A Life Apart (5 page)

In my memory, the time I spent at primary school is like one of those toys resting on spirals of tightly coiled springs: they are harmless as long as they stay in their wooden boxes, but will scar you full in the face if you happen to open them carelessly.

Firmly sat on the lid was Miss Albertina, who carefully controlled any opening of the box, and whose presence kept my first steps into the world from causing me any hurt.

I made no friends at all apart from Lucilla, but equally I had no enemies to guard against.

In this too I was much helped by Lucilla, because the other schoolchildren tended to take us together, sharing out between us, and thus somewhat allaying, any surprise, curiosity or aversion they might have felt.

“We all knew it would end this way,” Aunt Erminia is saying furiously.

She is sitting in one of the little armchairs in the hall. She must have stayed with us overnight: she was wearing sleek, dark green satin pyjamas that looked like an evening suit.

A noise had startled me out of sleep. From my bed I could hear the sound of steps, a sound much louder than all of us in the house would be able to make. So I got up. I found all the lights switched on. I walked across the empty rooms following the sound of the many voices, most of them absurdly unfamiliar. I stopped on the landing, wondering whether I should go downstairs. I feared the expression on the face of anyone that might see me for the first time, unless I could hold on tight to Maddalena's hand. After Aunt Erminia's, I can hear my father's quiet voice.

“She slept alone in the room at the back because she had problems with insomnia,” he is saying. “She had been suffering from … from depression.” I can hear that word taking its toll of sorrow on him. “For ten years.”

With my head between the slender stone columns of the staircase, I could see my father standing in the hall in his blue dressing gown and slippers. He was speaking to a woman in uniform while Maddalena, badly slumped on the little armchair by the door, wept with her head in her hands as she answered questions from other persons, also in uniform.

“Was she receiving any medical care?” the policewoman asks.

“She was in my care,” my father says. His arms are hanging along his body in a position that makes him look unnatural. “She would not accept any visits or doctors from outside. She was always … calm.”

“You do realise we will need an autopsy,” the policewoman is saying.

“Yes, I do,” he says.

Then he seems to feel my eyes on him and turns around.

“Rebecca …”

“Papa …”

Perhaps he came up to me, or perhaps I went to him – but when he spoke again, I was holding on to him, my arms tight around his neck.

“Mamma … she fell into the river last night. She leant over the little balcony to see the lights of Monte Berico, as she sometimes did, and she slipped into the black water.”

“Yes,” the policewoman is saying as she strokes my head, her fingertips barely touching my hair. “She slipped, and the water was very cold last night.”

“Where is she?” I say, my question falling into the silence that seems to have saturated the hall at once. “Where is she now?”

“She is gone for ever,” my father says quietly.

I cannot trace the sequence of facts. I am not sure whether it was then that I began to dream of my mother, in her usual black dress, descending from heaven to my little balcony like a mourning Madonna and trying to speak to me but failing because I am totally deaf. Some other times I would dream of her as she fell into the river, perhaps crying out for help. Then she began to appear
dressed in sky-blue, as I knew she had been on her wedding day. In the dream I would count the tiny white cornflowers around the neckline of her dress: one-two-three twelve on the right, one-two-three twelve on the left. I counted them again and again, looking sideways at her to check her mouth because I knew she was only waiting for a moment of silence from me so as to be able to speak, but instead of words her pale lips let fall a trickle of blood that crawled over her dress, marking the curve of her breast and hips and then all the way down to her left foot. A line that cut her in two, into before and after. At this point I would wake up screaming, and then start counting the ceiling beams, one-two-three twelve again, and the wooden planks laid across, one-two-three twenty-four.

In one other memory I am sitting at the piano, but not playing. I am bending double, my head resting against the keyboard and my arms clenched tight around myself, listening to my own heartbeat. Its pulse is so strong that it rhythmically moves one of the keys: do do do do. No no no no. The cold of the river comes through the wide-open windows and I let myself grow frozen: first my feet, then my legs, my head, my body, and last of all, my hands.

“May the Virgin of Monte Berico look upon us!” Maddalena says as she closes the windows.

Then she takes me in her arms, bunched up tight as I am, and sits in the little armchair next to the earthenware stove that spreads its dense heat around the room. She holds me tight, her breath through my hair, and as I relish the warmth of her body mixed with the heat from the stove, I say to myself: “I am ten years old.”

