Secrecy

by Rupert Thomson

  Fiore had edged closer, and was gazing up at Stufa, as if some aspect of his appearance mystified her. Brought up short by my dismissive tone, however, he hadn’t noticed. I watched as Fiore arrived at a conclusion.

  ‘You’re not very important,’ she said. ‘You’re not important at all.’

  Stufa lashed out with the back of his hand and knocked her to the floor. She was so shocked that she forgot to cry. Instead, she stared at him, wide-eyed, as if he had just swallowed a sword or pulled a white dove from his sleeve. Then her mouth opened, and she let out a piteous wail. I crouched down. Put my arms round her.

  ‘I don’t think it’ll do her any harm.’ Stufa calmly adjusted the emerald he was wearing. ‘Actually, I’m more concerned about my ring. It was a gift from the Grand Duchess. It’s rather valuable.’ He held his hand away from his body, the better to admire the stone, then turned and walked out into the drizzle.

  ‘My face feels different,’ Fiore said.

  A sharp-edged dark-blue mark had appeared on her right cheek, below her eye.

  ‘You’ll have a bruise,’ I said.

  ‘For ever?’

  ‘No. Just for a few days.’ I stood up. ‘Wait here.’

  I ran across the stable yard and out into the gardens. Stufa was ahead of me, on a path that led back to the palace. He was moving at a slow, almost ceremonial pace, like somebody in church.

  I was only a few yards away when he sensed my presence behind him. Startled, he backed up against a high laurel hedge.

  ‘You think you can do something like that and walk away?’ I said.

  Stufa laughed, his laughter no louder than exhaled breath. ‘Of course.’

  ‘She’s a child –’

  I had been about to say that she was backward, but Stufa interrupted.

  ‘She’s meaningless,’ he said.

  My knife was in my hand before I knew it, the sharp point probing the underside of Stufa’s chin. That flimsy membrane would offer little or no resistance. One swift upward thrust and the knife would pierce the soft tissue of the palate, then pass through the maxilla, or the nasal passages. After severing both the facial artery and the optic nerve, it would penetrate the spongy frontal matter of the brain. I could imagine the precise path that it would take. I could predict the damage it would do. Not without foundation was it sometimes said of me that I had studied anatomy in more detail than was strictly necessary for a sculptor.

  ‘You dare to threaten me?’ Stufa barely moved his lips, not wanting to disturb the tip of the blade.

  ‘If you ever do anything like that again,’ I said, ‘I’ll strip the skin off your body while you’re still alive and hang it on the back of your door like an old coat.’

  He gasped. The air that came out of him had a fermented smell, like compost.

  Stepping back, I put away my knife.

  Stufa touched his chin, then looked at his fingers, which were delicately smeared with blood.

  ‘It’s only a scratch,’ I said.

  His dark eyes lifted until they locked on mine. ‘I’m looking at a dead man.’

  ‘Then you must be looking in the mirror.’

  As I walked back to my workshop, I realized I was trembling, not with rage or fear but with a kind of wild hilarity. Probably it had not been wise to draw a knife on Stufa, but I had had just about enough of his needless provocations.

  It was the day after San Giovanni, and the sky was scorched and smoky. Doffo and Simone Guazzi had excelled themselves: the appearance of the dragon, an interlude they had called ‘The Defeat of Satan’, had been the high point of the firework display. I felt restless that morning, and slightly sick. Instead of making for the palace, I set off along the river, heading east. The air smelled of gunpowder, and also of burnt sugar, and I could hear a constant, thin whining, as if a mosquito were trapped inside my skull. Every now and then, I saw Stufa’s ring connect with Fiore’s cheek, or I remembered how the hilt of the knife had warmed in my hand as I held it to his throat, but beyond that, nothing. I couldn’t seem to think even one straight thought.

  I crossed the river by the Ponte Rubaconte, then followed the road that ran along the inside of the city walls. Irises had flowered on the stonework, their fleshy petals mauve and purple. Near the Porta a Pinti, I stopped to watch a man throwing buckets of water over a horse. Its coat gleamed like glass in the summer sun. Further on, I saw people lying in rows under the mulberry trees at the edge of the road. These would be peasant families who had travelled in from the countryside for the festivities. I made sketches of a mother and her baby. They were asleep, but they could just as easily have been dead.

