Or What You Will Read online

  “Are you sure?” Viola says, looking sadly at Hero’s corpse, her fingers rubbing Horse’s ears.

  “Yes. There’s nothing more sentimental than an animal graveyard. It would be sheer self-indulgence. And I don’t want people thinking I’ve gone soft.”

  “Nobody would ever think that,” Viola says loyally. She has loved, respected, and admired him for as long as she has known him, and shows no sign of stopping. It is a miracle, Orsino thinks.

  “I have enemies,” Orsino says. “They’re always ready to leap on any sign of weakness. No, Hero’s carcass goes to the dogs. It makes no difference to her now.”

  “Let’s give what’s left of the gruel to good old Pyrrha and go and find you something better,” Viola says, as he straightens and stretches again, shaking away the aches of the night, “Your mother wants to see you.”

  “She’s not here, is she?” he asks, alarmed, and suddenly tense.

  “No. She sent a note. There was some kind of disturbance last night, an apprentice was killed. She said she’d be calling in to talk to you later this morning.”

  Orsino frowns, leading the way out of the stable into the yard. Horse follows them out, scuffling through the fallen leaves, wagging her tail. Doves scatter before her, white doves with plumed tails. Orsino stops at the fountain to wash. The water is very cold. The stablemen are already going into the birthing stable. Orsino looks up past them, to the palazzo with its many small windows, and up above it to the tower that from here seems so light and airy, but which weighs on him so heavily.

  He puts his head under the cold water of the fountain to wake himself up, then abruptly pulls it out again, shaking drops everywhere like a dog. Horse jumps into the fountain to join in this new game. Viola grimaces as a shower of waterdrops hits her in the face.

  “More breakfast, and more coffee, and clean clothes, and I’ll be ready to play Duke and help sort out whatever it is,” he says. “It must be something serious if it killed an apprentice and if Miranda wants to talk to me.” Around their feet, doves coo and peck for grain as the little dog shakes herself dry.

  3

  DIRECT ADDRESS

  That’s her new book. What she calls the Florence book. It’s a sequel to Twelfth Night, and also to three books she wrote long ago. And as you can see, I am not in it. Well, then. Let’s try something else. Let’s try to get at this tangentially.

  Let me tell you what there is. Let me name and number the things so you can turn them over in your mind like people playing the old Kim game, where you are shown a tray and have to list the contents after it is covered up again. Let me tell you everything, so clear, so sharp that you can taste for yourself the tart purple berries exploding on your tongue, contrasting with the sweetness and the crispness of the folded pastry crust. Let me tell you—what, show you, you say? I can’t show you anything. This isn’t a picture book. It’s all telling here. We only have words between us. But let me tell you, so you may, if you choose, weigh the qualities of different silences.

  Now that I have addressed you directly, don’t let it worry you that you are in this story. Nobody will make you do anything but what you are doing already, reading and making the story live in your mind. I’m not about to inform you that you are walking down a long hallway with fraying carpet, which brightens as you pass a lace-curtained window, whose sill holds a single blossom of red geranium, drooping in a neglected flowerpot next to a dusty pile of books, their green and orange spines slowly fading to teal and lemon. I won’t ask you to decide the colours of the carpet (vermilion and ash) or of the tired paint on the walls. Most especially I will not say you are putting out your hand to turn the dented brass knob set in the peeling green paint of the door that leads out into the rose garden, only to have you revolt against me and jerk your hand sharply away, saying to yourself “Like hell I do!”

  We may get into the rose garden and discover its secrets eventually, but that isn’t the way.

  Second person is a strange conceit, and we don’t intend to make you go there. Some people seem to find it erotic, as it is the mode used for a lot of written pornography. Is the feeling of passivity, or of being told what you do and feel, perhaps charged for them with some subtle erotic tension of helplessness, of being swept away by events, out of control? Interesting to consider. When there’s a whole form of discourse used pretty much only for porn and experimental edgy literature, you have to think about it, question why—except that in fact nobody does seem to be asking that question. They laugh uncomfortably when she mentions it, until she mostly stops asking, although she does not stop wondering.

