A Life Apart (10 page)

“You smell like fritters,” Signora De Lellis says as she opens the door on a February afternoon.

“Aunt Erminia brought some at lunchtime,” I say.

“Uh! Madama Erminia!”

“Do you know her?”

“Everyone in town knows her.”

“How do you know that?”

“Up to two years ago I used to go out, to walk. Every day, way up to the Piazzale of Monte Berico, as far as the park, or down towards the Retrone. But play me something now.”

She would sit behind me after opening a score on the music stand.

“I don't need it,” I say, as I do each time.

And as each time she replies: “Yes you do. What does my son teach you? And besides I like turning the pages, they smell good.”

I would play on as her calm voice continued talking. She would suggest a
rallentando
or a different way to take a trill, she would ask me to repeat a
finale
or review the ways in which various concert pianists had approached a certain
presto
. I was astonished at how an adult could talk so much: Lucilla had accustomed me to inhabiting her swarms of words, but I had thought that a peculiarity of her own, the hallmark of a profligate child. At home one would only speak in order to inform, communicate or decide. At mealtimes, even in winter, it was easy to hear moorhens glide on the
waters of the Retrone as they sifted through surface weeds. My mother's silences had saturated the whole house, the river into which she had slipped, and ultimately all our lives. Speaking was an effort, it called for overcoming resistance not only from the air, but from our souls.

“Do not think of sorrows now, river child. This is a waltz: a dance meant for festivals to propitiate courtship and marriage. Your heart must follow the music, not the other way round.”

“So you really can read people's thoughts.”

“No – but I could smell river weeds.”

The lady in white became part of my life at once. School, meals and homework now were for me only interludes between visits. I would go three times each week, on the afternoons that Maestro De Lellis spent teaching at the
conservatoire
, to play and to listen to her. At a stroke she had replaced Lucilla, Aunt Erminia and even my mother. The little black dot in the corner of my eye turned into the white cloud of her light garments made for an everlasting summer.

My father did not know, and neither did Aunt Erminia, who often would not come back until late in the evening. Maddalena did know, but she kept the secret, albeit with much anxiety.

“What is it you do all afternoon with the old Signora? She's not all there, and can't play very well by now, the poor thing. Does she give you tea at least? What about Maestro De Lellis? Is he there too?”

“She's not that old, and she plays very well sometimes. I talk to her about school, about music – and I play too, you know. I go on the days when the Maestro is at the
conservatoire
. And anyway, what are you scared of, Maddalena?”

“You never know what people might have in mind,” she says sharply.

In actual fact, it was Signora De Lellis who did all the talking. She told me the story of each and every one of the pictures on the wall. The one from the Concorso Busoni, the competition she had
won at eighteen, which had taken her “around the world on the wings of a score”: Milan, Vienna, Berlin, Paris. And then New York. Next to it were pictures from all the concerts in that year, she standing radiant to the left of the piano, her hands open in front of her in a gesture of greeting but also of self-protection. The dress was always the same: white tulle, with a narrow waist and the skirt fanning out around her tiny, fairy-like feet.

“My parents tried to make me change it, because it would always look like the same concert in the press. But I said it brought me good luck and absolutely refused,” Signora De Lellis says as she strokes the dress in the photographs.

In New York, the dress was different: a white satin fabric sliding loosely over her body and highlighting the soft curve of her hips. Her hands too were in a different position, joined in front of her chest as if in prayer.

“I had to change my dress that time,” she says with some amusement. “I was pregnant already, and could no longer fasten the other one. Luckily my parents only realised when it was too late – or God knows what they would have forced me to do! I was under age at the time: it was a scandal. Uh! What a scandal! A ruined career, they all said. A wasted promise. It was the talk of the town, and the province, and eventually the national press. And they all wanted to know about the child's father – to hold him to his duties, they said. His duties! What petty, office-clerk language to speak of love and life. What they really wanted was to find him and throw him into jail. Back then, it was a crime to seduce – that was the word – an under-age girl. Unless the man was rich, of course, in which case, provided he married the girl, honour
was saved, or just about. Honour. My mother was so ashamed that she never set foot outside the house again, and she locked me up too.”

“Like my mother,” I say, interrupting.

“Not yet, darling, not yet. All in good time. It's a matter of understanding whether the truth will do good or just hurt. Truth is not as necessary as priests would have us believe, you know.”

But she liked to speak. So I learnt that her mother had not died “of a broken heart”, as everyone had said, but of alcoholism. The shame she felt when her daughter became pregnant might have worsened things, but she had been drinking for a long time, at least since “marrying up” and becoming the lady of the ancient villa that dominated the city from its high position, just as its owners had. They had been notaries, in the profession for generations, calculating keepers of the hatreds that set whole families and estates crumbling. And her father had died for the same reason: he had not killed himself for love, but crashed drunkenly into the glass cabinet in the salon. It was she who had found him, already dead at the bottom of the stairs: he had fallen and bled to death while looking for help. One could certainly not speak of such an improper thing. The suicide for love was a story she had invented: she the young, romantic pianist who had just become a mother and was now suddenly orphaned, rich and free. Free to go out, to play music and to create a legend that might have her pilloried in our small town, but gave tragic stature to her concerts abroad. “The sad angel” of the keyboard. In its craving for sorrowful narratives, the town soon reversed the sequence of events, and the pianist with the melancholy touch, orphaned and
then
seduced
and jilted, finally won its narrow provincial heart, erasing any memory of past shame.

“I returned to the New York stage two years later, with a light, brilliant Mozart programme – but even then the papers said that my interpretation revealed to the sensitive listener the sorrow at the source of my talent,” she says with amusement one day, showing me a photograph taken from the corner of the stage, in which the corolla of an almost nuptial white dress opens out around her as she bows in front of an enraptured audience.

