“Hello, Cristina.” Malory tried to maneuver himself off the bed without dropping the robe or ripping the netting. But at the sound of his voice, all of what Cristina had built to make Cristina Cristina gave way and she ran to the bed and grabbed Malory in a hug that was anything but controlled and photogenic. “Are you all right?”
Malory’s voice was unchanged from the first night she met him in Fatebenefratelli, when all she had wanted was to crawl onto Tibor’s lap in their claw-footed bath and have Tibor soap away all the longing while she scrubbed away all the guilt. She held Malory’s shoulders and looked past her own reflection at her old friend. There was something more formed about Malory, not exactly chiseled, but defined nonetheless. The universe had cooled in the past twenty years, and the softness of the young Malory had hardened into someone Cristina felt she could grab onto, small as he was, and not fall over.
“I’m happy you invited me,” Malory said, looking out the window for a moment towards the pasture. But her hand on his cheek was too present, the scent of Cristina—he hadn’t remembered it over the years, or it had changed, or his nose had simply gone into hibernation for two decades—too strong. It was the same scent, he was sure of it, that Isolde dabbed behind her Celtic ears when Tristan rowed over to Ireland and lost his mind. The smock she was wearing was of the same unbleached linen as Ottavia’s blouse and trousers, but softened and rounded in the places where Cristina softened and rounded, and led his eyes forgivably down to the breasts that sloped as gently as her nose and her chin, as dark and warm and inviting as the Pyrenees of Malory’s childhood. Malory was well aware of the vows of Perceval, Galahad, Roland, and all the other neo-Arthurian virgins who had, literally, lost their lives in just such a pass. But at this moment, with her hand on his cheek and his eyes deep within her cleavage, Malory was powerless to refuse her anything.
“Tibor couldn’t turn fifty without you,” Cristina said. But it was obvious—wasn’t it?—that Malory didn’t know the first thing about Tibor. About Tibor’s public successes, his public performances, maybe he did. But about Tibor’s private disasters, it was clear that Malory knew nothing. And she was glad. Not because she could still feel shame, but because, in some way, she wanted to protect the innocence in this strange Englishman who had brought Tibor back to her on that terrible day when she had the baby. The baby. The baby.
“It’s six o’fuck!” The shout came from outside, through the wall of the Blue House. “Is Sleeping Beauty awake?” Malory knew the voice, gone badly out of tune.
“Take your time getting dressed,” Cristina said. “Tibor can wait.” And Cristina was gone.
When he’d pulled on the trousers, shirt, and vest that Settimio had packed for him, Malory opened the door at the top of the outside stairs. Tibor was at the bottom, turned away, smoking. From the rear, he looked well-dressed at least, in a loose cashmere sweater the color of horse chestnuts, tight-fitting jeans, and kid-glove moccasins that Malory reckoned meant Cristina had burned the rest of his clothes. But as he turned, and the two looked at one another for the first time in twenty-three years, the view was different. Malory wasn’t surprised that Tibor had lost his hair, or at least enough of it to give him a vaguely Capuchin look at the crown, while the rest ran as long and gray as the Tevere after a bad rain, when plastic bags and bottles gargle in the eddies below the Isola Tiberina. It was the absence of Tibor’s beard that confused Malory. When had Tibor shaved? It was a face as smooth and round and devoid of life as any of the holy fools Malory had seen in the badly smoked portraits of saints beneath the organ lofts of Rome. It was the face of a man who had discovered either infinity or zero, when neither was an enviable choice—spooked, desperate, untuned.
But then there was Tibor’s palm. Malory descended the stairs, and Tibor’s palm landed on his shoulder. It pushed Malory up now, up the slope from the Blue House to the pond below the White House, the way the palm had guided him through the streets of Rome twenty-three years before. They walked in silence, slowly. But Tibor’s palm registered a real warmth. If the sum of the workings of Tibor’s brain no longer passed through his shaven and barren face, its heat still found its way somehow down a hidden channel in the neck and out the shoulder and arm to this one palm. Through this palm ran a trickle of confidence, a bond that had once been forged between them—if only to be fractured—twenty-three years ago.
