Palimpsest

“I don't understand.” Ludo opened his eyes to a room flooded with sunlight, all the brighter for her sparse belongings. The sunlight seemed to be unsure of what to do in the absence of a couch to fade or curtains to shine through, and so had gone helplessly nova in the center of Nerezza's living room. He groaned again, his head throbbing like a struck bell.

  “Don't you? I know it's hard to keep in your head, a hard wrestle, like Jacob and that angel. But she's there, you must see that. You saw her. She's there and safe and you don't have to worry about her anymore.”

  “Where the fuck is there?” Ludo did not often swear, but he felt he had placed the word perfectly, squarely.

  Nerezza looked at her shoes. She was dressed already, in cream and camel, impeccable, and Ludo thought she probably didn't know how to be anything less than that.

  “Palimpsest,” she whispered. “Don't make me… I don't like saying it. Here. I don't like saying it here.”

  Ludovico extricated himself clumsily from her and stalked into the small kitchen, buttering bread and slicing cheese for himself without speaking to her. He could feel her watching him fumble with her knives, knew his cheeks blazed with little points of blush that could not quite spread.

  Nerezza folded and unfolded her hands. “I know—”

  “I am not discussing this,” he snapped.

  “You were there, Ludo! You saw the horses. You ate a snail with a silver shell. You saw her, you saw Paola—that's her lover's name, Paola. Did you know her?” Nerezza hurried on. “You sat next to me and I tasted your tears.”

  “I had a bad fucking dream.” He felt satisfied having used that word again, as though it were a badge he could wear and polish.

  “Dreams don't work like that. Two people don't dream identical dreams.”

  “I am not discussing it.”

  Nerezza shrugged. “It's not that I feel responsible for you. I feel…” She stared at the precise moons of her cuticles. Strands of dark hair had begun to work loose from the meticulously messy knot at the nape of her neck. “I feel that Lucia left her life untidy and as her friend it is my duty to order it. If not for her, I would never have seen the things I've seen. It is the least I can do to…” She looked sidelong at him through her lashes. Ludo could not tell whether she meant the expression to look kittenish or morbid. “Feed her animals while she's gone.”

  Ludo gripped the edges of the cream-colored countertop. He shut his eyes; the sunlight turned his eyelids to a ruby smear. Had she been here? Had she eaten this brown bread with crystals of coppery sugar in the crust? Had she let a cigarette sigh into ash on that light-scoured terrace? He tasted the snail still on his lips; there were such screams in his ears, ringing, ringing! But it was a mad thing, an impossible thing. Leave it to Lucia to find a madness so big she could vanish into it and drag him with her, far behind, weeping for her, like a penitent on a chain, stumbling behind the priest's cart.

  “If you want to see her again,” Nerezza said quietly, “you have to accept this. It's fairly simple, in the end.”

  “If she wanted to leave me, there might have been a divorce. I've always liked legal documents. They feel so real. That would have been easier. Quicker. More final.”

  “This is very final. Or will be, when she's finished.”

  “You don't know her. You don't know us. She will find a way back to me, if the world is as you say and all this is real.”

  Nerezza laughed, a bark, a snap of an eel's electric tail. “She's gone, Ludo. And if she's lucky, she'll soon be in Palimpsest forever, and you'll only see her if you fuck the right shopgirl.”

  “But she's not there yet? Not completely? She's somewhere here, too, in Italy, in Europe? America?”

  Nerezza threw up her hands in disgust. “Oh, for Christ's sake. No one has gotten there yet, completely, permanently. But yes. I drove her to the airport. So that she could try. I helped her get a passport. You have no idea what she and I have been through together—I was there, I watched her go, toward Paola and Palimpsest and all of it. I helped her. She would have bled through her eyes for it. So would I. God,” she raised her eyes to the impassive ceiling, “if only the toll were as cheaply paid as that. If only I could bleed and that would be enough.”

  Helpless in the face of his idiocy, she lifted her slim shoulders and let them fall. He tired her, he could see it. An animal who made a mess all over her house. His tears and his semen on her sheets, the endless laundry of him, the endless water he required and gave back uglier, saltier, than he had received it.

