A Life Apart (12 page)

“Was mother mad?” I ask my father. I had been waiting for him in the hall, sitting in one of the little armchairs. First I had closed the doors to the other rooms, and opened the windows. The damp of the autumnal season mixed with the smell of river weeds was creeping up the stairs. Aunt Erminia was out. Maddalena was busy cooking.

“I don't think so – no.” He is more resigned than surprised. He has hunched his handsome shoulders and put his doctor's briefcase on the first step of the stairs.

“Sit down,” I say, pointing him to the other little armchair. He does. I have my mother's blue notebook in my hand.

“I gave it to her,” my father says when he sees it.

“It's a diary,” I say. He shows no surprise. “Did you know she kept a diary?”

“Yes, I did.”

“It was in her dresser drawer. Unlocked.”

“I never looked.”

“Why not?”

“Out of respect, I think.”

Neither of us spoke for many minutes. Outside, a sheldrake could be heard preening and washing his feathers in the river. The flutter of wings brought to mind the corolla of water spreading all around. The bells of Monte Berico were tolling six o'clock. The wind also carried the sugary scent of elm leaves in autumn.

“Do you want to read it?” I ask.

“No.”

“It's hard to understand. Do you know what she called Aunt Erminia?”

“No.”

“
Mostra
. Feminine of ‘monster'. She hated her. Why?”

“I don't know.”

I looked at him, trying to meet his eyes. But he was staring down at a spot on the floor, just beyond his soft moccasins that carried no imprint from his slim feet. Even after a day's work, he was elegant: his white shirt was not crumpled, his heavy blue linen trousers looked as if he had just stepped into them, his black hair seemed to have been combed one minute earlier in the bathroom at home. He sat in the little armchair with all the naturalness of tall and handsome men who seem to pass through any space hardly touching things, almost expecting everything to fit around them as a matter of course, as if the world had only been waiting for their passage to feel itself complete.

I thought of the way girls at school would talk about men, and I was struck by the idea that he must certainly be surrounded by women who were in love with him. Lucilla had said something about that when my mother died. But not one of them had ever called him at home, as far as I knew. Perhaps he had no other women after all, I thought. I was clutching the notebook with both hands and felt its cover slipping under my damp fingertips. I must have voiced my thoughts without realising:

“I have no other women,” my father says.

“Why not?” I hear my own voice asking.

“Because I ruin everything I touch – that's why.”

A pang of grief stabs through me.

“Is it me? Is it because of me?”

“No. It was because of me that your mother was … that way.”

I waited for a few more words that did not come. When Maddalena came to look for me at suppertime, she found us both sitting still in the dark.

Later that evening, I also questioned Maddalena. She was waiting for me in the kitchen, one elbow propped up on the table. Dishes and glasses were heaped on the dishwasher rack while the vanilla ice cream was melting in the tub left near the stove. She looked at me the whole time and answered me almost without crying – only, she was wringing her handkerchief in her hands.

Yes, she did know that the young Signora kept a diary, or that she wrote, at any rate, and she had also seen where she usually put her diary. Yes, she had told my father the doctor, and no, she did not know if he had read it or not. She could hear and see, but would not pry.

What did she think of my mother? That the young Signora needed help, a lot of help, and they gave her none, God forgive them. And no, absolutely not, in the Holy Virgin's name – she did not at all think it was my fault, that it was because of the way I looked that Mamma was like that. Some other terrible thing must have happened to her. In the beginning she had thought of something unspeakable between Madama Erminia and, God forgive her, my father. Why? Because Madama Erminia was too forward with him: because of the way she would brush against him as she passed behind him in the kitchen or on the stairs, because it was she who chose his perfumes, because of the way they would play the piano in the evening, tight next to each other, weaving their hands together, their shoulders touching. But in actual fact? In
actual fact no, it was not so, she was sure of that just as you can be sure that Our Lord died on the cross for us all. There was a special bond between Madama Erminia and my father, a blood bond. They had been so at one before they were born that – how to put it – they were destined to chase after each other all their life, and when they were in the same room it was as if they were in the same womb, and their bodies were part of each other and you shouldn't be surprised about it or think any evil of it: it was nature, and she had understood that as she watched them both. And if in the beginning Madama Erminia had made her angry, now she only felt pity for her, because she was doomed to not ever find peace with any man, and to desire the only man she could never have, the poor, unfortunate woman. But why then was my mother like that? She did not know.

Once she had overheard her saying something to my father: yes, directly to my father, one night after he had spoken to her – enough to tear your heart out, may the Holy Virgin help us.

