The Blind Contessa's New Machine Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  THE BLIND CONTESSA’S NEW MACHINE

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2010 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © Carey Wallace, 2010

  All rights reserved

  A Pamela Dorman Book / Viking

  Excerpt from “Elegy” from Collected Poems 1957-1982 by Wendell Berry.

  Copyright © 2005 by Wendell Berry. Published by Counterpoint.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Wallace, Carey

  The blind contessa’s new machine / Carey Wallace.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-19025-8

  1. Blind women—Fiction. 2. Inventors—Fiction. 3. Italy—History—19th century—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3623.A44295B57 2010

  813’.6—dc22 2010003332

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  for my mother:

  your trip to Italy

  Until morning comes say of the blind bird:

  His feet are netted with darkness, or he flies

  His heart’s distance in the darkness of his eyes.

  —Wendell Berry, “Elegy”

  THE BLIND CONTESSA’S NEW MACHINE

  ON THE DAY Contessa Carolina Fantoni was married, only one other living person knew that she was going blind, and he was not her groom.

  This was not because she had failed to warn them.

  “I am going blind,” she had blurted to her mother, in the welcome dimness of the family coach, her eyes still bright with tears from the searing winter sun. By this time, her peripheral vision was already gone. Carolina could feel her mother take her hand, but she had to turn to see her face. When she did, her mother kissed her, her own eyes full of pity.

  “I have been in love, too,” she said, and looked away.

  “Papa,” Carolina had said.

  Her father had laid his magnifying glass down on the map unrolled before him. A mournful sea monster loomed below the lens. Although it was the middle of the day, the blindness shrouded the bookshelves that rose behind him in false dusk. Only the large window over his head and the desk itself were still bright and clear.

  “Nonna was blind when she died,” Carolina said.

  Her father nodded. “And for years before that,” he said. “But I only half believed it. It was like she had another pair of eyes hidden in a box. She knew everything.”

  “Did she ever tell you how it happened?” Carolina asked.

  Her father shook his head. “I was very young then.”

  “I think maybe I am going blind,” Carolina told him.

  Her father frowned. After considering this for a moment, he waved his hand before his face. When her eyes followed it, he broke into a wide grin.

  “Ah, but you haven’t yet!” he said.

  She had told Pietro in the garden, when her mother had left them alone for a few moments under a sky full of stars that Carolina could snuff out or call back into existence simply by turning her head.

  Pietro had laughed and laughed.

  “What are you going to tell me next?” he had asked her, between kisses. “I suppose you can fly as well? And turn into a cat?”

  “Already I can’t see things,” she insisted. “Around the edges.”

  “Next you will tell me you have forgotten how to kiss,” Pietro said, and kissed her again.

  In those first days, Carolina measured her losses by the size of her lake. Her father had dammed a length of the small river that wandered their property as a present to her mother on their fifth anniversary. But as an amateur in these things, he had only clumsily dredged the surrounding marsh. The resulting body of water, thirty paces long and half again as wide, was in no place deep enough for a man to stand fully submerged. His young wife, still homesick for the sea, had tramped loyally across the soggy ground with him on the day of her anniversary but never returned voluntarily, so when Carolina turned seven, her father had scattered stone benches on the grassy shore, filled the lake’s surface with lantern-lit boats, and made a new present of it to his daughter.

  This time it was received gratefully, with an appreciation that manifested, in its early days, as tyranny: already Carolina had developed a passion for solitude, and from the date of her seventh birthday demanded that she be allowed to visit the lake, which sat half a mile from the house through vine-choked pines, entirely unaccompanied. After all, she argued, what else could it mean to own something?

  Completely overthrown by this reasoning, her father agreed, despite her mother’s misgivings, which, from long years of disregard, had finally gone to ground and begun to emerge again as sleeplessness, forgetfulness, and truly unspeakable fears.

  From this point, it became Carolina’s daily habit to walk to the lake, now silver with rain, now black, now gray, now solid ice, clear or milky depending on how quickly a freeze had taken it. In her tenth year, winter’s arrival had been both swift and brutal, so that the frozen lake retained an eerie clarity that allowed Carolina to see all the way to the bottom in most places, laying bare her watery property’s mysteries: the sunken branches, the green weeds, the fishes’ bare, bowl- shaped nests, and the deeper channel of the dammed river’s original path. With a broom borrowed from the kitchen maid to sweep the snow away, Carolina spent hours in her surveying, her face red and lips blue when she arrived at that winter’s dinners.

