Palimpsest Read online

  And with his bright case, Traugott stalks the stalls, his beard dyed to match the favored mounts of the day-today it is a spectral scarlet, and children reach out to touch the light of his long hairs, soft as a maids. He holds up his broad hands, full of little golden sacks-snails brim the edges, iridescent, the size of a dainty fist. He slurps one slowly with pleasure, with grief. The taste of them like buttered brandywine, like sugared goosefat, melts on his tortured tongue. Seeing the bobbing of his ruddy, guilty throat, a dozen spectators clamor for his service.

  Nerezza wears a wide black hat festooned with long, pale swan-feathers tipped in onyx and obsidian. The whole affair is pinned with the lacquered pelvis of a lynx. It shadows her face like an eclipse and she licks the meat from her snail shell with precise delicacy flicking the shriveled body into her narrow mouth. She stares down at the track from their high box, garlanded with leather reins, and raises a pair of silver opera glasses, trembling, to her face.

  “It will start soon,” she says.

  “What will?” Ludovico sits straight as a soldier. His left hand itches-there is nothing there, but he feels his flesh blazing, crawling with bees, while his right droops with the weight of a cold porcelain hand. He can hear the roaring of trains and the small voice of a viola in the dark. He is arrested by these things which he can feel but are not with him, not present in the stadium. But the scent of the steaming snail cuts through their shadows, and a murmur passes through the waiting audience. They hold their breath as one.

  “The night races, Ludo.”

  “You promised me Lucia, not horses.”

  “She is here. I have not seen her yet. But I am watchful.” She proffers the glasses.

  When lions sleep, their eyes are ever-watchful, he thinks. He takes the lenses, looks down to the track and its improbable gravel-there are horses there, yes, stamping their hooves and snorting, but they are monstrosities of leather hung over a clanking, clattering framework. Bronze ribs show through tears in the brown skin, creased and stained like an old map case. Their eyes are gaping holes that show occasional flames: whatever engine drives them spits out its heart in sparks and blue jets. They are thin; constricted chests tucked up like starving whippets, spindled legs never approaching equine proportion, concluding in bronze spikes that pierce the pearls of the racing ground. Their manes are braided backward into their tails, one massive leather cord proceeding from head to haunch in a sweeping arc.

  “They are so beautiful,” Nerezza breathes. “I know the woman who makes them-she lives in Silverfish, on the outskirts, on an estate that would beggar Naples. She has a scar on the small of her back, shaped like a liver A colt bit her when she was young.”

  “This is a dream,” Ludo sighs. He is not patient. “A dream, and I shall wake up sticky.”

  She gives him a withering look, and several of the outlandishly dressed folk near them-one hoists a parasol of sleeping gray lizards-recoil as though he has uttered a vulgar curse. He is saved in his shame by the sounding of a long, low horn, something like those Swiss leviathans Lucia had loved. The leather horses explode from their dock-the crowd throws back their sparkling heads as one and screams. Nerezzas own cry is high and piquant and terrible, and the horses screech their response, like the death of a thousand owls. Their mechanical gait is awkward and jerky, their spikes driving into the track, but the speed is undeniable, and it is over before Ludo can think it a dream again, the one with a red handprint on its rump streaming ahead in the last stretch.

  But no one applauds; their approval is silence, and it is total. Nerezza exhales slowly shakily, as she did when she climbed from him and fell asleep on the carpet like an exhausted cat.

  The next racers line up, but they are not horses. They are men, and women, too, their legs contorted into animal limbs-leopard, gazelle, lion, lizard, horse, and ostrich. They stand upright, most of them, on two exotic legs and stare miserably into the stands, their glares like accusations.

  “Who are they?” Ludo asked.

  “Veterans,” Nerezza sniffed. “This is a charity race. Pay no attention, the box seats are not supposed to deign to watch.”

