A Life Apart (6 page)

Aunt Erminia moved in with us a few weeks after Mamma's death. She came trailing a swarm of perfumes and colours that left their wake in each room of the house. I knew the one she loved best, a brand new, luscious fragrance dedicated to Chopin by a French
parfumier
: a mix of jasmine, orange and rose fading into Oriental notes of ylang-ylang and sandalwood. It had the texture, magical to my eyes, of an invisible veil that spread around her with every step she took, when she played, when she turned to smile at us, when she said goodbye. But the bathroom also overflowed with the mix of scents from her bodycare cosmetics: the passionflower cream she spread on her legs, the almond oil she used as an overnight mask for her hair. Often in the evening she would take me into the bathroom with her and talk to me as she tended to that body brimming with beauty. She would tell me about her pupils. Some were at school with me, and I liked to hear that they were much less gifted than I was, that they had made a huge mess of their end of year show, that they were unable to get going again if they missed a beat. I was still dreaming of the
conservatoire
, but Aunt Erminia would not budge on that.

“It's as your father wants: not until you've finished primary school,” she says firmly. “And anyway, the less you mix with that flock of trained geese who only get in because their parents push and kick them, the better chance you'll have to develop your own
style. Anyone can play well, but what matters is finding your own music inside.”

“Like Bach, you mean?” I needle her because the pitch of her fury gives me a shiver of pleasure.

“Bach! A stiff-necked Protestant bigot, prolific as a battery rabbit, who was lucky enough to catch one dead-boring refrain floating around in the
Zeitgeist
and then sanctified it by sticking it full of praise the Lord in the highest, amen!” she declaims, drawing a wide and final sign of the cross in the air.

“What about Wagner?”

“Music for the deaf. Hit the vibrations hard enough, and even the deaf will get the gist.”

“What about Mozart?”

“An incontinent two-timer with delusions of erotic omnipotence. Wrote music for the serial seduction of schoolgirls. Save the ‘Requiem': the ‘Requiem' alone is worth the whole insipid life of that powdered coxcomb – the rest can be forgiven. Perhaps, right on life's threshold, the God of secret designs gave him a glimpse of the abyss he was about to plummet into and allowed him to transcribe one small glimmer for our warning and edification.”

And she stretches her arms in front of her to protect me from that wrathful gaze whose mere mention seems to scare her too.

I adored my evening conversations with Aunt Erminia: the vertigo I derived from familiarity with that perfect body held me high in a sort of free zone where everything was permitted – even forgetting one's own ugliness.

“We must renew the whole house,” she says over breakfast one
morning, her glossy black hair dark as a moonless night against her bright green dressing gown.

“Things carry the stories they have lived through, and we need space for new stories in here.”

No-one answers. Maddalena places the bread basket on the sideboard with a heavy thump as she stares at my father from behind Aunt Erminia's back.

“We could start with the colours: they're too faint. It feels like living inside a box of stale candy. In the long run, colours like these make people weak,” she says undaunted, her hands miming a jittery shake.

What happened to me at that moment was like what we sometimes live through in nightmares, when we want to speak and are unable to: the mouth gapes in the painful physical effort to utter a sound, the eyes open wide as if staring straight at some terrible danger. But I could say nothing, and felt myself suffocating from a violent contraction inside my throat.

All I wanted was to speak and say that those colours were my colours too, that nothing in the world would induce me to part with the yellow of my bedroom or the sky-blue of the curtains in the salon, the walls in the hall, the kitchen fixtures. Those colours belonged to me more than my name that no-one ever used: they wrapped themselves around me, enfolding me whenever I moved from one room to the other or fell asleep at night. They were the colours my mother had chosen and not changed after my birth. They were the thread of continuity leading back to her own dreams, they were what she was before I was born. But these were not conscious thoughts for me – only a hard knot stopping my breath.

“I don't think so,” my father says very quietly. “I really don't think so,” he repeats in a louder voice as Aunt Erminia stalks out, shaking her shoulders as if to shrug off some noisome weight.

After Aunt Erminia stopped giving me piano lessons, I began to compose my own music. I only did it when she was not around, and often in the presence of Lucilla, who came to visit in the afternoon and knew how to bring out my playful mood.

“Imagine you're at the Teatro Olimpico,” she says, intoning her words like a hypnotist. “That's right. Or better still, at the Arena, in Verona. Can you imagine?”

“I don't know, I've never been there.”

“Oh my God, then you must-ab-so-lu-tely come with us next time we go. I've been a-ny-num-ber of times! My mother takes me every summer, for the opera, you know, the shows – and also if she's got something serious to make up for. Anyway, imagine an amphitheatre like the Romans': it's e-nor-mous, very dark and full-of-people.”

