Palimpsest (4 page)

Ludovico’s wife did not hear the prowling of the feline volumes in the dark. Lucia slept soundly, the form of her like a little hillock in his bed, her green nightgown barely rising, barely falling, part of the landscape of his house, so embedded in the soil of him that he often expected a flower to sprout from her shoulders, or wind up between their lips when they shared their morning kiss, as simple and necessary as a cup of coffee. Ludovico considered himself a contemplative man and held such thoughts as proof. The flowers that grew lightless in his skull were many and pale.

Lucia was not Catholic, rather, a hybrid: half atheist and half classicist. This had once given him pause, in the days when he, a good Roman boy, visited St. Peter’s and Trajan’s market with equal and untroubled reverence. She scorned the flat coin of his St. Isidore’s medal, hanging faithful and constant against his chest—
what kind of man is beholden to a saint no one remembers? He’s not
even Italian!
And though he loved her he could not explain that St. Isidore, though in no official capacity did he serve men of Ludovico’s persuasion, seemed to him the great saint of books, haloed in bumblebees who demanded at least two full columns devoted to their sociology in the saint’s
Etymologiae,
that massive compendium of medieval knowledge, the first encyclopedia, possessing the whole world between its boards.

When Lucia descended into such contrary moods, Ludo simply kissed the place where her soft black hair faded into the skin of her temple, and recited to her Isidore’s thoughts on the contrary nature of the chimera. For that was Lucia—his chimera, his composite beast, his snarling, biting, kissing thing.

But how intricate and sweet were the figures she inscribed in the margins of his books! What sort of bookbinder could he have been without her, her infinite variation, her obsessive knowledge of ink? She did not hear the tiger-books, but she smelled the trees of India and the terror of cuttlefish in her finger bowls full of black and violet and brown, no less vivid than oil paint. Together, they rarely needed to speak as he cut the pages and wrapped the boards in coppery silk, as he set the type in their ancient printing press: a truculent old dragon in the corner of the kitchen where they had had the stove removed to make room for it. It ate paper and excreted books, and Ludovico loved it, while Lucia, hands on her hips, shamed it into yet another year of groaning, protesting service.

Their happiness was the kind which is fashioned of the comfortable disorder of sauvignon bottles and coffee cups in the sink, paperback thrillers with split spines on the nightstand, bathrobes hung haphazard on high-backed, brocade-seated chairs, shutters left open all night, and the hallway ever in need of new paint.

In the second winter of their marriage, when Ludo drove up to visit his brothers in Umbria and left his wife alone, Lucia had been possessed by the vexatious and serpent-tailed temper of the chimera that was only ever leashed, grumbling, within her. She burned all the furniture in that hall: the telephone table and four Japanese paper lamps, a year’s worth of ignored mail, and a reading chair Ludovico had especially loved. Without eating or sleeping for days upon nights, she covered the bare, vaguely yellowish walls with the entire text of the
Etymologiae
, in a tiny, wild script he had never seen her use before and would never see again. When he returned she was curled up on the floor of the hall like an exhausted fox, sleeping among the words of St. Isidore.

Ludo wept when he saw it, falling to his knees beside her. From then on he visited St. Peter’s no longer, but held his own, silent mass in the empty, illuminated hall, kissing the Spaniard’s words like rosary beads. He forgave her the chair, of course, and she forgave him his saint, having satisfied herself of Isidore’s sanctity with her own suffering.

Thus they lived, intractable, silent beasts, yet adored of each other. He brought her slivers of marble from the streets in the place of the flowers other women might love, and these she held against her cheek until they warmed like flesh. She brought him strange and foreign glues in pots like witch’s unguents, and they understood each other. Until it was that he set to the task of binding a new book for a miniscule specialty press in Florence.

The book had a great many strange and ugly illustrations, he suspected done by the author himself, a Japanese gentleman, a practice of which Ludovico did not at all approve. Bookbinding, however, is a luxury trade, and he could not afford to pick and choose projects. Papers and silks and boards crowded the house—though none touched the precious hallway, which remained bare as a pauper’s cupboard.

Having nothing to do with the commission, Lucia amused herself in the city, and Ludo saw little of her. He imagined, when she let the door close softly in the morning, a golden paw and emerald tail disappearing out of the door in place of her sleek black heels and the flick of a crisp, cream-colored dress. This made him smile, and the sun of many days passed through his thinning blond hair.

