The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O'Farrell

Author:Maggie O'Farrell [O'Farrell, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

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During her days at the delizia, nothing is asked of her; at night, however, a great deal is expected. She has to give and surrender herself, to hand over her being to another, to grant him access and ingress, each night, every night. He is like a man possessed, a man on a quest: to conceive an heir, to ensure the continuation of his line. He goes at the task in the same way he approaches everything, with determined concentration and focus.

He becomes, at night, in her chamber, someone quite other. He sheds the skin of the Duke—it drops off him, she believes, along with the clothes he tosses aside as he crosses the floor between doorway and bed. He likes to rip back the sheets and look at her. This she finds hard to bear—the sudden shock of night air meeting her bare skin. She must not squirm with the embarrassment, must not hide herself or shut her eyes: he doesn’t like to see her do this. He is no longer Alfonso, anyway, no longer the man who sat with her at the long table over dinner. He has changed, shifted his shape, discarded that guise. He is a creature from myth, all skin and sinew and shocking swathes of hair; he is a river god, a water monster, crawled up from the Po river that meanders along the valley floor, assuming human shape to make his way to her chamber, to her bed, sliding himself between her bedlinen, and seizing her with his webbed fingers, rubbing his scaled skin against hers, subduing her with strength gained in aquatic depths, in struggles with twisting currents, the hidden gills in his neck pulsing and pulsing, drawing in the alien air of the room.

At this point, she is permitted to shut her eyes, while he enters a state that is with her, yet not. He is there, unmistakably, overwhelmingly. And yet he is elsewhere. He is transported, his face unrecognisable, in those moments when she forgets and opens her eyes and sees the grotesque mask above her: a face of fury, of intent, of unslakable need. She is quite forgotten, she thinks. All she has to do now is wait, count down the moments. The river god is enacting his nightly ritual, seeking that mysterious and necessary relief, pursuing his urgent need for human congress, pushing and pushing, as if to make his mark within her, his skin expressing droplets of river water, which drip down on to her, as if he contains the silty depths within him, as if all he seeks is to release them into her, so that she, too, might become, like him, a water creature, a mer-girl.

She has learnt to breathe, to request her muscles not to resist, to press herself further into the mattress to find a small amount of space for herself, not to flinch at the touch of his hand or other parts of his body. She has found that Isabella

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