couldn’t have matched himself. He felt the tiny weight of the paint on his lashes, he felt it smooth and harden his brows. “Gilding the lily,” she clucked, shaking her head, and then suddenly, as if she could not stop herself, she kissed him on both cheeks.
He bent his head to one side, thinking, When I get out of here the servant is going to have to carry my sword, and he is such an imbecile. It was as if the Cardinal preferred perfect idiots around him. Perhaps I am a perfect idiot, he was thinking. And then he bent forward and shaded his eyes with one hand. She had opened the blinds; that warm sun melted into the room; he felt the lightening all around him as surely as he saw it, and then she said:
“Darling child,” her hands clasping his shoulders.
That phrase, he thought again disgustedly.
“Rise, and look into the mirror. Is it not exactly as I promised you?” she whispered. “You are perfection. Men will fall at your feet.”
He stood gazing in silence.
He did not know who this creature was. Lovely? Oh, she was lovely, and innocent, so sheerly innocent, her large dark eyes gazing at him as if to accuse him of some sullying thought. Her bodice narrowed so perfectly to the waist, flaring up with its row after row of cream-colored ruffles and bows to that smooth white skin that was the illusion of a breast. Domenico would have been beside himself with jealousy, and the white hair, how it rendered this face fragile and delicate, remaking its features into those of this guileless young girl.
The white hair rose from its smooth seam at the forehead and the curls fell down on the gleaming silk of the long full sleeves.
She turned him around with both hands, standing on tiptoe as if to see some fine detail, and then dipping her index finger into the rouge pot she ran it along his lips.
“Ah!” It was more an explosion of breath as she backed away. “Now give me your leg,” she said, lifting the skirts with a rustle as she sat down. He placed his foot in her lap. She had gathered the stocking into a circle and smoothed it up, up, until she bound it with a garter at the knee.
“Yes, everything inside and out must be perfection,” she said as if reminding herself. She held the white leather slippers as if they were glass.
And now, finally finished, she stood back as though out of breath. “Signore…” She narrowed her eyes. “I swear to God Himself, that you could deceive even me.” And she continued to look at him as if she did not want him to move.
“You remember what I told you,” she said as he approached the hook where she had placed his coat. “You move slowly, you do not really move like a woman, for if you moved so fast and so much as a woman, the illusion would be broken, the illusion is a complete lie. You move more slowly than a human creature, and you keep your arms close to your body.”
He nodded. He had already thought it out, constructed it on a grand scale, having for days watched every woman that he could find so long and with such concentration he’d risked indiscretion.
“What is it you want?” She went to take his hands away from his old clothes. But he had drawn out the stiletto, and when she saw that, she stopped.
He was smiling at her as he slipped its icy blade right down the center of his breast.
She turned abruptly, and lifting a little pink rose from a vase, she held it up to the light so that he could see its hairy stem enclosed in a glass tube. This she inserted in that same place, beside the handle of the stiletto, so that only the little bloom showed.
And then she took his fingers, fondling them, as she slipped on the paste rings, and then she placed them on this small, fragrant, and plump little rose.
“Feel that softness,“ she whispered. “That is what you must appear to be.” And again her rough lips brushed his cheeks. She touched his lips as he smiled. “I am in love with you.” Her low voice rumbled from her chest, those neat small teeth revealing themselves in her own dry smile.
The carriage was moving slowly through the Via Veneto, halted every few seconds by the procession before it, the ruts from last night’s