Mirror Mirror (5 page)

“Have I admitted aloud to you something I have long suspected?” said Primavera. “You're a
fool
. No one passes this lake but to approach or leave Montefiore, and I've lived here since before mirrors were invented. I'd have known if this thing had a human owner. No, it's a creation of the water nymphs. I don't like it one bit. We ought to put it back.”

“I'm not a fool,” said the priest, “but though it pains me to say it, for once I agree with you. We ought to toss it back in the deep.”

“It's just a mirror,” said Don Vicente de Nevada to his little girl, holding her in his arms high enough so she could see herself, and she could see him too, loving her. “Can you see yourself? What do you see?”

“I see Bianca,” she said, “and I see
Papà.
”

He smiled.

“Where is
Mamma
?” she said, and craned her head this way and that, as if to peer beyond the mirror's ornate frame, around the frame's edges, into the watery recesses just out of view.

Vicente de Nevada neither scowled nor winced. Evenly he answered her, as he always had. “You can't see your mother; she is dead. This isn't a window to heaven. This is just a mirror.”

He didn't look for his wife there, nor was he the type of man to look at himself. Happiness now sometimes meant turning away from what one remembered of earlier, better happiness. When he did look, he saw the view reflected from the mirror, the view out the
salone
's windows, of Toscana and Umbria in fallow beauty, seductively ready for the next invading army.

But Bianca always thought of it as a curved sheaf of lake, pleasingly cut from water and hung on the wall.

What they told her, what she saw

P
RIMAVERA VECCHIA
had once had sex with a squid. On washdays in high summer you could still see the marks like a row of puckered bumps that the squid's passionate hold had left on her skin. They began beneath her right breast, circled around her ample hip, and closed in on her cloistered area.

“What were you doing with a squid?” asked Bianca.

“Everything a squid could manage to do,” said the cook. “Once you lose your husband to the wars, let me tell you, you become a fishwife in more ways than one.”

“What wars?”

“One or the other of them, I forget. I'm too old to remember what my feet look like, how can I remember my husband? Eat up your supper.”

Primavera was older than Gesù, or so she said. She knew how the world worked. She said: “You, my child, were conceived in a snowy dale.
The forests had lost their leaves, and the trunks of the trees had gone black with the wet of snow. I know this because of how white-and-black you are, that skin, that hair. Eat up that bread, haven't I told you already, before the mice get it.”

“What does
conceived
mean?”

Fra Ludovico wandered into the kitchen just then, sniffing for a shingle of ham. Primavera said, “It means thought up.”

“Are you corrupting the child?” asked the priest.

“I'm telling her of her origins.”

Fra Ludovico sat down at the table as if a symposium on the subject had been called. He said: “In the year of Our Lord 1495, on a bright autumn afternoon of stubborn winds and warm rain that smelled unpleasantly of salted cod and violets, the dark-tressed María Inés, originally of Navarre, gave you life. After her difficult miscarriages, you were her first child to come to term, and your mother lived long enough to name you Bianca and seal her devotion with a kiss on your bloodied hairless scalp.

“Oh, the love she had for you,” said Fra Ludovico. “I performed the christening with one hand and anointed the forehead of the corpse with the other. And then your saintly mother flew to heaven and became an angel. Now be a saint like your mother, will you, and fetch me a sip of wine to go with this ham. I've a twinge.”

Primavera, when the girl had gone: “You simple oaf, don't lie to her.”

“Hush, you suppurating old boil of a peasant.”

“You weren't present at the mother's death, and you know it. You're a priest, you aren't supposed to lie.”

“I'm a priest, I know better than most when a lie is permitted. I would have performed the rites had I happened to be in the vicinity. You know I would.”

Bianca returned with the wine. The priest toasted his nemesis. “May you choke on your godless superstitions and spend eternity in coals up to your squid marks. Amen.”

“Bianca, the kitchen fire is failing, and I left the kindling on a
cloth at the bottom of the steps. Can you bring it to the hearth?” asked Primavera. The girl, biddable enough, went off.

“I know you're an old fool,” said the cook, “but really, I'm surprised you would lie to the girl.”

“My lie is a slender thing. It serves a purpose. Bianca should see that her birth ushered her mother into heavenly bliss. Isn't it true enough? And isn't it good for her to consider?”

Primavera: For all you know María Inés was a harlot. She may be writhing in hell or removing an ocean with the lid of an acorn in purgatory. How can you promise Bianca her mother is in heaven?

Fra Ludovico: The stories of heaven belong in the heads of children. If, as children grow, the stories evaporate?—oh well. They leave behind a residue of hope that changes how children behave.

Primavera: That stinks more than your chamber pot.

And are you going to heaven or hell, do you think, with your heathen tricks and legerdemain?

I'm not going to die at all, just to spite the architects of the worlds.

Fra Ludovico crossed himself and ate some more ham.

Bianca de Nevada returned with the kindling and helped Primavera stoke the fire. She didn't ask more about her mother: What was there to say? But Fra Ludovico, warmed by the wine and the fire, talked about an arterial system of grace that webbed together human affairs. When he left, Primavera raked the embers again.

