OUT OF our need we patronize our artists, we flirt with our poets, we petition our architects: Give us your lusty colorful world. Signal to us a state of being more richly steeped in purpose and satisfaction than our own.
Thanks to our artists, we pretend well, living under canopies of painted clouds and painted gods, in halls of marble floors across which the sung Masses paint hope in deep impasti of echo. We make of the hollow world a fuller, messier, prettier place, but all our inventions can’t create the one thing we require: to deserve any fond attention we might accidentally receive, to receive any fond attention we don’t in the course of things deserve. We are never enough to ourselves because we can never be enough to another. Any one of us walks into any room and reminds its occupant that we are not the one they most want to see. We are never the one. We are never enough.
The holy find this some mincing proof of God. Damn them.
There was de Nevada, mourning the death of his daughter, and why shouldn’t he? But he came into the room and brought back the treasure we never believed he could achieve—that I doubted the existence of—and he also brought back to me the brusque male fact of my brother, and how dead he is. How I can never walk into the room again and have him mean something to me, even in his drunken lechery with other women; I can never even suffer the pain of knowing I’ve not quite caught his attention. There is no longer a Cesare Borgia with attention to catch. Don Vicente’s return brings it all up to me again; the phlegmatic humor rises in me and slashes hotly in my windpipe.
I lay the remaining Apple on its silver branch and turn to the mirror. The light has shifted somewhat and I almost feel visited—beside myself. It’s no doubt the effect of seeing that stone creature dissolve into the stonework of the fireplace, like a louse burrowing into the skin. It makes me feel that any wall or floor could shift its reliable shape and blurt forth into a creature again, as if the house were possessed of a stone ghoul. Uncomfortable. One would never be alone again, even in one’s boudoir.
“Mirror, mirror,” I spoke aloud, to steady my nerves, “who is the fairest of us all?”
I thought of my father, the great Pope Alexander VI, and how he had played at being the prelate of the Church of Rome. How he had had testicles of the sons of his enemies removed and gilded and returned to their owners in caskets beautifully inscribed with erotic carvings, to mock them. Yet he had also had baskets of overflow from our banquets brought out to those suffering from plague and famine on the banks of the Tiber just below Rome. What was fair in the use of power? Cesare’s friend Niccolò Machiavelli would have sharp praise for the man who used power to his best advantage. But Machiavelli didn’t consider the moral fairness in a ruler to be worthy of mention.
And who asks women to be fair, anyway, unless they do ask themselves?
I had sent Bianca away to be murdered, those long years ago. It seemed hard to remember. But my Cesare had cast his attention her way—he who had so little time left—and indeed, that was the last time we met in this life. A cock to every hen who staggered into his house, whether she was his equal or no. I couldn’t have that happen. Not for his sake; not for hers. Was murder the right alternative? Ah well, too late to decide otherwise now.
I looked upon myself the way I did when I was an adolescent. When life beckoned from the horizon. I could only imagine growing more beautiful, more powerful, more responsive to life’s beneficence and squalor. Back then, the figure who would look back at me in the looking glass was potent with mystery, more arresting than I could imagine actually seeming to anyone.
Now, the venerable Apple nodded perfectly against my cheek. Beside its immortal perfection I looked wan, a fishwife, a sister to old Primavera. I could see the thin struts of my shoulders making a yoke under my skin, and my neck arose from a shallow well. My eyes had fallen prey to a snare of webbed lines, too fine to be visible to anyone across the room—but what do we ever want but for someone to come nearer? And then all our imperfections are magnified.
I put my head to one side, criticizing my aging beauty. “Who is fairer?” I begged the mirror to lie and say “No one; you are beautiful as a legend.” I knew it wouldn’t lie. But I didn’t expect it to speak, either.
It spoke in the language of mirrors, not of words. A mist crept over the skin of the glass. Mistaking it for my hot breath upon it, I leaned forward to smear the fog away with my hand, to see some further truth, something consoling, that I hadn’t yet thought or imagined.
But when my hand reached out, I felt for an instant something other than the cold touch of glass. I cawed a sound of alarm. Before I fell to the floor, twitching with disbelief, I saw the child again. Bianca de Nevada. In my delusion she was no longer dead. She had a grave and magnificent expression. I can’t explain it. Puzzled curiosity. A raging patience. An articulate simplicity. A womanliness.
Or perhaps it was that she seemed like one who didn’t worry about what it meant never to be enough. The absence of such a care on her brow filled her with an unearthly beauty that I could neither achieve nor abide.