Mirror Mirror

  He looked sideways at her. She had dismissed him, and now faced the mirror. “I must see to my hair,” she spoke, almost to herself, in the way of certain women. She scooped up the single fruit on its silvery bough and held it alongside her face. It was such a feminine gesture, it brought back to him María Inés, and his child, Bianca, who would never become a woman. He turned to shutter his eyes, and followed the empty passage out into the empty world.

  Mirror mirror

  OUT OF our need we patronize our artists, we flirt with our poets, we petition our architects: Give us your lusty colorful world. Signal to us a state of being more richly steeped in purpose and satisfaction than our own.

  Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don’t in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.

  The holy find this some mincing proof of God. Damn them.

  There was de Nevada, mourning the death of his daughter, and why shouldn’t he? But he came into the room and brought back the treasure we never believed he could achieve—that I doubted the existence of—and he also brought back to me the brusque male fact of my brother, and how dead he is. How I can never walk into the room again and have him mean something to me, even in his drunken lechery with other women; I can never even suffer the pain of knowing I’ve not quite caught his attention. There is no longer a Cesare Borgia with attention to catch. Don Vicente’s return brings it all up to me again; the phlegmatic humor rises in me and slashes hotly in my windpipe.

  I lay the remaining Apple on its silver branch and turn to the mirror. The light has shifted somewhat and I almost feel visited—beside myself. It’s no doubt the effect of seeing that stone creature dissolve into the stonework of the fireplace, like a louse burrowing into the skin. It makes me feel that any wall or floor could shift its reliable shape and blurt forth into a creature again, as if the house were possessed of a stone ghoul. Uncomfortable. One would never be alone again, even in one’s boudoir.

  “Mirror, mirror,” I spoke aloud, to steady my nerves, “who is the fairest of us all?”

  I thought of my father, the great Pope Alexander VI, and how he had played at being the prelate of the Church of Rome. How he had had testicles of the sons of his enemies removed and gilded and returned to their owners in caskets beautifully inscribed with erotic carvings, to mock them. Yet he had also had baskets of overflow from our banquets brought out to those suffering from plague and famine on the banks of the Tiber just below Rome. What was fair in the use of power? Cesare’s friend Niccolò Machiavelli would have sharp praise for the man who used power to his best advantage. But Machiavelli didn’t consider the moral fairness in a ruler to be worthy of mention.

  And who asks women to be fair, anyway, unless they do ask themselves?

  I had sent Bianca away to be murdered, those long years ago. It seemed hard to remember. But my Cesare had cast his attention her way—he who had so little time left—and indeed, that was the last time we met in this life. A cock to every hen who staggered into his house, whether she was his equal or no. I couldn’t have that happen. Not for his sake; not for hers. Was murder the right alternative? Ah well, too late to decide otherwise now.

  I looked upon myself the way I did when I was an adolescent. When life beckoned from the horizon. I could only imagine growing more beautiful, more powerful, more responsive to life’s beneficence and squalor. Back then, the figure who would look back at me in the looking glass was potent with mystery, more arresting than I could imagine actually seeming to anyone.

  Now, the venerable Apple nodded perfectly against my cheek. Beside its immortal perfection I looked wan, a fishwife, a sister to old Primavera. I could see the thin struts of my shoulders making a yoke under my skin, and my neck arose from a shallow well. My eyes had fallen prey to a snare of webbed lines, too fine to be visible to anyone across the room—but what do we ever want but for someone to come nearer? And then all our imperfections are magnified.

  I put my head to one side, criticizing my aging beauty. “Who is fairer?” I begged the mirror to lie and say “No one; you are beautiful as a legend.” I knew it wouldn’t lie. But I didn’t expect it to speak, either.

  It spoke in the language of mirrors, not of words. A mist crept over the skin of the glass. Mistaking it for my hot breath upon it, I leaned forward to smear the fog away with my hand, to see some further truth, something consoling, that I hadn’t yet thought or imagined.

