The cold made the Swineys even more pagan than we had been – we avoided the church at San Tomà where the cold would martyr a polar bear.
Our blood ran slow with cold; we’d do anything that would put a bit of heat in us. It got so that we all slept in Darcy’s bed, barely breathing in the icy air that fell down the chimney. Feeling my sisters’ bodies beside me under the covers brought cruel memories of being in Alexander’s arms. Darcy reported that she had seen him near the trattoria.
‘With his wife,’ she said, looking at me. ‘And what would suit the creature but to go charging off in the other direction at the sight of me! Dragging the poor woman behind him, and the belly on her stretched to its giddy limit. Imagine, Manticory! That’s what you’re good at, isn’t it? Imagining?’
I rose and stumbled out of the bed, slipping on the icy floor.
‘Darcy, could you not be even a little bit kind?’ begged Oona. ‘And Manticory suffering so that she’d rather break her legs than stay warm beside you?’
‘I’ll try,’ sniffed Darcy, ‘but I’m not promising a great deal. Come back to bed, Manticory. There’s no use in lying there like a nun on a church floor.’
Surrounded by the thin bones of my sisters, I dreamed that night of all the Swiney Godivas, even Enda, as seven ice queens in the moonlight. We were standing barefoot and naked in a garden, our loosened hair enfolding us. Saverio might have photographed us like that, I thought on waking, with our hair transformed into a cascade of brittle crystal that joined us to the frozen earth beneath our feet.
Somehow, we lived through that winter and into the next spring. We ate just enough to keep the cruelty of the weather from killing us. We kept ourselves in heart by singing, warming our throats with old songs from County Kildare. Darcy even gained a little weight. I suspected that she had enjoyed some unaccustomed luck at her gambling, but took care to eat it on the way home so as to avoid sharing.
Some time in those bitter months Alexander’s child must have been born, a winter baby for a wintry father. If Darcy knew, she manifested her attempt to be kind by not torturing me with the news. As long as I did not know the sex or name of that infant, I could pretend, for whole minutes at a time, that it did not exist.
Pertilly continued to absent herself every afternoon for a few hours and to return with some potatoes or fish. When summer came, we took ferries to the islands and foraged for seaweed and mosses that she turned into soup.
And by that time I was also away from the house by day, employed by Saverio in his laboratorio, a graceful room bathed by the light of five tall windows. I did not know if he really needed an assistant to arrange the hands of his portrait customers on the arms of the prayer chair or faux-marble columns. Could he not, I wondered, manage without me standing by him in the small darkened room while he turned the spectral images on his glass plates into living faces? Did he truly require someone else to write the labels for the envelopes that held those plates? Or to trim the blue paper he used to give night scenes their special luminosity? Did he need me to tell stories to his child-subjects in my imperfect Italian, to keep them from fidgeting themselves into a blur?
He paid me the compliment of never requesting me to model for him. Nor did he ask me to animate the eyes of his gentlemen customers by letting down my hair for them.
Feeling guilty for his favours, I offered it to him for some photographs.
‘Thank you, no,’ he told me.
Even though I often found his eyes on me, they were not on my hair.
However, he taught me things about my own hair I’d never known, demonstrating how to hand-tint one of the old Swiney Godiva postcards.
‘Red is not red,’ he told me, squeezing a bewildering array of colours onto his palette. ‘If someone shaved a rusted pipe – the way a careful girl might pare her orange and roll its single rind around her wrist and let the light make yellow lichen of it in parts with the shadows of the foxes and deer lurking there and the glimmer of churning goldfish, a crab’s claw, a brick and a kidney bean besides – if someone did that, they would perhaps begin to assemble the colours of red in your hair.’
With a fine brush, he began to apply kidney bean, fox and lichen to his photograph of me.
‘But still,’ he said gravely, ‘this is not your hair. For it would not, forgive me, lie on a lover’s eyelids like clover or shuck like cornsilk between finger and thumb or taste as yours must in the morning.’
For the first time since I’d met him, I looked into Saverio Bon’s green eyes. And he looked back at me. ‘Do I shock you?’
I wanted to say, ‘You delight me,’ but I could not. How soon before Darcy would be telling him too the story of my incontinent lust? I murmured politely, ‘So many stories in one colour. I never knew. Thank you.’
‘Do I bore you?’ he asked anxiously. ‘My love of my work is unreasonable and inexcusable. Yet I do not apologise for it.’
Then the glass plates tinkled in one of the earth tremors that had been frequent in Venice in the last few days, and we rushed to still them before they chipped.
My old hatred and distrust of photography withered and died in that studio of Saverio’s. There I learned what kind of evenings you can have with a person of a nature sympathetic to your own, who is not of your blood but is of your business – for now I considered his profession a storytelling one like my own. Apart from the times with Alexander, I had never even known an intimate conversation outside my sisterly circle. Those conversations with Alexander I kept in easy reach on the shelf of my memory, and frequently took them down to peruse again. That alone should have alerted me to how I had craved friend-talk, and how much I would love it. But those exchanges with Alexander had not in themselves constituted a friendship, no matter how I wore those words to shreds with caressing nostalgia.
