The Lying Tongue (5 page)

He enunciated each word with the utmost clarity, and I could tell that he was enjoying his lecturing me.

“Just after it was published, Germany invaded Poland and these ideas were forgotten. It wasn’t until the late seventies, I think, that the book was republished in America, and recently crime statisticians have started to take this idea a little more seriously. It’s true that in the seventeenth century murder rates dropped, but the question is why? Standard theories about why people commit crime, such as the growth of cities, the gap between rich and poor, did not apply in the seventeenth century. The growth of cities and the rise of industrialization came much later, after the drop in the murder rates.”

I tried to follow his argument.

“Could the drop in murders therefore be traced to a psychological transformation, a view of ourselves as somehow more refined, more civilized? And if this is true, then I blame Coryat himself for the lack of juicy murders today. If history could be repeated, I’d have him stabbed to death with his own fucking fork.”

Crace looked at me with an intense, serious stare. Was this some kind of test? For a couple of seconds I didn’t know what to say. Then I took a gamble.

“I think there’s only one answer,” I said, meeting his gaze with an equally earnest demeanor. “We should ban cutlery—it’s the only way.”

Crace doubled up with laughter, the loose skin of his neck swinging from side to side. I laughed along with him—it was the right answer—but as I did so I suddenly felt the need to go to the bathroom. I tried to think of other things to take my mind off it and looked at some of the wonderful paintings on the walls of the drawing room, but it was no good. I cleared my throat.

“Excuse me, Mr. Crace, I’m sorry, but could I use your loo?”

“Oh, of course. How silly and thoughtless of me,” he said, shaking his head. “I haven’t even shown you around properly. Disgraceful. Come on, come.”

He led the way out of the drawing room into the portego and turned right down another narrow corridor, opposite the one that led past the kitchen and down toward my room.

“This door here,” he said, pointing to a door on his left, “leads into my bedroom and study, and this door is the one for the bathroom. When you’re finished, come and find me in my room.”

I pushed open the door and stepped into the large white room, which smelt strongly of the sewers. The floor was covered in hair and what looked like slivers of shredded toilet paper, some of which appeared to be blood-stained. I walked past the bath, which was deeply ringed with grime and ocher-yellow with age, to the toilet, which had its lid down. Tentatively, using my forefinger I lifted up the lid and seat. The bowl was coated in black-brown smears. This would have to be my first job, I told myself, quickly flushing the loo without looking down again. I moved over to the sink to wash my hands, but the soap, once creamy white, looked so encrusted with dirt that I opted to just rinse my fingers instead, bypassing altogether the musty towel that hung from the nearby rail.

As I came out, feeling slightly soiled, I made a plan in my head detailing everything that needed to be done and in what order. People at university, Eliza even, had always thought it odd that I was interested in keeping things neat and tidy. Obsessive, they had said. But they should have thanked me. I could never understand how people could exist surrounded by mess. If you lived somewhere, it was your duty to keep it clean.

I was sure Crace would be grateful for the help I could give him. After all, it couldn’t have been much fun for him living like this. The bathroom—cleaning the toilet, bath and basin—would have to be tackled first of all, followed by the kitchen. Then I would dust everywhere, get rid of all the cobwebs that had accumulated around Crace’s paintings and drawings, sweep the floors, polish the furniture and cut back the vines in the courtyard. How long would it take me to get the palazzo into some kind of shape? And then what about the upper floor that Crace had said was no longer used? Did he expect me to clean that as well? I dreaded to think what kind of condition that was in.

I knocked on Crace’s bedroom door and heard his voice telling me to come in. I entered the large room, which had windows overlooking the canal. Clothes—jackets, trousers, socks, under-pants and vests—were strewn all across the floor. Crace was nowhere to be seen. I walked across the terrazzo in the central part of the room, and then onto wine-dark parquet that had been laid in each of a series of alcoves that ranged around the edge. In one of the alcoves, situated between elaborately decorated buttermilk-colored columns, was a bed complete with a carved ivory head-board boasting a tempera painting of the Virgin and Child flanked by a couple of saints. Above this, Crace had hung another beautiful Madonna; I couldn’t discern the artist but it was of exquisite quality. The walls of the alcove were lined with a rich fabric covered by a pattern of broken columns and capitals. The bed itself was surrounded by thick burgundy curtains. As I brushed past it, a cloud of dust spores mushroomed by my knees.

“There you are,” he said from behind me.

I turned to see Crace walking out of a room I presumed must be his study.

“I thought I might get started—on the cleaning front,” I said.

“Yes, yes, good idea. I hope you don’t find me too feral. I have let things slip rather, I’m afraid.”

“Where do you want me to start? I thought maybe the bathroom and the kitchen first, followed by the rest.”

“Are you sure? I was rather looking forward to a drink.”

“Well, it won’t take me long,” I said.

“If you’re certain. It’s not really the nicest way to welcome a guest into my home, though, is it?”

“The sooner it’s done, the nicer it will be for all of us,” I said quite firmly.

“If you insist.”

We walked out of the bedroom, down the corridor and out into the portego.

“I’ll give those windows a wash as well, to let some light in,” I said, gesturing toward the end of the grand hall that overlooked the canal. “And then at some point, after I’ve done down here, you can tell me what to do about upstairs.”

