Page 20 of Palimpsest


  Hester had cried with him and eaten the rest of his lunch. She did not come back for two days, and he mildly wondered what might happen if she left him, if she decided that he was not kin to her after all. He supposed he would starve. Mila would come then, wouldn't she? She'd have to, to get him. To pack his bags for the country of death.

  But Hester returned, wearing two scarves against the cold, and set a great, swollen address book beside him on the graying floor. Business cards stuck out of it like porcupine quills. It bristled.

  “I told you they always tried to find me,” she said. “It used to happen so often. Nightclubs and bus stops and grocery stores, they'd just come up to me and grab me, like they had the right. I spat at them, especially when they sat there, all fat and in love, and tried to tell me all the wonderful things they'd seen. But I keep everything, really, everything.”

  There were numbers, so many, and addresses. Organized, if not neatly. He looked up at her, imploring. How could he choose?

  “Fine, fine,” she snapped. “Boy or girl?”

  He laughed hollowly. “I'm not… in fighting shape. I think it'll have to be a boy.”

  Hester wrinkled her nose, though he could not tell if her distaste was for his choice or that he meant to do this at all. But there was a boy, by dinnertime—hardly a boy, a bookish-looking man with a thin beard that ran around his jawline and a long coat with its collar turned up. He kissed Hester and she let him, but when his hand strayed to her breast she bit him, hard, and shoved him toward Oleg in the sodden bedroom. He tripped a little on the doorframe. Hester stood in the doorway, shaking, rubbing her fingertips and keeping her mouth so tightly closed a soul could not have slipped through the space.

  The bookish man did not seem to mind Oleg's thinness, or that he was too weak with hunger and too much sleep to do much of anything but let himself be kissed, his legs plied open. But the man had a gentleness in his mouth, held there like a sliver of candy, a sliver of sweetness. He looked with understanding and pity on Oleg, and held him so very close.

  “I know,” he whispered in his ear, “I know.”

  And there had been some heat, some pain, some desire in his dull, depleted body when Oleg felt himself suddenly full of the bookish man, suddenly weeping with need for this, for this living thing within him, for the leaping, bright, and blood-rich life that was abruptly in him where only sleep and Mila had been before. The man held his sharp hips firmly and tenderly, so as not to bruise him, and came quickly as though he knew Oleg could not take very much of this. He called a name as he did, and Oleg wished him well of that stranger, wherever they were, wherever he could find them.

  Hester watched, and wept, and clutched her book to her chest.

  ONE MUST CRAWL TO ENTER A TEAHOUSE. Those who do not know this are too prideful ever to approach. There is a door in the side, big enough for shoulders, for a head bent in humility. The roof is thatched from the fingernails of hermits who send small black boxes full of translucent clippings every winter. They are never yellow, or else the true connoisseur would know that the tea brewed there is inferior, brewed by those of dubious skill and biography.

  Darkness confronts you when you enter; there is so little light to be found when you are on your knees. The dim shadows clear as your feeble eyes adjust, and you see the golden walls, like skin, like the inside of a saints body. There are pillows for your penitent knees. A painting on the wall shows, in the quick, sure brushstrokes of a certain school of art, a city whose buildings are nearly as tall and spired as those of Palimpsest. But it is not Palimpsest, and you know it. It is just a landscape, like a mountain, or a flower; it was the great fashion some years past to sketch cities of the mind, places remembered or hoped for, with the same reverence given to a peony or a plover.

  A man and a woman move through a ceremony which will be inexplicable to you, ignorant and foreign as you are. Rosalie will draw her tongs of mother-of-pearl from her dress and pull new cups from a kiln of great beauty and delicate construction, whose gaping red mouth is the only light in the teahouse. Scamander will draw his tongs of black pearl from an ice bath, and pluck a disc of frozen tea from an icebox of great beauty and delicate construction whose gaping blue mouth is all you are able to see. There are tea leaves suspended in the greenish ice. He places the disc within the glowing cup, and the cup is cooled by it as the tea is heated, and the steam which unfolds is as rare and sweet as a ghost of sugarcane long perished. They will hold your head as you drink, exactly as parents teaching their child to drink will do. And when you have had your fill, they will smash the cups against the wall and wail in grief for their passing, and you will be brought low by their pure and piercing cries.

