Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

Vespi’s grip on the reins had slackened. ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She shifted beside him on the bench-seat. ‘You’ll have to do something unexpected.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘That’s for you to think of.’

  They had come to a standstill on the crest of a hill. The dirt road dropped steeply away in front of them, the valley below filled with dense white fog.

  ‘Don’t you have any ideas?’ Vespi said at last.

  ‘It would be better if it came from you.’

  Sitting hunch-shouldered, a nerve pulsing in his cheek, Vespi stared at the shrouded landscape. ‘Ah. Yes. I see.’

  Almost a year later, he walked up to her while she was waiting outside the ironmonger’s. It was a winter’s day, grey cloud shutting out the sun, and yet his face seemed to be radiating light. He asked if she had looked out of her window recently. She studied him. Was this a riddle? A joke?

  ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I look out of the window every day,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, but have you looked down?’

  She frowned. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘My mother what?’

  ‘Dio cane!’ Vespi tilted his head back, his Adam’s apple sticking out like something he had swallowed by mistake.

  As she watched him, thoroughly bewildered, white flakes began to drop out of the sky.

  ‘Snow!’ she cried.

  Vespi groaned. Gripping her arm, he made her promise to persuade her mother to look out of the window – to look down – before everything was ruined.

  Ginevra stepped out of the ironmonger’s, her newly sharpened knives wrapped in a piece of calico. ‘What are you two plotting?’

  At home again, while Ginevra put the knives back in their drawer, Faustina peered over the windowsill. Vespi had completely reorganized his allotment. Viewed from above, the rows of vegetables now spelled out a question: WILL YOU MARRY ME? She smiled. So he had thought of something after all. The snow was falling faster, though, and if it settled it would blur the words, or even render them illegible. Risking Ginevra’s anger, for she hated to be interrupted in the middle of a task, Faustina asked if she had looked out of the window.

  ‘I know,’ Ginevra said. ‘It’s snowing.’

  ‘No, not that.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Look outside. Please.’

  Ginevra banged the drawer shut and crossed the room. Once at the window, she stared at the landscape intently, as if driven by some compulsion of her own. ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

  ‘You have to look down.’

  As Ginevra leaned out over the sill, snow blew past her, into the room. It was so cold that the flakes lay on the floor without melting.

  She knew what Ginevra would say even before she stepped back from the window, and now, after all these years, she wondered why she had cared so much. Surely it wasn’t because she had wanted Sabatino Vespi for a father – or was it? Had she become so desperate for a father that almost anybody would have done? Or had she longed to see Ginevra surprised, altered – even, possibly, happy? Or was it more abstract than that? Had she simply hoped that love would triumph? Vespi may have been old and ravaged, and he may have lived with his mother until he was past the age of fifty, but at least he felt something. Wanted something. And so she waited, heart beating high up in her throat, as Ginevra turned to face her, brushing the snow from her hair and shoulders with gestures that were swift and brutal, just as they were when she wrung a chicken’s neck or paunched a rabbit.

  ‘Well, that clinches it,’ she said. ‘The man’s a fool.’

  There would be no marriage, no happiness.

  Love lost out, as she had feared it would. Love lost out, as always.

  I lifted my eyes from the table. ‘As always?’

  Faustina said nothing.

  ‘Is Vespi still alive?’ I asked.

  ‘I think so.’

  Ginevra had died of a fever when Faustina was fourteen, she said. It was then that she moved to Florence and began to work for her uncle Giuseppe. If he hadn’t taken her in, she didn’t know what would have become of her.

  I finished my acquerello. ‘When I met you the other day, you talked about having to invent another person –’

  ‘I don’t know why I said that. I shouldn’t have.’

  ‘Why invent another person, though? What makes that necessary?’

  She watched me carefully, as if we were playing a game. How close could I get to the truth without being helped?

  I tried another tack. ‘If there are two of you, which one agreed to come with me today?’

  She drank, then wiped her lips.

  ‘Which one sent the present?’

