A Life Apart (2 page)

She was indeed very beautiful. Like my father, she had the ability to give herself entirely to anyone who might be in front of her. She would gaze at them with her deep black eyes and at once make them feel very important. She did not talk much, but when she did, secrets stood revealed and things were made to happen: “Today we change colours in the kitchen!” and she lands two tins of yellow paint on the table.

“We are going to Monte Berico. Chop-chop, flat shoes on, off we go!” and she drags me out of the house, right past my mother, who does not answer our greeting.

I only ever went out at night: before supper in winter, after supper in summer. I was late understanding that my aunt had to wait until after dark. My seclusion had been ordered by my mother: going out was taboo, a taboo invisibly sculpted in the elegantly marbled walls of the house, a taboo on which the residue of life left inside would stand or fall.

We would take the dimly lit, deserted street between the two rivers. The smell of river weeds changed with the seasons: sweetish in summer, sharper in winter. Then we would climb up the flight of steps to Monte Berico, or sometimes go by the lower route, along the porticos. Always running, breathless, all the way up to the Piazzale, so we could look at the city below.

“It's huge,” I say, pointing at the dark shapes of houses and blocks under construction down below. “How do people find their homes?”

“All you have to do is keep the reference points.” And Aunt Erminia has me line my eye with her index finger as she points to the Basilica Palladiana with its green cupola swelling over Piazza
dei Signori, or pans around to the façade of San Lorenzo or the Bissara Tower, “That's going to topple like a pyramid of peanuts one of these days.”

“Will you take me to see it one day?”

“You can see much better from here.”

Sometimes her pointing finger would fix on one palazzo and she would tell me about its history, kneaded with the owners' clandestine love affairs, the mysterious deaths of servants and unwanted witnesses, the lavish gifts of some more generous scion, the fortunate alliances, the disastrous collapses.

“History is nothing but vintage gossip, and don't you forget it,” she says laughing as the perfume of her hair splashes over me and cuts my breath short.

She knew those palazzos one by one. Over time I learnt that she had some friend or admirer in each and every one of them. She attracted men with the excessive beauty of a dark complexion that evoked exotic sensualities, with her girlish long hair, with her laugh that exploded like a loud feast. And with music. Aunt Erminia was hardly outstanding as a musician, but few of her followers listened to her playing: hers was music for the eyes. Some critics were quite harsh with her: one evening, laughing, she read out one review to me: “… beyond the dazzling physicality of the pianist there is little more than the skill of a well-educated amateur.” But audiences adored her, and in the provinces she was a celebrity.

Whenever she spoke, Aunt Erminia would move her hands in the air, looking like a conductor fashioning a harmony of words rather than notes. She had perfect hands: her long, slender fingers
would fan out to clarify some important concept, bunch up in a nervous fist to emphasise an idea, or cut a horizontal slash in front of someone's eyes to close a discussion. They were bewitching hands to look at, and whenever Aunt Erminia was playing they would glide so lightly over the piano keys as to make one wonder whether the strings were being touched by some faraway magic.

I soon learnt to gesticulate as she did, with no need for any practice: I learnt out of affection, out of my desire to be like her. And so our conversations came to resemble a sort of comical hand ballet that might have looked from a distance like some secret sign language created to exclude the rest of the world.

All of a sudden, in the middle of one of our conversations, Aunt Erminia grabs hold of my wrists and looks at my hands as if for the first time:

“But they're wonderful!” she says.

And then, to my father:

“The child must play. She has a musician's hands. I've been blind!”

And without the slightest pause she drags me over to the piano:

“Play!” she orders.

“Play what?” I say. I am frightened. I have never dared to touch the baby grand on which she and my father play most evenings, sitting side by side, their shoulders touching lightly, their hands alike, elegant and self-assured, chasing each other without touching, coming closer and moving apart, interweaving and leaving each other, resting on the final note, ending with sadness, then one starting again quite unexpectedly and the other renewing the
chase, wasting each other with pleasure, meandering lost among the notes as if it were for ever.

“Play anything you like. Be a cat on the keys: go for a stroll.”

And I stroll at random up and down the keyboard. I know its unmistakable smell of antique wood treated with preserving oils, the low and high notes: they too are graceless at first but then I go back and correct them, I too am chasing a music, a little music of my own. Aunt Erminia can see something in my fingers:

“You will be a wonderful pianist!” and she scoops me up in an embrace. Then she sits at the piano and, tossing her head back, plays an
impromptu
that sets the walls shaking.

