She varnished one half of the Apple with the poison—the half toward which the last remaining silver leaf pointed, like a trembling needle. The tight, unwithering red skin of the holy fruit took the application sympathetically; indeed, only by the closest peering could she see the faint line that marked the edge of the brushwork.
One side, holy improvement; the other, an instant death.
The world was so easy to face with a tool like this in her hand.
She dressed carefully, finely, in the richest gown she happened to have on hand, and tied ropes of pearls about her waist and looped other strands of pearls through her hair. Then she flung open Vicente’s wardrobe and pulled from a hook a crimson cloak that had belonged to María Inés de Castedo y Nevada. Lucrezia didn’t know if Bianca would recognize the garment, but it felt superb to dress herself in it. The fit was perfect.
She swept through the salone, startling Primavera, who was just getting around to opening the wooden panels at the windows. The old woman crossed herself and followed as fast as her legs allowed.
Lucrezia flung open the door onto the loggia. Fra Ludovico was carting armloads of brilliant yellow ginestra to the roofless chapel. “Looks like our Duchessa is off to market,” he said, but at a second glance he added, “and she intends to buy the market. Where on earth are you going?” Her look was so venomous and straitened that without delay he flung down the blossoms in two intersecting lines, making a yellow cross on the ground. It didn’t hold her back. She trod upon it and kept going.
Appearing at the corner of the house, Vicente was on his way to continue his search. Daily he was making ever wider circuits out from the house, and one day he knew he would not come back. Now he gasped and fell into a fit of catarrh, raising his staff against her. That very cloak. “Villain,” he said, or tried to, his voice merely a throttle of phlegm in his throat.
“Bother,” she answered, distractedly. “Who can tell me where Michelotto is?”
Vicente wouldn’t and Fra Ludovico wouldn’t and Primavera Vecchia couldn’t even if she wanted to. Lucrezia found her son by herself, loitering in the sheepfold at the bottom of the slope. She proposed that he escort her into the woods for a walk. She was eager to see the rural springtime flowers. She would have company, and a young man’s arm, as she didn’t want to slip into a bog or tread upon a snake.
“You are too lovely to walk in the woods,” he said cautiously.
“Then let the woods improve themselves as I pass by.”
The cottage came into view. Michelotto seemed surprised to find it; perhaps he didn’t remember having seen it before? Or who might live within? No matter. Lucrezia paused at the edge of the clearing and said, “Let’s pause, have a bite to eat, you and I.”
She withdrew from an inner pocket of the cloak a portion of cheese, a small loaf of bread, and the Apple, which was wrapped in a coppery silk cloth for safekeeping.
“I don’t care for bread or cheese,” said Michelotto, “though the Apple looks fine enough.”
“The Apple isn’t for you,” she said. “But isn’t it appetizing?”
She held it up, and her own hunger for it began to gnaw at her. The air in the clearing fell still, and the bees about the doorway of the dwarves’ cottage seemed to cease their noisy commerce with flowers.
“Please,” he said. “I rarely ask you for anything.”
“Eat the bread if you’re hungry,” she said again. “The Apple is for another.”
“Who?” he asked, and she realized that, just possibly, he didn’t see the cottage before them. What a liability a slanted mind was.
At last, cursing mildly below his breath, he grabbed the bread and broke a segment off, and fitted a hunk of cheese upon it, and ate the two together, his eyes on the Apple all the while. It took little enough time for his eyes to grow heavy, as she knew they must. Still, waiting, she was almost driven mad herself by the rosy scent of the Apple.
Then Michelotto stretched, and yawned happily, and fell to the ground, heavy as lead. She waited a minute or two, and shook him roughly, but her labors over the bread had proved effective. He didn’t stir. Had she a mind to, she could have sliced his heart out of his chest and held it up for review, and he would never have awakened until the sedation wore off. How helpful to have a talent for cooking.
She got up and walked to the door of the dwarves’ cottage, and rapped upon it with impertinence.
“I am told not to open the door to anyone,” came the voice of Bianca de Nevada from within.
“And a sensible precaution, in these times,” said Lucrezia Borgia in her own voice. “I hear tell of men abusing the lonely maidens in their cow stalls and convent cells around here. But I’m a friend of your family’s, and I’m in sorest need. You may remember me or you may not; you may think of me well or ill; it doesn’t bother me. But my companion has fallen ill, and I want a scupper of water to revive him.”
She could hear Bianca pause.
“There is water in every stream,” she said.
“I don’t have the time, and I don’t want to leave him alone here. Rogues roam the countryside in these perilous times. Weren’t you bothered by someone yourself, recently? For the love of mercy, Bianca, open the door and at least pass me a flask of water; I ask for nothing more than that.”
Such small charity couldn’t be denied a traveler in need, Lucrezia knew, and Bianca was forced to open the top half of the door.
“Oh,” she cried as Lucrezia had known she must. “Not you, no,” and she went to slam the panel shut. But Lucrezia nudged an elbow in and stopped her, and pointed wanly at her son, ensnaring the girl’s attention through her instinct for good works.
