“Well,” Malory continued — and Louiza remembered his excitement, the way he propped himself up on one elbow, but made sure to leave a leg lying over hers, “the challenge was on. I was going to write even bigger numbers. I was going to do what she said was impossible. I was going to write infinity. I wrote my quadrillion and then, with the daring of sailing off the edge of the earth, I added a comma and three more zeroes. And then another comma and three more zeroes. I refused to do any other work in maths that morning. Or any other work during my other lessons. I kept at it with my notebook. After two days of writing commas and zeroes, I came up with a genius of an idea. Instead of writing three little zeroes, I wrote one big one. And then I substituted a zero with a diagonal slash for ten groups of three, and then a horizontal slash for a hundred groups of three.
“And so on. Three weeks of substitution, a fever of filling up notebooks, ignoring my lessons, the other boys, barely eating, ignoring the world around me. Until finally Mrs. Bogatay took pity on me and showed me the ultimate substitution. The sideways eight. °. Infinity.
“I was furious, of course, and I fought back. ° + 1, I wrote in temporary triumph.
“‘Equals infinity,’ she said, writing it out: ° +1 = °.
“° + °, I wrote. ° x °!
“‘Equals infinity,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry to say.’
“That was the day,” Malory said, putting his head back down on Louiza’s chest, “that I returned home after school and found the vicar waiting for me. Two days later they buried my mother. Monday I found myself at a new school. Every hour became an infinity of seconds, every day an infinity of hours. And every night, I curled up into the sideways eight of my best, my only friend.”
The Unimaginables began to play. The pine tree inside the house disappeared, the snow melted. Vince came, Vince went. Louiza solved the problems. And still there remained the pulse, the beat, the infinite, the unimaginable loss of her baby.
2/6
HE MORNING OF MY TENTH BIRTHDAY — OR AT LEAST ON THE morning of the tenth anniversary of my arrival at the baby hatch of Santa Sabina — Sister Francesca Splendida asked me if I wanted to be an angel.”
A girl. A girl stood beside the Bernini statue, speaking to Malory.
He had awakened to a brilliant late-summer morning. He had walked, as he had for more than twenty years of mornings, down the corridor, through the foyer, and into the dining room for his scones and tea, and had discovered Settimio and the girl beside the apple tossers.
“I found her in the Sanctum Sanctorum,” Settimio said, “half an hour ago, asleep on the desk. When she opened her eyes, she asked for you.”
The girl was even smaller than him, hair cropped in a golden helmet, almost as young as Louiza, or as young as Louiza had been twenty-three years before. Jeans, leather jacket over a white T-shirt, blue trainers — she must have been like many other girls on the streets of Rome. But Malory had met very few girls in recent years. In fact, none.
“Tibor said, ‘Malory will understand.’” The girl spoke English. But the words buckled Malory’s knees. He sat. The girl sat across from him. Settimio brought a cup and a plate. The girl continued her story.
A FAMOUS THEATER DIRECTOR WAS COMING TO ROME FROM AMERICA to stage a tenth birthday of his own — a revival of the Divine Comedy that had catapulted him to fame. He needed young things — a dozen young things — to play angels. For us damaged girls from Santa Sabina, Santa Chiara, Santa Cecilia, and elsewhere, it was a chance to run around the Circo Massimo dressed in something other than our daily uniform. And run around most of us did. I, alone among the dozen, followed directions. It was what I had been trained to do for as long as I could remember. And because I was so good at following directions and knowing where and when to go, at the end of the week Tibor and Cristina took me for a gelato in Testaccio.
They asked me questions — about my family, which I didn’t know, about my schoolwork. They were impressed by my Italian and my Latin, my history and my geography. Most of all they were impressed by my mathematical ability, which had already outstripped what the Dominican Sisters were able to teach in Santa Sabina.
When the Dante was over and the rest of the girls went back to the convent, Sister Francesca Splendida took me aside and told me I was being sent to a school in Switzerland. It wasn’t until I turned thirteen in a girls’ grammar outside Lucerne that I saw Tibor and Cristina again and realized — even if they didn’t say so explicitly — that they had been paying for my education and my escape from Santa Sabina. I thought Cristina was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, a real princess — I believed it when I heard Tibor order “thé au citron for La Principessa”—so I allowed each of them to take one of my hands and lead me down to the Lake of Lucerne, buy me a stuffed zebra, feed me a cream bun as if I were Paddington Bear and deposit me back at the school before supper. Later, at the English school above Nice, Tibor and Cristina came to visit every year on Family Day when no other family came for me. And even at the A-Level crammer outside Inverness, where my only friend was a flannel-covered hot-water bottle, I answered Cristina’s questions about my knowledge and Tibor’s about my dreams without asking why and kept a secret scrapbook with reviews and photos of all of Tibor’s productions in the bottom of a steamer trunk. “Cope-able,” was what one headmistress called me; I can’t remember if she was Swiss, French, or Scots — the word existed in none of the languages. “Ottavia is able to cope,” she wrote, “with anything.”
It wasn’t until I was on the cusp of graduating from Trinity that Rix the Porter rang up to say that a Miss Cristina was calling for me at the lodge. I was a week away from receiving my degree so hadn’t expected a visit. And it was immediately clear that there was something improvised about Cristina’s appearance. She was in a taxi. She needed to talk with me. She had been crying.
I suggested the Orchard, just a few miles outside of town, where I used to go when I was in search of a quiet place to contemplate Fourier Series and Eigenvectors. The next week it would be full of proud parents and cream teas and jam-sotted bees. But Cristina and I had no trouble finding a trestle table in a quiet corner of apple trees with the church rising up on the other side of the road.
“Ottavia,” Cristina began, dark glasses still firmly in place over the gray eyes that had first seduced me into a schoolgirl crush twelve years before. “You are old enough now that I think it is time to tell you a few things.”
My scrapbook of clippings memorializing Tibor’s successes also included photo features on Cristina. From the moment she strolled out of the maternity ward of Fatebenefratelli on that astonishing October evening in 1978, Cristina had found herself surrounded by a magnetic field that didn’t so much open doors for her as blow them off their hinges. A job scrubbing floors for a Reuters functionary at the Vatican led to an invitation to be a sound editor in New York and a pair of green cards for her and Tibor. Within a year she was reporting traffic on the radio. Within two, isobars and satellite radar on the Today Show. As tanks rolled through Tiananmen Square and heads rolled over six of the seven continents, no palace leader or rainforest revolutionary was safe from the charms of Cristina. Here was one page from Time, Cristina at the siege of Sarajevo, here in a firefight in Hebron. There were stories from Darfur, New Orleans, Nagorno-Karabakh, Praia da Luz, Casale, Gori, Wasilla, Garoowe where, for ten days that she would be happy to forget, she was the property of the Somali warlord Jama Abduk Boosaaso. Not to mention the dinners and interviews with Clinton, Blair, Havel, Prince Bandar, and Bishop Tutu. Cristina didn’t stop long enough to count, but her producers told her that she had filed more stories and won more Peabodys than Christiane Amanpour by a factor of three, not to mention a Pulitzer. And even now that she was approaching the age when correspondents with creaking knees and spreading posteriors were shunted behind studio desks in New York or London or Atlanta, Cristina not only remained in the field, but consistently placed in the Top Ten Sexiest Woman on TV. And not in the Grandma Class. Top Ten. Punto.