Venus Preserved (Secret Books of Venus Series)

  “How silent this world is.”

  This world. Indeed it seemed he knew it all.

  “It was noisier when you were here last?”

  “Much. But of course there’s something in the walls and the glass, so they tell me, to absorb external noises.”

  “Yes.”

  “I should like wine,” del Nero said, aristocrat still.

  “No wine,” said Picaro. “Only water.”

  “I think you’ll find,” said del Nero gently, “there is some wine.”

  Picaro went to the cabinet. There were three bottles, old black bottles, with sealed tops. Uninvited, someone had been in to augment Picaro’s stores—unless Cora and India had brought the wine. Picaro thought the first scenario the more likely.

  He uncorked one of the bottles, poured the red blood of the wine into a glass. The cabinet had correctly kept the wine room temperature, as it kept other things cool.

  “Thank you,” del Nero said. “You’re not drinking?”

  “Right. I’m not.”

  Unphased, (of course) the aristocrat, (son of a ducca) walked across to the Africara.

  “What a wonderful instrument. You play this?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you name it?” Picaro told him. “But forgive me, I remember, you don’t wish to discuss your calling. May I try my hand at this Africara?”

  Picaro said, “I don’t let that happen.”

  “I understand.”

  Picaro felt a sluice of indifference wash down him. What did it matter any more if some other—this fucking undead returnee—laid hands on the Africara? Nothing mattered. For Nothing reigned absolute.

  “Go ahead,” Picaro said.

  “I may? You’re gracious.”

  Picaro watched him, jealous yet remote. Angry. But not only at, or in, this moment. The angers of several years. And the inertia of them.

  Would del Nero know how to begin even, on this black bull—a music making creature so utterly unlike anything that had existed in Europe in 1700. But yes, it seemed he knew—instinctively?—and now he put his ringed slender hands on the instrument, as if on the body of a woman Picaro had once cared for as much as his own life.

  A jagged spill of notes.

  The hair rose along Picaro’s neck and scalp. His hands were iron fists. He felt, despite everything, a nauseous boiling rage.

  And then, from the Africara—a music like a smoke, soft, half-born, uncoiling through the air. Like wings, like thoughts—almost a silence, almost far away across the sky—a music of something that had no place here, let alone there, where any eighteenth-century musician had been. A music that belonged high over any city.

  All that.

  More than that.

  Astounded by horror, Picaro thought he had never heard its voice before, the Africara. But no, this was not its voice—this was …

  The music stopped.

  Picaro felt the room turn under him, as if he stood on some ancient canal flooding from a tidal sea.

  His hands were no longer knotted into fists. His belly was cold. A dry electric tingling lay over the surface of his skin, which settled only slowly.

  “You have been very generous,” said del Nero, “Signore Picaro. That means magpie, I think. From the Latin?”

  Picaro—no words would come. He cleared his throat.

  And del Nero crossed to him and handed him the goblet of wine, still half full.

  And Picaro drank a mouthful of the wine.

  Cloudio del Nero said, “I must leave you in peace. Good night, signore.”

  Picaro stayed where he was, holding the goblet, seeing del Nero in another dimension walk away through the rooms. Hearing him at the outer door, and the door undone, and in the passageway a murmur, (as the minder stirred) and then the door shut. And the glass fell out of Picaro’s hand.

  He saw it fall, catching a sparkle of light; a meteor, and knew it wouldn’t break, glasses didn’t break here, and then it hit the terracotta, and it smashed into a hundred broken stars.

  ALL NIGHT AFTER THAT, he dreamed of falling.

  Next morning, it was Cora who woke him, knocking on the door.

  She was alone, and laughing, in a sky-blue gown from the 1700s, her hair ornately dressed.

  “We’re going out on the canals.” When he didn’t respond, she explained, “to see the City. The UAS man is taking us.” He waited. She added, “And Cloudio. And you.”

  “Not me.”

  There was a little beauty mark, a tiny spangle, pasted on her left cheekbone. Her lips were rouged like strawberries.

  “You must come, Magpie. Please come. It won’t be any fun without you."