  The horn sounds like the death of a great whale and Ludo obediently turns away, pretends to be reading the newspaper of his neighbor, a thing more like a broadside than La Repubblica; he admires the letter-pressing, the decorated corners, reads idly about the paramours of a woman whose name means nothing to him, philippics on immigration and quarantine. The Dvorniki have been spotted on the south side of Zarzaparrilla-this publication would like to take the opportunity to thank them for their difficult and vital work. The paper smells faintly but distinctly of vinegar. Nerezza laces her black-gloved hand through his; he stiffens, but supposes resignedly that this is within the sphere of licit behavior, given that her inner thighs must still be bruised by his thumbs. She wears a ring over the glove on her middle finger, a tourmaline beetle with bulbous copper eyes. He keeps his gaze firmly on it, and cannot be sure he does not see its antennae waver Her grip tightens on him, her finger-pads recalling thumbscrews. The beetle ring bites into his knuckle.

  And he follows her eyes, eel-inscrutable, down the stands from their scarlet and leather box. Two women sit far below them: a blond creature with a green scarf, her hair like water pouring over an emerald riding uniform. Her gloved hand clasps the fingers of another woman, with coarse heaps of dark hair fastened with bronze compasses, graphite-nubs extending gracefully from their claws. She wears a calfskin dress, the exact color of her flesh. It is Lucia, of course it is Lucia, and her face is nakedly happy, a happiness it seems almost obscene to witness.

  Ludovico calls out to his wife, and she turns slightly but surely she cannot hear him over the cannonade of hooves and foot-pads below them, the sudden rain of pearls. She screams with the rest; the blond woman shuts her eyes in the convulsion of her cry.

  “Does this help you?” Nerezza says. “To see her, that she is here, that she belongs somewhere, that she is happy, that she has a lover, that she knows how to behave in the society? Does it fill up the place in you where she lived?”

  Ludo screeches her name over the din, but Nerezza holds him, pins him, her beetle ring, her gloved hand. She is too far away, his Lucia, his chimera, snapping her tail in the dust to hide her tracks.

  “She can't hear you. If you fling yourself over the balcony you will only bleed on the couple below us and break your bones on their chairs. Ludo, I brought you to see her, I didn't say you could touch her, that you could bring her back. You are a cut-rate Orpheus, and she has already vanished behind you on the stone stair-you did not even feel her go.”

  “I don't understand! Lucia! Lucia!”

  “She is blessed, Ludo. Perhaps she will touch a higher grace still, a grace we scream to enter but cannot even approach. That I cannot approach. We can only watch her, who may be permitted to see the silver cup but cannot touch it, can never drink.”

  Ludo weeps openly; tears drip from his chin like rain from a roof. Nerezza leans into him, covering them both with the brim of her hat. She licks the tears from his face.

  Far below, Lucia throws back her shining head and laughs.

  PART II:

  THE GATE OF HORN

  ONE

  WEEPHOLES

  Sei had never been comfortable in the presence of books. Their natural state was to be shut, closed, to grin pagily from shelves, laughing at her, promising so much and delivering such meanness, such thinness. They displayed only men and women with dead eyes and rituals of living she could not understand. When closed, books gave impressions of perfection. They did not need her.

  Sei's mother had once sat with her in a room with a grass floor and windows of paper. Sei had been very small. She had not yet ridden a train. In that room she had felt as though she were secretly inside a book, walled up in paper, sewn up with grass along her spine. Her mother's hair was so long and flat it glittered like a hard stone seen through seven inches of water. Usagi was named for the rabbit in the moon,
and Sei thought in those days that her mother hid a silver hammer in her yellow yukata with orange cranes on the sleeves, just out of her sight, and mashed rice and sugar in a great pearly barrel while Sei slept. She tried to stay up and catch her at it, but the mother of Sei was clever and quick.

  “Imagine a book at the bottom of a lake,” Usagi had said, pinching Sei's toes through her tafej-socks. “Fish read it. They wriggle into the spaces between the pages and eat up the words like rice. But the Sei-fish, who was very plump and blue and not like the other fish, could not fit in between the pages, and so was very hungry, and swam around the book eight times. Then the Sei-fish came to her mother, and the Usagi-fish said:

  “ ‘My daughter, why do you weep?’

