Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  But there was an aspect to all this that was even stranger. Perversely, as Faustina became more insubstantial, and harder to believe in, the girl I was working on emerged, took shape. On the day when I gently prised the first completed mould apart and lifted out the unknown girl’s left arm, I realized there was an eerie correlation between my experience and that of the Grand Duke, a correlation that was bound, at some as yet uncharted level, to draw us closer: I missed Faustina, just as he missed Marguerite-Louise, and if Faustina’s story about her origins was true, then the object of my longing was the offspring of his.

  Though I had preserved the carving of the dog’s head, both in the form of a mould, and as a specimen, in alcohol, I sometimes worried that it might not be enough to protect me. Or, to put it another way, I kept feeling there was a shortfall in the work itself, a connection I had failed to make.

  Then, on a frosty January morning, the Grand Duke’s head gardener, Navacchio, appeared in the doorway to my workshop. He was a diligent, thoughtful man with thinning hair and abnormally large ears; whenever I saw those fleshy lobes, in fact, I was tempted to reach out and give one of them a playful tug. He was sorry to disturb me, he said, but he had been growing fruit out of season, in a glasshouse of his own design, and he would appreciate my opinion. He handed me a peach from the basket he was carrying.

  I cut the peach in half, and as I stared at the dark-red stone at the heart of the fruit I felt something skip or catch inside me. I found myself thinking once again of Faustina’s scandalous conception. What had her father said? A small seed growing … I stood back, the halved peach lying on the table. Of course. Yes. That was it. I would place a baby in the belly of the girl. On the outside, she would be everything the Grand Duke was hoping she would be – an archetype, a beauty, a kind of Eve. Inside her, though, there would be a child that had grown to full term, and was ready to be born.

  Navacchio was fiddling with the handle of his basket. ‘You’re not going to try it?’

  I took a bite. The flesh was much crisper and more tart than I had expected.

  ‘Interesting,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t like it.’

  ‘I do. But it reminds me of an apple.’

  If Navacchio was disappointed by my response, he gave no sign of it. He just nodded gravely, thanked me and turned away.

  I should have been thanking him. For the next two weeks, I worked on the new idea, adapting a mould I had brought from Naples. Though the child would be hidden, and might never be seen, by anyone, it would have to be as beautiful as the girl who was going to carry it. I gave it flawless skin and sleek black hair. Its hands were tucked beneath its chin, its knees drawn up towards its chest. The umbilical cord, whose blood vessels were visible as strands of turquoise and orange, coiled under its left wrist, then over its upper arm, and vanished behind its back. Its gender would be concealed, indeterminate. I modelled the lower half of a uterus, its dusty purple-red inspired by Navacchio’s experimental peach, then I placed the child inside. What thrilled me most about what I was doing was the contrast between the girl’s flat belly and the fully grown baby it contained. An anatomical impossibility. Unnatural. Just plain wrong. Perhaps I had learned from Marvuglia after all! And yet … Though the work might appear to contradict itself, both the size of the baby and the shape of the girl’s belly were authentic, true. They were simply taken from different stages of her existence. I was showing the present and the future in the same breath. I was collapsing time.

  Was I worrying too much? Was I including too many layers of protection and defence? I didn’t think so. As I had said to Cuif once – and it had made him laugh out loud – I’d never lived in a place where paranoia was so completely justifiable. What’s more, this wasn’t only about protecting myself. This was about meaning. To the Grand Duke, the baby would symbolize his family’s immortality, the continuation of his blood-line. His heir. To me, it represented the child his wife had already given birth to, in secret. The child no one could ever know about. To me, the baby was Faustina. Here, at last, was the kind of ambiguity I had been looking for.

  On March the first I left my lodgings at dawn. It was a humid, stagnant morning, and I was glad I had not been drinking. I passed the Uffizi and set off across the Ponte Vecchio. I was eager to look once again at the commission, which I had finished only a few hours before. I had spent the previous day removing flaws and runnings, disguising joins, and applying a final layer of varnish. At midnight I had left her in the back room, under a sheet of muslin. I looked to the west and saw birds spiralling in the grubby air above Sardigna. What an unlikely journey, from that savage wasteland to the Grand Duke’s palace … A sudden yawning in the pit of my stomach. A kind of vertigo.

