‘You’re giving me ideas,’ I said.
She laughed.
I leaned down again and ran my tongue from her belly-button to her clitoris, taking my time to connect the two. Her skin tasted of rose-water, and also of saltpetre, and I was reminded, incongruously, of the Guazzi twins.
‘No one ever did that either,’ she murmured.
‘Maybe you should be paying me.’
‘Cheeky bastard.’
She twisted round and took me in her mouth. Unlike other women I had known, she didn’t hurry. It felt more like an exploration than a rhythm, her lips still, only her tongue moving. She understood how to make the pleasure last, and swallowed everything that came out of me.
‘Aren’t you going to penetrate me?’ she said. ‘I like to be penetrated.’
An hour later, as I walked back to my lodgings, a woman opened a first-floor window and leaned out. I jumped backwards, thinking she was about to empty a chamber pot. She laughed and offered to lower her price, seeing as how she had given me such a shock.
‘You’re too late,’ I said. ‘I’ve already been with someone.’
The woman looked back the way I had come. ‘I hope it wasn’t Cristofana. She’s got every disease under the sun.’
Her cackle followed me as I moved on.
Dawn was a slit of rose in a brown sky. The streets creaked in the cold. I was no closer to solving the conundrum I had set myself, but I felt I had learned something, both from the Englishman and from the whore, and as I climbed into bed I comforted myself by repeating the Grand Duke’s words: Take all the time you need.
At the end of a day’s work, I would often wander in the palace grounds. Sometimes I would pass the modest garden that backed on to the convent of San Giorgio, attracted by the perfume of its many exotic plants. Like the Vasari Corridor, it was reserved for the Grand Duke and his immediate family, and I wasn’t allowed inside. Other times, I would visit the menagerie, where monkeys swung fluidly through the upper reaches of their cages, frowning like old men, and vultures shifted and sulked, their plumage the stiff dull black of widows’ weeds. Crevalcuore, the man who tended the animals, made himself scarce whenever I appeared. Like me, he guarded his privacy fiercely. Or perhaps he was just shy.
One evening in March, I found myself on the Viottolone, a grand sloping avenue lined with laurel trees and cypresses. Halfway down the hill, I turned left, making for the circular maze near the eastern wall. I was thinking about the girl who had waited on me at the banquet. I couldn’t forget how her arm had grazed the back of my hand, igniting that secret place in my left heel. She had chosen not to look at me, it seemed, and yet the atmosphere between us had thickened and crackled, like the air when a thunderstorm is coming. It had been months since I had seen her last, and the interval between the two encounters had been so long that I had begun to think I might have been mistaken. There might be two entirely different girls. If that was the case, though, which one had left the package at the House of Shells? With its blind alleys and its dead ends, the maze seemed to embody my frustration.
The sun dropped behind the trees; light drained from the gardens. I was following a path that led back to the gate on Via Romana when I sensed that I was not alone. I stopped. Looked round. A man stood at the entrance to a covered walkway, his glittering eyes perched on ledges of bone, his complexion sallow, damp-looking. I had the curious impression that he was there because of me. That something in me had summoned him. Brought him forth.
‘Did I scare you?’ His voice was quiet but scratchy, harsh.
My vision darkened and began to pulse, a black flower slowly opening and closing its petals.
‘No,’ I said.
‘You’re lying.’
I stared at the man. He seemed familiar, and I couldn’t work out why.
‘I can smell it on you,’ he said.
That rasping whisper — I had heard it before, on the night of the banquet, when I was hiding on the stairs.
‘I know who you are,’ I said.
It was dusk now, and his face hung like a mask among the leaves, his high square shoulders hunched, the rest of his body invisible. ‘Oh? Who am I, then?’
‘You’re Padre Stufa.’
‘And you are?’
I felt sure he knew exactly who I was, but I told him anyway. His thin-lipped mouth stretched sideways. I thought of Tacitus, and his famous description of the emperor Domitian, who was never to be more feared, apparently, than when he smiled.
‘You’re the artist,’ Stufa said. ‘You make those sculptures.’
He took a step forwards and peered at me as if I were half in shadow. He was wearing a white scapular and a black hooded cloak. The emerald on his left hand hoarded the last of the light.
‘Not that I have much time for that sort of thing,’ he added.
Though his features were gaunt, almost starved, his body was big and hollow-looking. His ribcage would be the size of a barrel.
In the distance one of the Grand Duke’s peacocks screamed.
‘I mean, what can you show me,’ he went on, ‘that I can’t see every day, out on the street?’
‘Maybe I can show you yourself.’
Before he could speak again, I walked away. Perhaps I should have been more diplomatic, but there was an abrasiveness in him that provoked retaliation, and I began to understand why Bassetti had snapped at him on the night of the banquet. Even as I approached the avenue of cypresses and laurels, I could feel his gaze on me, the inner canthus of his eyes unusually sharp and curved, like the knives used in the harvesting of grapes. Only then did I realize that he was the man who had brushed past me, the morning of Bassetti’s visit to the House of Shells.
Spring brought rain and grey skies, the redness of the poppies startling the fields. I paid Ambrose Cuif another visit. When he had poured us both a glass of wine, I told him I had finally met Stufa.
Cuif’s mouth twitched. ‘What did you think?’
I described the scene in the palace gardens.
‘I wouldn’t take it personally,’ Cuif said. ‘He’s like that with everyone.’ He paused. ‘It’s almost as if he’s got a grudge against the world.’
I didn’t follow.
The Grand Duke’s mother had found him on her way to Pisa, Cuif told me. It was around the time of the Epiphany, and the boy was standing by the roadside. His face had turned grey with the cold; his eyes were black, opaque. He would only say one word — stufa, or ‘stove’. Was he referring to the burns on his arms and legs, or was he seeking warmth? No one could tell. In any case, Stufa became the name he answered to. He had no other.
Cuif sipped his wine. ‘He probably made the whole thing up. To make himself sound more interesting.’
‘Or to make people feel sorry for him.’
‘Exactly.’
But I could see it somehow — the winter landscape, the boy with the blank eyes at the edge of the road. The carriage approaching …
‘They call him “Flesh”,’ Cuif said suddenly. ‘Did you know that?’
‘Flesh? Why?’
‘Why do you think?’
I couldn’t square the nickname with the man I had talked to in the gardens. ‘Have you got any evidence?’
‘Of course not. There’s never any evidence against people like him.’
‘So it’s all just hearsay.’
‘You sound as if you’re taking his side.’
‘I’ve had rumours spread about me too. I know what it’s like.’
‘All right. Here’s an example. Given his qualifications —’ and Cuif was unable to resist a snort of derision — ‘he’s entitled to hear confessions. Which he does. But apparently he often withholds absolution from young women until they’ve granted him — well — certain favours —’
‘Apparently,’ I said.