Palimpsest (37 page)

Their days, for the moment, were mainly stolen kisses and laughter and long stretches of wrapping themselves around each other. November did not often talk to him, as she could not talk to Ludo, and so the barriers seemed natural to extend. They became not barriers, but a house of no words that sheltered them all. Oleg always brought November tea afterward. He wanted to. He needed to, to serve her, to be her Pecia, to be enough that what she had done to bring them all this far, what she had lost, had been worth it.

Ludo took him walking in the ruins, and though he did not speak, their kisses were frank and unfettered behind cypress and oak and grapevine, and the light, the light in those places was the impossible light of the rafters of heaven, and such lamps showed through, such lamps, and such laughing.

Signe-de-Renvoi

T
HE CITY SQUARE OF
S
IGNE-DE
-R
ENVOI
looks out onto the great fall of the Albumen into the earth, ringed in both fig trees and pomegranate trees, so that the air is always sharp and rich and sweet. There are dances there, and when the skirts swirl under the high, high moon, there is nothing in the world like the blue lace that shows beneath them. A charming, handsome woman of a certain age keeps everyone’s glasses full, a champagne brewed from pears and frozen grapes. Her hair is so long she has braided it all the way around her body, twice, and this serves as enough clothing for her. She has a pet, a stately old tiger with his claws long pulled, his teeth long fallen out. He is a relic of tigerhood, a bygone age when great cats knew calculus and dactylic hexameter and held a court of dreams in the jungle.

She has forgotten her name. I brought her here so very long ago, and when she died I made a copy, and another, and another. She could not speak when she lived, and I have not felt right making her copies speak, and so we have never conversed but in the silent ways of lovers. Sometimes I think that the war struck half my people dumb in her name, in her honor. But that is surely fancy.

The tiger lived, though, and I cannot explain that but I feel close to him, comradely. We have both lived so long, we old cats. We court of dreams.

I do not know why I have done these things. I do not always know why I behave as I do. Does anyone?

But I cannot let her go.

She is there tonight, dancing naked with her braids undone and flying like black serpents. I watch her in the body of an affable man with a loose pocketwatch chain, through his grandfatherly eyes, his age and his wisdom. I dance with her in his feet, and in her perfect ear I whisper the name I know but that she has lost like an earring:

Chanthou, Chanthou, my love, my wife.

_______

Ludovico watches the village dance. He would like to join in, but he does not feel right about it. He stands by the pier waiting for Oleg, patiently, as only he can be patient.

Which is not very patient,
he reminds himself.
But for Oleg I
can try.

“And not for me?” comes a voice across the grass, and he knew it would come, he had prepared for it, he had tested its weight on the river and found that he thought he could bear it.

Lucia stands near him in a yellow dress, the dress of Ostia and the pecan-colored couch. Her skin is lion-golden and her hair a riot of loose, dark curls. He says nothing to her—he cannot. The mound of his severed tongue still aches in his mouth.

You are not Lucia,
he thinks.
Please don’t tease me. You’re not her.

“Of course not,” Lucia says as though he spoke. “She would never come here. It is not … within her circuit of fashion.”

She steps into his arms with all the natural grace of a long-wed woman, and their kiss is genuine if she is not, deep and long, and he takes great good from it.

“I’m not Calypso, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she says.

He laughs despite himself. It is a broken sound, like a plate falling. Even in this, she is a perfect copy—she presents the classical reference like a gift, a way of explaining herself, and so it is a gift.

“I do not come to offer you immortality and love of me until the riotous death of the magnetic poles in exchange for your humanity. There are no such choices. I am an honest city, I think you can at least grant that.”

He nods, and holds her hand as they walk along the little wharf.

“I want to give you what you need, Ludo. It is important to me, as I think you and I will shortly be friends for a very long time. You gave your voice for me, like the mermaid in the fairy tale. I was charmed. I was wooed. I admit it. And you are so close to me now, it is like Christmas Eve. Don’t you feel it?”