  I slipped past Toldo, who was dozing by the gate. Dew blackened my boots as I walked down the track. The ancient myrtle trees, the distant fountains. The clarity of the air. Always a sense of sanctuary, of entering a sacred space. In the stable yard I stopped and listened. Nobody about. It was too early even for Navacchio.

  Once inside my workshop, I locked the door behind me, then took the dust-sheet and lifted it away. She looked so solid – so human. She was carrying a child, of course, but I had also filled the other hollow spaces – thighs, chest, skull – with a loose weave of burlap, which I had cut into strips and soaked in wax. The scrim, as it was known, behaved like ballast: it gave her substance, integrity. In the white morning light, her stillness was unnerving. She reminded me of a game we used to play as children, where we pretended to be dead.

  I moved closer.

  Her dark-brown eyes, opaque and yet intelligent, had been made by a glass-blower in Murano. Her lips had been painted with two coats of Parisian lacquer, and around her throat she wore a string of imitation pearls. Though the idea for the necklace had originated in Fiore’s story about the murdered countess, it also had a practical function, which was to conceal the place where her head joined her body. Her hair was her own. One shade lighter than her eyes, with suggestions of bronze and copper, it tumbled in a loose, lustrous rope past the polished curve of her right shoulder, coiling over ribs that were more hinted at than visible, through the gate formed by her thumb and forefinger, and on to her upturned palm. What pleased me most, though, was her skin. It wasn’t white or rose or cream, nor was it gold or ochre, yet all those colours were involved. The tones altered in the most delicate and elusive of ways, from the cool ivory of her forehead and the milk-blue of her armpits to the hot coral of her nipples, as if blood were circling inside her, real blood, sometimes rising to the surface, sometimes holding back, staying deep. I had paid attention to the most obscure and seemingly insignificant details – the particular hue of an eyelid or a fingernail, the special pallor of the parts of her that rarely saw the light. I had worried she might be too much of an aphrodisiac, and I had been right to worry. The way she looked off to one side, inviting my gaze while averting her own. The way her lips parted a fraction to reveal her teeth. The way her left leg lifted to afford a glimpse of the supple inner thigh. Even in the stark spring light, her beauty was carnal. Had I gone too far?

  Hardly having slept the night before, I lay on my divan and closed my eyes, only to be woken what seemed like moments later by a loud knocking. I hauled myself over to the door. It was the men from the local lumber yard, delivering the wood I had ordered. The girl would need some kind of plinth or platform if I was to show her to her best advantage.

  As I paid for the timber, I was aware of her behind me, and my stomach tightened with apprehension, but I knew what I would do should I be challenged or attacked. I had allowed for that eventuality. I would open the lid of her belly. I would unveil the child. I would tell the Grand Duke that I had been influenced and moved by his constant agonizing over the succession. What I was giving him, I would say, was what he had been missing – at every level. Not just a woman, but a child. Sometimes you have to picture what you wish for. Will it into being. What I had made was a petition. It might be art, but
it was also prayer.

  *

  I wrote to Bassetti the following day, requesting an audience with the Grand Duke, but it was almost a week before he sent for me. As I approached the apartment, the doors swung open, and Vittoria della Rovere emerged. It was the first time I had seen her close up. A great, bristling galleon of a woman with at least three chins, she had servants on either side of her to help her walk. According to Borucher, she seldom appeared at court; her legs simply couldn’t take the weight. She seemed to survey me as she drew level, her eyes cold, almost brazen, and then, without addressing me at all, she moved on.

