“Yes!” Louiza turned to MacPhearson. He had said what she had been thinking. Something was missing. There were crumbs on his beard. And in between his upper two teeth, a piece of shortbread was stuck, as big as an apple pip.
“What is it, Louiza?” MacPhearson said. “What happened to your solutions, to your imaginary solutions?”
“The baby …” Louiza whispered. And she saw MacPhearson’s face, with its pip-sized crumb of shortbread looking down on her. Not in that house with the pine tree inside. Not in the cottage, not in the Orchard. In Rome. In a room at the prow of a boat. And she was screaming, and he was talking in his low voice. And then she was screaming in the room at the prow of the boat.
Now she was off the boat, in the house with the pine tree inside.
Louiza jumped up. She ran down the hall. She ran into the bathroom, the kitchen, up the back stairs and into the bedroom and then into the guest bedroom, where Vince slept when she curled up into a ball and refused. Where was it? Where was her baby? Where was her baby? And she screamed. And she screamed. Vince ran up the stairs. MacPhearson looked down on her, his beard full of crumbs, his forehead heavy with sweat.
IT WAS DARK WHEN SHE WALKED BACK DOWN THE STAIRS. MACPHEARSON was gone. Vince was gone. The fire was low behind the grate, but the windows cast a light back onto the tree, the sofa, the lace tablecloth, and the folder of problems, the pencil. Louiza sat in her chair. She was wearing a woolen nightgown, a nightgown her mother had packed for her when she went to Cambridge. Her mother. She pulled her feet up and squatted on the chair below her, and buried her face between her knees for warmth, and rocked. The baby, the baby … where was the baby? What had happened to the baby? Baby, baby …
And as she rocked, she began to hear a sound. A guitar. An electric guitar, a low note, a slow trill, approaching from a distance, like a motorcycle along the Grantchester Road, or the first notes of “Foxey Lady.” She had heard the sound before. But it had always receded, always driven away as soon as she turned her head. Now, though, the sound grew louder, closer. And as it grew closer, it was joined by the treble tattoo of a light stick against a ride cymbal, tinsel and sparks. And then a pulse—not too fast, slower than a heart, but insistent, warming. An electric bass pushing rhythm into song.
It was a group. Not a Galois Group, or a Langlands Group, or any of the groups of higher mathematics she had played with in Cambridge that looked only like Greek letters and played only a tune of pencil scratching on paper. But a group of human performers, four of them, standing around the table—four girls. They were Una and Dodo, Terri and Quatro—their names were as clear as their costumes. Una wore a jasmine PVC mini-dirndl over a black-and-white, horizontal-striped rugby shirt topped by a Funkadelic corduroy cap, and she played a Gibson Flying V electric guitar in shades of cardamom and curry. Terri was more conservative—pinstriped Carnaby Street suit (flared trousers, of course) with a ruffled cream shirt open past her cleavage, just above her left-handed McCartney bass. Quatro was the schoolgirl, which meant she kicked her bass drum and tickled her cymbals in a no-nonsense, Scottish-knee-sock-and-tartan-skirt kind of a way, light years from Japanese anime porn.
And then there was Dodo. From the start, Dodo was Louiza’s favorite. Dodo was the lead singer of the group, camouflaged to the nines in bulletproof Gore-Tex, seven-league boots, and a Kiwi Ranger’s hat that disguised a meter-long plait of raven hair bound up in a double-helix with a jackknife and a bungee stick.
“Unimaginable …” Dodo sang, or said, or said and sang in a way that Patti Smith was beginning to insinuate into the universe. “More than imaginary. Unimaginable …”
“Yes,” Louiza said, stopping rocking, but not moving, except for her head as she looked from Una to Terri to Quatro and back to Dodo. “My loss. My baby. Unimaginable.”
“One over zero,” Una sang.
“Unimaginable!” the other three joined in.
“Two over zero,” Terri now.
“Unimaginable!”
“Three over zero, four over zero-o!” Dodo cried.
Add me to zero
Subtract me from zero
Multiply me by zero
Divide, divide, divide me by zero-o-o.
Ever since she was a small girl, Louiza had listened to teachers tell her, You can’t divide by zero. You just can’t. One divided by zero, they said, just made no sense.