  By the time I returned to Via de’ Serragli, it was past midday, and my feet hurt – I must have walked ten miles – but at least my head was clear. Then I heard iron-bound wheels behind me, and I understood why I had been feeling so unsettled. I stepped aside to let the carriage pass. It turned into my street, as I had known it would. Just before I reached the corner, I stopped and rested my forehead against the wall. I was thirty-seven years old, but, like a child, I wanted to make her wait. It even crossed my mind to walk away.

  Dressed in a derelict black gown with a high collar and frayed cuffs, she was peering up at my house. Her hair was the stained yellow-white of old ivory, and she wore a pair of dark lenses held in place by weighted cords that looped over her ears and dangled on either side of her thin neck. Here she was, my mother, yet she seemed a hastily assembled and eccentric version of the woman I had visited so often in my head. Like the figures I had seen in the processions for San Giovanni the day before, she appeared to have been knocked together out of sticks and cloth.

  Her maid spoke to her, and she turned and looked in my direction.

  ‘Gaetano …’

  My name sounded fragile, wounded.

  I took her in my arms. I couldn’t feel her hands on my back, and I suddenly remembered how she would never hold us when we were children – not me, not even Jacopo. She would only ever hold the air that surrounded us.

  ‘It’s a nice house,’ she said. ‘A bit gloomy, but nice. Do you live alone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She nodded, as if she had guessed as much.

  ‘You wear glasses,’ I said.

  ‘The light hurts my eyes. Since – since –’

  It was the word ‘earthquake’ that she could not say.

  ‘I bought them from a Chinese man,’ she went on. ‘In Palermo.’

  I asked if I could have a look.

  She lifted the weights over her ears and passed them to me. Her eyes, which I could have sworn were once dark-brown, had faded to the colour of dead leaves at the bottom of a pond. Her gaze was questing, stunned.

  ‘They’re made from tea-stone,’ she was saying. ‘It’s a type of quartz, I think.’

  When I put on the glasses, everything became muted, almost poetic. I felt I was looking at the present from some point in the distant future. Not the present at all, then, but the past. A world that was already gone. A memory.

  I handed them back to her.

  ‘I’m glad you thought of me,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you came.’

  Eyes shielded once more, she looked beyond me. ‘We had nowhere else.’

  Later, when I had shown them round, her maid, Lapa, spoke to me. ‘The earthquake, then the journey – she’s not the woman she was.’

  We both glanced across the room. My mother was peering into a trunk of clothes, as one might peer over a cliff.

  ‘You know something, Lapa?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I can remember the woman she was.’

  That same week, just before sunset, I passed a dead horse lying in the street, ringed by a horde of tramps and beggars. The horse had careered over the Ponte Santa Trinità, one of them told me, riderless and wild with fear, mane standing vertical. As it came down off the bridge, it skidded on the greasy paving stones, lost its footing, and broke a leg. Since it was worth nothing lame, they had decided to butcher it and parcel up the meat
.

  I was watching them dismantle the carcass, impressed by their dexterity, when a door opened further down the street and a priest stepped out. He looked left and right, then set off along the river. It was getting dark, and I only saw his face for a moment, but I was sure it was Padre Paone. A wave of dizziness: the world slid sideways. First my mother, now Paone. What could it mean? Circling the sticky lake of blood, I hurried after him.

  I quickly closed the distance between us, and by the time he turned left, into Chiasso dell’Oro, he was only a few yards in front of me. I followed him down Via Lambertesca, through the Uffizi, then along the side of the Palazzo Vecchio. His walk seemed familiar. Not measured and solemn, as when he celebrated Mass, but halting, even a little obsequious. I was reminded once again of the day he appeared as Jacopo’s accomplice.

