The Marriage Portrait(53)
She had known. She is sure of this. She had known but, also, she had not. The idea that she had once perceived the male organ as shy or afraid seems so distant, so misplaced, that she believes it must have been some other girl who stood before her father’s painting of Jupiter and covertly examined the curious tube of flesh that peeped out of a nest of hair.
Lucrezia counts the thuds of her heart. Up to twenty, then forty. She loses track after sixty. How long does this go on? Impossible to know. Why hadn’t she asked Sofia or her mother or even Isabella?
The weight of it—of him—makes it hard to catch enough breath.
Outside, she can hear a wind starting up. It has presence, this wind, and a character. It frisks against the shutters, sliding narrow fingers between the slats, rattling the locks. It purses its lips and blows down the chimney, scattering fragments of soot on the hearthrug. It rubs itself against the tiles of the roof above her head, as if it will prise them off with its insistent fingers.
Difficult to know where to put her hands. She wants to clear the hair from her face, from her mouth, but he is so much larger than her, there is so much of him, and he has two muscled arms that are pressing down into the mattress on either side of her so that she cannot move, and they are pressing down, too, on hanks of her hair. One of her palms, which has been flailing in the air, grazes some part of him, his back, perhaps, his hip, and the damp fleshy burn of it, the flexing motion, is so frightening, she removes it at once. Better then, she decides, to let her arms fall aside, apart, out of the way.
In the dining room, before any of this happened, as the rabbit stew was being cleared away, he had asked her if she would loosen her hair from its bindings for him, so that he could see it. She had done so. She had sat there, at the table, and undone the wedding plaits on one side of her head, while Emilia, who had been summoned for the task, did the others. This was in the before-time, prior to any of this, while they were finishing dinner. He had watched, reaching for a peach from the bowl set on the table, a paring knife in one hand. He had insisted she try the fruit, telling her that they were grown here, on the estate, that he had ordered they be picked for her, that the valley was a beautiful fertile plain, with perfect soil for agriculture. She had looked away at the word “fertile,” as perhaps he had known she would—when she looked back, there was a smile on his face and he was holding out a slice of orange-pink peach flesh to her, not unkindly. Go on, he said, try it. And he reached out and placed it between her lips, as if such an act was entirely natural—she had to open her mouth to accept it, she was left no other option but to take food from his hand. The taste of it instantly flooded her mouth, trickling down her throat so that for a moment she thought she might choke. It was startling, soft as moss, nectar-sweet with an edge of tartness. Well, he had murmured, watching her, leaning forward on his elbows, how do you like it? It tastes, she said, of the sun. It’s like eating sunshine. It must have been a good reply because he laughed and repeated the phrase to himself. Her hair, unravelled, still held the impression of the wedding plaits, rippling like wheat down her back.
Bed: once a place for sleep, or for staying awake to listen to the breathing of her siblings, to the nocturnal noises of the palazzo. And now another person may pull back the covers and enter it, and do—this.
The wind filters through a gap in the window. She can feel its cool, whispering caress on her cheek, like an invitation or a suggestion.
She discovers that if she turns her head to the side, it is easier to breathe, possible to draw in air that doesn’t feel as though it has already been shared in the small gap between them, sucked in and out again, in and out.
And with that breath comes a sensation like the weft and warp of fabric separating in two, and some part of her, the best part perhaps, answers the wind’s call. It shakes itself free. It gets up from the bed, leaving the bodies there, to do what they will, and moves away. The relief at putting distance between herself and that bed. The self, the part of her that is leaving, seems amorphous, shapeless. It is at once padding on noiseless feet across the floorboards and also floating somewhere up near the ceiling. This bodiless Lucrezia brushes past the rafters, the painted cherubs; it reaches out a hand to trace the lines of the rainbow. It is enormous, stately; it is minuscule and obscure.
Where the two people are stretched out on the bed, the form of one obscuring the other, is far below. That is a place of shadow and darkness. There is nothing to see of it. What is happening there is of no consequence to her now.
She passes through the walls, disintegrating and dissolving into plasterwork, beams, struts, wattle, brick, and then she coalesces again, in the air on the other side.
She is here now, outside the walls of the villa, where the night has painted its own version of the valley, in bold indigo strokes; where the wind animates this mysterious shaded landscape, setting the trees in motion, flinging night birds up to the blue-black air, driving angry blots across the unreadable face of the firmament. She is on the pantile roof, creeping along gullies and gutters, feeling the ministrations of the spirited wind, the spring of moss beneath her feet, but she is also down there on the ground, where the branches of the trees fan themselves out for the breeze, tugging one way, then the other. Where small, sharp stones push themselves up into her bare feet. Where the forest is a dark shape beyond the manicured hedges, beyond the pollarded fruit trees. It crouches, waiting.
Lucrezia is vigilant. Lucrezia is herself. Lucrezia can choose her own tempo, can increase it, can slow it down. She can gallop, sprint, through the gardens; she can spring over the hedges and paths, her body a streak of colour in the dim light, her ribs a vessel for her leaping heart. And when she reaches the forest, the trees will close about her, all the animals and birds within will send up their questions to the sky in squawks and cries, and she will wait with them, watching, for the first rays of cold morning light, which will feel restorative and forgiving on the complex silk of her skin.