‘They’re like the worst parts of ourselves, the most savage part — the part we’re ashamed of.’ She stopped in front of one of the cold blue wolves. ‘They’re like nightmares.’
Still he didn’t speak.
She wanted to know how he chose the colours.
‘I don’t choose,’ he said. ‘They just arrive.’
‘But they’re wrong.’
Marvuglia’s smile was instant, and oddly lascivious. ‘Not to me.’
Back in the kitchen, he poured more wine. When we were seated, he asked what I was working on. I told him I was interested in the plague.
‘I thought I saw a morbid streak in you.’ Knees wide apart, he reached down and tugged at his genitals. ‘How long have you two been together, anyway?’
‘We’re not together.’
‘Just as well.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘Why “just as well”?’
‘You don’t belong together. It doesn’t look right.’
I felt a bright needle of anger go through me, but I fought the urge to challenge or contradict him. Instead, I glanced at Faustina, who was smiling.
Marvuglia noticed. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘If your colours are anything to go by,’ she said, ‘I’m not sure we should believe a word you say.’
He remained motionless for a few moments, then burst out laughing. ‘You’re quite something, you are. Madonna rotta in culo, if I were fifteen years younger …’
He went to fill her cup again, but she told him she’d had enough. Not long afterwards, we stood up to leave.
Outside, in the courtyard, a warm wind was blowing, and the leaves of a scruffy palm tree scraped and clattered. My horse skittered sideways, almost tripping over its own hooves.
Marvuglia scowled at the sky. ‘There’s bad weather on the way.’
Up ahead, the land blurred as the storm blew in from the north. I was thinking about Marvuglia, and wondering why Towne had wanted me to meet him, and what, if anything, we had in common. For all its unpredictability, his work was rooted in the earth, and in the things of the earth. It seemed to house resentment and the desire for vengeance; it failed to achieve transcendency. And I had found the man himself sarcastic and devious. Deliberately provocative. His claim that Faustina and I looked wrong together still rankled, and in the end I had to turn to her and ask what she had made of the remark.
‘He was jealous,’ she said simply.
‘You think so?’
‘Why? What do you think?’
I shrugged.
Though clouds were massing, we stopped beside a river. While the horses drank, I watched the water sliding past. Impassive, solid. A curious yellow-grey, like travertine. Faustina picked up a leaf and held it at arm’s length, then let it fall. Off it went, scrawling on the smooth, blank surface, as if it had been activated by the contact, and was delivering a message. The fast approaching storm, the whirling leaf — I had a sudden, acute sense of the shortness of time. I reached for Faustina’s hand. I thought I could feel the life rushing through her veins. Such optimism, such naivety. No inkling that it could end at any moment. I turned her hand over. Touched the tips of her fingers, one by one.
‘They’re beautiful, your fingers.’
‘Are they?’
She looked at her hands with such detachment that they might have been a pair of gloves. Not her gloves either. Someone else’s. Someone she didn’t even know. I felt all my words had come too late. Nothing I could say to her would make the slightest difference. Something inside me crumpled, and I stared off into the trees.
When I turned back, a tear had spilled in a straight line down her cheek. I touched the path it had left, the shine on her skin, then put the finger to my lips, and almost before I knew it my mouth was on her mouth, and I was kissing her.
‘The first time I saw you,’ I said.
‘What?’ she murmured. ‘The first time you saw me, what?’
Wind clutched at the trees behind us; the leaves rattled.
‘I don’t know.’ I was shivering, but I wasn’t cold at all. ‘There aren’t any words for it.’
‘You weren’t short of words before.’
‘Did I talk too much?’ I pulled away, looked down into her face. ‘I meant everything I said. You’re lovely.’
‘Am I?’ Her voice was light, as before, but melancholy, fatalistic.
I kissed her again.
‘What did you think,’ she said, ‘when you first saw me?’
‘I felt I could look at you for ever, and that would be all I ever needed to see.’
‘That’s too much.’
‘It’s true,’ I said. ‘Would you rather I felt less?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
Lightning tongued the high ground to the north. Seconds later, thunder tumbled across the valley, loud and clumsy. Our horses shimmied, eyes flaring white.
As we scrambled up into our saddles, the wind hurled itself at us. We could hardly hear each other speak. Then the rain came, flung in huge, cold handfuls. We were soaked in no time, and the city was still miles off.
We rode side by side, crouching low over our horses’ warm wet necks.
Not long after seeing Faustina to her door, my body began to ache. Between one street and the next, my limbs weakened; it was all I could do to lead Faustina’s horse. When I reached my lodgings, the signora put me on a pallet on the ground floor and covered me with blankets. The sweat poured off me so fast that my skin seemed to have turned to water. She had to keep changing the bedding, complaining with her usual dry humour about my lack of consideration and my demanding ways. Fiore loomed over me, no space between the ceiling and her face. The room had folded like a paper lantern. I touched a cool place on the pallet, and my whole body shuddered. Moments later, I felt I had gone up in flames. There was no night and day, only hot and cold.
I saw the field of death we had ridden through on our way back. It was late, the night hour was tolling, and we’d had no choice but to make for the nearest gate. Outside Porta alla Croce was the place where they held public executions. And I was there again, huddled over my horse’s neck, eyes filled with rain. A dripping scaffold. One body hanging from a rope, another ripped right down the middle. A crow stood on a dead man’s skull. Mud everywhere. Puddles. Blood. Where was Faustina? I’d lost sight of her. I rode past four pallbearers, black cloaks to the ground, a coffin on their shoulders. A dwarf sat cross-legged on the mouldy lid. His head was shaved; his mouth had been sewn shut. A blind priest beat a drum.
I walked through our house and on into the courtyard. My mother had her back to me. She was talking to my father, who stood with his forehead against a pillar. He didn’t appear to be listening to her; his lips were moving, as if in prayer. My father, whose reputation as a craftsman was second to none. My father, the shipbuilder. My mother put a hand on his arm. He flinched and pulled away.
How could you? he said.
Sensing there was someone behind her, she glanced over her shoulder. When she saw me, her face became two faces — one for me, one against. The first, I understood. But why the second?
Not now, Gaetano, she said. And then, more forcefully, Not now.
My assassin showed, as I had known he would. He loitered on the threshold, one ankle crossed over the other, studying his nails. In his knee-high leather boots and his green velvet coat with its huge folded-back half-sleeves and silver piping, he was quite the dandy.
Who sent you? I said.
He did not reply. Instead, he took out a glass vial and removed the stopper. I asked him how much he had been paid. Twenty-five scudi? Fifty? Once again, he ignored me. Stooping over me, he cradled my head and held a spoon to my lips. His fingers smelled of sex, as if he had been pleasuring a woman. That was a bit much, I thought. Surely he could have waited until afterwards. All the same, I drank the poison down. And, almost straight away, a vicious cramp, as though I had swallowed a hand that was twisting my insides. Then a surprising revelation. There was no sudden, sickening drop into the dark. No panic or pain. No, the whole thing was far less brutal than I had imagined. I felt a kind of click. A soft jolt. Like being in a carriage when it runs over a rotten branch. There was the feeling that something had been severed. An uncoupling, then. But dreamy, stealthy. Deft. You fall away. You settle. Dust in sunlight, sediment in wine.