“Oh, no, there’s no need to bother with that,” he said. “I haven’t been up there in years. I think it’s probably so dirty up there that it’s started to clean itself.”

Smiling, he accompanied me through the double doors that led directly into the kitchen and showed me the cupboard under the sink where he thought I could find cleaning materials. I bent down and took out an old green bucket full of dried cloths and dirt-smeared bottles of bleach, scouring fluids and detergent, all of which were empty.

“That’s decided the matter for us, hasn’t it?” said Crace, his eyes twinkling.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve got nothing to clean with, and I can’t possibly let you go out and leave me. After all, you’ve only just arrived. It would be terribly bad manners.”

“But it will only take—”

“No arguments. We’ll have a drink and then we can talk about it. Now, what will you have?”

After a couple of drinks—dark, sickly sweet sherry, this time in glasses I had quickly washed out—I finally managed to extract myself from Crace and go in search of a shop. He insisted that I should be gone for no longer than fifteen minutes. I knew he didn’t like to be left by himself, but I didn’t think he was that serious. When I arrived back at the palazzo with two plastic bags full of bleach bottles, detergent, lime scale remover, wax polish, rubber gloves, a new toilet brush and a couple of packets of scourers and cloths, he was standing at the top of the stairs in the courtyard with a pained expression on his face, looking at his watch.

“Another minute and I’m afraid it would have been all over,” he said quietly.

“Sorry?” I said, breezing up the stairs toward him.

“Oh, never mind,” he sighed. “Never mind.”

After making sure Crace was settled in the drawing room, reading and with a glass full of sherry within easy reach, I set to work. In the bathroom, I raised the blinds, sending clouds of dust into the room, and then let some fresh air into the space. I put on my rubber gloves and attacked the toilet first, blasting it with half a bottle of bleach, which I let stand while I cleaned the sink. I took down the shower curtain, which was so badly mildewed that I would need to buy another, and scrubbed the bath, but while I managed to clean away a good deal of dirt, it was impossible to erase the oval of grime that ringed around its upper edge, a visual echo of its top lip. Using the shower attachment, I rinsed away the dirty water, extracted a handful of gray and yellow hairs from the plug hole and wiped the surface once more. I swept the floor, cleaning up the hair balls and strips of toilet paper, and emptied a waste bin full of even more loo paper, old plasters and worms of dental floss. I cleaned the mirror on the front of the small medicine cabinet above the sink, sorted out the shelves inside (which seemed to contain a great many plasters as well as some sleeping pills) and wiped all around it. Before opening the toilet, I flushed it a couple of times and then started to scrub, using even more bleach to try and shift the buildup.

Disposing of the rubber gloves I had used to clean the bathroom, I put on another pair and started on the kitchen. I slowly dismantled the tower of dirty dishes in the sink, careful not to break anything. After running out of space on the work surface, I placed the rest of the plates, pots and bowls on sheets of old newspaper on the floor. Bits of food—old pieces of half-chewed meat, disintegrating vegetables, a few splintered bones and a mass of flaccid green fibers—coagulated at the bottom of the sink, giving off a rank, rotten smell. I fingered my way around the rim of the plug and gathered it all up, shaping it into a ball in my hand and disposing of it in a black bin liner, and then started to wash the dishes.

How long had Crace been living like this, I wondered. From the evidence all around me—the dirt, the neglect, the mess—it seemed like he had lost the ability to cope some months ago. But most probably he was the type to resist employing someone, out of pride more than anything, for as long as reasonably possible. He had obviously reached a point where he realized he could no longer carry on living like he was. But what of his former employee, the boy who had lived in my room before me? From the state of things—he couldn’t have spent much time here at all. That, or he had only bothered to clean his room and nowhere else in the palazzo.

By late afternoon I had managed to clean the bathroom and the kitchen and had started to dust the cobwebs from the drawings in the grand hall. One of the etchings depicted an angel blowing a trumpet, holding a wreath and standing on a sphere, flanked by two figures beneath, one a male satyr, the other a woman surrounded by scientific and military instruments. As I leaned closer to the etching, I felt someone watching me. I looked up. Crace was standing outside the double doors of the drawing room, looking down the portego at me, smiling.

“Io son colei che ognuno al mondo brama, perché per me dopo la morte vive,”
he said in perfect Italian. “‘I am she whom everyone in the world longs for, because through me they live after death.’ The inscription underneath.”

I squinted as I tried to make out the Italian verse at the bottom of the etching.

“An Allegory of Fame,”
said Crace, walking toward me, repeating the first two lines and then continuing, “and if vice or virtue operates so as to obtain plunder or honorable empire, I am infamy for the former and for the latter fame. Vice has only blame from me while virtue has glory, palms and crown.”

“I didn’t realize you had such good Italian,” I said.

“Oh, just a little. It’s rather beautiful, though, this etching, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. Who is it by?” I asked, trying to see if it was signed.

“Battista del Moro, thought to be done around 1560. But I think it’s interesting that despite the rather moralizing verse underneath it, the figure of fame is looking not toward the personification of all that is good, but toward the satyr, the symbol of evil. And, if I’m not mistaken, I think she’s rather enamored of him, wouldn’t you say?”

I had to admit that yes, in the etching, she did seem more attracted to vice than to virtue.