Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  ‘What did he talk about?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘His wife, mostly.’

  ‘Does he love her?’

  ‘Yes, he loves her, but she’s gone.’

  She looked at me again. ‘Did she die?’

  ‘No. She went back to France. That’s where she’s from.’

  ‘I think I heard that story,’ she said. ‘I suppose he’s sad.’

  ‘Yes, he’s sad. But she wasn’t very kind to him.’

  Fiore sipped her acquerello.

  ‘She didn’t love him as much as he loved her,’ I went on. ‘People don’t always love each other the same amount, even when they’re married.’ In that moment, I saw Faustina as I had seen her last, her dress the colour of an olive leaf, and I felt the blood go rushing from my heart. I turned to Fiore. ‘Are you going to get married one day?’

  Her face tilted up to mine, and she gave me a strange, stubborn look. ‘I’m going to marry you.’

  ‘I’m a bit old for you,’ I said gently, ‘aren’t I?’

  ‘That’s all right. I’ll be older soon.’

  When I laughed, it startled her at first, but then she realized she must have said something clever, and she began to laugh as well.

  On Friday I got to the Mercato Vecchio early. It was busy, as always, not just with stall-holders and their clientele, but with all manner of con-men, quacks and entertainers. I watched a cripple’s pet monkey juggling walnuts. Nearby was a dentist in a bloody apron, who delighted his audience by repeatedly pulling good teeth instead of rotten ones.

  I had been waiting for a quarter of an hour when Faustina appeared. Stepping back into the shadow of a loggia, I sketched her as she wandered among the stalls, tasting olives and salted almonds. She had such a casual, spontaneous air about her that you never would have suspected she was meeting someone.

  At last, I could resist no longer. I went up and touched her on the shoulder. She turned slowly.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said.

  ‘You weren’t late. You’ve been here all the time.’

  ‘How could you tell?’

  ‘I could feel it.’

  ‘I couldn’t believe I was the one you were waiting for. I felt really lucky.’

  ‘If you pay me too many compliments at the beginning,’ she said, ‘you might find yourself with nothing left to say.’

  ‘The beginning of what?’

  Her face appeared to rock a little, like a boat disturbed by a wave that had come from nowhere.

  ‘And anyway,’ I said, ‘I disagree.’

  ‘Do you?’

  I stared out over the rooftops. The pale-gold October light streamed down on to my face. My skin seemed to be absorbing it, soaking it up. Light could feel liquid.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t disagree more.’ My face still felt illuminated, not just by the sky, but by a kind of candour, the fact that I was speaking the truth. ‘I’ll never run out of ways of telling you how beautiful you are.’

  She linked her arm through mine, and we walked east, along the Corso. I remembered what Marvuglia had said as we sat in his kitchen. You don’t belong together. It doesn’t look right. What did he know?

  ‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I drew you.’

  She asked if she could see. I took out my notebook and opened it. She stared at the image for a few long moments. ‘I look like that?’

  ‘To me you do.’

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  In Piazza Santa Croce a crowd was gathering for a game of calcio. Music started up close by. There was a man hunched over a lute, his hand a blur. Another man blew on a set of pipes. A third hammered at a tall, barrel-shaped drum, his face transfixed, almost demonic. Faustina stood in front of me, and I watched over her shoulder, my face close to her hair. The three men were arranged in an arc around a dark-skinned woman who wore a leather waistcoat and an ankle-length bronze skirt. Her eyelids were painted with black dots, which made her eyes look caged. She sang in a guttural, agonized voice, her head angled sideways and downwards, her hands clapping in a rhythm I had never heard before. Leaning back against me, Faustina put her mouth next to my ear. They were Spanish, she said. They came through the city every year.

  I followed her across the square and into Via dei Malcontenti. As we passed alongside the church, a few hundred people surged in our direction, all looking beyond us, and I had to keep hold of Faustina and edge sideways, leading with my shoulder, or we would both have been swept back into the square.

