“So,” Tibor said, his hands resting with their accustomed weight on both of Malory’s shoulders. “Now we are fine. We are all fine. I will put the clams in to soak and start chopping the garlic.” Tibor turned Malory towards the water. “Look at the sunset on the pond. Count to ten minutes, then come on up. I promise I’ll be ten minutes wiser. The Pip, you know …” Tibor tapped his throat. “The Pip will help me up Dante’s twelve steps.”
Malory felt Tibor’s hands leave his shoulders, listened as Tibor moved away through the grass, to the sound of his shoes climbing the terrace. He squatted at the edge of the pond and looked into the water, at the reflection of a ceiling as ornate as any of Michelangelo’s. The Pip was gone, his last link to Louiza swallowed by Tibor. With that swallow, all air was sucked out of the evening. Malory felt he would never again take a breath.
The next moment, something loosened. Malory stood. His windpipe opened and, in that intake of breath, while the bellows were drawing the wind and the pollen and the feathers and the dust and the mayflies and the pips of the world towards him, a face appeared across the far side of the pond. A face backlit by the last rays of the sun, so that age was softened into something still recognizable. A golden head. A pale chin lifted upward, still scenting the air twenty-three years later. A body, a woman rising up from the meadow like a lost deer in the last light of day, as pale as she was the afternoon she crossed from the Orchard to St. George’s Church, Whistler Abbey.
If there had ever been a doubt that he should dedicate his life to finding the woman he had twice lost so long ago, that doubt had been replaced with a certainty that here, only a pond’s width away, was the real Louiza, unboxed, alive, as beautiful as his uncased memory could have painted her.
At the far side of the pond, the taste of apples grew rich in Louiza’s mouth and the haze of late afternoon lifted from her eyes and the warmth of the sun on her hair pushed her towards the water.
“Malory,” she said.
Malory was amazed — amazed that the simple act of giving away the Pip had brought Louiza back to him. As all the loneliness and research of the past quarter century faded into the forest, the pond began to glow in the light it reflected from the woman moving towards him from the far side of the water.
Louiza awoke — perhaps for the first time since she had given birth in the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli. She saw Malory by the edge of the water and the girl from the Farmers’ Market halfway up the terrace. And she knew, even as Una and Terry and Quatro and her beloved Dodo began to pick their ways over the stumps and the fallen branches into the woods, that the music of the Unimaginables was fading away forever, and that here were the real solutions she had been searching for. This small man, this small girl.
Ottavia, from the herb garden on the side of the terrace, saw the pantomime down below her and understood — although there wasn’t time for her to construct an entire bedtime story out of it — that this man she had found in a strange villa above Rome and this woman she had found in the round barn of the Farmers’ Market on River Road were bound to each other as tightly as the statues of the man and the woman in the Villa Septimania. She belonged with them as much as the apple she had taken belonged with the statues.
But as she began to walk down the terrace towards them, she saw two other men approaching Louiza. They were running — at least the one with the crew cut, the one she had seen at the Farmers’ Market taking Louiza away from her, was running. The other man, old and hobbled, followed with difficulty up from the Blue House, sporting a cane and the graying remnants of a red beard. She saw Malory notice the men and turn back from the pond, searching for something on the low table, something he was desperate to find. Ottavia gathered her breath within her to shout a warning to Malory, to Louiza, to all of them.
Then the shot rang out.
It seemed to Malory — like Dante’s Tuscan peasant on the side of a hill at the time of day when the sun turns his face and the woman he loves lifts her chin across the pond to call him home for supper — that all the fireflies of the world had come to illuminate TiborTina, to show in a single, pitiless flash the solitude of Ottavia and Cristina, the paralysis of Malory at one edge of the pond, of Louiza at the other. In the light of that big bang, Malory saw the sorrow, the seven-sided confusion of Tibor blown into as many memories, although he had no way of recognizing the faces of all the women — not just the Indian Antigone with her crying baby but all the women: women of memory, women with memories — who paused as they heard the blast on their own private hillsides far away. All paused, at TiborTina and beyond, and smelled the air, touched their hearts, glanced around, as if a universe had just disappeared and their lives weighed a fraction less than they had a moment before.
Up on the porch of the house, above the terrace abandoned by La Principessa and her court, all the countless bits of what had been Tibor’s childhood and adolescence and hopeful struggle and boundless energy, all the memories of the actresses of Tenth Avenue and the ballerinas of St. Petersburg and the demimondaines of Paris and nights sleeping rough in Rome and cracking a vertebra or two leaning over the parapet of the organ loft of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, all these bits went flying through the nighttime air towards the half-roof above the terrace, towards the top branches of the three protective birches, towards the quivering underbellies of the leaves, and lit up the night with a light as sharp and ambitious as the flames of hell; all strove with a last muscled flicker of energy to become a part of the great Tevere of stars that twisted across the heavens.
The bit of Tibor that flew the highest, attached for a moment as brief as that timeless instant at the beginning of the beginning to a still-intact apple pip, was his first memory of a rising sun in the depths of a Bucharest winter; of hair dark, years away from the merest hint of gray; and the two eyes, gray, even silver, interrupting his rehearsal, looking for a bathroom, drawn to his — eyes pure and clean and full of a saving innocence in a time before knowledge, before the wisdom of Minerva overran them both. That final spark of Tibor’s compounded, complex, unimaginable love for Cristina released its forgotten energy and lit up the sky above the Red Barn and Cristina’s gray head.
And then, since these countably finite memories — each attached to a portion of swiftly cooling brain — had been forcibly exiled from any connection to heart and lung, all that remained was the echo of the pistol that Mr. Jeddah had left in the plastic bag on the bar of the Seven Veils, the bag Ottavia had so thoughtfully retrieved for Tibor. Then came a silence and then the prayers of the crickets and the mantras of the bullfrogs, as the fireflies — whose memories are the merest fraction of their brief lives — lit what was left of the world, until, giving way as it must to the law of gravity, the light circled back upon itself, licked its paws, crept into a box, let fall the lid and seal, and settled cold, extinguished, irreversible.
Part Three
If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.
3/0
11 September 1692
ear Mr. Newton,
I regret to inform you that, on the night of 10 September, after consuming a light supper with a bottle of claret, Her Royal Excellency, the Queen of Septimania, retired to the Sanctum Sanctorum for the last time. Enclosed, please find a letter in her hand addressed to you. I rest