  “‘Because I cannot read the book at the bottom of the lake, which all the other fish love,’ said the Sei-fish.

  “‘Don't cry, my child, for I have read this book and I will feed you all the things inside it, one by one, so that you will not be hungry and fill the lake with your tears.’”

  Sei twisted around, bunching up her persimmon-colored holiday obi. She put a small hand on her mother's face.

  “But Usagi-fish, should I not someday read for myself?”

  “It is not necessary, my little squash-flower, for I can read it, and I will always be here.”

  Thus books had always been slavish footmen in her mother's maddening court, sullen things that would not admit her. She learned her kanji and her katakana with a bent and proper head, but she did not read for pleasure, neither fiction nor histories nor philosophy. Other fish might own books, might love them, might know their secrets.

  And so it was that Sei had been kept pure for this book, its true bride, untouched by other narratives, naïve of the wiles of any previous structures, voices, imagery.

  Imagine a girl at the bottom of a lake, living among the fish. This girl was not more innocent of the ways of books than Sei. Sei felt as though this book had been written for her and only for her, as though Sato Kenji had opened her mouth like a doctor and looked within her heart for the substance of his book, and written only what he saw there. She was a nun in service of it, virginal and blank, desperate to become devoted; she had saved herself for this, stored her love within her so that this book, which could not possibly have been written for any purpose but to crawl inside her and dwell there like a holy thing, so that this book would not be ashamed of her profligacy.

  And Yumiko was touching it, thinking Sei still asleep. Sei crept out of the ryokan bed and peered around Yumiko's naked waist to read along with her.

  There is a story told in Aomori Province concerning the patronage of trains. The Kami of the Wind and the Kami of Engines struggled over who would bless the trains of Japan, who would earn the right to enfold them into their long arms. By this time the folk of Japan were closed up into trains for hours upon hours each day, and in the cities of the Kami there was a great consternation as to who should receive the numerous silent prayers for punctuality, for speed, for unmolested progress. The Kami of Wind stood upon a plaform of orange clouds and argued that the trains belonged to him, for their great speed sent up such currents of air, and the high plaforms of the Shinkansen entered into his territory, and he shook them daily with his breath. The Kami of Engines, not very beloved among her kin, stood upon a dais of crushed automobiles and sewing machines drenched in old oil. Through her greasy hair she glowered and said that any machine which churned fuel and ate kilometers was hers and hers alone to adore.

  The debate continued so long that the attending Kami fell into a deep sleep, for public debates are more tiresome than either the participants or the audience care to admit. While their assembled family slept, the Kami of Wind stole onto his opponent's dais with the intention of destroying her and assuming the trains for himself without contest. He drew a great breath to push through her heart, but as the breath was drawn into its fullest, the Kami of Engines stepped into his arms and kissed him, pulling him into her with great violence, so great that the whole of his breath was spent into her. But the air rushing through the heart of the Kami of Engines only fed the fires within her, sending them high into heaven, and she consumed him utterly, and thus the trains worship with the song of their passing the Kami of Engines with her long oily hair.

  It was terribly difficult for Sei to watch Yumiko read the book. To see her lay her thumb in the spine and let the soft cover fall over it. Sei winced, bit her lip, crushed within her the desire to snatch it back. Yumiko had gotten miso on the corner of a page. You're ruining it! the heart of Sei cried out. But was it not fair? Had she not allowed this girl's mouth on her throat, her hands within her body? Did she not know the secret things of Yumiko: that her deepest skin tasted of the sea? That her cries were high and breathy, like a child's hiccups? Did Sei not owe some few of her own secret things in exchange for this knowledge?

  She chewed the inside of her cheek. No, she thought. Yumiko has other lovers, but I have no other books. Yumiko marked her place and looked up.

  “And he was your first?” she asked archly. “The man who wrote this?”

  Sei blinked. “Not my first, of course not. I'm twenty, not twelve.”

  “No, not your first lover. When you dreamed of the fortuneteller, was it after this man?”

  “Yes.”

  “And then me.”

  “It's not like I went looking for you.”

