A Life Apart (11 page)

During my first two years at secondary school, I had sometimes tried to ask Maddalena what had become of Lucilla. The solitude of my endless mornings at the classroom desk in Contrà Riale wore down my ability to bear with my nostalgia for those huge tides of words with which, throughout primary school, Lucilla had pulled me into her world, and thanks to that, into the world at large.

I often caught myself thinking she might have been trying to look for me. I no longer knew anything of her: not where she might be, not why she was not writing or calling me. I imagined situations that would make it impossible for her to make contact: far away perhaps, perhaps on the other side of the world? Or in prison, even? Under no circumstance, though, did my doubts ever turn into resentment: I knew that her silence must have a reason, and that only my ignorance of things was keeping it from me.

One day, by chance, I learnt from Maddalena that Miss Albertina had found a teaching post outside town. After the end of primary school I had never seen her again, and yet the certainty that she too, like Lucilla and her mother, was now someone I could no longer meet quite unexpectedly, perhaps in Corso Palladio or Piazza Matteotti, gave me a feeling of unbearable loneliness.

“Will Lucilla at least come back?” I say to Maddalena one evening. All through the day I had been trying to find the courage
to ask, going into the kitchen on the pretext of a second cup of tea, a glass of water, an offer of help in baking the biscuits. I would have wanted to ask at suppertime, so as to stop Maddalena rushing off with the excuse of some errand, but Aunt Erminia had appeared that evening with stories, more and more stories to tell.

And so the question had come late, sharp with urgency and also with fear of the possible answer, hardly an instant after Maddalena had turned the lights out at bedtime. Sheltered by darkness.

“People do what they can. And sometimes a thousand years are like one day.”

“Sometimes when?” I say, undaunted.

“When people have to fight.”

Maddalena too is speaking sharply: she does not know how to be elusive, and if ever she has to be, finds it very hard. Perhaps she has no answer, or none that may reassure me.

The present evil was the indifference that surrounded my life. Aside from Maddalena, who could sense the unfairness of that isolation but had no way of breaking it, neither my father nor Aunt Erminia seemed to be aware of it. And so at times, with shocking suddenness, that imperviousness to feelings into which people accustomed to sorrow constrain themselves gave way to a bitter nostalgia for the merry sound of Lucilla's steps ringing out next to mine on the paving stones of Corso Palladio. And that longing would cut my breath short.

Then my enquiries grew even more awkward, questions asked knowing full well it was no use:

“Why won't Lucilla call me? She knows where to find me.” I
have stopped Maddalena halfway up the stairs, her arms full of freshly laundered linen.

“It is written: ‘then go out of that city and shake the dust off your feet',” Maddalena says after a long silence. “Sometimes you have to leave like that.”

“But I am not dust,” I say, protesting without realising.

“We all are in the end,” Maddalena says conclusively, turning around like she does when tears are too much even for her.

“I'd like the keys to her room,” I say to Maddalena one day.

“It's open,” she says from the kitchen, in a natural tone, as if she had been waiting every day for this moment to come.

I close the door behind me. No known smells to give me any sense of direction. My mother had no smell, or perhaps I had never been close enough to smell hers. In any case the room has been aired regularly. I open the curtains, the window, the balcony door. The world rushes at me. Smell of warm autumn rain. Faraway grapes, pomace, road dust, river weeds, feathers: they too are warm. I look down and see a moorhen: a doomed late brood, perhaps with no eggs laid. Smell of sweet pastry, lemon icing. My heart misses a beat – this is a memory: Lucilla's mother, the last cake she baked for me, before she left. The smell of books, old books, the Library, I walk past it every morning. The smell of Giardino Salvi, fine gravel and white swan feathers, of ring road, of motorway, of faraway snow on the mountains. I do not know my mother's smell.

I sit at her little dressing table, like she used to do. Women write, Signora De Lellis said. There is a mirror in front of me and I can see the door behind me. I realise how she would catch a glimpse of me whenever I glided quickly past her, ten times, a thousand times a day.

It is raining hard on the narrow stone balcony and on the river. The sound of a moorhen shaking water off her feathers.