“Six divided by two,” one tall, rock-star of a junior teacher told the class, “equals three. And three times two equals six. There is at least one solution to the problem, therefore the problem makes sense. But six divided by zero equals?”
“Zero?” one small hand suggested.
“But zero times zero?” the teacher asked.
“Also zero.”
“And not six. Therefore, not the answer.” In fact, the teacher stated, there was no answer, no number which, when multiplied times zero equaled six. Therefore six divided by zero, any number divided by zero, made no sense.
And yet, Louiza remembered thinking, and yet—there it is. There is six divided by zero, right up there on the chalkboard, and seven divided by zero next to it—not just a trick of the light. And in later years, ≠ divided by zero and i divided by zero joined their sisters in the very real world of Louiza’s imagination and refused to disappear just because they did not make sense. If the Imaginary System was based on the square root of –1, now she had a new system, a new group of friends. If someone could call the square root of –1 i, then Louiza could baptize one divided by zero as Una, and two divided by zero as Dodo. Una times zero equaled one, Dodo times zero equaled two. Simple. The Unimaginables—in vinyl miniskirts and knee-high boots—and quicker than they could kung fu a dozen gangbangers they divided by zero and multiplied times zero and came up with a whole number and rocked, far better than any junior maths teacher.
Louiza picked up her pencil and opened the folder of new problems MacPhearson had left her. She divided by zero and solved the problems, one and then another and then another. The Unimaginables, her sisters, saving her from the unimaginable.
And Malory.
“Standing on the shoulders of giants”—isn’t that what he said when she opened her eyes in the organ loft? Malory told her that Isaac Newton said if he saw further than others it was because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. “I’m lucky,” Malory told her, “if I even get a peek between their legs.” She thought of Malory when the Unimaginables first began practicing their particular music in her brain. That March afternoon, waking up in the organ loft of the church with Malory, the infinite was in the air. “When I was a boy,” Malory started, “just when my mother took ill, I had a great need to see things, to stand with the giants. I remember the day Mrs. Bogatay told us about infinity. I asked her, ‘What does infinity look like?’ And she answered, ‘It’s bigger than any other number.’ And I asked, ‘Is it bigger than a quadrillion?’—I was the only nine-year-old in school who knew the word, and it became my signature number. Mrs. Bogatay invited me up to the chalkboard and had me write out a quadrillion—one with fifteen zeroes after it. And then, as simple as cutting off my penis, she erased the final zero and replaced it with a one. She had found a larger number.
“Well,” Malory continued—and Louiza remembered his excitement, the way he propped himself up on one elbow, but made sure to leave a leg lying over hers, “the challenge was on. I was going to write even bigger numbers. I was going to do what she said was impossible. I was going to write infinity. I wrote my quadrillion and then, with the daring of sailing off the edge of the earth, I added a comma and three more zeroes. And then another comma and three more zeroes. I refused to do any other work in maths that morning. Or any other work during my other lessons. I kept at it with my notebook. After two days of writing commas and zeroes, I came up with a genius of an idea. Instead of writing three little zeroes, I wrote one big one. And then I substituted a zero with a diagonal slash for ten groups of three, and then a horizontal slash for a hundred groups o
f three.
“And so on. Three weeks of substitution, a fever of filling up notebooks, ignoring my lessons, the other boys, barely eating, ignoring the world around me. Until finally Mrs. Bogatay took pity on me and showed me the ultimate substitution. The sideways eight. °. Infinity.
“I was furious, of course, and I fought back. ° + 1, I wrote in temporary triumph.
“‘Equals infinity,’ she said, writing it out: ° +1 = °.
“° + °, I wrote. ° x °!
“‘Equals infinity,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to say.’
“That was the day,” Malory said, putting his head back down on Louiza’s chest, “that I returned home after school and found the vicar waiting for me. Two days later they buried my mother. Monday I found myself at a new school. Every hour became an infinity of seconds, every day an infinity of hours. And every night, I curled up into the sideways eight of my best, my only friend.”
The Unimaginables began to play. The pine tree inside the house disappeared, the snow melted. Vince came, Vince went. Louiza solved the problems. And still there remained the pulse, the beat, the infinite, the unimaginable loss of her baby.
