A Life Apart (8 page)

In the afternoon I would rush to the
conservatoire
, just a few steps from home, at the Ponte degli Angeli. The
conservatoire
also had a staircase, but this was a grand stairway of honour made of highly polished marble, where one felt like dancing to the notes gliding down in a dissonant tangle from the three storeys of music classrooms. I was unaware of that desire back then, but now I know I felt it, because these days, each time I climb those stairs, unravelling as I do so the merry riot of sounds coming from the classrooms, recognising the Boccherini of a cello student, the Vivaldi being practised on the flute or the Clementi of the first piano grades, I find myself stepping more lightly, taken by a faraway feeling, a childhood caress at once innocent and momentous.

“Does my young pupil have something of her own to propose today?”

This was the greeting with which Maestro De Lellis, who had wanted me as one of his pupils, always welcomed me.

I owed my admission to the
conservatoire
the previous autumn to him. That is why Aunt Erminia was crying when she came out of the audition room: it was the humiliation she suffered when her opinion, her “furious striving”, as she had called it when she told me about it some time later, had not been enough.

“Maestro De Lellis stood up while everyone was shouting at everyone else and no-one was listening to me, no-one at all – as if I didn't exist. He waited for silence and then said that probably,
unless the merciful God of Christians gave proof of his existence in this life, you would never become a concert pianist, and unfortunately not a teacher either, since the world
merely deigns
, as he said, to celebrate appearance, ephemera, the rind, the disgusting grease paint of common decorum – those were his exact words, they sounded like they came straight from some Victorian preacher a hundred years ago. But that in your hands you possess the art of creation, the gift to call back to life, through music, the beauty that was denied to you. That we could but welcome and cultivate it, that we should thank the circumstances, or God if we are so inclined, for being given this opportunity. That he didn't know how, but there had to be a way in which this gift would do good to the human race.”

Clearly I did not compose my own music at the same speed at which I would learn the pieces assigned by Maestro De Lellis, but whenever I did have something to propose our lessons would gain the intoxicating quality of a wild run through autumn mist. I felt the dangerous pleasure of letting myself go, the excitement of a child at play, the fear and yet the need to be daring, to listen, to counteract, to disagree. The grace of forgetting my cruel shape. Maestro De Lellis gave me space and guided me, and I was grateful to him for it. There was no offence, it was not about me, it was for music, for the piece that in the end would come out new, unlike anything that had existed before, created, or generated, by me.

“It would be … embarrassing, you understand – on stage, like that, with all the others. Embarrassing for her, above all. And for the
conservatoire
too, for the other children, and … the parents. But above all for her.”

I do not know who is behind the classroom door, I cannot hear the reply given by Maestro De Lellis, who as ever is speaking in a quiet voice.

I turn back taking care not to be heard and walk very slowly down the marble stairway. I wait in the hall reading the concert notices, then go back upstairs.

“I won't play at the end of year recital,” I say as I throw the door wide open.

“I understand … it is meant to be compulsory, but we can consider a few possibilities …” the Maestro says with a smile.

“No possibilities. I won't do it.”

I had learnt my place. At school, in the morning, I could not escape: I would sit like a statue born from the clumsiness of an unskilled craftsman, hoping to blend in with the desks scarred by markings, the splintered chairs, the worn, crazed marble tiling of the floor, the walls tacky with yellowed old adhesive tape. At the
conservatoire
I was not the target of any offence – but that was also because I would not open out beyond the space assigned to my presence, which was the classroom of Maestro De Lellis.

I knew nothing about him: since no-one would speak to me, I was party to no gossip or sharing of secrets. That was another reason why I missed Lucilla.

“He's not married. He lives nearby, that's why he walks to our house and also to the
conservatoire
. On Viale Dante, in a villa along the main road to Monte Berico. His mother, the old Signora, is a little cracked. She must be tinder-dry by now. His grandparents were from one of the city's good families. Notaries. His grandfather died the day after his wife was buried.”

A tear gushes away from Maddalena, who is answering my questions about the Maestro.

“How did he die?”

“He … he committed suicide. For love. For love of his wife. Very romantic, they said. And since he was who he was, they even gave him the blessing before taking him to the cemetery. Not to church, because that was too big a sin for those times, but the priest did take him to the cemetery and they put him in the family vault. It was his daughter found him – the old Signora. She didn't go to the funeral: they were not on very good terms. May the Virgin forgive her – but she did have her reasons.” She is wiping her tears as they fall on the freshly ironed whites.