  But when my hand reached out, I felt for an instant something other than the cold touch of glass. I cawed a sound of alarm. Before I fell to the floor, twitching with disbelief, I saw the child again. Bianca de Nevada. In my delusion she was no longer dead. She had a grave and magnificent expression. I can’t explain it. Puzzled curiosity. A raging patience. An articulate simplicity. A womanliness.

  Or perhaps it was that she seemed like one who didn’t worry about what it meant never to be enough. The absence of such a care on her brow filled her with an unearthly beauty that I could neither achieve nor abide.

  The return of the prodigal

  THE CIRCLE of mist gave onto a room Bianca remembered, though for a moment she thought it was empty. By leaning near she could see beyond the margin—it was more like looking through a window than into a painting, for as her angle changed, more came into view. That was when she saw the woman on the floor.

  Bianca couldn’t tell if she was weeping or—could it be?—thrashing in laughter. She rolled over and over, and her limbs seemed unfamiliar with each other. A white worm of spittle drooped from her lower lip. On the floor nearby lay a branch of an apple tree with a single fruit attached.

  The woman there on the floor is convulsing, thought Bianca, and her heart moved cautiously. She reached out her hand, forgetting for a moment that she was entombed in a room without exits. Her hand met a barrier of hard air and couldn’t penetrate it.

  As she regarded it further, she recognized the floor of the salone of Montefiore, its shiny waxed bricks laid in herringbone. The woman who suffers is someone I know. It’s the woman at whose word my father left me; the woman who looked in upon my childhood with slight but steady interest.

  It took Bianca a while longer to remember the name of Lucrezia Borgia. Borgia! With the reclamation of that single word, a tide of memories surged forward, and each small wavelet made her older and fiercer, but also more amazed and incredulous.

  How she could think, these years later, of bits of childhood things that she hadn’t realized she was taking in. She had the whole of Italy in her mind—murkily, but there it was, a long pennant of a land, with so much to know, so much to appreciate. The shallow hills of rusty scrub in the south, and white villages around tourmaline harbors; and sweep after sweep of wheat and rape and olive, and gnarled nap of grapevine halfway up the slope of every river valley. The blue distances of the lower Apennines, the wind-twisted cypresses and the fierce patriotic pines; the sheep in a panic in the fold, the fox on the prowl in the hen yard. Everywhere, the ruins of Roman temples, like ancient discarded teeth of the long dead giants of the past. The polished glory of the states today, of Florence preening, of Milan preening, of Venice curled up knee-deep in the waves, of Rome too vain to preen. Siena, Lucca, and then Savoy, and the lakes of the Dolomites, splashes of blue and gold whenever you looked, except in snowstorms, when they went white and silver instead.

  She saw all this, she saw the land with an encompassing catalogic clarity, though she had scarcely ever been off the hill at Montefiore, at least not in her livin
g memory. She saw the dozen duomi like so many pepper pots on a table linen painted italia. She saw the separate characters of the seas and knew that the northern Adriatic swelled with different and more insidious force than the southern Tyrrhenian. She saw the remains of the Etruscans and the Athenians and the Phoenicians and the Egyptians and the Cretans and the Visigoths and the Franks, like so many spices scattered into a meat pie. She saw the roads spoking from Rome, a vast asymmetrical wheel. She saw Mithrais in his lair, and Jupiter broadly speaking to Neptune, thundercloud to wine-dark wave. She watched Romulus and Remus suckle from the wolf and then, when their appetites grew more human, eat her. She saw the bishops and the pagan priests and the soothsayers and seers, all much the same man, and she saw much the same woman nearby, watching and helping and performing her little anonymous sabotages. (She looked like Primavera, small and gnarled, an onion left in the root cellar too long, and gone a little soft.) She saw Christ wait in Sicily to be recognized. She saw Saint Peter crucified in Rome, and Savonarola roasted in Florence. She saw the rivers tie themselves in knots of blue, the clouds spell the names of popes in the sky, the rocks pick themselves up and rearrange themselves, and she saw Vesuvius and Aetna lose their tempers.

