A Life Apart (4 page)

Lucilla was free to leave her jersey thrown on a footstool in the hall, her school bag in the kitchen, her shoes in the bedroom. She was free to scatter traces of herself wherever she went, to vent anger at her mother if she was not allowed another ice cream or a new book. She was free to ask and free to exist. My own existence on the other hand was stained with a sort of original debt due to my horrible ugliness, something that made it natural for me to have no claim to anything more than the miraculous affection that my father, Aunt Erminia and Maddalena were able to feel for me. I was grateful for that, drenched as it were in a sorrowful gratitude that reached so deep into my feelings and desires as to allow them expression only when they perfectly coincided with those of the people around me. But back then I had no way of knowing that, and so would look on in amazement as Lucilla threw a tantrum, or hold my breath listening to the swarm of words with which her mother would chase her around the house. I was frightened by the quantity of feelings that could be expressed in words. In my house, words were as flat as dictionary entries, and were hardly ever used to convey anything other than information, engagements, appointments. On a very few occasions, when the talk was of myself and my future, Aunt Erminia would grow animated and fall with my father into brief skirmishes which would end in a sort of spent agreement.

At Lucilla's, words would swell with rage, grow long and spiky as hatpins, bare their teeth, sink them into the soul, fret and fume, and sometimes explode into screams that would deform them past all meaning. Or else, and sometimes immediately afterwards, unexpectedly, while shock and sorrow still shook the limbs, words
would grow lighter, less turgid, and open out into a soothing, cool caress that brought the dispute to a close.

“Good heavens, you're soaked!”

On my first visit, Lucilla's mother opens the door, her body squashed against the door frame, taking up the whole space. Even the corners seem to bulge with the fullness of her. She is wearing an enormous yellow raincoat covered in perfectly spherical droplets. Tiny pink piglets are jingling in front of my eyes and dripping water onto the floor.

This is also the first time I have left the house on my own, and the anxious exhortations to take good care repeated by Maddalena up to the moment of our goodbye outside the house are jostling with a generous range of polite greetings, which have no way of getting through the stream of words coming from Lucilla's mother.

“Ah yes, I've just come in myself,” she says hurriedly. “I've still not put my brolly down, see?” And I notice that the piglets are in fact dangling from the spokes of a huge acid-green umbrella.

“These were made of clay originally – imagine,” she explains. “They all went to pieces in the first rainstorm, so I've replaced them with these little rubber ones. Not as pretty of course, but very practical. Oh – please do come in, darling, come in, sweetheart!”

And I think I will never be able to get in, because there is not space enough for anyone else in that hall. But she takes my hand, squeezes and squashes herself against me and ushers me into a short narrow corridor where my boots are placed on a small mat, my little umbrella inside a white floor rack shaped like acanthus
leaves, my raincoat on a wooden stand meant to look like a man with raised arms. And there is space for Lucilla too, when she comes from her bedroom teetering perilously on the spiky heels of a pair of huge pea-green shoes with white polka dots.

“Make yourself at home!” Lucilla's Mamma shouts a moment later from the kitchen, where she is putting a fruit tart in the oven and at the same time, her hands still dusted with flour, hammering on the keys of a garish red typewriter the translations from English and German by which she makes a living.

And I did, sitting very properly in the little orange director's chair in Lucilla's bedroom as she settled herself cross-legged on the bed and tried to start an ever-broken tape recorder, at the same time telling me once again about her father who had eloped a couple of years earlier with a ve-ry-beau-tiful and scandalously young girl after pulverising the bank account and selling the house on the sly. Dis-ap-peared, dis-solved without a trace. The whole town had been talking about it, had I not heard? No, I had not.

“She was one of his students,” Lucilla says, whispering so as not to be overheard by her mother. “My father taught Greek and Latin at the Liceo Pigafetta. They had been lovers for two years, in secret because she was un-der-age – imagine. Then, as soon as she turned eighteen, they dis-ap-peared. One morning she left for school, and so did he. Then, nothing. My mother found herself on her own with a small child – me, that is. Her work doesn't pay well enough, so she swallowed her pride and reported him: the police are still looking for him. Because of the main-tenance, you understand.”

I did not understand much at all, but listened to the story of a
different life and compared it to mine: what is better, a cheating father who in the end disappears altogether, or a mother who is there but also is not, so that you may perhaps still hope for something and spend your life frozen in wait?