Music took hold of my life. The entirely new awareness that something was expected of me filled my days with feelings I had not known, feelings that took the place of that sort of empty waiting that had held my energies frozen until then. Perhaps I could show that something in me was good after all, that I could be loved in my own right rather than out of some hazy sense of protectiveness or guilt.

I was not the child prodigy that Aunt Erminia had seen, but I learnt quickly, and wanted to play with my whole being.

For a long time my father kept quiet. In the evening, after supper, he would stand behind me and listen, and I could feel his black eyes piercing my hands. I could feel his uncertain thoughts, how he feared deluding himself and in turn causing me to delude myself.

Later he took to listening to me as he sat in the little white cretonne armchair next to the turquoise glazed earthenware stove. He would not speak or offer any advice, but he was relaxed: I could
see him close his eyes and follow the music's rhythm with imperceptible movements of his fingers.

I have been playing from memory ever since the first day. In fact my memory was quite unused, the idle waste of my days hardly taking up a fragment of it. Reading a score once was enough for me to remember it as easily as the prayers Maddalena would teach me at night. That way I was able to look at my hands: I would watch them in amazement as they created the sounds that filled the air, follow them as they took on a life of their own, leaving the body, gliding over the keys, stopping at the pauses, teasing out the grace notes and slowing at the finale. Just like Papa's hands, just like Aunt Erminia's.

At first, Aunt Erminia herself was my teacher. She would come in the morning or in the evening, depending on her teaching schedule at the
conservatoire
. In winter I would wait for her with my nose squashed against the glass pane of the salon window, in summer I would slip my head between the slender stone columns of the balcony. By the time she came, I would have already spent several hours playing, but I never let her find me sitting at the piano. I would run to meet her, and she would scoop me up, lift me high, and then set me down on the stool.

“Light, light, light!” she says, improvising a swift arabesque on the keys.

“Or heavy, heavy, heavy!” she roars, swooping thunderously on the lower notes.

And we began. After a while Maddalena would come in, bringing tea, freshly baked meringues, the vanilla biscuits I loved, the
gâteau au beurre
. Then we would go and ask my mother, who until
that moment had remained in her room on the opposite side of the house, to come and take afternoon tea with us. She never spoke, but I took care to leave the doors open in the hope she might be listening and would one day say something about my progress.

“The child must be enrolled at the
conservatoire
,” Aunt Erminia says one evening at suppertime, abruptly dropping her spoon and clenching her fist as if to stop that thought escaping her. “She's below the normal age for auditions, but exceptions are made for a talent such as hers.”

My father rests his fork and places his hands palms down on the table, with the gesture used for important discussions that require patience. He struggles for words, without looking at me.

“She is going to school in October and heaven knows how … how difficult that will be. The
conservatoire
, with all those little girls in their pretty white shirts and pleated navy skirts, the ribbon in their hair bobbing up and down in time with the ‘Rondo alla Turca' – that would be … too much, just too much.”

Aunt Erminia explodes, crackling like green wood in the fireplace:

“She's not some ‘Rondo alla Turca' piano player! She is a pianist made for the
impromptu
and
polonaise
, for the ‘Wanderer Fantasie', for Rachmaninov! She can transform music, she can make it … make it beautiful. She has people in tears when she plays, you know that! She's without equal in her age group – like a prodigy. And you cannot ignore a miracle!”

Maddalena passes me the pudding, weeping all the while in her open and generous manner. I only have a vague idea of what is wrong with me. I know I am ugly, very ugly. My frightening
ugliness is a shadow walking in front of me – but I cannot imagine what it might become once set outside the walls of the house.

“I'll wear skirts and ribbons too, if I must,” I hasten to say. But no-one replies.

The only sound comes from my mother, who is toying with the excessively red, excessively round cherry decorating the pudding on her china saucer.

I enrolled in the
conservatoire
much later, five years later in fact. I sat my exam, just as my father had predicted, among excruciatingly pretty little girls in ribbons and bows. But in the meantime, horrifying things had happened in my life, and by then I knew. I played behind a tall wooden door as highly polished as the marble slab behind the Madonna of Monte Berico where people lay their hands to beg for grace, on a flat-sounding piano that was much inferior to mine. I knew, I had learnt: while playing, I must remain expressionless, for the best expression on my face is precisely no expression at all. I must pour my entire life into my hands – all of my life, all of it.