“Tibor,” Malory began.
“Shh, shh,” Tibor waved the cigarette in front of his face, launching fireflies of ash and spark.
“Tibor,” Malory insisted. “How are you?”
Tibor stopped. He didn’t look at Malory, but he withdrew his palm.
“Is that a scientific question?”
“That morning,” Malory said, realizing that this might be his only chance to broach the inevitable subject. “That Christmas morning. Antonella.”
“Antonella?” Tibor repeated. “Who the fuck is Antonella?”
“My colleague from Cambridge? The Christmas party after the Dante? The redhead? The one you promised to protect, but instead …”
“The Pip, Malory,” Tibor said. “Did you bring the Pip?”
Malory stopped walking. And in one lung-squeezing moment of degutted breathlessness, Malory realized that what he had seen that Christmas morning—the image of Tibor making love to Antonella, an image of horror and beauty and infinite betrayal—didn’t exist, no longer existed, perhaps had never existed for Tibor. The stone that had lodged in the tightest corners of Malory’s intestines was rock of his own invention—or if not invention, then preservation. Tibor, or Tibor’s memory, or perhaps all the alcohol that Tibor had swallowed in the past twenty-three years, had excavated the memory of that night, that action, that betrayal as completely as ten thousand Dacian slaves had torn down a mountain of volcanic rock to create room for a column to the memory of their own defeat. Malory looked at Tibor’s face, a face that even in its bearded tangle once had a power and conviction that had made Malory feel safe and honored by its friendship. That face was blank, dry, begging for something from Malory. With the tip of his smallest fingernail, Malory poked the column of his twenty-three-year-old memory of betrayal, and it fell to the ground in ash and blew into the pines.
What it revealed was a light that shone back into his face.
“Stay,” Louiza had told him all those years ago as he left the maternity ward at Fatebenefratelli.
“Stay,” Antonella had told him as the Rumanians had carried her off to the Dacia.
Louiza had trusted him to return, Antonella had trusted him.
But Malory had been late. He had been curious. He had betrayed them both.
But that wasn’t it.
Gone was his anger at Tibor. Gone his disappointment with Antonella. Instead a vision rose up in front of him, behind him, refracted in all the shades of the rainbow as his memory fed freely on the months and the years. It was the vision of his own betrayal.
Malory had ignored the simple, he had slipped off the towpath. Malory had betrayed the obvious, the gift that had climbed the ladder to the steeple of St. George’s that March morning. Malory had betrayed the gift that Louiza had brought him, the vision of what he could become. He had committed that crime alone, without the help of Tibor, Antonella, or Settimio. He had hidden it behind a veil of red hair and Rumanian beard. And for that, he had served a sentence of twenty-three years in Septimania.
“The Pip, Malory,” Tibor repeated. “Did you bring the Pip?”
“Why?” Malory asked. The vision slunk away into the trees around the pond. The air grew light. Malory breathed. “It’s only an apple pip.”
“Then you won’t mind giving it to me?” Tibor asked. “If it’s only an apple pip.”
“Why the Pip?” Malory said.
“For a performance.” Tibor squeezed Malory’s shoulder with a pressure that seemed both kinder and more insistent than before. “A performance tonight. One show only, I promise. You’ll get it back.”
“Tibor”—Ma
lory surprised Tibor with the shift of register and cadence—“there was a baby. Back then. In Rome.” Malory had one more question before he could feel entirely free. “A few years later, Settimio told me that the press, the public thought Cristina had a stillbirth in Rome, a miscarriage, uterus ravaged from Bucharest abortions. But that isn’t the truth, is it? Cristina had a baby. That day I met you. She did, didn’t she?” The Ospedale Fatebenefratelli. Louiza. Cristina. Images that hadn’t faded during his hermitage. “There was a baby. Is Ottavia that baby?”
“Has it occurred to you, Malory,” Tibor said, his hand dropping from Malory’s shoulder, “that maybe Ottavia is Louiza’s baby?”