  But no. Don’t worry. We’re really not going there. That door can remain firmly closed for now. You can set your back against it if you want and lean hard against it, holding it shut, taking a deep breath, safe, with the rose garden and the pool, whether full or drained, securely out there on the other side of it. You are in this story only passively, notionally. I can’t see you, you don’t exist yet, at this moment of composition, as, in her real time and place, plumbers pace about in the background, poised to interrupt with questions at any second, and she thinks she might as well indulge me in tangents for a little while. Only she is here, and the plumbers, with their layered blue toolbox and patronizing manner that assumes she knows nothing, understands nothing, simply by virtue of gender. You aren’t here with us now, and your potential future existence hangs in an even more tenuous space than I do. You may not even be born yet, or you may never come into existence. You are the reader, always and only. I am making no contract with you to do anything beyond what you have already agreed to do in running your eye along these words so far, one by one as they come to you, and continuing to turn these pages. I will ask you to do nothing but read, and remember, and care.

  If you refuse to care? If reading this so far has made you shudder and recoil? If you have no least curiosity about that apophatic pool by the rose garden, not even whether it’s a swimming pool or a pool full of waterlilies, if you don’t want to at least glance at those books on the windowsill and scan their titles? Then you are not my reader, not any of my imagined readers. Stop now, while you are ahead. Take your embodied self off to read something else, feeling grateful for your solidity, your reality, and that of the world you inhabit, go read something you’ll enjoy more, or deal with the pipes and boilers banging and hissing in your own life, and leave the rest of us here. We will do well enough without you, I dare say.

  When she’s writing, she always says, “Some people are going to hate this,” and then she smiles sharply, showing her teeth. She says they are not the people she is writing for. She laughs when she reads their one-star reviews on Amazon and Goodreads. Her most popular answer in Goodreads is where somebody says they have read forty-six pages of her most popular book (the book where I am a dragon at a university) and asks if it is worth going on, and she says no, life is too short, they should read something they like instead. She values the readers who press on and find it worthwhile, who may frown and blink now and then but keep reading, keep trusting the words, slip into the reading trance, the stories we spin you. We value you; she and I stand utterly united in this, loving you, who may or may not exist in some future time but are all potential now, as the plumber mutters and clatters in the background, releasing a gush of steam.

  So listen now, like a bedtime child, snuggle down under the texture of the soothing word blanket and let yourself be lulled. When she sang her daughters to sleep, the only period of her life when singing was a frequent occurrence, she used to call it lulling them into a true sense of security. Trust me now, forget your self-consciousness, the consciousness of your separate solid self that I deliberately aroused, let yourself sink down beneath the warm weight of the story I am telling you. Trust me, it’ll be much more interesting than her story about a dead horse.

  4

  THREE ANECDOTES

  Once upon a time—have you ever thought about that formula? Why is it “upon”? We hear the phrase as one wor
d, once-upon-a-time, and don’t think about it. This happened once only, and it happened in time and … upon is a time word, and a strange one: upon a May morning, upon reading these words, upon turning this tap, upon reaching your destination. Usually it means as soon as something has happened. Upon a time. The time where all stories start. And once, as if to say this was so, but it is no longer. And don’t say no, war stories start “No shit, there I was,” as if that’s different from “once upon a time.” I hate that. And it’s bullshit. There’s no difference between fairy tales and war stories, stories for families and stories for men when they’re on their own. Pah. All stories start both ways. There’s no difference between once upon a time, and believe me, because I was there and still bear the scars. There are scars in everyone’s stories, and people who were right there, and unless they’ve died they’re right here still. What all told stories have in common, and the thing that makes them different from life, is that they are over, completed, known.