The examiners remained locked in discussion for a whole hour, Aunt Erminia with them. I had played very well, and was much more advanced than all those little girls. I knew by now what they would be discussing: they were wondering whether a creature of such unfortunate appearance would ever be able to play, what she would be able to make of her art, what point there was in training – I beg your pardon, I mean “cultivating” her. This is what they were saying, choosing their words carefully so as to show no disrespect to Aunt Erminia.

“Ten out of ten. You're in!” Aunt Erminia says, rushing out and wringing her hands. It is her turn to cry, but not for joy.

Maddalena leads me away from the corridor where I have been waiting between two rows of candidates, all stiff and silent next to their mothers.

“What shall I do now?” I say as I stand still outside the main gate of the
conservatoire
, holding on to Maddalena's hand as if it were a safety ring.

I have grown, and she can no longer take me up in her arms as she used to, so she hugs me, but not like one would hug a little girl: it feels as if she too is holding on for safety. Forgetting that I am only ten years old, she says:

“You shall play, my girl, that's what. And you shall eat and sleep and go places. Life must be taken wholesale, if you start nitpicking that's the end of it. You shall play and play and play. That's your gift, and there are those born without even one single little gift to go by.”

That was what she said, more or less – in a sharp voice, but blowing her nose from weeping with the emotion.

Back home we found my father sitting in one of the little armchairs in the hall, a medical journal in his hands.

“Back already, Doctor?” Maddalena says sternly.

“How did it go?”

“Very well, of course: she was admitted.”

That word sounds and feels like a promise of life coming towards me. Admitted: there is a place for me, all for me, and I have won it. I have not turned up at the
conservatoire
like some misfortune come out of the blue.

My excitement speaks for me:

“But will you do with me what you do with Aunt Erminia?”

“Do what?” my father says, staring straight at me.

“Play four-hand in the evening,” I say through my fear.

“We shall see,” he says, gently, after a moment.

The ancient two-storey palazzo overlooking the Retrone river, in the old neighbourhood of Le Barche, had been bought by my father shortly before his marriage, and lovingly restored by my mother. All the rooms had high narrow windows, many with little balconies in Vicenza stone, a brittle material requiring continual maintenance. Apart from the salon on the first floor, the house was always plunged in half-shadow. For that reason my mother had chosen only pastel colours for the walls and the furnishings. She loved light blue, and had been forced to engage in lengthy negotiations by the town planning authority, who had decreed the balconies must be green, like those in the other palazzos of the city – but she did have her way in the end, opting for a pale lava blue that she described in the application paperwork as sage green.

The salon was huge. Two of its outer walls overlooked the still, dark waters of the Retrone, and six French windows reaching all the way up to the ceiling let the light in. Each window had a gauzy white curtain, with a heavier one, sky-blue and edged with silver threads, hanging over it to give shade on hot summer days. One of the windows opened onto a corner balcony that led to my parents' bedroom – or rather, since the day of my birth, my father's bedroom. The world's bustle disturbed my mother, who had moved into a room at the back of the house, overlooking the river.

The ground floor was taken up by the kitchen, the dining-room,
a study and a small drawing-room sited exactly below the salon balcony. This was the coolest room in the house, and in summer my mother spent her days there, sitting in an armchair upholstered in a Sanderson fabric printed with a pattern of violet and blue hydrangeas. She often held a book in her hands, but hardly ever seemed to turn the pages. Returning from his clinic or from the hospital, my father would go to her as she sat in that room, and speak to her.

I would listen to him from the balcony. Hidden away from passers-by thanks to the balustrade and an oleander plant, I sat hugging my knees and leaning my back against the sharp corner – and I waited. When the season made it necessary to close the windows, I sat listening instead on the first step of the inside staircase.

I could hear my father coming in:

“Good evening to my lady!” he would say every single day.

He would sit in front of her and take her hands into his. I never really saw what happened, but I did hear every sound and could easily imagine.

