Rebecca Lim: Muse

I realise as we get closer to the giant arch that it’s the main entrance to the Victorian-era Galleria: a building with a wide frontage onto the Piazza del Duomo that’s punctuated by graceful arched windows. The few people allowed to pass under the arch by the burly security guards standing on either side, look like ants.

Everybody seems to be focused on my car. Nobody’s looking at the sky, which is filled with billowing grey storm clouds as high as mountain ranges. They look like the massed sails of a fleet of Spanish galleons setting out to war. Nuriel and Luc are out there in that, somewhere. If one of them hasn’t already killed the other. The thought makes my stomach lurch.

Don’t force me to choose sides, I think feverishly. Please.

Gia sees me shiver, and knocks on the glass screen between the three of us and the driver, telling him to turn up the heating.

As we draw up to the entrance of the Galleria, she points out the two giant banners hanging down either side of the high, open archway and murmurs, ‘You see how much faith Giovanni placed in you? The gamble he took on you was huge.’

The left banner, at least one hundred feet tall, features a colour photograph of a model with strong eye make-up and a sky-high beehive wearing a stunning red, vintage-style evening gown, the kind that Gia herself would kill to own. I realise belatedly that the dress looks vintage because the photograph itself is from another time, maybe the 1960s. And it’s in Giovanni’s signature red, rosso Re. It’s from the start of his career.

The right banner depicts a model whose small, symmetrical face is dominated by smoky, smouldering eyes; her long, caramel-coloured hair is tousled and unbound, and pulled forward over her shoulders. She’s wearing a gown that looks as if it’s made of chain mail created from molten gold. Her hands are wrapped around the bejewelled pommel of a golden sword, which she’s holding point down before her, like a medieval knight in a painting or on a tombstone. The model’s long, narrow feet are bare and she looks like a pagan warrior queen, a powerful sorceress.

The two images side by side are so stunning, and so unlike each other, that it takes me a moment to realise that the figure on the right is Irina. It’s the opening look from the parade, without the wings.

‘When was it taken?’ I whisper, craning my head up to study the vast image through the tinted windscreen of the limo. I would have remembered the sword. It would have made me recoil even more than the wings.

‘When we arrived three days ago,’ Gia replies softly. ‘But before … you did.’

Vladimir startles us both by saying loudly, ‘We’re in position.’

The car door on my side is suddenly thrown open and I have to shield my eyes from the sudden glare of camera flashes. Giovanni’s head of security leans in and Vladimir hands me out towards him.

‘Well, if it isn’t Little Miss Crackhead,’ I hear someone say nastily as I make my way under the arch, blinking as my eyes adjust to the level of light inside the Galleria.

In the strange way I sometimes have of seeing too much almost at once, I see that the building — a kind of glorified shopping mall that’s four storeys high — is cruciform in layout, shaped like a giant cross. That fact alone raises instant goose flesh on the backs of my arms. It’s formed of two covered arcades at right angles to each other, each with a vaulted, arched ceiling built of struts of iron and thousands of panes of glass. Where the two arcades meet in the middle, there’s an octagonal space, topped by a giant glass and iron dome that has to be over one hundred and sixty feet across. The floors of the Galleria are inlaid with mosaic tiles that form symbols and patterns of great beauty and rich colour, and there are colourful painted scenes upon the pendentives beneath the gigantic dome. It’s all stunningly beautiful.

The arcade I’m facing down forms the north–south axis of the cross. A team of black-clad men and women are putting the finishing touches to a narrow white catwalk that runs down its dead centre, and laying out white chairs in rows on either side. The catwalk features a circular platform that’s centred beneath the giant dome, and narrows again as you move away from the dome towards the northern end of the arcade. There it ends abruptly in a white, featureless ‘wall’ with a concealed opening, which is actually one wall set in front of another that runs back behind the first. The effect is such that the people I see coming and going through the narrow aperture seem to suddenly just appear or disappear.

More people are busy setting out white chairs around the central, circular platform, while others are standing at the iron railings of the third-floor balconies, carefully making final adjustments to the false wall of giant video screens that hides the shopfronts inside the Galleria from the audience. It’s as if real life is not allowed to intrude on the spectacle Giovanni has planned. I realise suddenly that all these people are busy turning this glorious building into a kind of giant blank canvas on which his final vision is to be projected.

Gia takes me by the arm as Juliana materialises in front of us, surrounded by security men in dark suits. There’s a worried crease between her strong, dark brows, but a smile lightens her expression when she meets my eyes.

‘You are just in time,’ she says to us both. ‘While they test the sound and the light, we make you ready, yes? Come this way.’

We’re absorbed into Juliana’s security detail and move as a group towards the northern end of the catwalk, through a sea of stares and whispers and gestures.

Someone abruptly turns on the lightshow. My hands fly up to my face in awe as the entire space — the blank white of the catwalk, the video screen-covered walls, even the chairs — is suddenly transformed into a moving, changing panorama of the universe. Giovanni has brought the cosmos inside: everywhere I turn, I see comets, black holes, supernovae, strange fissures in time and space, twisting and curling overhead, all around. Along one side of the arcade, a solid wall of stars melds into the weird towering shapes of stellar spires — so much like reaching fingers, the expelled breath of the universe itself. On the other, the remnants of supernovae morph into the surface of distant Io, then Saturn’s rings, then the boiling fury of the sun. Celestial bodies wheel and turn all about us, in every colour, in every hue, as if painted by an artist’s hand. And almost every person inside the Galleria stops what they’re doing to witness these acts of creation and death, time itself, unfolding all around us, moving across our skin, our faces.

As we walk beneath the giant dome, it comes to life, dripping with a cobweb of tiny, sparkling blue lights. A blue so pale and luminescent it’s almost the colour of holy fire.

And the music that suddenly bursts forth from the speakers is the operatic duet that was playing when I walked through the atrium of Atelier Re yesterday. Two voices, two soprani, singing a piercing melody so haunting, and so familiar, that I screw up my face in pain, trying to remember where I’ve heard it before, how I know it.

‘It’s the closing song,’ Juliana bellows cheerfully. ‘Your song. You appear in the white bride’s dress, the wings and boom — the voices, like the angels. The end. Happiness.’

Happiness?

It’s too much for me to process. I feel as if I’m spinning weightlessly, out of control, through space as those disembodied soprani sing: Sous le dôme épais Où le blanc jasmin Ah! Descendons Ensemble!

It’s French. Someone told me that once. From Léo Delibes’ Lakmé. The Flower Duet. And it means: Under the thick dome where the white jasmine … Ah! We descend, together!