I was still a sorry little squirt rocking back and forth to find my balance. She was sitting in her usual armchair. One moment earlier I had slipped from Madama Erminia's control and fallen forwards, knocking my forehead against the marble floor, right at my mother's feet. She had not tried to help me up, had not made the slightest effort to stir, not moved a single muscle. Neither as I fell nor afterwards. And he, my father, had arrived at the right moment to see everything, may the Lord Jesus help us. And he had picked me up from the floor, and soothed me, and found ice for my bruised forehead, and I had finally calmed myself, bundled up in his arms like a sheldrake fledgling, only my little head peeking out
from under the jacket he was still wearing – just like the sheldrakes on the river, only my little head to which my father was holding the ice.

And then? Maddalena paused in silence as she saw the scene again through my eyes. And then I had fallen asleep, and he had placed me in Maddalena's lap and taken my mother's hands, cupped them between his as one would cup water before drinking it, kissed them with tenderness and desire and then clasped them around her face, forcing her to look at him. But Mamma had closed her eyes. And then he had spoken to her all the same: “Life is not a precious object that we must guard through the years. Often, when it comes into our hands, it is chipped and cracked already, and we are not always given the pieces to fix it. Sometimes we have to keep it like that, broken as it might be. Sometimes we can remake the missing pieces together. But life is in front of us, behind us, above and inside us. It's there, even if you shy away and close your eyes and clench your fists. You are not alone: start over with us. We are there for you.”

And then? And then, with her eyes closed and the voice of a robot, she had spoken to him: “What I have seen is not God. And now let me go.”

No, Maddalena did not know what she might have meant, but it was clear that her rage was directed at my father, and to be perfectly honest she thought my mother really had not seen me fall, that she had just been deep in thought or dream, may the Holy Virgin help us. Surely we should have done something to help her – but nothing was done. Madama Erminia burned with her own fire, and she hated my mother, the young Signora, for stealing her
brother and his love. Or perhaps for being more beautiful than her, of a different beauty that had more gentleness, more light – a bit like an angel, there, that's the word. And everyone loved her by “spontaneous motion”, as Madama Erminia would say. And my father was scared of saying or doing anything. Maddalena could see him as he watched her from a distance, and it was clear that he would have wanted to do something. But what? Shake her, pull her out onto the little balcony in the wind and the rain, grab her by the shoulders and shake her until things fell back into place. But nothing, may the Holy Virgin help us. There he was, blocked like a broken clockwork cuckoo with its beak just out of the hatch and the voice forever caught in his wooden throat. Why? No reason why. People are born like that. Handsome or ugly, plucky or shy. That's nature for you.

“Are you the Lady of the Night?”

The next day I had arrived at the nettle-tree house very early. Again Signora De Lellis was at the door, standing still in front of me, her usual quiet smile widening her round face that age had hardly creased.

“Yes. Your mother called me that ever since our first meeting.”

“A night meeting?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Between the two rivers.”

“I want to know,” I say as I close the door behind me.

That day she did not walk upstairs as usual, but led the way into the kitchen, which opened onto the back of the house. It was a very light room despite overlooking the darkest part of the garden, where the rising ground climbed steeply forming a slope of shrubs and rocks, and where the nettle tree spread its thick branches casting shadow on the flowerbeds. On the garden side was a conservatory in which one could easily feel as if sitting outside, almost embraced by the branches of the huge tree. The wooden furniture, painted white, helped create an environment that seemed to radiate light.

That day, Signora De Lellis made tea for me.

“You always have tea at your house, don't you? So Aliberto tells
me. And so also she told me – so she did.”

“Then she did talk?” I ask.

“Yes, she did,” Signora De Lellis says with a sigh.

She was sitting in front of me in a position I did not recognise. When she was telling me about the photographs or turning the pages of the scores I did not read from, her moving hands conveyed all the vitality of a restless existence that was not yet played out. But that afternoon she held her hands in her lap, the palms resting on the pleats of her dress, her fingers spread apart. Drawing deep into herself, she was trying to recall memories that would not wound me, to fill the gaps, make up for my missing memories, and she was doing so with concentration, aware that I would make those memories mine with the images, the colours, the nuances transmitted by her words. She knew that from that day on my mother would speak in her words and have the feelings that she ascribed to her. At that moment, she was birthing my mother for me. I had nothing at all to offset her descriptions, apart from some sentence spoken at mealtimes, a casual word now and again, the barbed hints from Aunt Erminia, the noise of a fall and a cry I had not heard.

