The Bellini Card

95

Her arms moved out to him.

“I haven’t been afraid to love,” the contessa said. She slipped her hands around his chest.

Yashim looked down. “I think, madame, you do not want-”

“I want, Yashim. I really want.”

“I am a eunuch.”

She laughed softly. “A eunuch? Why not? I’m not waiting for a man, or a woman-or a eunuch, Yashim.” She smiled a secret half smile. “I’m waiting for a lover.”

But later, much later, he saw the tears run down her cheeks.

“Don’t stop,” she breathed softly. Her face gleamed in the candlelight.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I only-”

“Shhh.” She touched his head. She threw herself back in a slender arch, stabbing her fingers into the sheets, her wild golden hair flying across the pillow.

“Tell me,” she said later. “Tell me how it happened.”

Yashim was silent for a time. His glance moved around the room, seeing the louvered shutters against the windows, the patterned damask of the curtains around the bed, the paneled walls glimmering pearl gray, the dark spaces where the portraits hung.

“How is nothing,” he said slowly. “It is done as it is done. By the knife.”

He dreaded her next question: even now, after all these years, he had no complete answer. Men’s motives continued to surprise him. Women’s, too.

“Why?”

He shook his head. “Who knows? Whether a thing is done from duty, or desire.”

Their eyes met.

“Once,” she began, “I–I went to Istria. I had a son.”

She said it so abruptly that Yashim blinked.

“A son,” she repeated through gritted teeth.

Yashim was still.

“I was so young. So-so resolute.”

“Resolute?”

“The vow I made, Yashim.”

She shuddered and covered her face with her hands. “I gave him away,” she said tonelessly. “I wouldn’t come back to Venice with a baby. So I gave my baby away.”

Yashim said nothing: there was nothing he could say.

“I have spent my life trying to forget him.”

She drew up her face and stared at the wall, her fingers to her temples.

“And there is not a day I do not think about him.”

Her breath hissed between her teeth. “I have never told this to a soul. I wonder why I’m telling you?”

Invisible Yashim, the lover who leaves no mark.

“Perhaps I am telling you because I think you will not judge me.”

“No one can judge but God.”

She stood up, erect and graceful, and poured a glass of wine.

“He would be twenty-four,” she said. “A little peasant boy from Istria.”

“Would you-would you look for him?”

She shook her head. “I tried. Two years ago I went back to the convent where he was born. They understood, Yashim, those nuns. They understood, they prayed with me-but they couldn’t help. They said-they said that my son was a blessing to a woman who had lost her child.” She clenched her hands. “And I have become that woman, Yashim. Not by the will of God, but by my own. My own!”

She picked up the glass and drained it, and with a wild laugh she flung it into the fireplace.

“Why should I ever be afraid, Yashim? You can be frightened only when you have hope, and I have none.”

But later she curled up to him: “I want you to take me again, caro.”

But Yashim only shook his head and stroked her hair until she fell asleep.

Then he got up, silent and weary, and went to the room that had been prepared for him.