Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  No, Jacopo, I said calmly. You’re the coward.

  The colour left his face. Sodomite, he muttered. Degenerate. Then, almost as an after-thought, Necrophiliac.

  These were no longer accusations. These were facts.

  I slid the gun back into its holster and vaulted up on to my horse. My mother was standing at the top of the steps, by the front door. Her mouth opened, then closed again. I said I was sorry for what had happened, and that I loved her, but she was shaking her head. I’m glad your father isn’t here to see this.

  Would he have protected me? The venom in my voice surprised me. Well, would he?

  She looked away.

  I tugged on the reins, which were warm from the sun, and rode off down Via Dione. Then north, towards Catania.

  It was a fantasy, of course.

  All fantasy.

  I glanced at my hands, white with plaster. I could taste blood, and I was shaking. At least I knew why I felt such anger, though. Could Jacopo have told me the origin of his? I doubted it somehow. Probably he had been born with it. Probably he had been tugged, red-faced and raging, from the womb.

  The door opened, and I jumped.

  ‘It’s only me,’ Earhole said.

  Though I knew where I was, I could sense the blue sea at the end of the street, between the buildings, and I could feel the jolt of the gun in my trigger hand – a gun I hadn’t even realized I owned! – and I imagined that my brother would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, or even lose his leg altogether, like Faustina’s friend. He would become a bitter man – a bully to his wife and mother, an ogre to his children. I had done nobody any favours. I should have shot him full in the face and sent the back of his head careening sloppily across the street. I should have ended it, once and for all.

  I heard a cough. Looking round, I saw Earhole with another barrow full of ice.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’

  The girl’s body had been delivered shortly before midnight on Friday. At dawn on Sunday, and without entirely understanding why, I surgically removed the section of skin with the dog’s head carved into it. I pinned it to a flat piece of cork and placed it in a jar of alcohol. As I returned to the body, I noticed a green blush or stain on the right side of the abdomen, a sure sign that the process of decomposition was under way. I had finished just in time.

  Since then, Earhole had made a second journey to the lazaretto, where Belbo had seen to the burning of the body. No trace of it now remained. In its place on the marble slab lay the fruits of thirty hours’ almost uninterrupted work. As always, I was struck by the contrast between the crude, grubby shapelessness of the moulds and the specific, subtle secrets I knew them to contain. Looking at the outside, you wouldn’t have been able to guess the first thing about the girl’s appearance – except, perhaps, for her height – but there was this eerie, magical fact: the space inside would look exactly like her. Every detail of her physical being had been captured, stored – immortalized. Though she might seem to have gone, she was actually still there, suspended between two different forms of existence, made of air.

  I sent Earhole home happy, with a handful of quattrini in his pocket, then I walked back to my lodgings. I could feel the sun on my shoulders, but darkness kept bleeding into my field of vision, and the world wobbled and swirled around me, as if it were being blown out of molten glass and had yet to solidify. Though it was two in the afternoon, I climbed into bed and went straight to sleep.

  I woke to an uncanny hush. My wrists ached, and my whole body felt stiff, unwieldy. I lay quite still. The city sounded as if it had been smothered. Even with my eyes closed I could tell that it was light. Was it Monday already?

  Later, standing at the window, I saw that a fog had descended, a fog so dense that the lopsided shutters on the building opposite were only vague suggestions of themselves. I thought of the moulds lying in a cupboard in my workshop, and my heart speeded up as I remembered the feeling of lightness that had flowed into me during the dismemberment, that flare of exhilaration for no reason. I sat at my desk and wrote to Faustina, asking her to meet me by the column in the Mercato Vecchio, as usual.

  When I arrived that afternoon, there was a man with a brazier of glowing coals in the corner of the square. I watched him twirl a pair of blackened tongs, the blue smoke emptying into the fog. He was roasting chestnuts. It was the feast of San Simone, he told me.