Saverio’s words flowed in and out of my mind, not lingering as there was always something new to be said. Little fumes and gurgles of music often punctuated our conversations: a flautist from La Fenice lived downstairs. Sometimes Saverio made me an alchemical cup of coffee from beans he ground himself or a bread roll with Taleggio cheese drizzled with honey and a heart-shaped red apple sliced in two. With Saverio, I’d sit up all night talking at the retouching table, laughing, gulping tiny cups of his intense espresso, cramming my mouth with macaroons he bought from the pasticceria in his square. I’d creep home at dawn while my sisters still slept.
In those days and nights in his laboratorio, I learned that Saverio had no wife, sister, brother or parent to support. He lived in a spare but elegant style in apartments above the studio.
So he did not need to work those hours we kept so late into the night, except in that his love of the work was stronger than sleep.
But he seemed to need to help us by paying me a wage, and there was often a basket of food and kindling at the door for me to take when I left, and I was in a state to be nothing but grateful. Embarrassment is too rich a commodity for the poor, even for me, even when I imagined Saverio’s scrupulously clean fingers handling each tomato, each bread roll, as he placed it inside the perfect white napkin, tying the four corners in a pair of soft rabbit ears.
Chapter 45
A sealed note was delivered to me at the hand-tinting desk at the studio. Alexander’s writing ordered: Leave the gate and doors unlocked tonight.
I stood abruptly, spilling my coffee in shameful rivulets. Saverio raised his eyebrows. I looked away from him.
The earth trembled slightly – the substratum of the lagoon had been grumbling noisily for days. The note sailed gently from the desk to the floor where Saverio could see its meagre words.
Having read them, Saverio too looked away, and then walked and quietly left the room.
A few moments later, I heard his footsteps and felt his hand gentle on my wrist. ‘I have another letter for you, Manticory. In the last months, I have watched you do battle with love, as if love were an enemy in your house whom you must kill in order to live. You are brave. You
have armed yourself and you have only rarely lain down to weep. Every time you give up, you stop giving up and fight some more. I am amazed by you.’
He bent and took my face in his two warm hands, tilting my head up to him.
‘No, Manticory, do not look away from me. Do not look down.’
I looked at my small self reflected in his eyes.
‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Don’t look at her. Look at me.’
I too rose, but he did not surrender the gentleness of his hands on my head.
He said, ‘You have made me think about love between men and women, and how it should be done. I could not say these words aloud to you, so I wrote them down some nights, almost like a story – yes, here I am too with the stories. Perhaps I am infected by your love of words? I did not intend to let you see these writings, these pictorial philosophies of love, these worded photographs, or whatever you might call them. I am not ashamed of them, yet till now I did not wish to place the burden of their longing on you. My mind is changed.’
He picked up Alexander’s note and handed it to me.
‘Could you read what I wrote, please, before . . . Sardou?’
‘Before Sardou,’ I promised quietly.
He tucked both his own letter and Alexander’s into the basket of food he had prepared for me.
‘For later,’ he emphasised. ‘But before.’
I left immediately, for there would be no more concentrating that day. In my room of Chinese pavilions, I read Saverio’s letter.
On the outside, he had written in pencil: This is all the fortress I can build you for now. I could have wished a sword and a pistol, today. Forgive me. S.
Inside, the words were penned in black ink, without correction:
If I were permitted to love such a woman as you, Manticory, I would want her in my studio, and in my kitchen and in my boat as well as in my bed. She would inhabit the frame of my vision like a permanent stain on the lens for I would want her in every place my eyes see and every place I am. I would want her inside me. I would need to know each story inside her, including what makes her eyelashes flitter, in the contour and pockmarks of every pebble she picks up from the beach we walk along together, in the seashell lamp that she follows with her green eyes like a pilgrim.
I would want to know why she sometimes looks with suspicion at a bridge. I would want her eyes to open up with pleasure every time she lays them on me. I would want to understand who she is at three in the morning and who she is at eleven the next night, and all the shes she has been in between. Of course, I am greedy: I would want all those shes to have been mine.
I would cherish the imprints of her teeth in an apple and the silhouette of her waist against the light of the window.
I would want to capture her at her desk and see the words growing on her page, knowing that I seeded some of them but that by far the largest number come from places I have never been. There will be days when she will not find one word to pour into my hand; I shall not hate those days because then she will look for the words in my own mouth, and because I know there shall be other days when she drowns us both with her words. I would want those hands of hers to write me in tiny corners of her tales. I would want to start stories that she finishes and I would want to enter her stories at unexpected moments and run down a calle with them, with her following breathless, indignant, laughing until the picture of us blurs and we melt into one another with hands too busy to write a caption.
I’d like to run my finger along the tip of her nose when she’s in profile, gazing, in that way she has with her eyes far away in the land of what she wants. I would not let her eat her honey from the edge of a knife any more: I would show her that honey is sweeter on soft morning bread in a bed of butter. I would show her how not to break her hand on the locked door of love and instead to know an open door when it smiles at her. I would teach her that the natural motion of the heart is not chafing. Love does not scald, I would explain to her, or cramp, or starve. It fattens and chatters and thanks. It never undervalues and it always senses something marvellous coming.
