“Give me back eight years of huddling for warmth in a cave of your making. Give me the dress I wore in Ostia, and my cigarette case with the cockatrice on it. Give me everything in me that was stamped out by everything in you. Give me back a girl who had never heard of a chimera, who had never read that stupid encyclopedia, who had never had to hear herself called an animal. Then I'll come home.”
Paola strokes Lucia's cheek with the back of her hand and pulls her like a doll, extricating her from Ludovico. He does not trip her, but he wants to; he knows her ankles and they are his, forever, always. But she crawls past him, weeping so bitterly that her back arches and heaves with it, as though she is trying to expel something from deep within her. They disappear out the tiny door, and Ludo lies slack-mouthed on the floor, his heart livid and black, his throat cracked like an old book.
Rosalie pulls an incandescent cup from her kiln, and Scamander pats her hand warmly, the dirt and blisters of decades in the fingers he puts on hers, the witness of themselves in Lucia, in Ludo, in all the times when the children were a trial and the money was scarce, when tea and cups were too thin, far too thin, to separate them from the empty, sterile air. Rosalie cradles Ludo in her lap, and Scamander steams the tea. He holds it to the poor man s chapped mouth, and the bookbinder drinks mechanically
“It's all in how you swirl the tea in the cup, son,” he says gently. “Clockwise, four times, not a bit less. That's the secret.”
Ludo crawls again from the teahouse. The grass is cold and wet. The tips of the blades are beginning to freeze, stiff as quills crackling under his clumsy palms. He stands up beneath the baffled larch, and traffic sings by, little different than Roman traffic, carriages and motorcars more ornate, more frilled and flared, but a bustle and shout he knows, that comforts him. In no city can he imagine the traffic as anything other than this exercise in martial prowess and disdain of death.
Ludo looks down to see that a
bee has alighted on his hand. It perches on one of his protruding veins, that ropy road traveling up his arms and out of sight. He always wore his blood too bright, too close to the surface. Blood was the trouble. All that worry about the Phlegmatic tissues and it was always the dark, red, splattering blood that would be his plague.
The bee does not leave him, but instead rubs its legs together impatiently, as though irritated to find no pollen on this sanguineous flower. A second joins it, and a third. Ludo thinks he ought to panic, but, after all, Isidore had his bees, in every icon, in every fresco. If he could bear them, Ludo can-but of course, Isidores bees were representative, metaphorical, the spiritual manifestation of his remarkable intellect. These are quite real, and they seem to be whispering to each other.
There are five now. They ignore the larch and flutter their wings with indefinable emotion. Ludo turns his palm over and they eagerly gather in the little valley of flesh near the pad of his thumb. Their fellows are coming thick and fast now, a black veil with flashes of gold like lightning glittering within. Their buzzing is a long shriek, and he knows it, he knows the sound, for she knew it, that other woman, with a bee sting on her cheek, and he knows her, for he has tasted with her and danced with her, far from each other. Ludovico closes his eyes, letting them settle onto him, praying to his saint, his patron, his last guardian ghost.
“Let them bite me, Isidore,” Ludo whispers. A prayer. A plea. “Your small and industrious lovers of virtue. Let them taste me, who has no virtue, and carry me away to become honey in the mouth of a king with a diadem I shall never wish to see.”
FOUR
ACTS OF VESTA
Ludovico had told himself a thousand times over the years that it was stupid to come to the Forum to think. Tourists indulge themselves because they think it makes their thoughts more magnificent, eternal. A man who had lived here all his life should have been beyond such childish acts. Ludo approached forty years of age with an utterly accurate internal map of Rome laid out over his heart, so that his ventricles corresponded precisely to a history of epochal lust and clam-dye and death by poisoning. He should have been above a place so well trampled by the tiresome and well-meaning that it could possess no molecule of its original self, only the cells of their bored and time-strapped bodies, squinting in centuries of suns.
But he liked it there. He couldn't help it. Ruins were calming to the scholarly soul. He liked to think about the Vestals in their great round house, which always looked to him like a salt mill, tending their little fires and writing diaries forever lost, diaries of quiet lives spooled out into virginity and the contemplation of a goddess of whom no stories were told at all.
Ludovico liked to think that, in the long years of their seclusion, the sisters wrote amongst themselves a secret Encyclopedia of the Acts of Vesta, stories of the hearth in which Vesta was a great and beautiful thing, her long hair dropping embers wherever she walked, striving in knightly fashion—of course she would have a furnace-grate for her shield, and a curling black poker as her lance—against demons of the everyday, against unfaithful wives and the winds of winter, against cruel merchants out to cheat her and against those many-headed ogres who seek the death of children: sleeping sickness, starvation, military service. Against the death of love.