  I taught them how to do this, when all of us were young. I do hope you enjoy our little local customs.

  Scamander and Rosalie have spent their lives in service of this ritual, and they believe wholly in the symmetrical thinness of the edge of a teacup on the potter's wheel and the edge of the tea as it freezes. These things are full of meaning for them, and they wrote a monograph on the subject when they were in the fullness of their faith. Their teahouse is situated in a small park between Seriatim Boulevard and Deshabille Street, a trapezoidal space with seven white stones in a pleasing arrangement under a larch tree, which was confused in its profligate youth and now drops chestnuts each spring. In order to reach it, one must dodge the traffic rails, which are well-greased and smooth here, and leap into the park before one is crushed by a carriage, motorized or muscle-drawn.

  This, too, is pregnant with significance in the eyes of Rosalie and her husband, for grace may only be found briefly, and always in the midst of madness.

  Ludovico does not know he is meant to crawl, but it has become his natural locomotion, like a rabbit jumping. It is dark inside, as it should be, and he lifts his eyes to the crowded house only to see what he has so long wished to: a blond woman with a green scarf sitting calmly cross-legged as a deva. She holds the naked hand of another woman in hers, a woman with mad black hair and a stare like a lion flicking its tail.

  I have saved this for him. For us to watch, and for him to suffer. But I could not hold her back from him any longer. Perhaps I am over-eager I know you will forgive me.

  It is Lucia, of course it is Lucia, why should it not be Lucia? Why should this not be granted to him, this chance and this grace? If he would but ask Scamander about the coincidence of it, the old man would explain about discs of ice, and how they thin as the edge approaches. The place where air meets ice is fraught with possibility, and it is not for mortal men to inhabit.

  Ludovico whispers to his wife.

  “Lucia. Oh, Lucia. You're here. You're here.”

  Her eyes constrict. She stiffens as if to run, but the ceiling is too low and it would be an impoliteness beyond bearing.

  The blond woman beside her, who can only be Paola, coughs apologetically and Lucia nods to him exactly as a stranger just introduced might: meaningless kisses on the cheeks, a cold countenance, but she is shaking. As her lips graze the still-hot rim of her cup, her chimera mouth pleads without sound:

  Please go. Let me have this.

  But Ludo does not know the protocols. He is too full of tears and hope for that. He cries out, loudly, and the room freezes, the drinkers sneer, their lips curling back from sharp teeth. “Lucia,” he brays, “where have you been? What do you mean?”

  Her eyes are liquid, enormous, a child caught out. “This is mine,” she whispers, mortified by him, his appearance, his disrespect. It will reflect poorly on her. “You can't have it. Please.”

  Ludo is beyond comprehension. He crawls to her on his knees, in humility, in shame, penitent. Begging to enter again his severe and monstrous idol.

  “I didn't want you here,” she hisses.

  Paola snorts a little. She is too familiar with Lucia, behaving as if she is in full possession of the situation, and how dare she presume to know a thing about them? Ludo hates her immediately, sorts her past eel and mouse and
into insect, devouring, soulless ant.

  “He couldn't have gotten here in the first place if not for you, my love,” she says gently, “so don't be too angry. If you didn't want him here you should have shut up your bedroom like a mosque. I did. I thought you would.”

  Lucia rolls her eyes. “I was sure he wouldn't figure it out-no one does from the first night, and what were the chances he'd find another one of us? He never leaves that apartment.”

  “Figure what out?” Ludo is conscious of a great many eyes on him, but he cannot make himself move from his wife. She looks at him pityingly.

  “This place, Ludo. Palimpsest. This city. How to get here, how to live here.”

  At that, the patrons scramble to the tiny exit, a sudden riot of velvet hats and gold-soled shoes, shoving and squeezing through the little door, crawling desperately over each other to get out. They do not like it, they do not want to hear it, to know it.

  “Lucia,” he says when the room has cleared. For him it is so simple. “Come home, please, I have missed you so much.”

