Palimpsest

“Lyudmila,” Oleg interrupts softly, “why don’t you drip water from your mouth when you speak anymore?”

She is quiet; her hand freezes on his temple.

“Do not ask me that, Olezhka. Let it be just a little while longer.”

“All right, Mila.”

Clouds sweep over the stars, and there is no light left on the long, white river.

FOUR

PEREGRINATIONS

Nerezza cradled Ludovico’s head in her arms. She did it awkwardly, not being by nature a nurturing dove of any breed, unused to ailing men in her bed, in her kitchen, in need of her coffee grinder’s shrill whirring and her boiling water, in need of her. But she tried, gamely, as another woman might try to swallow fiery spices out of politeness.

“Ludo, drink. You have to.”

He turned his head from her, for a moment thinking he might throw up.

“Lucia,” he groaned.

Nerezza rolled her eyes. “Yes, Lucia. I know. It doesn’t mean you don’t need to drink when I tell you to.”

Ludo drank. It was bitter and thick and duskily sweet. Lucia had often ordered him about—he required it, flourished under it, as he could never remember that eating remained vital even when a book was overdue and so beautiful it cracked his sternum with the force of it. She had had to curl his fingers around a spoon once, when a new American translation of the Bucolicswas on the press and unconscionably late. Ludo had not tasted the carroty soup or the bread, but she had tasted for both of them.

“If you cry in my house,” Nerezza said, “I shall call security.”

“I don’t understand.” Ludo opened his eyes to a room flooded with sunlight, all the brighter for her sparse belongings. The sunlight seemed to be unsure of what to do in the absence of a couch to fade or curtains to shine through, and so had gone helplessly nova in the center of Nerezza’s living room. He groaned again, his head throbbing like a struck bell.

“Don’t you? I know it’s hard to keep in your head, a hard wrestle, like Jacob and that angel. But she’s there, you must see that. You saw her. She’s there and safe and you don’t have to worry about her anymore.”

“Where the fuck is there?” Ludo did not often swear, but he felt he had placed the word perfectly, squarely.

Nerezza looked at her shoes. She was dressed already, in cream and camel, impeccable, and Ludo thought she probably didn’t know how to be anything less than that.

“Palimpsest,” she whispered. “Don’t make me . . . I don’t like saying it. Here. I don’t like saying it here.”

Ludovico extricated himself clumsily from her and stalked into the small kitchen, buttering bread and slicing cheese for himself without speaking to her. He could feel her watching him fumble with her knives, knew his cheeks blazed with little points of blush that could not quite spread.

Nerezza folded and unfolded her hands. “I know—”

“I am not discussing this,” he snapped.

“You were there, Ludo! You saw the horses. You ate a snail with a silver shell. You saw her, you saw Paola—that’s her lover’s name, Paola. Did you know her?” Nerezza hurried on. “You sat next to me and I tasted your tears.”

“I had a bad fucking dream.” He felt satisfied having used that word again, as though it were a badge he could wear and polish.

“Dreams don’t work like that. Two people don’t dream identical dreams.”

“I am not discussing it.”

Nerezza shrugged. “It’s not that I feel responsible for you. I feel . . .” She stared at the precise moons of her cuticles. Strands of dark hair had begun to work loose from the meticulously messy knot at the nape of her neck. “I feel that Lucia left her life untidy, and as her friend it is my duty to order it. If not for her, I would never have seen the things I’ve seen. It is the least I can do to . . .” She looked sidelong at him through her lashes. Ludo could not tell whether she meant the expression to look kittenish or morbid. “Feed her animals while she’s gone.”

Ludo gripped the edges of the cream-colored countertop. He shut his eyes; the sunlight turned his eyelids to a ruby smear. Had she been here? Had she eaten this brown bread with crystals of coppery sugar in the crust? Had she let a cigarette sigh into ash on that light-scoured terrace? He tasted the snail still on his lips; there were such screams in his ears, ringing, ringing! But it was a mad thing, an impossible thing. Leave it to Lucia to find a madness so big she could vanish into it and drag him with her, far behind, weeping for her, like a penitent on a chain, stumbling behind the priest’s cart.

“If you want to see her again,” Nerezza said quietly, “you have to accept this. It’s fairly simple, in the end.”

“If she wanted to leave me, there might have been a divorce. I’ve always liked legal documents. They feel so real. That would have been easier. Quicker. More final.”

“This is very final. Or will be, when she’s finished.”

“You don’t know her. You don’t know us. She will find a way back to me, if the world is as you say and all this is real.”

Nerezza laughed, a bark, a snap of an eel’s electric tail. “She’s gone, Ludo. And if she’s lucky, she’ll soon be in Palimpsest forever, and you’ll only see her if you fuck the right shopgirl.”

“But she’s not there yet? Not completely? She’s somewhere here, too, in Italy, in Europe? America?”

Nerezza threw up her hands in disgust. “Oh, for Christ’s sake. No onehas gotten there yet, completely, permanently. But yes. I drove her to the airport. So that she could try. I helped her get a passport. You have no idea what she and I have been through together—I was there, I watched her go, toward Paola and Palimpsest and all of it. I helped her. She would have bled through her eyes for it. So would I. God,” she raised her eyes to the impassive ceiling, “if only the toll were as cheaply paid as that. If only I could bleed and that would be enough.”

Helpless in the face of his idiocy, she lifted her slim shoulders and let them fall. He tired her, he could see it. An animal who made a mess all over her house. His tears and his semen on her sheets, the endless laundry of him, the endless water he required and gave back uglier, saltier, than he had received it.

A small knock came at the door, like a polite cough. Nerezza’s face did a curious thing; it flushed, and she smiled, a smile which seemed to come out of her marrow, raw and livid. Her dark eyes dazzled and Ludo quailed from her a little, from this woman, the mark of whose mouth still blazed on his cheek.

A man and a woman stood at the door, clutching each other’s hands fiercely. Nerezza took them both in her arms and the three of them stood for a moment, their heads pressed together, their arms hanging limp around each other’s waists. Ludo bit his lip, bearing within him the awful feeling of stalking in the cold just outside the warm glow of a fire, unable to draw closer. The man kissed the top of Nerezza’s head with a rough tenderness; the woman laid her head in the crook of her shoulder. When they finally broke ranks, Nerezza led them both by the hand to the kitchen, where Ludo shrank against the wall, trying not to appear as though he shrank at all. They were strangers, their eyes full of tears, and they advanced on him like assassins. He longed to flee.

“I asked them to come, Ludo,” Nerezza said. Her voice was rough and harsh, an eel-voice, from the deeps, and he found in that moment that he hated it. “So that we could explain to you, so that they could. It’s a hard progress we make, and lonely, frightening—but it doesn’t have to be like that. This is Anoud, and this is Agostino. They are my lovers.” She paused for a moment, as if to make space for Ludo’s disapproval to have its little fit. “But that’s not why they’re here.” The two of them nodded eagerly. Anoud was dark, Moroccan maybe, her skin the color of old dust. Agostino was tall and ascetic, with an ungainly nose and a distantly grieving expression. He looked to Ludo like a man who wept often. The trio guided him to the long chaises of Nerezza’s minimal living room, and he allowed himself to be seated, his limbs arranged like a doll’s. They stared at each other for a long time, unwilling to be the first to speak, but Anoud and Agostino did not let go of Nerezza’s hands, clutching them so tightly that the tips of her thumbs had gone purple. Nerezza began, her voice soft, buoyed by her lovers’ presence.