William Shakespeare — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 2

A café in a foreign capital. Grey light through tall windows; snow not yet fallen but promised. VALERIO sits alone at a marble table, a slender device of glass and silver open before him, its pale glow flickering like a captive moon. Behind the bar, framed in tarnished gilt, an antique mirror holds the room within its silver eye — and down its face runs a single hairline fracture, thin as a hair pulled taut, dividing every face it keeps.

BEPPO, the waiter, sets down a cup, wiping his hands upon his apron.

BEPPO: Another cup, signor? You have sat two hours with that little window of light and drunk but one. Your masters across the water must pay you well to stare at nothing.

VALERIO: They pay me, Beppo, to be everywhere and nowhere — my body here, my labour flung like a fisherman's net across the ocean's girdle, and what it catches, catches me. I speak to men I have not touched in a twelvemonth; their voices come to me through this small glass, thin as ghosts that knock but will not enter.

BEPPO: Ghosts that knock but will not enter — that is half of Purgatory, signor, and the other half is our coffee. [He goes.]

VALERIO (alone, regarding the mirror): What is a mirror but a promise kept — that what stands here shall there stand faithfully, no traitor to the face, no flatterer? And yet look — there, along its silver cheek, a fracture thin as thought, that was not made by hammer nor by fist, but by some patient hour no eye did mark, some frost that crept while all the house was still. I wonder — does it show me whole, or cloven? Is that same crack a wound within the glass, or but the shadow of a wound in me, that I, come newly to this foreign town, alone among a million lit windows, do carry cracked and call it merely travel? For what is distance but a hairline fracture drawn through the pane that shows me to myself — my hand upon the keys, my voice unheard, my supper eaten to an empty chair — and still the glass reports a man intact, when all the while some quiet rift runs through him?

Enter GRAZIANO, richly and carelessly dressed, a stranger's ease upon him as though the café were his own parlour.

GRAZIANO: Good morrow to the glass, and to the man who study it so hard he might be wooing it! Forgive a stranger's boldness — I could not pass and not remark how tenderly you frown upon that mirror, as a physician frowns upon a wound he loves too well to heal too quick.

VALERIO: You read men's faces as I read that fracture, sir — too nearly, and perhaps too well.

GRAZIANO: Nay, I read mirrors, sir, which is a rarer trade. This one, I'll wager, is older than the roof that shelters it — Venetian glass, or near enough, brought west by some poor merchant fled from debt, and sold for less than half its silver's worth. I know its history as I know my own poor pockets — empty, and full of tales.

VALERIO: You know its history?

GRAZIANO: I know a man who knows it — which in this city is the selfsame thing. Such glass, once cracked, is said to hold within its fault the last true face it kept before the breaking — as though the mirror, dying, chose to remember one guest above the rest. [Aside.] And I have use for men who half-believe such tales, and coin enough to make the whole seem true.

VALERIO: A pretty fiction.

GRAZIANO: Fictions are the only coin that never counterfeits, signor, for all men know they're false and spend them still. But come — you sit here daily, do you not, speaking to lights that answer from afar? A man so friendless in a foreign spire might welcome company that costs him nothing —

VALERIO: Nothing, you say?

GRAZIANO: Why, next to nothing. A cup, a tale, an afternoon's good word. [Aside.] And later, when the crack has worked its will, a debt he'll pay and never know he owes.

BEPPO (from the bar, muttering): There's small choice in rotten apples, and less choice yet in gentlemen who smile before they've dined.

VALERIO: I thank you for your tale, sir, and your company — though I have learned, in glass as well as men, that what seems whole may hide the truer flaw, and what seems flawed may be the truer glass.

GRAZIANO: Then let us drink to flaws, and to their mending —
For fortunes crack, sir, ere they find their ending.

So the toast hung a moment in the air, and faded with it. Enter no one, for a moment — only the grey light thickening at the window, and the small glass upon the table dimming as VALERIO's hand withdraws from it. GRAZIANO has drawn a chair uninvited, and sits now with the ease of a man who has never once been refused.

GRAZIANO: You'll find, signor, the tale grows richer told a second time. Shall I proceed? The merchant — mark this well — did leave a wife behind him in the glass's homeland, and some say her face is that which the fracture keeps, hoarded like a miser's coin beneath the silver skin —

VALERIO: You said before it was the last face kept. Now it is a wife's, and fixed forever. Which tale, sir, would you have me carry home?

GRAZIANO [Aside.]: He counts my fictions as a clerk counts pence — this one will not spend easy. [To VALERIO.] Why, both, good sir — for tales, like debts, may be renewed at interest, and grow the truer for the telling twice.

VALERIO: A physician frowns, you said, upon a wound he loves too well to heal too quick. I think, sir, you diagnose more wounds than you would cure, and love them better for the fee they bring.

GRAZIANO [starting, then recovering with a bow]: You wrong a stranger's kindness —

VALERIO: Do I? Then let me test that kindness with a question. What debt, sir, do you speak of to yourself, when you suppose I cannot hear the asking? For twice now you have murmured to the air some reckoning I was not meant to catch — as men do talk to ledgers, not to friends.

BEPPO (returning with the pot, pretending business at the next table): Aye, signor, mark that — for I have poured this trade fresh coffee twenty years, and know a cozener's thirst from a true man's: the one drinks to be seen drinking, the other drinks because he's dry. [He sets down the pot with unnecessary force.] This gentleman has ordered nothing yet, and talked the longest.

GRAZIANO: The waiter grows familiar.

BEPPO: The waiter grows old, signor, which is a rarer trick in this trade than growing rich, and I have watched enough smooth tongues lap cream from strangers' cups to know the taste of it upon my floor.

GRAZIANO [the ease cracking, thin as the glass itself]: I meant no more than an idle tale to pass a grey man's grey afternoon —
VALERIO: And yet the tale was aimed, sir, like an arrow feathered close and fitted to the bow, not loosed at random into empty air. You'd have me believe the mirror keeps a face, and pay, in time, to learn whose face it keeps — is that not so? Speak plain, or else be gone.

A silence. GRAZIANO rises; the stranger's ease has thinned to something poorer, half a shrug, half a confession he will not fully make.

GRAZIANO: You are too nice a scholar for my trade, signor. I had thought a man so far from home, so friendless in a foreign spire, so hungry for a voice that is not glass, would buy a fiction cheap and never weigh the coin. I see I am mistaken in my mark. [He bows, retreating toward the door.] Yet mark you this, before I go — the fracture in that glass is no less real for all my lies about it; some crack indeed runs through it, made by frost or time or some old grief the room itself forgets. I lied about its keeping, not its being. Good day.

[Exit GRAZIANO.]

BEPPO: There goes a man who'd sell you back your own shadow and swear he'd fed it well.

VALERIO (alone once more, the small glass before him gone dark, the mirror behind the bar catching what light remains): So — the crack was true, though the teller false; and I, that thought myself the only broken thing in this bright room of strangers' voices, find the glass itself no better mended than my heart, and no worse either. Perhaps that is the comfort — not that the fracture heals, but that it's honest, running plain for any eye to find, while I had thought my own concealed, and carried it like a coin sewn into a hem, unspent, unseen, and yet still weighing there.

He rises, leaves coin upon the marble, and pauses at the door, looking back once at the mirror's fractured face.

VALERIO: I came a stranger to this glass and town,
And leave no stranger — for the crack is shown:
Not mended quite, nor wholly to be mourned —
A truth, once hidden, is a truth returned.

[He exits. BEPPO alone, wiping the marble table, glances up at the mirror, sighs, and returns to his work as the grey light deepens toward the promised snow.]