He would tell her about his work: his patients, their pregnancies and childbirths, their illnesses, their problems, his doubts. Often he would answer himself, his voice now deep, now tense, now just tinged with gladness when a high-risk situation had been resolved, when a mother had been saved. I would listen very closely to everything he said: his low voice would slide along my body like an embrace, and his rolling r's had the effect of a caress that reached deep inside me to some sensitive spot in my mind, numbing it into a sort of blank, weightless abandon. There was something of a
secret in the pathway of his words, and I thought he always sought those that best highlighted the deep vibration of his voice. I could feel his voice inside me, it stayed with me all through the night and the following day, until the next night, the renewed meeting. Sometimes my father would also speak to her about me, and then I would listen to his words with even closer attention: he told her that I played very well, that I was already writing my own music, that I seemed to be at ease.

“It's happening tomorrow,” he says to her on the evening before my first day at school. In my bedroom, the light blue school bag is ready, with all its pens, crayons and pencils. With the required exercise books in their dust jackets: red, green, yellow and blue. With the little rounded scissors and the wooden ruler. With Aunt Erminia's present: a light blue and white fountain pen with a nib of white gold.

It is the last day of September, a day that still holds the sultry heat coming from the plains of the Po. A slightly sickening smell of old river weeds is rising from the water.

The words are brand new and the r's in my father's throat seem to slip away as if sucked back into a whirlpool.

“She's going out tomorrow. I know you must be worried. You'd like to keep her at home – and so would I, perhaps. But we can't, we mustn't. Good God, how I want you to be here for me, with me, at times like these! Look at me for once! Do you remember when you used to tell me my black eyes held the whole universe, when I used to answer that the universe was blue as your eyes, not black like mine! I know you're in there. Say something, speak to me. I know you don't want her to go out, I know. I did as you wished:
no nursery school, no
conservatoire
. But we can't now, do you understand?”

I can hear him shaking her. Perhaps he has grabbed her by the shoulders. No poetry. When he speaks to her, my father turns into a poet and addresses her as if in verse – but not tonight.

“Erminia says you're like a walled-up fortress – but she doesn't know you the way I do. You're a wall of fire, but burn only inside. God how I miss you tonight. What shall we do? Should we have beastly figures carved out of stone and place them at the front door like the dwarves of Villa Valmarana, and keep her locked up in here with her tutors, like they used to do back then? Perhaps it is life after all, the way you live inside this house, perhaps more of a life than mine out there. What do I take from the outside in the end? My life is here. And I am so inadequate! Do you understand? Yet I do have some happiness to cherish: I did know happiness with you! And I still hope … but she … what can
she
hold and cherish if we keep her shut inside? You will say it's better to live with desire than with relentless humiliation. Better locked up in the misfits' palace rather than free to be mocked, excluded and wounded?”

I sink my head between my knees and press until it hurts. Maddalena had told me that story: a dwarf princess had been born at the Villa Valmarana, and her parents had always kept her locked inside the house, employing dwarf servants, dwarf jugglers and dwarf tutors so that she would be spared the sorrow of knowing her condition. But one day the princess had somehow been able to look over the high wall surrounding the villa and to look at the world below. And climbing the narrow cobbled street was the most beautiful prince, the easy stride of his supple
long legs swirling the folds of his soft cloak around his perfect body. Then the dwarf princess, overcome by despair, threw herself into the street below and died. When the seventeen servants of the villa looked over the wall and saw that their princess had come to such a gruesome end, they were turned to stone with grief – and there they still are, seventeen statues of sorrow.

“I know that all of this would be no tragedy,” my father says, his voice growing more and more strained, “if only we were together. But to be unable to understand what has stolen away your soul at a stroke! It wasn't the child, no, it wasn't. I see mothers every day who adore their disadvantaged children as if they were so many Child Christs. Our child is … she's a prodigy. I mean it! She is our child. She carries our lives inside her, and we can help her find her own. How can you not see? Your sea-wave eyes are always so far away. I would want to look even just once where you are looking, and to understand where your sorrow comes from: I might be able to fight a sickness that I know.”

There is a noise behind me: Maddalena. She puts her index finger to her lips and takes me by the hand. Downstairs, the noise has startled my father, and I can hear the swish of the armchair fabric. From the way she is holding me, I can tell that Maddalena has been listening. Perhaps she too always listens.

“You will go to school and do very well,” she says firmly as she drags me away. “And the more time you spend with your head and heart out of this house the better. Remember you are the only proper person in here – the only one.”

“What about my father? What about Aunt Erminia?” I say as tears begin to well inside me.

“Satan can also dress up as an angel of light,” Maddalena says, sharp and dry as an oracle. But seeing how frightened I am she corrects herself:

“Sometimes we have to be careful even of those who love us.”