The Blind Contessa's New Machine Read Free

of yellow slices turned lazily on its surface. There, she caught sight of the young man again. The girl in the lavender dress was leading him to the dance floor by the hand.
    Forgetting her gown for the moment, Carolina ducked under the heavy folds of cloth that covered the table. She emerged beside Renato, an ancient servant with a nose like a piece of melted marzipan who, she had also recently discovered, had the talent of twisting handfuls of clover into flowered crowns.
    “Renato,” she demanded, pointing. “Who is that, being led around like a bad dog?”
    Renato followed the line of her little finger. Then he laughed with the gentle exasperation grown people usually reserved for a child who couldn’t be expected to know better.
    “That’s young Turri,” he told her.

    The small dam her father had built to stem the original river stood on the far side of Carolina’s lake. Just beyond the dam, the river became a clear rocky creek that ducked into the forest and flowed on to Turri’s land, emerging to become the flashing ribbon at the foot of the Turris’ back garden. The Turri home itself sat just out of sight over the next hill, facing the same dusty gold road as her father’s house.
    This made Turri one of Carolina’s closest neighbors, and after their first meeting she recognized him from time to time on the road as he went by. Apart from the lake, her favorite place was an alcove window on the second floor of her father’s house, where she was a close observer of the neighborhood traffic. Each figure that passed on the road had a role in a complicated ongoing drama she constructed from whatever details she could glean about them on any given day. Turri was a favorite character in these scenes. In stark contrast to the endless parade of placid old women carrying their unvarying baskets of lemons and eggs, he gawked at the clouds and stumbled over rocks. He chased flying things with his hat. He came to abrupt halts for no reason at all. In addition, he was likely to be in possession of any number of evocative props: a pair of brown mice in a wire cage; a thick candle that sparked and steamed, but didn’t go out in the rain; a basket of feathers that the wind caught and scattered just as he disappeared over the rise, giving the effect that some enchantment had transformed him into the flyaway plumes.
    But they didn’t speak again until Carolina was ten, when she discovered him standing in the hard sun on the side of that same road, glaring down at what seemed to be a tangle of women’s dresses and sticks, embellished here and there by lengths of the same twine she’d seen the gardener use to tie sweet peas to their leafy towers.
    Carolina had been engaged that day in her own explorations. It had recently come to her attention that many of the things adults had told her about the world were not true. Her mother was rarely tired, as she claimed: it was just that she preferred spending her days in her own rooms to speaking with Carolina or her father. This realization led Carolina to begin testing other claims. She unleashed an entire stream of overheard curses at a stand of undeserving daffodils and discovered that her tongue did not, in fact, turn black. She slept with a coin her father had given her under her pillow for a week, then carried it carefully to the lake and threw it in, but a swan boat did not emerge from the rings inside of rings that spread on the dark water, as she had wished.
    As a result, Carolina had decided to test the limits of her more immediate surroundings. She knew that the road led over the hill to the Turri villa, which she had passed a hundred times. But in the opposite direction, the path forked. One branch led to the small town she sometimes visited with her mother to buy books or cloth. The other turned into her father’s forest, but their carriage had never gone down it in Carolina’s memory. From the carriage window, she could only catch a short glimpse of treetops