Faces Under Water Read online

  The boat was past them and had gone around a bend of the canal. Its spine-ridged wake faded. Only the gentle slop-slop now again, on the hull.

  “A bad woman,” said Squashed Ear. He crossed himself.

  “Your cousin knows her.”

  “He’s heard tell.”

  She was a whore then. Did that explain everything?

  Del Nero had gone to a whore, fallen out with her or her manager, been robbed and stabbed and flung down in the canal?

  Furian stared at the water, where the wake of the other boat had gone, and where the mask of the dark and white Apollo had floated, face up. Things were simple. They were always simple. He felt a sense of desolation, agonizing loss, so that a cry plunged in his chest, wanting to thrash up into the air. He coughed dryly instead.

  “Yes, it stinks here, Signore.”

  * * *

  AFTER ALL, FURIAN SLEPT a couple of hours. Sometimes, on the fourth, fifth or sixth night without sleep, this happened.

  At first, asleep, he was aware of the too-warm, gritty sheets, the uneven hardness of the mattress. Then that went.

  He was in his father’s house. He was fifteen, it was the day he composed the little harpsichord sonatella. His mother had played it, and they had applauded.

  “This must be shown at the Temple. It should have a wider hearing.” His father, proud and certain.

  Now his mother and sister, in their white dresses.

  Was it spring in the dream? There was the scent of the statue-ed pool, and violets from the inner garden, and black dolche on a plate.

  He said to his sister, older than he, “Why are your eyes so blue, Caro?”

  “But my eyes aren’t blue at all.”

  “Yes, bluer than violets.”

  He was very happy. He had never been curbed or treated unfairly. They had praised his achievements and bolstered his proper self-esteem. They had given him the True Religion, God, the Christ, the Virgin, and all the angels to care for him. He had beautiful clothes, lace on his shirts. He did not need to follow his father into the mercantile business which had made them rich. He could do what he chose, write music, write essays, walk among the charming wealthy people, attend to the fascinating adventurers who came into the house. One day he might select a lovely wife, or an adventure. He would want for nothing.

  “My handsome boy,” said his mother, all across the room. As a child, he had thought she, and his sister, the most gorgeous of all women. But now he knew there were other women more gorgeous, (as he knew there were other lands, and strange, discovered continents.) This did not make him love his kindred women less. He felt a tender pity for these first two sweethearts, now set a little aside for others more rare.

  His mother sang—a bird trilled in its cage. The bird was blue as his sister’s eyes, but the bird had been grey, and his sister’s eyes dark.

  There was no reason why such happiness and comfort, such security, such pleasure, should ever end. Their house was strong enough to withstand storms. His elder brother, for example, who had taken up with a girl of the streets. She had been removed to a good apartment, taught manners and fashion. She was now a flawless mistress, who blessed them all, prayed for them daily at a respectable mass. His own youthful indiscretions, (older than fifteen now), had been laughed over, smoothed over. His father: “My children are God’s gift to me. I value them. They can do nothing I will turn my back on.” They had eaten guinea fowl at breakfast, and white honey from the hives of their estate. Tonight they would dine on charcoaled boar, apples baked with cinnamon. There was to be a concert, a famous singer had arrived to entertain them. A ship had come in from far, far away, another world. There were bales of silk, better than even the East could produce, silk so fine it could be run, yards of it, through a woman’s ring. And outside were the games of the City. And beyond the City the playground of the earth. There was nothing to fear. Even death would be kind, and a hundred masses said to make safe the soul. None of it need ever, ever end.

  3

  HE SPENT THE AFTERNOON and evening in Cupid’s room. She was a prostitute, young and pretty, though not really to his secret taste, very slender, almost boyish, with short curly hair. She was skillful, but did not pretend, lying under him or over, if he preferred, with a calm friendly face. Once only, in an excess of desperation and lust, dead drunk and slow, he had made love to her for an hour before burying himself inside her. He had thought she was giggling, the curious bubbling sounds, until he understood she too had reached a crisis. She told him afterwards, abashed, she did not like this to happen. What she did was a sin, but the Virgin would forgive her, if she did not enjoy it. However, she offered at the shrines of Venus and Neptune, too.

