Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘Strange,’ I murmured, ‘how this hair differs from your other hair.’

‘Which do you prefer?’

‘I prefer it all.’

Eyes still closed, she smiled.

‘There’s no part of you,’ I said, ‘that I don’t prefer.’

‘You’re not making any sense.’

The coiled springs proved hard to cut, and all the time I was aware of her cunt below me, and its aroma, which was the aroma of love-making — a new mingling of her juice and mine, a recent, ripe concoction of the two of us. To give myself a better angle, I decided to kneel beside her, next to her right hip. Turning my back on her, I aimed the scissors downward, towards that little knot of tissue that gave her so much pleasure. As before, I tried to cut as close to the root of each hair as I could. Slowly, I filled the last of the three packets.

Though I was facing away from her, I heard her breathing quicken, and when I glanced over my shoulder I saw that her left hand was up against her mouth. I kept snipping at her pubic hair, getting ever closer to the place where the skin parted. Once the packet was full, and I had laid the scissors to one side, I climbed over her right leg and slid my prick into her cunt. Eyes still closed, she sank her teeth into the edge of her hand, just below the little finger.

I closed my eyes as well and moved inside her, imagining the ribbed flesh, the supple rings of muscle. Mauve and yellow flowers filled the blank screen of my eyelids, the petals loosening and drifting downwards on to smooth grey stone. I kissed the soft bristles in the hollow of her armpit, then I kissed the smaller hollow of her clavicle. I moved up to her mouth, which smelled of ripe melon. Not the wound-red Tuscan water-melon, but the pale-green variety I had bought in Naples once, and which had grown, so I was told, on the wild coast of Barbaria. I breathed her breath, I licked her lips. When I reached beneath her and held her buttocks in my hands, she trembled all over, her cunt seeming to flutter, and I thought of a fish in the bottom of a boat, a fish just lifted from the water, then she tightened round me and I came. The force of it threw me sideways, and my head struck the ceiling where it slanted above the bed. I must have cried out because she opened her eyes and asked if I was all right.

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I hit my head.’

‘The ceiling is rather low.’ She began to laugh, despite herself. ‘Does it hurt?’

I was laughing too. ‘Only a bit.’

She lay back.

‘I came too quickly,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t help it.’

‘No, no. It was good. I liked it.’

‘I saw flowers. Huge mauve and yellow flowers, all massed together, and falling slowly through the air —’

‘When you hit your head?’

I laughed again. ‘No, before. When I was inside you.’

‘Flowers?’ she said. ‘I never heard of anything like that.’

It was a happy time, the happiest I had ever known. Later, though, when I looked back, I saw that I had been living in a kind of dream state. But perhaps that’s what happiness is: a suspension of disbelief or a willed ignorance, which, like held breath, cannot be sustained beyond a certain point.

By the first week of April, I had put the finishing touches to the commission. In the end, I didn’t use the contents of the three packets. Working with scissors had been a mistake, perhaps, since many of Faustina’s hairs were too short to implant successfully. Instead, I resorted to hair plucked from a corpse provided by Pampolini. I had, in any case, begun to feel uncomfortable about the idea of involving Faustina, not least because she claimed to be the bastard child of the Grand Duke’s wife. When confronted with the adjustments I had made, the Grand Duke declared that I had, once again, more than fulfilled his expectations, and presented me with a dark-brown doe-skin coat which he had bought in London, and whose cuffs, pockets and hem were discreetly embroidered with silver thread. I also began to be invited to the most exclusive gatherings, and met many luminaries of the age, people like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, who had developed the microscope, Hayyim Pernicca, a Kabbalistic scholar from Livorno, and Govert Bidloo, an anatomist who had written a musical work known as an opera, the first of its kind. What’s more, when I attended court, I was allowed to within a few paces of the Grand Duke, perhaps because we now had a whole new area of common ground; after all, when it came to a certain subject, I was the only person in the world he could talk to. In company, I took care to underplay the change in my fortunes. In private, though, I felt valued as never before.

Then, one sultry morning towards the end of that month, I discovered that my gnawing sense of the unrepeatability of things had been justified, and even, to some extent, prophetic, though not at all in the way I had imagined. I was in my workshop, with the doors open to the stable yard, when Vespasiano Schwarz appeared. Sweat had blackened his armpits, and he was panting. The Grand Duke wanted to see me at once, he said. I asked if something was wrong. He didn’t know.

The shutters were closed in the Grand Duke’s apartment, and it was much cooler than outside. After consulting with a Dutch engineer, he had built a number of circular recesses into the floor, which could be packed with ice and covered with iron lids. It was one of his more ingenious initiatives. Before my eyes could properly adjust, though, he was in front of me, and gripping my right hand in both of his.

‘Oh, it’s awful, just awful.’ He peered into my bewildered face. ‘You haven’t heard?’

There had been reports of a catastrophic earthquake in Sicily, he told me. The south-east, in particular, had suffered enormous devastation; whole towns had been razed to the ground. He had no details as yet, but he understood that the death toll was high.

‘It’s where you come from, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Your family are there.’

Objects swam slowly up out of the gloom. A moon-shaped marble table, a porcelain vase. A sprawling lead-grey hunting dog.

‘Yes,’ I said.

The earthquake wasn’t recent, he told me. It had happened some time ago; news had taken a while to filter through. Spanish troops had just arrived in the city, on their way from Messina to Milan. They would have the most up-to-date information. In the meantime, he insisted that I go to the chapel and pray with him.

Later that day, I walked down to the barracks where the Spaniards were billeted, but it was almost sunset before I could find a soldier who could tell me about Siracusa. He was drinking on his own in a tavern by the river. His wife’s family came from Noto, he said, and he confirmed what the Grand Duke had told me. Large sections of my city had been destroyed, and at least three quarters of the population had been killed. As for Noto, it had been flattened. Wiped out. There were no survivors. Augusta and Catania had disappeared too. Of the dead that had been recovered, most had been shovelled into vast holes in the ground. The fear of contagion was such that there had been no time for niceties. Blessings had only been said once the mass graves had been sealed.

‘I don’t suppose you know what happened to my family?’ I said.

I gave him my name, then told him where I was from.

Keeping his eyes on the table, he said that the part of Siracusa where I had grown up had been reduced to rubble.

‘My mother lived there,’ I said. ‘My aunt as well.’

The Spaniard rubbed at his whiskery cheeks with both hands, then shook his head. ‘I didn’t hear anything about them.’

‘And my brother, Jacopo? Any news of him?’

Was my brother was a military type? I nodded. If the Jacopo he was thinking of was the right one, the Spaniard said, he had built himself a villa out of town, on Plemmirio. During the earthquake, the sea had swept inland, annihilating everything in its path. Jacopo, his wife, and his three children were all missing, presumed dead.