I woke to an uncanny hush. My wrists ached, and my whole body felt stiff, unwieldy. I lay quite still. The city sounded as if it had been smothered. Even with my eyes closed I could tell that it was light. Was it Monday already?
Later, standing at the window, I saw that a fog had descended, a fog so dense that the lopsided shutters on the building opposite were only vague suggestions of themselves. I thought of the moulds lying in a cupboard in my workshop, and my heart speeded up as I remembered the feeling of lightness that had flowed into me during the dismemberment, that flare of exhilaration for no reason. I sat at my desk and wrote to Faustina, asking her to meet me by the column in the Mercato Vecchio, as usual.
When I arrived that afternoon, there was a man with a brazier of glowing coals in the corner of the square. I watched him twirl a pair of blackened tongs, the blue smoke emptying into the fog. He was roasting chestnuts. It was the feast of San Simone, he told me.
‘Doesn’t the air smell wonderful?’ Faustina stood at my elbow. Over her shoulder was a bag that clinked every time she moved. ‘You disappeared again,’ she said. ‘Did you have another fever? Did you nearly die?’
I smiled. ‘It’s only been three days.’
‘It felt longer.’
‘To me too.’
We began to walk.
‘There’s something that’s been troubling me.’ I paused. ‘I’ve been feeling awkward about what I said last time I saw you. I feel I disappointed you.’
‘You’re not to think about that.’
‘But —’
‘No.’ She looked around to see if anyone was watching, then moved a step closer. ‘You haven’t kissed me yet. You haven’t even said hello.’
That evening Faustina took me to the ghetto. I had only been there once before, with Fiore, and I had forgotten how cramped and derelict it was, the streets no wider than corridors, and often blocked by piles of waste or rubble. The buildings towered above me, their dark-grey façades scarred and mottled, their eaves lost in the fog. Since the ghetto could not expand sideways, it had to go upwards, into the sky. It was all done illegally, with no controls. Some buildings were eleven storeys high.
We passed the well in the Piazza della Fonte. The whole area was dense with smells — smoke, fat, piss, and damp. Underneath, though, like a recurring theme, I thought I detected something which reminded me of ash or cinders, fainter than the other smells but much more acrid. I asked Faustina if I was imagining it. She shook her head. Twenty years ago there had been a fire, she told me, and part of the ghetto had burned down. The place was still being rebuilt.
Later, as she emerged from a shop with two tallow lanterns, the bell for the night hour began to ring.
‘If we’re not careful,’ I said, ‘we’re going to get —’
My sentence was cut off by the thud of the gates closing and the metallic crash of iron bolts being slammed into their sockets.
Faustina only grinned.
She led me to a grand, grim building in the ghetto’s north-east corner. Looking up at the windows, I saw that each storey had been divided horizontally. You could fit more families in that way. Some of the apartments had such low ceilings, she said, that only small children could stand up straight.
By the time we reached the fifth floor, the murmur of voices had died away. The upper storeys were uninhabitable, she told me. As we climbed higher, she advised me to watch my footing. There were stairs that had rotted clean through.
We came out at last into a drawing room or salon. I crossed to the window. The street was so narrow that I could almost have stepped on to the roof of the building opposite. I faced back into the room. A sofa stood against one wall, its springs and stuffing showing, and an iron chandelier lay on its side in the middle of the floor. These traces of splendour didn’t surprise me; before the buildings had been requisitioned by the Grand Duke’s family, they had belonged to some of the most famous names in Florence — Pecori, Brunelleschi, Della Tosa.
‘No one’s going to find us here,’ I said.
‘And if they do, they’ll probably be criminals,’ Faustina said, ‘like us.’ She lifted her lantern higher. ‘Did you see the fresco?’
On the far wall was a pastoral scene, with groups of nymphs and goatherds arranged against a landscape of pine trees, streams and hills. The clouds above their heads were edged in pink and gold. At first glance, it looked like a thousand other frescoes, but then I noticed that the figures were all looking to their left, and that their expressions varied from nervousness and apprehension to outright alarm. It wasn’t possible to know the reason, though. At some point in the past a wall had been built across the room, and half the fresco was missing.
I asked Faustina what she thought they were frightened of.
‘It could be a wild animal, I suppose.’ She studied a girl in a lilac dress who had thrown up an arm as if to fend off what was coming. ‘But I like not knowing, actually. It’s more powerful that way.’ She looked at me, her face glowing in the burnt-orange light of the lantern.
‘You’re beautiful,’ I said.
She made a joke about the fact that I could hardly see her.
I went and stood by the window. When I was with Faustina, I always had the feeling that this was something that wouldn’t happen again — that this was all there was, or ever would be. I found it exhausting to have to treat each new encounter as though it might well be the last. It was partly the times we lived in, of course, which had made criminals of us, as she had said, but it was also specific to her, it arose out of her character, and if I paid her too many compliments — something she had noticed, and seemed to feel ambivalent about — it was perhaps because I was trying to bring her nearer, trying to turn what we had into something a little less unstable.
‘I think you’ve ruined other women for me,’ I said, staring out into the fog. ‘I used to look at women all the time. Since I met you, though, I don’t do it any more. What’s the point? I know there’s no one who’ll come close.’
She came up behind me. ‘You almost sound sad.’
I smiled. ‘I’m not sad.’
‘I told you before. If you keep on like this, you’ll run out of things to say.’
I turned to face her. ‘I’ll never run out.’
We sat down on the sofa, and Faustina loosened the drawstring on the goatskin bag that Vespi had given her, the bag she had used for her spells and potions. She had brought some of the wine that was traditional on San Simone, a loaf of bread, green olives in a twist of paper, and half a dozen slices of porchetta. She uncorked the bottle and poured us both a cup. The wine was so young I could taste the grapes in it.
‘This is what my father drank,’ she said, ‘the last time I ever saw him.’
It was around the time of her thirteenth birthday, and Remo stayed for three whole days. One afternoon, he went out hunting with another man from the village. When he returned, his lack of awkwardness with her and his exaggerated attempts to appear alert told her that he had been drinking. That evening, he settled at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine. Leaning against the wall with her hands trapped behind her, she watched him so closely that she could see the pulse beating in his neck. He had entered Tuscany illegally, he said, through the hills near Chiusi. He had risked everything to see her. If the authorities found out he had crossed the border, he would be thrown into prison, or even hanged. In the past, she had always let him speak, but this time she interrupted. She didn’t understand, she said. Why wasn’t he allowed to cross the border?
He drained his glass and poured another, then he said something that sent a thrill right through her.
‘You don’t know it, but you’re asking how you came to be born.’