A Life Apart (13 page)

“What about me?” I ask the following day, at the end of a Schumann
Lied
that I have played with my whole soul hanging from Signora De Lellis's silent lips. She was moving around the room, rearranging a portrait on the wall or a score on a shelf, without pausing.

When her narration had ended the previous evening, the kitchen was already dark and Maestro De Lellis, surprised to find the lights turned off when he returned from the
conservatoire
, had looked for us, first in the salon, then in the other rooms, and only finally in the kitchen. We had not heard him, and I was forced to make up some excuse for him – and above all, back home, for Maddalena.

She stopped and looked at me with a solemn expression on her face.

Then she sat on the sofa, spreading her white dress out around her.

“It's frightfully simple: when you were born, your mother fell ill with depression. It happens to most women: nothing new. The hormones at work for nine months have worn themselves out to build life cell by cell, tissue by tissue, and when the work is done they let go. Then it gets better. There usually is a husband who knows what to do at that time, or some grandparents. Your mother had neither. And nor did I – but I did have my music. I always say to Aliberto that he has another mother, as well as me. Anyway,
Erminia could not believe her luck when she was able to regain her place close to your father because your mother was unwell. Your grandparents found your mother's unhappiness too much to bear: they died one after the other – of course they were also quite old. But before dying, they spent days and weeks insulting your father.”

“Why?”

“Because your mother had been a happy girl, and now she no longer was.”

“What about me?”

“Fear makes people selfish and blind and deaf. No-one could really see you.”

“Because I'm ugly.”

She made a gesture of annoyance: “You are special, my child. So special that your looks would not have played such a huge part in a different environment. Your father is a doctor. Many things can be done!”

I could not understand, and she saw that.

“I mean little operations, cures to make one better, as everyone does, you know, everyone. And then, enough! We are on earth all of three days, and spend them building hells for each other with all this nonsense about looks and appearances.”

She took a deep breath.

“They hid you away. And they hid your mother away too. In a town like ours, these things meant shame and guilt. Things that must be buried away unconfessed. But now, play me some Bach. I need structure.”

She stood up and opened the window. The wind wafted in a faraway perfume of incense.

“They are cleaning up at the Basilica of the Virgin, with the doors open,” Signora De Lellis says, inhaling deeply again. “It's airless down here.”

“What guilt?” I ask.

“They said your mother had discovered a relationship between Erminia and her brother. It was not true, but Erminia did nothing to refute the rumours. She was playing, she liked them to believe it. They said your mother had gone mad because of that, and also that you were Erminia's daughter, and that your mother's pregnancy had been a cover-up. They said she was offered money, that she accepted because of her great poverty, and then lost her mind. It was crazy, of course, completely crazy. I know what people are capable of in this town – oh, I do know! But I had my music. That's why I used to take Aliberto on tour with me. When, as a tiny baby, he could not sleep, I would place him in his basket on the piano lid: after a few bars he was gone. And when I came back, I came with success. Success is a very powerful instant bleach: everything is white and clean again.”

“In the diary, my father is ‘the liar',” I say as I softly work my way through one of the “English Suites”.

“Lies, hypocrisies, evil talk. The Ten Commandments should be rewritten so as to order people ten times over to hold their tongues, rather than worrying so much about sex and private property. Your father had not told your grandparents the truth. There had in fact been some cases, some problems in his family. It's one of the oldest families in town, and they had intermarried for centuries – because of money, of course – and they gave birth to all sorts of creatures, all sorts. Especially half-wits, as they used
to be called. Your grandparents would never have allowed him to marry your mother, never. He was scared he would lose her. She was told at the hospital: a secret like a hairball she had to swallow. Offered by Madama Erminia.

“But Aunt Erminia seems to be fond of me.”

“Yes, she does. But where is she now? What is she doing for you? You were her audience, the excuse she needed to remain in your house, next to him. Erminia has given her whole self up to her relentless fire. She is not well, Rebecca.”

“What about my father?”

“Your father has a good heart, but is like a King Charles spaniel puppy finding himself by mistake in a litter of wolves. He cannot behave as one of his own kind, he cannot follow the ways of the wolves. Inadequate. A victim.”

She had spoken with her back to the window, the breeze lifting her fine hair.

I had finished playing a while earlier and was looking at her.

“How do you know all this?” I ask in the end.

“Your mother,” she says softly. “Night after night, month after month, year after year.”

