Palimpsest Read online

  Slowly with a deliberateness he savors, and will savor still in the morning, he raises his head and stares at her directly, her clear, spangle-painted eyes, her cheeks with tiny jewels embedded in the skin which is just beginning to show wrinkles, laugh lines, without bitterness or malice. Silence crashes through the hall and explodes at his feet.

  “I'm sure,” Oleg says evenly, “its all true. Every word. Want to come to the rubbish heaps with me? We can rut under the moon and see where you end up.”

  The woman's violet mouth opens slightly perhaps in shock, perhaps in pleasure at being confronted at last with real live immigrant manners. The giraffe-legged maître d’ surges up behind him and cuffs his ear with one enormous, manicured hand. He seizes Oleg's arm, and without a word hauls him from the glassy cobalt hall and deposits him unceremoniously onto Zarzaparrilla Street.

  Gabriel strolls out a few minutes later-sweet boy, good boy, loyal compatriot.

  “ I told you,” is all he says, as he pulls the gondola's lead free of the dock and pushes them out into the street of coats again. He is cold, as though Oleg transgressed against him personally embarrassed him, made him a fool.

  “But it's a dream,” Oleg insists. “It was fun. We won't even remember it in the morning.”

  “You don't know anything, Oleg,” sighs Gabriel, and they do not speak while the wind picks up through the last, late stars and light begins, lemony and cool in the east.

  “Give me the scissors?” Oleg says finally smiling as brave and bright as he has ever learned to do. But Gabriel has turned away; his gaze is over the sweet, small rooftops, down alleys Oleg does not know. He is gone: softly, subtly, irrevocably. He doesn't turn to look, or graze fingers as he hands over blades longer than his legs. Oleg stands, nearly toppling them, and holds his architect-not his, not really-and whispers against his neck his best apology:

  “I want to tell you a story Its short, I promise. And its about love. See, in the land of the dead, a boy who was run over by a black car fell in love with the Princess of Cholera, who had a very bright yellow dress and yellow hair and shiny yellow shoes…”

  But Gabriel is not listening, and his back is stiff beneath his coat. Oleg sadly takes up the bronze scissors and knifes through the flowing street below the boat. Dismayed threads pop free of shoulder seams; buttons fly. Below he sees nothing but more sleeves and brume, but he is both a swimmer and a maker of keys, and he knows how to fit himself into gaps too small for others. He cannot stay in the wreck of Gabriels disapproval, and the night is almost done. Oleg holds his breath and dives blade-first he falls and falls, so far.

  In a train station, a woman with blue hair is suddenly dizzy; on a street of cedar, a beekeeper in a long dress sneezes as her nose fills with wool.

  There is a river flowing beneath the street of coats, a river the color of milk. It is slow and thick, rolling in long, lugubrious currents of cream and curdle. There is a flannel sky over it, and a long brick tunnel overgrown with golden moss and flabby, half-translucent mushrooms, slick and silver, like the flesh of oysters. It has fallen through in places, and Oleg has fallen through the places.

  He walks along the bank, a crumbling, ornate rill carved with lamenting faces whose tears feed the river. Their mouths contort, their eyes plead, and they pass by unmarked beneath his feet. He limps, and this disturbs him, for in dreams does not one fall painlessly like a sigh?

  There is a bench, one of those that seem, wherever they are, that they ought to have been in Paris, with a view of the Seine. There is a woman sitting there in a long dress, watching the mushrooms flutter. As he draws closer, the dress becomes deeply blue, spattered with silver stars. It is formal; it has a bustle like the base of a cupola. Her hair is wild and loose, though, mouse-colored, very like his own, and strung through with snow, though no flakes fall underground. She turns to face him and he groans; the mushrooms recoil.

  “I missed you, Olezhka,” says his sister, and holds out her long arms.

  FOUR

  THE ARCHIPELAGO

  Lucia was gone.

  Ludovico sat naked in his hall, cross-legged, as if to be .J shriven. The Etymologiae flowed up the walls around him: Lucia's breadcrumbs, all raven-devoured, and he the child left behind in the wood. He touched them, the tiny grooves in the paint, places where she had been, where her fingers had moved. If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her—she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette. He could smell her leonine scent in their bed, and would still, even weeks after she had slept there. He could not bear to sleep where she had, to ruin the imperceptible outline of her body, which was surely now only a fevered hope and a lie of unwashed linens. Her laugh, harsh and cruel and short, hung like garlands of blackened roses by the long, thin windows. He had hardly eaten but to put his teeth to the bones she had left on a chipped plate in the kitchen, to fit his mouth to a dead thing she had once worried.