“What reasons?”

“Well – gentlemen and ladies prize their good name more than life itself. And I've said too much already.”

“And you – did you forgive the Virgin?”

“What are you saying?”

“For making your children die, I mean. And your husband too.”

After the hours spent at school in the morning, my control slackens. I build up some credit that settles for a few hours the debt I contracted at birth because of my terrifying ugliness.

“Don't go saying these awful things, for the love of the Holy Virgin. She didn't make them, they just died. Life is mystery. Is it blasphemy they teach you, in Contrà Riale?”

She did not know how close she was to the truth.

During that first winter of secondary school, after lunch, when the cold kept old people resting in their houses, whenever I had
no classes at the
conservatoire
I would go out, well wrapped in my blue coat, with my blue hat and blue scarf to protect myself from drivers' eyes. Walking along Via Giuriolo and part of Viale Regina Margherita, I would climb the flight of steps leading up to Monte Berico to then go down towards Viale Dante and reach the house of Maestro De Lellis. I could have taken the lower route, following the road from its beginning: that would have made the climb easier, but I preferred the flight of steps that reminded me of my evening jaunts with Aunt Erminia. I had kept the habit of running as I climbed, savouring the pleasure of exhaustion that emptied me of all the cares from my mornings at school. I would not stop in front of the locked gate, but walk past quickly, with hardly a glance, and then two houses down I would cross the road and retrace my steps, passing the house gate again and glancing once more through its bars. At the Piazzale del Cristo, where the row of porticos leading Sunday pilgrims to the Basilica takes a right turn, I would sit for a few minutes on the bench in front of the Carmelites' monastery, and then, still running, make my way down and back home. A little ritual after which I would start playing, listening to music and doing homework.

In this way I had built a fairly clear picture of my teacher's house. It was a small two-storey villa, white and well kept. Unlike the neighbouring ones, it had no balconies but large windows only screened by pastel curtains, often open to show glass chandeliers. There was a huge one on the upper floor, its crystal drops glimmering with bright light and moving as if swaying in a gentle breeze whose origin I could not imagine. And always, each day, the sound of a piano could be heard: someone was listening to
piano music, without interruption, every afternoon. Or playing it. At least so I thought, sometimes.

“It's wrong to peek into people's houses,” Maddalena says sternly when I tell her about my excursions. But then her curiosity prevails:

“And what is the park like?”

Its size was that of a garden, but it had trees so tall in fact as to recall the great expanse of Parco Querini, near the new city hospital. There was a cedar whose main trunk opened out into three sturdy arms like a candlestick, stretching high over the gate towards the roof of the house. Once, during that time, I dreamt I was asleep in the almost level space at the base of the three arms, a space protected by that mighty natural trinity that seemed to be offering me up like a gift to heaven. Or protecting me from heaven, perhaps.

Behind the house one of the trees, somewhat constrained in the small available space, was spreading its slightly drooping side branches over the roof, and its fruits hung round and dark, creating a pattern against the blue. Some had fallen onto the ground and had been rolled by the wind onto the garden gravel and the road. Once, just outside the gate, I found one and took it home.

“O blessed angels of Paradise, it's a nettle tree!”

The sight of the fruits has Maddalena weep even more than usual.

“My poor husband planted one in our house at Ferrovieri when our first child was born, may Heaven guard him among its angels. He said it reminded him of his land, he came from the lowlands, but from a nice place, full of trees. He had chosen Ferrovieri
because it was green and the river widens spaces, he said. And he always used to say that the children could climb the nettle tree, because it has solid branches, not like the cheating fig tree that will crack even when it's big. And then it's a holy tree, the nettle tree is – they also call it the rosary tree, because you can make rosary beads from the fruits. If you find me sixty or so, I will make you one: I know how.”

No-one could ever be seen in the garden or inside the house, even though the light was always on, signalling some sort of presence.

Once I was forced to stop in front of the gate. Through the closed windows I could hear a piano played with a sound I could not recognise. I could not tell who the composer or the musician might be. It was not the unmistakable touch of my teacher, which had a brilliancy and a slight unconscious tendency to draw long waves of sounds, something that could barely be perceived: although the notation and expression of the score were respected, the entire sonority of the piece would rise and fall as if imitating a cradling movement of which he evidently was not aware. By contrast, the sound I could hear as I stood in the street was assured, unhesitating, but disordered. It was clear that the duration of the notes was not as it should be: they were slightly too long, or a little too brief. One was tempted to interrupt the playing and clean it up. Yet this was not the insecurity of a beginner: it had a kind of logic – and then, the music did not come to any end. There were no movements, no pauses. It was as if flowing in fits and starts around a basic theme that was precise although never wholly formulated. There was something bewitching in that
sound, as note after note it promised a resolution that never came.