  “Sorry.”

  “But he says you must.”

  “Who says that?”

  “Leon.”

  “Who’s that? One of the UAS?”

  “He’s from the project. I mean, something to do with Cloudio. We met Cloudio. He lives downstairs.”

  “Do you know,” said Picaro, “who Cloudio is?”

  She laughed still. He sensed she had spent the night at a party, where there had been some very strong legal highs available—hasca, something like that.

  She answered, “No, Cloudio is … Cloudio. I like Cloudio. But it’s you I love.”

  “That’s nice of you, thank you. Have a good time in the City.”

  As he started to close the door on her, it stuck.

  There was CX, and the door could not ever stick. Unless, evidently, the CX made it do just that.

  He recollected Flayd, managing to open the palazzo’s main door. Some overriding key from the University … No doubt he could have done the same with this door, only hadn’t had the gall. The University Auxilary Staff seemed to be running things. Everything. All in the cause of their project, their experiment.

  Cora, apparently not realizing the door had stuck, thinking he’d had a change of heart, reached through and caught his hand. She kissed it. “I loved our night.”

  He took his hand from hers and went back into the apartment and Cora followed him, because she thought she was invited to do so by the unclosed door.

  In the room with the oriental lamp, she offered one of her surprises. She leapt at the lamp chain, gripped it, swung through space, let go and spun away, turning a somersault in the air before her perfect landing at the bedroom door.

  Picaro pulled her into the bedroom, sat her on the bed. She threw herself back and lay smiling from the pillows up at him.

  “Listen Cora, they’re playing games.”

  “Who, most darling? Shall we? Let’s play games—”

  “Where’s your friend India?” he asked.

  Cora, enpillowed, shrugged her milk-white shoulders. He thought of del Nero, also shrugging. Shrug everything off that troubled you or might impede the progress of your desires.

  “Cloudio,” said Cora. She kicked her legs. “Cloudio, Picaro, and Cora.”

  Picaro could hear someone outside, in his private apartment. He went back out of the room, and saw a woman (also young and smiling) putting wine bottles into the recessed cabinet. “‘Viorno, sin,” she said.

  The anger returned, but it was miles away. Picaro could feel it trampling through him, its hoofs echoing.

  When it ended, he felt he didn’t care, either. Not now. Nothing could be done, it was all out of his hands, so why kick at this?

  In the closet he found a suit of clothes from the eighteenth century. Someone else had been in—when?—all this burglary in reverse—and left them. He took them out, carried them on to the balcony, and flung them over into the canal. He wasn’t angry any more, it was simply practical.

  Cora, bemused finally, stood gazing after them. But he had no intention of telling her that, in 1701, if he, a black man, had worn them, they would have been the livery of a slave.

  He dressed anyway, as always, and when that was done, and he had drunk water from a fluted glass, he went out of the door, which no longer stuck.

  They were wa
iting below in the house vestibule, three UAS that he did not recognize, another girl (also UAS) in renaissance clothes and pearled hair, and Cloudio, standing there like a tall, calm child about to be taken on an outing.

  Cora darted over to Cloudio. He caught her hand, lowered his head to it and kissed the fingers. The companion gesture to Cora’s with Picaro—which had been rejected. Cloudio gave Cora his arm. His eyes had the same phosphorescent-looking film on them Picaro had imagined there last night—did he only imagine it now?

  Picaro stared at Cloudio and found that he had moved himself towards this revenant. Moved close in, Picaro looked into Cloudio’s face, at those eyes that seemed to have changed, and to be changing, as if he had come up from the lagoon, with nacre hardening on the irises and pupils.

  What do I see? You, Simoon—you’re the sibyl—tell me what I see.

  And back in his head he made out his mother’s drowsy laughter, not a bit like Cora’s.

  Your appointment.

  But one of the UAS, (not the others, Chossi, or the one dressed 1906—Leon?) was shaking Picaro’s hand too vigorously. The UAS woman was fluttering them all firmly out of the building, and on the canal waited a canopied boat with velvet seating, poled by three oarsmen.

