Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  I shook my head. ‘You’re such a Florentine.’

  ‘Actually,’ he said, with the smugness of a card player who is about to display a winning hand, ‘I was born in Padua.’

  The black geraniums I had planted outside my workshop bent in the wind as the porters carried the stretcher down the track, the girl’s body blurred by the threadbare cloth that covered it. The dark shapes of the overhanging myrtle trees swirled above our heads, the flesh of the night sky peeled back to reveal the white bone of the moon.

  Before leaving Santa Maria Nuova, I had come to an arrangement with Pampolini: I had agreed to pay what he was asking, but only on the condition that I could borrow his assistant. With rigor mortis looming, I would have to work fast, and I didn’t think I could do it on my own. Not only was Earhole accustomed to the dead, but he had also been party to the irregular circumstances in which I had acquired the corpse. In hiring him, I would be ensuring that the circle of confidentiality stayed closed. Earlier that night, he had asked me to trust him. This was his chance to prove himself worthy of that trust.

  Once the porters had lifted the girl’s body on to the dissecting table, I asked Earhole to escort them back to the gate. As soon as they were gone, I removed the covering. Pampolini had put coins on the girl’s eyelids to keep them from sliding open. He had also fastened a piece of rag around her head to hold her jaw in place. I reached down and gently wiped away the mucus that had seeped from her mouth during her journey across the city.

  Earhole reappeared. I showed him the metal-lined drawers I had built into the dissecting table. When packed with ice, they helped to slow the process of decomposition. I plucked the key to the Grand Duke’s ice house off the wall and gave it to him.

  ‘Take the handcart,’ I said. ‘Bring as much as you can manage. And hurry. Every second counts.’

  While he was away, I cut off the girl’s hair and laid it in a wooden tray, then I shaved her head and removed the hair from her armpits and her groin. That done, I coated her body in a thin layer of hemp oil. She gleamed in the candle-light as if she had just broken out in a sweat, but I was the one who was sweating. I tested her fingers. Still no sign of stiffening.

  In fifteen minutes Earhole had returned. Rigor mortis occurred four to six hours after death, depending on the temperature. In Pampolini’s opinion, the girl had died between seven and eight o’clock. It was now midnight. Even with the doors wide open and the ice-filled drawers, I didn’t think I had more than an hour to prepare the body for casting. After that, manipulation would prove impossible.

  I propped my notebook open at the relevant page. Guided by drawings I had made during the summer, I bent the girl’s left arm at the elbow, leaving her hand resting on her belly. I liked the elegant, elongated diamond of air that opened up between her arm and her waist, and there was a kind of tenderness about the hand. A subtle sensuality as well. To keep the arm from moving, I fitted a small right-angled cushion filled with sand against the outside of the elbow. Walking round the table, I straightened the girl’s right arm so it lay flush against her body, her palm and the inside of her elbow facing upwards. Casting the delicately curling fingers wouldn’t be easy, but they were an integral part of the image I had in mind. I placed the hand in a three-sided wooden box, which would lock it in the chosen position. As for her legs, they needed to mirror or complement the arms. Leaving her left leg extended, I eased her right knee outwards a fraction, then brought her foot back in so that the sole almost touched the left ankle. I wedged more sand-filled pillows between the legs to stop them straightening, then I stood back. The girl looked natural, relaxed and – strange, this – solitary. The angle of her head was wrong, though. If I turned her face towards her left shoulder – if she appeared to be avoiding the viewer’s gaze, in other words – it would leave her poised between modesty and invitation, and I would be combining the dreamy grace of Poussin’s ‘Galatea’ with the boldness of his ‘Sleeping Venus’. That, at least, was my intention. I was conscious of Earhole in the shadows, watching.

  ‘Are you tired?’ I said.

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Why don’t you sleep?’

