Palimpsest

Ludo dug his nails into leones, into ambulant, as if to unearth from them her face, her stride, her long golden tail brushing paw prints from the scrub-dust.

They had always been beasts, curled and snarling in their cave, intractable, invidious. Of course they had, chimera and saint—but hadn't they made their monstrous contract, hadn't they eaten youths together and made a lair of these five rooms? Hadn't he seen her face in some shield years past and been rooted to this floor, his stone arms pinning her to him? Where could she even dream of going that he would not already be there, knowing her as he did, knowing her best, knowing her nature, her origins?

He looked at the apocalypse of the Japanese book: spread over the floor, hundreds of linen pages, silver paint, black silks. He screamed at them: impassive, inelegant illustrations, trains like limp snakes. She would have done better, they would have been yawning leviathans under her pen, chewing through the belly of the earth. The ceiling swallowed his cry with genteel embarrassment. His deadline was long past, the contract given to another binder in Parma. He did not care, he had let it go. And this was left in place of his wife: pages, paint, silk. He pissed on them, he spat, he tore them, he ate them, he threw them from his window. There seemed to be no end to their number—it was an infinite beast, one surely known to whatever podium occupied his beloved Spaniard in the libraries of the dead. Ludo laughed in the dark and began to scrawl on the wall, near the baseboard, where he would not crowd Lucia's hand:

18.c.1. In the remote west are creatures whose body is that of a great book with a spine of wood and glues the matter of which is like unto the blood of a man. In rage does the beast snap its covers and gnash its chapters one against the other, and should a man attempt to make end to such a one, it will spew forth the substance of its life in the form of pages without end, and he shall be overwhelmed entirely by the copious waste of the brute, and thus does the beast ransom itself from death…

He stopped, having no further joke to share with the ghost of her.

Seven sewn covers empty of pages stacked themselves into a rough Ionian column to bear up his coffee; spilled glue from the sinew of an ox had hardened into caramel below the defunct radiator. Four hundred and twelve pages had swallowed up the couch, the one Lucia had bought in Ostia b

ecause it was precisely the color of a pecan shell, on which she had slept naked and alone for three nights so as to drink up all that billowing color into her impossible skin. The ruin of the Japanese book covered his floor like a wrought carpet, and his steps sounded loudly, too loudly, on their leaves.

Ludo lay over them, the couch soft and flaccid beneath him now, no longer smelling of Lucia or the sea, or that summer on the beach when she wore only yellow and she had not yet frowned in his presence, not even once. He put his face into the pages and breathed the desiccated smell of long-dry ink, sifting through it with archaeological patience, searching for the vanished weight of his wife's knees pressing little cups into the fabric.

By the time the moon slid out of the sky like a button in a dress, Ludo had fallen asleep, curled in the lap of his book monster, an illuminated dining car stuck to his cheek.

“Have you seen her?”

The sentence, its mere shape in his mouth like an old, flattened fig, exhausted him. He had stamped it with his tongue like a press, copy after copy, into the hands of everyone he met, all of their friends with tortoise-shell glasses and buckled shoes, briefcases with embossed mottos, pens tapped against teeth, frosted lips pursed, napes pinched, Chianti in fat-bellied glasses at a dozen cafés where he tasted nothing of the cakes or coffees set before him. He and Lucia had not been good friends, the two of them curled up like turtles into the shape of the other. They had rarely sought out the people they had known before the advent of their walled world, their untouchable quiet.

The woman across from him now was a university acquaintance, quite far down the list of Lucia's folk. He was reasonably certain her name had been, presumably still was, Nerezza, something stiff and severe like that. Lucia collected severe and baroque humans like a grotesque kind of zookeeper. Nerezza's flecked eyes were small and narrow; she looked angry even when she laughed.

“Why do you assume she has left you? There might have been an accident; you could call the police.” She measured out her voice through her lips like an iron flattening a sleeve.