  We passed Via del Corno, the House of Shells visible halfway down. Was it my imagination, or did he hesitate? I slowed too. Then he moved on, turning the corner into Borgo de’ Greci.

  ‘Father?’

  The word had left my mouth before I could suppress it.

  Startled, the priest looked round.

  He had Paone’s slick black hair, but his face was rounder, and more cherubic. And he was far too young. Paone would be approaching sixty. This man was forty at the most. Perhaps that explained my mistake: it was Paone as he had been when I last saw him – Paone as I remembered him.

  ‘Can I help you?’ the priest said.

  I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.’ Then, surprising myself, I added, ‘I thought you were the priest from my hometown. I haven’t seen him for years.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you.’ He smiled.

  ‘Oh, it’s not a disappointment. If anything, it’s a relief.’

  The priest’s smile became uncertain. ‘Are you in trouble?’ Hands clasped, he moved a step closer.

  ‘There’s no need to concern yourself.’

  I saw that he was tempted to probe further. In the end, though, he chose not to.

  ‘Go in peace,’ he said.

  It was two or three weeks before my mother would talk about what had happened.

  ‘I was buried in the rubble,’ she said. ‘I could hardly breathe.’

  I held her hand. Its swollen knuckles, its thin black veins. ‘You’re safe now.’

  Her eyes veered round the room, as if the walls might tumble at any moment.

  I had put her on the ground floor. I had covered the cold tiles with bright wool rugs and installed a stove made of white majolica. The first days had been difficult, though. She ate very little, and could not sleep. Unfamiliar sounds upset her – and almost every sound was unfamiliar. My sleep was broken too. When I woke I would often hear her talking to Lapa, her voice subdued and tremulous. Once, towards dawn, I heard the front door slam, and found her on the street-corner, warning a passerby not to go home, but to stay outside, in the open.

  There had been several earthquakes, she told me later, occurring over a period of three days. The one that had frightened her most had come during the night. She remembered a rumbling that sounded like thunder, but in the ground rather than the sky, and a wind that was like no wind she had ever heard before. She was shaken from her bed. Plates and glasses smashed, and a wardrobe toppled over, landing on its face. She ran out on to Via Dione. There was no moon. In the darkness people’s screams were silver. She couldn’t explain what she meant by that. A neighbour knelt in the middle of the street. He was crushed by falling masonry. The bell rang in the steeple opposite, even though there was no one pulling on the rope. She watched a woman run past with a bird-cage, its tiny wire door flapping, nothing inside. She remembered her sister, and hurried back into the house. It was then that the ceiling collapsed. They were trapped in what remained of the hallway, not far from the front door. Luckily, it rained. They took turns drinking the black water that dripped down the walls. Later, after they had been dug out, they heard the ground had opened like a mouth. Modica, Ragusa and Scichilo were swallowed. Nothing but stinking, brackish pools where they had been. The sea had risen up; shoals of fish were found miles inland. She had seen a dead donkey in an orange tree.

  Her jaw shifted, as if her teeth hurt. ‘All our family documents were lost. The record of who we are, and what we own. All gone. And people too – so many people …’

  ‘Flaminia’s all right, though?’

  ‘She’s in Palermo.’

  ‘Father Paone?’

  ‘Gone.’

  There was nothing left of the house that Jacopo had built, she went on. Not a single stone. She had told him not to live out there. She had said it was dangerous. He wouldn’t listen, though. He never listened.

  ‘It was so brutal – so thorough.’ A shiver shook her. ‘But that isn’t what stays with me. What stays with me is that bird-cage, with its wire door flapping …’ She looked at me; her pupils had shrunk, and white showed above and below her irises. ‘I can see it now.’

  Two months after my mother’s arrival in Florence, Jack Towne invited me to his villa near the Fortezza da Basso. On a hot, late August night I was shown into a parlour and asked to wait. With its muted furnishings and its padded walls, the room had the deep, airless silence of a mausoleum. Though I barely knew the man, somehow this seemed in character.

