Dark Shimmer

by Donna Jo Napoli

  We work in silence. A second page. A third.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  He nods.

  “I wasn’t intending to interrupt you, but I panicked.”

  “You’re afraid of her?”

  “She might hate me. Agnola’s afraid of that, too.”

  “She has no reason to dislike you, Dolce. No one does. You’re unusual, that’s all. They’ll get used to you.”

  “You’re wrong. People had plans, and I upset them.”

  “How?”

  “Maybe her oldest daughter is meant for you.”

  Marin puts down his cloth and stares at me. “You always surprise me. You’ve been here a month, so I should be used to your directness by now.”

  “I’m blunt. Agnola is trying to teach me to—”

  “No. Don’t change. Not with me, at least. I’m grateful for your ways.” He takes a deep breath. “The Contarini daughter cannot be thinking of me. I cannot say what she looks like. Or even recall her name.”

  “Agnola told me that girls here are betrothed to men they don’t know. Family alliances.”

  Marin smiles. “I know. This is my world. But no one is betrothed to me.”

  “She might want to be, though. Any girl could wind up married to someone…decrepit and smelly, as Bianca would say. Or mean.”

  Marin folds his arms across his chest. “Are you saying I’m not mean, decrepit, or smelly?” His eyes tease. I smile, and he says, “There’s more to a person than what you see in the here and now.”

  “I know. Agnola told me how you’ve suffered…losing your wife and son. It made me feel…that mere breathing hurt.”

  Marin’s whole self tightens. He steps closer.

  “The signora wants to get rid of me because I’m in her way,” I say. “I can understand that. She doesn’t hate me because of what she sees, but what she fears.”

  Marin steps closer still. His breath stirs my hair. “Who has ever hated you because of what they saw?”

  “Nearly everyone. My ugliness shocked them.”

  “Ugliness?” He shakes his head. “Would you please explain?”

  I knew it would come to this. “Will you swear not to send me back home?”

  “Is there a reason I would?”

  “No. I have no one there. No family at all.”

  “Then I swear.”

  “I lived on Torcello, in a community of dwarfs. My mother was a dwarf. I was forbidden to know about the world outside Torcello. They told me I was a monster. I had no friends but Mamma. Bianca was the first person I met after leaving the island.”

  “My God! Dolce…” Marin is silent. Then, “What that must have been like—growing up like that—then meeting us. You must have felt…like the world didn’t make sense. A thousand questions crowd my head.”

  “Don’t ask them. Please. Please don’t treat me like…a curiosity.”

  “I won’t.” His chest heaves. “No one can look at you and not see your beauty. You don’t even paint your face, yet you’re the fairest.”

  “I don’t care about that. I mean, I’m glad you like to look upon me. Very glad. I’m glad my mother did, too. But…how we look doesn’t matter.”

  “Unless others have made it matter.” Marin’s arm circles behind me and his hand presses on the table. I stand in that circle. No part of him touches me, but I smell his skin, I feel the warmth that emanates from him. “If you were my bride,” he says, so close my hair moves, “I can think of the perfect wedding gift. A mirror, of crystal. Then your own eyes can tell you how beautiful you are.”

  A mirror. It’s as though he senses the whole of me, as though he understands and recognizes me, though I haven’t said a word to him about mirrors. Somehow he knows I could look in one now, I could look and not cry. “I never knew someone might love me as a husband. I never thought…” My voice comes out as a broken whisper. His neck pulses just a breath away from my lips. “All I want to do is make up for the sad things that have happened to you, all of them, your whole life, all the things I don’t know and maybe won’t ever know.”

  “Good.” His voice is hoarse.

  “But you have to understand, Marin. I have never even thought about a man before. Do you see? It makes sense that I should feel this way about you. It’s different for you, though. You are surrounded by women who can love you, who can dream about being your wife.”

  “I care for you. Does it matter why?”

  I step back so that I can see his face fully. “Living here with you like this…I begin to see that it can’t continue. We both know that.”