  Ludo pressed his cheek to the wall, and the letters warmed beneath him like her shoulders in winter: Cum leones dormierint, vigilant oculi; cum ambulant, cauda sua cooperiunt vestigial sua, ne eos vena-tor inveniat… the words bent the corner sharply, winding on past the telephone table with its slender green lamp. When lions sleep, their eyes are ever watchful, and when they walk, they obliterate their tracks with their tails so that the hunter may not find them…

  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.

  Her rooms were as severe as the angles of her own bones. There was a black chaise, a glass cabinet. She poured him a resinous yellow wine he did not like. He felt his eel—not his, surely!—circle him and was feebled by her. Nerezza settled her weight on his lap—she was heavier than she looked, as though her bones were made of iron. She moved her violet skirt aside—such an expensive thing, thick as a book cover, and her legs like pages.

  “I am a path to her,” she said, her black eyes piercing and undeniable. Ludo had followed with a monk's faith. He opened his mouth against her neck like a wolf, as though he could tear her open that way and find Lucia hiding, or waiting, inside. She moved her legs around him, sliding, squeezing things that would not let him free, so tight that his knuckles were pressed against them as he fumbled with his belt and kissed her again, deeply, with a crawling feeling of loss—Lucia would not like this. Or she would not care. Which did he want? Ludovico scratched her back brutally with his free hand, hoping that his marks would show as dark and dire as the maps on their flesh, the map she had no right to, yet bore.

  Nerezza would not open her mouth no matter how he moved in her. She was wild-eyed, seething, but breathed serenely through her aquiline nose, her black eyes clamped on him like a bite. She was narrow within and without, and the press of her all around him threatened to force his soul out through the top of his head. He screamed into her—he could not help it. He screamed into the dark, into the empty house, into the compact interior world of Nerezza, the eel-hearted, the great and solemn beast who did not cry out in her shu
ddering, but bit his cheek savagely and held it hissing in her canines as he came like glass breaking.

  THE LANES OF PARIMUTUEL CURVE in long, lazy arcs, so as to take in their circuit the whole of the Troposphere. The city shakes three times when the races ring the great baleen-railed track, when a hundred hooves send up sprays of black pearls, when the spectators as one throw back their heads and scream out the substance of their ecstatic wills. There is a dome, for rain in Palimpsest is like an eager lover: ever-present and zealous, steaming with ardor. Under the dome, chocolate silk sweeps down from a frame of kaleidoscopic glass, each bar blown in as many colors as a church window. Enormous orange lamps hang like miniature suns, banded up in black chains. And the track, the track of pearls, wheels in its grand circle, ever on. The stands are rarely empty: slavering, pilgrim-fervent, the crowd leans forward as one great, spangled body to see the poor beasts run.

  Traugotts voice, a copper pan shaken in the wind, sings up from the stalls. He is a breeder of snails and dwells in a house of three stories. In his youth he covered each of the floors in rich soils of black and red, leaves of gold and green, grains brown and sweet, violet petals as thick as a pat of butter. In his middle age, birch and fig saplings sprouted through the kitchen tile; hedges ring the furniture. His great petit-gris slowly move from parlor to wash-closet, gorging themselves in paroxysms of helicicial rapture. They mate in the chimney, sing softly the hymns of snails on the windowsills when the moon blanches the verdant paint to black.

  And when the days of races approach, he takes the roundest and sweetest of them into his bedchamber, and on a brocaded bed so great it spans the floor entire, so soft he cannot bear to sleep upon it, he lays them down like children. There Traugott instructs his beloveds in an ascetic discipline, a consecrated fast, for the stomachs of men cannot bear very much of what the stomachs of snails contain. He leads them in prayer to the high Helix on her throne of soil, her opalescent flesh bound with sweet grasses, her eyestalks quivering with compassion, with mercy. So Traugott quivers as his jewels perish in purgation and starvation, so Traugott weeps for them as he polishes their shells and packs them into a green valise.