The King's Gold (44 page)

“Oh,” he said.

He looked down. He had read me.

I had fallen into a miraculous, heart-flinging, ocean-sized daughter-love with Tomas de la Rosa.

Two very difficult days passed after my transmutation.

It was now an early Venetian morning. June 11. Erik and I sat on the floor of St. Mark’s Basilica. We were the first ones there; it is possible to snatch minutes of solitude even today in the greatest, and most horrible, of European churches if you cheat sleep just enough. And we had cheated sleep. We had cheated sleep for two whole days and were half demented from our waking dreams. The convulsions of history both personal and universal had continued to make their tremors felt upon our wildly expanded minds ever since we found ourselves the unlikely inheritors of the Wolf’s ancient curse.

After I had gazed in love upon my biological father, who had struck both Yolanda and me with a kind of lethal Cupid’s arrow as opposed to literally poisoned arrows, we had all raced from the lair beneath Santa Maria Assunta into the storm-whipped wilderness of Torcello. We tracked down the bloody path leading to the savaged shore, the missing boat with its escaped or drowned Marco, and the moon-blasted ocean. Farther down, the line of Tomas’s own schooner had been cut, and the boat cast adrift, so our stranded crew was made to spend one sleep-free night beneath the pictures of hellfire and doom. The next morning found us transported back to Venice by a fisherman who navigated his craft with an amiable air that belied the Venetians’ reputation for coldness. We then dragged our broken-down hides into a lovely hotel with an antique maid who fed us Bellinis and turbot, and (most of us) fell upon this repast like wyverns before staring dazedly out at the amethyst-colored canals. As Erik still didn’t want my parents to know about Domenico or Blasej, Yolanda and I kept that to ourselves, trying to explain to my family all the rest of what had happened.

Yet what should have been an inventory of our bereavements—love, fidelity, trust, Latino patrimony, the Aztec gold calendars, and holy Druidical books—and our gains—historical detection, triumphant reading—became instead a distraught inspection of the Lazarene Tomas de la Rosa. He drank like a whale while smilingly telling us more fables about my Arthurian-Toltec grandpa. Manuel grew white; my mother red. A bareheaded Yolanda accused him brutally with her ashen lips, even as her hands crawled over the tabletop to him, so that she touched his face and arms with an unguarded ecstasy. For my part, my fears about Erik were beginning to painfully resurface from the anodyne of my unwarranted affection for Tomas. I could also see how with every gesture, every word, de la Rosa continued to exhale chaos upon the deflated Manuel—and my mother, too—as if this
deus ex machina
came equipped with his own satanic censer of charisma that he swung above us.

The one person who did not figure into this ambiguous ending was my lover.

Erik was exhausted. He did not eat very much of his turbot. When he heard Tomas’s story about the sword and South America, he did murmur bitterly about King Arthur being a villain and no hero, and Excalibur being the scourge of mankind, but otherwise remained silent. During even the most antic part of my family’s verbal battles, he regarded us with the benign offhandedness of an amnesiac.

I knew the time had come to deal with our legal problems and to try to bring my man home and make him safe. But Erik didn’t want to face all that quite yet.

“We should go back to St. Mark’s Basilica, to honor the dead—the old Aztec ancestors,” Erik had suggested the night before. “Before we go to the police and explain everything, anyway.”

“No, we should go and get you a lawyer. And me one, too, I guess. It’s time we faced the trouble we’re in. And see if there’s any way we can make it home in time for the wedding—it’s in five days—”

“No, just give me another day or so. And besides, we have to go to the basilica. The gold they used to repair it is all we’ve got left.”

“Erik—”

“Please, Lola, just don’t argue.”

So that last Italian morning we sat in vigil, side by side, to stare up at St. Mark’s efflorescent, stolen sky. For a long while we did not speak, though we did hold hands.

Above us soared the central dome, which depicts the Ascension. It is a twelfth-century Renaissance masterpiece made out of gold mosaic circles. Christ sits on his rainbow, in a wreath of sky and stars, surrounded by a further ring of four angels or sirens. Gold-limbed trees form a lower halo in the flaming leaves, along with a curvature of saint-hermits and Mary-goddesses who girdle him in a holy orbit, as well as a magic circle of Latin words that spin
FILIUS ISTEDI IC CIVES GALLILEI
around and around like one of Yeats’s gyres.