  Her eyes were still fixed on me, clear and steady.

  I looked past her, through the open doorway. The inn faced west. Since we were high up, I would have expected to see Florence in the distance – the thin, oddly knuckled tower of the Signoria, or Santa Maria del Fiore’s liver-coloured dome – but the day had grown smokier, and all the hollows and rumples in the land were hazy, veiled in mist.

  ‘There are two of me as well,’ I said, ‘but in my case it’s different. One’s true, the other one’s a lie.’

  ‘Which one’s here now?’ She was borrowing my language.

  ‘You already know the answer to that.’

  She nodded, then looked down at the table and began to follow the grain with her forefinger.

  ‘Did you recognize it in me,’ I said, ‘when you first saw me?’

  ‘Recognize?’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know if that’s the right word. I felt something. I’m not sure what it was, though.’ She was still running her finger over the rough surface of the table. ‘In the palace I wasn’t expecting to see you. I was there for a different reason.’

  ‘I know. You told me.’

  She looked over her shoulder at the view. ‘I’m illegitimate,’ she said in a low voice.

  I took hold of her hand, the one that had been tracing the grain in the wood. She didn’t resist, but kept her face turned away.

  ‘I’m a bastard,’ she said.

  The curve of her throat and chin against the landscape’s silty blues and greys. The fall of dark hair past her shoulder. The soft gleam of her lips. I stared at her as though I were trying to burn her image into my memory. As though I might never see her again.

  ‘You’re a wonder,’ I said. ‘You’re beyond compare.’

  She seemed to jump. A shiver had gone through her, or else somebody had walked over her grave. She faced me again, then withdrew her hand and brushed something invisible from her cheek.

  ‘You don’t even know me,’ she said.

  *

  As we rode into the village where the potter was supposed to live, I saw a man slouched on a low wall, mending a wicker basket. I climbed down off my horse. His thick grey hair fell to his shoulders, and his hands were huge and slow, with fingernails that were circular, like coins. I asked where I could find Marvuglia.

  ‘Who’s looking?’ he said.

  I told him my name.

  He swore. ‘I thought you were coming next week.’

  ‘You’re Marvuglia?’

  He heaved himself to his feet. His narrow eyes had raw, pink rims. ‘Now that you’re here,’ he said, his gaze shifting to Faustina, ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

  When we had tethered our horses, he led us through a gate and across a courtyard. In his kitchen he slopped some red wine into beakers he must have made himself. Displayed on a dresser were more examples of his work. An eel slithered across the green pond of a plate, dogs tussled on a bowl that was swollen as a pregnant woman’s belly. They were mistakes, he told me. He liked mistakes. In fact, he sometimes thought he preferred them to the pieces that were judged to be successful. I asked how he achieved such intensity of colour. One day he had been working with all the doors and windows open, he said,
and a gust of wind had whirled into the room. Ash from the grate had landed on the blue glaze he was applying to a vase. Though he had assumed the vase would be ruined, he had fired it anyway, and it had come out oddly luminous. He had enormous faith in accidents. How could you learn anything if nothing ever went wrong?

  ‘But you’ll be wanting to see my proper work …’

  We followed him through a low doorway and into a large, cool room. Hanging from the vaulted ceiling were several planks, each of which had a verse from the Old Testament carved into it. On a long trestle table in the middle of the room was an array of Marvuglia’s animals. I moved closer. They struck me as both primitive and pagan – partly, I thought, because they were life-size – life-like – and partly because the glazes flouted the laws of nature. The wolves were all blue, for instance – not an ordinary warm blue, like the sky, but a blue that was bruised and bleak, a chilblain blue, with hints of indigo, flint, and dirty ice. His goats were the blackish-red of old wounds or dried blood. His sheep were rust-orange, like metal left out in the rain. Every piece Marvuglia made had an injured or untended quality, a quality of having been mistreated or abandoned.

  He asked Faustina what she thought.

  ‘They frighten me,’ she said.

