Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘Well, that clinches it,’ she said. ‘The man’s a fool.’

There would be no marriage, no happiness.

Love lost out, as she had feared it would. Love lost out, as always.

I lifted my eyes from the table. ‘As always?’

Faustina said nothing.

‘Is Vespi still alive?’ I asked.

‘I think so.’

Ginevra had died of a fever when Faustina was fourteen, she said. It was then that she moved to Florence and began to work for her uncle Giuseppe. If he hadn’t taken her in, she didn’t know what would have become of her.

I finished my acquerello . ‘When I met you the other day, you talked about having to invent another person —’

‘I don’t know why I said that. I shouldn’t have.’

‘Why invent another person, though? What makes that necessary?’

She watched me carefully, as if we were playing a game. How close could I get to the truth without being helped?

I tried another tack. ‘If there are two of you, which one agreed to come with me today?’

She drank, then wiped her lips.

‘Which one sent the present?’

Her eyes were still fixed on me, clear and steady.

I looked past her, through the open doorway. The inn faced west. Since we were high up, I would have expected to see Florence in the distance — the thin, oddly knuckled tower of the Signoria, or Santa Maria del Fiore’s liver-coloured dome — but the day had grown smokier, and all the hollows and rumples in the land were hazy, veiled in mist.

‘There are two of me as well,’ I said, ‘but in my case it’s different. One’s true, the other one’s a lie.’

‘Which one’s here now?’ She was borrowing my language.

‘You already know the answer to that.’

She nodded, then looked down at the table and began to follow the grain with her forefinger.

‘Did you recognize it in me,’ I said, ‘when you first saw me?’

‘Recognize?’ She frowned. ‘I don’t know if that’s the right word. I felt something. I’m not sure what it was, though.’ She was still running her finger over the rough surface of the table. ‘In the palace I wasn’t expecting to see you. I was there for a different reason.’

‘I know. You told me.’

She looked over her shoulder at the view. ‘I’m illegitimate,’ she said in a low voice.

I took hold of her hand, the one that had been tracing the grain in the wood. She didn’t resist, but kept her face turned away.

‘I’m a bastard,’ she said.

The curve of her throat and chin against the landscape’s silty blues and greys. The fall of dark hair past her shoulder. The soft gleam of her lips. I stared at her as though I were trying to burn her image into my memory. As though I might never see her again.

‘You’re a wonder,’ I said. ‘You’re beyond compare.’

She seemed to jump. A shiver had gone through her, or else somebody had walked over her grave. She faced me again, then withdrew her hand and brushed something invisible from her cheek.

‘You don’t even know me,’ she said.

*

As we rode into the village where the potter was supposed to live, I saw a man slouched on a low wall, mending a wicker basket. I climbed down off my horse. His thick grey hair fell to his shoulders, and his hands were huge and slow, with fingernails that were circular, like coins. I asked where I could find Marvuglia.

‘Who’s looking?’ he said.

I told him my name.

He swore. ‘I thought you were coming next week.’

‘You’re Marvuglia?’

He heaved himself to his feet. His narrow eyes had raw, pink rims. ‘Now that you’re here,’ he said, his gaze shifting to Faustina, ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

When we had tethered our horses, he led us through a gate and across a courtyard. In his kitchen he slopped some red wine into beakers he must have made himself. Displayed on a dresser were more examples of his work. An eel slithered across the green pond of a plate, dogs tussled on a bowl that was swollen as a pregnant woman’s belly. They were mistakes, he told me. He liked mistakes. In fact, he sometimes thought he preferred them to the pieces that were judged to be successful. I asked how he achieved such intensity of colour. One day he had been working with all the doors and windows open, he said, and a gust of wind had whirled into the room. Ash from the grate had landed on the blue glaze he was applying to a vase. Though he had assumed the vase would be ruined, he had fired it anyway, and it had come out oddly luminous. He had enormous faith in accidents. How could you learn anything if nothing ever went wrong?

‘But you’ll be wanting to see my proper work …’

We followed him through a low doorway and into a large, cool room. Hanging from the vaulted ceiling were several planks, each of which had a verse from the Old Testament carved into it. On a long trestle table in the middle of the room was an array of Marvuglia’s animals. I moved closer. They struck me as both primitive and pagan — partly, I thought, because they were life-size — life- like — and partly because the glazes flouted the laws of nature. The wolves were all blue, for instance — not an ordinary warm blue, like the sky, but a blue that was bruised and bleak, a chilblain blue, with hints of indigo, flint, and dirty ice. His goats were the blackish-red of old wounds or dried blood. His sheep were rust-orange, like metal left out in the rain. Every piece Marvuglia made had an injured or untended quality, a quality of having been mistreated or abandoned.

He asked Faustina what she thought.

‘They frighten me,’ she said.

He nodded, but said nothing.

‘They’re like the worst parts of ourselves, the most savage part — the part we’re ashamed of.’ She stopped in front of one of the cold blue wolves. ‘They’re like nightmares.’

Still he didn’t speak.

She wanted to know how he chose the colours.

‘I don’t choose,’ he said. ‘They just arrive.’

‘But they’re wrong.’

Marvuglia’s smile was instant, and oddly lascivious. ‘Not to me.’

Back in the kitchen, he poured more wine. When we were seated, he asked what I was working on. I told him I was interested in the plague.

‘I thought I saw a morbid streak in you.’ Knees wide apart, he reached down and tugged at his genitals. ‘How long have you two been together, anyway?’

‘We’re not together.’

‘Just as well.’

‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why “just as well”?’

‘You don’t belong together. It doesn’t look right.’

I felt a bright needle of anger go through me, but I fought the urge to challenge or contradict him. Instead, I glanced at Faustina, who was smiling.

Marvuglia noticed. ‘What’s so funny?’

‘If your colours are anything to go by,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure we should believe a word you say.’

He remained motionless for a few moments, then burst out laughing. ‘You’re quite something, you are. Madonna rotta in culo, if I were fifteen years younger …’

He went to fill her cup again, but she told him she’d had enough. Not long afterwards, we stood up to leave.

Outside, in the courtyard, a warm wind was blowing, and the leaves of a scruffy palm tree scraped and clattered. My horse skittered sideways, almost tripping over its own hooves.

Marvuglia scowled at the sky. ‘There’s bad weather on the way.’

Up ahead, the land blurred as the storm blew in from the north. I was thinking about Marvuglia, and wondering why Towne had wanted me to meet him, and what, if anything, we had in common. For all its unpredictability, his work was rooted in the earth, and in the things of the earth. It seemed to house resentment and the desire for vengeance; it failed to achieve transcendency. And I had found the man himself sarcastic and devious. Deliberately provocative. His claim that Faustina and I looked wrong together still rankled, and in the end I had to turn to her and ask what she had made of the remark.