  Covering two lengths of string in pig fat, I fixed them to the girl’s left leg, one on either side, so they stretched all the way from her hip to her ankle, then I reached for the sack of powdered gypsum and heaped several scoops into a bowl. When casting Fiore’s hands, I had used lukewarm water, and the plaster had set too rapidly. This time I would use cold water and a sprinkling of grog – a pulverized burnt clay – which would slow down the chemical reaction and give me a little more control. I stirred the mixture until it formed a creamy paste, then started to apply it to the leg, careful not to dislodge the bits of string. I worked fast, methodically. My mind, unanchored, floated free.

  I hear you’re making something special for the Grand Duke …

  Stufa’s words.

  That night in the carriage, I had thought at first that he was taking an interest. How naïve of me! All too soon, he had become dismissive, if not openly contemptuous. What had he called my work? Histrionic. Gratuitous. And it didn’t bother him if he upset me. Not in the slightest. In fact, he seemed to want to upset me.

  Did I scare you?

  His cheekbones sticking out like knuckles, a sharpness to his mouth, his tongue. That black flower again, its petals opening and closing …

  My eyes grew heavy. I let my head rest on my arm and found myself returning to Siracusa. I was on horseback, the volcano behind me, its slopes the colour of a pigeon’s wing. I passed white convent walls, the air keen with ripe lemon and wild sage. Below me, far below, the soothing lap and flop of waves. The sea.

  I came round a bend in the road and the town appeared ahead of me, the pink dome of my old college rising out of the clustered buildings, the wide bay of the Porto Grande glittering beyond.

  My throat tightened.

  I rode across the shallow harbour, then past a group of fishermen and up Via Dione, high-sided, sunk in shadow. I stopped outside our house. Someone had dropped a melon, and it had split open, a gash of crimson showing in the dark-green rind. I climbed the steps and went inside. The smell of dried roses, beeswax, flaking plaster. The tiles earth-brown, vein-blue. The doors ajar, the rooms peaceful, cool.

  And then an image that seemed lifted from my memory. My father in his study, bars of gold light laid out on the floor. The nobleman he worked for – Gargallo – was standing close to him and talking in a low but forceful voice. Gargallo with his lavish clothes, his head of dark-brown curls …

  I saw my father’s mouth twist. He turned his back on his employer and spoke to me without so much as a glance in my direction.

  Go and find your mother.

  As I backed out of the room, Gargallo looked round, and his expression, which had been affronted, softened into a smile I neither understood nor trusted.

  Come here a moment, he said.

  I ran for it.

  Then I was downstairs, under the pear tree. From a distance, my mother looked the same, but when I stepped forwards, into the sun, I saw how she had changed, and it was hard not to burst into tears, thinking of all the moments I had lost, all the time I had used in other ways. And I had aged as well. There were lines on my forehead, around my mouth. I had no grey hair as yet, but the whites of my eyes were muddy, no longer the pure egg white of a child’s. I told her what Jacopo had been saying. I had wormed my way into the family. I was a leech, a misfit. I didn’t belong. He said all that? she murmured. I do belong, I said, don’t I? Of course you do, she said. He’s wrong, then? Yes, he’s wrong. But I’d had to prompt her, lead her, and I couldn’t shake the feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me, something she couldn’t say. I held her close, and the years since we had last seen each other unrolled before me like a wave breaking, the years kept unrolling, over and over, the ache I had thought I was used to, the wound I carried no matter where I went …

  The waves grew louder, and I lifted my h
ead and looked around. Earhole was asleep on the divan, his knees drawn up towards his chest, one hand beneath his cheek. The night was quiet but for the push and pull of his breathing; it was his breathing I had heard inside my dream. I stood up and crossed the room. His fretful face, his poor mank relic of an ear. I fetched a blanket. Drew it over him.

  The flames of the candles paled and then became invisible as the window high above me brightened. The moulds for the legs and feet were finished, and I was working on the girl’s right arm. The casting of her right hand alone had taken more than an hour, requiring seven interlocking piece-moulds. As I straightened up and stretched, I heard Earhole shift behind me.

  ‘I’ve been asleep!’

  He sounded amazed, as if sleep was a feat he had attempted many times, but had never quite achieved.

  The ice had melted, I told him. Could he fetch another load?

