The Whirling Girl

INSIDE THE BASILICA, THE air was crisp. Brilliance was the second shock. Clare had read that there were those who disapproved of the recent redecoration, over a hundred years before. Radiance poured through the west-facing rose window. The vaulted ceilings were the deep blue of an evening sky, and sprinkled with small gold stars. The pillars were layered in white and terracotta marble; every surface was patterned in designs like the patterns on Venetian paperweights. There were angels in any larger space. A church built to hold the body of a woman so beautiful that she had to scar her face and rub ashes in the wounds in order to touch the heart of God. But look how she got her own back in the end.

Clare wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do. The only other

occupant of the church was a black-robed priest who nodded to Gianni as they entered, then swished away behind some arches. Gianni had been silent once they entered the basilica. He walked to the front and knelt. She walked up one of the side aisles, quietly as she could, her steps echoing. The glass casket of the saint gleamed behind the central altar.

She was so slight, yet even in death ferociously determined. Her papery skin clung to her skull, sinking into the huge dark hollows of her eye sockets, emphasizing the magnificent arc of her nose. Her little brown hands were folded on her stomach. Clare tried to picture those fingers digging into the earth on the day when her lover’s dog returned without his master. The beautiful Margherita would have been wearing satin slippers. Now her feet were bare, the toes pointing upward, fragile as bird bones, supported by another cushion of gold-embroidered brocade. Under her black cape she wore a dress woven in cream and black checks, the perfect garb for the humble, self-effacing and determined exercise of power. She may have become good, but she had dealt in what was humanly possible.

Clare reached out to touch the glass. This girl, this saint, had healed the sick, had stopped wars, had raised the dead. The glass was cold.

She heard Gianni speaking softly in a chapel to the side — perhaps to the priest? Then she saw he was alone, with a cell phone to his ear.

OUTSIDE, CLOUDS HAD ROLLED in. Clare stood waiting in the entry of the church, aware that she still had the fatal hat. If it started to rain she could put it on. She decided to start down on her own, avoiding further disappointments. Then she noticed a container in the entry, soliciting donations for victims of a recent earthquake. The hat wouldn’t do a lot of good, but who knew? Maybe it would bring some other man with a very short attention span into the life of some other woman. She was about to move away, when a further idea pinched her. No. Outrageous. She took a deep breath, drew in her waist. But the belt tightened until she took it off. She weighed the silver buckle in her hands, finally stuffed it deep into the pile of clothes.

When the man who’d spent such a long time on the phone with someone else came out of the church, he took her arm and guided her down. He was solicitous, careful, guiding her over rough spots. By his silence, she supposed it had been his wife on the phone. She supposed he thought it would matter to her that he had a wife, that Canadian women didn’t know how to handle a little lark. She hated how close he was to being right. She’d made a sacrifice up there. Why? She’d rid herself of the thing that for years she’d imagined cinched her into a certain type of being. But here she still was, dreaming herself into more than she could possibly have. They came out onto the cobbled street leading down to Piazza Garibaldi. The mist had thinned to suspended rain.

“But you must be cold!” She said no.

“And I am again remiss! I have been caught up in some small perplexities, and I have let them bite my tongue.”

“I’m sure a journey along the Stations of the Cross is not supposed to be filled with cheesy chatter.”

“Cheesy.” He was standing in her path, looking down at her. “This would apply to a chatter full of holes?”

No doubt about it, he was very attractive, despite the thrusting chin, the forehead careening into that major nose, the skin a little pitted but no way cheesy.

He said, “Aiii! But also I have forgotten about our errand with your hat.”

“That’s okay. I managed to offload it.”

“Offload.”

“As in dump.”

He looked at her closely. Of course he knew it was a rebuke. “It was private, then, this offloading? A satisfactory event?”

“Yes, it went just fine.”

He glanced away from her, frowning — then sprang up a little rocky bank to a wall overgrown with a riot of rock roses, their papery pink flowers gathering light even in the mist, returning a moment later with just one bloom.

“I have been so foolish, all this time since we met,” he said. “I would like to offer this.”

She held it in the hollow of her hand. “Cistus incanus,” she said. “I read something about it just last night, in a book of folk herbal remedies. It’s described as a specific against terror.”

“Thank you for telling me that, Clare Livingston.”

There. Her name.

She said, “And you are Federica Inghirami’s brother.”