Aside from Maddalena, I cannot remember anyone weeping when my mother died. Perhaps that was because there was no funeral, which is the proper occasion for weeping. And the reason why there was no funeral was simply that no-one knew how to take charge. When the priest appeared the next morning, bringing shy words of comfort, he did at some point mention that as far as he was concerned there was nothing to stop the funeral being celebrated in the beautiful church of Santa Caterina, at the foot of the Virgin of Monte Berico: “The Lord certainly knows how to comprehend her sorrow and our grieving,” he said. But more than my father, it was Aunt Erminia who opposed the idea:

“My sister-in-law had lost her faith. It would be a real insult,” she says to the priest, with a violence made all the stronger by the sharp nervous lines she is slashing in the air.

The priest is standing near the front door, and bows slightly to all of us:

“Grief is very powerful, and can push us to go where we truly do not want to go.”

“You are all past masters in the grim art of assuming, without knowing and without listening, where people want to go and what they really want to do … My sister-in-law had wanted to die since … for years.” She stops short, looking at me as if something is suddenly bothering her.

“And last night she made it,” she says in the end, so softly that
had the silence not been complete her words would have been lost in the rustle of the curtains on the landing.

I knew then that my mother had taken her own life, and some obscure shame whose origin I could not fathom made me lower my eyes – but no-one had any place for me in the desert of their thoughts. Only the priest, with an unpractised gesture, strokes my head:

“Nobody knows, even when they think they do. ‘Right' and ‘wrong' are words made to put good people on the cross.”

“I think we are … inadequate for a funeral,” my father says, preventing some terrible words that Aunt Erminia seems ready to utter. “But thank you, from all of us.”

During the following days, Maddalena prepared me for all the visits we were meant to receive. She roamed around the house, blowing her nose into a huge handkerchief of finest muslin and trailing a wake of tears along the corridors and over the armchairs that she would move a few inches and then replace, without any conviction or necessity.

At regular intervals she turns abruptly towards me:

“You poor, poor child,” she says as she crushes me in an embrace. “Poor child. We should have done something. But no, all quiet, always quiet, out of respect for the young Signora. Sooner or later she will get better, your father used to say. We mustn't force her. And this is the result. Truth was, it was easier for everyone that way. The young Signora out for the count and Madama Erminia holding court in her brother's house. And now, you'll see, she'll be moving in. But I'll take care of you, rest assured. No-one will send me away from here without you.”

She ironed a pretty dress, electric blue with a white collar, that had been bought for me to wear at school parties and had remained in its box, and retrieved her many mourning clothes. She baked lemon and vanilla biscuits that filled the rooms with their heart-breaking aroma. She swept and dusted more than she usually did, because it was the right thing to do, she said, and because it kept her busy – and kept me busy.

Papa and Aunt Erminia had disappeared, wrapped up in all
the bureaucratic paperwork that follows a violent death – or so Maddalena said, over and over again, as if to convince herself. Nor did I dare ask about their very unusual absence. During those days I did not go to school, I did not know whether it was proper or not to play music, I did not have the courage to go near the piano.

On the third day, it became clear that we would receive no visits. The telephone also remained unaccountably silent: not one of my father's patients, not even Lucilla ever called.

“It's just not possible,” Maddalena says over lunch, her tension exploding. It is Sunday and we are alone in the house. It is raining outside, and traffic noises are muted.

“Not possible.”

She wipes her tears and says to me firmly: “You eat your
tiramisù
. I'll be back in a moment.”

She was back an hour later, out of breath with haste, but even more so with outrage.

“Madama Erminia has told everyone that we wanted no visits. It seems she's had it printed in the newspaper as well. She just about stopped short of sticking posters all over town – just about!”

She was furious, and wept more than usual. She sensed how those missed visits were another wound for me, how in that way I was once again excluded.

“And then play, my child. You play! Save yourself!” She takes my hands in hers, delicately, as if she were praying: “You have life in your hands. Let us thank the Virgin and the Christ Child!”

She carries me upstairs, sits me at the piano and says:

“Play something that'll make us cry all of our tears, and let's be done with it!”

She let herself fall into the little white armchair in which my father used to sit in the evening, and sat listening, bolt upright, still wearing her jacket and hat. I chose a sad
siciliana
and played it with the anxious relief of one who can finally breathe again after risking suffocation.