  A small knock came at the door, like a polite cough. Nerezza's face did a curious thing; it flushed, and she smiled, a smile which seemed to come out of her marrow, raw and livid. Her dark eyes dazzled and Ludo quailed from her a little, from this woman, the mark of whose mouth still blazed on his cheek.

  A man and a woman stood at the door, clutching each other's hands fiercely. Nerezza took them both in her arms and the three of them stood for a moment, their heads pressed together, their arms hanging limp around each other's waists. Ludo bit his lip, bearing within him the awful feeling of stalking in the cold just outside the warm glow of a fire, unable to draw closer. The man kissed the top of Nerezza's head with a rough tenderness; the woman laid her head in the crook of her shoulder. When they finally broke ranks, Nerezza led them both by the hand to the kitchen, where Ludo shrank against the wall, trying not to appear as though he shrank at all. They were strangers, their eyes full of tears, and they advanced on him like assassins. He longed to flee.

  “I asked them to come, Ludo,” Nerezza said. Her voice was rough and harsh, an eel-voice, from the deeps, and he found in that moment that he hated it. “So that we could explain to you, so that they could. It's a hard progress we make, and lonely, frightening—but it doesn't have to be like that. This is Anoud, and this is Agostino. They are my lovers.” She paused for a moment, as if to make space for Ludo's disapproval to have its little fit. “But that's not why they're here.” The two of them nodded eagerly. Anoud was dark, Moroccan maybe, her skin the color of old dust. Agostino was tall and ascetic, with an ungainly nose and a distantly grieving expression. He looked to Ludo like a man who wept often. The trio guided him to the long chaises of Nerezza's minimal living room, and he allowed himself to be seated, his limbs arranged like a doll's. They stared at each other for a long time, unwilling to be the first to speak, but Anoud and Agostino did not let go of Nerezza's hands, clutching them so tightly that the tips of her thumbs had gone purple. Nerezza began, her voice soft, buoyed by her lovers’ presence.

  “Do you remember, Ludovico, the first night? Do you remember the house with the frog-woman in it?”

  He did not want to admit to this. It was like admitting to syringes in the refrigerator or being unable to read. He did not like to be pried open at the hinges and stared into, murmured about in disapproving tones. Why couldn't Lucia just stay with him, in their little home, with their books and their roasted chickens? Why must this horrid scene now play out?

  “Yes,” he said gruffly, biting the word in two.

  “Her name is Orlande,” said Agostino. His words echoed loudly, too loud in this place.

  “Do you remember that you were not alone?” asked Anoud sweetly, looking tenderly at Nerezza, and a flood of jealousy released bile into Ludo's heart.

  “You must think very hard, Ludo,” said Nerezza. “You must try to remember. There were others, with you. Then, and now. When you sat in the stands with me, you felt them, you felt someone else eating when you had no plate before you. Someone else kissing when you were not.”

  He struggled—it is never easy to remember a dream. A fleeting vision of long, blue hair swept through him, and he shuddered with it. St Isidore, you never imagined this thing, Ludo implored silently. In what column would you have placed it?

  “There were three of them,” Ludo said slowly, and he felt the weight of that memory lift from him. “One had blue hair. She was very young. Another, I think, another had a bee sting on her face. And
there was a man with keys hanging from his belt.”

  “Yes,” breathed Nerezza. “Anoud and Agostino, you understand, were there when I sat in Orlande's shop, when I put my feet into the ink.”

  “Only two?”

  Nerezza pressed her lips together until they went white, and her companions would not look at him. They seemed to sag into each other, their breath stolen.

  “About three years ago,” Nerezza said, “our friend Radoslav was killed. He was the other one, in Orlande's shop with us. It's … so hard to stay careful there. It is easy to become involved in unsavory things, and easier still to find oneself without shelter in dark alleys. There are people in Palimpsest—they call themselves Dvorniki… it means ‘street-cleaners.’ They're veterans, you remember? Like I showed you, at the races. Their leader, or priestess, or whatever, has a shark's head. They hold sabbats in doorways, any doorway, but they have a great, huge one built in the basement of the big train station… you haven't been there yet, though. Anyway, it's just an empty, carved doorframe, all black. No door, no hinge. And they… well, it's wonderful there, in Palimpsest, but sometimes it's not very nice.”

