Read Online The Blind Contessa's New Machine by Carey Wallace - Free Book Online Page B

the evidence of that evening’s feasts, and gypsy music began to drift through certain open windows.
    Pietro loved these rambles, willing to bear with his young wife’s caprices for the opportunity they offered him to catch at the dim curves of her retreating figure in a close alley, or press her against the walls of some back street. He was an ardent but gentle lover, most tender with her when freed from the impossible task of forcing his deepest feelings to the surface as words. Carolina was half thrilled and half terrified by the way he changed in the dark: shocked by the places his hands sought out and by the way her own body rose and burned under them, amazed to find that her own touch could make him flinch or groan, but most of all grateful for a world in which only taste and touch, sound and smell, mattered, where, even if she did open her eyes, the horizon had shrunk to just what she could still take in: Pietro’s eyes, the back of his neck, her finger caught in his teeth.
    Each day, however, was a new mystery. Rising from their shared bed, they dressed quickly, like the first man and woman, newly naked and ashamed. Their meals were passed in long silences, punctuated by half-remembered pleasantries. At a loss, Pietro returned again and again to the theme of her beauty, which he earnestly believed must please her as much as it pleased him.
    “I think the angels were God’s practice,” he would say, reaching out to catch a handful of her hair. “To make this pretty head.”
    Carolina could not think of what to say to this. The angels of her catechism were fearsome men and she was terrified to speak of God, in case he might remember her and speed the curse he had chosen. Furthermore, Pietro didn’t seem to want his compliments returned. In the first days of the honeymoon, confused by the praise, she had retreated into basic etiquette.
    “Your eyes are beautiful as well,” she said.
    For an instant, he had smiled like a petted child, but just as quickly the light of pride was lost in a frown. “Beauty is a blind guide in a man,” he told her, probably in the same stern tones it had been told to him.
    “I’m sorry,” she ventured.
    “There is no need,” he said, more gently.
    Carolina couldn’t remember this restraint in the months of their courtship, but the moments they had spent alone together before their marriage amounted to mere hours, spent in breathless snatches behind hedges and in hallways, exchanging burning kisses, groping blindly for whatever might be hidden beneath the lace at her breast or in the hollow of his hand. Beyond that, under the watchful eye of her family, they had only flirted and teased until the day, as her mother wept quietly, Carolina had raised him from his knees.
    “Would you like to go dancing tonight?” Pietro asked one evening, joining Carolina on the balcony. “They are building a pavilion on the beach.”
    The lengths of white gauze that shut out the morning light twisted around them like the tethered ghosts of ocean breezes. The sun had just vanished into the horizon and in the gloaming below lights had begun to appear, marking the path of the streets, the entrances of restaurants, the stands where night vendors peddled wine and fruit to lovers and young families at the water’s edge.
    When she didn’t answer immediately, he nuzzled her neck like a favored horse.
    “We don’t have to dance,” he said. “You give me a command.”
    Carolina turned in the circle of his arms and looked up at him. Surrounded by darkness, his handsome face was as frank and hopeful as a child’s.
    In despair, she closed her eyes.
    Pietro kissed them.

    Her husband’s property bounded her father’s. In fact, the river that fed her lake flowed into it from Pietro’s land. A bend in the water was visible from Pietro’s house, at the foot of a gentle slope that rolled down to a landing area where a pair of old boats dozed in the sun.
    On the first morning after their return from