“Michelotto, Michelotto. What has happened. I’ll fetch water—”
She disappeared for a moment and brought back a small earthenware flagon.
Lucrezia accepted the water without comment and crossed to the body of the boy, which looked convincingly crumpled and lifeless. She knew that water would revive him shortly. She had only a handful of instants in which to finish her task. Gently she raised his head onto her lap and used a finger to work his mouth open. She dribbled a little water onto his tongue. Some of it trickled out the corners of his mouth, making him seem more like his slack-jawed self, even though comatose.
“Is he recovering?” asked Bianca. She hadn’t come outside. She’d been well warned by those dwarves. But her hands twisted at the top of the locked lower portion of the door, worrying.
“He may, in time,” said Lucrezia. “I’m glad I remembered you were here, Bianca de Nevada. I had heard about it, but hardly believed it.”
“Who knew such a thing?” said Bianca warily.
“Your father.”
Bianca drove the heels of both hands into the sockets of her eyes. Her spine shook and her garment slipped off one shoulder. “Don’t speak to me of my father,” she said, when she could talk. “He made it his career to leave me, when I needed him. He took his instruction from you and your brother, when he might have stood up to you. He might have taken me with him. You lie to me, you old woman.”
Lucrezia Borgia couldn’t be moved by the sentiment, nor could she forgive the insult. Old woman. Old. But she smiled with the wiles of a thousand years, and said, “A child will rail against the inevitable, and then, as an adult, will learn that the inevitable can be avoided. My dear, you are marooned in a magical grave, a tumulus of ancient embittered spirits, and you refuse to emerge, out of fear and horror of the world, and of me. But I am atoning for having borrowed your father from you. I’ve come to withdraw you from your grave, to restore you to life and to your father. Vicente de Nevada has come back to Montefiore. He’s there now. He has sent me here to collect you. He has sent his proof.”
She unfolded from the sepal-like corners of the cloth the magnificent Apple. “Here is what he has found for us, the treasure he was dispatched to collect all those years ago. Though we need it no longer, it retains its holy magic. It will release you the rest of the wa
y into your life, and you can come with me. When Michelotto awakes we will, the three of us, return to Montefiore, and reunite you with your father.”
Lucrezia had been speaking without design, by instinct, but she could see by the widening of the girl’s eyes that she had put into words some silly belief the girl held. “I don’t know why I should trust you,” Bianca said at last, but her chin yearned forward, out of her tomb, and her voice was soft. She was still so young, so foolish. Petty ignorance has its charm, to be sure.
“I’ll show you I mean you no harm,” said Lucrezia. “Your father brought this holiest of sacred totems for Cesare, but it can do him no good; he is dead, and his corpse rots in a graveyard in Navarre. But let it do you good, and me besides. Look, I will show you it’s safe; I will eat some of it myself.”
She held it up in the sun, and turned the leaf so it pointed toward Bianca de Nevada. Then she slaked her own hunger with a single bite from the unvarnished side of the holy fruit.
She couldn’t say how she felt; she had seldom had words for happiness. Happiness was a cruel hoax, usually, eclipsing momentarily the true sour nature of the world. Yet now she had a moment of rankest hope, that perhaps beneath the shining aspect of the world there was a dark richness, a vein of clarifying joy. She waited for the giubilo immenso to pass, for that is the nature of visions; they slam to a close and then, my dears, that is that. Better not to have had them at all. But the moment lingered until it wasn’t a moment, or she was inside the moment in a way so full it had infinite riches to it, aspects of immortality her usual apprehension denied her . . .
Like the sun coming out unexpectedly on a prospect of lagoon, lighting the surface of the water on fire with white, and someone like Cesare coming forward on the quay.
Michelotto burbled behind her insensibly, and she knew that time was passing, she knew it must be, though she couldn’t feel it. She smiled more genuinely than she expected to, and held out the Apple to Bianca de Nevada.
“Oh, you try too,” she said.
The girl held the fruit in both hands and trained her eyes upon Lucrezia. “You are known for your poison,” she said, “but if God would will it, I would rather be removed from a world in which you can lie to me so.” She bit from the side, the silver leaf trembling. Michelotto sat up suddenly and retched all over himself. Bianca dropped the Apple and her eyes slid up into her skull.
The oval window
WHETHER IT be the highest of holy days or the day a comet smites a granary, the farm chores always need to be done. Despite the shock of seeing Lucrezia Borgia in glamorous dudgeon, the household had gotten on with its day. Fra Ludovico and Primavera were down in the fields, Fra Ludovico to perform a blessing over the spring planting, Primavera to supply some pastries and ale to the contadini. No longer interested in his estate, Vicente had taken a small bark onto the mirrored surface of Lago Verde, and he stirred at the muddy bottom of the water, trying to dislodge any corpse he might find.
Montefiore had stood undefended.
So the dwarves had come in, without invitation, and made their way with some effort up the flight of steps to the piano nobile and through the door. It wasn’t their noses so much as their ears that turned their steps leftward beyond the entrance hall, because the glass made a sound of rippling, a kind of crystalline lapping. They could hear it sag. They weren’t so far beyond their earlier selves that they had lost that capacity.
