Mirror Mirror

  “Gesù,” she said. “Preserve me from this dream. Who are you?”

  The boulders spoke—the others first—naming their incapacities, naming their attributes as stone. Blind, deaf, mute, and lame; lacking in smell, lacking in the ability to savor. The one nearest her, the one who seemed most like a figure, said, “I am Heartless, for I cannot feel.” With the severe expression of an owl he turned his head and glared at her.

  “Heartless,” she said, nodding, as if able at least to understand this much.

  “And our departed partner is named Next,” said Heartless.

  She didn’t know what he meant. She was busy trying to understand that he was really speaking. She wasn’t sure she could see his lips move, but perhaps the beard and untrimmed mustaches concealed motion.

  The other stone senses shifted, like heavy creatures in swiftly flowing water: ponderously, thoughtfully, so as not to lose their balance. She couldn’t be sure of their sexes—male or female, or whether they had sexes at all. But Heartless seemed the most finished in form, perhaps because he stood the nearest, and he was clearly male, anyway, from his overly bristling eyebrows to the pouching groin.

  “I’m bewildered,” she said. “Talking to a stone. How can this be?”

  Heartless shrugged.

  “How long have I been asleep here?” she said.

  “It’s not long.”

  “I’ve become a mature person. But I only remember falling in the forest.”

  “You fell at our door.”

  “Luck—?”

  “Design.”

  “Why?”

  “You could be safe here.”

  “How did you know I would fall at your threshold, though? As I recall it, nothing was chasing me. I had fled a hunter, I’d been told not to return to my home. The night was a terror, the woods scrabbling their twig fingers—but how in all the world could I fall right where you planned?”

  “We planned to be where you fell. It isn’t the same thing.”

  “But how did you know?”

  Again, he shrugged.

  “How much time have I slept here? There are chores to do,” she said, straightening up. “If not chores at the farm, then surely, chores here.”

  “You approve of our arrangements?” he said brightly.

  “Not as gloomy as I’d have imagined. But how long have I been here? I am older—my arms feel like paddles, my breasts turn at their own speed, my legs are monstrously long. Look at these nails. It’ll take days to file them down.”

  “You’ve been here long enough to grow, I suppose,” he said without interest.

  “I’m here four years, or five, certainly. Or six?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And what have you been doing in all those years?”

  “Waiting. Waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Standing here around me? For years? What did you do all that time?”

  “To the extent we are capable,” he said with a slight grin, “we were thinking.”

  “What do you think, then?” she demanded of him.

  He considered. “Slow thoughts.”

  The others came forward a little. They were like small children with decrepit faces. Their heads were large, noses bulbous and raw, beards tattered, or patchy, or bushy as broom. There was a family resemblance of a sort, but only a little variety in the stitching on a sleeve, the color of a cloak. One had a full set of very black teeth inset with gold bands—an arresting sight.

  “What do you want of me?” she said.

  Heartless made a sign, dotting the air with a series of poking motions, as if writing something with his finger. “Once we wanted to change into something more human than we are. Now we only want our brother back. Without him, we shift, we adjust. We need to know where he is.”

  “I have nothing to do with your brother,” she said.

  “Perhaps you do,” he answered. “He went to your father to propose a bargain, and when your father left, our brother went with him. We guess that your guardian, la Donna Borgia, can tell us where he is.”

  She had forgotten about her father, about Lucrezia. She had forgotten about the world beyond the room. It hurt her head to think of it.

  “How does la Borgia know where your brother is? You’re speaking nonsense.”

  “I’m speaking truth,” he answered. “Your guardian now stands before our looking glass. We want it back. We want to look in it and see our brother. We don’t want to change any more. We change before your eyes.” It was true. The lips were more red, the fingers more divided; the beard looked less like carved granite and more like human hair. “We want to be whole and alone, and she has divided us into segments, as if we were lost individuals, the way humans are. We aren’t humans.”

  “You are dwarves,” she said, asking more than stating. He turned his head.

  “We want our looking glass.”

  A hole in the world

  TIME BEGAN to pass in a more customary fashion, which is to say that Bianca grew to be able to see better. The dwarves left her alone. At first she would sleep and wake fitfully, but in time more regularly. The befurred darkness overhead looked less like the inside of a marsupial pouch and more like a ceiling, with carved rafters, and a chandelier made of four stag skulls, with full racks intertwining, and candles set in their forking branches.

  Though Proserpina remained to smile vacantly ahead, the accoutrements of the tomb seemed to be disappearing. Were the dwarves smartening things up while she was asleep? Providing a more habitable space for her? Or was she organizing it herself, out of interior boredom and memory?

  In time, the walls of the chamber became paneled halfway up with a wormholed chestnut sadly in need of oiling. Above the chair rail the walls were sheathed in a sort of green stone with a pale black striation, and nooks and shelves and crannies were cut in them any which way. There were long, deep shelves, suitable for salvers or shields to be slotted in, and cubbies large enough for nothing more than a mug, a ring, a pair of gloves. But the shelves were too high for the dwarves, for they were all empty.