He nods, helpless to do more. They are quiet, and she skips a stone or two down the cream-churned river.

She stops and stands on her tiptoes to look him in the eye. She is so young and her brow is so clear. There are no frown lines in her.

“Are you ready?” she says, and her voice is strong and steady. “I love you. I have loved you for nine years, and I knew it was nine and not eight. I only said that to hurt you. That summer in Ostia was the core of us, and it was shining and warm and the color of pecan shells. All of this I did in a frenzy, a madness, but it did not touch us, in our walls, our lair. There, I was yours alone, and I was happy. I am your beast, and you are my saint, and I forgive you, for that is what noble beasts do, and I am a noble beast. And beasts forget, too. It is only the sadness of saints that they cannot.”

She kisses him, and her breasts are warm and soft against his body. “I love you, and I am your wife, and I forgive you of all the sins of this world, all the sins we invented just to commit within our cave. I love you,” and the light of her eyes seems to shift to something darker and cleverer than his Lucia, something vast and old. “I love you, Ludovico. In a world without end. I love you.”

She walks away from him, up the low rise toward the dancing and the lights, and she is carrying her sandals by the straps as she did when last he saw that dress, the torchlight on her hair like an absolution.

FOUR

T
HE
F
AVOR OF
V
ESTA

I
will never forgive you,” Nerezza said, clutching her wrist in her hand so tightly that it left red crescent moons in her skin. They had gone for coffee, because she could not bear the house.

Ludo tried to smile at her, his eel-girl, lost in the brumey water, circling herself in the dark.

“I have had to listen to the three of you fucking and laughing for days,” Nerezza snapped, “and I am sick to death of you.”

He was quiet for a long while. Why had he not taken them to his apartment?
Because it is Lucia’s place, and it is pleasant to be among
people who know the same secrets. Agostino, Anoud. Even Nerezza.

Ludo took out a pad of paper and a pen. He wrote, in fine, even lines:

Is that why you gave us up to Ululiro and those men? To be rid of us?

Nerezza shrugged. She did not look away; she was not ashamed. “Why should you be different? Why should the rest of us be chained to the earth while you go free? I have done what I have done. It is mine to own and pay for. You lived.”

He reached for her hand, and she bore that touch, and so he thought perhaps she was not utterly lost to him.

He wrote:
It is not so easy for me after all, you see.

“I do see,” she relented. “But I do not forgive you. And you should not forgive me.”

Ludo wrote:
I want to give you what you need, Nerezza. It is important
to me
.

“You haven’t the first idea what I need, Ludo. How dare you?”

He squeezed her hand and lifted it to his lips, kissed it, held it as though with that hand, all he was allowed, he could hold all of her. Ludovico let her hand fall and wrote furiously:

Have I ever told you why I go to the Forum? I go to look at the temple of
the Vestals. They lived there, secluded, not just virgins, though that was important,
but keepers of wills and historical papers. They wore white; they wore
their purity like shields. They were the daughters of Vesta, Vesta, who kept the
hearth. And as long as they were inviolable, the city was kept safe, kept whole.
Forever. And maybe if they had—because they failed, sometimes, because they
were young and they could not choose their nunnery, and they were punished
for it, even killed—Rome would not have lost the favor of Vesta and fallen into
the dark. Because it was the hearth-goddess who left them without light, without
fire. Do you understand?

Nerezza’s eyes were full of tears, but they did not fall, they were hard, harder than anything he had within him. Her eyes were sharp and dark, reflected into crystal. She shook her head.

They could not live in the city, Nerezza. They could not drink at the festivals,
or take lovers in alleys, or eat mackerel in the market. But without them,
the city fell into the dark and the cold, into a hole in the world. Because they
were inviolable, the city lived within the circuit of their skin, and they kept it
safe, like a mother, like a goddess.