  Tonight, at the Revel of Diana, Furian knew what he was likely to see. He had needed to take off the aching edge.

  Afterwards they sat eating apricots. He fed the fruit into her cunning little mouth.

  “I wish you were rich, Furian. Then you could own me. Would you like to?”

  “Nothing more,” he said gallantly.

  He knew—it was less affection than her desire to ‘sin’ only with one man.

  Her bed in the dying light was the color of a dying pale yellow rose. She looked so young, but she was nineteen; she had told him her age two years ago.

  She still wore her mask, which showed only the eyes, two swan wings threaded with cheap tinsel. He had hinged open his own mask, up to the nose, so he could kiss her. and eat an apricot.

  “That makes you look like a duck, Furian!”

  He thought of Juseppi, who had been a bull and a fish.

  Between nine and ten, he dressed, and left her with a silver ducca. Downstairs, he went to the coffee shop near the Lamb Bridge, and waited for Squashed Ear to arrive.

  A mandolin player was playing, badly, the melody of the Song Cloudio del Nero had composed. They would be sick of it in a week.

  Squashed Ear was late. When he came, he looked not uncouth, black coat and black hat with a long blue feather. Furian had also dressed well, white stockings, the dark grey coat, and the hat with the grey plume. (He had, too, come armed.) Shaachen, he was aware, would dress in his worst best, the shirt with silver lace, earrings, God knew what else.

  “Signore—I only discovered you by your long-nose mask’”

  “Yes. You’re late.”

  “Your pardon, Signore. There was a to-do by the Primo water steps. A priest had to come out.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “It was a woman, a boatman’s wife. She had fine tits but she was howling and tearing her hair.

  “There’s a drink.”

  “Thank you, Signore. I need it, I tell you. We thought it was the usual—some man of us got her in the family way.” Bored, Furian tossed back his brandy. “But it wasn’t that. Shall I tell you, Signore?”

  “If you like.”

  “Lost her husband, Signore. Gone missing. And she treated him like pig shit, was it any wonder. And Chomo, he says just this to her—the man’s cousin, you understand, and she screams and screeches, pushed up his mask and rips his face with her claws. So Bollo runs to the Little Church by the Primo, and gets a priest, and the priest, he comes up, and he says, Quietly, daughter, you are a woman. But she only says, What do you know? This to a holy priest.”

  Furian had forgotten Squashed Ear was a gossip. In the long watches on the canals he tended to quietness, but became excited before other work. In his belt, was the sharp knife. He carried too a stout stave, as Furian had recommended.

  “We’d better be going. He wants us at the Centurian’s by eleven.”

  “Yes Signore. But isn’t that like a woman. Doesn’t want you when she has you. Goes crazy when you leave her. Of course, she’s the boy at the University. He worked for the scholarship, but it took every penny Juseppi could put by—”

  Furian paused. He glanced at Squashed Ear’s lion mask.

  “Juseppi, Signore, he’s a steady one. I’d never have thought he’d go off and leave that sow, for
all her bitchery.”

  “Maybe he found a nicer lady.”

  “Good luck to him then, Signore. Yes, good luck.”

  And taking up Furian’s bottle, Squashed Ear swigged from it heartily.

  * * *

  SHAACHEN WAS ALREADY AT the Centurion’s Bridge. He was not, as he had said, on the Neptune side, where the small bearded idol stood in his niche, but on the Maria side, by the lighted image of the Virgin.

  He wore a plain mask, and carried his heavy bag of tricks, which he immediately handed to Furian.

  “Stick close.”

  “You’re expecting trouble tonight.”

  “Always I expect it.”

  Squashed Ear slouched behind them.

  There were black gulls flying, some twenty or thirty of them, across the panes of black sky between the houses, so also reflecting in the black panes of the canals.

  The moon had risen beyond Fulvia, over the sea.

  “You see,” said Shaachen to Furian, “I have an enemy here tonight.” Furian said nothing. Shaachen said, “Take note. It’s the Prince Teobalto.”

  “A prince, no less.”