“But then she wasn't …”

“Mad? Oh, yes, she was – in the end she was. Anyone would go mad in her situation, anyone. But in her words it was possible to distinguish truth, to tell it apart from fantasy and from the hypocrisies that surrounded her. It takes patience – and I do have patience. Besides, I am an expert in hypocrisies.”

After my birth, my mother's life had tilted onto a slanted plane. She had not even been able to fight. No-one had taken hold of her hand from above or thrown her a line. Because of selfishness, impossibilities, inadequacy. In her deformed inner world, my father was the liar whose mannered and powerless love only resulted in locking her inside the circle of her own derangement, and he was therefore punished with silence.

Perhaps it had only started as a provocation, a game that had then imprisoned the player without a knight in shining armour to challenge and break the spell. My father had stayed close to her, but the words struggling to find their way into my mother's mind every evening had failed to touch her heart. What use the world of others when our own feelings have forsaken us, and all that is left is the injury of deception suffered? Deception inflicted by one who had declared measureless passion but then had stopped short in the face of our pain, by life that had promised and then recanted, by the God we had implored so much only to find him cloaked in indifference.

My mother had confused sorrow with rancour, and had been unable to see her own weakness mirrored in my father's uncertain and respectful tact.

And he had let it happen.

“The young Signora was like the ducks on Lake Fimon, back when hunting was allowed up there,” Maddalena says, still holding
my mother's diary in her hands after reading it through. I had shown it to her because I knew she had loved my mother.

“How so?”

“As they sifted through the water weeds, they would swallow the hunters' birdshot and get lead poisoning. So they would lose their sense of direction and start swimming around in circles. They would float, of course, but they were just swimming themselves out. Till they got so exhausted that they dropped and drowned.”

In the end my father also read my mother's diary. We never spoke of it. I never showed it to Aunt Erminia.

The following summer saw their separation. He no longer played with her in the evening and would not be found at home at the expected time, having gone out for a visit or coming back too late. Often, at mealtimes, Aunt Erminia's conversation went unanswered, and after a while she almost completely stopped coming to supper. One evening she announced that she was returning to her own apartment in Piazza Castello. My father replied in a neutral tone that she should do what she thought was best. She emptied out her room, and little by little the house lost the memory of her perfumes. Only one, a rather heady passion flower fragrance with sandalwood notes, lingered on: it seemed denser, more persistent than the others, but that, Maddalena explained to me, was because Aunt Erminia had broken the bottle on the stairs.

I spent much time in my mother's room. With the balcony door wide open and the curtains blowing in the breeze, I opened drawers, put her clothes in order, cleaned and sorted through her collection of little angels. I discovered that she had been collecting little angels since her childhood: praying angels only, their hands joined together or holding little missals. Under her bed and among her clothes I found seven tin boxes full of them. She was not very methodical: in some cases she had written an angel's provenance on its base or inside the folds of its garment, in others there was a
tiny scrap of paper rolled up like a parchment and inscribed, in her minute sky-blue handwriting, with the date, the angel's provenance, and sometimes a verse or a prayer as well, and it was hard to tell whether they were her own words or passages copied from the Bible or some other book.

There were angels made of wood, of glazed earthenware, of glass. One was made from dried corn leaves, and its wings looked like silkworm grids. One had wings made from real, white bird feathers. A South American one looked like a sturdy child with a swarthy, square face: it was easier to imagine him shouldering loads in a coal mine than singing hymns in heaven around God's throne. Most of the angels wore white or sky-blue garments. My mother was probably not yet unwell when she had placed them in the boxes: they were archived in good order, their wings well spread around their bodies, their haloes, when present, forming neat circles around their heads. As I looked at them, I could smell some scent, but it was not my mother's. Some of the angels were made of scented wood: one was carved in camphor wood, another in white pine. I lined them up on her dressing table and counted seventy-nine. Redoubled by the mirror and by the polished surface of the dresser, they were a heavenly host. I decided that they had been locked up far too long.

I was proceeding slowly because I had no wish to ever finish. I feared the moment when there would be nothing left to discover. This was so important to me that on some days I would not go into the room, and found fulfilment in the simple act of waiting. Sometimes I would content myself with taking her little armchair out on the balcony and just sitting there, reading a book.

One day I found in her chest of drawers a box covered in white fabric with tiny blue polka dots. When I opened it, a strong perfume of lavender and vanilla rushed at me. The box contained a comb, a hairbrush, some hair slides, some blue and charcoal eye pencils and a rectangular bottle almost full of perfume: a lavender essence with an aristocratic vanilla base note, as explained by the words on the back. It was a very fine object, with an unusual fabric label.