She was crying in earnest then, angrily, harshly, without sound, without forgiveness, but she did not let go of his hand. He kissed her and kissed her again, and slowly, with a small smile, as though it was a joke shared long ago between them, he kissed the tears from her cheek with his round mouth.

_______

Ludovico left her in the café, drying her face, composing it again into eelskin and electricity. He stepped into his taxi and sped off through the Roman streets toward the airport, washed with light, past the ruins of ruins, the city built on its own grave, built out of itself, time and again, a world without end.

VERSO:

Y
OUNG
-E
YED
C
HERUBINS

ONE

T
HE
F
LAYED
H
ORSE

A
maya Sei sits in the broad open pavilion of the Fushimi Inari shrine. She folds her hands over her stomach, trying, for the hundredth time, to decide. One thousand blaze-orange
torii
gates open up behind her, winding up the mountain like a long tunnel into fire. Spiders of improbable size string their rain-colored webs in the corners of the gates. They are pale green, though that means nothing here, still it makes Sei smile. There are huge circles under her eyes, and she feels ill, sore in every joint, in every part.
I am the Kami of
Engines,
she thinks to herself,
and I have come to take the winds of my
lovers into my belly, and to burn.

_______

This is the eighth day she has waited at the shrine. The stone foxes—she has heard there are thirty-three thousand of them on the mountain, an exact number, yet infinite, infinitely variable vulpine faces, and they regard her now with familiar acceptance, like a family dog who has come to love a frequent visitor. The evening is crisp, the leaves almost all brown now, the persimmons flaccid and smeared on the stones. There is a belt of pale gold around the horizon, and above it, all is blue, a universe of blue, like the light at the bottom of a lake.

_______

But today they do come, walking through the festooned gate of the shrine, three of them, holding hands.
They are so beautiful
, she thinks.
So strong. I have paid such a price for their easy passage,
she thinks.
It was worth it, that they have not suffered as I have.
The woman’s skin looks as though it was burned many years ago, but it is healed now, and shining. She is wearing gloves in the cold. One of the men is tall and older, with glasses and poor posture. The other is younger, sad-looking, very thin. But they know her, they know her immediately, and she runs to them, as fast as she can, and despite everything she flings herself into their arms, and kisses the man with glasses as though he is her most desperate wish. He does not give her his tongue, and she does not seek it. And then the woman, whose mouth tastes like the sugar-candies her mother loved, and then the young man, who circles her waist with his arm and lifts her off the ground.

“Come on,” she says in Japanese, but they understand her meaning, and Sei leads them into the tunnel of gates, up and up, one thousand of them, into the crystalline blue night, into the infinite foxes, into the green spiders and the flame-colored pillars. Without knowing why, she begins to run ahead of them, and in her belly the first quavering movement comes with the pounding of her feet.
Oh
, she thinks,
oh, you poor thing. I’m so sorry. You are a terrible toll to pay. I don’t think it will hurt. Just … imagine a book
at the bottom of a lake. Fish read it. It is your book, all your own, and you can
find such wonderful things written there …

And she is filled with terror, and filled with joy, with the brightness of their kisses, with the fluttering of her child, with the light of the first stars, and—

_______

And Sei is speeding at the head of the Flyleaf Line, the unpredictable child-train, through the underground and up into the city, the elevated rails, the sassafras-scented air. She cuts her hand with the edge of a steel disc and laughs softly as oil bubbles up from beneath the controls. She presses her palm to it and the shriek of ecstasy that erupts from train and girl shatters three streetlamps as they pass. She sinks into the arms of the Third Rail, and her legs seem to flow into the circuitboard, and her hair seems to flow back over the body of the locomotive, and her arms are pressed back against her sides so that her face, the face of the train, the new train, can feel the wind dancing by.

At Oathusk Station, they will say they saw a train fly. They saw it jump the tracks without the smallest hesitation, jump into the air as though it had waited a lifetime for that jump, and race into the tall grass. The black-faced sheep scattered, and the raspberries exulted as the train that is Sei who is the train moved like light toward the mountains and beyond.