  Once, in a land of rolling hills and gentle swift-flowing streams, a land of vines and olives and hard wheat, a land where all the towns and villages were built on hilltops, for defence and to see far away, there was one town, rich with the manufacture of art and wool and luxury goods, that lay in a plain beside a river. It was not defenceless, however, for it had walls. The walls were bigger than the town needed, for after it had grown and extended its walls several times a terrible plague came, and the population no longer filled the whole of the space the walls enclosed. They were strong walls of smooth grey stone, and the six gates set in them had towers and portcullises like castle walls, and bright flags flew from them, and they were defended by guards in glistening mail and coloured surcoats. The flags caught the breeze and showed their brave devices in bright colours: flowers and eagles and the sun. Here and there in the walls stood solid stone bastions, and on the bastions were set cannons. That’s what bastions are, solid blocks strong enough to take a cannon recoil, which makes the common phrase “last bastion” have much more resonance. Bastions were invented in the early fifteenth century by Brunelleschi, an artist and architect who spent a season in the field with the army and came up with this innovation, a man of this city, because yes, this city in the plain is the flowering city of Florence, or rather let us call it Firenze, because why should we choose to filter its name through the tongues of its French enemies? They’re the reason why they needed the walls and those bastions in the first place.

  Here we find ourselves suddenly on a stout grey wall in the real world, in a real place and time. It wasn’t Brunelleschi who pulled us out of the realm of fairy tale, not Brunelleschi only, it was the guns. You can have the Renaissance in secondary world fantasy, but never gunpowder, though gunpowder was an invention of the Middle Ages that came before, and platemail was invented to defend against pistols, so those knights in shining armour you like to imagine lived in a world that never was. Guns somehow poison the possibility of fantasy. (Even Zelazny only just got away with it in The Guns of Avalon. Most fantasy that has guns is real history with added magic, like The Dragon Waiting.)

  Brunelleschi, sculptor, architect, and inventor, turning his hand to many things in that way that absolutely characterises the Renaissance, that time of excitement when everything that was old that was good was coming back and mixing with everything that was new in a heady ferment that had never been before. And, in a way that was particularly Florentine, he was a trickster too. Let me tell you about Brunelleschi in the real world before we advance further towards the borders and bounds and brinks of the fantastic.

  First, the story you may already know. In that time of revival, when they thought they could get back the ancient world but better, with God and without slavery, Brunelleschi built the dome of the Duomo, Firenze’s great cathedral. It is still the largest unsupported masonry dome in the world. At the time they began it, in a great leap of faith, to make the greatest cathedral anyone had ever raised to the glory of God, they had no idea how to complete it. The ability to make a dome like that had been lost, if indeed it had ever existed. But they built the foundations, and then Brunelleschi came along and created new mathematics, new machinery (cranes and winches unlike any ever seen before, which still exist and seem rather a product of the Industrial Revolution that was still three hundred or more years away), and new designs. From all this a huge miraculous dome rose, which is hidden among houses, so that whenever you do catch a glimpse of it, you cannot but be startled at its size, as well as catching your breath at its beauty. Before Brunelleschi began work, when he was standing before the committee who could give him the job, when he had never built any dome at all, they asked him for details of how he would do it. He pulled an egg out of his pocket and asked them to make it stand on end. People tried various ways, and failed. Brunelleschi broke the end off the egg, and stood the rest of it up. They scoffed and said anyone could have done that, and Brunelleschi said yes, they could, if they had only thought of it. He didn’t explain further, and despite the lack of details, they gave him the money and the workers and the permission that let him go ahead and make his beautiful incredible dome, which still stands, defying perspective, accreting legend. His dome, their dome, Firenze’s dome, the world’s dome.

  It’s amazing it worked, really.