I stood outside the gate for a long time, my scarf fluttering around me in the wind. But the music did not stop.

“It was my mother at the piano, yesterday afternoon.”

Maestro De Lellis is as courteous as ever as he speaks, his back turned while he takes a score from the chair.

I am plunged deep into a shame that I had never known before in his presence.

I had been walking past his house and stopping just outside for weeks: impossible to think he had not noticed me.

“When I am not teaching, I spend all my time with her. She is not well. She was once a concert pianist.” His tone is somewhat apologetic. “If you would like to, Signorina, you may come in tomorrow. You could give me your opinion on the piano: your excellent ear could be of help to us. There is something in that piano that disturbs my mother, but neither I nor the tuner are able to tell just what it may be.”

“What about that music?”

“That is a story I will tell you some time.”

“What about the swaying chandelier?”

“You shall see.”

I went with Maddalena, who had been adamant.

“A young lass does not go alone to visit a man.” In her anxiety, having to contradict me, she finds again words from her native dialect.

“But his mother's there.”

“Yes – but will she be
all
there? Even as a young girl she was a wild little thing.”

“Then you know her! What do you know about her?”

“Nothing – graveyards are overflowing with those of too much knowing.”

The door was opened by Maestro De Lellis, who was not at all surprised to see Maddalena, but could not properly do the honours.

“Iis there someone at the door Aliiberto, iis someone there? Doo come in! Glaad to see you, very glaad!”

The words came from the first floor, quietly drizzling down a wide staircase of polished wood that curled around itself rather heavily, forming a half-spiral. It was a voice of music, gentle, made of quavering notes set apart by intervals of one tone. She was singing rather than speaking, but sounding wholly unlike what I usually heard from the pupils of singing classes at the
conservatoire
. Now I know that it was something similar to monastic cantillation. And the words had the extraordinary pattern of the music I had heard the day before, the duration of sounds splayed out across a phrase, following an inner melody entirely its own.

“We are coming, Mamma. Do play if you like, while you wait for us.”

At that moment a music started, entirely different from the one I had heard the day before, but with the same outlandishly anarchic and yet mesmerising pattern.

“Doctors think it might be a singular, anomalous form of Pick's Disease,” Maestro De Lellis says calmly. “I would define it as a sort of personal, musical version of the disease. She only has very long-term memory – memories of her childhood and adolescence – and, if I may put it that way, a
working
, short-term memory. Very short-term, in her case.”

“Is the music hers?” I say.

“She will start from a theme of her own invention. At times it is possible to recognise some parts of the famous pieces she has played throughout her life. She will look at her hands and remember some of the notes she has just played, but not the correct sequence of their duration – and so she will make small variations on that theme, hooking onto the last notes she can remember, but with continual changes to the duration. We may perhaps define it as a sort of
terza rima
as applied to music – only written in free verse.”

“She could read from scores,” I say, still trying to understand.

“She no longer likes to do so. She will … wrap herself in her music. It's the disease. There are those who cannot stop talking: she plays. This peculiar form has been the subject of much study, as it were: several neurologists have asked for recordings of her music. And she does the same with words.”

“Tears your heart out, this music does,” Maddalena says as she dries her eyes.

“Not always: it depends on the initial theme. Sometimes I will suggest one to her – something lighter.”

“Does she ever stop?” I ask, recalling the afternoons I have spent listening.

“She does when I ask her to, or when she has slowed down too much and cannot recall the last notes: often, then, she will be unable to start again of her own accord. Some other times she can.”

He was in no hurry to go upstairs. The front room was very beautiful. The three large windows overlooking the front courtyard were matched by three more at the back of the house, which was dominated and somewhat darkened by the huge mass of the nettle tree. Most of the room was taken up by a monumental sofa with a white cover and two
bergère
armchairs upholstered in a shot fabric patterned with roses. But the most astonishing feature of the room were its walls, entirely covered in photographs alternating with portraits, all showing the same woman, now young, now more mature, in some cases already on the verge of old age. Always sitting at the piano, on stage, in the act of playing. No family photographs.

“Your mother,” I say.