  5

  THERE WAS A LIGHT MIST that morning, which smoothed the water and the buildings with melted pearl. In the mist perished the last traces of a lingering false dawn. The City was dreamlike, and in its dreaminess more convincingly real than ever. So it must have looked uncountable mornings in the past, when it was fully actual and stood above the sea. Truth and Time had been an antique allegory of this place, depicted over and over in sculpture and painting. But the facsimile had become Truth, and Time had stopped. And through the resulting legacy, the boat slid like a stiletto.

  As Venus woke (it was very early, not yet seven) images, sudden views, mobile tableaux containing moving human beings, leapt against Picaro’s eyes. He saw them with an abnormal acuity, as if to make up for lost visual opportunities: heaps of golden oranges and apricots on stalls along the banks; green melons on a pale violet wall of some shadow palace, gothic, with thin, pointed arches; traceried balconies that seemed made of lace; hanging lanterns, catching the lit sky. Flotillas of masonry came always drifting towards them. The dagger of boat slit purely through. Under arcades that had been raised (once) in the 1300s, under the galleries of renaissance palazzos. Churches of marble and domes covered in silver foil floated on thin lines of light. Tenements towered up on rotting green stems which could never, now, rot, and unfurled a bunting of colored washing between the wisteria.

  Fishing boats passed them on the surface of the lagoon. The sailors hailed each other through the mist, coral sails rigged as if on bent bows. In a great open space before the church of Maria Domina (an indigo box decorated with Byzantine goldwork from the ancient East), a puppet-show had begun. Figures danced on their little stage, from the Skilful Comedy. They looked living and animate, as the entranced crowd perhaps no longer did.

  Picaro saw … glimpses of streets funneling through the blocks of houses, salad-green gardens that spilled over walls. Every alley, every canal, had its pet Virgin Maria, or its guarding Neptune. And the banners among the roofs were mingling with spires and conical chimney pots, flags painted with the City’s Zodians, the Fishes, the Scorpion, the Crab.

  All this, Picaro saw, just as he heard the soundtrack of the City, its harmony and discords.

  Otherwise, in their boat, no one spoke, or hardly at all. Dividing the silk water between the banks of brickwork, stone and mist, they might have been sailing down the Styx, astonished and agog at the sights of the underworld. And Picaro thought that now Venus was, after all, a kind of Hades, for she lay under the sea, as the Greek and Roman hell had lain under the earth.

  Del Nero was seated across from Picaro.

  Now and then, against his own will, Picaro looked at him. And then, Picaro saw this: the City reflected in the looking-glass eyes of the great musician. And could not see, any more, into the eyes.

  Only now and then some little murmur from the UAS people. Was everyone comfortable? (Incredible notion.) Would they care for this or that? (Yes, children taken on an outing, spoiled kids who might have anything they wanted.) Cora liking to go over to a bakery, and sweet cakes being handed down, still hot and sticky—even Cloudio taking a bite, another, smiling—and later there were almonds dipped in caramel.

  In backwaters, where the shade of palaces dropped ink-purple in the wafered jade of the canals, noticing the phantoms of people behind thick-eyed windows, or white hands opening a pair of crimson shutters bright as wings.

  Sometimes Picaro thought he should speak after all, though not to was so restful—to give in, to accept—restful. But besides he couldn’t be bothered, hadn’t the energy, lulled and mesmerized by all of this, reflecting in the water and in the eyes of a dead man who was alive.

  So the morning became late, and became noon, and they left the boat, walked across the Primo Square, ate a meal in the Greek Room of Phiarello’s, (where a table had been booked) under the murals of nymphs. It was food partly from the 1700s. There were pancakes, dumplings, no potatoes, and dishes of chocolated fruits. They drank an old red wine, then champagne. All of them drank this, including the four UAS. They were such a happy little party, Cora bubbling away, flirting with everyone, the UAS woman—Jenefra?—telling some story, as if she were only another careless member of their kind, something about her studies and misfortunes in some other city, when she was sixteen. (See, I was sixteen once, and made mistakes, just like you were and have.)