And in the end someone did ring our doorbell – the next day, a few minutes before five. Maddalena and I went to open at the same moment, and found ourselves facing Miss Albertina. She was holding by the hand an extraordinarily dressed-up Lucilla.

“God bless you!” Maddalena says forcefully, taking hold of Miss Albertina's hand and sweeping her inside together with Lucilla. “God bless you both! We are just having tea. Will you join us?”

“With pleasure, thank you,” Miss Albertina says, her hair bobbing up and down.

Lucilla links her arm through mine, and lingering a few steps behind Maddalena and Miss Albertina as we make our way upstairs she whispers:

“It was me who told my aunt that you'd cer-tain-ly be at home for your five o'clock tea! At school we had some surprises ready for you, some poems and letters to bring you: my aunt got us to make them. But then Murari, the son of the newspaper director, said your Aunt Erminia had spoken to the journalist who wrote the article about your mother, and dic-ta-ted to her that there were to be ab-so-lu-tely no visits. None-at-all. To respect your grieving, you understand? Then we thought we would give you all these things when you came back to school. But noth-ing-do-ing. No sign of you. So then I said to Aunt Albertina: ‘We're going!' It's me
who solves the problems in our house, as my Mamma always says. And here we are. How are you? Lovely dress. I've dressed up too. My Mamma wanted to come as well, but Aunt Albertina said no, it would feel like an in-va-sion. Everyone's thinking strange things about all this because …”

“What?” I say, interrupting her as I stop dead on the stairs.

“I real-ly-should-not tell you this. I've prom-ised. But they say that your father is finally free from a night-mare. That a handsome young man like him could ab-so-lu-tely not live like that, no way.”

“Like what?”

“Like a gelding, they say.”

“A gelding?”

“Someone who never makes love. You understand? A monk. Because clearly she never did, even though many say he must surely have found ways to con-sole-him-self.”

“Who says that? How …?” I realise I do not even know what questions to ask.

“Where is your father now?”

“I don't know.”

“And your Aunt Erminia?”

“I don't know. They are very busy with all the paperwork.”

“All day long? They're who knows where, waiting for calm-on-the-troubled-waters.”

“What waters?”

“Did you hear her fall?” she asks, very softly so as not to be overheard. “And why was your Aunt Erminia at the house that night?”

I can see myself standing next to the little table in the salon,
where Maddalena is placing the teapot and cups, and suddenly feeling as if the floor were the black surface of the Retrone washing under my blue shoes, the silver buckle sinking fast out of sight and taking me along on its downward plunge.

“Help!” I call out, reaching out and catching hold of Miss Albertina.

“Holy Virgin of Monte Berico, she's dying!” Maddalena shrieks. And she lies me down on the floor that once again is solid as it should be.

“Rebecca is coming back to school tomorrow,” I can hear Miss Albertina say. “Let her father know. If I don't see her, I shall call the police. She cannot be left locked up in here.”

“She will come, rest assured,” Maddalena says determinedly. “And if you do write a report for the social services, I shall sign it too.”

An astonishing alliance was thus forged by chance on that day, one that would play a decisive role in my future. That threat of a report, something too frightening for me to ask about, was hardly ever voiced but only half mentioned in a whisper, one single time, in my father's presence. It was Maddalena who did it one day, after some disagreement of which I had not been aware. She did it casually, with her back to him, as she washed something in the sink with exaggerated care. Yet from that moment, that threat took up silent residence in each corner of our house, ready to be floated fearlessly whenever a decision needed to be made. A powerful weapon in Maddalena's hands.

When Maddalena came to collect me from school, she would often stop to talk with Miss Albertina. Normally I could not hear
what they were saying, and whenever I did, it was usually some harmless exchange of information about homework or the weather. Yet I knew that their curious alliance was about me, that they were keeping watch over something, without perhaps even knowing exactly what it was.

A few days later Papa returned home, without any explanations, and resumed work between his clinic and the hospital. Aunt Erminia also reappeared: she arrived one evening at suppertime, tanned and perfumed, more beautiful than I had ever seen her. She spoke little, and mostly about music, the
conservatoire
and her untalented pupils. Throughout the evening, each one of her remarks went unanswered. When she left, we did not feel in the least reassured.