  “I…lead a cautious life. I collect books, for God’s sake, what could be more careful? The Senate accepts my library work as fulfilling my responsibility toward the Republic. I told myself my only goal is to make sure Bianca grows up well, so that she can make the decisions that are right for her.

  “And now…you appear. Dangerous.”

  “Dangerous?”

  “You threaten the peace I have worked so hard to protect. You are strong, Dolce. I’ve listened to you repeating after Agnola. Sometimes you sound so much like her, if I close my eyes, I think you’re my sister. You can live here and learn how this society works and the offers of marriage will flood in. You can marry whomever you want. I’ll provide a dowry for you. Our old family palace was huge. It was meant to house my parents and bachelor brothers, of whom I have none, and passels of children, of which I have only Bianca. When I sold it, I wound up rich. I have more money than anyone needs.

  “That’s the right thing to do. To provide you a dowry. To help you along in life. Then set you free.”

  “I wouldn’t be free, Marin. I’d be lost.”

  “Does that mean you want to marry me?”

  My skin goes gooseflesh. “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  “Then I am to do the wrong thing?” he says tentatively. “We are to do this together?”

  “Would it make you happy?”

  Marin nods.

  “I’ve never had the chance to make anyone happy, anyone other than Mamma. But you have to tell me something first.”

  “Ask.”

  “Do you want more children?”

  “If children come, I would be happy. If they don’t, they don’t. We have Bianca and each other.”

  The world has flipped again. Before I was afraid of having a child like me, for fear the others would drown my baby in the lagoon. Now everything has changed. A child might not be like me. “What if I had a dwarf child? My mother had me.”

  “Children come to us or not, Dolce. On their own terms. A child is a gift. I know how to be grateful. Ingrates are the worst sort of people, don’t you think?”

  He understands the world the way Mamma did. He understands me. Lord in heaven, he understands me.

  When Ribolin got sick, Agnola sent for an animal healer, who arrived with a satchel of medicines. Among his many vials was one that glistened. Quicksilver! A plan hatched instantly; I begged him to sell it to me.

  Marin didn’t even ask why I wanted the money. It was a pittance to him. He showed me a bowl in his room where he keeps the thin coins called denari and he said I could take whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I stood in the doorway as he pointed the bowl out, of course. I wouldn’t enter his room.

  I went into that room the next day, though, when he was out. And I gave Lucia La Rotonda a coin for her small, round tin mirror. It reflects only dimly, no matter how much you polish it, and it distorts. These are the mirrors of the popolo, the ordinary people. Lucia La Rotonda’s delight told me I’d overpaid. But when I offered Antonin a handful of coins to buy a piece of round, clear glass for me, no larger than my palm, he said, “Signorina, you’ll need the same number in silver ducats if you insist on clear glass.”

  So I asked Marin. He went to the bank and came home with a heavy pouch. He didn’t ask what I wanted the ducats for. He had sworn he would never question me over money. He said the worse disputes in Venezia are always over money. I don’t really
understand money, but if people fight over it, I think it’s best he knows what I do with it. So I told him that I was making a present for someone. And that I hoped it would matter to us in the long run.

  This is the only way I can think of to appease Signora Contarini.

  And thus began my secret task. I wandered the house, looking for a place I could disappear to. On Torcello I was alone more than I wanted. Here, there’s always someone about.

  This palazzo offers few hiding places. Every room is used, on and off, all day, and servants come and go. I don’t want anyone to happen upon me or touch the quicksilver. No one gets sick from handling glass or tin, that’s clear. So it has to be the quicksilver that made Venerio and me shake and turned our fingers and toes pink and our heads into throbbing gourds. I won’t allow anyone else to get sick from mirror making.

  I found my spot: a storage room where garlic and onions hang from the rafters, above wine casks stacked on top of one another. Behind them is my workshop.

