Salamander

by Thomas Wharton

  Horror-struck at the abyss beckoning his sanity, he set himself a daily regimen of imaginary printing. Unencumbered by the limitations of real paper and ink, the dumb recalcitrance of inanimate objects, he was free at last to dream a book unlike any other. In his head the calculations based on the golden section flew together in angelic concord. It all made sense now. The book would climb into being on the infinite spiral of the Fibonacci sequence. The frame, the container of the words, was the key.

  The various stages of producing each sheet were parcelled out by the ratcheting of the gear. To make the work expand to fill the vague gulf of time before him, he went about it more slowly than he would have with a real press, setting and printing only one single sixteen-page forme every hour. As night fell and the cell sank into darkness, he would peel an invisible sheet from the type, blow on its intangible surface, hold it before his unseeing eyes to check the quality of his nonexistent impression.

  In time his phantom presswork failed to distract him from his situation and he sank into a torpor out of which he would jolt awake in the dark, having sat heedlessly on his pallet through an entire day. He eventually decided that he was neglecting to imagine the text that was to fill his spectral pages. To his inner vision the impression was always clean, unblemished, his best work, but the matter remained utterly obscure, veiled from him as if he had lost the ability to read. He had always relied on his customers to supply him with the text that he would print and bind, but now, he realized with dismay, he would have to become author as well as printer.

  No other possibility presented itself than that of beginning with Irena. He had already filled a book with her name. This book would contain everything else about her that he could remember, their first meeting and all that followed. He filled column after imaginary column with the timbre and nuances of her voice, with every word they had spoken to one another, with the changing colour of her eyes, the coolness of her hair streaming across his naked chest, her body, volcanic, supple, entwining with his, the scent and taste of her skin, until, remembering his last sight of her, on the far side of the gallery the morning of what was to have been their fourth night together, he was so overcome with despair that he left his work and curled up in a ball on his pallet, seeing and hearing nothing and hoping only for death.

  To survive he would have to begin elsewhere. He recalled a passage he had found in one of the Count’s books, a commentary on the tenth-century System of Al-Kindi, who postulated the causal influence of everything upon everything else. The entire cosmos, from the tiniest atomies to the vast silent spaces beyond the moon, formed a web of connectedness within the mind of God. From this astounding proposition the Arab philosopher conjectured that a complete knowledge of one single thing, any single thing, be it a chair, a feather, a raindrop, the merest trifle, will lead at last, through the web of relations, to an understanding of everything else. A radiant knowledge of All. The tiniest pebble under one’s feet a mirror in which the entire Creation was invisibly reflected.

  Casting about for an object to be the seed of a universe, he plucked a straw from his pallet and described to himself its length, shape, coloration, and texture. From there began a meticulous survey of the pallet from which he had taken the straw, followed by an inventory of every square inch of his roughly trapezoidal cell, each stone of the walls and every crack and crevice in the mortar between each stone, the mouse droppings he found each morning on the bare floor, the comings and goings of the rats and the many-legged vermin that nested in his pallet and that ate the mouse droppings, the tiny scraps of dry and scaling skin that would fall from him like snow whenever he scratched his burning limbs, the tremulous webs of light reflected from the water that ran beneath his cell, the reef of dirty ice that slowly formed on the embrasure when winter came and just as slowly thinned and wasted away the next spring.

  His senses, their sphere of action limited, did not grow dull but rather began to sharpen on what little was available to them. In time the soft patter of a centipede’s legs resounded for him like the tread of a column of marching men. He could watch the stones of the walls settle a little farther each day into one another as they sank slowly towards the river. Lying awake at night he smelled the blood moving under the surface of his skin, felt the tug of the rising moon in the glands of his neck and groin. One day, instead of printing, he sat on the floor and watched a spider build a web in the crook of his arm.

  Everything was woven into his work.

  He moved, inch by inch, through the halls of the castle and into the world.

  From time to time he heard the panel in the door slide open. He would not look to see who was observing him. He kept on with his printing. Let them wait. They would get their book when it was damned well ready.

  Chewing his heel of loaf he bit into a rolled cylinder of paper. A note from Djinn. The backward message, once he had deciphered it, told him that the Count had gone with his men to a hunting salash in the mountains and that if they acted quickly Flood could be freed and spirited out of the castle that night. The printer sliced his finger on the edge of the paper and sent back a message scribbled in blood, asking Djinn to wait, if he would be so kind, until his work was finished.

  One spring the river rose through the grate in the floor. He climbed from his bed one morning into ankle-deep icy water.

  The flood subsided after a few hours, but not before collapsing a section of the wall opposite the door. Behind the fallen stones stood a gnarled trunk of bare wet rock. The unhewn roots of the castle. When he put his ear to the crevices at dusk he could hear the squeak and flutter of bats waking.

  A pair of night herons nested for a season in a corner of the cell. Their luminous eyes followed his movements back and forth across the tiny space. After a while he ignored them, certain that they were mechanical toys belonging to the Count.

  Time became spherical. Past events gathered around him like words in a book he could read as he pleased, in any order.

