The Marriage Portrait(54)
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She wakes with a gasp, flinching from a dream in which Maria is pulling her by the hand along a corridor, urging her on, and Lucrezia cannot disentangle herself because, strangely, she and Maria are inside a single dress, a stiff, weighty gown, and Lucrezia is trying to keep up with her sister, who will not slow down, and Lucrezia is worried about tripping over the hem. Just as she falls, her dream-feet tangling with Maria’s, her dream-self about to strike her head on the floor, she lurches from sleep to consciousness in the space of a heartbeat.
She finds herself lying on her side, at the very edge of a bed, in an unfamiliar room, the ceiling high, the walls pale and glowing with an inconstant dappled yellow light. Maria is gone, the shared dress is gone. Her hair has been spilt, like liquid, all over the pillows and the bed; it falls in confused gilded streams down to the floor; it tangles in her fingers and covers her mouth. What is going on? Something must have happened. She never goes to bed without weaving it into a long rope that lies obediently beside her all night, like a pet or a familiar.
From behind her comes a noise so unnerving and unaccustomed that her scalp shrinks. The suck and draw of breathing. The rise and fall of another’s chest. It is heavy, measured: the sound of someone’s slumber.
Lucrezia’s mind leaps like a flea from the sight of her hands up close, the alluvial puckers and creases that striate their innards, to the ache she feels in her lower body, which seems to pull down, as if her interior is attached to a rope, to her unfastened hair, to this edge of the bed and the rug beneath it, to the dust motes circling in the golden slabs of light, to the ache, to the breathing behind her, to the ache, to her hands, up close.
She raises her head, slightly, ever so slightly: she does not want to wake the person behind her, so she is careful to move herself an infinitesimal amount at a time, barely rustling the bedclothes.
There he is. The sight of him is a shock. Hair like black feathers on the pillow, face devoid of any expression, as if whatever dreams he is having soothe and transport him, the stubble on his chin and cheeks emerging like a miniature forest on a mountainside.
Lucrezia stares at him, as if she were considering a sketch: Man, Asleep. Ruler, at Rest. When he is awake, she is unable to look at him for long—the fact of him, the presence of him, is too overwhelming. The way his gaze seems to miss nothing, to take in every detail, his mind always working and interpreting and assessing, that knack he has of being able to pluck your every idle, private thought from the air and consume it so that it is part of himself, comprehended, filed away. This, she supposes, is what it means to be a ruler. But like this, his eyes shut, his mind at ease, she can examine him without embarrassment. He is, just for now, not the ruler of Ferrara, not the newly appointed head of a powerful court, but a being asleep, no more and no less.
Here, on the pillow next to hers, is yet another version of the man she has been given to. There are, it seems to her, many Alfonsos, all fitted inside one body. There is the heir she met on the battlements, as a child, then the person behind the marten painting and the loops and dashes of the letters sent from France during the two-year wait for marriage, then the duke who claimed her at the altar, the person in the carriage, and the man in shirt sleeves who gave her a tour of the garden. And now, here is another: a sleeping satyr, with a naked chest, his unnerving lower half concealed by the folds and drapes of sheets.
What a boon it is, what a piece of luck, to be able to take her time like this, to examine every part of him.
She takes in the rings on his fingers—two on his right hand, and one on his left, the signet ring, bearing a tiny inverse impression of his eagle crest—the thin gold chain around his neck, and the way it catches and tangles in the hair. His lips are parted so she may also observe his teeth, how white and sharp they are, how evenly spaced, and that he is missing one on the lower left side of his mouth: evidence of some accident or other loss. The hair on his upper body is darker than that on his arms, she can see. The hair on the chest grows in two waves, which approach each other in opposing directions, meeting in the middle in a sort of cresting line. It is as if he is formed of two halves of a cast, like a sculpture, and has been fused down his central line. His nails: clean, clipped short. His lashes: black. His eyes: shielded by lids, ever-moving from side to side, as if even in sleep he is reading and decoding information—missives from court, letters of state, accounts, political treatises, reports of unrest.
Slowly, so slowly, she eases herself away from him, sliding between mattress and sheet, until she is out of the bed, away from it and all that has happened there, and moving in her disturbing nakedness across the room, registering the ache and soreness between her legs, her hands finding her slippers and smock, lifting her zimarra from the floor and pulling it hastily about her.
She glances for a moment at the painting of la faina, propped on the mantelpiece—and how well it looks there, against the pale plaster of the walls, its eyes following her across the room—then lifts the latch on the door, swings it open, and passes through it, closing it behind her.
She moves along the corridor, silent in her lambskin slippers, past the small anteroom where Emilia is sleeping, past a narrow and dark staircase used by the servants, on and on, down some steps, and out on to the loggia.
It is early in the morning, the sun inscribing long shadows from the bases of the columns and trees and the group of servants standing in the courtyard, conferring with each other about something, safe in the knowledge that their masters will not be up for hours.