  That spring, her mother had insisted her father build Carolina some kind of shelter on the banks, and he had erected a one-room cottage of unpainted wood, stained red, a few strides from the water. Light poured into it through glass windows set in all four walls. A collection of worn rugs covered the
floor. The furniture was sparse: an old couch weighed down with patched velvet quilts, a desk, and a chair. The room was small. Standing in the middle of it, his arms outstretched, Carolina’s father could almost touch both walls. A fireplace opened at the foot of a slim chimney behind a screen worked with brass mermaids, another of her father’s well-intentioned but unsuccessful presents to her mother, who found all reminders of the sea not a comfort but a grief.

  Once the cottage was built, the great house lost its grip on Carolina completely. She passed more of the nights of her remaining childhood on the couch at her cottage than in her own bed, buried like a black-eyed field mouse in piles of thick velvet, or naked in the warmth the summer sun left as a remembrance after it set. On warm nights, she threw the windows open and tacked fine scarves over them to foil the insects. Outside, the frogs and birds sang their boasts, hopes, and threats.

  Because she had first learned the lake with a child’s eyes, Carolina was able to believe for a while that the fact that she could no longer take it in with a single glance was just another of the many tricks her body had played on her in the mysterious operation of turning her into a young woman. The church, and the distance to the city, and the grand ballroom’s once-endless expanse had all shrunk as she grew up. Why should the lake be any different?

  But just after her eighteenth birthday, around the time she and Pietro were engaged, the trouble with focus at the borders of her vision advanced. She could no longer recognize figures at a dance until she turned to face them directly. At the same time, her sight contracted, as if some unseen spirit had cupped his hands on either side of her head, blotting out her sight to the right and left. The rest was lost in darkness.

  Turri, of course, had understood immediately. He had raised his own hands to either side of his face. “Like this?” he asked.

  Carolina nodded.

  For an instant, his blue eyes widened with worry. Then they changed. He still looked directly into her face, but his focus was on something far beyond her, his mind casting through the books of an invisible library. Carolina hated this expression: sometimes it passed in an instant, but often it meant she had lost him to his thoughts for the afternoon.

  For the moment, however, he was still gathering evidence. “For how long?” he asked.

  “Half a year,” she said. “Since before Christmas.”

  Beyond the silk pinned in the lake house windows, a summer loon sang a few notes, then lapsed back into thought.

  “I’ve read about it,” Turri said. “Blindness can come from the sides, or from the center.”

  “The center?” Carolina repeated.

  “Like an eclipse, in the center of your vision. But it’s permanent. And the darkness grows from there.”

  “But in my case, it is collapsing from the outside,” she said.

  “That is the other kind.”

  Tears sprang to Carolina’s eyes. She allowed them to cloud her vision, grateful for a blindness she could wipe away with a flick of her wrist. When the tears passed, Turri sat gazing at her as if she were a new problem in math.

  “How long?” she asked.

  “I’m sure it is different in every case.”

  When she didn’t look away, he dropped his gaze. “I can find out,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Have you told Pietro?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  Turri studied her for a moment longer, then gave a short laugh. “But he doesn’t know.”

  She shook her head.

  Turri took her hand.

  For once, she let him.

  Carolina and Turri had met for the first time when she was six and he was sixteen. Her mother had decided that spring that Carolina was old enough to attend her father’s lemon blossom dance, which he held each year when his wax-leaved groves burst into bloom, to mark his gratitude to the new spring sun, the saints, or whatever gods might still be lurking in the old hills. Carolina had been allowed to pick the fabric for her own dress: a robin’s egg brocade trimmed with white lace from the exotic and impossibly distant Switzerland. She spent a dozen afternoons in the seamstress’s studio, where the air was thick with glimmering dust motes and the scent of lily and basil that drifted in from the room next door, where the maids arranged the flowers they’d cut in the yard. As Carolina watched, the patient old woman cut the fabric for the bodice and the small bell of the skirt, then stitched the miniature gown to life, the needle in her crooked fingers drawing the thread through the folds so quickly that Carolina sometimes lost sight of it.

  When the gown was complete, three days before the party, Carolina worried that she might die of joy. The old woman hung it on her wardrobe, where it shone in the morning sun like a piece of the sky. For those three nights, Carolina slept only fitfully. Often, she crept out of bed to make certain by touch that the gown was still there and that she was not being misinformed by her dreams, as so often happened. Although she had stood for a number of uncomplaining hours while the dress was measured and fitted, she refused to try it on after it was finished, half saving it as she might carry a sweet drop in her pocket until the end of the day, and half terrified of the unknowable but unquestionably profound change that would take place in her the moment she put it on.