  The floor was littered with rags, ladles, cooking pots, boots, axes, gems, urns, swords, pelts, skeletons of small animals, bundles of dried vegetables, hooded cloaks, blankets sour with mildew, locked books, calcified turds, platters, coils of rope, candles, censers, colorfully glazed storage pots sealed with wax, belt buckles, pearls, lilies in bloom from their tubers, eggs, keys on an iron ring, several cats, bedding, and corked vials carved from ivory.

  There was still no door, no window, and she couldn’t say whether the dwarves disappeared or reappeared in the middle of the air, or if they just went and stood behind the bits of furniture for hours on end. It was almost as if they had some way of cloaking their access to the exit. As Bianca’s thinking grew sharper, she thought: Maybe they project themselves forward or backward, so that some semblance of them lingers in the air after the essence has already removed itself. At any rate, there was always a murkiness in their aspect.

  At the beginning the dwarves seemed to have interchangeable attributes. She couldn’t keep them straight. The one with a red beard and a monk’s tonsure at breakfast seemed, at lunch, to have a red beard but a full head of curly white hair, and the monk’s tonsure was now being sported by the dwarf with the black teeth. Their voices were hard to track because only one of them ever seemed to speak at a time. Perhaps it was that they all had the same voice except the one who had said, crisply, that he was MuteMuteMute. But after a while it began to seem as if things were solidifying. As an exercise to prove herself canny, Bianca tried to catalog the dwarves’ attributes, and the harder she tried, the more the attributes seemed to stay put.

  Heartless was the one who most often took the voice. He seemed to have a certain patience for Bianca. It wasn’t the patience of a dog, or of the vacant gooseboy, or of Primavera even; it was a patience with no expectation of a reward. Bianca grew to like the times when Heartless was there and the others, in their mysterious way, g
one. He sat near her and ran fingers through his red beard, clearing it of pebbles, grit, sand.

  She’d found a pot and underneath it, with some effort, she had located a fire. Though she couldn’t see a flue, the smoke from a healthy fire slithered elsewhere, somehow, and occasionally the pot was helpfully filled with cold water. So she could boil vegetables and leaves and scraps of meat. If she looked to the right or the left, and concentrated, she could find a table, and more often than not it was heaped with whatever she needed—a candle snuffer, a stole for warmth, a cut of lamb and a heap of onions, a tankard of warm milk.

  Though she tried, she couldn’t find a key to fit in some door that she might locate one day.

  But she found her memories, bit by bit, working backward. She remembered Ranuccio, the hunter, and his abduction of her from the kitchen. She remembered him without remorse or contempt. Indeed, as he was the last person she saw before her long, dreamless sleep, she remembered him well, as if she had known him well. The long chin, the neat beard, the feel of his hand around her wrist. Four, five, six years later, she could still feel the heat and the pressure of his palm and his fingers against her.

  She remembered Primavera next. Primavera. It was as if Prima-vera were a huge egg of a woman, a moon, bowling along in the corridors of the house. Bianca felt a wealth of fondness toward the old woman, who seemed to have been present at the birth of the universe and grown old long before the first drops of the Flood burst from God’s vengeful clouds.

  Of the others, she was less sure. She remembered Fra Ludovico a little, his blustery ways, his off-key singing. How he disguised his bravery as foolishness.

  And then there was her father. She’d never forgotten him, ever, but he was so far behind her now. She’d been, what, six, seven when he left? And now she must be seventeen. Vicente de Nevada, who had left her to—to what? To follow some woman? To find his fortunes? To be rid of the burden? If she knew herself better, she’d know whether she could forgive him or not.

  What was she, really? What had she become? What did it mean to be a girl, or a new woman, imprisoned on the crest of a lonely hill, imprisoned in a room without a window or door? She found herself dubious about basic personal matters—whether, for instance, she preferred peaches to figs, or the music of harps to the music of lutes. How could she be such a cipher? How could there be so little of her to know? And here she was, older and mature, but now as good as dead, with no one but ambulatory stones to talk to.

  There had been other children at Montefiore, surely? In trying to picture them, she wasn’t sure if she was inventing them as effectively as, an hour ago, she’d come up with a fresh camisole.

  She remembered a lad with an expression of permanent surprise on his face; that grass was green when he went out of doors seemed to come as a pleasant shock every time. He waded about the world with a gabbling hedge of orange beaks and downy flowers—the geese. She remembered geese. So he must be the gooseboy. Sweet dim thing.

  She remembered the maids of the kitchen, who might have been her friends but for their rural ways. Though Bianca had slopped pigs and gathered olives and helped boil the tallow and hang out the laundry, she hadn’t been a candidate for their friendship.

  So she had been lonely. Yes, now she could see it. Lonely, in part because she hadn’t been a rural farmhand. She had been the daughter of the house.

  Montefiore.

  She remembered it with a heady pleasure. The chapel without its roof, the steep walls on the house’s cliff side, the way the house otherwise sagged comfortably down toward the approaching slope, its red roofs like plums drying in the sun. If she was the daughter of the house, the house was her real parent. The only one that had lasted. “I want to see Montefiore,” she said to the principal dwarf, Heartless.