  One day he stepped back from the press, wiped his brow, hung up his leather apron, and peered out the window of the shop. It was a cold winter morning in Lady Chapel Court. Snow was falling softly, silently, and the stones of the court had vanished under a covering of white. He wiped at the frost on the warped pane and saw a small figure in a red cloak. Meg, making snowballs. She looked up, saw him in the window, waved and shouted, although he could not hear the words. Come out, Nicholas.

  He went to the door and opened it. The court, the snow, Meg had vanished. He turned back to the shop and he was in his cell.

  From time to time he was visited by people he had known. His rivals in the printing trade. Papa Martin, the playing-card maker, one of his father’s old friends.

  And people he did not recognize. An elderly white-bearded man in a green cloak stood near him all one evening at his work.

  – Do I know you? Flood finally asked.

  The old man did not speak, but held up his large, powerful hands to reveal strange characters burned into his fingertips. Letters, Flood finally realized, of the Hebrew alphabet.

  He awoke one morning to find that the space where his imaginary press stood was taken up by the wooden skeleton of a real press. He approached the empty frame warily, wondering if by relentless mental exertion he had imagined part of it into existence. He spent the rest of the day collating sheets rather than give in to the temptation to touch the apparition and have it vanish into nothingness.

  The next day the impression assembly — the screw, the bar, the platen – had joined the frame. He could no longer resist, and smiled as his hands slid into their old familiar grip around the well-worn contours of the bar. This, his hands told him, was his press, the old workhorse of the House of Flood and Son.

  The following morning the carriage assembly was there: rounce, coffin, tympan and frisket, the ink bats hanging from their hook beside the ink block. He set a forme of imaginary type and was about to lock it into the coffin when he stopped, set the forme on the floor, and lowere
d his own face to the cold surface of the press stone. Like a rider greeting his mount he stroked the smooth, dark wood.

  He slept fitfully that night, and was awakened at dawn by an unfamiliar sound. He sat up and peered into the corners of the cell, searching for the source.

  A key, scratching like a mouse in the lock.

  The heavy wooden door swung open with a faint squeal of hinges that told of the recent application of oil. A slender dark-skinned young man stepped warily into the cell, carrying a tray of type. He was followed by a girl of ten or eleven with pale russet hair, dressed in a boy’s waistcoat and breeches. Her eyes in the stark light gleamed a watery aquamarine. The young man and the girl stared at Flood for a moment, then at each other. Finally the girl stepped forward.

  – Greetings, Signore Flood, she said in English. My name is Pica. I am your daughter.

  Sometimes the reader places her ear close to a book and hears a distant sighing of waves. In the crevice between the pages her fingers touch a wand of cold wet sand, studded with tiny fragments of iridescent shell. The ribbed and sloping paper itself seems to invite her.

  She wades in cautiously, her naked feet moving like snails over the sharp stones.

  THE BROKEN VIOLIN

  After floating on the sea for days and days, she was washed ashore on an island where stood the palace of a beautiful but sad Queen. When the ladies-in-waiting opened the windows that morning, they saw the quaint little cask lying on the sand. Your Highness, they said, hoping to cheer her, you should see the lovely little cask the waves have washed ashore. The Queen ordered them to bring the cask to her, and when it was opened, out stepped the maiden, as radiant as the moon. Where are you from, the Queen asked her, and why are you sailing the sea like that?

  She has wet the bed again. Above her, the winged face of Sister Beata hovers in the blackness.

  – Filthy child. The third night in a row. Get up.

  She must stand in the lavatory until dawn. Water trickles from stone spouts like gaping mouths. The unpassing night. Something scuttles over her bare foot. A rat, squirming itself into a crevice in the rotten masonry.

  The young novice who patrols the rooms every night with a shaded lamp looks in on her once each hour, on Sister Beata’s orders, to make sure she remains standing.

  The novice whispers from the doorway.

  – It’s no wonder you wet your bed all the time. You were born at sea, they say. On a ship.

  Before sunrise the girls in their nightdresses drift into the lavatory, glancing at her with sleepy curiosity. One of the older girls steps up to her.

  – Hey. Pissalina. You’ve got funny skin. It’s shiny, like a frog’s.

  Francesca is beautiful. Several times before this day she has caught Pica staring at her creamy skin, her long, lustrous black hair. Francesca is speaking to her, but her angry gaze burns through Pica to something else.

  – Your mother named you Pica? The magpie. So are you a magpie, then, or a frog?

  – I’m not …

  — The Maestro had red hair like yours. He died the day you came to the Ospedale. Maybe you’re the Maestro’s little secret, and that’s why he died. One look at you.

  The girls laugh and turn away, tugging off their nightdresses. They chatter, shriek at the rats, shove each other under the waterspouts. Their shouts in the vaulted room slapping night awake. The bells of San Zaccaria sound the hour and voices rise in answer from the chapel:

  Venetus surge, sta in excelso, et vide jucunditatem quae veniet tibi a Deo tuo …

  Your name is a typeface, he told the girl. Except you pronounce it pike-a.

  – I say it peek-a.

  She asked him if there was anything he needed.

  – A bath. Please.