“Louiza?” Malory repeated. Of course the thought had occurred to him, in that fraction of a moment when Ottavia first found him in the Villa Septimania. But he had filed it in the cabinet where he kept similar thoughts, like waking up one morning ten inches taller or with a PhD.
“Who had a baby in Fatebenefratelli, Malory? Cristina? Louiza? You? Me? Who are the fathers? Who are the mothers? ‘Oh the streets of Rome,’” Tibor sang:
are filled with rubble,
Ancient footprints are everywhere.
Malory remembered Sasha and his guitar, the Dacia, the first warm night of Rumanian friendship in Rome. And Tibor’s voice, if not completely in tune, still closer than ten minutes before:
You could almost think that you’re seeing double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs.
“And the baby?” Ottavia appeared. Had she been standing with them all along, hidden by her smallness? “Who was the baby?”
Tibor laughed—impossible to know what image from what Fellini that laughter hid. “You, Ottavia,” he said, “were the one we pretended was our daughter. When it was convenient.”
“On Family Days,” Ottavia said.
“And other days. Ones you didn’t see.”
“But not when I needed.”
“No,” Tibor said quietly, “maybe not. Maybe I have been wrong. Eternally wrong.”
“What’s the matter, Tibor?” Malory asked.
“I lack the Pip,” Tibor answered.
“Why the Pip?”
“You told me the story of how your Virgin Louiza, your mathematical Eve, found the Pip and not only tuned your organ, but tuned your organ!”
“Tibor, Ottavia is …”
“So … isn’t it possible that there is a power in that Pip? Isn’t it possible that, if you are descended from King David and Charlemagne and who knows how many other Grand Poo-Bahs, that your Pip is the great-grandson of that original apple from that original tree? That your Pip holds the sum of all human knowledge? And isn’t it just possible that if I swallowed the Pip with a glass of the purest rainwater, I will not only find out why I make La Principessa and Ottavia and everyone around me—and I’m including you, Malory—so unhappy? But maybe, as a bonus, the Pip will raise my pickled limp puli like Lazarus from the dead and I’ll get laid once more before I die?”
“Tibor,” Malory said, “it’s just an apple pip. If it had been able to solve anyone’s problems, don’t you think it would have solved mine?”
“The Pip, Malory. I need the Pip.” Tibor placed both his paws on Malory’s shoulders. There was such a frightening lack of harmony in his voice—not even close to the F-sharp of twenty-three years earlier, a far more desperate sound oozing from Tibor’s throat.
I have come so far, Malory thought. I have left the Villa Septimania for the first time in decades. My anger is gone, my sense of betrayal is gone. Who knows where Louiza is, if she is even alive. If I need to bring any part of the world into tune, the way I had promised my mother long ago, it is this part, this TiborTina, with Tibor, Cristina, and their daughter, my wonderful new friend, Ottavia.
And the Pip is in my pocket. What harm could it do?
“Here you are, Tibor,” Malory said, pulling the old 35-millimeter canister out of a vest pocket. He shook the Pip. A dry rattle in the throat of the canister. Malory couldn’t bear to open the top and look.
Tibor stepped back, releasing Malory from his grip. With one shaking hand, he took the canister from Malory, with the other he opened the top.
“I will not turn fifty, Malory,” Tibor said. “Je refuse.” And with that, he tipped the canister to his mouth and swallowed the Pip.
Malory couldn’t move. Tibor couldn’t move—although Malory’s paralysis was due to shock and Tibor’s due to the explosion he expected would release his body from its pain. Only Ottavia realized that performance was just that—performance.
“Tibor,” Ottavia took his elbow. “Are you okay?”
“I suffer,” Tibor whispered. A large patch of sweat had gathered below his right breast. His entire face was wet. “I suffer from Septimania.”
Malory looked at Tibor breathing heavily, two, perhaps three inches away. He wondered whether anyone had been as close to Isaac Newton—at the end of his life or ever—as he was at this moment to Tibor. And he wondered—was he right to give him the Pip?