Ludo liked to contemplate how their virginity was meant to keep the city whole, and as he sat in the shade of Byronic cypresses, he suspected it wholly true: that the inviolability of one soul can keep the whole of hell outside the gates of the city she chooses as her own.
Ludo thought, that day as they sat together on a low rise of crumbled stones far from the center of things, that Nerezza should have been a Vestal. In her utter impenetrability, she could have held the whole of Rome within her, red brick and tufa and aqueducts and catacombs, within the borders of her womb, and they would have been safe within her, safe forever, for no Goth or Gaul could broach that barrier.
“They didn't sting me, at all, not even once.” Ludo sighed.
“I'm not surprised. Insect life is a funny thing there.” Nerezza squinted herself in the broad, brazen sun, the molten light which poured like splashing wine over every shattered plinth and capital.
Ludo cleared his throat a little. “The Etymologiae says that bees are virtuous because they are much loved by all, and sought after with great longing by everyone, because their honey tastes as sweet in the mouths of paupers as in the mouths of kings. Do you think that's logical? That a creature can be virtuous just because it is loved and sought after, that the act of being loved, of being sought after, even if it is passive, is equal to an act of martyrdom or great piety, which is active? That it can confer grace to a whole species?”
“I think any encyclopedia is bound to have a great number of lies and fancied-up stories in it, Ludo.”
Ludo shut his eyes against the light; he saw the pinkness of his eyelids swim before him. “But what does it mean, then, if a man is sought out by those virtuous bees? Sought out with great longing by creatures whose very souls are defined by the fact that they are greatly longed for?”
“I don't know.”
“I wanted them to sting me. It was like the church, with all the silent people and their awful limbs, animal limbs. I wanted to be covered by other souls until mine was pressed to death, like a witch. Why do I feel that so much, when I'm there? Why do I want to be drowned in other people? I never want that here.”
“It's different, for everyone. I can't answer any of these things, Ludo. I'm glad you saw Lucia, that it… gave her up to you. Because you can't really think that by chance you stumbled onto her Sunday tea. But I have no grace, nothing to add to any encyclopedia of that place, I am not sought after and I have no virtue.”
He wanted to say: I seek you. He wanted to say: You are not my wife, but you are my Virgil, leading me through circle after circle of Purgatory How can a man not love the body that brings him so close to God ? But in the face of her inviolable mood, her frowns and her stares, he could not make himself drag her into Dante.
“Oh, Ludo,” she whispered, “if you want to be happy, just let it be.”
“Before the teahouse, I would have clawed through the earth for fifty years to find Lucia on the other side, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane. Maybe she'll still be there, with arthritis and absolution. But even if I never see her again, I have to go, I have to keep going to Palimpsest. I have to try. It is a world without an Etymologiae. Without an etymology, without origin. I'll go, and I'll lay a map of that place over my heart instead of Rome. I'll rent a small shop, an accountant's office, and write columns upon columns, everything that people know in that city. I will write, do you understand? I'll bind books, too, I'll bind them, as I have always done, and there will be pages like raw cream and the finest glues, the strangest glues, made from every kind of rendered beast, but I will bind only what I have written. Perhaps in fifty years, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane, will pass my shop and ask herself what strange old man is looking for his glasses in the display window, and we shall have a great deal to talk about. We will have coffees. I will save a chair for her. I am capable of that. Of waiting, of faithfulness. I am capable of service, of holding a city in my inviolable belly.”
Nerezza watched him with murky eyes, shaded by pity and loathing and envy. Ludo did not understand it, but the nature of eel-kind is beyond the comprehension of land-dwellers, and he let her invisible body, black as rope, circle him, circle him, crackling, sere.
“How can you talk about it as if you've already managed everything, merrily planning your little life in Palimpsest? Such a selfish little boy you are, Ludovico! You've borrowed a toy, and you think it's yours forever. If Lucia had shoved you off her that night you would never have known about any of this.” Hard, friable tears moved in her eyes. “Do you understand anything? Radoslav is dead. If we have it right, if what Agostino told you is true, if we've guessed the way, I can never go. Not ever. And I won't watch you gaily traipse into my country because your wife thought it was easier to just lie there and let you fuck her.”