  Magliabechi was with the Grand Duke that morning, as was Stufa, and they had been joined by Paolo Segneri, a Jesuit scholar, and a number of Alcantarine monks from Montelupo. First to leave was the palace librarian, who muttered the words ‘nest of vipers’ as he passed, then bit voraciously into a hard-boiled egg he must have been holding, concealed, in one hand. He was soon followed by the others. Stufa paused in front of me, his big, spare frame and oddly hoisted shoulders blocking out the light. He said my name, then smiled. As before, his smile filled me with unease, perhaps because it seemed directed at some point in the future that only he could see, a time when my star had fallen. There was no amusement in it, and no benevolence. On the contrary. It revelled in the prospect of disaster.

  ‘How long have you been in Florence now?’ he said in his usual harsh whisper.

  ‘Two years.’

  ‘And when will you be moving on, do you think?’

  I watched him carefully, but didn’t answer. After our last awkward encounter in the carriage, I had decided there was little to be gained from talking to him. I didn’t want to give him any more power and leverage than he already had. As Salvator Rosa had written beneath his atmospheric self-portrait: Either remain silent, or speak better than silence.

  ‘Rumour has it,’ Stufa said, ‘that you don’t stay anywhere for very long.’

  ‘There are all kinds of rumours about me,’ I said. ‘Only the other day, I heard that I was sleeping with my landlady.’

  Stufa’s head tilted. ‘It’s not true?’

  ‘People like us tend to attract rumour,’ I said, ‘don’t you find?’

  ‘People like us?’ Stufa said.

  I shrugged.

  He left the chamber, the dry scrape of his voice still in the air, his black cloak billowing around his ankles.

  At last, I was alone with the Grand Duke. He seemed distracted, though, if not irritable, and even the news that I had completed the commission wasn’t enough to alter his mood. He was about to depart for Rome, he told me. I should arrange delivery to coincide with his return.

  Faustina was away for longer than expected, but in the middle of March I received a small packet filled with pomegranate seeds, her way of signalling that she was back. We arranged to meet on a Sunday outside the Porta al Prato. That morning there was a light breeze, white clouds tumbling over Empoli, and I wasn’t the only person who had thought of going for a walk in the Cascine, the lush, densely forested area to the west of the city. It wasn’t a feast day, but the air had a tingle to it – the beginning of spring, warm weather round the corner – and all sorts of hawkers and peddlers lined the streets. One had a stack of little cages and a banner that said GOOD LUCK FOR SALE. Not wanting to be late, I didn’t stop to investigate.

  The crowds carried me along, people shouting, shoving, and my heart began to rock and tilt, as if only loosely moored inside my body. It had been almost three months since I had seen Faustina, and though I had often looked at the picture I had drawn, I no longer trusted it. It was just a fragment. It gave me nothing. It was like being shown a drop of water and asked to imagine a breaking wave. She was back. Such apprehension swept over me that I nearly turned around and fled.

  I had passed through the western gate and was making for a path that led off into the trees when I felt somebody take my arm, and I knew, without looking, that it was her.

  ‘Keep walking,’ I told her, ‘then we won’t stand out.’

  She had been gone for so long that I thought she might have forgotten the tight grip the city had on all our lives.

  ‘Have things been bad?’ she said.

  I nodded. ‘It’s got worse.’

  The world darkened as a cloud hid the sun.

  ‘A while ago,’ Faustina said, ‘you asked me about the sign outside the apothecary. Do you remember?’

  ‘You told me, didn’t you?’

  ‘Not everything.’

  We were talking as if she had never been away. I glanced at her. Her forehead’s curve, her downcast eyes. The lustre of her skin. It was just as I had suspected: in person, she outshone any memory I might have of her.

  The stones in the wall above the door were actually a kind of map, she said. They described a passage that conspirators used to use. If you passed the apothecary, heading north, you came to a dead-end alley on your left. Halfway down the alley was the entrance to the passage. Walk in and you would reach a gap that echoed the gap in the arrangement of the stones. It was a deep ditch or drain, and since it was pitch dark in the passage, you wouldn’t see it until it was too late. It proved fatal to all but the initiated. Once you had jumped over it, you followed the path suggested by the main body of the question mark, turning right, then left, then left again, and emerging at the rear of the apothecary. The key to the back door was attached to a piece of wire that hung against the wall.