Right-hand drawer. Black stocking, white stocking, white headscarf, light blue fountain pen, bone comb, hairpin, hairpin, hairpin, prayer book – prayer? Light blue stocking – light blue? Notebook. Blank. End of drawer.

Left-hand drawer. One blue skirt, fine pleated. Bunched up: Maddalena's fury. One flat black shoe. Smell of leather, also faint. Other flat black shoe. One blue notebook, an iris elegantly embossed on its hard cover. Writing.

First page:
Tiny pieces of sky are falling on me and cutting me all over.

six months five days three hours

Are these poems? I am reading my mother's diary with difficulty. She writes in a pale blue China ink faded by time into all
shades of grey, almost invisible in places. Her handwriting is an astonishingly spiky microscript, made of tiny vertical strokes with few horizontal ones: a light step wandering across the page. There are no corrections. My mother thought carefully before she wrote.

three years eleven months two days

Is Mostra Aunt Erminia? But why? Who is the liar? There are no dates. And why is my mother writing in such a difficult, cryptic way? Is she frightened?

six months six days six hours

Who speaks to my mother from the river at night? What are the references to time? I rush through the pages, trying to understand.

My little girl has returned to the house on the river. He tells stories into my silence and cannot see that it is nothing but waiting, and it won't come if I speak, even only one word, and neither will it come in silence, it won't come yet cannot but be awaited, because a promise was given to us and we believed in it, or perhaps we believed that someone had offered it especially to us and one must put oneself and one's life on hold and wait though nothing nothing seems to come and yet one would do anything to hasten its coming, anything, and one is frightened lest one might not hear its steps if the silence is less than perfect and the sacrifice less than total. For how can one accept that life will ravel shut just when it is most generously unfolding its promise?

five months two days

My age marks her days! I am her time-keeper. My mother did not write only poems. The mysterious writing speaks of my
being here. And why are the dates not in order? I read at random into the diary looking for words that might cross with a memory, afraid I will not be able to recognise anything.

four years two months twenty-nine days

My mother did see me, she wrote poems for me. I cannot stop reading and rereading these three verses that stroke my hair like her hearing me as I walked past her door, she with her back turned, facing this diary placed on the table.

three years two months thirty days

“He” is my father. Women write, Signora De Lellis had said. How much did my mother write? Why did she hate Aunt Erminia? What happened, what could I not see?

nine months

Is she delirious? And suddenly I understand the order. She first wrote in the right-hand pages of her little notebook, then when she got to the end started again on the left, and so anyone reading the diary through will lose track of time. I look for a day I may somehow be able to recall.

six years five months twenty days

My time at school brings a shift in the writing, that turns subtler, more and more reticent: a dissolution of thought consuming itself in vowels reduced to tiny dots, word endings almost invariably left to the imagination.

six years seven months one day

From this date onwards she has written in poetic form about Lucilla, Maddalena whom she calls Woman of Tears, the music I played, Aunt Erminia and a certain Lady of the Night.

seven years seven months two days

What woman spoke to my mother between the two rivers?

seven years seven months eleven days

Many poems lose themselves after the first few verses, turning into alliterative games from which a thought suddenly emerges. A leap on the edge of lucidity. Then she plunges back down, each time just a little lower than before. Further on, she reverts to prose, but becomes incoherent.

The dressing gown belt showing from the wardrobe, trapped. The pocked stonework of the little balcony. A white kitten with her left back leg missing. The eye of a man on a little girl.

Hailstones piercing holes into the new green leaves of the elm trees. Yellow corolla pierced with holes by the sun. Flowers, painted on the pillars of a church, from afar they look like teeth, they are laughing the tongue blood red.

Is it possible to leave one's life and stay alive?

eight years seven months

She has kept to the sequence of dates, though. It's as if all her lucidity were concentrated there.

The Lady of the Night has left. She too into the silence. He calls from the black river with a rustle of tiny mice grooming themselves on a raft of algae. What else is there to say. The sorrow of not seeing her again. Never again my little girl of the house on the river. Unseemly weeping of time regretting its own existence.

Tiny pieces of sky are falling on me and cutting me all over.

nine years

I am reading the last page over and over again. How is it possible that nothing of these feelings for me could pass through into my life? Why did I not understand? Why did no-one understand?