“It was a re-al-re-lief for us,” says Lucilla, who evidently has absorbed her mother's words to the point of becoming one with her. “The last years had been she-er-hell: he would shout at my mother that she was fat and stupid and had only been able to have a little girl as fat and stupid as herself. He would tell her she was ignorant because she did not read phil-os-ophy and knew nothing about Noh theatre. And Mamma would stand up for me, saying I am a sen-sitive child, that I have a gift for singing, that you must look for the right-qua-lities in a person.”

She spoke with no sorrow, patiently shaking the tape recorder until it started with a jarring hiss that hardly allowed a hint of the sound to come through. A music genre that was never heard at my house, where no-one cared for singing:
Lieder
that sounded mournful and brilliant in equal measure to my young ears, sung in German and therefore incomprehensible. She would sing over the recorded voices and make up the German words she did not know. She would obsessively repeat one stanza from Schubert's “Die Forelle”: “so zuckte seine Rute, das Fischlein zappelt dran, und ich mit regem Blute sah die Betrog'ne an.”

“The fisherman tugged hard on his line, the little fish was thrashing, and I looked on in sorrow at the poor de-ceived-victim,” Lucilla says, translating for me each time, reciting from memory the version her mother has written out for her on old exercise book pages.

“Why ‘deceived'?” I ask, playing along with her game.

“Because the fisherman, to catch the little fish swimming happily in the clear little brook, had mud-died-the-water. The rogue,” she says, bringing her hands up to her face and opening her eyes wide to emphasise the horror of that act.

At other times she would bend her powerful childish voice to the drama of “Gretchen am Spinnrade”: “mein Busen drängt sich nach ihm hin. Ach dürft ich fassen un halten ihn, und küssen ihn, so wie ich wollt, an seinen Küssen vergehen sollt!”

“My breast is yearning for him – ah, would that I could hold him, and keep him, and kiss him just as I want, no matter if I dieof-his-kis-ses!” Lucilla repeats over and over again, hugging her generous body, her head tilted over one shoulder and her eyes closed.

I preferred Gregorian chant: there was something familiar in those Latin sounds, reminding me of the prayers Maddalena would recite for me at bedtime. I loved them because they were gentle and sounded like lullabies.

I would listen without replying. I liked it when the talk was not about me: sorrow touching someone else was such a relief that I felt no guilt or embarrassment.

What astonished me about Lucilla was the relative poverty in which she lived. I noticed, without understanding, that noone would see to replacing old or broken things like the tape recorder, or the pencil case that would not zip up, or the pencil stubs so short that they would slip out from between her fingers.

When, at home, she took her shoes off, my gaze would fall
again and again on her fat toes poking out of socks that might once have been pink or light blue.

Sometimes she would notice:

“Mamma says I eat-through-socks and she can't keep up. This month she's had to buy me all-of-the-ex-ercise books for school. Just as well I was given all the textbooks by my aunt – though I shouldn't tell any-one, or they'll think she's being unfair.”

Being born ugly is like being born with a chronic illness that can only worsen with age. At no time in life does the future promise to be any better than the present, there are no happy memories from which to derive any consolation, and to give oneself up to dreams results only in a surplus of sorrow.

An ugly child lives warily, striving to behave in such ways as would not add to the trouble already caused by her appearance. An ugly child will not throw tantrums or make demands, will learn very quickly to eat without dropping breadcrumbs, will play quietly and only shift things when strictly necessary, will tidy her room without being asked, will not be caught twice biting her fingernails, will not wear out socks and shoes because she moves very carefully, will not raise her voice or make a noise as she goes downstairs, will not argue about which clothes to wear.

An ugly child is grateful to everyone for any affection they may show her despite the disappointment of her birth, she knows her place, says thank you for the presents that are just what she wanted, is always happy of anything that may be proposed to her, seeks no attention or caresses, keeps herself in good health: since she cannot give any pleasure or satisfaction, she will at least try to cause no trouble.

An ugly child will see, observe, investigate, listen, perceive, grasp by intuition; in each inflection of a voice, each facial expression, each gesture that might escape control, each brief
or drawn-out silence, she seeks some token element that may concern her, for good or for bad. She is frightened of hearing anything that may confirm what she already knows: that her life is a real misfortune. She is always hoping to hear one word that will absolve her, even if it should be spoken merely out of pity.

