Fallen Irrecoverable

I dislike attending balls. The pretended languor of the men who seem to have spent the last half of an hour in front of their mirrors practicing their jaded expressions repels me, and I cannot love the ladies who preen and flutter and sharpen their files of tongues on the bones of every one who passes before turning the buffing side to polish up friends and enemies alike. Not even our fair city's favorite, the masquerade, can captivate me; there the artifice so apparent and stifling in other gatherings of the like is only externalized and treated as a clever trick.

Solitude in the workshop or the library comforts me far more. There I am alone with no one to expect anything from me — no witty words of which I have none, no sympathy or empathy of which I cannot express, only the wood and the knife under my hands shaping themselves into gentle and undemanding shapes, beauty existing for beauty's sake and no one else's; silence, acceptance, peace.

Tonight we have been invited. I must go. Uncle makes jolly talk about showing off his two fine boys and Amadeo struts and skips, tossing here and there jesting words about how many girls will fall in love with each of us, the fine di Auditore three, but I do not say a word. Everyone sees Uncle, or at least his money, and many people see Amadeo and his brilliant colorful clothes and his brilliant colorful talk, but no one sees Dante and his frozen seawater eyes, his poorly wound voice, his opinions and any trace of personality, aye, his very soul hidden deep underground and forgotten.

Among fellow humans I am like a diver among tropical fish. They congregate and swirl round me, hoping for entertainment or food or simply something diverting, another one of them grown strange and ungainly, but I could better communicate with the rock below us all. But I go — what else is there? — and I drink a little, I talk a little, I try to be left alone.

It is when I look up from my knees and my empty hands under the table in the corner of the room, hoping Uncle and Amadeo will come and tell me it is time, finally, finally to go that I see him through a chance gap in the press of bodies.

His face is uncovered, as are those of everyone around him tonight, but his is the pale of marble, a consumptive or a corpse, with only the slightest tinge of living color to it — unless that is the warm light of the fires, merely a whispering trick. His hair is almost the same, but even more devoid of shade or hue; white, real white despite his age (surely no more than mine, his face is unlined and his back unbowed), pure as untrod places in the Antipodes of winter. God, my heart cries for me, what is this, what, this unworldly, unholy even, drawing toward I feel; what this strange assurance that I desire to be near this presence, what this mesmerization, what, what, what. His eyes are dark in the candlelight, dark like the earth in the peat bogs of the Britons where men and children give themselves up to the hungry fingers of the earth and sink into the bed of their mother, their final lover.

I too sink. I cannot breathe.

His movements are languid but graceful and meaningful every one, as powerful as the prowl of the wildcat in the long grass waiting to strike. My heart struggles against its drowning prison, spewing fire that burns my face red and my skin hot from within as it fights against suffocation. There in the flickering light dances another glint, just as white as the snow and crystal that surrrounds it: a sharpened diamond in the line of quartz chips, a dagger in his smile. I am sickened, headless, bellyless, weightless. His teeth are so sharp, like a spirit from a tale of the forests.

Understanding is beyond me. I should be moving, I should rise and come to him, I should ask him if he has a name, this it, this vision, but his voice seems to wrap cold arms around me and hold me fast to my seat. I dare not, I cannot. What I see cannot be real. What I feel.

In the space of a breath I am fallen, irrecoverable, in love.