  “You are bitten with the usual human rage of wanting,” replied the dwarf, munching on a bone that looked unsettlingly like a human digit.

  “Nonetheless,” she said, “I am human, or used to be, and I don’t see any shame in it. I want to see the place I come from.”

  “Don’t we give you all that you need?”

  “I have clothes, I have a book of devotions to read and a small Spanish guitar to play. I have food of exactly the quality and variety I can imagine but no finer, nothing to delight me by its novelty. If I am to be restricted to the apprehension of anything I’ve known in my previous life, then let it at least include memory. I want to see Montefiore again.”

  “Aren’t you happy here?” asked the dwarf, a bit morosely. And then more slyly, “Were you ever happy there?”

  “I was something there,” she said. “Aware of something sad, but real. Living on the forward edge of any ordinary day. Things happened. I don’t know how to answer your question about happiness. Happiness doesn’t signify. Can you give me what I ask?”

  She didn’t understand the equation by which her needs were met; at times she believed she was making the dwarves up herself. But Heartless, whose red beard seemed more and more likely to sit on his face and not wander off to someone else’s, finished his meal. He pushed the bone to one side and belched, and got down off his stool. He walked to the middle of the room and said, “Were you to get what you want, poor thing, you wouldn’t want it. Isn’t the wanting richer?”

  “I don’t know what is richer,” she said. “It’s not a question that interests me.”

  “Then pick me up and help me, and you deal with your concerns as you must.”

  She didn’t want to touch him. She hadn’t touched any of them since the day she washed her menstrual blood from their stone feet. She was afraid he’d change in her arms. But he stood there with rude dignity, glaring, and she had no choice. She stood and approached him, and reached down and picked him up under the arms. She grunted with the effort. He was a boulder, after all.

  “Turn my face toward the wall,” he said.

  She did, with some trouble, and when she had cradled his seat in her braced arms, she leaned closer to the wall, which today seemed a hairy web of roots and skittering stones, and soil falling in soft dry fans upon the granite floor.

  Heartless reached out and twisted aside two protruding tree roots with as little fuss as if they were made of softened wax. He poked them into gentle swags. In the space between them, framed like a window, he put out his left hand and smoothed the dirt. Then, having removed a stone or two and eaten them, he leaned forward and breathed on the rude circle he had implied with his hands.

  The air turned silvery, a vertical plaque of fog. Again Heartless pushed forward his hands and smoothed it. He patted it down till the air was still and gray as a slice of ice cut from a frozen lake. He breathed again. With an expression suggesting he regretted her appetite for the past, he gestured at Bianca de Nevada.

  “Go ahead, then. Look, if you must.”

  The beast in the wall

  VICENTE PRACTICED remembering the tricks that weather could play on the eyes.

  —How fog could shroud the features of a person, making them seem, at a distance, little more than the suggestion of a human.

  —How the sky could glow with pale-colored ribbons after a rainstorm.

  —One night the moon had bloomed over the plains with the color of the juice of a blood orange.

  —One day the moon had swaggered up to the sun and punched it in the eye, and the world had gone midnight at midday. Birds had lost their bearing and smashed against the walls of the kitchen garden, and Primavera had made a stew of them.

  In the absence of any real weather in the dungeon, Vicente designed days, months, whole seasons in his mind. But how odd, wasn’t it, that the crispest memories were of aberrations. The snow in April, that one year, when icicles formed on the clematis blossoms. The year it thundered at midnight, Christmas Eve, aborting the service. Was that 1500, when all of Europe was readying to be overrun by hellish vermin, in preparation for the doom of time? But whatever had been borne that frightful year had skittered away without much damage, smothered by the smooth
round of normal days. And it was ordinary days—the lazy passing of sun over the orchards, hour by hour—

  It didn’t do to consider how much he missed them. He just imagined them and let them drift away.

  Since he couldn’t be getting younger, he must be aging. As his muscle tone went, so, perhaps, his mind. He therefore wasn’t as surprised as he might have been to notice one day that a portion of the wall seemed to be bowing. Perhaps it was a sort of erosion. He had been in here an awfully long time, after all.

  For a while the wall just seemed to swell, like a bubo, though mercifully free of that certain rankness. Finally (after hours, or days, or weeks? Who could say?) the growth detached, and an accretion of boulder stood on its own single footing. Vicente, when he could pull himself to his feet, found he could walk around it. The place from which it had been evacuated seemed a deeper pocket than such a stone would require.

  He sat and looked at it, on and off. Indefinitely. It seemed at times to have the character of a creature, though he knew if he began befriending random boulders, his final mental collapse was near. The stone had no face, which was the confounding part. Four legs clumped closely together, more or less the same shape, each lumpy with a bit of knee, slightly splayed at floor level to suggest a padded foot. The legs terminated above in a domed and sloping brow.

  There was no mouth, or none he could be sure of. An orifice puckered at one side, off center, though it might as easily be an anus as a mouth, or an ear. Or just a beauty mark of sorts. The stone didn’t radiate menace, though in a way Vicente would have welcomed even menace, to vary his days.