  I began to mix a new batch of plaster.

  Usually, when you had a votive image made, you chose the part of the body that was injured or diseased. You reproduced the part you wanted cured. In this case, though, her whole body had become a votive image. Whether her death had been accidental, self-inflicted, or the result of an assault, she would almost certainly have suffered. In recreating her, I wasn’t seeking a cure – obviously it was too late for that – but I was restoring her to her former self, before whatever happened, happened. I would be preserving the dog’s head, though, so I would be capturing the moment of violation too. There was that hidden hint of a dark future. When the time came to cast the back of her neck, I would blow on the wet plaster to make sure it absorbed every detail, no matter how minute. Later, I would brush a glistening scarlet wax into the cuts and scratches I had so faithfully recorded. Since the girl would be lying on her back, the dog’s head would remain a secret. At the very least, it would constitute a homage to her anonymous existence. At best, it would act as evidence. If the girl was an object of beauty, she was an object of violence as well. She was youth, but she was also death. Perhaps the piece would have more in common with my other work than the Grand Duke had imagined: it would be a vision of what lay ahead, even though, on the surface, it appeared to be the opposite. Would it be enough to protect me? Would it really be enough? I had to hope so.

  By mid-morning, I had cast the limbs. Out in the stable yard, I plunged my head into a bucket of water to jolt myself awake, then went for a walk in the gardens.

  October. A crisp blue sky, a heap of leaves smouldering nearby. Such a stillness after the wind of the night before. I thought once again of the man I had killed. His stink in my nostrils, the blood seeping from the wound …

  I began to tremble.

  The narrow street, the shadows swooping. Then the knife. It had all happened so fast. What else could I have done, though? I shook my head, then crossed myself.

  I remembered looking at my father after he was dead. Jacopo had insisted on it. My father’s body had been laid out in a back room in our house. He was uncovered, perhaps because he had just been washed. I tried to turn away, but Jacopo wouldn’t let me. No, look. He forced me closer. Smell. It was a hot day, and my father’s belly had begun to bloat. A fly stood on the white of his left eye. He didn’t blink. I watched as the fly rubbed one leg against the other, unhurried, finicky. My father stared past it, at the ceiling, intent on something only he could see. Jacopo was breathing noisily behind me. You did it, he whispered. It was you.

  Smoke floated past, a blue shawl in the air.

  Though I barely had the stomach for it, I had decided to dismember the girl. I was under no illusions about how difficult it was going to be. What’s more, I didn’t feel she deserved further mutilation. As a rule, I worked with the bodies of criminals, and there was the feeling that dissection formed part of the punishment. But this girl was innocent – a victim even before I set eyes on her. And anyway, was it strictly necessary to dismember her? Could I cast the torso without removing the limbs? I had no time to think it through. She had been dead for at least fifteen hours. In twenty-one hours – or less – her body would begin to decompose. I had to make a decision, and then stick to it. Any hint of vacillation would be fatal.

  As I stood on the grass, I heard a cry. Turning, I saw a vulture scramble across the path with the zookeeper, Crevalcuore, in pursuit. He was about to close his gloved hands round the creature when it spread its wings, hauled itself into the air, and flapped away across the gardens. When Crevalcuore noticed me, he lifted his arms out sideways as if to say, What can you do? In the meantime, the vulture had settled in a distant ilex tree. It looked like a broken black umbrella, blown high into the branches by last night’s wind.

  I felt Faustina pass behind me, touching the nape of my neck with cool fingers. She asked me how I was.

  I’m all right, I said.

  You must be exhausted. Don’t you want to come to bed?

  I smiled.

  Then Earhole called me. The water had boiled, and he had laid out all the tools.