  But it was Lucrezia Borgia that she cared about, Lucrezia Borgia who was as enmeshed in all this particularity as she herself was. The woman was now sitting on the floor with her legs stretched straight out in front of her. Then she opened her legs slightly and threw back her head and closed her eyes. Her pelvis lifted from the floor and she shuddered.

  Bianca had often seen Fra Ludovico at prayer, and knew that his mutterings could grow so intense that he often forgot he wasn’t alone. (Well, he wasn’t; God was around somewhere.) Now, since Lucrezia Borgia couldn’t know she was being observed, Bianca felt sordid. She dropped her gaze and looked away. When she looked back—yes, as she’d feared; the window was gone. A matted bit of old cloth hung in its place, a tattered moth-eaten tapestry with a picture of a unicorn picked out in dirty white wool, and a hunter peering from a thicket.

  She became impatient; the world of Montefiore had sprung up like a tang in her mouth, like a hexed appetite, and she would have more of it. “Heartless,” she called, “where are you?”

  She looked about. The creatures were there, doing something. Making a meal of some sort. Uselessly. “Can’t you scrape a carrot, even?” she said. “Give me that.” Bianca had scraped few enough carrots in her childhood, but her hands were human hands and could invent a way to do it more efficiently than the dwarves.

  They looked at her with baleful gloom, as if scraping carrots efficiently was their chief ambition in life.

  She thought of several niggling things to say to the seven of them, but as she was sorting out which one, she realized with a start that she was clear that they were seven. She could count them now. “Martedì, mercoledì, giovedì, venerdì,” she said to the four on one side; “sabato, domenica, lunedì,” she said to the others. “What are you doing here all at once?” They jostled like small children, eager and untroubled by sentiment, watching a cook wring the neck of a chicken.

  “What are you doing?” said MuteMuteMute.

  “I’ll make you a meal,” she said. “Why not? I need things, though, things to cook with.” She realized that though she’d eaten—occasionally—the sight of that apple in Lucrezia Borgia’s lap had made her hungry as hell. Hungry not to eat, but to feed someone.

  Suddenly she became happy. “Things to cook with?” MuteMuteMute and Tasteless brought her a large earthenware jug that she recognized as a ghirarium, a storage jug for dormice. She lifted the lid and saw that skeletons of dormice were splayed on the ramps molded against the inside walls. “You’ll have to do better than this, men,” she said.

  They became lively with the game of it. A bloody haunch of venison from a drawer, a splash of melted butter in the heel of a shoe. Eighteen ropes of garlic. A damp heap of hairy borage leaves. Four dried peas. A handful of pine needles and acorns, which she set aside as a garnish. Two giant potatoes, each one as large as the head of—was it Gimpy?—who carried them, one under each arm. A pot of fish eyes like buttons, all still damp and intelligent. Laboriously she lined the fish eyes up along a shelf, like the serving dishes for a party of sea horses, and the eyes followed her as she moved around the table. She’d serve them to Blindeye and see if they helped.

  The room came into crisper focus as she worked, and a smell like real food began to fill the space. The dwarves took to tussling on the floor and singing mean songs about one another, and asking repeatedly when the meal would be ready. “When it’s ready,” she answered, stirring.

  “Bowls,” she said at last. “We need bowls.”

  They stopped their capering and looked at her.

  “Well, wash your hands and get your bowls,” she said.

  They looked; they all had, more or less, hands.

  “There’s a pump in the corner; use it,” she told them. She pointed. By now she knew, yes, there it would be, and there it was.

  They washed and splashed and plugged the pipe with their fingers to spray one another. They found bowls somewhere and brought them to the table. Bianca could locate no spoons, but soup could be drunk from a deep bowl. She used the first bowl as a ladle for the others. When she had supplied each of them with a meal, she found a small stool and sat down with them.

  “Let us thank God for our blessings,” she said.

  “What blessings are those?” asked Bitter.

