Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘She’s a child —’

I had been about to say that she was backward, but Stufa interrupted.

‘She’s meaningless,’ he said.

My knife was in my hand before I knew it, the sharp point probing the underside of Stufa’s chin. That flimsy membrane would offer little or no resistance. One swift upward thrust and the knife would pierce the soft tissue of the palate, then pass through the maxilla, or the nasal passages. After severing both the facial artery and the optic nerve, it would penetrate the spongy frontal matter of the brain. I could imagine the precise path that it would take. I could predict the damage it would do. Not without foundation was it sometimes said of me that I had studied anatomy in more detail than was strictly necessary for a sculptor.

‘You dare to threaten me?’ Stufa barely moved his lips, not wanting to disturb the tip of the blade.

‘If you ever do anything like that again,’ I said, ‘I’ll strip the skin off your body while you’re still alive and hang it on the back of your door like an old coat.’

He gasped. The air that came out of him had a fermented smell, like compost.

Stepping back, I put away my knife.

Stufa touched his chin, then looked at his fingers, which were delicately smeared with blood.

‘It’s only a scratch,’ I said.

His dark eyes lifted until they locked on mine. ‘I’m looking at a dead man.’

‘Then you must be looking in the mirror.’

As I walked back to my workshop, I realized I was trembling, not with rage or fear but with a kind of wild hilarity. Probably it had not been wise to draw a knife on Stufa, but I had had just about enough of his needless provocations.

It was the day after San Giovanni, and the sky was scorched and smoky. Doffo and Simone Guazzi had excelled themselves: the appearance of the dragon, an interlude they had called ‘The Defeat of Satan’, had been the high point of the firework display. I felt restless that morning, and slightly sick. Instead of making for the palace, I set off along the river, heading east. The air smelled of gunpowder, and also of burnt sugar, and I could hear a constant, thin whining, as if a mosquito were trapped inside my skull. Every now and then, I saw Stufa’s ring connect with Fiore’s cheek, or I remembered how the hilt of the knife had warmed in my hand as I held it to his throat, but beyond that, nothing. I couldn’t seem to think even one straight thought.

I crossed the river by the Ponte Rubaconte, then followed the road that ran along the inside of the city walls. Irises had flowered on the stonework, their fleshy petals mauve and purple. Near the Porta a Pinti, I stopped to watch a man throwing buckets of water over a horse. Its coat gleamed like glass in the summer sun. Further on, I saw people lying in rows under the mulberry trees at the edge of the road. These would be peasant families who had travelled in from the countryside for the festivities. I made sketches of a mother and her baby. They were asleep, but they could just as easily have been dead.

By the time I returned to Via de’ Serragli, it was past midday, and my feet hurt — I must have walked ten miles — but at least my head was clear. Then I heard iron-bound wheels behind me, and I understood why I had been feeling so unsettled. I stepped aside to let the carriage pass. It turned into my street, as I had known it would. Just before I reached the corner, I stopped and rested my forehead against the wall. I was thirty-seven years old, but, like a child, I wanted to make her wait. It even crossed my mind to walk away.

Dressed in a derelict black gown with a high collar and frayed cuffs, she was peering up at my house. Her hair was the stained yellow-white of old ivory, and she wore a pair of dark lenses held in place by weighted cords that looped over her ears and dangled on either side of her thin neck. Here she was, my mother, yet she seemed a hastily assembled and eccentric version of the woman I had visited so often in my head. Like the figures I had seen in the processions for San Giovanni the day before, she appeared to have been knocked together out of sticks and cloth.

Her maid spoke to her, and she turned and looked in my direction.

‘Gaetano …’

My name sounded fragile, wounded.

I took her in my arms. I couldn’t feel her hands on my back, and I suddenly remembered how she would never hold us when we were children — not me, not even Jacopo. She would only ever hold the air that surrounded us.

‘It’s a nice house,’ she said. ‘A bit gloomy, but nice. Do you live alone?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded, as if she had guessed as much.

‘You wear glasses,’ I said.

‘The light hurts my eyes. Since — since —’

It was the word ‘earthquake’ that she could not say.

‘I bought them from a Chinese man,’ she went on. ‘In Palermo.’

I asked if I could have a look.

She lifted the weights over her ears and passed them to me. Her eyes, which I could have sworn were once dark-brown, had faded to the colour of dead leaves at the bottom of a pond. Her gaze was questing, stunned.

‘They’re made from tea-stone,’ she was saying. ‘It’s a type of quartz, I think.’

When I put on the glasses, everything became muted, almost poetic. I felt I was looking at the present from some point in the distant future. Not the present at all, then, but the past. A world that was already gone. A memory.

I handed them back to her.

‘I’m glad you thought of me,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you came.’

Eyes shielded once more, she looked beyond me. ‘We had nowhere else.’

Later, when I had shown them round, her maid, Lapa, spoke to me. ‘The earthquake, then the journey — she’s not the woman she was.’

We both glanced across the room. My mother was peering into a trunk of clothes, as one might peer over a cliff.

‘You know something, Lapa?’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I can remember the woman she was.’

That same week, just before sunset, I passed a dead horse lying in the street, ringed by a horde of tramps and beggars. The horse had careered over the Ponte Santa Trinità, one of them told me, riderless and wild with fear, mane standing vertical. As it came down off the bridge, it skidded on the greasy paving stones, lost its footing, and broke a leg. Since it was worth nothing lame, they had decided to butcher it and parcel up the meat.

I was watching them dismantle the carcass, impressed by their dexterity, when a door opened further down the street and a priest stepped out. He looked left and right, then set off along the river. It was getting dark, and I only saw his face for a moment, but I was sure it was Padre Paone. A wave of dizziness: the world slid sideways. First my mother, now Paone. What could it mean? Circling the sticky lake of blood, I hurried after him.

I quickly closed the distance between us, and by the time he turned left, into Chiasso dell’Oro, he was only a few yards in front of me. I followed him down Via Lambertesca, through the Uffizi, then along the side of the Palazzo Vecchio. His walk seemed familiar. Not measured and solemn, as when he celebrated Mass, but halting, even a little obsequious. I was reminded once again of the day he appeared as Jacopo’s accomplice.

We passed Via del Corno, the House of Shells visible halfway down. Was it my imagination, or did he hesitate? I slowed too. Then he moved on, turning the corner into Borgo de’ Greci.

‘Father?’

The word had left my mouth before I could suppress it.

Startled, the priest looked round.

He had Paone’s slick black hair, but his face was rounder, and more cherubic. And he was far too young. Paone would be approaching sixty. This man was forty at the most. Perhaps that explained my mistake: it was Paone as he had been when I last saw him — Paone as I remembered him.