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.”“Turri?” Pietro said broadly, as if helping a friend to set up the punch line of a well known joke.“They have been friends since she was a child,” Carolina’s mother added quickly.“So have I!” Pietro said, soldiering through the joke himself since nobody else had chimed in.“He filled the river with soap bubbles when we were boys.All the reeds were choked with foam.I saw a red finch fly off with a bit hanging from his beak, just like an old man with a beard.”He paused, listening for laughter, and seemed surprised, as he so often did, to find that the crowd he had been speaking to had dwindled again to just the two women who had been in the room with him when he began.When neither Carolina nor her mother spoke, his face clouded.Then an explanation seemed to come to him.He strode quickly through the plants, took Carolina’s hand, and kissed it.“When will you take me to your lake?” he asked.Because she could not imagine this, Carolina did not answer.After a moment, Pietro smiled indulgently.“That’s all right,” he said.“It is better if sweethearts keep some secrets.”The following weekend, as a small choir of violins wavered in unison about some great disappointment in their distant past, Pietro kissed her for the first time.They stood in the shelter of a grotto below the verandah of the Conti house.Above them, all their neighbors spun in circles under torches that burned at the borders of the makeshift dance floor.His kiss was gentle, but urgent.When he released her, she dropped her head onto his chest, her face hot and her breath fast.No one had ever kissed her before, and nothing she had heard or seen had prepared her for the insistent warmth that spread through her limbs.He laughed, stroking her thick hair.Carolina held fistfuls of his jacket in both hands, waiting for the heat to pass.Instead, it grew stronger, singing louder than the violins.She lifted her face.“Again,” she said.A month later, as August’s last blossoms began to fade, Pietro dropped to one knee as her father watched from his post by the fireplace’s empty grate and her mother half rose from the couch where she lay.He extracted a small piece of crumpled paper from his pocket and unwrapped it to reveal his mother’s diamond ring, which glittered like a piece of ice melted down to almost nothing by the morning sun.Refusing him was impossible.Carolina was never sure when the blindness had first set in.Looking back through the dim and crowded closets of her mind, she found half a dozen days, spread over a decade: the time when, as a child, she had rubbed her eyes so hard that the world had been dappled for hours with red and green shadows; the way that everyone else seemed to get used to the dark long before her eyes could pick shapes out; a day when she hit her head falling out of a tree and woke to find the whole world unmoored, turning as gently as a leaf might turn on the surface of her lake.Every trick her eyes had ever played came back to her: birds that proved to be only flowers blooming on a branch; flowers that suddenly awoke, spread their wings, and proved themselves birds.But it was the autumn after Pietro’s proposal, when she was eighteen years old, that the blindness became undeniable.Later she realized that it must have begun at the borders of her vision and worked its way in like twilight: so slowly that no change was noticeable from one moment to the next, but so steadily that by the time she recognized evening setting in, true night seemed to be only a breath away.As the trees released their leaves, she grew uneasy.She could hear the ringing splash of a loon landing on the lake, but the corner of her eye wouldn’t catch its motion.Squirrels teased her from the trees, but by the time she turned her head to see them, they had vanished.When that season’s last leaves sank to the bottom of the lake, leaving the forest bare, Carolina gazed across the black water at the line of seven trees that her father had allowed to stand when he first cleared the land: a generous old willow, a wild apple, a junk tree with smooth gray bark, an oak, a sapling and a pair of slim birch rooted like twins or lovers, so close that their branches rattled together in the wind.Counting them all had been a favorite game when she was a child, and was still a comfort as she grew.But now her vision could not take them all in.She could see the willow, or the twins: never both in the same glance.For the first time, she understood that she was going blind.The realization came to her with all the force of a conversion.Like a new believer, she could never see the world the same way again, whether she kept her faith or lost it.But the shape of the new world, the tempo of its liturgy, the properties of its angels and demons, was still a mystery.For most of the winter, Carolina tested her blindness.For instance: how fast did it move? Perhaps, having taken all her life to reach this point, it might take another twenty years to claim another fraction of her sight.With scientific precision that would have made Turri proud, she sketched the trees on the opposite bank and marked off what she could see when she faced them dead on from the top step of her house.In November she could take in five trees, bounded by the willow and the sapling.By the New Year, the sapling had vanished.When darkness began to swallow up the willow as well, she tried to tell her mother and father.When the willow was extinguished, she told Pietro.By this time, Pietro had learned enough about her habits to recognize that she was not like the other young ladies of his acquaintance, and had taken to calling her “my stranger
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