  What did the dead man say.

  Had he said anything?

  His slender hands, almost feminine, yet steely strong, delicate on the fine frosted glasses, the napery. You couldn’t see through his hands. But then, you couldn’t see through his eyes. There was nothing in his eyes. That was, Nothing. And the Nothing had soaked outward, forming a sort of phosphorescent shine. And so you saw that.

  A Victorian brass band was playing in the square after lunch.

  “I love Picaro’s music,” said Cora.

  “Oh yes,” said one of the UAS men, “the Africarium—I’ve always admired that—”

  Picaro heard them as if from beyond an egg of glass, a dome with which he had surrounded himself.

  Why was that?

  Neurasthenia perhaps.

  Or the wine. Or something, something …

  After the sociable meal they went, the happy party, to see the reconstructed Rivoalto, no longer really islanded. They rode in their boat under the Bridge of Lies, and cried out lying things, (had Picaro too? Del Nero?) and Cora cried out, “I hate Picaro—loathe his music!” And laughed. And beyond the Liar’s Bridge, other bridges, bridge on bridge, reflections again, of each, and each also making a perfect circle with its canal self, until the boat shattered them all in fragments. The mist was gone. The City was vibrant, no longer pearl, hard-cut opal.

  In the afternoon, the Palace of the Ducemae lifted its patterned walls for their inspection, its pillars ending upward in keylike traceries. It had courtyards like books of gold and gardens full of singing birds. Was del Nero to be taken to visit the palace? He had been there, presumably, off and on, when he lived. But they didn’t pause. Instead, there was another palace they went to, with a ceiling ten meters high. In its center a void of sunny sky (painted) filled by winged figures, in turn surrounded by painted statuary and painted mauve vases of flowers. A chandelier hung down, every prism coiled by flowers of stained glass. Beneath that there were little colored-in creatures of plaster, hares and ducks, parrots and tortoises. They too looked real, like the painted sculpture, the flowers. Venus then had always been this way. Venus, who showed Time and Truth fondling each other, an old man and a lush young woman—which perhaps made Truth a whore after all. Venus, which had paintings of the goddess Venus herself, holding up her mirror. Venus, which displayed the Apocryphal Lion of the City, in cream stone, lying down, and upr
ight, and high among the roofs on backdrops of Heaven—blue and sunburst stars and wheels of the Zodiac, or else presented the Lion with a sword in one paw, declaring on the carved banner that uncoiled from its lips: BEHOLD ME, THE MIGHTY LION NAMED MARCUS. WHOEVER RESISTS ME I WILL BRING LOW. And in the Setapassa—the market of silks—was a column stolen from Egypt, crowned by a black basalt sphinx, and nearby another one, dredged up from the lagoons, crowned by a sphinx that was white.

  Picaro found himself then standing with Cloudio del Nero in the late afternoon, under the flaming gold dome inside the Primo.

  They stood side by side, gazing up, and the four UAS were far off, and Cora had gone with them. How had they got here, Picaro and del Nero? As if a scene had been changed—even time—for hadn’t they come here this morning?

  The basilica was filled by people, but also by carvings, by painted crowds. By columns of marble and porphyry and serpentine, inlay of alabaster, sardonic agate and jaspers looted from the East. Christ stood among seven flames to open the seven seals of world destruction, against mosaics of goldleaf in molten vitreous—and a jeweled vine that represented his own Mystery. While below circled four colored horses.

  Elsewhere, KARITAS read the inlaid words, (Love) and SPES (Hope) and MISERICORDIA (Mercy). As if these things existed. But they were in Venus, City of Stopped Time and Truth-the-Whore, who stole and lied and brought low—and here anyway rode the Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

  “This is a city of the damned,” softly said Picaro, taken aback to hear himself talk, and by what he said.

  “Always it was,” said the other. The other one, who had been dead.

  “So, tell me about damnation,” Picaro said.

  Up there, Christ, a beautiful white man, Lord of Kindness, unleashing the last annihilation on mankind. (The horses seemed to move.)

  Del Nero now didn’t speak.