  ‘I’m telling you this in case you need it one day,’ she said.

  ‘Your uncle won’t mind me knowing?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But remember, you’re the only person who does.’

  We walked in silence, arm in arm. It seemed enough just to be touching.

  ‘There’s a tradition associated with this time of year,’ Faustina said at last. ‘It’s something lovers do.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They get lost – deliberately.’

  We left the path and struck off at an angle, into the trees. The ground sloped upwards, became uneven. A slender shaft of sunlight leaned down through the mass of foliage, as if to remind me of our second fleeting encounter, Faustina reaching past me for a plate. There were fallen branches, ferns with serrated leaves. Soft beds of moss. Faustina removed her arm from mine, and we held hands instead.

  After a quarter of an hour, the woods thinned out, and we came to a wide, canal-like stream called the Mugnone. In the distance, beyond the fields, I could just make out a range of scrubby, grey-green hills. It was out there somewhere that Faustina had been conceived – on horseback …

  Far from the eyes of strangers, lost at last, we kissed. The smell of her hair, the feel of her shoulder blades beneath my fingers.

  ‘You’re still here,’ she murmured. ‘I was afraid you’d leave. I was afraid I’d come back to find you gone.’

  We kissed for so long that my mouth tasted of hers.

  ‘You’re thinner,’ I said.

  ‘Too thin?’

  ‘No.’

  We sank to the ground, and made love fast, clutching at each other, as if to make quite sure that we were really there. When we came, we came at the same time. My shuddering seemed part of hers. The edges of our bodies overlapped; I had no sense of where I ended and she began.

  Later, I asked about her travels. She had been to many places – Trieste, Ferrara, Milan – but it was Venice that excited her most. She had been ferried about in a golden gondola. She had eaten duck ragout, a delicacy made from small black waterfowl known as ‘devils of the sea’. She had been to a bull hunt, a gambling hall. She had seen a horse dressed as a child. A fortune-teller had whispered to her down a long wooden pipe. He told her that she was loved, and when he saw her smile he rang a little silver bell to signify that he had guessed the truth.

  ‘One night,’ she said, ‘I went to a masked ball disguised as you.’

  The look on my face made her laugh.

  She rented dark, sober clothes, and ha
d a mask made up. Brown eyes, a pointy chin. A slightly worried expression. She hid her hair under a wig of dark-brown curls. It was normal at carnival. The poor masquerading as the rich, the young pretending to be old … Everything was mixed up, the wrong way round. But also true, somehow.

  ‘I danced as you,’ she said, ‘even though I’ve never seen you dance.’

  ‘I’m terrible.’

  ‘People wear masks all the time, not just at carnival. In the theatres, the cafés – everywhere. No one can judge you. Everyone is equal. Free.’

  She lay back and stared up into the canopy of leaves, her eyes serious, her hair laid over the raised root of a tree.

  ‘Such freedom,’ she said, ‘in Venice.’

  By the time we left the woods, it was getting dark. Walking back along Via al Prato, I saw the man with the cages and the banner. This time I went over, curious to know what he was selling. Each little cage was made from sorghum stalks, and contained both a cricket and a mulberry leaf. They brought good luck, the man said, and were popular with children. Thinking of Fiore, I bought one.

  I said goodbye to Faustina on Porta Rossa, and as I watched her disappear into a narrow, lightless gap between two grimy buildings I had the feeling, once again, that she had slipped through my fingers. Even though she was back, and we had spent the best part of a day together, I hadn’t had enough of her, and I was tempted to run after her, but I knew at the same time that it wouldn’t change anything.

  Back at the House of Shells, Fiore was sitting on the floor in the parlour, arranging some bits of metal that she had found. A rusty spoon, what looked like a terret from a bridle. One half of a pair of scissors. I handed her the cricket, explaining that it would bring her luck. She thanked me, then suggested that we give it to Ambrose Cuif.