Palimpsest

Ludo is beyond comprehension. He crawls to her on his knees, in humility, in shame, penitent. Begging to enter again his severe and monstrous idol.

“I didn't want you here,” she hisses.

Paola snorts a little. She is too familiar with Lucia, behaving as if she is in full possession of the situation, and how dare she presume to know a thing about them? Ludo hates her immediately, sorts her past eel and mouse and

into insect, devouring, soulless ant.

“He couldn't have gotten here in the first place if not for you, my love,” she says gently, “so don't be too angry. If you didn't want him here you should have shut up your bedroom like a mosque. I did. I thought you would.”

Lucia rolls her eyes. “I was sure he wouldn't figure it out-no one does from the first night, and what were the chances he'd find another one of us? He never leaves that apartment.”

“Figure what out?” Ludo is conscious of a great many eyes on him, but he cannot make himself move from his wife. She looks at him pityingly.

“This place, Ludo. Palimpsest. This city. How to get here, how to live here.”

At that, the patrons scramble to the tiny exit, a sudden riot of velvet hats and gold-soled shoes, shoving and squeezing through the little door, crawling desperately over each other to get out. They do not like it, they do not want to hear it, to know it.

“Lucia,” he says when the room has cleared. For him it is so simple. “Come home, please, I have missed you so much.”

She puts her hand on his head, an old gesture, not yet leeched of tenderness. Her hand and her voice are cold. “But it couldn't have been only me. He's here now, and this is very far from where I would have taken him. Who was it, Ludo? Who let you crawl into her like you come crawling to me now? Did you even know that's how it works?” She stares spitefully at him, her hair piled up and strung through with tiny bronze feathers.

“Nerezza. And Anoud, later It didn't mean anything. It was a way to you. She said it was. The only way.”

Lucia hoots haughty laughter. “That's impressive. Nerezza's like a sphinx. Awfully hard to pry open. Is that what you liked about her?”

“It wasn't about liking.”

“But you do, I can tell. I was married to you. Was it eight years? I stopped counting.”

“What difference does it make? You left me. You could not have run further away from me. How can you be jealous?”

She looks at him blankly “Do as you like,” she spits.

“I'd like you to come with me. Give me your hand, come home. It can be easy. I won't reproach you, not ever. I swear it. It will be as it always was. You will lie on the couch the color of pecan shells and I will kiss your shoulder blades. It will all be forgotten.”

Paola puts a firm hand on his shoulder. “Save it. It's over.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?” he shouts furiously. Scamander flinches in the corner of the teahouse and Rosalie clutches her tongs in the event of hysteria. “Who the hell are you to talk to us? You have no right.” He strikes the floor with his palm, and it is wrong, a tantrum, a childish thing, but he cannot help it.

“I'm hers,” she says simply. Her eyes slide into him, appraising, searching, and withdraw, finding him lacking, surely, small, an animal. “She lives with me in the real world. In a little flat overlooking a river. We have geraniums and a cat. We belong to each other, and soon we'll find the last one of our Quarto, and then we'll be able to live here forever. And you will only ever visit.”

“I met someone, Ludo, a long time ago.” Lucia sighs. She is trying to be kind and he recognizes that this is a trial for her. She can barely contain her scorn. She holds it before her like a shield. “A man with a funny birthmark. You know it by now. You have it. I'm sorry for that. Fucking him seemed harmless, an act performed outside our walls, and therefore unreal. You taught me that, that nothing outside us could be real. I believed it, I think. I believed it in Ostia. I believed it until him. And it was harmless, it was. You were so busy with that book, that Japanese thing. You didn't need me. And to have a thing I didn't have to share with you was rich and sweet. I was spread out under you so far and so thin, nothing of me was my own.” Lucia looks at her empty cup. “It is so beautiful and awful here, so much more real…well, more real than you. Than the story you told about us. This is my place, now, it's not yours, it's not. You have the world, this is mine.” Her voice had grown high and panicked, as if he were preparing to steal something from her. “You have Isidore and your glue and you have your brothers in Umbria and I had nothing, nothing but you and those stupid walls, and I was lonely living inside you, Ludo. You are not big enough for me.”

“I… I thought we contained each other. I thought you were happy, as happy as you could be.”

“No, Ludo, you were happy. Now listen to me, please.” She leaned close to him, her breast brushed his arm. “Get out.”

“No! I won't leave you. I can do as well as you, I can crawl through Rome on my belly like a worm and find all the secret ways in.”

“You can't follow me. I'm inhuman, remember, a monster, a chimera.” She spat their private word between them and he recoiled from the lump of it. “You are just a man, you cannot go where monsters go.”

“I'll find my Quarto first. I'll beat you to it. I'll take this place from you.”

Lucia laughs, loudly and cruelly a braying, mocking laugh he had only rarely heard. The blond woman all in green draws to her feet, pulling his wife with her.

“Ludo, you're a fool,” Lucia hisses at him. “You might as well be wearing a hat with bells and drool on yourself for the amusement of your betters. You'll never manage it. They fought a war over this, Ludo. People died, for real, in the real world and here. They bled and they had their hearts eaten by…by people like me. Death, real death, not some dancing skeleton on vellum. The price of it, the price of the tea I drink, the races I watch, the slices of chestnut I will eat, the wines I will drink, the price of all that would break you in two. It nearly broke me. No. Rot in the real world, Ludo. That's where saints live, under the sun, under the open sky. Their holiness means something there. I don't want you here.”

Ludo reaches out for her, grabbing at her feet, pathetic, knowing he is pathetic, unable to stop himself. “I love you, I love you, stop it, please. Just come with me. It doesn't have to be home. I will stay here with you, and we'll be a world within each other again.” He is wretched, yes, and he knows it. He is crying, and kisses her knees. She rolls her eyes.