  Only an hour after the party had begun, however, she found herself pressed against the wall in her parents’ ballroom, forgotten. The air was hot and cloying with the scent of a thousand lemon blossoms, branches her father’s men had pruned that day to keep the old trees healthy and force more fruit from them. Far above her head, her parents’ friends exclaimed greetings and gossiped like chickens. A few had taken her hand and remarked how pretty she looked as they came in. Some of them had even dared to pat her head. But now she was lost amid an unfriendly sea of whispering skirts and legs.

  Then a pair of the legs came to a stop in front of her.

  Carolina threw her head back.

  A tall boy with light brown hair and bright blue eyes looked her over for a moment. Then, to her shock, he took a seat beside her on the ballroom’s highly polished parquet floor without making any provisions to protect his fine black trousers. With him seated and her standing, their faces were at approximately the same level. The young man did not address her.

  Carolina thought hard. “Are you tired of dancing?” she asked after a moment.

  “I’m not good enough at dancing to have gotten tired of it,” the young man said.

  His manner was earnest enough to satisfy Carolina, and his logic appealed to her despite the fact that his meaning was difficult to grasp. She nodded gravely.

  The young man gazed out at the swirling crowd. “What do you think of this party?” he asked.

  For a moment, Carolina cast about in her mind for a worldly lie, but her excitement over the truth quickly overcame her. “This is my first dance,” she confided, watching him closely for the reaction a fact of such weight demanded.

  She was not disappointed. The young man’s eyes grew wide. He nodded slowly, taking her announcement in as if, as she suspected, it changed everything.

  Then a movement in the crowd caught his attention. Carolina followed his gaze up to the face of a determined girl in a lavender dress, pushing through the crush of guests a few paces away. She was looking for something. This didn’t seem out of the ordinary to Carolina, but it frightened the young man. He shrank back against the wall. When it didn’t give way behind him, he glanced at Carolina for help. Carolina’s brows drew together as she stared back, trying to understand his problem so she would know what to offer him.

  Then the young man seemed to come to his senses. He scrambled to his feet.

  Carolina tilted her face to see him at his full height.

  He executed a handsome bow. “You look lovely tonight,” he told her. “Just like you fell out of the sky.” He lifted her small hand, bent low to kiss it, and slipped away into the crowd.

  Carolina watched him go. Then she darted between a small forest of trouser legs suffus
ed in a cloud of spicy cigar smoke and wound her way through the crowd at the buffet of cakes and sweets. Just beyond them, her mother’s enormous crystal bowl presided over the corner table, filled with tart lemonade. A handful of yellow slices turned lazily on its surface. There, she caught sight of the young man again. The girl in the lavender dress was leading him to the dance floor by the hand.

  Forgetting her gown for the moment, Carolina ducked under the heavy folds of cloth that covered the table. She emerged beside Renato, an ancient servant with a nose like a piece of melted marzipan who, she had also recently discovered, had the talent of twisting handfuls of clover into flowered crowns.

  “Renato,” she demanded, pointing. “Who is that, being led around like a bad dog?”

  Renato followed the line of her little finger. Then he laughed with the gentle exasperation grown people usually reserved for a child who couldn’t be expected to know better.

  “That’s young Turri,” he told her.

  The small dam her father had built to stem the original river stood on the far side of Carolina’s lake. Just beyond the dam, the river became a clear rocky creek that ducked into the forest and flowed on to Turri’s land, emerging to become the flashing ribbon at the foot of the Turris’ back garden. The Turri home itself sat just out of sight over the next hill, facing the same dusty gold road as her father’s house.

  This made Turri one of Carolina’s closest neighbors, and after their first meeting she recognized him from time to time on the road as he went by. Apart from the lake, her favorite place was an alcove window on the second floor of her father’s house, where she was a close observer of the neighborhood traffic. Each figure that passed on the road had a role in a complicated ongoing drama she constructed from whatever details she could glean about them on any given day. Turri was a favorite character in these scenes. In stark contrast to the endless parade of placid old women carrying their unvarying baskets of lemons and eggs, he gawked at the clouds and stumbled over rocks. He chased flying things with his hat. He came to abrupt halts for no reason at all. In addition, he was likely to be in possession of any number of evocative props: a pair of brown mice in a wire cage; a thick candle that sparked and steamed, but didn’t go out in the rain; a basket of feathers that the wind caught and scattered just as he disappeared over the rise, giving the effect that some enchantment had transformed him into the flyaway plumes.