The Garden of Letters (4 page)

From the time she is ten years old, Elodie attends classes after school at Verona’s Liceo Musicale,
on the corner of Via Roma and Via Manin. By eighteen, however, she studies there full-time. Her lithe frame carries her cello case to the school’s cloistered walls. Everything around her cast an impression. The blue-gray plaster walls, the stark practice rooms. The smell of dry leaves meeting moist air.

Her memory is like soft, red clay. A face on the street. The pattern of a dress. All that she encounters remains fixed inside her mind, like a web of permanent fingerprints.

She plays Vivaldi, Albinoni, Beethoven, Bach, and
, the music flowing through her, her body soaking up each note. Her body is just another part of her instrument. Her legs are strong like a colt’s; her lean arms have the quiet strength of a dancer.

When she plays, she closes her eyes. She hears the fire. She senses the water. Her bow is like lightning. Striking. Flashing. Touching down sometimes for just an instant, and other times moving back and forth like a saw. She does not play with any sense of fear.

Outside, the world is blackening with the encroaching war. She senses it like a shadow as soon as she leaves the classrooms at the Liceo or her home. The women in line for food at the grocery store, their hands clutching ration cards; the striking factory workers protesting on the streets. The black, billowing shirts of the Fascist police on their motorcycles. The fear that doesn’t hang in a single note, but rather an intricate orchestration that is impossible for Elodie to decipher.

She is chosen to play in an advanced string quartet with three other students. Lena, a violist, is chosen as well. The majority of girls attending the Liceo Musicale play the piano or the flute. But Elodie and Lena are among the few girls who play the strings.

The two girls are opposites. Elodie, with her dark black hair, her sinewy body, and her green eyes. Her friend Lena looks more German. Her body is soft and curved. Her hair blonde, her eyes blue and round. There is a voluptuousness to the way she plays her viola as well.

They quickly become friends and learn to complement each other’s playing. Lena laughs more easily and takes Elodie to the cafés to have espresso after class. She does not have Elodie’s memory, though. Lena is like the two boys in the quartet as she needs to read the musical score. But on several occasions, her beauty is responsible for distracting their classmates.

“Franco was trying to look down your blouse today in rehearsal,” Elodie teases. “It’s a small marvel he didn’t lose his place . . .”

“He’s an imbecile.” Lena snorts. “He wouldn’t be able to open my bra even if he had three hands.”

Elodie is amazed by her friend’s quick tongue. It’s such a contrast to Lena’s angelic looks and the mask of demureness she wears through the halls.

Lena is critical, too, of Mussolini’s alliance with the Germans. “Those swine,” she calls the Germans. “The lowest from the gutter. You just wait and see . . . if we’re not vigilant, we’ll be like Czechoslovakia and they’ll be steamrolling in here and ruling our country.”

Elodie can feel the weight of eyes on them as her friend blurts out her feelings.

“You shouldn’t speak so loudly . . .” she whispers. “You’ll get us dragged into the police station with talk like that.”

“What are you afraid of? The police don’t see us as a threat. You’re just a girl with a cello on the street. They’re too stupid to even notice us.”

Elodie looks around. What Lena said is true. The piazza is lined with women pushing baby strollers and a few men walking toward the post office. They are just two young girls carrying instruments, and easily blended into the scenery. No one takes notice of them at all.

Verona, Italy

A
PRIL
1943

As a child, Elodie fell asleep with music in her head. In the morning, she would wake and hear it, too. “Sleeping with the angels,” is what her father called it when your dreams were accompanied by song. But Elodie couldn’t remember a time when she didn’t hear notes while she slept. Her father played long into the night, when he thought the house was already asleep. Softly and quietly, he played a nocturne, or occasionally a quiet romance.

He always stood near the tall paned windows that overlooked the street, his white shirt slightly unbuttoned, his violin tucked expertly underneath his chin.

His playing was the lullaby of her childhood. She knew when he played Mozart that he was savoring good news, when he was nervous, he played Brahms; and when he wanted forgiveness from her mother, he played
. She knew her father more clearly through his music than she did through his words.

Like her, he spoke very little. It wasn’t that he didn’t have thoughts or feelings. If anything, he had too many of them. He didn’t have a quiet head. He felt things too deeply. Music had become a tonic for him early on in his youth, and he had learned to play three instruments expertly: violin, cello, and piano.

Elodie’s mother, Orsina, was not a musician herself, but had fallen in love after hearing him perform.

He had been invited to play in her native city, a labyrinth on water. A place where in winter, the fog merged with the sea. Orsina’s father knew the feather of every bird and made a living from all things ornithological. He traveled three months a year to places as far away as Africa to collect rare plumage for his hat store, a jewel box known to the city’s most fashionable at the corner of San Marco’s Square. Ostrich, peacock, and yellow and blue parrot, every journey brought home a trunk full of feathers, each one more exotic than the last.

Orsina couldn’t forget the sight of her mother’s beautiful bed, laid out in feathers. Silky plumes layered in abundance; a feather coat of turquoise, lapis, and green. It was her mother who took her father’s extravagant bounty and transformed them into the beautiful hats that filled the windows of their store. Her narrow, tapered fingers were so delicate and nimble as they sewed dozens of seed pearls, silk corsages, and thin wisps of veil. Orsina learned the styles early from her mother: cloche for the ladies and the English tourists, broad-rimmed for church and weddings, and the flapper headbands with beads and white feathers for those who liked to dance. In her mother’s workroom, there were always tall stacks of fashion magazines her father had sent from Paris so that his wife could be kept abreast of the latest styles. Orsina spent her days leafing through the pages, dreaming beyond the lagoons of her own childhood, to places like France, where there was a different kind of light. Cities where one didn’t float but were beautiful all the same. She imagined them like confectionary sugar, air-spun and light as gauze.