“Come. Let’s prepare the vongole,” Ottavia said, looking up at both men. “Go to the kitchen, I’ll pick some parsley and pepperoncino and meet you there.” The girl stared into Malory for a moment. Malory felt there was a message he was missing, but by the time he thought to ask for a translation, she had run up the steps of the terrace and around the far side of the house.
“Twelve steps,” Tibor said. “How easy she makes it seem.”
Malory looked after Ottavia, and looked at Tibor looking at Ottavia.
“When Dante was up the culo of Satan, all Virgil had to do was show him a secret tunnel, and twelve lines of terza rima later he was back in the land of the living.”
And then Malory saw the plastic bag sticking out of Tibor’s pocket. And out of the opening of the bag, a handle of a gun.
“Tibor,” Malory said, “what’s that?”
“A bag,” Tibor said, taking it out of his pocket. “A gun. Here …” Tibor handed the gun to Malory. “I don’t imagine you’ve ever held one.”
Malory had no idea that a gun was so heavy. But he knew that he must not give it back to Tibor.
“Don’t worry, Malory,” Tibor smiled. “Ottavia is safe. We are all safe. I’ll put the gun inside the house.” Tibor began to reach for the gun, but stopped as he saw Malory flinch. “Or if you prefer, you can hold onto it.”
Malory set the gun carefully back into the plastic bag Tibor held out to him, and put the bag on a low table by the pond.
“So,” Tibor said, his hands resting with their accustomed weight on both of Malory’s shoulders. “Now we are fine. We are all fine. I will put the clams in to soak and start chopping the garlic.” Tibor turned Malory towards the water. “Look at the sunset on the pond. Count to ten minutes, then come on up. I promise I’ll be ten minutes wiser. The Pip, you know …” Tibor tapped his throat. “The Pip will help me up Dante’s twelve steps.”
Malory felt Tibor’s hands leave his shoulders, listened as Tibor moved away through the grass, to the sound of his shoes climbing the terrace. He squatted at the edge of the pond and looked into the water, at the reflection of a ceiling as ornate as any of Michelangelo’s. The Pip was gone, his last link to Louiza swallowed by Tibor. With that swallow, all air was sucked out of the evening. Malory felt he would never again take a breath.
The next moment, something loosened. Malory stood. His windpipe opened and, in that intake of breath, while the bellows were drawing the wind and the pollen and the feathers and the dust and the mayflies and the pips of the world towards him, a face appeared across the far side of the pond. A face backlit by the last rays of the sun, so that age was softened into something still recognizable. A golden head. A pale chin lifted upward, still scenting the air twenty-three years later. A body, a woman rising up from the meadow like a lost deer in the last light of day, as pale as she was the afternoon she crossed from the Orchard to St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey.
If there had
ever been a doubt that he should dedicate his life to finding the woman he had twice lost so long ago, that doubt had been replaced with a certainty that here, only a pond’s width away, was the real Louiza, unboxed, alive, as beautiful as his uncased memory could have painted her.
At the far side of the pond, the taste of apples grew rich in Louiza’s mouth and the haze of late afternoon lifted from her eyes and the warmth of the sun on her hair pushed her towards the water.
“Malory,” she said.
Malory was amazed—amazed that the simple act of giving away the Pip had brought Louiza back to him. As all the loneliness and research of the past quarter century faded into the forest, the pond began to glow in the light it reflected from the woman moving towards him from the far side of the water.
Louiza awoke—perhaps for the first time since she had given birth in the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli. She saw Malory by the edge of the water and the girl from the Farmers’ Market halfway up the terrace. And she knew, even as Una and Terry and Quatro and her beloved Dodo began to pick their ways over the stumps and the fallen branches into the woods, that the music of the Unimaginables was fading away forever, and that here were the real solutions she had been searching for. This small man, this small girl.
Ottavia, from the herb garden on the side of the terrace, saw the pantomime down below her and understood—although there wasn’t time for her to construct an entire bedtime story out of it—that this man she had found in a strange villa above Rome and this woman she had found in the round barn of the Farmers’ Market on River Road were bound to each other as tightly as the statues of the man and the woman in the Villa Septimania. She belonged with them as much as the apple she had taken belonged with the statues.
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