She gets up and turns off the light.

“And you are playing. No-one can see you and you're playing playing playing something no-one's ever heard before and everyone's saying ‘Who is she? Does anyone know her? She's a mir-acleof-na-ture!' And they listen, they listen in silence …”

And wrapped in the sweet darkness veined with pale blue I would play, I would make stately
adagios
out of the slow rhythm of the timeless days that had followed my mother's death, as the black water that had lured her turned into an obsessive theme set again and again in variations of ever-increasing speed and intricacy chasing into each other without respite.

“What's this one?” Lucilla says.

“It's the water of the Retrone,” I say as I ripple through an
arpeggio
, a water sound starting on a high note and falling deeper and deeper down to the low notes on the keyboard until it turns into a graceless roar.

“It's scary.”

“No it isn't – if it's music it isn't.”

“Now play the rain.”

The rain too starts sharp and clear and then turns into a storm that tears things down.

“Do the storm that ends and the blue sky coming back.”

But she did not like my blue-sky music. It came out like variations on Pachelbel: changeable enough, but still giving away the main theme. Reassuring, yes – but hardly new.

“I want a music that doesn't remember sorrow,” she suddenly says one day.

I remain motionless, my fingers touching the edge of the keyboard as I struggle to find the notes.

It is dark around me, but it's not Lucilla's doing. I realise it is almost evening.

“No, I can't.”

Very young girls think they can become anything: princesses, doctors, teachers, actresses. An ugly child knows she will always be just ugly.

An ugly child has no plans for the future. She fears it and does not look forward to it, because she cannot imagine it to be any better than the present. She listens to the plans made by other girls and knows, has always known, that they do not concern her. So she thinks she feels no sorrow if she happens to guess the wishes of those describing their own future as models, singers, airline stewardesses, ballerinas, barristers, physicians, office workers or professors. That is the other girls' world. At times she catches herself thinking there might be work that can be done while remaining hidden, staying indoors, in the dark – but she does not know about that and is scared to ask.

Just like there is no work, so there is no partner in her future: she knows that no-one will ever feel for her anything more benevolent than pity.

An ugly child cannot even love the past, since it does not carry any happy memories. In fact she wishes with all her strength that she could erase bad memories, but she cannot, because even the hurt of being offended is life, and thus preferable to the nothingness of indifference.

An ugly child can of course have dreams, but each awakening causes her to sink deeper and deeper down, and so she soon loses that art.

The first summer after my mother's death loomed ahead, terrifying. The winter had passed among lessons, homework, the visits from Lucilla, the evenings with Aunt Erminia. But with the end of the school term in June, I was overcome with emptiness. On the last day I felt more unhappy than I ever had before. The other children talked about the holidays they would take during those months, that time of passage between primary and secondary school, while for the first time I became aware of being different in ways other than those determined by my looks. My mother's presence had filled my days in spite of everything. She was enough for me. If she was in the little drawing-room, I would incessantly walk up and down the stairs, on the slightest pretext, or sometimes on no pretext at all, so as to make sure, glancing sideways into the room, that she was there. I did not really look at her: I was content with that dark shadow in the corner of my eye, the black spot that spoke her presence.

If she was in her bedroom, I would make sure the doors were open, and play my piano. My mother always left her bedroom door ajar, and deep down I know I was hoping she did that for me. And then sometimes I would stop playing to slide silently along the corridor leading to the bedrooms, and quickly pass in front of hers. She always faced away from the door, and often sat at the little dressing table that she used as a desk, without ever seeming to notice me.

But with her death my days became empty. And with the end of the school year they turned into gaping chasms. Aunt Erminia told us of an important concert in Milan and said she would not be back for several days. After the tragedy she had stopped teaching me, and I had not dared ask her about it. I would play, but without the audience – voiceless and inexpressive, perhaps even deaf but an audience nonetheless – that my mother's presence had been.

In the evening, only Maddalena would sometimes sit and listen to me, although music made her weep even more than usual. She would listen and sigh, letting large teardrops fall heavily onto her blue apron.

“I am Maestro Aliberto De Lellis – I have come for the piano lesson.”

A tall man, perhaps no longer young, with large and inquisitive clear eyes, is bowing towards some midpoint between me and Maddalena. He is dressed in an oversized white suit and, despite the heat that makes the air shimmer over the tarmac, he is wearing a tie.