  We turned left, then right, the streets narrowing. All that remained of the music was the pulsing of the drum. She led me through a door of warped wooden staves and into a wild garden. There was a cluster of palm trees and a tiled terrace. I followed her down some steps and through an arbour, its metal frame in the clutch of superannuated fig trees and twisting vines. We walked in a green gloom, rotten fruit exploding softly beneath our shoes.

  ‘Who else knows about this place?’ I said.

  ‘I’m not sure. Children, maybe.’

  She had found a twist of ribbon once, she said. Another time, her foot had caught in a wooden hoop.

  Beyond a tangle of undergrowth, at the far end of the garden, was a second, smaller terrace, overshadowed by pine trees and the remains of a pergola. Two pillars, a stone bench. A few broken pots. The faded pink tiles were decorated with pale-green concentric circles, like the ripples when a pebble is dropped into a pond.

  ‘When I was young, I was alone a lot,’ I told her. ‘I used to break into abandoned houses.’

  I described how I would stride out on to the first-floor balconies and make speeches to the crowds that massed below. A sea of faces. Deafening applause.

  Faustina was brushing the leaves and dirt off the stone bench. ‘So you always knew you were going to be famous?’

  ‘No, no. It was just a game. Anyway, I’m not famous.’

  ‘You will be,’ she said.

  I glanced at her, sitting there. I could see her as a little girl – dark, wary, eel-quick. ‘Were you lonely as a child?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘I had a friend called Mimmo. He thought I was a witch.’ She grinned. But then the grin faded so fast that her whole face seemed to shrink.

  I joined her on the bench. ‘What is it?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Tell me.’

  His name was Mimmo Righetti, she said, and he lived on the narrow, curving street where she grew up, in a house with a green door. His father worked with wood. His mother was dead. Why did Mimmo think she was a witch? Perhaps he had heard people in the village gossiping, or perhaps it was just a feeling that had come to him, as sudden and unprompted as a shiver. Your mother’s not your mother, he would chant in his fluty voice, and she would pretend that his face was a window and she was looking through it at the view, and Mimmo would shout, Look! You see? You’re definitely a witch! because all the little hairs had lifted on his arms. But he had identified the central mystery of her life: her mother wasn’t her mother. Later, when he was eight or nine, he added a second line: And your father’s never here. It was true: he wasn’t. Her father, Remo Ferralis, was someone she did not know, and hardly ever saw. That was something else she didn’t understand. When Mimmo called her a witch, it was as if he was addressing all the aspects of her life that she could not explain. Whether he intended it or not, he had given her a way of thinking about herself.

  She did her best to live up to his expectations. She would gather plants and herbs and tie them in bunches and hang them from the beams to dry. She would spend hours distilling potions, which they would drink, and which would give them stomach ache or hiccups or diarrhoea. She would build fires, make offerings. Cast spells. She would try to transform herself. Your mother’s not your mother and your father’s never here, Mimmo would chant, and she would whirl round the flames, her black hair flying, and Mimmo would sit on his haunches, hugging his knees, and sometimes she really did feel as if her face had changed, as if she had turned into
another person – or no, as if she had become someone, finally become someone – and it thrilled her, and scared the daylights out of her, and made her feel different, special, powerful.

  One warm September afternoon, as they returned from an expedition to the woods, trees rising on one side of the white dust road, a steep drop on the other, she told Mimmo they were going to attempt something extraordinary.

  ‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to fly – like birds.’

  ‘Like birds!’ He tipped his head back and stretched out his arms, and if she hadn’t grabbed him by the collar he would have missed his footing and plunged headlong into the gully, a fate that had befallen more than one drink-addled peasant on his way home from a dance.

  ‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had the potion yet.’

  He grinned. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘The ghost house.’

  ‘I knew it!’

