A Splendid Gift (5 page)

Portofino, Italy

October 1943

He asks if he can carry her rucksack for her. She tells him no. “I carry this myself.” He does not push her. He cannot read her quite yet. He can only smell the fear on her. To him, it’s the scent of a hunted animal. She is restless and suspicious. Her expression does not soften as they walk up the narrow streets toward his house. She focuses her eyes ahead and does not stop once to gaze at the unspoiled beauty of the village or the sea below.

He alternates from walking in front of her to moments of lagging behind. Sometimes he feels the betrayal of his own body. The swell of his stomach, the shortness of his legs, the foot injury that kept him out of this war. She is steps ahead of him, and he notices the strength of her body. The ribbon of muscle in her calves, the tightness in her hips. The firmness of her arms.

“We’re almost there,” he tells her.

She looks back at him and stares. He has seen that look—the vulnerable wanting to appear strong—countless times over the past year.

“You can trust me,” he tells her.

Again she stares at him. One of the straps of her rucksack slips off her shoulder and she readjusts it.

“What is your name?” he asks.

She is so tired that “Elodie” nearly slips from her tongue, but she catches that word before it escapes her. “Anna,” she says. “Anna Zorzetto.”

“Anna. I am a doctor. The only one here in the village. I promise, you have nothing to fear from me.”

His explanation seems to register with her, but she does not soften in the sunlight. He notices that the exact opposite happens instead, as if her body stiffens with his every word.

She tries to read him. The look in his eyes, the lines of his face that suggest both a sadness and an earnestness at the same time.

She turns her head back again, as if to look one more time at the port below. She is desperate to forget the sheer terror she felt only minutes ago, when she feared they might question her papers, or even worse, search her bag.

“Well,” she finally manages to say, “I suppose I will have to trust you. I don’t have any choice, do I?”

***

They walk deeper into the rocky cliffs, climbing a small, narrow path, passing over ancient stone walls that barricade a steep mountainside, before they arrive at a small archway covered in vines. Tucked within the jungle of flowers and thicket is a white house with a heavy door, the wood painted in glossy coats of green. She notices the lemon and fig trees and, again, the perfume of jasmine in the air. She feels dizzy. These are not the trees of her childhood in the north of Italy, with its crisp smell of pine and juniper berries in the air. Here she feels as though she has awakened from a dream. The dialect is foreign. The skin more weathered, the clothes less refined.

How many days has it been since she has slept deeply? The fatigue inside her is paralyzing, and she is thirsty for sleep. Everything she does seems to require an inordinate amount of energy, compounded by the strain of trying not to appear tired and vulnerable.

Inside the house, he offers her a glass of water. She drinks it down greedily and he refills the glass. And, then, one more time. He goes into the kitchen and cuts her three pieces of bread. He spoons some honey into a bowl. He removes the stem of a persimmon and quarters it with a knife before scooping out the soft flesh into a saucer.

She takes only one spoonful of the honey with the bread even though she wants more. She takes only a little of the persimmon. She does not want to reveal the nakedness of her hunger. But the third glass of water, she finishes entirely.

“You are probably tired from your journey,” he tells her. “I have a spare room, where you can get some rest.”

He walks her to a small room with white walls, painted tiles on the floor, and a window that overlooks the sea. The air billows through the translucent curtains, and the image reminds her of her skirt lifting in the ocean breeze.

“Yes, I need to sleep,” she says.

He closes the door behind him, and she waits until she hears his footsteps down the hall. She notices the key in the door and turns it, hearing the lock click. Then, knowing she is finally safe, at least for the moment, she lifts up her rucksack to the bed and unpacks it.

***

The contents are both what one would expect and what one would not.

She takes out the first layer. The spare blue dress, her slip, and her underclothes. Then, the sweater from Luca, which she brings to her face and inhales.

Her heart pounds as she removes the second layer. A small toiletry bag that contains her toothbrush, a bar of soap, and her comb.