  “A tall thin one, with a wig like a sheep’s fleece, and the sheep inside it. He may have set minions to upset my work.”

  Soon they reached the arches that ran along beside the Equus Gardens, and Shaachen led them into the bar, where they drank wine.

  They heard the Primo strike eleven.

  Shaachen got up and they went on into the Gardens.

  The public walks were busy with sellers of brandy and lemonade and riotous masked patrons. Between the cypresses and yews, the lamps shone like burning flowers. Three old gypsy women crept through the throng, with faces like clever parrots, selling charms. Shaachen brushed them off, but Squashed Ear fell behind a moment to purchase something. “Does he want it to assist kick or prick?” Shaachen muttered.

  Steps led up to the high terraces of the Gardens.

  Here the only horses in Venus were kept luxuriously stabled in a lofty palace with a gilded chariot and four-horse team on its roof. They passed presently the ornate building, and next the wide enclosure where the blue rhinoceros stood, arrogant and forlorn beneath a juniper tree, staring back at those who stared at it. Over its tall railing ran a silver plaque, that proclaimed it a type of unicorn. Shaachen knew better and said so. The house of the white lions was noisy, although they had gone to bed. Their roars echoed fitfully over the Gardens.

  There was a rhinoceros-lion smell too, mingling with the roses and night-blooming jasmine.

  From here, you could look down and see the moon, round and edibly white. She posed now on the dome of the Primo, so they were momentarily twins.

  Among the cedars, two police stood in their tricorn hats and dark garb. They flanked the marble archway that led through into the wild land beyond the Gardens, the Groves of Diana.

  Shaachen, with his paper, got them by. But others would sneak through, over the low fences, among the thick, black-green trees. The Groves were a place of trysts.

  Perhaps Juseppi was here with his mistress, the willing girl Furian had advised him to seek.

  A white arm glimpsed among the night shrubs, but it was a statue. Few could make love to a stone.

  Half a mile down, in the cultivated rough country beyond the gate, they easily discovered the Revel, which had already begun. It was an open pomegranate heart of lamps and so-far civilized noises, with an orchestra playing. (On her plinth, marble Diana stood naked in her drapery, two marble hounds at her heels, the sickle disc on her forehead. Her cold eyes looked indifferently away.)

  It was the prince Teobalto, also plain-masked, and seemingly with, as Shaachen had prophesied, a piled sheep upon his head, who came mincing to greet them, with two satyr youths in silks and myrtle crowns gamboling after.

  “You are here, dear Doctor. Do you have miracles with you?”

  “Of course, Signorissimo. Everything’s to hand.”

  “I expect great marvels. Better than your show for Floriano.”

  “Ten times better, Signorissimo. Or strike me.”

  Shaachen winked offensively.

  Wine came, nosegays.

  Furian looked long, and slowly, all about him. His eyes made for him a shifting tapestry of lambent dresses, coats, hair piled in false clouds, the flicker and stab of jewels. And to this, the orchestra played accompaniment so mathematically, like a mechanical toy. It had four dolls, at tabor, at fiddle, at trumpet, even a harpsichord balanced on a floor of planks. While everywhere, half-disembodied and alive on their own, the masks of Carnival. A true unicorn to make any rhinoceros blush. A maned tiger. Gargoyles, Neptunes, dryads. And the fashionable new masks that were like fans, their spread tines rising into the plumes of peacocks and flamingos. Furian had known all this, something close to it, only those few years since. He missed it still, the comforts and allurements, the sweet fragrances of pampered washed skin, and perfume from the Orient. He rubbed his sores against the splinters of his loss, viciously cherishing everything he might no longer have.

  “Look there,” said Shaachen. “Look, look.”

  “What? Which?”

  “Her mask—the Principessa Messalina.”

  “You know their names, not I.”

  “The blond gown clasped with opal.”

  Furian looked. She was a tall woman, whose ziggurat of hair matched her dress. The mask was a wonder.

  A fan, but of fretted ivory, out of which partly emerged the outlines of a delicious ivory face, with dawn lips and evening lids.