  They skirted the village and turned on to a dirt track that led past a vineyard and an olive grove and out along a low ridge. Up ahead, she could see the two tall cypresses that marked the entrance to Sabatino Vespi’s property. It was Vespi who had given her the goatskin bag she was carrying. That morning she had packed it with everything they would need: a jar of water from the ancient spring below the village, some dead skin shaved from Mimmo’s heel, five spiders’ legs, the head of a rose that she had dried in the sun and ground to a fine powder, a chopped-up clove of garlic, part of a honeycomb, a grey hair found near the altar – she thought she had seen it fall from the priest’s head during a Mass to celebrate the Assumption of the Virgin – some sprigs of basil and oregano, a blue flower, a few of her own fingernail clippings, some sawdust from Mimmo’s father’s workshop, and, most important of all, a glinting black-green feather, which must have belonged to a raven or a crow.

  After passing Vespi’s house, the track dipped down and curved to the right, and the roof of the ghost house appeared below, crouching on a promontory that overlooked the wooded valley to the north and the smooth clay hills beyond. It was said that the woman who owned the place had been born in the same year as Galileo, which would have put her age at roughly one hundred and ten, but nobody had set eyes on her for years, and the few who claimed to have caught a glimpse of her – a figure hesitating on the track at dusk, a face adrift in an upstairs window – often thought it was a ghost they had seen. She was so old, perhaps, that nobody could tell the difference.

  That morning, the two friends hurried down the slope towards the house, an open barn on their right, the tall brick tower of the dovecote to their left. They circled the well and knelt in the yellow grass under the peach trees, which stood at the edge of the property. On waking, Faustina had imagined they would test her potion beyond the trees, where the ground dropped twenty feet to the field below, but when she saw the ladder leaning against the back wall of the house she changed her mind. The ladder seemed providential, too good to be true, though it also carried a warning: two rungs were missing near the top, as if to discourage people from climbing any higher.

  She uncorked the jar of water and began to add ingredients. Last to go in was the flower, which she had found behind a market stall the previous Tuesday.

  ‘Blue to represent the sky,’ she said. ‘Our new element.’

  They crept through the grass to the back of the house. Up against the wall, in shadow suddenly, she shivered.

  ‘What if the woman comes?’ Mimmo said.

  ‘She won’t,’ Faustina said. ‘She’s dead.’ Then wished she hadn’t said the word.

  She followed Mimmo up the ladder, the jar in her left hand. Once on the curving tiles, they kept as low as they could. The slope of the roof would shield them from anyone who might be passing along the track.

  She showed Mimmo the feather. His face lit up; he was alive to its significance. As she stirred the potion, using the feather as a spoon, they murmured the incantation he had invented, and always now insisted on: Your mother’s not your mother and your father’s never here. They repeated the words until their heads were empty – the magic needed a clear space, a kind of arena, where it could happen – then she handed the jar to Mimmo. He brought it up to his lips. Over the rim she could see his eyes, wide with excitement and anticipation.

  ‘Like birds,’ he whispered.

  He took two or three gulps, his face twisting as he swallowed. It’s like medicine, she had told him once. The worse it tastes, the better it works. She swirled the contents of the jar and drank the rest.

  It was a breathless early autumn day. The sun had lost none of its heat, and the mountains to the north-east were a dusty, faded purple. Her body twitched suddenly, as if she were on the brink of sleep.

  ‘I think it’s time,’ she said.

  They rose to their feet.

  Mimmo lifted his arms out sideways, as if to test his new powers. ‘I can’t feel anything.’

  ‘It’s subtle,’ she told him. ‘Light as air.’

  She felt slightly sick; she tried not to think about the spiders’ legs and the priest’s greasy hair.

  ‘Shall I go first?’ she said.

  ‘No, me.’ He jumped up and down, making the loose tiles clack. ‘Me first.’

  She put an upright finger to her lips.

  He scrambled up to the apex of the roof. Still on all fours, he turned his back on the chimney and began to make his way down to the far end. From there, it was a sheer drop to the ground. He stood up. He was facing away from her, his arms held at right-angles to his body. He appeared to be looking out into the heat-haze that shimmered above the land.

  Then he stepped off the roof.

