Jonathan Levi - Septimania

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.

But as she began to walk down the terrace towards them, she saw two other men approaching Louiza. They were running — at least the one with the crew cut, the one she had seen at the Farmers’ Market taking Louiza away from her, was running. The other man, old and hobbled, followed with difficulty up from the Blue House, sporting a cane and the graying remnants of a red beard. She saw Malory notice the men and turn back from the pond, searching for something on the low table, something he was desperate to find. Ottavia gathered her breath within her to shout a warning to Malory, to Louiza, to all of them.

Then the shot rang out.

It seemed to Malory — like Dante’s Tuscan peasant on the side of a hill at the time of day when the sun turns his face and the woman he loves lifts her chin across the pond to call him home for supper — that all the fireflies of the world had come to illuminate TiborTina, to show in a single, pitiless flash the solitude of Ottavia and Cristina, the paralysis of Malory at one edge of the pond, of Louiza at the other. In the light of that big bang, Malory saw the sorrow, the seven-sided confusion of Tibor blown into as many memories, although he had no way of recognizing the faces of all the women — not just the Indian Antigone with her crying baby but all the women: women of memory, women with memories — who paused as they heard the blast on their own private hillsides far away. All paused, at TiborTina and beyond, and smelled the air, touched their hearts, glanced around, as if a universe had just disappeared and their lives weighed a fraction less than they had a moment before.