  I picked up a boning knife and cut into the upper thigh. Though soft, the tissue was surprisingly tough. On I went, into the layer of fat. A shocking yellow-orange. Who would have thought such vivid colours could be hidden inside our bodies? I sliced through one of the main veins. Out seeped a thin, transparent liquid, a sort of serum. This was followed by a dark-red jelly, which oozed lazily across the dissecting table’s chilly marble top. Hip joints were always a test of both technique and stamina. Wrapped in a weave of muscles and tendons, and sealed in a capsule made from the most resilient type of membrane, the bones dovetailed in a tightly fitting ball-and-socket construction. Once I had broken into the capsule, I would need a mallet and chisel to disarticulate the two component parts. As I stepped back, wiping my forehead on the inside of my arm, a bolt of pure exhilaration surged through me. In that moment I somehow knew I was going to produce a piece of work that would exceed my capabilities. A contradiction in terms, perhaps. But that was how it felt.

  Some three hours later, in the early afternoon, I loaded the severed limbs into the handcart, then asked Earhole to take them to the lazaretto, where the bodies of the diseased and derelict were burned. Left over from the plague years, the building was south of the city walls, about half a mile beyond the Porta Romana. When I last visited, I had been greeted by a man I recognized, but could not place. We had met last spring he told me, in a tavern. I had bought him wine. Back then, he had earned his living at the Campo della Morte. Belbo was his name. I told Earhole to ask for Belbo, and be sure to treat him with respect. The man had an easy-going manner and a slice-of-melon smile. In his time, though, he had worked as an executioner.

  That evening, as I lifted the mould away from the girl’s neck, I was confronted once again by the image of the dog, the scratched lines white with plaster now, and a fierce anger crackled through me, like a stack of pine needles catching fire. All of a sudden I was back in our house again, in the turret room. My mother stood with her back to me, staring out over the harbour, the long blue ridge of Monti Climiti in the distance.

  Not a word from you in years, she said.

  There was a crash three floors below. Boots struck sparks off the tiles in the hall, then grated on the smooth stone of the stairs. Jacopo came striding down the corridor. His complexion had coarsened, and his hair had thinned, but the old antagonism was perfectly intact.

  I heard you were here. He was panting from the climb. I can’t believe you had the nerve.

  Why not? I said. It’s my home.

  His laughter was an abrupt and violent displacement of the air, less like a sound than a blow. He went and stood at the window, and when he spoke to our mother his back was turned, and his voice was hard and cold. You shouldn’t have let him in.

  He’s my son, she said.

  Is he? Is he really?

  Yes.

  Because there are stories –

  Jacopo … She was reproaching him.

  What’s wrong with everyone today? He was still gazing
out over the rooftops. Your son, as you insist on calling him, has brought nothing but shame on this family.

  That was a long time ago, she said. And besides, we’re not even sure what happened.

  Nothing, I said. Nothing happened.

  Jacopo swung round. You keep quiet.

  You haven’t changed, have you? I said. Still throwing your –

  He seized me by the collar and whirled me, one-handed, along the corridor and down the stairs. Though I struggled, I knew I had no chance of freeing myself; it was his fury, I thought, that kept him strong. He hurled me down the front steps with such force that I landed on my back and bit my tongue.

  Get out of my house, he said, and stay out.

  Your house? It was difficult to speak through the blood that was welling up in my mouth. It’s not your house, it’s our mother’s, and you have no right to –

  I have every right, he said. I’m head of the family, and I know what’s best. What’s best is that you’re not here, not ever. What’s best is that you’re far away – or, preferably, dead.

  Is this about Ornella?

  His face flushed. Don’t bring my wife into this.

  It’s because I knew her first.

  He began to stroll, loose-shouldered, down the steps, a swagger he had perfected at his military academy. I scrambled backwards, towards my horse. Reaching sideways, I pulled an arquebus out of its holster. I had just noticed it was there. Or perhaps, as in a dream, it had only materialized when it was needed.

  Jacopo stopped in his tracks and smiled – partly, I suspected, out of shock, but partly, knowing Jacopo, with a kind of relish. It was as if I had just raised the stakes in a game he was confident of winning. Put that thing away, he said.

  I aimed at his legs and fired.

  Jacopo’s head flew backwards, and he dropped to the ground so heavily that the paving stones appeared to shudder. Blood soaked the right leg of his breeches.

  Coward! he yelled.