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  ‘They’re like the worst parts of ourselves, the most savage part – the part we’re ashamed of.’ She stopped in front of one of the cold blue wolves. ‘They’re like nightmares.’

  Still he didn’t speak.

  She wanted to know how he chose the colours.

  ‘I don’t choose,’ he said. ‘They just arrive.’

  ‘But they’re wrong.’

  Marvuglia’s smile was instant, and oddly lascivious. ‘Not to me.’

  Back in the kitchen, he poured more wine. When we were seated, he asked what I was working on. I told him I was interested in the plague.

  ‘I thought I saw a morbid streak in you.’ Knees wide apart, he reached down and tugged at his genitals. ‘How long have you two been together, anyway?’

  ‘We’re not together.’

  ‘Just as well.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why “just as well”?’

  ‘You don’t belong together. It doesn’t look right.’

  I felt a bright needle of anger go through me, but I fought the urge to challenge or contradict him. Instead, I glanced at Faustina, who was smiling.

  Marvuglia noticed. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘If your colours are anything to go by,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure we should believe a word you say.’

  He remained motionless for a few moments, then burst out laughing. ‘You’re quite something, you are. Madonna rotta in culo, if I were fifteen years younger …’

  He went to fill her cup again, but she told him she’d had enough. Not long afterwards, we stood up to leave.

  Outside, in the courtyard, a warm wind was blowing, and the leaves of a scruffy palm tree scraped and clattered. My horse skittered sideways, almost tripping over its own hooves.

  Marvuglia scowled at the sky. ‘There’s bad weather on the way.’

  Up ahead, the land blurred as the storm blew in from the north. I was thinking about Marvuglia, and wondering why Towne had wanted me to meet him, and what, if anything, we had in common. For all its unpredictability, his work was rooted in the earth, and in the things of the earth. It seemed to house resentment and the desire for vengeance; it failed to achieve transcendency. And I had found the man himself sarcastic and devious. Deliberately provocative. His claim that Faustina and I looked wrong together still rankled, and in the end I had to turn to her and ask what she had made of the remark.

  ‘He was jealous,’ she said simply.

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘Why? What do you think?’

  I shrugged.

  Though clouds were massing, we stopped beside a river. While the horses drank, I watched the water sliding past. Impassive, solid. A curious yellow-grey, like travertine. Faustina picked up a leaf and held it at arm’s length, then let it fall. Off it went, scrawling on the smooth, blank surface, as if it had been activated by the contact, and was delivering a message. The fast approaching storm, the whirling leaf – I had a sudden, acute sense of the shortness of time. I reached for Faustina’s hand. I thought I could feel the life rushing through her veins. Such optimism, such naivety. No inkling that it could end at any moment. I turned her hand over. Touched the tips of her fingers, one by one.

  ‘They’re beautiful, your fingers.’

  ‘Are they?’

  She looked at her hands with such detachment that they might have been a pair of gloves. Not her gloves either. Someone else’s. Someone she didn’t even know. I felt all my words had come too late. Nothing I could say to her would make the slightest difference. Something inside me crumpled, and I stared off into the trees.

  When I turned back, a tear had spilled in a straight line down her cheek. I touched the path it had left, the shine on her skin, then put the finger to my lips, and almost before I knew it my mouth was on her mouth, and I was kissing her.

  ‘The first time I saw you,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ she murmured. ‘The first time you saw me, what?’

  Wind clutched at the trees behind us; the leaves rattled.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I was shivering, but I wasn’t cold at all. ‘There aren’t any words for it.’

  ‘You weren’t short of words before.’

  ‘Did I talk too much?’ I pulled away, looked down into her face. ‘I meant everything I said. You’re lovely.’

  ‘Am I?’ Her voice was light, as before, but melancholy, fatalistic.

  I kissed her again.

  ‘What did you think,’ she said, ‘when you first saw me?’

  ‘I felt I could look at you for ever, and that would be all I ever needed to see.’

  ‘That’s too much.’

  ‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Would you rather I felt less?’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’

  Lightning tongued the high ground to the north. Seconds later, thunder tumbled across the valley, loud and clumsy. Our horses shimmied, eyes flaring white.

  As we scrambled up into our saddles, the wind hurled itself at us. We could hardly hear each other speak. Then the rain came, flung in huge, cold handfuls. We were soaked in no time, and the city was still miles off.

  We rode side by side, crouching low over our horses’ warm wet necks.

  Not long after seeing Faustina to her door, my body began to ache. Between one street and the next, my limbs weakened; it was all I could do to lead Faustina’s horse. When I reached my lodgings, the signora put me on a pallet on the ground floor and covered me with blankets. The sweat poured off me so fast that my skin seemed to have turned to water. She had to keep changing the bedding, complaining with her usual dry humour about my lack of consideration and my demanding ways. Fiore loomed over me, no space between the ceiling and her face. The room had folded like a paper lantern. I touched a cool place on the pallet, and my whole body shuddered. Moments later, I felt I had gone up in flames. There was no night and day, only hot and cold.

  I saw the field of death we had ridden through on our way back. It was late, the night hour was tolling, and we’d had no choice but to make for the nearest gate. Outside Porta alla Croce was the place where they held public executions. And I was there again, huddled over my horse’s neck, eyes filled with rain. A dripping scaffold. One body hanging from a rope, another ripped right down the middle. A crow stood on a dead man’s skull. Mud everywhere. Puddles. Blood. Where was Faustina? I’d lost sight of her. I rode past four pallbearers, black cloaks to the ground, a coffin on their shoulders. A dwarf sat cross-legged on the mouldy lid. His head was shaved; his mouth had been sewn shut. A blind priest beat a drum.

  I walked through our house and on into the courtyard. My mother had her back to me. She was talking to my father, who stood with his forehead against a pillar. He didn’t
appear to be listening to her; his lips were moving, as if in prayer. My father, whose reputation as a craftsman was second to none. My father, the shipbuilder. My mother put a hand on his arm. He flinched and pulled away.

  How could you? he said.

  Sensing there was someone behind her, she glanced over her shoulder. When she saw me, her face became two faces – one for me, one against. The first, I understood. But why the second?

  Not now, Gaetano, she said. And then, more forcefully, Not now.

  My assassin showed, as I had known he would. He loitered on the threshold, one ankle crossed over the other, studying his nails. In his knee-high leather boots and his green velvet coat with its huge folded-back half-sleeves and silver piping, he was quite the dandy.

  Who sent you? I said.

  He did not reply. Instead, he took out a glass vial and removed the stopper. I asked him how much he had been paid. Twenty-five scudi? Fifty? Once again, he ignored me. Stooping over me, he cradled my head and held a spoon to my lips. His fingers smelled of sex, as if he had been pleasuring a woman. That was a bit much, I thought. Surely he could have waited until afterwards. All the same, I drank the poison down. And, almost straight away, a vicious cramp, as though I had swallowed a hand that was twisting my insides. Then a surprising revelation. There was no sudden, sickening drop into the dark. No panic or pain. No, the whole thing was far less brutal than I had imagined. I felt a kind of click. A soft jolt. Like being in a carriage when it runs over a rotten branch. There was the feeling that something had been severed. An uncoupling, then. But dreamy, stealthy. Deft. You fall away. You settle. Dust in sunlight, sediment in wine.

  The assassin tucked his vial back into his pocket. Three paces took him to the window, where he stood with his back to me. There was bird-lime on his coat, just where the right arm joined the shoulder. I tried to remember what that signified. A windfall? His downfall? I couldn’t think. In any case, he hadn’t noticed. Odd that – me dead and knowing all about it, and him alive and none the wiser. His right shoulder lifted, his elbow eased sideways. Even from where I was lying, I could tell he was adjusting his testicles. The killing had excited him, perhaps. Then, as my thoughts were beginning to scatter and disintegrate, he spoke for the first time.