I know I will never in my life play on a stage, and for once, treacherously, the thought stabs its way into my feelings.

“Success is like a river in spate,” the old Signora says. “It will burst into your life out of the blue, and when it's gone, you'll have to rebuild everything.”

I did not have the courage to ask any questions, but in her ceaseless flow of words she would let fall some hint or sign that would lead me back in time, back to when my mother was alive, back to things I had failed to notice even though I wore out my days in the effort to listen, to miss nothing about her life.

One day, during the following autumn, it became clear that she had known my mother.

She had asked me to play Mendelssohn's “Venetian Barcarolle”. I was surprised: it was a much easier piece than any I would usually bring to her. I know now that I was not playing it properly, having learnt it by ear from Aunt Erminia's exaggeratedly slow and sentimental version.

Signora De Lellis was sitting behind me.

“Is this the way you used to play it for your mother?” she says.

“Not for … for her. Not only for her. I played it because Aunt Erminia liked it. I don't know if my mother, if she … was listening to it, if she liked it at all. I … we had no way of knowing. She would not ask … she never did.”

“Neever.” She reverts to her cantillation at times, when she has something important to say.

“Never. She never spoke about us, about me or anything to do with me.” I am choosing the most neutral words, so as not to make her suspicious, so as to keep that open chink in her narration. I
want her to speak, and fear anything I say might wake her from the gentle rocking motion of her memories.

“She adored this ‘Barcarolle',” she says.

“Adored it?”

“When they can't speak, women write, remember. How long has it been?”

“A year,” I say, without her needing to be any clearer.

“One year, seven months and seventeen days.”

“Is that so?”

“It is.”

She said nothing more. She stood up from her armchair and walked once around the room, looking for something. Then she opened the first drawer in a polished briarwood wardrobe, and from a flat gilt box took a huge white fan that she started slowly waving in front of the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. The fan moved noiselessly, like angels' wings breezing past.

“It's made of ostrich feathers,” she says without looking at me, the fluttering of her hair and her dress enhancing the image of a cloud. It was easy to follow her luminous shadow as it moved around me. Speak, I wanted to say. Tell me. Tell me what you know. If I can play this piece to perfection she might tell me. I know how to keep secrets, I am kneaded from the very stuff of secrets, I myself am a monstrous family secret, a secret of nature, a universal secret. I mustn't get that note wrong, I mustn't I mustn't. If I play well she'll tell me, if I don't look at her she'll tell me, if I don't ask she'll tell me, if I make no mistakes she'll tell me. My fingers are flying, they know these notes, I have played them countless times. Perhaps I had understood my mother liked
them, perhaps that was the reason. Or was it for Aunt Erminia? Steady, you gruesome hairy monster. That's what Beatrice called me in class this morning. I can hear everything, I can see. They think being ugly also means being deaf and blind. She smelled like blood as she talked to Federica, like the fillet steak Maddalena beats with her tenderiser before cooking it – there, I've messed up now. Too slow this finale, too too slow. You stupid hairy monster, the old Signora has stopped speaking.

“Have you gone into your mother's room since?” she says in the end.

“No, I haven't.”

“Then it's time you did. Don't you think so?”

Maddalena did go into my mother's room after her death. That day, the wind was raging at the curtains of the French window leading to the little balcony from which she had fallen.

From the doorway I had seen Maddalena tidying away the traces of the police who had left everything thrown open, rummaged through, mixed up, scattered around. Stockings with books, ribbons with light bulbs, dresses with notebooks with perfumes. Most of those things I had never seen before. I knew none of her perfumes.

Maddalena began from the wall to the left of the door. She was placing books back onto the empty shelves, picking them up from the floor according to size: the tallest ones first, and gradually down to the smallest. She would dust them one by one, now and again stopping to dry her tears as they fell like raindrops onto the covers. If she spotted a mistake in the downward order she was building, she would move one book or another. Then she turned to the wardrobe. The clothes were all heaped on two small white armchairs. So it was that I saw the sky-blue wedding dress. The tight corset was held up by two slender satin ribbons. The skirt, hardly widening as it fell in the shape of a bellflower, was enriched by some deep pleats opening onto a white fabric embroidered with cornflowers, their fringed petals interweaving in a game of rainbow threads. Maddalena also retrieved from the floor a weightless white stole edged with tiny embroidered cornflowers.
The dress had been a present from the Carmelite nuns of Monte Berico.

“It's worth a fortune,” Aunt Erminia says one day, in the mood for talking about the wedding. She is speaking in a loud voice, so that my mother can hear from her little drawing-room. “Fully hand-stitched – every single thread. And for free. Your mother used to win people over just like that. She was like the Pied Piper. She would pass by, all dressed in white, and even flowers would bow on their stems.”

Suddenly Maddalena had turned towards me as I stood in the doorway, my feet as if cemented to the floor, and looked at me in despair. Then she had started scooping up great armfuls of things at random. Clothes, shoes, papers, notebooks, all stuffed at raging speed into drawers, crammed into the dresser, shoved under the bed. She would throw everything in, level the top with her hands, and close. The desk lamp ended up in the trunk, the pictures under the bedspread, the hair brushes, bedside clock and lingerie into the dresser drawers. Until everything was shut away, or put under.

“Why?” I ask.

“The dead are like shoes,” Maddalena says. “Each to his own, or they'll hurt too much.”

Before leaving the room she closed the balcony shutters and the window, drew the curtains and smoothed them with her hands so they would fall back down in regular folds.