Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

He seized me by the collar and whirled me, one-handed, along the corridor and down the stairs. Though I struggled, I knew I had no chance of freeing myself; it was his fury, I thought, that kept him strong. He hurled me down the front steps with such force that I landed on my back and bit my tongue.

Get out of my house, he said, and stay out.

Your house? It was difficult to speak through the blood that was welling up in my mouth. It’s not your house, it’s our mother’s, and you have no right to –

I have every right, he said. I’m head of the family, and I know what’s best. What’s best is that you’re not here, not ever. What’s best is that you’re far away — or, preferably, dead.

Is this about Ornella?

His face flushed. Don’t bring my wife into this.

It’s because I knew her first.

He began to stroll, loose-shouldered, down the steps, a swagger he had perfected at his military academy. I scrambled backwards, towards my horse. Reaching sideways, I pulled an arquebus out of its holster. I had just noticed it was there. Or perhaps, as in a dream, it had only materialized when it was needed.

Jacopo stopped in his tracks and smiled — partly, I suspected, out of shock, but partly, knowing Jacopo, with a kind of relish. It was as if I had just raised the stakes in a game he was confident of winning. Put that thing away, he said.

I aimed at his legs and fired.

Jacopo’s head flew backwards, and he dropped to the ground so heavily that the paving stones appeared to shudder. Blood soaked the right leg of his breeches.

Coward! he yelled.

No, Jacopo, I said calmly. You’re the coward.

The colour left his face. Sodomite, he muttered. Degenerate. Then, almost as an after-thought, Necrophiliac.

These were no longer accusations. These were facts.

I slid the gun back into its holster and vaulted up on to my horse. My mother was standing at the top of the steps, by the front door. Her mouth opened, then closed again. I said I was sorry for what had happened, and that I loved her, but she was shaking her head. I’m glad your father isn’t here to see this.

Would he have protected me? The venom in my voice surprised me. Well, would he?

She looked away.

I tugged on the reins, which were warm from the sun, and rode off down Via Dione. Then north, towards Catania.

It was a fantasy, of course.

All fantasy.

I glanced at my hands, white with plaster. I could taste blood, and I was shaking. At least I knew why I felt such anger, though. Could Jacopo have told me the origin of his? I doubted it somehow. Probably he had been born with it. Probably he had been tugged, red-faced and raging, from the womb.

The door opened, and I jumped.

‘It’s only me,’ Earhole said.

Though I knew where I was, I could sense the blue sea at the end of the street, between the buildings, and I could feel the jolt of the gun in my trigger hand — a gun I hadn’t even realized I owned! — and I imagined that my brother would walk with a limp for the rest of his life, or even lose his leg altogether, like Faustina’s friend. He would become a bitter man — a bully to his wife and mother, an ogre to his children. I had done nobody any favours. I should have shot him full in the face and sent the back of his head careening sloppily across the street. I should have ended it, once and for all.

I heard a cough. Looking round, I saw Earhole with another barrow full of ice.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’

The girl’s body had been delivered shortly before midnight on Friday. At dawn on Sunday, and without entirely understanding why, I surgically removed the section of skin with the dog’s head carved into it. I pinned it to a flat piece of cork and placed it in a jar of alcohol. As I returned to the body, I noticed a green blush or stain on the right side of the abdomen, a sure sign that the process of decomposition was under way. I had finished just in time.

Since then, Earhole had made a second journey to the lazaretto, where Belbo had seen to the burning of the body. No trace of it now remained. In its place on the marble slab lay the fruits of thirty hours’ almost uninterrupted work. As always, I was struck by the contrast between the crude, grubby shapelessness of the moulds and the specific, subtle secrets I knew them to contain. Looking at the outside, you wouldn’t have been able to guess the first thing about the girl’s appearance — except, perhaps, for her height — but there was this eerie, magical fact: the space inside would look exactly like her . Every detail of her physical being had been captured, stored — immortalized. Though she might seem to have gone, she was actually still there, suspended between two different forms of existence, made of air.

I sent Earhole home happy, with a handful of quattrini in his pocket, then I walked back to my lodgings. I could feel the sun on my shoulders, but darkness kept bleeding into my field of vision, and the world wobbled and swirled around me, as if it were being blown out of molten glass and had yet to solidify. Though it was two in the afternoon, I climbed into bed and went straight to sleep.

I woke to an uncanny hush. My wrists ached, and my whole body felt stiff, unwieldy. I lay quite still. The city sounded as if it had been smothered. Even with my eyes closed I could tell that it was light. Was it Monday already?

Later, standing at the window, I saw that a fog had descended, a fog so dense that the lopsided shutters on the building opposite were only vague suggestions of themselves. I thought of the moulds lying in a cupboard in my workshop, and my heart speeded up as I remembered the feeling of lightness that had flowed into me during the dismemberment, that flare of exhilaration for no reason. I sat at my desk and wrote to Faustina, asking her to meet me by the column in the Mercato Vecchio, as usual.

When I arrived that afternoon, there was a man with a brazier of glowing coals in the corner of the square. I watched him twirl a pair of blackened tongs, the blue smoke emptying into the fog. He was roasting chestnuts. It was the feast of San Simone, he told me.

‘Doesn’t the air smell wonderful?’ Faustina stood at my elbow. Over her shoulder was a bag that clinked every time she moved. ‘You disappeared again,’ she said. ‘Did you have another fever? Did you nearly die?’

I smiled. ‘It’s only been three days.’

‘It felt longer.’

‘To me too.’

We began to walk.

‘There’s something that’s been troubling me.’ I paused. ‘I’ve been feeling awkward about what I said last time I saw you. I feel I disappointed you.’

‘You’re not to think about that.’

‘But —’

‘No.’ She looked around to see if anyone was watching, then moved a step closer. ‘You haven’t kissed me yet. You haven’t even said hello.’

That evening Faustina took me to the ghetto. I had only been there once before, with Fiore, and I had forgotten how cramped and derelict it was, the streets no wider than corridors, and often blocked by piles of waste or rubble. The buildings towered above me, their dark-grey façades scarred and mottled, their eaves lost in the fog. Since the ghetto could not expand sideways, it had to go upwards, into the sky. It was all done illegally, with no controls. Some buildings were eleven storeys high.

We passed the well in the Piazza della Fonte. The whole area was dense with smells — smoke, fat, piss, and damp. Underneath, though, like a recurring theme, I thought I detected something which reminded me of ash or cinders, fainter than the other smells but much more acrid. I asked Faustina if I was imagining it. She shook her head. Twenty years ago there had been a fire, she told me, and part of the ghetto had burned down. The place was still being rebuilt.