His age seems to vary according to the point on which I rest my gaze: his clothes push him towards the threshold of middle age, his fair hair and relaxed smile make him look much younger. We are standing in front of the open front door, not knowing how to deal with this apparition and its unlikely name.

“Welcome,” Maddalena says at last – but she cannot quite decide to let him in, as if she did not fully trust him. “Did Madama Erminia send you? I'm so sorry, perhaps she forgot to mention to us …”

“Oh, no wonder, the poor darling. Ever since she stopped teaching she …”

“Stopped teaching?” we both say, interrupting him at the same time.

“Yes. She gave notice at the
conservatoire
after … after the events … the event …” he says, looking at me.

“But she's always talking about her pupils …” I start, then stop short, realising I have said something wrong.

“ It really has been awful,” Maddalena says with finality, moving aside a little, but not far enough to let the Maestro in.

“As I have learnt from Erminia herself, having met her by chance in Venice …”

“Venice,” Maddalena repeats.

“That's right – having learnt that she feels, how shall I put it … guilty, no longer being able to teach this outstanding niece of hers,” and he holds out his hand as if wanting to shake mine, but thinks better of it, “about whom she has told me so much at the
conservatoire
– I am one of her colleagues, I should have told you – I have offered to help. I have a love of talents that are … special,” he says, and bows again, towards me this time.

His voice is as hesitant as his movements, but he does not seem intimidated by not being expected.

“We are having tea. Would you like a cup?” Maddalena says: she has decided to trust him.

“Yes, please.”

And suddenly, as we walk upstairs, he takes my hand. With an abrupt gesture, a pull sharp as a break-off shot on green baize, he grips my hand in his. The unexpected promise of a lasting
presence. He was the first person to ever take my hand of his own accord, rather than as prescribed by good manners or social role. The shock I felt overcame any possible reaction on my part: I gave my hand up to him, abandoned it to his, which was cool as a child's, soft as a pianist's.

It was he who filled my days during that summer. He was a calm man with elegant manners, and the emotions that somehow passed between us helped me to temper the passion of the music I played with him.

He steered me out of Aunt Erminia's riotous romanticism and taught me to love the geometric harmonies in Bach, the enigmatic quality of Russian composers, the tightly coiled, unreleased vitality of Vivaldi, whose Bach transcriptions for the clavichord he would happily play for me. He would express the pleasure of teaching me what he knew in the form of old-fashioned compliments:

“Oh-oh! Despite your truly young age, Signorina, you have executed this
pavane
in impeccable style!”

I found those compliments charming. And I loved the way he would make me repeat any difficult passages, patiently, without ever seeming to grow tired. After the storm that was Aunt Erminia, the measured flowing of his hands over the keys was healing the tension that inhabited me.

Maddalena inflicted many long pauses and many cups of tea on him before finally finding the courage to ask. Reticent, he would change the subject with delicate courtesy, congratulate her on the ever-varied flavours of her biscuits, enquire about my love of vanilla. But our opportunity to learn about unknown aspects of Aunt Erminia did come in the end.

“Does she have any men then?” Maddalena says one afternoon, blurting out the words with the pinch of bad grace that always accompanies indiscreet questions.

“Well … not as far as one would know … or say,” the Maestro says cautiously. “Certainly, many have … tried. To go out with her, I mean. To pay her a compliment to … test the ground, so to speak. But they had no luck – none at all. She just laughs and runs away.”

“That's not normal, is it,” Maddalena says sternly. “It's one thing to take vows, and then it's fair enough. But otherwise … besides, she's always so provocative.”

“She is,” the Maestro says, agreeing in spite of himself.

“A
bronsa cuerta
. Could she be a
bronsa cuerta
?”

“I'm not sure I understand,” De Lellis says guardedly.

“A smothered ember: looks like a saintly little virgin but is actually a man eater,” Maddalena says with a dose of brutality.

“I wouldn't know,” the Maestro says conclusively.

Aunt Erminia seldom came home that summer. After the lie she had told us about her concert in Milan, she gave us to understand that she was going on holiday, but never sent a postcard from anywhere. Nor did anyone ever ask her any questions. Our evening conversations at her bath time had grown much less frequent, and she never enquired about the Maestro or complained about the new music that she sometimes happened to hear me play. September would bring my audition at the
conservatoire
– so she told me many times, as if to remind herself. I certainly could never have forgotten about it.

“Do people talk about Madama Erminia?”

At the question, a slight jolt runs through the Maestro's hand, and he spills a few drops of dark tea on the spotless white lace of the tablecloth.

“No. I – I wouldn't know.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“I … no, I don't think I would.”

“Who could tell me then?”

“It is not always good to know.”