  Anoud took up when Nerezza's voice faltered—Ludo did not even know such a thing could happen! “Radoslav cheated a Dvornik at Valorous,” she continued. “That's a game, with little copper stars you move around a board covered in white silk. He couldn't have known the man was political. Radya was just… like that. Reckless. They came for him while he was drinking licorice wine in a hotel—the most civilized thing you can imagine, and the Dvorniki just grabbed him, with crab claws and donkey jaws…. They dragged him to the train station, to that big black doorframe, and they cut his throat on the lintel, praying that no immigrants should ever find their way to Palimpsest, that his blood would seal all the ways and roads.”

  “It's so stupid.” Agostino sighed. “Brutal, idiotic, Neolithic rituals, and they don't work anyway. If they worked there would never have been a war.”

  Ludo shook his head. “I'm sorry he died, but—”

  “You don't understand,” Nerezza snapped, her eel-tail back, her blue sparks crackling. “We wrote letters to him. We talked on the phone, for hours and hours. We had found him working in a provincial post office in Isaszey in Hungary, of all absurd places. We had planned to meet that summer, we had rooms at the Sofitel in Budapest, we had planned it like a picnic. We needed time, you see, time to tidy things. And to delay the pleasure of it was natural to us.”

  Again, Nerezza lifted her shoulders—not a shrug, but her only gesture of helplessness, of submission to the constellations and the turning of invisible clocks. The grief on their faces was so naked that Ludo turned away from it with the same propriety he would have shown to a girl caught undressing.

  “But didn't he just wake up? I mean, if it happened there, shouldn't he be all right here? Isn't that how it works?”

  Anoud began to cry softly, little wrinkled noises he could hardly hear. Agostino caressed her face with two curled fingers. Nerezza stared stonily at him and shook her head.

  “Do you remember how often Lucia traveled out of Italy before she disappeared?” Nerezza continued, abandoning his question. She did not weep, even a little.

  No, of course he didn't remember. Lucia left; she came home. He did not try to track her, what would be the use, with that great tail, that determined erasure? Where had she gotten the money for such things? Impossible that this could have occurred while he looked the other way, that Lucia could have been so consumed by something not him. He wanted Nerezza to stop talking, to just shut up and leave him alone.

  “She was looking for her… Quarto. That's what it's called. What immigrants call it.”

  Anoud laughed through her tears, a squeaky, mouselike sound. “That's us,” she said. “Immigrants. Saying these words is always so hard! They sound so ridiculous in the daylight, with coffee in the pot and cats crying to be let in. They sound poor and small. But we did know her, Ludovico. We all did. There are not so many of us that we do not find ways to know each other. She was looking for them, and she found two of them. Their names are Alastair and Paola. We never met them. Paola was Canadian; that's so far away.”

  “But Hal,” Agostino cut in, his gangly arms still draped around both women, “Hal lives in—” Nerezza shushed him, and he hurried on without naming a city. Ludo wanted to throttle him. “Well, he wasn't so far. They met just a little while ago. They found each other, like we did. And they went to find the others together. We think… we think that's how it's done. How you get to Palimpsest permanently. How you… emigrate. We think you have to find your Quarto here, in this world.”

  Ludo felt his blood beat against his face. The great unsaid thing floated heavy and choleric in the room. “Am I correct,” he said, “in assuming that there is no one in this room who has not slept with my wife?”

  He had been prepared for silence and took it for his answer. Ludo was, he knew, deep in the book of beasts, crushed between their many pages, growling all around. Anoud slid out of the grasp of her lovers’ hands and alighted by him. She had a pinched nose, small eyes—an ungenerous face, he thought. A mouse, certainly, if ever a woman had been a mouse. Hay-child, impossible generation, and such plagues. He was distracted by her hands, so slender he could not imagine there was flesh between skin and bone, and on her smallest finger was a carnelian ring, a smear of red on gold, the tiniest of stones.

  Ludo had bought it in Ostia that long-ago summer, the summer of the yellow dress, when he and Lucia sought out that wonderful pecan-red shade on everything: rings, couches. When they bought wildly things to build a house around them, certain that nothing they laid their hands on would ever need altering, replacing.