I would want to lift the covers of our bed for her, only to have her get in on the other side, laughing. At the beginning of the history of our love, I would want her to dispose herself on my body as a boat lies on water, utterly accommodated and yet subject to my tireless rising and falling. I would want her to lie low in me, so that I almost enclose her in my element, but part of her will always remain safely out of reach in the realm of air. I would want to lie beside her and feel her hands on their adventures. I would want to clean my face with the humidity of her skin. I would want to lie against her body, with my mouth fastened on hers, even as we hurtle in a train through the snow. I’d want our heat to nourish creatures who might otherwise die of cold.
I would want her to turn round and come back to me three minutes after leaving me. Indeed I would not survive parting from her unless I knew she was coming back.
But if she had to leave me, even for an hour, I would open drawers and find the smell of her fingers inside. I would bury my head among the spoons and scissors she has touched.
Does this sound mad, or bad, Manticory? I have hated watching you in love with that man, spending your heart like a bird on a thorn bush, bleeding to death, not even noticed.
‘Except by you, Saverio,’ I said aloud, opening my armadio and placing his letter on the top shelf. I inspected my taut face in the kindness of its speckled mirror.
‘You noticed everything,’ I told Saverio quietly.
But all I wanted that night was for Alexander to behave as Saverio wrote.
That night Alexander loved me in a way that had no love in it. When he groaned, I felt as if a snake had died inside me. My thighs were painfully raw with the violence of the loveless friction. He shrank away from me immediately and sat up on the edge of the bed, as far away from me as possible.
‘I did not mean for that to happen,’ he mumbled.
‘Then why did you come here?’ I asked. ‘If you have not come back to me?’
‘Don’t talk,’ he said. ‘I have things that need to be said.’
‘Darcy has horns!’ I blurted. ‘She lies, I mean. Surely you know that about her. You’ve always known it. Why do you believe her now?’
‘Horns?’ he said cynically. ‘You’d say anything, wouldn’t you?’
The words came out of him then. He told me blandly that in the months since Darcy had shown him what he ‘should have guessed’, he had been spending time with his wife, and she had reminded him very forcefully of the happy early days of their marriage.
But you told me that you were never happy with her.
I hugged myself to keep the tears inside me.
‘She forgave me before, when I ran away to war to avoid marrying her. She forgives me again. It is her nature. Elisabetta has helped me realise that there are just so many things to do and see and enjoy, which I have sullenly and stubbornly ignored, or been led away from, so many parts of my life that could be better integrated and so many plans that could lead to interesting things.’
And I? Am I not an interesting thing?
‘I thought we . . . you and I. I thought . . .’
He made an equivocal noise, low in his throat.
‘We enjoyed—’
You were there too, I wanted to tell him, when we made love.
‘Maybe we did once. But even before Darcy told me . . . I no longer felt for you the way I used to. I had to put so much of myself away when I was with you, accommodate so much. You will not do, Manticory. You will not do for me. Elisabetta says that it was a part of my low regard for myself that made me associate with . . . uno scherzo della natura . . . one of nature’s jokes, a circus freak. Don’t be offended, Manticory. You are what you are. And Elisabetta has helped me see that you were of course using me to elevate yourself, as is only natural in one of your birth. Your origins dictate that you have a certain native cunning that facilitates those actions in you. Of course, I succumbed out of m
y own weakness. It’s not really your fault, Manticory. I should not have let the thing go on so long. I blame myself for that.’
‘Could we not address some of those—’
He spoke to me as he would to a drunk in the street who petitioned him for money, his voice taut with righteousness. ‘I would not be a participant in such . . . there is nothing to address.’
The dawn was coming. I reached for his hand and wrenched it out into the light. He wore, for the first time, a ring.
I looked at the plain hoop of gold and at his face. He turned his head then, as the room shook with another little tremor from beneath the palazzo. When the room stopped being blurred, there was some clarity in my thoughts too. I understood that the reason he was behaving as less than a gentleman with me was that Elisabetta, who had met Swineyness in the form of Darcy, had led him to the understanding that I was less than a lady. I was a thing with hair. And it was my excesses of hair that made me a thing. I was not bred up to romantic love in Venice. I was a Swiney, of the sodden earth of Ireland.
He was speaking to Elisabetta’s script. And now, when I thought back to his disdain in our first backstage conversation, when he had decried the quackery of the Swineys – that had probably been scripted by Elisabetta too. He had been under her influence then. He was again now. I had distracted his affections for several years, but now Elisabetta had reclaimed his opinions, with a little timely help from Darcy. His wife already had his ring, so she did not need his love. All that she currently required was that he did not admire me any more.
Alexander took my quietness as quiescence and even praised me for it.
‘You do at least know me well, in your way,’ he said. ‘That’s why you will eventually see how things must be. You’re a good creature at heart.’