  Lucia La Rotonda’s old tin mirror was larger than the round glass piece that Antonin bought for me. Perfect. I set the glass in the very center of the tin mirror. As a table, I used a block of marble. A base from a broken pot served as a weight. My mirror is ready. But I haven’t gone down to fetch it yet.

  I sit in the music room and try to block out the sound of Bianca plucking at the harp. She likes me to be here while she practices, but my headaches came back with a vengeance the night after I poured the quicksilver on the new mirror. Darkness shimmers at the edges of my vision, it presses on me from both sides. But I know that will go away again. And the mirror will be worth it.

  I am stitching a little velvet purse as I pretend to listen. One side of the purse has a circular hole in the middle, exactly the size of the glass piece. I will slip the mirror inside the purse, and the larger tin setting will fit snugly while the glass mirror center shows through that hole. The ribbon that closes the top of the purse will allow it to be hung from a waist sash. The velvet is pale yellow like sunshine. If yellow becomes something even Signora Contarini wears, then yellow will no longer be the mark of the Jew and the prostitute. It worries me a little that I have indulged myself in this small rebellion. After all, I don’t know any Jews or prostitutes, but I do it for Mamma and for all outcasts. I could make dozens of purses this size from the piece of velvet I bought when the cloth merchant came by with samples. I feel giddy. Perhaps dangerous, as Marin said.

  “Stitching isn’t your forte.” It’s Agnola. Like Marin, her speech is speckled with words I don’t know, often foreign.

  I can guess what she means, though. “My mother never taught me. Her fingers weren’t nimble.”

  “Let me help. Let’s go in the sewing room.”

  She takes the little purse and we sit side by side in soothing silence. “Let’s just do a simple loop around this opening,” she says, and finishes it off beautifully. “I can embroider rosettes with leafy vines running between. What do you think?”

  “It’s fine as is. You are a wizard.”

  “And you are a puzzle. What on earth is the use of a purse with a large hole in one side?”

  “I’m making a gift. It’s a secret, but only because you’ve told me I’m not allowed to do it or speak of it.”

  There go her brows into those deep furrows I know well by now. “It could be dangerous to keep secrets from me, Dolce. I can’t help you if you need help.”

  “I’ll tell you if you won’t scold.”

  “I might scold, Dolce. But if you’re doing something I’ve told you you’re not allowed to do, you really don’t care much whether or not I scold you, do you?”

  “You reason like Bianca.”

  “We’re all one family.”

  I snatch the purse from her and try to smile—if only the pounding in my head would let up, I could enjoy this moment. “Stay here. Inside this room.” I close her into the sewing room and go downstairs as quickly as I can without jostling my head too much. It seems no one is about, but you never can be sure. I leave the storeroom door ajar to let in light, crawl behind the wine casks, and uncover my small mirror. I polish it with a soft, clean cloth and slip the mirror into the purse. It fits well. Then I pull a garlic head from a hanging braid of them. I carry the garlic conspicuously in my left palm. Everyone knows I feed little Ribolin garlic to ease his worms. I race up the stairs and put the garlic on top of the chest at the foot of our bed. Then I return to the sewing room.

  “Tell me what you think.” I hold out the purse.

  Agnola’s mouth falls open. She reaches for the mirror with care, and looks at herself a long time. “This is the finest quality, isn’t it?”

  “I told you I was a master.”

  Her head jerks up. “You made it?”

  I nod.

  She shakes her head slowly. “Does Marin know?”

  “I haven’t told him.”

  “Don’t.”

  “I must. I don’t want secrets between us. Besides, I want him to see what I can do. It took me years to perfect this method.”

  She presses her lips together and shrugs. Then she looks again at the little mirror in the purse and sighs loudly. “Will you hang it from your waist?”

  “It’s not for me.”

  Her face opens. “For me?”

  “No. Oh, I’m so sorry, Agnola. Of course it should be for you. I’ll make another.”

  “No, no, don’t be silly. The glass alone must have cost a fortune.”