2/6
HE MORNING OF MY TENTH BIRTHDAY—OR AT LEAST ON THE morning of the tenth anniversary of my arrival at the baby hatch of Santa Sabina—Sister Francesca Splendida asked me if I wanted to be an angel.”
A girl. A girl stood beside the Bernini statue, speaking to Malory.
He had awakened to a brilliant late-summer morning. He had walked, as he had for more than twenty years of mornings, down the corridor, through the foyer, and into the dining room for his scones and tea, and had discovered Settimio and the girl beside the apple tossers.
“I found her in the Sanctum Sanctorum,” Settimio said, “half an hour ago, asleep on the desk. When she opened her eyes, she asked for you.”
The girl was even smaller than him, hair cropped in a golden helmet, almost as young as Louiza, or as young as Louiza had been twenty-three years before. Jeans, leather jacket over a white T-shirt, blue trainers—she must have been like many other girls on the streets of Rome. But Malory had met very few girls in recent years. In fact, none.
“Tibor said, ‘Malory will understand.’” The girl spoke English. But the words buckled Malory’s knees. He sat. The girl sat across from him. Settimio brought a cup and a plate. The girl continued her story.
A FAMOUS THEATER DIRECTOR WAS COMING TO ROME FROM AMERICA to stage a tenth birthday of his own—a revival of the Divine Comedy that had catapulted him to fame. He needed young things—a dozen young things—to play angels. For us damaged girls from Santa Sabina, Santa Chiara, Santa Cecilia, and elsewhere, it was a chance to run around the Circo Massimo dressed in something other than our daily uniform. And run around most of us did. I, alone among the dozen, followed directions. It was what I had been trained to do for as long as I could remember. And because I was so good at following directions and knowing where and when to go, at the end of the week Tibor and Cristina took me for a gelato in Testaccio.
They asked me questions—about my family, which I didn’t know, about my schoolwork. They were impressed by my Italian and my Latin, my history and my geography. Most of all they were impressed by my mathematical ability, which had already outstripped what the Dominican Sisters were able to teach in Santa Sabina.
When the Dante was over and the rest of the girls went back to the convent, Sister Francesca Splendida took me aside and told me I was being sent to a school in Switzerland. It wasn’t until I turned thirteen in a girls’ grammar outside Lucerne that I saw Tibor and Cristina again and realized—even if they didn’t say so explicitly—that they had been paying for my education and my escape from Santa Sabina. I thought Cristina was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, a real princess—I believed it when I heard Tibor order “thé au citron for La Principessa”—so I allowed each of them to take one of my hands and lead me down to the Lake of Lucerne, buy me a stuffed zebra, feed me a cream bun as if I were Paddington Bear and deposit me back at the school before supper. Later, at the English school above Nice, Tibor and Cristina came to visit every year on Family Day when no other family came for me. And even at the A-Level crammer outside Inverness, where my only friend was a flannel-covered hot-water bottle, I answered Cristina’s questions about my knowledge and Tibor’s about my dreams without asking why and kept a secret scrapbook with reviews and photos of all of Tibor’s productions in the bottom of a steamer trunk. “Cope-able,” was what one headmistress called me; I can’t remember if she was Swiss, French, or Scots—the word existed in none of the languages. “Ottavia is able to cope,” she wrote, “with anything.”
It wasn’t until I was on the cusp of graduating from Trinity that Rix the Porter rang up to say that a Miss Cristina was calling for me at the lodge. I was a week away from receiving my degree so hadn’t expected a visit. And it was immediately clear that there was something improvised about Cristina’s appearance. She was in a taxi. She needed to talk with me. She had been crying.
I suggested the Orchard, just a few miles outside of town, where I used to go when I was in search of a quiet place to contemplate Fourier Series and Eigenvectors. The next week it would be full of proud parents and cream teas and jam-sotted bees. But Cristina and I had no trouble finding a trestle table in a quiet corner of apple trees with the church rising up on the other side of the road.
“Ottavia,” Cristina began, dark glasses still firmly in place over the gray eyes that had first seduced me into a schoolgirl crush twelve years before. “You are old enough now that I think it is time to tell you a few things.”