There I was, agonized over the damage that the last days had done to Erik, but suddenly I felt that things could still somehow work out. Overwhelming fears of Erik’s delayed nervous breakdowns and our incarcerations vanished as gold light filtered down onto my face like a palpable blessing. And I did not care that my brief consolation was only a delirium brought on by wishful thinking, stress, the flashblack of angel dust–like hallucinogens, and the optical illusion caused by a trillion dollars’ worth of nectarine-colored heritage robbed from my ancestors and the entire world.

I did not care. I stared up at gold and at history. I had been sitting on my tailbone, straight-backed. I found myself all at once on the floor, my shoulders on the stone mosaics, my face tilted toward the dome. I grasped Erik and brought him down next to me. I do not know if he could see the beginnings of my rapture. Nor could I yet see his. I could not say to him that it had started to return to me again, in a deeper and more shocking form than even in Sofia’s cave. The witch’s flying potion still worked its magic in my blood, and visited upon me this second vision, which has been the vision of my life.

I stared up at the circles whirling above us. It made me think of the halo around Christ in Michelangelo’s
Judgement
, which creates such pandemonium in the order of Heaven and Hell. This pandemonium or Nirvana suddenly reflected within me. I thought of all that gold destroyed in the flash of Antonio’s alchemical hopes. I thought of the Aztecs, and the fanged idols they’d erected, replaced by the golden altars of Mary. I recalled the sight of Erik’s face when I lay there choking in the cave, and the images I had of his childhood and his womb-life and his death. And I began again to feel this tremendous love. I thought of the chaos of all things.

The man swinging down on a rope in the dark beneath the Torcello cathedral. A mother rising from the depths of the Central American jungle with her silver hair like Ishtar’s aura, and how she had a switchable passion in her heart for Alvarez and de la Rosa. I thought of my two fathers. I thought of the maxim
Nomen atque omen,
and how the slave had hoped that he was the forever opposite of the Wolf, that
Lupo
was
Opul
reversed absolutely, and he intended
il Noioso Lupo Retto
to be a complete anagram:
Io Sono il Opul Tetro,
I am the dark and gloomy Opul. I thought about how dangerous the Fool’s skin-shifting wordplay was, because when he changed places with Antonio, he had not only started fresh but also died. For hadn’t the dark and gloomy Opul taken on some of the madness of his captor in those last moments when he burned those men on the Siena battlefield with his naphtha? Just as bad Marco showed me a face that I had also seen on Erik?

No, no, all of these people are strangers to one another, and there is such a thing as evil, but I still gazed up at heavens made of history and of gold. I looked very closely at those circles. They seemed less like the bounded confines of an antique Heaven and more like the wild halo in Michelangelo’s
Last Judgement
, which spins out of control, into new shapes. An Aztec god had been destroyed to make this Mary and this Christ. And one day, too, this place would fall. Venice would sink down to the fiery, tectonic plates at the bottom of the ocean, only to rise back up in the form of a shining Chinese fish or a drop of the Indian Ocean. It would
turn and turn again.
It would take centuries, but it would perform its
trick.
And in this vision there was also no difference between the Aztec werewolf-god Xolotl and the risen Jesus Christ since they were made of the same mettle. Yes, there was no difference, either, between Montezuma and Cortés, who were brothers without knowing it. And I was made of the same stuff of Tomas and Manuel. And there really was no such thing as a forgery, because I could translate into the daughter of de la Rosa, or even SotoRelada, while staying the authentic girl of Alvarez.

I was finally in love with the whole world, the whole, wide, hating world. There was a terrific danger in this epiphany, a heresy that threatened lives and our history. But it is a madness out of which much can be made. I had never been so happy in all my life.

“Erik, Erik,” I said.

When I looked over at him, I saw that he was crying.

Large, clear, viscous tears slipped from the corners of his eyes and down his cheeks. His eyes squeezed shut, and his mouth opened wide with grief. This grief was over Domenico.

“Erik,” I said.

He shook his head. I leaned over and kissed him. I kissed him again.

“Erik, remember what you said in Florence, to Dr. Riccardi?”