  “Ourselves, one another, food, and bowls, and God,” she answered. “Come now, fellows.” She made the holy hand gesture and dropped her eyes, and began to mumble in Latin. The dwarves watched her closely and did as she did, though they had no Latin to speak of, and mumbled nonsense instead.

  When they were halfway through with their meal, a bubble of stone began to form in the floor near Bianca’s feet. She watched with curiosity as it swelled in a manner oddly organic. “The floor’s calving,” she remarked, and so it seemed; before her, in a minute or two, stood another dwarf, who looked less human than the others. He stood on two feet, tentatively, though his arms seemed not entirely convinced they were arms. He wore a tunic of sorts to cover his nakedness.

  The dwarves looked at him as if surprised, as if unfamiliar with him. Yet he seemed to be something less than an invader. He seemed to know where he was. He looked at Bianca and nodded, as if there was something about her presence that was satisfying.

  He spoke. The language was guttural, the accents dark and shapely. The seven dwarves flinched. Deaf-to-the-World said, “It’s growling at us.”

  “It wants some of our supper,” said Tasteless. “It’s a fool; the supper’s awful. Who calls this food?”

  “Besides, there’s not enough to go around,” said MuteMuteMute, which was hardly true; the pot was still nearly full. But the newcomer dwarf seemed to need a bone upon which to gnaw, or a scatter of pebbles on the floor, like seed thrown to the fowl.

  The newcomer spoke again, more urgently. The resident dwarves leaned forward, as if trying to understand, but their patience was slim, and one after another they went back to their soup.

  The newcomer came forward and pounded on the table. The dwarves smiled at him as one might smile at a child saying something innocent and stupid. But the soup seemed powerfully good, all of a sudden. They sucked at the marrow from the bones, they splashed the broth, they poked whole onions with their spoons so that onion sleeve gave birth to smaller slimmer onion baby, and onion baby regurgitated onion sleeve again, and so on.

  “Behave,” said Bianca.

  The newcomer growled like a dog. He made his throaty remarks again and again, more and more desperately. The seven dwarves began to make fun of him, to imitate his succulent murmurings and mime his anguished expressions. “Oh, it wants to be loved,” said Bitter. “What a hopeless thing it is.”

  The visitor straightened up as if a new thought had occurred to him, and he brought out of an inner pouch a nice enou
gh apple, from which one thick slice had been taken.

  “Oh, something sweet for after the soup,” said Bianca. “And I’ve been thinking about apples. Well, you’re kind enough to offer this, whoever you are.”

  She found a knife when she put her hand out for one, and she gripped its ivory handle firmly. When offered it, she took the apple, and she saw that the slice that had been taken out was roughly an eighth. She divided the remaining fruit—rare wonderful fruit!—into seven other segments. She offered a slice, one after the next, to the seven dwarves.

  Each dwarf accepted the fruit. Each one took a piece in his dirty hand, and regarded it the way Fra Ludovico considered the Holy Host. Each one partook of the offering, for good or ill.

  Bianca sat back, bemused, affectionate, interested. The chair was suddenly comfortable; it had cushions, and a small stool for her feet, carved in the Roman style.

  The dwarves made little display of their satisfaction or their regret at the sweet, though they didn’t clamor for more nor immediately push away from the table. Gimpy folded his arms across his stout chest and achieved a look of reflection. Heartless stroked his beard—he was the red beard!—and began fishing through his pockets as if for a pipe. MuteMuteMute smiled and began to hum a melody Bianca almost thought she remembered: a sprightly, cogwork melody with no apparent beginning or end. Deaf-to-the-World took up the knife and began to play with a splinter from the edge of the table, teasing it into a form of some sort. Tasteless sprayed a glorious smile in everyone’s direction and began to snore. Bitter scowled at his brother’s laxness and pounded one stubby finger on the table, as if rehearsing arguments internally so to be ready to drive points home when the conversation began in earnest. And Blindeye turned his head and looked at Bianca as if he had never seen her before. When she caught his eye, she smiled, but he ducked his chin and lowered his eyes, suddenly mortified at his temerity.