“We met on a gloomy, moonless night. I often went out late at night, or very early in the morning. I was well, back then. I'm well now, you will say. But back then it was official. I was allowed out. You had been born a few months. She was fleeing fleeing fleeing, but really did not know what she was fleeing. She saw me sitting on the bench at the bottom of the street between the two rivers. I could clearly smell the strong scent of a brooding moorhen: the smell of warm feathers. She passes me and asks me if I have been
sent by him. ‘Him?' I ask. And she says: ‘Yes, him.' We musicians, you know, are accustomed to meeting all sorts of original people. This young Signora in black, roaming the night alone, did not surprise me. After all that was what I did too. ‘Yes and no,' I said to her. She touched me lightly, checking I was actually there: she was already unsure of herself at that time. But then, who knows! ‘How do you mean, yes and no' she says. ‘No, since to my knowledge at least, no-one sent me,' I reply. ‘Yes, since I might be here because someone wants me to be. Some believe in that.' ‘God?' she says, sorrow and irony in her voice. ‘If he existed he should be fairly dismissed on the grounds of terminal incapability and absenteeism, after which he should be executed for cruelty and burnt at the stake for heresy against the truths he himself has proclaimed.' ‘That's been done already,' I say. ‘He's already been flogged and crucified and killed and buried.' ‘But he lays claim to existence,' she replies, ‘and savagely gorges on the desires that cut into our heart.'

“Then she sat on the bench, at the far end. And she started her story. No, she did not speak of you, child. She spoke of her family. Her parents were peasants, ashamed of the poverty sticking to everything like the greasy odour from the stables: to their clothes worn down until one could see through them, to their patched-up shoes, to their hair singed by the home-made hair styling. If they had to come to town to go to the doctor's, they would get up at daybreak to have a bath. At the last minute, just before leaving, they would iron the shirts they had brought in fresh from the morning sun. They would hurry on to the hairdresser's or the barber's. Then, in the hospital bathroom, before going in to see the
doctor, they would scrub away at their nails again, one more time, fingers and toes, right there where the smell is like flypaper glue that won't come off even with thick bleach. And then every single time, at the end of the visit, as they fumbled for their wallet or took out their handkerchief, that smell would suddenly escape from the bottom of a handbag, thick and cloying, the unmistakable odour of cow dung, of straw festering under the hooves, of milk caked sour on the udders they had squeezed the day before. Like a wicked genie cooped up for too long, that smell rose above the scent of the freshly washed shirt, landed on top of the hairspray, mixed itself in with the surgery disinfectant and spread out into a cloud as big as the room, ready to fray into a lingering wake that followed them as they left.”

Signora De Lellis paused and for the first time since I had met her I saw fatigue on her face. She took my hand and looked at it a long while, stroking my fingers.

“See, it's all about these – the fingers. It wasn't the stables: the true shame was in the taint. It was the taint they had to scrub off. It had always been there. It ran in both families, your grandmother's and your grandfather's. Sometimes children would be born with many fingers. They were normal, pretty as babies, and mentally healthy too. But they were locked away, out of ignorance, out of fear of prejudice and shame. And so they became ill. They grew stunted, rickety from knowing no sunlight, unable to speak from living in the stables with the animals. Sooner or later they would be killed by some disease, or by a horse kicking them as they slept between the hooves. Your grandfather did not tell your grandmother because he was afraid he might lose her, and
your grandmother did the same. They had two boys, both with many fingers, so many you could not tell. Both died when they were very little, and someone must have known how, because after the death of the second one the mayor came, and the priest with him, and they said he'd better be the last one or next time the police would come instead. Then your grandparents finally made up their minds to go and see a doctor, and had no choice but to tell him that the many fingers ran in both families. He said it was hopeless, they should stop trying. But it was not easy to follow that sort of advice back then. Your mother was born after nine months of tears and novenas to the Virgin of Monte Berico, and it was a miracle. She had the right number of fingers, and was so beautiful that she always had pride of place in the living Nativity of their village: first the Christ Child, then a little angel in prayer, and later, when she was slightly older, the angel of ethereal light announcing salvation to the shepherds. And it was during a Christmas play that your father saw her: she was the Madonna, all dressed in white, her sky-blue veil studded with golden stars. He asked for her hand after the midnight mass. He was handsome, rich, he came from the city. But your grandparents were beside themselves with the fear that she might be cursed with the same fate as they had been, and the next day, as soon as they knew, they left just as they were – no fresh shirts, no hairdresser's. They walked into your father's town study and made him swear that his family had never had anyone born with more than ten fingers, or anyone a little ‘behind', or anyone lame or deaf or cross-eyed, and that only good blood had been flowing in its veins for generations and generations. And he gave his word. Then, kneeling
in front of the two peasants, old and bent and laden down with guilt and fears as they were, he asked permission to marry your mother. Because love is like that, it has no memory and no future, it does not know that the days can awaken past histories.”