“Look, child,” she said. “Is this a kitchen fire or is it the fires of hell?”

“There is a pot on a chain for our broad beans,” said Bianca. “I don't know if hell has such a pot.”

“Is your mother a dead woman or is she a broad bean?”

This was a harder question to answer. Once a mother started being dead, and was planted in the ground, what was to say she didn't emerge, eventually, as a broad bean? “I'm not sure,” said Bianca.

Primavera said, “You're young enough to be ignorant, but you are not a fool like some I know. Of course your mother isn't a broad bean.”

“They say you are an onion,” said Bianca, snuggling toward Primavera's lap.

“That only refers to my distinctive and refreshing odor. Now, listen to me. When your mother died, she died. Maybe the saints came and put her in a sack and took her to visit with Saint Peter. Or maybe the worms broke their Lenten fast to chew on her delicious lips. Nobody knows, but what's done is done, and your job is to be clever and not to listen to nonsense. Do you understand me?”

“How do I know what is nonsense and what isn't?”

“If you're ever in doubt, throw a pepper up in the air. If it fails to come down, you have gone mad, so don't trust in anything.”

She made a supper out of peppers and broad beans, illustrating her point obscurely. Bianca ate heartily though she wasn't sure she understood the lesson.

She would ask her father, though, when he returned.

When Don Vicente arrived home a few days later, some latest necessary negotiation with the Papal legates having broken off unsatisfactorily, Bianca greeted him with the question. But
Papà,
is
Mamma
an angel or is she a broad bean?

For once Vicente was in no mood. “Who puts a notion like that in your mind?”

He fired the corrupt old matron, but Primavera refused to leave the kitchen. “It would take me half a day to walk to the village, and you'd just have to send for me again when you changed your mind, and my hips aren't what they were.”

“They never were anything much like hips,” sniffed Fra Ludovico in passing. But Primavera's point carried the argument, and Vicente relented.

Is
Mamma
dead? Is she really dead? Or is she an angel, or a bean, or something else?

“I'm surrounded by simpletons,” said Vicente.

But he remembered his daughter's birth—in a nook in a tavern on the road from Rome, when María Inés's water broke without warning. The baby came twisted and ought to have died, but the
mother died instead. For a payment of florins her corpse was allowed to share a churchyard grave with a local merchant who conveniently had died the same day. (The merchant had been a widower and his dead wife wouldn't know he was buried with another woman until purgatory, when everything was too late to change anyway.)

Whether Vicente began at once to love Bianca in place of her dead mother or whether he had to learn not to despise her for causing his wife to bleed to death, Bianca lived a lifetime without finding out. Fra Ludovico was wrong: Truth is as evanescent as lies, and dissolves in time. But as a father will, Vicente had taken Bianca in his arms, and he continued on the road through Spadina toward Spoleto.

Except for that which pertained to the confusing and contradictory legend of her birth, Bianca de Nevada had been told little about María Inés de Castedo y Nevada. The flattering characteristics that memorialize the person who dies too young aren't altogether convincing. María Inés had been a saint, an angel, a paragon. But Bianca had to wonder. Had her mother never thrown a stone at a cat, or peed in the vegetable garden, or stuck out her tongue at the Archbishop of Pamplona? On these matters neither Primavera nor Fra Ludovico would comment.

So Bianca came to consider her mother something like the stark unsmiling icon of the Virgin that Fra Ludovico kept propped up on a shelf in his cell. In the severe older style, unpopular these days, the piece showed judging black eyes, lips pursed as if reserving a mother's kiss for someone more worthy than Bianca.

“Papà?”
said Bianca, the question mark carried in the set of her small shoulders. “Where is
Mamma
now?”

He couldn't answer her inquiry. He held her instead and walked to the steeper side of the mount, where the wind raced up the east face of the slope with such speed that it could carry a piglet from a barnyard below and brain it against one of Montefiore's protruding roof beams.

Vicente regarded his Bianca. Of her beauty there was no doubt, and no description would serve. But the name was correct.
Bianca,
a
name referring to the polished whiteness of her skin, almost a marble from the Carrara region; and
de Nevada,
the father's family name, betraying his own humble status in the outlands of Aragon, but pertinent here:
of the snowy slopes.

And Bianca saw her father too, his wavy chestnut hair standing almost straight up in the wind. She couldn't see her mother in him, but she could see something that she guessed he might have learned from poor dead María Inés: a habit of love. So maybe growling Fra Ludovico was right about the contagious quality of blessings in human affairs.

Don't leave, don't follow

C
AN'T I
go with you? I'll be still and say my prayers.”

Her exposure to other girls limited, Bianca nonetheless had learned to sulk prettily enough. It didn't work, though. Her father wouldn't let her off the property. She could go no farther than the orchards and the higher of the hay meadows. Only as far as the bridge, and onto it, but not across it.

“The weather is terrible,” he said, and shivered, though it was high summer and the goats sat panting in the shadows, too tired to bleat. “Beyond the bridge a dreadful snow falls. My beard crusts over and in minutes my cloak is stiff as a cuirass. I can't turn at the waist. If you were walking behind me and you fell and called my name, I wouldn't hear you: plugs of ice form in my ears.”