  She puts her hand on his head, an old gesture, not yet leeched of tenderness. Her hand and her voice are cold. “But it couldn't have been only me. He's here now, and this is very far from where I would have taken him. Who was it, Ludo? Who let you crawl into her like you come crawling to me now? Did you even know that's how it works?” She stares spitefully at him, her hair piled up and strung through with tiny bronze feathers.

  “Nerezza. And Anoud, later It didn't mean anything. It was a way to you. She said it was. The only way.”

  Lucia hoots haughty laughter. “That's impressive. Nerezza's like a sphinx. Awfully hard to pry open. Is that what you liked about her?”

  “It wasn't about liking.”

  “But you do, I can tell. I was married to you. Was it eight years? I stopped counting.”

  “What difference does it make? You left me. You could not have run further away from me. How can you be jealous?”

  She looks at him blankly “Do as you like,” she spits.

  “I'd like you to come with me. Give me your hand, come home. It can be easy. I won't reproach you, not ever. I swear it. It will be as it always was. You will lie on the couch the color of pecan shells and I will kiss your shoulder blades. It will all be forgotten.”

  Paola puts a firm hand on his shoulder. “Save it. It's over.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are?” he shouts furiously. Scamander flinches in the corner of the teahouse and Rosalie clutches her tongs in the event of hysteria. “Who the hell are you to talk to us? You have no right.” He strikes the floor with his palm, and it is wrong, a tantrum, a childish thing, but he cannot help it.

  “I'm hers,” she says simply. Her eyes slide into him, appraising, searching, and withdraw, finding him lacking, surely, small, an animal. “She lives with me in the real world. In a little flat overlooking a river. We have geraniums and a cat. We belong to each other, and soon we'll find the last one of our Quarto, and then we'll be able to live here forever. And you will only ever visit.”

  “I met someone, Ludo, a long time ago.” Lucia sighs. She is trying to be kind and he recognizes that this is a trial for her. She can barely contain her scorn. She holds it before her like a shield. “A man with a funny birthmark. You know it by now. You have it. I'm sorry for that. Fucking him seemed harmless, an act performed outside our walls, and therefore unreal. You taught me that, that nothing outside us could be real. I believed it, I think. I believed it in Ostia. I believed it until him. And it was harmless, it was. You were so busy with that book, that Japanese thing. You didn't need me. And to have a thing I didn't have to share with you was rich and sweet. I was spread out under you so far and so thin, nothing of me was my own.” Lucia looks at her empty cup. “It is so beautiful and awful here, so much more real…well, more real than you. Than the story you told about us. This is my place, now, it's not yours, it's not. You have the world, this is mine.” Her voice had grown high and panicked, as if he were preparing to steal something from her. “You have Isidore and your glue and you have your brothers in Umbria and I had nothing, nothing but you and those stupid walls, and I was lonely living inside you, Ludo. You are not big enough for me.”

  “I… I thought we contained each other. I thought you were happy, as happy as you could be.”

  “No, Ludo, you were happy. Now listen to me, please.” She leaned close to him, her breast brushed his arm. “Get out.”

  “No! I won't leave you. I can do as well as you, I can crawl through Rome on my belly like a worm and find all the secret ways in.”

  “You can't follow me. I'm inhuman, remember, a monster, a chimera.” She spat their private word between them and he recoiled from the lump of it. “You are just a man, you cannot go where monsters go.”

  “I'll find my Quarto first. I'll beat you to it. I'll take this place from you.”

  Lucia laughs, loudly and cruelly a braying, mocking laugh he had only rarely heard. The blond woman all in green draws to her feet, pulling his wife with her.

  “Ludo, you're a fool,” Lucia hisses at him. “You might as well be wearing a hat with bells and drool on yourself for the amusement of your betters. You'll never manage it. They fought a war over this, Ludo. People died, for real, in the real world and here. They bled and they had their hearts eaten by…by people like me. Death, real death, not some dancing skeleton on vellum. The price of it, the price of the tea I drink, the races I watch, the slices of chestnut I will eat, the wines I will drink, the price of all that would break you in two. It nearly broke me. No. Rot in the real world, Ludo. That's where saints live, under the sun, under the open sky. Their holiness means something there. I don't want you here.”