She next comes to her nightgown, then the small pouch with the amulet on a leather cord, which she cups in her hands. But then on the bottom of her rucksack, she withdraws a book, so slender it could be a journal. For a moment, she pauses. She rests her hand on its well-worn cover. Then, slowly and with great reverence, she opens it. Inside this book is another folded piece of paper. But it’s not something written in a code that she doesn’t understand. Nor is she meant to deliver it as she did during her days as a messenger for the Resistance. Instead, she unfolds it to reveal a sheet of musical score.

She closes her eyes and hears the song imprinted on it.

***

How does one hear music? Is it the rhythm of an unspoken language? An untranslatable code?

Elodie hears the notes inside her head like the movement of water. It begins in soft ripples. She also hears the notes in color. An ink wash of pale blue, or the glimmer of white stone. Soothing at times, then escalating. Long, interconnected strokes that enter her in a wholly different channel. Not through her mind, but in the deepest cavity of her belly.

She closes her eyes and remembers her cello back in Verona. The prestigious music school where she carried her instrument every morning, in the black case nearly the same size as she.

She remembers holding the cello between her legs. Her knees two bookends against the lowest curve, one arm embracing the neck, while the other held the bow. With each stroke of her bow, her body coaxed the instrument into song.

But now, she merely takes the sheet of music to the bed and folds her hands over the top. She relaxes as the notes float through her. Sleep finally takes over her, until there is nothing but the melody of the notes inside her head.

***

Her parents had given her that first instrument when she was seven. For several months prior, she had gone to sleep hearing them discuss which instrument she would study. Her mother had wanted the flute, but her father had pushed for the violin. But Elodie had begged for a cello. She had first become enamored by the instrument’s beautiful sound while at a concert at her father’s school. The students had played the Dvořák cello concerto, and she sat there mesmerized.

On that walk home, she pierced the air with her own imaginary bow. She still heard the music in her head, every note lingering inside her. The dance of that cellist imprinted on every fiber of muscle and piece of bone.

The day she was finally given her first cello, and the sight of her father placing the dark leather case on their dining room table, were memories that Elodie stored inside her mind, each image like a single note connected to the next. She would never forget the sight as her father unsnapped the case. The instrument had been wrapped in a beautiful red scarf to protect the bow from scratching the varnish, and when her father removed it, Elodie gasped.

“It’s a three-quarter size,” her father told her as he handed the cello for her to hold. “When you get a little older, you’ll play on a full size.”

She took the instrument from him and, immediately, Elodie felt her heart begin to race. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever held.

“And the bow, Elodie. . . .” Her father took out the bow and handed that to her as well.

“She is her father’s daughter,” Orsina said, sensing that her daughter would have no problem once she learned the necessary techniques. “I can’t wait to hear her play.”

***

Elodie began her studies slowly, her father adamant that whatever she learned, she would learn correctly. The first thing he taught her was to caress her cello.

The ideal, he told his young daughter, was not to distort oneself. Instead, one needed to find a natural way to embrace the instrument. “You need to become one with it,” he told her.

He took her hands and placed them on the top of the shoulders of the instrument. Then, slowly, he moved Elodie’s hands alongside the cello’s edges, allowing her to feel every curve.

The sensation of the wood beneath her palms was soothing. Each part of the instrument’s construction, evoked its own tactile response; the varnish of the wood, the length of the fingerboard, and the ridges within the scrolled neck.

Elodie’s father showed her how to use her knees to secure the cello’s tail into the floor to prevent slipping. He lifted her bow from the table, “A cellist holds the bow naturally, not like a violinist,” he told her. And then he laughed and did a small pantomime, mimicking the awkward way a violinist gripped his bow, the left fingers rolling slightly, a technique that was used to increase the volume.

Over the next few weeks, she learned to make notes emerge from her cello. She began to feel her arms transform. No longer did they seem like two unremarkable appendages, but a part of her that had their own unique power. Like a bird’s wings, they could lift and stretch. Her wrist, too, she learned to curl and extend, lending grace and beauty to her playing. She learned to wait. To take breaths. To hover her bow just above the bridge and then finally strike. She absorbed her father’s instructions with an understanding beyond her years.