My scrapbook of clippings memorializing Tibor’s successes also included photo features on Cristina. From the moment she strolled out of the maternity ward of Fatebenefratelli on that astonishing October evening in 1978, Cristina had found herself surrounded by a magnetic field that didn’t so much open doors for her as blow them off their hinges. A job scrubbing floors for a Reuters functionary at the Vatican led to an invitation to be a sound editor in New York and a pair of green cards for her and Tibor. Within a year she was reporting traffic on the radio. Within two, isobars and satellite radar on the Today Show. As tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square and heads rolled over six of the seven continents, no palace leader or rainforest revolutionary was safe from the charms of Cristina. Here was one page from Time, Cristina at the siege of Sarajevo, here in a firefight in Hebron. There were stories from Darfur, New Orleans, Nagorno-Karabakh, Praia da Luz, Casale, Gori, Wasilla, Garoowe where, for ten days that she would be happy to forget, she was the property of the Somali warlord Jama Abduk Boosaaso. Not to mention the dinners and interviews with Clinton, Blair, Havel, Prince Bandar, and Bishop Tutu. Cristina didn’t stop long enough to count, but her producers told her that she had filed more stories and won more Peabodys than Christiane Amanpour by a factor of three, not to mention a Pulitzer. And even now that she was approaching the age when correspondents with creaking knees and spreading posteriors were shunted behind studio desks in New York or London or Atlanta, Cristina not only remained in the field, but consistently placed in the Top Ten Sexiest Woman on TV. And not in the Grandma Class. Top Ten. Punto.
“Why did I come today to talk to you?” Cristina asked. She hadn’t touched her tea, nor removed her glasses. Leaning back, her helmet of gray hair lying just past her ears against the canvas of the lawn chair, black linen blouse without sleeves, black linen trousers without calves, and toenails that needed no paint shining out from within her espadrilles, she seemed like a runway astronaut about to eject into the ether. “Because I may be your mother. And a mother’s duty is to warn her daughter.”
Even though mathematics was my strongest suit, I had, of course, created plenty of fantasies featuring Cristina and Tibor as my parents, although we couldn’t have looked less alike. Where Cristina and Tibor were tall, I barely broke five feet and struggled to get my weight up to a hundred pounds. There had been a time in my first year at Cambridge wh
en I brought cutouts of Cristina’s head from People and Time to Cropper’s across from the Trinity gate and asked the hairdresser to perform the impossible with my thin, disembodied hair. I tried to smoke, since I never saw either of them without a cigarette, but found it easier to imitate Cristina’s preference for thé au citron. I had no desire to become a director like Tibor or an investigative journalist like Cristina. But they had clearly spent a lifetime coping with one thing or another. And maybe, just maybe, they were the biological origin of what the headmistress had called my copeability.
But the word maybe and its verbal cousin may awakened the part of my mathematical brain that dealt in probabilities. I may be your mother, Cristina had said. I could understand the uncertainty of Tibor’s paternity, but with mothers … isn’t there a higher level of probability, reaching almost to absolute certainty?
“There was confusion,” Cristina went on. “Tibor and I were very poor in those days and we had just arrived in Rome.” That much I knew from the articles in Il Messaggero and Oggi that celebrated Tibor’s 1988 return to the Eternal City and the dinners and drinks in expensive restaurants by the Pantheon or the Palazzo Farnese that featured Tibor’s face next to Laura Morante or Valeria Golino. “I was pregnant. I gave birth in Fatebenefratelli. But then …”
“I know,” I said, wanting to save Cristina the pain of saying it but also keen to try out my pet theories, “but you didn’t have enough money, the Italians were going to send you back, you had to give me up. Santa Sabina …”
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t that.” Cristina looked up to the church across the road, the steeple cradled in the cleavage of the afternoon sun. “The room in the maternity ward of Fatebenefratelli was very beautiful—white light, the river just past the windows on both sides. I was there for a whole day—very quiet, very tranquil, floating on a white bed between contractions, twenty-four hours at least, totally alone. More than alone—well,” she stopped and realized that she was speaking to me. “While Tibor …”
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