  A quarter of an hour passed, and still Towne did not appear. I opened the door to the adjoining room and stepped inside. The silence intensified. There were three sofas upholstered in dark velvet – chocolate, damson, aubergine – and fixed to the ceiling was a large round mirror. The tapestry at the far end of the room depicted a scene of such complex debauchery that I had to turn myself almost upside-down to make out what was going on. In the corner, on a pedestal, stood a life-size sculpture of a goat. The burnt vermilion glaze told me it was Marvuglia’s work.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting.’

  I swung round.

  Towne came forwards, smiling. ‘You went to see Marvuglia, didn’t you? He told me.’ One hand on my shoulder, he guided me back into the other room. ‘What did you think?’

  I spoke about Marvuglia’s colours, and how they conveyed injury and torment.

  ‘And the man himself?’ Towne said.

  ‘I imagine he’s got enemies.’

  Towne nodded.

  Our conversation turned to the prints and drawings that were his stock-in-trade. I was curious to know what sort of work the Grand Duke had bought from him. Towne looked at me steadily. A two-headed calf, he said. A dwarf. Anything deformed or freakish. I remembered the armless German and fell silent, wondering what place I occupied in the Grand Duke’s collection, but when Towne produced a folio of drawings of people who had contracted syphilis I was suddenly glad that I had come. I had been planning a series of pieces based on pleasure and its consequences, and the drawings would be invaluable as reference. Towne was a hard bargainer. At last, though, we agreed on a price.

  To celebrate our transaction – the first of many, he hoped – he insisted that I dine with him. In my opinion, we had less in common than he supposed, and I was eager to get away, but he wouldn’t listen to my excuses. He took me to the Eagle, an eating-house near Via Tornabuoni. To my dismay, the first person I saw when I walked in was Stufa. He was sitting at a table with Bassetti. Before I could suggest a change of venue, though, Towne had called out a greeting. It appeared he knew them both.

  After the initial courtesies, during which Stufa acted as if I wasn’t there, Bassetti turned to me. ‘I hope your mother’s settling in.’

  ‘She is. Thank you.’ I hadn’t told the Grand Duke about my mother’s arrival, let alone Bassetti, but this was his way of reminding me that nothing escaped his attention.

  ‘She was lucky to survive,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘And lucky to have someone to turn to, someone to take her in.’

  ‘I’ll do my best for her.’

  ‘Apparently,’ Stufa said, his eyes still lowered, �
��she’s a bit unhinged.’

  I faced him. ‘I would like to apologize for what happened in the gardens.’

  Though Bassetti was still eating, the angle of his head had altered.

  ‘I shouldn’t have threatened you,’ I said.

  ‘You were upset by the news of the earthquake.’ Stufa’s delivery was unconvincing, flat; he might appear to be making allowances for my behaviour, but he was keeping his true feelings hidden.

  ‘All the same,’ I said.

  Stufa studied me. ‘I don’t think you’re being entirely honest with me.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You haven’t forgiven me for what I did.’

  ‘What did he do?’ Bassetti’s voice was mild, almost uninterested.

  I looked at the red silk curtains that hung against the windows. When I told Signora de la Mar what had happened, the blood had rushed to her usually pallid face. You should have slit the bastard’s throat right there and then. Fiore’s father hit her when she was little, she said later. Fiore was never quite the same after that. I had promised her that Stufa would answer for his actions. As yet, I had no idea how to keep that promise.

  But Stufa was talking again. ‘You haven’t forgiven me, and you’re not going to. It’s not in your nature. I know what you’re like, you people from the south.’

  ‘In my opinion,’ I said, ‘it’s usually a mistake to generalize.’

  A smile registered on Bassetti’s lips.

  ‘It means you have an overly simplistic view of the world,’ I went on. ‘It can affect your judgement. Lead to mistakes.’

  Stufa adjusted the position of his fork. ‘But you’re not denying it.’

  ‘I’ve said what I wanted to say.’ I stepped back from the table. ‘Enjoy your meal.’

  When we were seated, Towne gave me a look of mingled admiration and surprise. ‘There aren’t many who would speak to Stufa like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Was I rude?’

  ‘You don’t need to apologize to me.’