  “Nothing compared with the price of a mirror. I should have made this one for you. I’ll make another fast. I need this one for today; the Contarini mamma is coming.”

  “You made it for Signora Laura?”

  “It’s a peace offering.”

  Agnola puts the purse on my lap and looks at me, awestruck. “You’re a genius.”

  I smile despite my throbbing head. “You think it will work?”

  “You’ve won the whole war, Dolce.”

  In the afternoon, Antonin announces that Signora Contarini has arrived. But she waits below in her gondola with her daughters, ready to whisk Bianca off to an afternoon garden party at the palace of the Mocenigo family. I am not invited. Agnola is, but she has declined, out of loyalty to me.

  I need to get the signora alone so we can talk. I take Bianca by the hand and we go downstairs to the gondola.

  Signora Contarini has the good grace to look a little flustered at my appearance. “Good day. Climb in carefully, Bianca.”

  “Please, Signora,” I say. “Please, could you come upstairs just a moment?”

  “The afternoon is already half gone.”

  “It will take just a moment. I have something for you.”

  “For me?”

  “A little something.”

  “Well, surely you can bring it down to me.”

  I fight off tears. “It will be quick.”

  She holds out her hand and Antonin rushes to help her onto the dock. She follows me without a word. In the sewing room, I hand her the purse.

  She stares at it. “What is this?”

  “A mirror.”

  “Well, I can see that. A very fine mirror. The finest I’ve ever seen.”

  “Then you like it?”

  “It’s magnificent.”

  “Let me tie it at your waist.”

  She takes a step back. “What do you mean? You can’t possibly mean this is mine.”

  “It’s my gift to you.”

  “Such an extravagance! And why?”

  “Because…I need us to be friends.”

  She stiffens. “You are the most extraordinary girl. Do you think a friendship can be bought?”

  I look at her. “No. But I hope this will show you how fervently I want us to be friends. All my life…I never fit anywhere. Except here. I don’t know how I was so fortunate to wind up with this family. I mean no harm. I didn’t choose to upset anyone’s plans. It just happened.”

  Signora Contarini holds the mirror to her face, the
n looks at me. She licks her reddened lips and her eyes seem sad.

  “I don’t want anyone in pain. Not on my account,” I say. My eyes burn.

  “My daughter would prefer an unfettered husband anyway, I think.” She speaks slowly. “A man in his twenties, with no history, no children from a prior marriage, no memory of a first wife to live up to.”

  My fingers massage my forehead.

  Signora Contarini gazes into the mirror. “It is a miracle of a gift. I shouldn’t accept it.”

  “Please accept it. For my sake, and Bianca’s.”

  She looks at me with troubled eyes. “You’re…a rather simple girl. Straightforward. I should have been kind to you from the start.”

  “Do me this kindness now, please. Accept the mirror.”

  “There are many other, far less costly things you could have given me. Don’t tell me I’ve entirely misjudged and you sit on an outrageous fortune.”

  “This is costly for me.” My head wants to explode. “Very.”

  “Why a mirror?”

  “I thought you would appreciate it.”

  “I do.” She stares into it. “Absolutely colorless. Accurate. Maybe more…Some of the priests call transparent mirrors evil.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s only once we reach heaven that we see things clearly. San Paolo said that. In a mirror like this, we can see our own death, waiting for us. We can count the increasing number of lines on our faces. Just by telling us the truth, crystal mirrors can leave us bitter. Greedy for more.”

  “Transparent becomes murky,” I say through the shadows that threaten my own eyes right now.

  “You put it well.”

  “Mirrors also show beauty,” I whisper.

  “Appealing to vanity is never a good thing.”

  “Appealing to beauty is a different thing.”

  She looks ruefully at the mirror. “Who are you really for, little mirror?”

  “You. No one else.”

  She swallows a small laugh. “Everyone else will want one.”

  I drop my hand and hold on to the back of a chair. I’ll keel over if I don’t hold tight.