  He would not leave his cell, and so Djinn repaired one of the Count’s few useful contraptions, a tub that could fill itself with hot water from an adjoining boiler. Flood lay back in the scalding water, his armour of dirt dissolving. When he rose out of the bath and looked at the thick black film on the surface, he had the feeling he had left someone behind.

  Djinn fetched a barber from the village who sheared off Flood’s matted nest of beard and trimmed his tangled mane. It had been getting so long, he told the girl, that it was starting to dip in the ink block.

  She showed him the T-shaped piece of metal she had always had, carried around her neck on a ribbon.

  – I couldn’t find anything in the castle to fit it.

  – That’s a quoin key, he told her. For keeping a forme of type locked tight in a chase.

  He studied her. She was here to learn the craft, he decided. That was why she had brought the quoin key. He scrabbled in his typecase and took up a lowercase letter a.

  – On the bottom are the feet and the groove. On the body is the nick, here, and the pin mark. At the top, the shoulder, the neck. And lastly, the letter itself. The face.

  He looked up. She was gazing around the cell, not listening.

  – Who was your mother? he asked

  – The Countess, she said.

  She returned to his cell in the evening, bringing him a supper of bread and beet soup. When she set the tray on the press stone, he stepped up close to her, reached out, and touched her face.

  – You’re cold. Porcelain?

  She backed away.

  – No, signore. It’s cold up here. That’s why I thought you might like some hot food.

  – How old are you?

  – Eleven. Or twelve. I’m not sure.

  – Those are boy’s clothes you’re wearing.

  – I ruined my own clothes getting across to the island. Djinn gave me some of his.

  – You … swam here? Why didn’t you take the ferry?

  – It was full of people.

  – People coming here?

  She looked away as if embarrassed.

  – To see the castle, she said. They pay to see …

  – The freaks, he said. And the madman.

  He looked up at the gear in the ceiling, its teeth rusted to stumps. The machinery had been silent for so long.

  – She’s dead, isn’t she?

  – No, the girl said fiercely. I don’t know where she is. No one does.

  A grey, gusty morning, the torn sky sending down a few stray pinpricks of icy rain. This is the hour they take the air in the walled corte, watched by the novices, older girls who had been accomplices until their heads were shaved and their bodies swathed in black. The younger girls are not supposed to speak to anyone who comes to the gates, but men stop there often, to watch them and sometimes call them over to talk. When this happens, the novices turn away and say nothing.

  She cannot remember ever having been outside the Ospedale. The map of Venice in her head has been constructed of rumour, stories, vague scraps of knowledge that might possibly be clues to the world outside, like the sign set into the wall threatening parents with dire consequences should they try to pass their own children off as orphans.

  Most of the girls will become the wives of merchants and tradesmen. Sometimes the nuns decide that a girl should be married to God and become one of them. And there are a few girls who one day are just gone, and no one says anything. Francesca is sure they are sold like slaves to rich men.

  Pica catches sight of a shard of blue glass lying on the cobbles. She halts, wondering how it got here, how it escaped the sweeping-woman’s broom. She stoops swiftly, plucks the bit of glass from the ground, slips it into her apron pocket. Later she will hide it with her other treasures, in the secret hollow in the wall beside her bed.

  She hears a sound and quickly straightens up. A red-faced old woman in a frayed cloak is watching her through the bars of the gate. The midwife who brought her to the foundling home. They have met at the gates before. The old woman tells her stories.

  – I wanted to see how you were getting on, mouse.

  – I’m well, thank you.

  – You look thin. Are those stingy old women feeding you enough?

/>   – Yes. I don’t eat sometimes.

  – Why not?

  – I put the food in my pockets for later, but I forget about it and it goes stale. The girls say that’s why I was named Pica. (She will dare a question she has never asked.) Did my mother name me?

  The midwife heaves a deep sigh and Pica catches the faint vinous reek of her breath. She loves the smell, like the wine they sip at Mass from the gold chalice. The old woman’s stories, breathed to her on this dark incense, hold the same mystery as the words the priest intones over their bowed heads on Sunday.

  – The poor dear was so weak, all she could do was whisper. She’s so small, she said, and then, Pica. Call her Pica. I’d never heard such a name for a girl, and I wanted to ask and make sure, but they hurried me out of the room with you squealing in my arms.

  – Does my mother send you here to see me?

  – No, child. That was the last time I saw her.

  – Why did she give me up?

  – Oh, mouse, she didn’t. They took her away. They broke her heart.

  – Who?

  Tears glitter in the midwife’s bloodshot eyes. She strokes Pica’s cold hands through the bars.

  – You’re so tall, mouse. And so pretty. Just like the princess in the stories you used to like. You won’t be caged in there much longer, that’s for certain. There’ll soon be rich young men stopping here instead of foolish old women.

  – They say I was born on a ship.

  The midwife sobs, exhaling another sacramental gust.

  – She had a hard time of it, poor thing. You were not going to come out, I thought, and then when you did you were all black and curled up and I thought, The little tadpole is already finished before she’s hardly begun. Then you gave a slippery little kick in my hands and started bawling.…