  ‘Doesn’t the air smell wonderful?’ Faustina stood at my elbow. Over her shoulder was a bag that clinked every time she moved. ‘You disappeared again,’ she said. ‘Did you have another fever? Did you nearly die?’

  I smiled. ‘It’s only been three days.’

  ‘It felt longer.’

  ‘To me too.’

  We began to walk.

  ‘There’s something that’s been troubling me.’ I paused. ‘I’ve been feeling awkward about what I said last time I saw you. I feel I disappointed you.’

  ‘You’re not to think about that.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘No.’ She looked around to see if anyone was watching, then moved a step closer. ‘You haven’t kissed me yet. You haven’t even said hello.’

  That evening Faustina took me to the ghetto. I had only been there once before, with Fiore, and I had forgotten how cramped and derelict it was, the streets no wider than corridors, and often blocked by piles of waste or rubble. The buildings towered above me, their dark-grey façades scarred and mottled, their eaves lost in the fog. Since the ghetto could not expand sideways, it had to go upwards, into the sky. It was all done illegally, with no controls. Some buildings were eleven storeys high.

  We passed the well in the Piazza della Fonte. The whole area was dense with smells – smoke, fat, piss, and damp. Underneath, though, like a recurring theme, I thought I detected something which reminded me of ash or cinders, fainter than the other smells but much more acrid. I asked Faustina if I was imagining it. She shook her head. Twenty years ago there had been a fire, she told me, and part of the ghetto had burned down. The place was still being rebuilt.

  Later, as she emerged from a shop with two tallow lanterns, the bell for the night hour began to ring.

  ‘If we’re not careful,’ I said, ‘we’re going to get –’

  My sentence was cut off by the thud of the gates closing and the metallic crash of iron bolts being slammed into their sockets.

  Faustina only grinned.

  She led me to a grand, grim building in the ghetto’s north-east corner. Looking up at the windows, I saw that each storey had been divided horizontally. You could fit more families in that way. Some of the apartments had such low ceilings, she said, that only small children could stand up straight.

  By the time we reached the fifth floor, the murmur of voices had died away. The upper storeys were uninhabitable, she told me. As we climbed higher, she advised me to watch my footing. There were stairs that had rotted clean through.

  We came out at last into a drawing room or salon. I crossed to the window. The street was so narrow that I could almost have stepped on to the roof of the building opposite. I faced back into the room. A sofa stood against one wall, its springs and stuffing showing, and an iron chandelier lay on its side in the middle of the floor. These traces of splendour didn’t surprise me; before the buildings had been requisitioned by the Grand Duke’s family, they had belonged to some of the most famous names in Florence – Pecori, Brunelleschi, Della Tosa.

  ‘No one’s going to find us here,’ I said.

  ‘And if they do, they’ll probably be criminals,’ Faustina said, ‘like us.’ She lifted her lantern higher. ‘Did you see the fresco?’

  On the far wall was a pastoral scene, with groups of nymphs and goatherds arranged against a landscape of pine trees, streams and hills. The clouds above their heads were edged in pink and gold. At first glance, it looked like a thousand other frescoes, but then I noticed that the figures were all looking to their left, and that their expressions varied from ner
vousness and apprehension to outright alarm. It wasn’t possible to know the reason, though. At some point in the past a wall had been built across the room, and half the fresco was missing.

  I asked Faustina what she thought they were frightened of.

  ‘It could be a wild animal, I suppose.’ She studied a girl in a lilac dress who had thrown up an arm as if to fend off what was coming. ‘But I like not knowing, actually. It’s more powerful that way.’ She looked at me, her face glowing in the burnt-orange light of the lantern.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ I said.

  She made a joke about the fact that I could hardly see her.

  I went and stood by the window. When I was with Faustina, I always had the feeling that this was something that wouldn’t happen again – that this was all there was, or ever would be. I found it exhausting to have to treat each new encounter as though it might well be the last. It was partly the times we lived in, of course, which had made criminals of us, as she had said, but it was also specific to her, it arose out of her character, and if I paid her too many compliments – something she had noticed, and seemed to feel ambivalent about – it was perhaps because I was trying to bring her nearer, trying to turn what we had into something a little less unstable.