He did not notice it, therefore, until she was ministering to the printing press, ink smudged onto her cheek like a crow’s errant feather. Her back was to him, so that he saw the hollow of her knee. At first his gaze slid over it easily—what part of Lucia did not have ink splattered over it in the casual and elaborate patterns of any novitiate to a printing press’s mysteries? But it drew his eyes back to it, a pulse of thin, livid lines, like an impossibly complicated bruise, an arcane brand. It was bounded by cherubs blowing winds at her calves, like old maps, and a serpent humped near the south end of the grid—for it was a grid, a crooked, broken grid, angling over her skin, intersections and alleys and monuments labeled in the same miniature script that covered their hallway. He could not read the names, but he was sure they would be in Latin, Lucia’s clear and lucid favored tongue, and the only appropriate dialect for mapmaking, as well Ludovico knew.

“What happened to your leg?” he asked gently.

Lucia twisted to look over her shoulder, her waist crinkling, and extended her leg like a statue of Daphne in mid-tree. “Oh.” She sighed. “That. I don’t know. I went to the doctor, so you needn’t worry, I’m fine. It’s ugly, but, well, benign, I guess, is the word.” She put down a plate and crossed the kitchen to kiss his temple sweetly. “Maybe the books have taken a liking to me and have begun to dare kisses.”

“I’ve never printed a book like that.”

“Well, I can’t tell you what it is. I don’t know. Pretend your wild chimera-wife got a tattoo and don’t think about it.”

But he could not stop thinking about it, and the Japanese book receded from his care like water tossed from a window. He began, instead, to sketch the patterns of the grid on his wife’s leg in the margins of the errata copies, invading neat lines about the essential nature of trains and their conductors with serpents and winds. When Lucia dressed to go out in the evening, he begged her to stay, to crook her knee for him, to let him touch the stain, the grid, the map.

She acquiesced, and lay on her stomach so that he could examine her like a manuscript in desperate need of restoration. She pressed her face into the pillow; he pressed his lips to her skin, tasting the rough, salty roads printed there by whatever invisible press had hunted and leapt upon Lucia in the dark. Ludo closed his eyes against them, let his eyelashes shudder over their routes and byways. His tongue was a letter press on her, stamping out his desire. She tried to turn over, but he stopped her, unable to bear the disappearance of the knee-map. He kissed the backs of her thighs and slid his hands under her stomach, whispering her name with all the reverence of abandoned Catholicism, pressing his cheek to the side of her long neck, which he had always thought slightly too long for comfortable human proportion. He held her hair aside in one hand as he entered her, and she shut her eyes, silent, pliable as pages. He willed her to cry out, pushing harder, to hurt her, even, if she would only say his name, or moan, anything. But she did not, and he could not make her.

As they moved in an old and practiced pattern, his fingers found her knee again and felt the streets of some unnamable city tremble under his hand.

Hieratica Street

T
HEY DREAM AGAINST WARM BREASTS
and empty beds of the four black pools in Orlande’s house. They stare straight ahead into her pink and gray-speckled mouth, and the red thread sweeps tight against their wrists. On four laps the frog-oracle lays four cards, but they do not look down, not yet.

But we may, we who peer. We who disturb.

On her bare knees sits the Flayed Horse, signifying Sacrifice in Vain, Loveless Pursuit, Fecundity Unlooked-For. Her blue hair brushes the hard, creased edges of the old card.

On his threadbare lap balances the Three of Tenements, predicting Auditory Hallucination, Cirrhosis, a Man Turned Away from Salvation. He fondles his keys, and the sound of it seems, to our eyes at least, to soothe him.

On her denim-shrouded thighs lies the Unhappy Rook, suggesting Grief without Name, Symmetry of Experience, an Empty Larder. She alone takes up the card, holds it to her cheek, covering the bee sting there with the plain, stark image of a broken chess piece.

On his linen trousers rests the Archipelago, foretelling a Plague of Eels, Loveless Pursuit, a Dark-Haired Woman with Two Fingers Missing. His ink-stained fingers dig into the meat of his palms.