Orsina had not expected that it would be a concert in I Gesuiti that would cause her to leave Venice. But her life took on another path, when one Friday evening, shortly after her twentieth birthday, her parents closed their shop early and took her to hear a rising young violinist play. It was at that concert that she found herself transported by music and entranced by the musician who played before her.

She and her parents walked that evening to the church, her father in a dark suit, her mother in a pale lavender dress; a cloche hat the color of plum blossoms framed her face. Orsina had chosen something wholly different; she wore her hair loose and a yellow dress made of the lightest chiffon.

As they settled into the wooden pews, the sounds within the church seemed to shift. Gone was the somber atmosphere of a Sunday Mass. It was as if the pale gray and celadon marble, with its intricate patterns and lace cut from stone, was electrified. Excitement and anticipation now filled the holy walls. No one glanced at their prayer books. Instead they all craned their neck to see the dashing violinist tuning his strings.

Soon he stood with his instrument at his side and smiled modestly as the church’s cultural director proudly introduced him as the latest virtuoso from Verona. The audience clapped and Elodie’s father began to play.

Elodie loved the description her mother often told of hearing those first notes.

“Like magic,” she said. “I had seen feathers all my life, and his notes seemed like feathers floating in the air. Arabesques of movement that made my head spin.” Her mother always gasped for air after remembering the moment so intensely, as the memory literally took her breath away.

“When he played a Beethoven Romance the audience was enraptured. Your grandfather tapped me on my leg and told me: ‘You’ll always remember this, the first time you heard genius!’

“But I already knew I would never forget it. I was completely intoxicated by the music.” Orsina always smiled at this point and took another breath. “And I knew that the man who could create such beauty was the man I wanted to love.”

At this point, Elodie’s father would laugh and reach toward his wife’s hand.

“I’m glad I’ve always played my violin with my eyes closed . . . Had I seen your mother in the front pew, with her dark hair falling over her shoulders and her eyes as green as tulip leaves, I would have forgotten every single note. I’m thankful I saw her only after I’d finished playing.”

Orsina beamed. “I told your grandmother that I wanted to learn to play like that. But she shook her head and told me that such playing could not be taught. That is a kiss on the head from God.

“The line was so long to meet your father after that concert. The cultural director himself had to stand between him and the crowd.” Her mother’s black hair was now streaked with wisps of gray, but Elodie could always still see the young girl beneath whenever her mother laughed.

“I saw you right away, Orsina,” her father said. The years melted away from his wife’s face as he saw her once again standing there in front of him for the first time. The pale lemon dress, the jet-black hair, the sparkling eyes. He remembered with great sweetness how her hands trembled as she handed over her program for him to sign.

“He took me from my beautiful lagoon,” her mother would now say, so many years later. “But I have no regrets.” But sometimes, on very hot nights, Elodie could detect a wistfulness in her mother’s voice. There was a parchedness, a thirst within her words. And when the summer bore down its horrendous heat, Elodie could hear her mother’s words like an elegy, sad and full of longing.

“It’s the dryness of the heat here. I’m not used to it . . .” Every summer brought the same lament. Elodie would watch sympathetically as her mother took a handkerchief to wipe her forehead. “I grew up surrounded by water. Inky blue. Green and black. We marked the seasons by the height of water, the mist, and the fog. As a child, my first memory was the touch of water. My first taste was the salt from the sea.”

Elodie knew her mother had tried to fill her life with all things beautiful, and that she saw life through a unique prism. A pair of optimistic eyes. One only had to shift the angle to reveal another facet, to radiate another beam of light.

She filled their house with flowers. Venetian vases the color of ribbon candy were abloom with lilacs in the spring and roses in the summer. She prepared comforting food from her childhood: baccalá and polenta. Risotto steeped in squid ink and Burano cookies, which her father had loved to dip in sweet wine. But music she left to her husband and daughter. The only time Elodie ever heard her mother sing was when she was alone in her bath.

Does everyone have a song? Elodie wondered if even those not blessed with a musical gift still had their own melody somewhere locked within. Her mother’s voice emerged only when she was shoulder deep in water. It struck Elodie like the gentle hum of honeybees, modest and sweet. It floated over the steam of the bath. She saw her mother’s hair piled on top of her head. Her long neck like a swan’s, the angles of her well-chiseled face. She sang songs in Venetian dialect. Mostly love songs, but occasionally she would sing one of the melancholy ballads of the gondoliers.

But it was the latest French songs that her mother seemed to love the most. Her affection for Paris had been the reason she had chosen a French name for her daughter. “Your name came to me like the notes from a harp,” she would tell Elodie. And she would smile at her daughter, knowing that although she had never yet visited that other city of bridges and light, she had created something with its own sparkle and beauty.

Orsina believed that her singing was her own secret. Little did she know that on the nights when she excused herself to bathe, Elodie and her father would lock eyes. If they were practicing their instruments, at the sound of the heated bathwater being poured, they’d place down their bows. Then the two of them would sit back in their chairs and close their eyes. They did not rustle or even make the slightest sound. They just waited, like the audience at the conservatory, for Orsina’s voice to come.

It emerged almost like a flute, her sweet voice floating through the door. Gone was any trace of parchedness. Orsina sang in a language her daughter didn’t understand. But Elodie intuitively comprehended every melody. Her mother’s voice reflected these subtleties in the same way Elodie interpreted her musical scores. Elodie now understood why Orsina had wiped tears from her eyes when she or her father played. She understood what it was like to listen to music created by a person you love.