like completely separate beings who just happened to be travelling in the same direction, at the same speed. It was a perfect understanding, harmony made visible.

  She shook her head. ‘I’ll never be able to ride like that.’

  Towards midday we stopped at an inn on the edge of a village. A white ox lay in the muddy yard. An old woman was standing nearby, arms folded, legs apart. When she saw us, she turned and went inside. We followed her. The floor was dirty, and the air smelled of cold grease. I ordered wine. She didn’t have any wine, she said with a sour face. All she had was acquerello, a drink made from water and the dregs of crushed grapes. She seemed to resent our presence, even though she must have depended on people like us to earn a living.

  We took a table by the door.

  ‘I think you know what I’m going to ask,’ I said.

  Faustina looked at me and waited.

  ‘You work in an apothecary, but you were in the palace on the night of the banquet …’

  ‘That’s your question?’

  I nodded.

  ‘There’s a reason,’ she said, ‘but I can’t tell you – at least, not yet.’ She sipped her acquerello. ‘It was nothing to do with you.’

  The old woman brought us a thin rice broth, a plate of white beans and some cold cabbage. I asked for bread. She didn’t have any. As we ate, Faustina spoke about her childhood, which she had spent in Torremagna, a hill-top village south-east of Siena. She had lived with her father’s sister, Ginevra Ferralis, in a house whose back wall formed part of the old fortifications. She had grown up thinking of Ginevra as her mother. Ginevra had sharp elbows and long, slightly bandy legs, and there was a violet smear on her left cheek, as if she had been out gathering wild berries and had reached up absentmindedly to wipe her face. She had never married, though she had been engaged to the son of a local judge, who had left her for a richer woman only a few weeks before the wedding. She learned the bitter coin-taste of abandonment, and no man was allowed into the house again, except for Sabatino Vespi, who courted her for a decade and didn’t get over the threshold more than a handful of times.

  Vespi was much older than Ginevra, Faustina said, and though he lived on a ridge outside Torremagna, he spent most afternoons on a plot of land at the foot of the village walls, directly below Ginevra’s house. It was there, on a west-facing slope, that he grew the fruit and vegetables that he sold in the nearby market town. Faustina would often go with him. They would leave so early that stars would still be scattered across the sky, and she would sit on the tailboard, facing backwards, her bare feet dangling above the white dust road. Wrapped in a rug that smelled of earth, she would watch as the dark shapes of scrub oaks, pines and cypresses jolted by.

  One Tuesday morning, when she was nine or ten, he broke a long silence with a question that caught her off guard, though she knew, with the uncanny, unearned certainty of a child, that this was a subject he had been turning over in his mind for years. ‘Do you think your mother would ever marry me?’

  ‘Do you want to marry her?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  Intrigued by the force he had put into the words, she scrambled over the heaps of onions and garlic, and climbed up on to the bench-seat.


  ‘So you love her?’

  Vespi looked towards the moon, which had faded as the darkness faded, and was now no more than a chalk scratch on the slowly heating pale blue of the sky.

  ‘I loved her long before she got engaged,’ he said. ‘I loved her before she knew what love was. I loved her first.’

  She had never heard him talk about his feelings before – it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have any – and she stared at his battered, unshaven features with a kind of awe.

  ‘Does she know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You never told her?’

  ‘I should have. I was too shy, though.’ He looked at her. ‘You think it’s too late?’

  If she tried to imagine Ginevra’s heart, she saw wood-shavings, and bacon-rind, and thin, curling off-cuts of boot-leather. It was like peering into the corner of a shed, or into a room that was hardly ever used. She hoped her heart never looked like that.

  Vespi saw that she had no reply for him. ‘You do, don’t you? You think it’s too late for poor old Vespi.’

  Once, when Vespi appeared at the house with a basket of his own fruit and vegetables, she had watched through a crack in the door. Why do you keep bothering me? she heard Ginevra say. Why can’t you leave me alone? Vespi stood in silence, his chin lowered almost to his breastbone. It’s because I’m all you can get, isn’t it? Ginevra said. Is that what I am? All you can get? Still Vespi didn’t speak. Ginevra stepped close to him and angled her face in such a way that her birthmark must have filled his field of vision. You’re sorry for me, aren’t you? Why not admit it? Then, shockingly, she turned sideways and vomited on the floor. Vespi’s hand hovered near the small of her back as she bent over. He didn’t dare to touch her, though. He muttered something – Faustina thought she heard the word beautiful – but Ginevra was on her hands and knees by then, clearing up the mess, and didn’t notice.