“A good musician must cultivate the art of interpreting,” he instructed her. “The staves of the score are a road map. You read the notes, you play them as the composer dictates, but the emotion. . . . that is what makes the music your own.”

She looked at him wide-eyed and rested her bow on her knee.

“You must always listen to what your teacher tells you, then interpret it . . . demonstrate that you’ve understood far beyond just the playing. Do you understand, Elodie?”

Elodie nodded. “Even though you’re young, I can tell you are gifted already by the way you sense what’s hidden beneath the music.” He walked over to her and took the bow from her hand, placing it on the music stand that was in front of her. Then, he took his daughter’s hands into his own.

“When you were only a few months old, I held you in my arms. I looked at that beautiful face of yours and saw your mother’s almond-shaped eyes, her perfect mouth. But I saw you had my hands.” He opened her palm. “You have the same long fingers, the same wide expansion.” He closed her hand again and brought the fingers up to his lips and kissed them. “You’re destined to be a great cellist, because I can sense you want to bring your cello to life.”

***

Just as her father anticipated, a special magic developed between Elodie and her cello. The instrument slowly became her, and she became the instrument. A unique bond that grew increasingly intense as her studies progressed. Sometimes when she held her cello, Elodie thought she could sense a pulse beating within its wooden cavity. It never occurred to her that it was her own heart she was hearing.

As she grew older, she was given a full-sized cello that her father had bought from a retired teacher at the conservatory. Made of walnut wood with a honey colored finish, she practiced on it daily and her repertoire soon blossomed. She played the Brahms Cello Sonata in E major and the Vivaldi Sonata No. 5 with increasing emotion. She mastered the Tarantella, a piece that challenged her stamina, but she practiced it for hours until the notes were as clean and as bright as sunlight.

But just before her seventeenth birthday, only four months before her auditions to become a full-time student at Verona’s music school, her father came home with an early birthday gift.

“It’s a Venetian cello,” he told Elodie. This time when the case was opened, the cello was wrapped in an enormous yellow scarf. Her father seemed to meditate over the instrument for a brief moment, as if he were offering a small prayer. Then, with a grand gesture of his wrist, he withdrew the material to reveal his daughter’s newly gifted cello.

“It’s extraordinary!” Elodie couldn’t contain her excitement. She had thought the two cellos she had played on previously had been beautiful, but this one was truly magnificent. The instrument was unlike any cello Elodie had seen before. The varnish was not brown, but a striking red. A topaz colored light glowed below its glossy coat, so that the cello appeared as though it possessed its own internal fire.

Elodie’s hands fidgeted. She was desperate to touch it.

“In honor of your mother, it had to be Venetian.”

Her father handed her the instrument and by instinct, Elodie began to caress it. Her hands moved across the edges and every curve, just as she had done with her first cello years before. Almost immediately, she could tell the proportion of this particular cello was slightly different. The bottom part swelled slightly, thus creating a more voluptuous shape. Even the carving of the decorative scrolls seemed wholly different. As if the luthier responsible had been motivated more by whimsy then tradition when creating its flourishes.

“Papa,” she said, still touching every part of the instrument, as though she could not quite believe her eyes. “This must have cost you a fortune!”

“Its journey into our living room is a long and complicated story,” he said softly. “But I assured the former owner that you would care for the instrument as if it were an extension of your own body.”

Her father returned to the case. He pushed aside the yards of bright yellow silk and retrieved a long, slender bow made of dark, exotic wood.

“The owner said it had to be played with this bow in order to bring out the cello’s full beauty.” As soon as her fingers took hold of it, she remarked at its lightness.

“It feels almost weightless,” she said.

She pulled herself to the edge of her chair and began to prepare the bow. She first tightened the hair, and then applied the rosin.