This excerpt is taken from Chapter Eight in The Innamorati when Erminia finds herself in the piazza, watching a performance of the Commedia troupe, the Libertini. She is stunned by the magic of Anna Forseti's masks. And their power incite in her the longing to be fully the fantastic creature that she is, threatening to undo the vow of ten years of silence made to Orpheus, as a way of retrieving the voices of her sisters won by Orpheus in a match. But powerful creatures like Sirens can not hide for long behind a mask and in this intersection of theater, poetry, song, and fantastic masks, Erminia returns to herself with terrible consequences.
...Erminia tensed, as her foster brother Nicolo sidled next to her in the crowd, his breath hot in her ear. He pinched her hard, his rough nails trying to pierce her skin.
Tears welled in her eyes and bled into the tiny spaces between her skin and the rough surface of her mask. Erminia turned to face him and he was leering at her as if glad to see her tears. How small he is, she thought, and pathetic, like a mangy cur. What chance has he to know the ecstasy of sublime love? How easy it would be to bestow that blessing and that curse upon him.
Her briny tears weakened the outer shell of her mask andthe dirty skin split open in a jagged line from her breastbone to her cheek. She inhaled, parting her lips and the skin tore over her mouth, her nose, and her forehead, the radiance of her white skin blistering through the dissolving husk. Wind blew the tangled hair out of her face, and her eyes blazed sapphire.
Terror leapt into his face. He struggled to turn away but she grabbed him by the bosom of his shirt, and held him. Her eyes bore into the shallow well of his heart. Now will I sing for you! she thought, drunk with the dust of the masks' magic.
Sound boiled in her throat, filled the cavern of her mouth, pressed against her teeth. She tilted her head back and released one long note in a thin stream of blue light. Somewhere between the tines of her back¬bone she mourned her broken silence, her broken vow. But the flowing sound scraped the hard crust of loneliness from her skin like the sea tearing the mussels from the rocks.
Once freed, Erminia could no more swallow her voice into silence than she could stop the arms of the moon from pulling the sea every night to the shore. It had been wrong to hide it. Silence was a curse laid on a curse.
Dimly, Erminia heard other sounds swirling about the edges of her song. Human sounds. Swearing, shouting, men roaring, women screaming. A child bawled for its mother and a man called out the name of Isabella. But those sounds meant nothing. They were the ordinary noises from the mouths of mortals. But the siren's song was created from the sea that gave birth to Venus. It was a gift and a curse, the howl of the inferno and the sweet descant of paradisio. Her voice was so pure that all, even the masks, must bow before its authority and listen. Her song coiled in the ears, blinded the eyes, filled the nostrils. It crashed over mortals like sea spray, drowning them in their own tears.
Erminia felt the surge of panic around her as the crowd, unable to flee her song, huddled beneath its power. She took pity on their weakness and dampened its razored edges. The light of her voice changed, softening from a white-hot blaze into the muted green of the deep sea, as she gathered their cries and transformed them into a hard shell. She let her song cover the villagers like a mask and shelter them from the madness brought on by hearing her voice.
She closed her eyes as she sang. Her body stretched thin and high, swaying like sea grass beneath the rising tide. She filled every corner of the village with her voice, flooded it with her passion, covered the cold, rumpled beds, the empty cradles, even the straw still warm from the couple who had stolen away. She laid her voice over the last shouted curses, the last pleas for mercy, the last cries for love until all was drowned in the depths of her watery song. Fatigue touched her. The greening sound of her voice began to falter, the ribbon of music to fade. When she opened her eyes, she saw the last notes trapped in the flowers of the jacaranda tree. A wind freed them and carried them in a handful of leaves out to the sea. Her limbs felt heavy as sea-sodden wood. She gazed at her arms gleaming white in the moonlight and then lifted her head to look around her. Slowly, she raised a hand to cover her mouth.
Her song had transformed the village into a world of brittle coral. The high-walled houses, even the dour face of the church, had been covered with the terraced bark of coral cliffs. Slender arms of coral reached out into the night from the lintels of the shops and branched from the covered archways of the street. The village appeared in the moonlight as though the ocean had receded, revealing this strange configuration from its hidden floor.
The villagers too had been encased by coral. A mother, her features masked by the pocked surface of a grey coral, clutched coral children to the hardness of her coral skirts. Pietro's pregnant wife lay on the ground, her bone-white form curved around her belly, her hair a carpet of mussels over her back. Erminia moved among them, touching them in wonder. Bleached white faces with eyes of abalone stared back at her. A child's face was lavender, an old woman's teeth black and grey.
Erminia approached the stage and looked up at the actors. Anguish filled her at the sight of their coral faces, their arms held up to express themselves one last time before her song encased them in silence.
Only the masks remained untouched by the transformation. They stood out in stark contrast, a black satiny skin against bleached faces. A narrow band of gold light shimmered along the leathery edge. Arlecchino stared at Erminia, his coral lips parted to speak, his hand held up to her. The patched diamonds of his costume were mimicked in pink and green coral. But in the dark holes of the mask his eyes were a lifeless grey.
What have I done? Errninia thought as she turned slowly in the quiet village. No wind rustled the coral leaves of the jacaranda tree. She touched her face and felt the rough skin. She looked at her hands, brown and chafed, the nails dirty. What have I done, she thought bitterly, but lay one curse against another?
As great as the joy she had felt in singing was the cyclone of despair that now claimed her. She sat down amid the coral statues, her knees drawn up to her chest, her arms wrapped around her legs. Orpheus had won again. That head of his was laughing and she could almost hear the mocking sound of it in the scraping of the waves. Laying her head on her knees, she wept silently.
Notes From De Sirenibus Part I, Notes From De Sirenibus Part II, Notes From De Sirenibus Part III, Notes From De Sirenibus Part IV
Excerpts From The Innamorati: Eminia the Siren I, Erminia's Song II, Erminia and Two Poets III, Erminia's Embrace IV
Photo by Spanish photographer Cristina Otero