“I am very much her brother.” Again that heel-click, that mock self-presentation — followed by an involuntary flash of distress? He said, “Though as you might have guessed, we have had different fathers.” Was that the scandal that Ralph Farnham had gleefully referred to? (Only in Italy old dear. Unless you count our Royals …) The famous mother, Clare thought, the descendant of an elevenyear-old suicide.

“I confess I recognized you right away,” he said. “Not on the autostrada, no. I didn’t get a chance. But I have, of course, your beautiful book. The moment I looked in your car this morning, I knew who ROMA 5984W was. I beg you forgive me this game. Indeed, I had come over from Siena today with the hope of finding you at home. But then, such coincidence! To find that Clare Livingston was also the one who had left me spellbound on the autostrada. So I put off explaining. I think this was the reason.” He shook his head. “Though it is hard to track one’s motives in these matters. I confess it was something I do not entirely understand.”

“Yes. Me too.”

They stood looking at each other then, in the mist, with all the foolishness gone. He took her arm again. They walked on. When they reached her car, he asked, “You will accompany me to the wedding, yes? I will pick you up on that day, at five?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You have misled me with your excellent Italian. I believed you understood when we discussed this plan with Petronella?” This was such outrageous nonsense that he was laughing as he said it; but then the abashed look again, as if this wasn’t really what he wanted to say, or who he was. He looked so absolutely perfect in the setting, with the intricacy of tile-roofed houses and cypress lanes climbing the hills behind him, and fine beaded mist settling on his wild but shining hair. He explained that the wedding was a pageant celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of a marriage. No, not one of his troubleprone ancestors, but a lord of this city, to a noble girl from Siena. The whole town in medieval dress. Petronella would be the mistress of ceremonies.

Unfortunately, he had just learned (he tapped his phone as he explained) that in the interim he must return to his estate near Siena on urgent business. Would Clare do him the honour of attending this pageant, as his guest, in ten days’ time?

It would be lovely to accept. But she wanted it too much. She was still that person who would never be satisfied with just the small gifts, but would always want what she couldn’t have.

She didn’t need to let him go just yet, though. “Tell me about your estate,” she said. “You’re saving endangered species.”

His eyes lit up. “Also we bring things back. Do you like this thought of extinction in reverse?”

“Unless you’re thinking of Tyrannosaurus.”

“No, unicorns will be the biggest.”

“They come around a lot, do they?”

“You are mocking me.”

“Goodness no.”

“Our unicorn has very few believers, yet every day he appears somewhere in the world, on coins or castle walls — often fighting with a lion. I suppose you will tell me you also do not believe in the lion.”

He had taken a stance in front of the statue of Garibaldi, echoing the bearing of the great hero himself, hands clasped as if leaning on a sword, looking into the distance.

“You will say the unicorn is a mythical beast. And I will tell you that of all the mythical beasts he is most pervasive and the oldest.” Gianni began to pace. “In the valley of the Indus, our unicorn was carved into seals used as a form of passport, an early form of money! So you see he grazes exactly at the root of human industry and commerce. How long ago do you think this fashion for our nonexistent creature begins?”

“I don’t …”

“Almost five thousand years! But then, let the doubters rejoice!” Gianni threw up his hands, backed into the path of a reversing car, stepped forward without noticing near-death. “A thousand years later Signor Unicorno disappears. Is he gone completely from the earth? No, he is on his migration route. Stage by little stage he moves on to Mesopotamia, up through Anatolia, then eventually over to Europe, where we still see his image every day!”

He was gathering a crowd. The leader of a tour group paused, holding up her triangular flag, beckoning her followers in closer.

He snapped a sprig of lavender from the bed below the statue. “And why can it be that with all this evidence, we still refuse to believe?”

The tour leader shook her head. None of her charges knew either.

He crushed the lavender; the scent mingled with the exhaust of cars. He said, “Think of all the creatures on the earth that have lived, then disappeared. Think of the hole in the universe this makes. An entire species gone, and the earth is silent of their thoughts. So this is what I try to do —” He turned desolate gleaming eyes on Clare. “I try very hard to believe. And I make a place where, at least, rare creatures can come and be safe. And after that … who knows? If there is one thing we can be sure of in this universe, it is that what seems to us irrational can become scientific fact. Who knows what shadows might unfold in our deep woods, if given peace to breathe?”