  The committee who gave him the job, the Wool Guild’s committee for overseeing the work on the Duomo, deserves a great deal of credit for supporting him in his genius. Not everybody would. Indeed, few committees at any time and place would have given Brunelleschi funding after he broke that egg and refused to explain. The committee members were men of vision too. And the committee still exists. Not the individuals, of course. They lived in this world and were mortal. The committee itself, which is eternal, replaces its members one by one as they retire or die, but it survives, still continuing its long task. It has a beautiful and informative museum beside the Duomo now, but better than that, the committee still oversees the actual work of building the cathedral, which still isn’t complete, which will never be complete, which is being created even as it is restored. The committee lives, the work goes on, scaffolding rises, tiles are commissioned and made and set in place, choices and decisions are made about funding, now as when that arrogant genius Brunelleschi stood before them with the egg. This is one way to be immortal, which may be some consolation in the absence of more satisfactory ways.

  The next story is about Brunelleschi and Ghiberti. Brunelleschi and Ghiberti were both artists, sculptors, and architects, and rivals in everything. They were both of the same age, and the same social class—guildsmen, which meant they could vote and hold office in the oligarchic republic that was Renaissance Firenze. They could wear the woven red cioppa as a sign of their status, as a toga was in ancient Rome. (Cosimo de’ Medici said cynically that three yards of red cloth made a gentleman.) A hundred years before this, Firenze had rid itself of its nobles, who were always feuding. They killed them, or exiled them, or barred them from holding office, and all the old noble families except one vanished. That one, the Tornaquinci family, went to ground, changing their name to Tornabuoni and pretending they had been merchants all along like everyone else. The strangest thing about this is that it means nothing. There are no consequences. They married into the other guild-class families and became exactly like them, and their origin never mattered to anyone. They didn’t end up on top, or betray the city, or anything. History doesn’t work like a story. It rarely wraps up satisfyingly. It’s full of perpetual loose ends and dangling motifs that any writer reading it immediately wants to tug on and tie up into bows. But here, now, at the moment we are considering early in the Renaissance, 1401, the very beginning of an exciting new century, the names of qualified guildsmen are put into purses and drawn out to see who rules the city. Eight men of the merchant class rule for two months at a time, the highest honour the city affords. It was a real, if time-bounded, power, and if it led to inconsistent policies, well, it’s better than tyranny, and how is your democracy doing at
that this fine day? (Don’t answer that. Don’t even think about that.)

  The names were drawn out for other things, too, such as judging city art competitions. There was in 1401 an art competition for who should make the new bronze doors of the Baptistery, Firenze’s amazing circular church, with its inner dome covered already in golden mosaics telling the whole story from creation to doomsday. It was actually built around 1100, but falsely believed by 1400 to be a converted Roman temple to Mars, because in Italy anything large and wonderful was attributed to the Romans, as in more northern places the works of the Romans were attributed to giants. The artists competing to make the Baptistery doors were given some bronze and asked to make from it a sample panel, the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Ghiberti and Brunelleschi each made a panel, in fierce rivalry. None of the other entries were worth consideration, but these two were both wonderful. The judges whose names were drawn from a purse were torn between the two offerings, but in the end chose Ghiberti’s panel, and gave Ghiberti the job of making the great doors.

  This committee of judges, unlike the Wool Guild committee, was an ephemeral thing that dissolved right away, as soon as Ghiberti was chosen. The two panels, however, were preserved, and can be seen today in the Bargello Museum. The most interesting thing isn’t comparing them and second guessing the committee to decide which one you’d give the prize to, fun though that is. But it’s much more interesting to compare Ghiberti’s panel in the Bargello to the same panel on the actual doors he made, the doors that bear the name Michelangelo gave them a century later, “The Gates of Paradise.” Look carefully at the panels. We have three, the one on the doors and the two competition models, all showing the same scene from the same story, that strange Old Testament moment of aborted child sacrifice, when Abraham obediently takes up the knife to murder his son at God’s command, and God sends an angel with a ram just in time to save the child. They’re all different. In between the time of the competition and making the actual door, linear perspective had been invented, mostly by Brunelleschi.