  “Do you think I'm calling you a whore?”

  Sei picked at the threads of the futon. Women were difficult; she had always found them so. They were like hoary old fish, keeping to the lake bottom, harder to catch than men, harder to keep. And they just looked at you with those armored piscine eyes that showed nothing at all until you turned away out of shame at some act for which you could not begin to answer.

  Yumiko pushed A History of Train Travel firmly back across the tatami. Sei grabbed it gratefully, held it to her chest to warm again with her skin against it. Yumiko shook her head.

  “I want to take you somewhere tonight, Sei, will you come?”

  Of course she would. Kyoto was a great red basin, and she fell toward its center, toward Yumiko in her blue plaid skirt, toward her mouth and her dreamy, abrupt way of speaking. Toward that other place that Yumiko knew, the place on the other side of night, the place whose trains were wholly without end.

  “In the meantime,” Yumiko said cheerfully, “want to see a whole lot of wasted money?”

  And so they went into the city, through the high garden walls and narrow streets, toward the phoenix-heart of Kyoto.

  Yumiko was right, the Golden Pavilion was ugly. It squatted on the water like a fat yellow raccoon about to paw for fish. The pond was utterly still, reflecting the thing back at itself without a ripple. Sei could not quite convince herself the building was gold, though she knew it was: her grandmother had given over her jewelry to the leafing of the pavilion after it burned all those years ago. It just seemed yellow now just paint. She wanted to touch it, even so, to feel her grandmother's necklaces again, bouncing against an old, soft breast.

  It had burned in the fifties, the whole thing. A monk had been obsessed with it, had loved it, and had set it on fire one cold night. He had wanted to burn with it, but the smoke was not enough, and he outlived the object of his adoration. When they learned about him in school, Sei thought that she understood him, the need to be rid of a thing, and also to scream with it and in it and breathe it until you choke. Koi moved hugely through the little lake surrounding the temple, improbably moveable stones.

  Once, she had made the mistake of asking her mother where she was born.

  Usagi had put a butterfly comb into her daughter's hair and said: “I was born in a train station, my little orchid-stem. Your grandmother was too big to travel, but she longed to see the cherry blossoms at Tsukayama Park, where she was a girl, before the war, before she married and danced south to Kyoto with ribbons in her hair.”

  “How can you be born in a train station? There aren't any
doctors,” sensible little Sei had said.

  “Did you know, in stations that are very deep underground, there are things called weepholes, little holes in the walls to let wetness out? Water trickles out of them and it looks as if the station is crying, crying for all those souls that pass through it and do not stay. In the station where I was born, the weepholes had been made into little kabuki faces with great eyes that really wept, all that water, rolling down their cheeks.

  “‘Push harder,’ said the weepholes to your grandmother.

  “‘Lie below us, and we will watch over you,’ they cried, and their mouths were very tragic, the way mask mouths so often are.

  “ ‘Your child is a girl,’ they said when it was over, and though some of them were disappointed, most of them seemed pleased and wept tears of joy.

  “ ‘She is like a small rabbit, kicking her big red feet,’ they said, and so I was called Usagi, and lived to become your Usagi-Mother. On Grandparents Day, I return to the station to wipe away the tears of my midwives.”

  “I wish I had been born in a train station,” Sei had sighed.

  “Perhaps when you have a baby, you will long to see cherry blossoms,” Usagi had answered, and tickled her under the chin.

  Sei's mother had been better than a book. She had been stranger, both more closed and more open. Even when she was a child she suspected her mother was mad—a little mad, in a charming way, that made her say funny things in funny ways, not horribly mad, like the women on television who tore their hair. But whenever her mother read from the book at the bottom of the lake, the stories were impossible and sad, and Sei knew they were not true. But she could not help remembering them, and taking them into herself like food and water, and when she learned of the wicked monk who burned up the Golden Pavilion in the holocaust of his own desire, it sounded rich and odd, like a story her mother would have told her, and she had thought of the weepholes that presided over her mother's birth, and the beautiful trains that must have borne witness to such a thing.