  Ludo reaches out for her, grabbing at her feet, pathetic, knowing he is pathetic, unable to stop himself. “I love you, I love you, stop it, please. Just come with me. It doesn't have to be home. I will stay here with you, and we'll be a world within each other again.” He is wretched, yes, and he knows it. He is crying, and kisses her knees. She rolls her eyes.

  “Give me back eight years of huddling for warmth in a cave of your making. Give me the dress I wore in Ostia, and my cigarette case with the cockatrice on it. Give me everything in me that was stamped out by everything in you. Give me back a girl who had never heard of a chimera, who had never read that stupid encyclopedia, who had never had to hear herself called an animal. Then I'll come home.”

  Paola strokes Lucia's cheek with the back of her hand and pulls her like a doll, extricating her from Ludovico. He does not trip her, but he wants to; he knows her ankles and they are his, forever, always. But she crawls past him, weeping so bitterly that her back arches and heaves with it, as though she is trying to expel something from deep within her. They disappear out the tiny door, and Ludo lies slack-mouthed on the floor, his heart livid and black, his throat cracked like an old book.

  Rosalie pulls an incandescent cup from her kiln, and Scamander pats her hand warmly, the dirt and blisters of decades in the fingers he puts on hers, the witness of themselves in Lucia, in Ludo, in all the times when the children were a trial and the money was scarce, when tea and cups were too thin, far too thin, to separate them from the empty, sterile air. Rosalie cradles Ludo in her lap, and Scamander steams the tea. He holds it to the poor man s chapped mouth, and the bookbinder drinks mechanically

  “It's all in how you swirl the tea in the cup, son,” he says gently. “Clockwise, four times, not a bit less. That's the secret.”

  Ludo crawls again from the teahouse. The grass is cold and wet. The tips of the blades are beginning to freeze, stiff as quills crackling under his clumsy palms. He stands up beneath the baffled larch, and traffic sings by, little different than Roman traffic, carriages and motorcars more ornate, more frilled and flared, but a bustle and shout he knows, that comforts him. In no city can he imagine the traffic as anything other than this exercise in martial prowess and disdain of death.

  Ludo looks down to see that a
bee has alighted on his hand. It perches on one of his protruding veins, that ropy road traveling up his arms and out of sight. He always wore his blood too bright, too close to the surface. Blood was the trouble. All that worry about the Phlegmatic tissues and it was always the dark, red, splattering blood that would be his plague.

  The bee does not leave him, but instead rubs its legs together impatiently, as though irritated to find no pollen on this sanguineous flower. A second joins it, and a third. Ludo thinks he ought to panic, but, after all, Isidore had his bees, in every icon, in every fresco. If he could bear them, Ludo can-but of course, Isidores bees were representative, metaphorical, the spiritual manifestation of his remarkable intellect. These are quite real, and they seem to be whispering to each other.

  There are five now. They ignore the larch and flutter their wings with indefinable emotion. Ludo turns his palm over and they eagerly gather in the little valley of flesh near the pad of his thumb. Their fellows are coming thick and fast now, a black veil with flashes of gold like lightning glittering within. Their buzzing is a long shriek, and he knows it, he knows the sound, for she knew it, that other woman, with a bee sting on her cheek, and he knows her, for he has tasted with her and danced with her, far from each other. Ludovico closes his eyes, letting them settle onto him, praying to his saint, his patron, his last guardian ghost.

  “Let them bite me, Isidore,” Ludo whispers. A prayer. A plea. “Your small and industrious lovers of virtue. Let them taste me, who has no virtue, and carry me away to become honey in the mouth of a king with a diadem I shall never wish to see.”

  FOUR

  ACTS OF VESTA

  Ludovico had told himself a thousand times over the years that it was stupid to come to the Forum to think. Tourists indulge themselves because they think it makes their thoughts more magnificent, eternal. A man who had lived here all his life should have been beyond such childish acts. Ludo approached forty years of age with an utterly accurate internal map of Rome laid out over his heart, so that his ventricles corresponded precisely to a history of epochal lust and clam-dye and death by poisoning. He should have been above a place so well trampled by the tiresome and well-meaning that it could possess no molecule of its original self, only the cells of their bored and time-strapped bodies, squinting in centuries of suns.