Casimira presses vermin beneath her porcelain and chitin molds, Orlande presses them beneath red yarn, and out they go into the city together, new and raw and empty as a saucepan. It is an admirable symmetry.

He willed her to cry out, pushing harder, to hurt her, even, if she would only say his name, or moan, anything. But she did not, and he could not make her.

for it was a grid, a crooked, broken grid, angling over her skin, intersections and alleys and monuments labeled in the same miniature script that covered their hallway. He could not read the names, but he was sure they would be in Latin, Lucia’s clear and lucid favored tongue, and the only appropriate dialect for mapmaking, as well Ludovico knew.

Thus they lived, intractable, silent beasts, yet adored of each other.

Ludo wept when he saw it, falling to his knees beside her. From then on he visited St. Peter’s no longer, but held his own, silent mass in the empty, illuminated hall, kissing the Spaniard’s words like rosary beads. He forgave her the chair, of course, and she forgave him his saint, having satisfied herself of Isidore’s sanctity with her own

She burned all the furniture in that hall: the telephone table and four Japanese paper lamps, a year’s worth of ignored mail, and a reading chair Ludovico had especially loved. Without eating or sleeping for days upon nights, she covered the bare, vaguely yellowish walls with the entire text of the Etymologiae, in a tiny, wild script he had never

Their happiness was the kind which is fashioned of the comfortable disorder of sauvignon bottles and coffee cups in the sink, paperback thrillers with split spines on the nightstand, bathrobes hung haphazard on high-backed, brocade-seated chairs, shutters left open all night, and the hallway ever in need of new paint.

She did not hear the tiger-books, but she smelled the trees of India and the terror of cuttlefish in her finger bowls full of black and violet and brown, no less vivid than oil paint.

For that was Lucia—his chimera, his composite beast, his snarling, biting, kissing thing.