He shook his head again, not looking at me.

I began to feel cold. “Erik, Erik—let’s get married. I don’t care about the wedding. Let’s find a church. Now. Like you were saying in Siena. Let’s find a priest—”

He still didn’t answer. Then he said: “No, no wedding. I can’t anymore.”

I clung to him. I grew desperate. Tourists had begun to pour into the basilica, but I didn’t care.

“Erik, remember, you said that love changes you for the better.”

“It doesn’t.” He turned his hot eyes toward me. “But I
would
let it change me, Lola. Because I love you, I love you. So I let it make me into anything, into the worst. And it did.”

He would not say more. He rose to his feet; we left the basilica without giving it another look. The gold shimmered briefly behind us before we found ourselves again in the tumult of the square.

I remember the rest of that day very clearly. The light on the water shone like citrine and pearls, as if Opul-Antonio had thrown his treasure into the lagoon. The rainbow-black pigeons flew in circles above us. The warm, wet crush of travelers swarmed in Casanova’s footsteps and in Titian’s. I spoke to Erik twelve more times of marriage, but without avail. We passed the Bridge of Sighs, noting the shadows cast by the Doge’s Palace, where the authentic Antonio Medici had starved to death in squalor but for the golden helmet that so cleverly hid his face from the world.

At night, the blue and red gondolas skimmed over the waters. Men in striped shirts sang. Erik and I had a brief dinner with my savagely quarrelsome family before retreating early to our white-linened hotel room, so that we might have a good rest before the next day’s confrontation of our legal and domestic dramas.

In the morning, I woke up in a patch of sunlight. The other half of the bed was empty, Erik’s side of the closet cleared. There was no note. He left only the faintest trace: a night maid had seen Signor Gomara leave the building at three o’clock in the morning, looking half-dead, she said.

Erik was gone.

Four months later, back in Long Beach, I sit on a folding chair in the dusk-filled and empty Red Lion.

The windows are shuttered. I would have been a bride by now, but instead, I am a single woman dressed in bulky, utilitarian clothes designed for travel. My books are in boxes or stacked in corners and waiting to be packed. The autumn atmosphere, unaided by my Tiffany lamps, is shadowed and most certainly filled with ghosts.

Outside, things do not look much better. The day of the Twin Towers has come and passed, and the newspapers are stained with the same frighteningly gorgeous red and black hues of medieval prayer books, or Mexican Day of the Dead masks.

Thus, the lessons of cataclysm taught to me by the
Versipellis
Opul of Timbuktu, and expressed so beautifully by Michelangelo in
The Last Judgement
, are facing a terrible test.

Miracles are possible: A man can change from slave to master; with the stroke of gold paint the Aztec world can fold like an exquisite corpse into the Italian and perhaps back again; Hell can transform into Heaven. And I can fall in love, like Antigone, like Electra, with the villain who is Tomas de la Rosa.

Still, the desire for chaos that so glamoured me in the Basilica di San Marco has given way, in my heart, to a longing for the twelfth-century version of a permanent and immutable eternity. Tolkien’s Lothlorien! In other words, I do not want another person to die, ever, or anything more to change, except for all the dead to come stumbling out of their smoking graves to look wonderingly at the sky, and to laugh about their eternal, inextinguishable stasis.

And I would like but one more transmutation: Erik is not here. I would alchemize him back into my bed and back into my arms.

Therefore, the room is dark; the books and ephemera have been stored away. The two red-gold coins of Aztec gold (which I smuggled out of Italy, yes, which I stole like the most justifiable of bandits, despite the continued rancorous phone calls of Dr. Riccardi, and my bevy of international criminal lawyers), are locked in the store safe. Conan Doyle lurks in this pile, unread, unsold. In the next stack mumbles Verne and King alongside Sofia Medici’s unbelievable-but-true
Diario Intimo.
In recent months, I have wondered if all these masters’ lessons have been learned by me. I wondered, generally, if the season has come for me to put away fantastical things. The Red Lion still roars from the store front, and he will stay there for the time being. Maybe one day I will bring him, too, down.

I rise from my chair, wander over to one of these book stacks. Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
and Sir Sigurd Nussbaum’s
Italy: Land of the Lycanthrope
are closed tight, like shut mouths.