“Yes. So that she may remember herself as she once was,” Maestro De Lellis says apologetically. “The sickness has … robbed her of the best memories in her life. Not even her successes were spared. She has nothing left.”

The pictures had not been arranged in any order: some very large ones next to tiny ones, next to oil, charcoal or pencil portraits. Nearly all the photographs were in black and white: she
evidently loved to dress in white, and shone as if gliding over the black background of the piano, the concert hall, the stage. She seemed to glow with an inner light, radiant with the beauty that comes from feeling oneself important, part of something that has value and brings happiness.

“She's an angel, just as everyone used to say.” To dry her tears today, Maddalena has brought a snow-white little handkerchief of finest cotton muslin.

“Critics liked to call her ‘the angel of the piano'. They would say that she had an angel's name: Gabriella De Lellis. And she did indeed always dress in white.”

“De Lellis,” I say, involuntarily repeating the Maestro's words.

“Yes. I know nothing of my father. When I was a child, she would tell me that I had two mothers: herself and music. Later, she promised that one day she would tell me everything. Then she fell ill – but I have the good fortune of not entertaining any curiosity.”

“Curiosity is a sister to the devil,” Maddalena says approvingly.

We climbed the stairs in silence, instinctively tiptoeing so as not to disturb that tranquil drizzle of notes echoing from one wall to the other, from one floor to the other, thanks to acoustics that I perceived as flawless.

She did not look up. She was sitting at the piano and looking at her pale fingers as they glided all along the keyboard like young girls at play on the beach. She was following them with the care of a childminder responsible for their movements, pleased with them and at the same time apprehensive lest one or the other should escape. Her full-length white dress was fluttering
in a breeze, revealing a well-rounded, softer and more maternal body than shown in the photographs on the ground floor. There was nothing dry about her: for once, Maddalena had been wrong.

“The chiild from the hoouse on the riiver,” she says softly in a singsong voice, without lifting her eyes from the keyboard.

Maestro De Lellis stops dead in the middle of the room.

“Then you remember her, you remember what I told you …”

“I reemember the sohrrow of women who aare mothers to beeloved children.”

“Did you know my mother?” I say anxiously.

“Too many questions make for bad answers,” Maddalena says, immediately cutting me short. “There's a breeze in here …”

Maddalena wants to change the subject fearing I might be indiscreet, but it is true that a swirl of air is coming from somewhere, and making us shiver even though we are still in our coats.

The light-filled room was almost wholly taken up by the grand piano, surrounded by three large
ficus benjamina
whose leaves were quivering softly, rustled by a slowly revolving wooden fan suspended from the ceiling and almost completely hidden by the plants. The glass chandelier also participated in that quiet movement, which I had noticed from the street on my afternoon walks.

“My mother needs the breath of the world around her,” Maestro De Lellis says softly. “She once used to walk for hours: to Parco Querini in the city, or the park of the Villa Guiccioli, not far from here, above the Basilica of Monte Berico.”

“She used to come to Ferrovieri, too, along the Retrone.”

Maddalena is not sure she wants to speak. She stops and watches her playing, waiting for some sort of assent that does not come.

“It was raining, the first time I saw her. You could see her from far off. She was walking along the river bank and her white dress was flying about her, at first. She was looking in front of herself without noticing how the rain was making her skirt heavier and heavier. I had the impression she was talking to someone: an angel talking to her fellows.”

“I did not know that. I would not have thought she would walk out that far. On the other hand, that is a typical symptom of her illness, this restless wandering,” the Maestro says.

“But it's not far: you can take the path that goes down to San Giorgio, it's very quick.”

“I don't know it, she never took me there …”

“Perhaps it was one of her secrets,” Maddalena says in a conclusive tone.

While playing, Signora De Lellis was following my movements around the room. I was accustomed to feeling people's eyes on me, and could tell whether their gaze was moved by curiosity, disgust, compassion or – sometimes – benevolence. In this case, it was interest. This was not the wan stare of a weak-minded elderly lady: she knew me, knew who I was, or at least I reminded her of something definite, a remembrance whose fragments she did not have to struggle after as they drifted around, unmoored in her memory.

I could hear nothing wrong with the piano. It was an extraordinary Steinway, perfectly tuned – and I did not have to try and find any possible fault with it: when, as suggested by Maestro De
Lellis, I moved closer to examine its mechanism, his mother leant forward slightly, as if looking for inspiration, and whispered in my ear, without any lilting or singing vowels:

“Ring the bell tomorrow. I'll be waiting.”