An ugly child is the daughter of chance, fatality, destiny, a freak of nature. She is surely not a child of God.

“The priest is here,” Maddalena says, rushing breathlessly into the kitchen where we are having lunch. Our doorbell very seldom rings. “He's sorry to come at such an awkward time, but was hoping to find you at home. He says the child is at school now, and she's of the right age: with your permission, he would be glad to see her at catechism next Saturday.“

“There's no question of that,” my mother cuts in sharply, staring down at some point on the tablecloth.

Shortly after the beginning of the school term, there was a parents' meeting.

“There should be a law about these things, for goodness' sake. You can't put children in these situations.”

“And what about ourselves? It's all so embarrassing. The very fact of having to speak of it …”

“My daughter's been having nightmares since the beginning of term.”

“And my little girl – she wouldn't want me to tell you, but she's started wetting the bed again.”

“And then, where have they kept her until now? Let her stay there! Her father has money enough to send her to school anywhere he likes!”

“Quiet, please!” Miss Albertina says.

“We're not in class now, Miss. You're not the boss now. We have a situation here – a problem to solve.”

“But there is no problem at all,” Miss Albertina says. “The children …”

“The children don't say anything to you! You have the knife by the handle in class every morning!”

“Will you be quiet! It's not that, Miss Albertina. We know what an exceptionally good teacher you are, and that you'll do everything you can. The point is … that child.”

“Is she even normal?”

“I'm told she is, actually, and that she knows a lot.”

“Oh she does,
I'm sure
– like a parrot.”

“That's right, a parrot.”

“Well, that's going a little too far, don't you think? It's all so embarrassing.”

“She can't stay in a normal class. There are special schools for these cases. Her father is hardly short of money.”

“But she is not some
case
,” Miss Albertina says. “If you will just let me …”

“You have to tell it like it is – and stop beating about the bush.”

“Don't say that, that's not right. Miss Albertina, we know how marvellously good you are, and that's why we want to talk to you before going ahead … I mean, the point is …”

“Going ahead with what, for heaven's sake? What is it you have in mind?” the teacher says abruptly.

“Going ahead, yes. There are lawyers among us and there are things that can be done.”

“But she's the sweetest child. She was just unlucky. She's very bright – she plays the piano,” Miss Albertina says hastily.

“Oh she does,
I'm sure
– some monkeys can play piano too. You can't deny the facts, Miss Albertina.”

“The fact is, she even smells.”

“That's quite enough!” the teacher says, unable to contain her exploding anger.

“
We
'll say what's enough here. This was done wrongly from the word go. We should have been warned of her coming. As parents, we should have been asked to give our opinion.”

“I haven't seen her, but my daughter says she's a real monster.”

“And then, can you imagine the school photographs?”

“That's right – the photos!”

“But that's not the point, I keep telling you! The point is,
she
can't be happy in a normal class, and Miss Albertina, who is so good, knows that very well.”

“We must have the courage to do what's right. After all there are special schools where she could find friends of her own kind.”

“That's right. My daughter says she never speaks to anyone.”

“She never speaks because none of the other children will say a word to her. That's what they must learn,” Miss Albertina says.

“They have to feel secure when they come to school, that's what! There's specially trained staff for people like that!”

“That's right. Of course we know these monsters exist, but that's no reason why we should …”

“What's monstrous is what I'm having to hear in this room,” Miss Albertina says, raising her voice. But she is not accustomed to that, so her words come out in a screech: “I was tricked into coming here this evening. I would never, ever have come if I'd known. And if one single word of this loathsome meeting ever leaves the room, if the child or her parents are ever told about it, I – I will do something awful. I know things about every single person in this room. The hypocrisy caked all over your tongues and hearts – now that's what's monstrous.”

“And then?” I ask Lucilla.

“Then she stormed out like one-pos-ses-sed, and I wasn't quick
enough to move away from behind the door, so it got me – right here,” she says, pointing to a raised purple bruise on her temple. “Then she asked me where Mamma was and I told her she hadn't been invited – imagine. But I found out and went along.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing. She made me swear I wouldn't tell you a-sin-gle-word about it.”