  ‘I think you’ve ruined other women for me,’ I said, staring out into the fog. ‘I used to look at women all the time. Since I met you, though, I don’t do it any more. What’s the point? I know there’s no one who’ll come close.’

  She came up behind me. ‘You almost sound sad.’

  I smiled. ‘I’m not sad.’

  ‘I told you before. If you keep on like this, you’ll run out of things to say.’

  I turned to face her. ‘I’ll never run out.’

  We sat down on the sofa, and Faustina loosened the drawstring on the goatskin bag that Vespi had given her, the bag she had used for her spells and potions. She had brought some of the wine that was traditional on San Simone, a loaf of bread, green olives in a twist of paper, and half a dozen slices of porchetta. She uncorked the bottle and poured us both a cup. The wine was so young I could taste the grapes in it.

  ‘This is what my father drank,’ she said, ‘the last time I ever saw him.’

  It was around the time of her thirteenth birthday, and Remo stayed for three whole days. One afternoon, he went out hunting with another man from the village. When he returned, his lack of awkwardness with her and his exaggerated attempts to appear alert told her that he had been drinking. That evening, he settled at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine. Leaning against the wall with her hands trapped behind her, she watched him so closely that she could see the pulse beating in his neck. He had entered Tuscany illegally, he said, through the hills near Chiusi. He had risked everything to see her. If the authorities found out he had crossed the border, he would be thrown into prison, or even hanged. In the past, she had always let him speak, but this time she interrupted. She didn’t understand, she said. Why wasn’t he allowed to cross the border?

  He drained his glass and poured another, then he said something that sent a thrill right through her.

  ‘You don’t know it, but you’re asking how you came to be born.’

  When he was in his early twenties, he said, he had worked as a groom on one of the ducal estates. This was during the time of the Grand Duke’s famously tempestuous marriage.

  ‘It was a magnificent villa,’ he went on, ‘with its own private theatre, formal gardens, and a river nearby, but it was in the middle of nowhere – at least, that was how it seemed to the Grand Duke’s wife. She had become increasingly hysterical in Florence, and the Grand Duke thought that if he sent her to the country she might calm down, but she felt lonely and frightened. She was at the height of her beauty, and she was being buried. What if her light went out, the light that made her who she was? It was around that time that she started wearing black; she was in mourning for her life. She would come down to the stables every day – riding was her only consolation – and we would talk. She told me not to call her “Your Highness”. She wanted me to treat her like anybody else.’

  Faustina asked what they had talked about.

  Remo laughed. ‘Well, actually, she did all the talking. I just listened.’

  She told him about visiting the court at Fontainebleau, and how she had fallen in love with her cousin, Charles. She showed him the ring Charles had given her. It was an opal, she said, a stone that stood for passion and spontaneity. I lost my wedding ring in the first week of my marriage. I still have this one, though. What does that tell you? How she had loved Fontainebleau! There was boating at midnight on candle-lit canals, dancing on carpets of rose petals. There were banquets that lasted from dusk till dawn. They drank snow-cooled wine, and dined on peacocks’ tongues and teal soup with hippocras and pies that sang because they were filled with nightingales. Beef was served in a gold leaf sauce. You ate gold? Yes. To make us strong. She talked about those days as old people talk about their youth – and she was only twenty-one! But it was a time when she had been happy – deliriously happy – and she seemed to know that it would never come again.

  One wet afternoon, while he was polishing saddles in the tack room, the curtain of rain in the doorway parted to reveal the Grand Duke’s wife, a lilac umbrella open above her head, her eyes glowing underneath.

  ‘I’ve given Malvezzi the slip,’ she said.

  Malvezzi, her chamberlain, had been instructed to follow her everywhere and report on her behaviour. Ever since his arrival at the villa, she had delighted in torturing the poor man by going on walks that lasted hours, knowing full well that he was overweight, and had no chance of keeping up.

