Rupert Thomson - Secrecy

‘Have they?’

‘Yes. You’ve been misinformed.’

‘So what did they get wrong? Not the fact that she’s a whore, surely?’

Bassetti waited to see if I would react, then he reached for the small bell on his desk. I remembered Faustina’s fortune-teller, and how he had used a bell to signal that he had guessed the truth about her — namely, that she was loved. Had Bassetti guessed the truth about me? The door opened behind me. ‘Show this gentleman out,’ Bassetti said, ‘would you?’

When I was halfway across the room, near the fresco that symbolized his rise to power, he spoke again. ‘As a foreigner, Zummo, you may not be aware of this, but there’s a law that applies to women like her. They’re required to wear a yellow band or ribbon, either in their hair, or round one of their sleeves.’ He lifted his eyes from the document he had been studying. He had a look I had seen on his face before, benign and drowsy, like someone who has eaten a heavy meal and is ready for a nap. ‘The penalties for not doing so,’ he said, ‘are quite severe.’

‘I came as soon as I could,’ Faustina said. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

‘About an hour,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry.’

We were in the overgrown garden, beyond the fig arbour. Only a few yards away was the place where we had first made love.

She took a step towards me, and then stopped. ‘Is something wrong?’

The sun had dropped behind the trees. The bottom of the sky looked charred. I felt the air approach, then push past, as tangible as a current of cold water in the sea. A shiver went through me, lasting longer than a shiver should.

‘They think you’re a prostitute,’ I said.

The spaces between her features seemed to widen. ‘What? Who does?’

‘Bassetti.’

‘Why would he bother with someone like me?’

‘I know. I’ve been thinking the same thing.’ I pulled a leaf off a fig tree and slowly tore it in half. ‘You haven’t denied it.’

Her cheeks burned. ‘Do you believe him?’

‘No. Of course not.’

‘You don’t sound very sure.’

‘I don’t know what to believe, Faustina. I’m not sure of anything. I can’t sleep.’

She put a hand on my forearm. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You asked me once if I would take you away from here. When I told you I couldn’t, you said, What if I was in danger? Do you remember?’

She nodded.

‘Well, now you are,’ I said. ‘These people, they’re above the law. They are the law.’

Only a few days earlier, I had come across a crowd gathered in Piazza di Santa Trinità, an open space that was often cordoned off for games of football. They whistled and jeered as two cloaked officials appeared with a young woman. The sign that hung around her neck said ‘For Whoredom’. The officials tore the dress off her back and began to whip her. She turned to the people who surrounded her, her shoulders streaked with blood. Help me. I didn’t do anything. I’m innocent. The jeers and whistling grew louder. A fisherman told me that the woman was supposed to have slept with a Jew from Livorno. It would be the same, I thought, if Faustina was accused of being a whore, and was found to have broken the law by failing to wear a yellow ribbon. She, too, would be publicly stripped and flogged.

When I turned to look at her, she seemed smaller and more fragile than before. She had put on the cream silk gown I had given her; she was too beautiful, too visible.

‘You can’t stay here,’ I said. ‘I’m worried what they’ll do to you.’

‘Why is it,’ she said, ‘that things are always being taken from me?’

‘I wish I could protect you, but I’m not sure I can.’

‘We’ve only just begun to know each other. Now it’s over.’

‘Don’t say that. This isn’t the end.’

‘It feels like it.’

I took her hand. It was cold. She had gashed the skin at the base of her thumb.

‘How did that happen?’ I said.

Sleepily, she looked down at her hand, but didn’t answer. I asked again.

‘That?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I was in the shop, I think.’

Night was falling. The green shade in the garden deepened.

‘Don’t forget me,’ she murmured. ‘People are always forgetting me.’

I gripped her hand more tightly.

‘Promise me,’ she said.

‘I promise.’

She took her hand away. My words had done little to comfort her; it was like blowing on a fire that had already gone out.

‘I seem to have spent most of my life in hiding,’ she said. ‘It makes me wonder if I’ll ever be able to stand out in the open — in the light.’ Tears welled into her eyes. ‘I thought that might happen with you.’

What if I had told her to come with me, and we had left the city, and made a new life in another place? I didn’t, though. We didn’t.

‘Is there somewhere you can go — temporarily, at least? Until things die down?’

‘Sometimes I feel like a ghost —’ She shook her head, as if angry at herself. ‘But I already told you that.’

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘It’s all right to repeat yourself.’

‘No. It’s not all right.’

She turned away. I hurried after her. She moved ahead of me through the fig arbour, the hem of her dress trapping leaves and twigs, and then releasing them. Everything was speeding up. Receding. Time was a kite loose in a gale.

When she was out of the garden, she stopped suddenly and faced me. She was calm again. Beyond her, the street angled away, dark and deserted. In the distance, I could just make out the fire-blackened pot of the Duomo, upended against the blue night sky.

‘It’s not you,’ she said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

I took her in my arms, and words came in a rush. I wasn’t sure what I was saying. I crushed her against me, my mouth in her hair.

She freed herself, stepped back. Her chin lifted. ‘You’ll be all right.’ She reached up and touched my cheek. ‘You’ll be fine. You’ll make wonderful things.’

Wonderful things. Yes, well. There followed a number of weeks when all I did was work. I saw no one except Lapa, who brought news of my mother, and the occasional meal. I would fall asleep at my table and wake two hours later with a dead arm and a stiff neck. I would yawn and stretch. Go back to what I had been doing. I had sent Faustina away, and I didn’t know where she was, or if I would ever see her again. I didn’t cry, but there was an ache in my throat, and my vision kept misting over.

November became December. Bassetti’s insinuations had stayed with me. How could they not? I kept hearing my mother’s voice, drowsy, lowered to a murmur. I behaved badly. I was weak. At the time, I had assumed she was referring to the fact that she had not protected me, but what if she was talking about something else entirely? I chose not to pursue that line of thought. I preferred to believe that Bassetti was trying to undermine me. If that was the case, he was succeeding: I felt unsteady, fragile, under siege. Predictably, perhaps, my work had darkened. Inspired by the drawings I had bought from Mr Towne, I had embarked on a detailed and definitive study of the ravages of syphilis.

Just before Christmas, Redi visited. He would have come sooner, he said, but he had been called to Pisa, where the Grand Duchess had once again been taken ill. The syphilitic woman I had just completed seemed to fascinate him, and he examined her for long minutes with the magnifying glass he always carried on his person. He was particularly taken with the tiny, solitary maggot crawling over her left retina, and I was pleased he had noticed, since it had been intended as a modest homage to him and his entomological research. After Redi had left, though, my exhilaration faded. Never before had it struck me so forcibly that I only created perfect forms in order that I might damage them. I would hack and scrape and gouge at the unblemished surfaces, and sometimes, as if imitating those who were employed by the Office of Public Decency, I would heat my instruments over a flame, then watch as their glowing tips sank into waxy flesh. I was like a perverse barber-surgeon, operating on the bodies of the healthy to make them sick. Was it true what Jacopo and others had said of me, that I was a pariah, and that my activities were morbid, contaminating and repulsive?