  For a moment he seemed to remain quite motionless. He hung in the air, the back of his head outlined against the flawless sky, and she thought he was about to veer sideways and soar up over the track and on towards the village.

  Why hadn’t she stopped him?

  Why hadn’t she gone first?

  He had insisted, though, and there had been no mistaking his eagerness as he scurried over the tiles. He had believed in the potion to such an extent that she had begun to think it might actually work. Like Mimmo, she had wanted it to work. For those few seconds, his faith had converted her.

  Then the air let go of him, and he vanished from sight, and there was a dull, ugly sound, like something collapsing. She rushed to the edge of the roof and peered over. Mimmo lay crumpled in the yellow grass. One of his legs had twisted back on itself; the skin had broken, and a piece of bone was showing.

  She coughed twice and almost vomited, then she hurried back across the tiles. Down the ladder. Round the house. Out of the shadow, into the sun. Mimmo was still lying on the ground. His eyes were closed, and the fingers of his left hand were moving slowly, almost numbly, like insect feelers.

  ‘Did it work?’ His grey face made his lips look mauve. ‘Did I fly?’

  ‘I think so.’ She glanced over her shoulder. The roof was higher than she remembered. Above the tiled edge the blue sky seemed to lurch and tilt. ‘Yes. Just for a moment.’

  His head moved sideways, and he was sick in the grass. Dark specks floated in the viscous fluid. Spiders’ legs. Rose dust. A rustle came from behind her. Looking round, she let out a cry. An old woman stood at her elbow. Her black clothes were so faded that they had gone brown, and her face was as cracked as a dropped plate. On her bald head she wore a hat made from a cabbage leaf. She began to speak, but Faustina couldn’t understand a word. The sounds were shapeless and morose. Like groans. She told Mimmo she would fetch help, then she turned and ran.

  She made for Vespi’s house. He would know what to do. She talked to God the whole time she was running. Strange gabbled prayers. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Then: It’s not true. It can’t be. I must have imagined it. And then: You could have let him fly. Just once. Would that have been so difficult? And finally: He’s not going to die, is he? Please say he isn’t. She ran so fast she tasted blood.

  Mimmo didn’t die, but he lo
st his leg. They cut it off, just above the knee.

  A few days later, she called at the Righetti house. Mimmo’s father came to the door. Mimmo was still in hospital, he said, but they thought he would pull through.

  She burst into tears. ‘It was all my fault.’

  Mimmo’s father placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘He told me what happened. You were on the roof, and he was showing off. He went too near the edge.’

  Mimmo had lied in order to protect her.

  ‘You’ve always been a good friend to him,’ Mimmo’s father said. ‘He looks up to you.’ He turned his eyes on her. Burst veins in the whites. Sagging lids. ‘He would never blame you.’

  Her heart thumped. Did he know? Had he guessed? There was nothing worse than the feeling of being found out.

  Before she left, he showed her the strap the barber-surgeon had wedged between Mimmo’s teeth before he operated. Mimmo had bitten clean through the leather.

  Though Mimmo’s father told her that she was always welcome, she couldn’t bring herself to visit again. From that day on, she always turned right when she left her house, even if it meant going out of her way. If she saw Mimmo from a distance, stumping along on crutches his father must have made for him, she would duck down a side street, or else she would double back. And he, too, kept himself to himself. She could have said she was sorry, she supposed, but the longer her silence lasted the harder it became – and besides, he wasn’t the sort of person who would have expected an apology. Given that he had covered for her, it might even have offended him.

  ‘Actually, that’s nonsense,’ she said. ‘I was just a coward.’

  Though there was still light in the sky, the shade in the garden had deepened. I stroked her arm, and all the tiny hairs stood up. She looked into my face.

  ‘I was a coward,’ she said again.

  My hand moved to the smooth groove at the back of her neck. The colour of her eyes intensified, like embers when you blow on them, and my mouth found her mouth, my tongue was touching hers, and I thought I could taste salt, the almonds she had eaten earlier.