They lace their hands together instinctively as she ties the yarn—all their many fingers tenuous and needful, blindly groping. Before their eyes Orlande’s great green head floats, rimmed in silver, like an icon. The frog-woman shows them a small card, red words printed neatly on yellow paper:

Go. You have been Quartered.

The knots slacken, fall away. The four of them walk out, across the frond-threshold, into the night which smells of sassafras and rum, and onto broad, cinnamon-colored Hieratica Street. They stumble into the cane-strewn night, their feet filthy, their heads swimming with the winds of a not-too-distant sea.

This is the part I like best. When they are so new. Newborn colts are not so innocent.

The frog pushes them out of her shop like a mother urging her children toward the coach on their first day of school:
Never fear,
my darlings! All these horrors are yours to survive!

Is it an accident of the clock that the four of them wheel dazed onto the thoroughfare at the same moment that a wave of crickets come hopping from the factory, bowing a complex binary minuet on their platinum legs? Or perhaps merely poetic? Casimira presses vermin beneath her porcelain and chitin molds, Orlande presses them beneath red yarn, and out they go into the city together, new and raw and empty as a saucepan. It is an admirable symmetry.

The four of them stand in a street cross-hatched with desiccated lily leaves, as though they did not know that one may be crushed there, staring dumbly at each other, a herd of idiot gazelles. They have not let go of each other’s hands; they cannot bear it:
not yet,
not yet!
Their feet, benumbed, are overrun by crickets with glass wings.

There are obvious things to say, but none of the four of them can find a voice buried in their ribs. Will you stand there forever? Will you become a piece of statuary on which children will swing and clover will grow?

No—here is a gilded cart drawn by twin herons, their long black legs rustling the street-leaves. Out of the green-curtained window the head of a third heron, spectacularly turquoise, extends, eyes narrowed to avian slits.

“Out of the way! I shall trample you thoroughly, see if I won’t!”

The cart-herons squawk harshly and swing wildly around the quartet, galloping onto 16th Street with long, graceless strides. Eight hands shake free of each other; the men clutch their elbows in nervous agitation. The girl with blue hair stares at them with dark eyes.

“Which way to the trains?” she whispers to her comrades. Wrong question, child! You mean to say:
Where am I? Who are all of you?
What has happened to us?
But no one ever asks after sensible things. The others shake their heads—they cannot help her. And so she runs in the direction that seems best, turning as sharply as the herons onto a brightly glowing avenue that shears off from Hieratica like a broken branch.

_______

Abandoned, the others scatter like ashes. The road stretches before and beyond, lit by streetlamps with swollen pumpkin-globes, and the gutters run with a sudden, utter rain.

PART I:

I
NCIPIT
L
IBER DE
N
ATURIS
B
ESTIARUM

ONE

T
HE
F
LAYED
H
ORSE

S
ei woke with the grassy, half-rotten smell of ryokan-tatami in her nose and her face streaked with tears. She immediately tried to go back to sleep, to catch the herons, fading already, but alas—sleep lost is sleep lost. She felt a weight on her wrists, like the memory of heavy bracelets. Her second thought was to find Sato Kenji, to shake him and bite his mouth and ask him if he had written a book about the city, too, if she could press it against the other, which lay still in her backpack, cold and black. When would he fly north again to Tokyo on their sleek white serpent? Tomorrow? Never? In what car might he wait for her? Useless, she decided, to ask.

She dressed without thinking about it much, took two rice-balls—one stuffed with salted plum, one with salmon—and Sato Kenji’s little book with her, and fled the milling, noisy hostel into the city. Kyoto was designed on the pattern of a Go board, by imaginative and impish urban planners who surely drank a great deal. As she progressed from square to square, staring vacantly at the thick cypress bark rooftops and leering Fu dogs, Sei felt strange, floating. She was a smooth white disc, clapped on all sides by slippery black pieces, reflecting the sky, helpless, with the Shinkansen on one hand and the endless pavilions of Kyoto on the other.

She chose the Silver Pavilion out of all the temples. It had been her mother’s favorite, and so, like an inheritance, was hers. It was shaded in autumn leaves so bright the trees seemed to bleed. The persimmons were so golden they hurt her eyes, and the sun stabbed at her through the blazing fruit. She had a terrible dry taste in her mouth, as though she had drunk too much, though she had had nothing but water since Tokyo.