Lions are watchful even when they sleep, he thought. “Because I know her! She meant to leave. She was always … a woman of intent.”

Nerezza laughed like a cough. “Yes, she was. How funny that we talk about her already like she is dead. Well. I could say that I've seen her, but I don't think that would be of much use to you.”

Ludo waited, trying to be patient with her, to see what Lucia had loved in her, even in this to touch his wife. His palms sweated through the knees of his trousers. Such an ugly thing, the ever-leaking body. Nerezza scowled.

“Tell me, Ludovico,” she said, drawing deeply on her thin little cigarette. “Have you had any dreams lately? Bad ones, crazy ones, like the kind you have in a hospital, when they won't let you out and you can't see your family.”

“Of course. My wife has left me. I have terrible dreams, when I sleep at all.”

“That's not what I mean. How about a rash? Like hives, but it doesn't itch. Black. Like a tattoo.”

“Yes, yes, on my back. I don't care about that. She had it on her knee. She said it was nothing. Communicable nothing, I guess.”

Nerezza rolled her eyes, stubbed out her cigarette. Ludovico loathed smoking. He had tried to explain to Lucia once that it contorted the humors, it was hot and dry and would burn out the delicate phlegmatic apparati and leave her breathing fire. He had been earnest; she had kissed him with her mouth full of smoke, and his lungs had trembled, blazing, parched.

Nerezza rolled up the sleeve of her violet dress. There were lines on her forearm, Lucia's lines, his lines. How dare she? How dare she bear on her body that last thing which had passed from his wife to him? But no cherubs winged at the edges of Nerezza's streets. There was an oblong track in the center of the snaking avenues, like the Hippodrome seen from an impossible distance. On her flesh the mark was horrible to him, bare, violent, as though she had torn into herself with jagged glass—torn into him, into Lucia, taken their secret disease, their private travail.

“Now,” she said quietly, laying her arm on the table between them like a meal, like meat. “It is possible for me to say that I have seen Lucia. It is also possible that I know where she is now, that I am certain she is safe and well. It is even possible that I touched her face not three days past, and that we have passed men like a whiskey flask between us. These things I have to give you, but they are also lies, for I have not seen Lucia in the waking world, nor do I know where she is while we speak here, at this place, drinking this coffee, eating this crème caramel. It is for you to decide if you will take these things from me.”

Ludo closed his eyes. She talked like Lucia, dreamily, darkly, pregnant with meaning he sometimes thought pretended. The sun pressed its hands upon his face and he burned. “I will take them, Nerezza. Tell me where she is so that I can bring her home.”

“Ludovico, poor soul, Lucia will never come home. She won't, and she doesn't want to. I think—and it has been a long while since I knew either of you well—but I think it would be better if you told yourself she was dead, and believed it, and became a widower.”

Nerezza allowed a small smile, though it fit her face poorly. It was an encouraging smile, even motherly. Go along and play, little boy, it said. We are so busy; it is such work to be grown up.

Ludo grimaced. “If the world contained within it enough black to mourn her, perhaps I could. As things are, I am what I am, and she is what she is, and we are neither of us dead.”

She took his hand gingerly, the gesture of a sleek-legged rider approaching a great beast she intends to master. He was surprised to find no sugar lump in her palm. If Lucia was a chimera, heaving her great lion's body from couch to floor to bed, Nerezza was an eel, dark and snapping, too slippery to touch, however fiercely she might be held. He recalled his Etymologiae: that the eel is born in mud, and eats earth, that the mud of the Ganges gives birth to giant eels, black and worm-blind, gargantuan, holy. Perhaps it was her and her inscrutable tribe of which Isidore spoke, sliding up out of the great ashy river with water beading on their breasts.

He gripped her hand suddenly and she disentangled herself with a deft motion, practiced at escape.

Her apartment was not far from the café, but they did not stumble into it in the manner of lust-addled lovers. They walked, slowly and without ardor, hand in hand, into her house, where four long windows let in the diffident afternoon sun.