THERE WAS no Apple left, for when she fell, the Apple rolled into the door behind her. I didn’t think to try to reclaim it until I was thirty or forty feet away, hustling that sluggish goose of a gooseboy up the slope. When I turned back, uncertain, I saw that the house had disappeared. There was simply a tumulus in a glade. Shadows of blue and granite. Traces of winter’s snow lingered in long striations, like the thin fingers of ancient women who refuse to clasp their hands in prayer and decently die. There was no door, no smoking chimney, and all I could smell was leaf rot and mold, and the wet earth waking up again.
Michelotto, small miracle of contradictions, was chattier as we came closer to Montefiore, and began to ask about the cottage in the forest. I hadn’t thought he noticed it, or remembered it at all if he did notice it, but he seemed clarified in mind. As if his episode in a coma had given his feeble mind a better rest than it was used to getting. “A girl lived there,” he said. “And I spoke to her.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “I’m sure there was. When you were little you used to speak to the geese, and you claimed they spoke to you too.”
“They did,” he said. “They told me many things that I didn’t understand.”
“Fascinating and marvelous. What secrets do geese know?”
“Who they like and who they dislike. Among the other geese, I mean.”
“I see. A hierarchy among the gaggle. I’m sure that was spellbinding to listen to. Look sharp, you clot, you’re trampling in the mud.”
“They also mentioned who they liked among the humans. They didn’t care much for you, for instance.”
“Well, I cared for them dearly, especially when braised with red wine and currants from Corinth.”
“They said you will listen to no one but yourself.”
“Well, you listen to the geese and the wind and the farting of frogs; you do the hard work for me.”
“They said you would listen to them someday.”
“Have they anything interesting to tell me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but in a complicated tone, as if he might have meant I don’t know if they do, but he might also have meant I don’t know whether you will find it interesting, but others would.
“It was Bianca,” he then said. “Bianca de Nevada, who used to live with us.”
“Is that so.” But I didn’t care to speak about Bianca, nor to allow the memory to take hold in his usually incurious shell of a mind. So I took his hand, and I let my middle finger trail across the center of his palm, as faintly as I could manage given we were lighting out cross-country. He took a swig of breath, being startled in a new direction, and my efforts were fruitful. I turned to smile at him and said, “You have grown to such a man, my Michelotto. If we knew each other better I might be a better mother to you.”
In this light vein I dragged him away from the subject of Bianca and turned several keys in that ill-regulated apparatus of a human being that had not been turned before. Raising a child is hard work, I’ve found; and this is why I’ve seldom kept myself to the task. But moment by moment, as a responsible parent is able, one must help the young fledgling to encounter more adult arenas of engagement.
The house was still empty. The pagan rites that attended the sowing of the fields were well under way and, I understood, would last into the night, when a bonfire of last year’s rubbish would announce the satisfactory preparation of this year’s crops. I pulled Michelotto into the house and tutted him for the barnyard smell. “You are old enough to perfume yourself with something more redolent than goose shit,” I said. “Oh, it falls to me, I see, to teach you how to clean yourself up for a woman. Take off those filthy clothes and throw them out the window to be burned. Your days as a gooseboy are over, my dear.”
I was busy watching him, though he seemed wary enough—and that was a good thing; it suggested he hadn’t been initiated into the holy mysteries of sex by the sluts and bored soldiers’ widows in the hamlet below.
I have always liked to watch a man remove his clothes. The faint modesty that all men evince—once or twice in one’s career with them anyway—makes their bodies the more beautiful to behold, when at last the tunic is hauled over the shoulders and the loin wrapping is untucked and kicked away. I made to give him a semblance of privacy, and turned to fuss over the heating water. But there was the mirror in which I would glimpse his handsome form, because mirrors don’t lie about men, only women.
It was then that I saw the mirror was gone. Michelotto’s emergence from the clothes of his childhood had distracted me. I wailed from a rage I didn’t understand. Maybe it was simply that I’d been denied the right to hear from the mirror that she was dead. It was all I would have wanted, to look at the mirror and see nothing but myself.
Michelotto worried himself over me, and came forward to calm me in my distress. I suppose I was keening, and it made him uncomfortable. He didn’t know what he was doing. Anyway, there was no mirror to see.