Meanwhile, as Giovanna stood anxious, shy and proud in her master’s place, with an electric-grey pigeon warming her head, Rossetti, who would have been insulted had he known Leonor’s new misapprehension of him, persuaded the erratic Silvia to take him back to her rented room. The roses had not yet wilted in their vase and her tabby cat Lilith was barely getting hungry. Silvia removed her clothes with darling clicks and rustles; Rossetti undressed himself with clinks and clanks. Three bronze coins fell out of his pocket. How the procedure was carried out I who was not there cannot tell you, but it remains certain that with great success they made love in her bed, and afterwards, while he lay naked beneath the white sheet watching her and humming “La Paloma,” although he did not know why it had entered his mind, a fly crawled upon his bronze forehead as Silvia stood naked by the shuttered window, sipping wine, holding Lilith against her breast and stroking her, hungering ever more to vanish from Trieste, which was why her eyes kept shining and glittering on that late afternoon by the sea. She had booked a berth on a certain twin-masted brigantino, the Tancredi, a former warship which now sailed into the past, ferrying seekers of lost dreams. To get rid of her lover, she acquiesced in becoming the next Signora Rossetti; by then the Tancredi had already departed. The instant her intended had dressed, constructed their rendezvous for that very evening behind the botanical gardens, kissed her lips, breasts, hands and then departed, Silvia, tyrannized by the fact that in summertime Trieste the smell of sweat can drown both smell and sound of sea, smashed her wineglass in a rage, at which Lilith, frightened by the uproar, hissed and showed her claws, which impelled Silvia to throw the animal out the window; and the calmness with which she observed the cat’s whirlings and screechings all the way down rendered her worthy of either damnation or pity — all because the odor of sweat from that unmade bed exasperated her. Now she desired to embark for Hvar or Opatija, where the sea’s fishy vapors make frequent headway against the air. Accordingly she poured the roses and water from her vase onto the bed, hurled the vase out the window to shatter on top of her dead cat, laughed, pulled her dress on, painted her lips reddish-black, cocked that pale hat on her head, locked the door behind her, just in case (which proves her not utterly irrational) and set off once more to buy her ticket to sea-freedom, but this time Leonor Fini, unapprised of Silvia’s unforgivable cruelty to cats, caught sight of her, and although she mostly preferred men she could dominate, or men-women to play with, Leonor found herself in a mood to give and receive Communion between this girl’s legs for the instruction, humiliation and delectation of all Leonor’s membrane-shrouded ladies bathing in pitch, Leonor’s gentle corpses and Leonor’s lesbians in jester dress — for by now our talented heroine had advanced beyond seeing other people’s ghosts; she invented her own. The world of Leonor Fini, the painted world, could be reached by lifting aside a certain oil painting on a certain easel. Being one of those women who say yes when they would rather say no, Silvia permitted Leonor to lead her to her studio, which was just downstairs from her mama’s apartment, and presently, after cigarettes and absinthe, her hostess opened the door in the easel, took her hand, and pulled her down to the dark garden of lichens, logs and glossy greens; so that before she knew it, Silvia was standing naked in dark water, huger-breasted than ever before, with the sky red behind her, and half-submerged skull-crocodiles watching; Leonor was dancing white and naked on a black driftwood log, and the grey-wigged red-cloaked skeleton of the Angel of Anatomy performed a string solo for them both, drawing a rib across the music-hole in a woman’s pelvis. — Silvia was thinking: I’d rather be in Opatija. — And then catbird ladies commenced to fly softly down, hovering just above the tarry water, swishing it around with their fat white breasts, so that before Leonor and Silvia had even made love once, Silvia was in distress, recalling all too well what she had done to Lilith and therefore (I am happy to say) repenting, which Our Lady of the Flowers found pleasing, since to her way of thinking contrition became people about as well as anything. Beneath a long veil, a jewel-like skeleton, pale and smooth like a fly’s eye, now squatted to embrace a bald unconscious man-woman to whom Leonor paid more attention than to Silvia — who stole the opportunity to dress. Leonor, who had anticipated painting a portrait of her standing waist deep in that pool, threw a glass dildo at her head and commanded her never to come back, which suited both parties. By then it was Sunday afternoon, so Silvia decided to climb the stairs of the bell tower. She would sail to the radiant sea on Monday. The tower was dark. Passing the Roman griffin or Pegasus or whatever it was, and the wing-headed thing carved into the marble, the excited girl ascended and ascended. Here the light was bluish-greyish-white, yet also warm; and gazing across the world she saw the myriad masts like stalks of dark grass in the harbor, beyond which the last roofs and the lighthouse demarcated the end of gravity. Tomorrow she would happily forsake the humid glare of the coast, gathering up armloads of those sea-diamonds which glitter all the way to Dalmatia — but spiderlike within the immense metal skirt of the cathedral bell clung Rossetti; for Our Lady, entreated with his orange-fragrant prayers, and wishing to encourage and even facilitate his promise-keeping (although his sincerity in proposing marriage I myself cannot help but fault, and the only reason she haunted his desires was that she had broken their rendezvous), had informed him where to find her. Giovanna being irrelevant, he invited Silvia to bronzify herself and share his plinth forever. She for her part, determined to be free, leaped out into the sunlight. Just before she met the pavement, the Madonna dei Fiori looked upward, not at her but at Rossetti, who, fascinated by the bloodstain on her stone forehead, was thereby saved from witnessing Silvia’s death — but all the same, he wept verdigrised tears on his plinth for a full three weeks, after which he got consoled by a slim, lovely young wasp-waisted beauty in a black jacket-skirt and black tights who held a whip and sometimes permitted him to feed tidbits to her pet bulldog. Her name was Lina. The whole time, Giovanna had heroically concealed her own troubles behind her palm branch.
Leonor, who loved a good quarrel, had been in a fine mood ever since she threw Silvia out. After drinking absinthe with two transvestite friends of hers she saw again the ghost of ancient Tanya Cirtovich in a light black veil, and painted that sad woman into the background of her latest oil autoportrait. The next time she visited the Madonna she found her weeping, and that was how she learned about Silvia’s suicide. Here I wish to insert that of all the Madonnas in the world, Our Lady of the Flowers takes greatest local interest in the doings of sinners. I have it on authority that when Buddha abandoned his family to go drink enlightenment beneath a tree, his little daughter cried so much as to fall into danger of death, so in the end they sent her to Trieste to be cared for by Our Lady, who sang her madrigals by night and gave her suck from her fine stone breasts until she became a stone seagull, a happy enough outcome were it not for the fact that after the fall of Mussolini they forgot who that seagull was and moved her into the Lapidarium. Our Lady wept twenty-four stone tears over that — the most she could have done for anybody so unchristian — and then, on a sultry autumn day when the bora blew the window open, transformed her into a real bird so that she could fly over the sea more or less as Silvia had wished to do. As for Silvia herself, how could Our Lady help such a bad girl? But was it Silvia’s fault that she had been created incapable of Triestine happiness? Moreover, she had repented about killing her cat. So the Madonna wept a river of tears into the sewer and through the forgotten Roman catacombs under the street and then down all the way to hell, in order to extinguish the flames which wracked that poor dead girl, who thus grew sufficiently sane to pray for Lilith, which entitled both Silvia and Lilith to come back to life, a favor which Our Lady gladly accomplished; she even gave Silvia a painted basket in which to carry her pet, who presently forgot to distrust her.