“So, Bernini put a little stone box beneath the elephant’s gut, to make Fra Domenico happy. And then Bernini led his elephant into the middle of the piazza. Now, a lesser artist might have faced the elephant’s trunk towards the church and another might have faced him away, as if pulling the weight of the cathedral towards Heaven or the Tevere, whichever came first. But Bernini was a genius. He parallel-parked Dumbo with his left flank against the church and his head facing the lobby of the Hotel Minerva. And then he lifted the tail of his beast ever so daintily to the port side, so he could aim his fragrant marble farts through the window of the study of the Dominican friar.”
Louiza’s contraction subsided, her grip on Malory’s neck and wrist loosened. She giggled.
“I like your girlfriend,” Tibor said.
Malory smiled down at Louiza, trembling and chapped, her hair, damp from exertion, pasted to the whiteness of her cheek, but smiling up at him all the same.
“Showtime, kids!” Tibor squeezed Malory’s shoulder and set off at a jog towards an alley at the far corner of the piazza. With the new-found strength of an elephant with an obelisk on its back, Malory lifted Louiza once again and ran. From Piazza Minerva, Malory followed Tibor down the narrow Via dei Cestari, past the windows of the liturgical boutiques, where ecclesiastical dandies ran up diocesan expense accounts with accessories for their altars and sacristies. Malory pressed Louiza’s face into his chest away from some of the more explicit artifacts — the portraits of Jesus straight off the covers of romance novels and body-building mags, the altar cloths woven with raised scarlet threads as if freshly washed in the blood of the lamb, the crowns of thorns, the boxes of 14-karat nails.
At Largo Argentina, Tibor stopped the cars and motorini for Malory to ford the rush hour traffic and then raced ahead down a narrow vicolo to the massive door of the Palazzo Caetani on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure. Caetani, Palazzo Caetani — Malory knew the name. When the vicar mentioned something about an inheritance, Malory’s inheritance, he’d named property in Rome. A villa, or was it a palazzo? It couldn’t possibly be something this cold and massive, with an entryway ten, twenty, maybe thirty feet high, the name Caetani etched in testamentary capitals above the door. But the name Caetani, Palazzo Caetani troubled Malory’s memory as he hefted Louiza around the side of the building and followed Tibor down a narrow slalom of Cinquecentos and Citroens. He knew the name.
“Malory?” It was Louiza struggling to say something against his chest.
“Yes?” Malory said, pausing halfway down the alley, where a drainpipe bled a green stain of neglect on the side of the palazzo. “Tibor, wait!” he called, and crunched his ear down towards Louiza’s mouth. “What is it, Louiza?”
“Biscuit,” Louiza said.
“Biscuit?” Malory leaned in closer, wondering what he had heard.
“Biscuit,” Louiza repeated. But before Malory could ask whether she was really hungry and he should stop at a café on the way to the hospital and was this really wise, Louiza screamed and writhed in another contraction. Malory held onto her as she opened and closed and squirmed and changed shape and form like — which one of the Greek water gods was it, Malory tried to remember, in which one of the Greek myths?
And in his own struggle to remember, another memory shot its way to the surface of Malory’s sweating brain. Biscuit. Biscuit tin. Antonella’s biscuit tin. Caetani. Palazzo Caetani and Antonella’s biscuit tin and the small black-and-white television set in the Maths Faculty on Selwyn Road and the voice of Anna Ford.
“Aldo Moro.” But now it was the voice of Tibor, who had run back from the bottom of the alley and stood with Malory. “This was where they found him. Like I said, there’s a war going on.”
Malory remembered the TV footage he’d watched with the sobbing Antonella — the crowd in the alley, the Palazzo Caetani, of course. And the cherry Renault 4, boot open, the assassinated Prime Minister curled up in his own fetal drama.
“Louiza wants a biscuit,” Malory said. Louiza’s body slowly relaxed, and the moisture from the latest contraction left a stain against Malory’s corduroy lapel.
“And I want a coffee,” Tibor said, “and half a bottle of grappa. But there isn’t time.” And Tibor put a large paw on Malory’s shoulder and propelled him forward, down the alley.
“Biscuit later, Louiza,” Malory murmured. He felt her nod, or at least felt her nose bury itself between two buttons of his shirt until it pressed its wet, friendly intimacy into his chest.
She wanted desperately to talk to Malory, to tell him about the problems. But she couldn’t, weak with the pain and the effort and needing sleep and a biscuit, maybe two, and some tea, and a way to ease this thing, this problem out of her womb and into this world. But what world? The world in her vision was Malory’s damp shirt, the walls of Renaissance palazzi as Malory carried her through the streets of Rome, the occasional bit of sky. Broken columns, amalgamated brick and stone of crumbling houses, a square block of roof, and then a sky that opened up as Malory carried her towards the river, figured more as variables in an equation than as points on a guided tour of Rome. They were all part of another problem of origins, like the problems they had brought her in the cottage. If she could only solve this problem, Louiza thought, then maybe, just maybe, the pain would go away.
There would be time, she was sure of it. There would be time to take pencil and paper and sort it all out. As blurred and bumpy as the journey was, Louiza felt a comfort in Malory’s arms. She was rescued. Malory had come and rescued her, even if she had been the one who had traveled — she still couldn’t remember how — across the Channel and half of Europe to find him in Rome. He was with her now, carrying her past elephants and down alleys, carrying her and their child. Had she told him? Of all the many questions, the one that had an answer was whose child she was carrying. It was Malory’s, could only be Malory’s. They would be together, the three of them, she and Malory and the child, bound in that indelible equation i = u.
But where in that equation was there space for the baby? Louiza raised her face towards Malory, Malory of the determined eyes, Malory of the unfailing plod and steady breath, who was trotting after Tibor, following him past the buzz of motorcycles and the rush of water mixed with the diesel of autobuses. The equation was perfect with Louiza and Malory, but with Malory and Louiza alone. Louiza = Malory, Malory = Louiza. Maybe that’s why this baby inside her was causing such pain, up, down, inside and out. It didn’t fit. The baby didn’t fit in the equation.
There was another equation that troubled Malory.
October minus March equals seven. Seven, not nine. Not the nine months of human gestation, but the seven months since he had made love to Louiza in the organ loft of St. George, Whistler Abbey, which, although they seemed like an eternity to Malory, didn’t add up. Wasn’t twenty-eight weeks much too early? Was Louiza’s baby premature? Or worst of all, had some other organ tuner climbed into Louiza’s loft two months before him?
“There it is,” Tibor shouted at Malory as they shuffled across the Lungotevere through the fallen leaves of the plane trees. Malory saw an island in the middle of the river, a fortress of an island, a stone boat floating, against the rules of all physics, in the middle of the river.