  She lowered her umbrella. ‘How long have we known each other, Remo?’

  In his opinion, they hardly knew each other at all, but he wasn’t in a position to say so.

  ‘About two months.’

  ‘And what do you think of me?’ she said. ‘Do you find me boring? I’m always talking, after all – talking my head off.’ She walked in a tight circle just inside the stable door, water dripping from the tip of her umbrella. ‘You know, I’m not sure I’ve let you say anything, not in all the time we’ve spent together. Look at you now. You’re just standing there. You can’t get a word in edgeways.’

  Remo smiled. ‘I don’t find you boring.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Quite the opposite.’

  ‘What do you mean by that, Remo? Put it in words, so I can understand.’ She issued her commands with such a light touch that they felt like invitations, and she had moved closer, close enough for him to be able to see the drops of rain on her black dress, close enough to sense the warmth of the skin beneath.

  ‘You –’

  She moved closer still. No woman, it seemed, had ever stood so close.

  ‘Your voice –’

  ‘What about my voice?’

  There was such a sweetness to her breath that he thought she might have eaten an apricot or a peach while crossing the garden. Though neither apricots nor peaches were in season.

  ‘What about my voice?’ she said again.

  ‘The way you speak. I suppose it’s because you’re French.’

  ‘You think I sound funny.’

  ‘No, I like it.’

  A horse stirred behind him. The whisk of a tail. Hooves shifting, clumsy, in the straw.

  ‘I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you,’ he said. ‘It’s impossible, at times, to believe it. I think I must be dreaming. Imagining things. But then I realize that I’m awake, and that you’re real.’

  ‘How do you know I’m real?’

  She was so much cleverer than he was. She knew how to manipulate a conversation, how to give it a different shape, a new direction. Six words was all it took.

  ‘How do you know?’

  Her pupils widened suddenly, and he felt he was falling towards her, into her.

  Her breath against his face.

  ‘Touch me,’ she said.


  He stepped back.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘I’m not good enough for you?’

  That lightness again.

  The rain hung behind her, as hard to see through as a piece of gauze. The world lay beyond – inaccessible, remote. Or maybe it was right there with them, where they stood.

  He did as she had asked.

  Early the next morning, he saddled two of the finest horses in the stable, and they rode west, towards Pisa. The lead-grey air, the dull copper of the sun. The mist so close to the ground that a farmhouse seemed to float on it like an ark. They had not discussed what they would do when they reached the coast. He assumed she had a plan. She didn’t seem like somebody who would ever be short of ideas, though all of them would involve a gamble. Perhaps she would charter a boat, and they would set sail for the south of France. That, he thought, was her immediate aim: to escape the prison of her marriage. He was happy, for the moment, to be with her, but he didn’t dare to think too far ahead.

  Just as well.

  The authorities caught up with them in the wooded hills not far from Lake Fucecchio.

  ‘All right,’ Malvezzi wheezed. ‘The fun’s over.’

  The Grand Duke’s wife was escorted back to the villa. Remo, suddenly alone, expected to be punished. The galleys at the very least. Even, possibly, execution. Instead, they sent him into exile, with a warning that he should never set foot in Tuscany again. Perhaps they knew the Grand Duke’s wife was responsible, and that he was no more than a pawn in one of her many games.

  ‘What they didn’t know,’ Remo told Faustina, as she listened open-mouthed, ‘what no one knew, not even me, was that you were already alive inside her – a small seed growing …’

  Faustina stared at him. ‘The Grand Duke’s wife was my mother?’

  He looked right through her, back into the past. He seemed to be having trouble believing it himself. It sounded like a story, even to the story-teller.

  ‘My mother,’ she said again.

  ‘You were conceived on horseback!’ Remo laughed in delight, then shot her a wary glance. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you that.’ He hit the side of his head and groaned. ‘I shouldn’t have told you anything. I’m an idiot.’ He hit himself again.