There it was. The mirror waited for them. They still had a choice.
Getting it down from the wall was harder, though, than it looked. Nextday decided at last to enter the wall and unhook it from behind, and let the other dwarves wait before the fireplace and catch it. But he couldn’t enter the wall; it resisted, a convincing otherness, separate from him. He felt as if he couldn’t breathe for an instant, and the dread was full and interesting in itself; he rather liked it. But the job was neither to panic nor to observe how to avoid panic, but to get the mirror. So at last they pulled a table over from the center of the room and scrambled onto it.
In the end, they managed all right, and the mirror was removed from the place it had hung the past decade or two—a mere breath in their long life, but a painful breath, a held breath; and they felt coarser, richer, more devious, more themselves, to have it back among them.
Nextday found a length of fabric to blind the mirror’s eye. They carried it out as miners will carry a fallen brother, among them; there was something corpselike about the slight bulge of the glass beneath the shroud. It was stored in the wheelbarrow, and Gimpy, the roundest among them, got in with it, to cushion it with the softness of his belly.
They began to sing, merrily for them, as they made their way from Montefiore. A rooster crowed, a dog or two barked tympanically; the winds contributed atonal sostenuti. It felt good to be unformed, ready, capable of possibility.
No one saw them come or go.
In time, they reached their lair, which to them had never looked like a cottage, nor hardly a cave, but was still home, with all the musty coprolitic warmth and personality of home. The glamour of the mirror, even behind its shroud, commanded their attention, and they were well into their fourth or fifth argument about how and where the splendor should be set, and in what ways to revel about its recovery, when they finally stumbled upon the body of Bianca and took her for dead.
They began to weep and curse. Not for love of her, particularly, but because their transaction had been compromised. The mirror had come at too stiff a price, and while they had it, it wasn’t free and clear. So Nextday tore the shroud off the mirror and they looked at themselves therein.
They were seven or eight or nine small men, bleeding obstinately toward some kind of humanity, stuck in a process of change that they could no longer vary. They might have used their mirror as an escape hatch, to ask it the single correct question, the only question a mirror ever cares about: not who did I used to be, nor who am I now, but who am I to become?—for the secret act of light that fires a mirror is this: A mirror’s image is always forward of the truth by an instant or so. While a question is formulating—Who is the fairest of us all, say, or How many crow’s feet can I pretend not to have today? or Is this the face of a murderer?—the mirror always knows the answer before the question is asked.
The dwarves had hobbled out of their stony natures partly by accident and somewhat by design, but they had hoped, at last, to be able to choose whether to consider the experiment a failed one, and if so, to retreat into their lost selves, and subside, insensate, insensible even. But now they couldn’t empty their pockets of memory, of irritation, of regret or conundrum, of paradox or paradise. They were trapped by the laws of their own devising.
Feeling the old moments silting away, Nextday took his all-but-human hands and put them upon the bowed glass of the mirror. He was able at least to remove the glass from the poisonous quicksilver behind it. However, he could no longer absorb the constituent parts of glass into his skin. He was left with a long oval of glass that could reflect nothing—a long anonymous shield, barren of deceit. The looking glass, clear enough now, without the looking aspect.
Putting the glass down, he huffed and ejected a knob of mucus, and his back bent over. He looked as if he would vomit with grief, but he didn’t. He dropped his head lower and scratched in the ground for something, and his tail hung in dejection.
The others set about to construct a coffin for Bianca de Nevada, and partly from sorrow—for their sadness strengthened as they began to recognize their castaway status—and partly for punishment, they set the glass from the mirror into the lid of the coffin, so the girl’s beautiful form could decompose as they watched, and as it rotted, their own indictment and incarceration would be more fully nailed upon them too.
I am a woman who killed for love
I am a woman who killed for love.
I am a woman who killed for lack of love.
The mirror declares that the twin accusations are equal.
I am the black dove who
pecks at the coffin
Wanting to manage a more reliable insult,
To chew her eyes from their sockets, say, to wring
The hair from her head, to desecrate the silk
Of her unblemished skin in the way that birds do best.
Reflections
THERE WAS no Apple left, for when she fell, the Apple rolled into the door behind her. I didn’t think to try to reclaim it until I was thirty or forty feet away, hustling that sluggish goose of a gooseboy up the slope. When I turned back, uncertain, I saw that the house had disappeared. There was simply a tumulus in a glade. Shadows of blue and granite. Traces of winter’s snow lingered in long striations, like the thin fingers of ancient women who refuse to clasp their hands in prayer and decently die. There was no door, no smoking chimney, and all I could smell was leaf rot and mold, and the wet earth waking up again.
Michelotto, small miracle of contradictions, was chattier as we came closer to Montefiore, and began to ask about the cottage in the forest. I hadn’t thought he noticed it, or remembered it at all if he did notice it, but he seemed clarified in mind. As if his episode in a coma had given his feeble mind a better rest than it was used to getting. “A girl lived there,” he said. “And I spoke to her.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “I’m sure there was. When you were little you used to speak to the geese, and you claimed they spoke to you too.”