  “She has, herself, the countenance of an ox,” said Shaachen. “No doubt the mask suits her better. Made, they say, such masks, by an inner circle of the Mask Guild. I’ve heard she keeps it on in bed, her husband, the prince, prefers it. Her lover, too.”

  Shaachen also was an old gossip. Furian turned away, to where a monkey was jumping over a cane, higher and higher, with apparent good will.

  Beyond the monkey, at the edge of the clustering trees, blue glimmered on darkness.

  He said, lightly, to Shaachen, “And who is that one?”

  “Oh, caught your fancy, has she? I thought you only liked the bad girls, Furian Furiano.”

  “So I do. Isn’t she bad at all?”

  “Not with your sort. But I don’t know her. Yes, a graceful line. But too slight. What does she live on, honeydew?”

  Squashed Ear leaned forward. “There’s supper over there. The sort of food I don’t often see.”

  “Eat,” said Shaachen, “don’t gorge. There may be work to do.”

  Squashed Ear strode boldly behind the rows of dainty gilded chairs, to long tables holding pagodas of fruit, and a terrible greenish salt-swan from the lagoons, stuffed with spicy fish, no doubt, and dressed in its feathers. There came a rearrangement about the orchestra. A goblet of Venusian crystal was in Furian’s hand. Impossible turquoise glass blown with vapors like cirrus. He stared at it. He did not want this moment, because he knew now they would sing the Song. And she—she stood there against the trees in her alien blue. The woman whose eyes held blue fire.

  He drank quickly. The wine was ancient and heady.

  It lifted up his skull so the moon, which now was sailing closer over the groves, could see in at his brain.

  A little boy dressed as a Roman page was standing before the harpsichord stage. He had the fine, pinched face and pouter pigeon chest of a diver’s child. They were trained to develop their lungs for swimming long segments of time under Aquila and Silvia, searching out drowned treasures of Venus. Sometimes one would be found instead to have a voice,

  The orchestra rippled, and the mincing Prince Teobalto called out shrilly, like an elderly lady at the play, “Hush! Hush, if you please!”

  Twittering, the party went silent, and the Song began.

  He should watch her. Watch her butterfly mask, watch for the flame of blue tears escaping the eyeholes. Or would tell-tale blood, also as in a play, appear on her fingers or her gown?
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br />   With the orchestra supporting it, like a transparent bird, the child’s voice—he had one, indeed—flew up the delicate notes.

  Furian now heard all the words.

  In his darkness, having found her, he could only try to win her. But she would not smile, he could not make her smile. Not at a jest, not in happiness, not even out of compassion. And so he must leave her to her solitary stony fate, and himself could only die.

  At the last word, the boy held the note, long and long, the orchestra whispering, garlanding the silk-drawn hurt of its beauty. The audience held its breath. The vulgar ones counted. Not needing to count, Furian knew the child held the note for one whole minute, until he mildly signaled with hand, the orchestra coiled up the Song, and his voice sank effortlessly to an end.

  They fell on him like loving hyenas, petting, stroking. The child, not out of breath, suffered it with dignity, until his gaudy guardian came up to lead him away.

  The tears had pierced from Furian’s own eyes.

  They had burnt him where they got out. The long-nosed mask hid everything.

  But she stood immobile by the trees. Her own mask would hide nothing, for why should she care. And he himself was not moved, forgivably, by human tragedy, only by the power of music.

  Shaachen said urgently, “Wake up. Fetch that lout.”

  And primly, “How dare he use the nobles’ tables as a trough? He should have gone to the servants’ station. I must go down now and prepare.”

  IN THE BEGINNING, Furian had been intrigued by Shaachen’s alchemical and sorcerous talents, but he was too skilled. If they were tricks, you could not see through them, and if the magic were real, they inspired an idea of horror. What kind of world was it where evil and humiliation prevailed, yet a sun could be made to rise from a bowl of water?

  The country was very wild here, had been let go, the trees enormous, primal flowers in long, tasseled grass, and here and there a statue artfully toppled, its hands snapped off, girdled by moss.

  In a clearing, lit now by the moon, Shaachen went to a marble altar. It was perhaps fifty years old, looked a thousand, cracked and weathered, with ivy. Trees closed thick behind it.