  Ludovico reached for Anoud's hand and she gave it warmly, stroking his cheek with the other, a kind attention, as if soothing a child whose knee has been skinned. But he did not want her hand. He tugged at the little ring; it would not come. Anoud tried to draw her hand away, but he seized her wrist and scrabbled at the ring with his fingernails. His tears came as quickly as her little well of blood beneath the band, and between their fluids he wrested it from her, his breath hitching with panicked cries. Anoud held her finger to her lips and glared at him, wounded, bereft. Her gaze flickered to Nerezza and back to him. She inched closer, carefully, a little mouse seeking the owl's audience, with one round ear lost already. She held her scratched hand to his mouth; he knew this gesture, as every Catholic child knows it, and he kissed the signet of her blood.

  “I'm sorry,” Anoud whispered. “I loved her, if that matters. It's easy for me to fall in love. You could say I'm a prodigy. I loved her, and I can love you. I can see a day not so very far distant when you bring me tea before dawn and kiss the hair from my forehead. My capacities are not less than hers.”

  She kissed him truly, her tongue small and hesitant, her curly hair brushing his cheeks. She tasted strange, foreign in his mouth, like a red spice. Ludovico's bones groaned in him. She was sweeter and smaller than Nerezza. Softer. More tamed, gentler, eager to be loved.

  “Don't you want to see it?” Anoud breathed. “Just see the races and the feasts and the ocean? Just taste the air? Don't you remember how sweet the wind is there? Does the city hold nothing you desire?”

  Ludovico did remember, after all. Not just Lucia. He remembered the snail-seller, and the sea wind. Fine, he thought. I give in. I give in to this, if that is what is asked. If I must pay in women for the city, for all it contains. I can bend under it as under God. As I bent under Lucia, my star of the sea, my endless storm.

  And so Ludo returned Anoud's kiss. He pulled her white shirt from dark shoulders and pressed his face to her breasts, fuller than Lucia's, with nipples like coffee beans. He cried out into her skin and she accepted his cry with a merciful quiet, letting his cry fall all the way down to her heart. She guided him onto her, moved Nerezza's spare bathrobe aside to bring him into her, arching her back to show him the hidden smallnesses of her mouse-body pressing her
knees to his hips. Ludovico looked past her as he rocked back and forth with her motion, providing little of his own. She was so slight he hardly felt her beneath him, just the wet warmth of her around him, clutching gently. Ludo was silent, aghast in his submission, the little ring still clutched tight in his fist. He looked to Nerezza—shameless thing!—her head thrown back in Agostino's arms as he thrust his angular body into her over and over, his braying bull-voice muffled in her neck. Her mouth was open, her face streaked with tears.

  PALIMPSEST POSSESSES TWO CHURCHES They are identical in every way. They stand together, wrapping the street corner like a hinge. Seven white columns each, wound around with black characters that are not Cyrillic, but to the idle glance might seem so. Two peaked roofs of red lacquer and two stone horses with the heads of fork-tongued lizards stand guard on either side of each door. The ancient faithful built them with stones from the same quarry on the far eastern border of the city, pale green and dusty, each round and perfect as a ball. There is more mortar in the edifices than stones, mortar crushed from Casimira dragonflies donated by the vat, tufa dust, and mackerel tails. The pews are scrubbed and polished with lime oil, and each Thursday, parishioners share a communion of slivers of whale meat and cinnamon wine. The only difference between the two is in the basement-two great mausoleums with alabaster coffins lining the walls, cal-ligraphed with infinite care and delicacy in the blood of the departed beloved contained within. In the far north corners are raised platforms covered in offerings of cornskin, chocolate, tobacco.

  In one church, the coffin contains a blind man. In the other, it contains a deaf woman. Both have narwhal s horns extending from their foreheads; both died young. The modern faithful visit these basement-saints and leave what they can at the feet of the one they love best.

  Giustizia has been a devotee of the Unhearing since she was a girl-her yellow veil and turquoise-ringed thumbs are familiar to all in the Left-Hand Church; she brings the cornskins, regular as sunrise. When she dies, they will bury her here, in a coffin of her own.