“Yes, it is her perfume,” my father says when I ask him, a few hours later. He was standing motionless on the stairs, still holding his briefcase and staring at the perfume bottle as he spoke. “She always wore it. The day you were born the whole delivery room was flooded with it: she said that the first smell you would know should not be that of disinfectants and medicines, but the scent of beauty. I have not smelled it since that day.”

He looks at me with uncertainty: “We had some sent each month by a craftsman perfumer from Milan – we had discovered it together during one of our first journeys. For a long time I forgot to cancel the order, and they kept sending it.”

“Do you still have it?”

“It's in my room, I think.”

“May I have it?”

“Yes, you may.”

“There are no photographs,” I say to Maddalena.

I had succeeded in making my explorations last through the whole winter. I had opened each and every drawer and box, moved furniture and rugs, cleaned and tidied the room, adjusted here and there the order in which objects had been arranged.

When I encountered the folder of sketches and notes that my mother had assembled while renewing the palazzo in which I lived, I spent more than a month looking through it. She had made pencil drawings of the front of the house and of all the rooms as they were before the works, and committed her plans for transforming the building to delicate watercolours. She did not have permission to make structural alterations, and so she had worked on the fixtures, furnishings and plants. There were seven watercolours of the main door, showing a sequence of progressive simplifications. In the last one, the door was as I knew it, but on the right, as in every version, there was a stone planter with a pomegranate tree. I had it placed there in the spring. And I asked my father for the wooden globe that she had planned for the salon – like “a little Coronelli”, as she had written in her notes. It stood in the corner overlooking the river, framed by the two French windows, the pale marbled walls in the background. And there were watercolours of the smaller and larger balconies, overflowing with lavender and white daisies. She had painted the lavender with tiny silvery brush strokes, and the blue of its flowers shaded into
the white of the daisies making a frieze of light that softened the severity of the stone building.

“No,” Maddalena says. “No photographs.”

“Why not?”

“Some photos are like ladders in a pair of tights: if they're there, you can't look at anything else.”

I insist. “Do you know if there are any photographs in the house at all?”

“There are none. Not even of my own: it's in the contract, too.”

“What contract?”

“My employment contract: I do not have permission to show any photographs of my family or of any other subject anywhere in the house – that's what it says, in black and white.”

“But your photos are … a different matter.”

“At the interview I had cried all the time. Madama Erminia said I was gushing enough already.”

Undaunted, that evening I questioned my father, who explained that Aunt Erminia had preferred things that way: for my mother's sake, as she had said. Better to hide anything that would remind her of what she had been, so as not to make her depression worse. We would show the pictures again when she got better. No, he did not know whether she had kept them or thrown them away. No, he did not know where Aunt Erminia was. He did not think she had stayed in town. She had not been seen at the
conservatoire
in a long time.

I realised then that my house was completely devoid of any memory of the past. There were no pictures or photographs of my mother or my father or my grandparents. Or a lamp that might
have belonged to an uncle and then have been carefully restored because it was just perfect for the little table in the hall. Not one rug or a pair of opera glasses, no jewellery passed from mother to daughter all the way down to the house on the river. Among my mother's things I had not found a tiny box hiding in its velvet lining a pair of weightless golden earrings with a finely crafted little crown of blue gems, nor a tiny diamond placed on top of a slender, pointed silver ring. I had looked for that little box. But my mother's jewels had disappeared: hidden, stolen, sold, thrown out of the window and into the river.

That spring the mayor decided to have the murky Retrone drained, because the citizens of Vicenza were complaining of the noxious smells rising from the water. In the mud and silt dredged up by the diggers, the workers found enough refuse to pave the Piazza dei Signori, including a lovely tricycle that turned out to be yellow and green after a good clean. Then came a grandfather clock in walnut wood, still in good condition, and a bag of jewels – not the real thing, albeit very good imitations. The theft – but they were real jewels, the owner had said – had been reported the year before by Mr Longhella, antique dealer in Piazza del Mutilato. There was also a delightful tin caddy decorated with dreamy cupids, perfectly sealed and full of love letters that turned out to have been written by the previous canon of the cathedral to the pretty wife of the current mayor. Having landed the mayor in the pillory and the antique dealer in prison for fraud, the drainage works were promptly declared complete by the town hall, especially as the noxious smells had grown worse and the citizens were making even more noise.

“This town is like its river,” Maddalena says as we watch the departing diggers from the balcony of my mother's room. “Better not dig down to the depths.”

No coffer of old jewels was ever found.