A Life Apart (3 page)

Of course I have a name: it is Rebecca. But I only really found out on the first day at school, when Miss Albertina started to call me by my name – and she has never stopped.

Maddalena's sweaty hand had almost crushed my fingers as we made our way. When I let go of it to take Miss Albertina's dry hand, I thought that the teacher had surely never cried in her whole life.

She was short, slightly built, her straight black bob emphasising her every word with sharp movements in a sort of shiver.

“She is late. Are you the mother?” she says as she takes my hand. I see her hair start sharply backwards as she looks up at Maddalena, who is at least eight inches taller. We are outside the classroom. A subdued buzz of voices is coming from behind the door.

“No I'm not … actually … her mother is … she's not well. Her father is a doctor, he … he had an emergency this morning … just this morning, very early.” Maddalena is stammering and telling lies, at least about my father: he was ready at our front door, austere and elegant in his blue linen trousers and monogrammed white shirt, then he decided that she should take me.

The teacher's hair quivers with a tinge of annoyance.

“Would you tell them that I should be delighted to meet them. Have a good day.”

“Yes of course … I shall tell them today … as soon as I get back.
Straight away.” I hear Maddalena's reply, which only reaches the teacher's back.

I know now that dying of grief really is quite hard, and not worth hoping for – but that morning, when I walked into the classroom with its endlessly high ceiling, that had suddenly become quiet as a cathedral, I did hope with all my strength that my poor unfortunate body, pierced by the darting eyes of those twenty-two motionless children, would reach its end.

But no. Miss Albertina's hair fell rigorously straight at the sides of her stern face as she moved some of the girls so as to place me where she thought might be best: in the third row, next to the wall, right by the window. I had no-one behind me, but could see everyone, and above all, sense everyone. I could not hear their words, that had been tamed in good time by Miss Albertina – but I could feel their heavy thoughts and smell their curiosity as it oozed from the excited skin of their hands that were covering their mouths, hiding their grimacing.

Next to me sat a blonde, fair-skinned, hugely fat girl.

“My name is Lu-cil-la,” she whispers, almost without moving her mouth. “You are Rebecca, the daughter of my Mamma's doctor. I saw you once in his study, a few months ago: you were with your Mamma, she has won-der-ful red hair. The teacher is my aunt. She's my Mamma's sister but they're very different. My Mamma is like me – fat, I mean. But we must thank God, because everything's alright with us: our legs and our brains, I mean. We mustn't grumble about the way we are: it could be much worse. She says I talk too much but I've promised her I'll be ve-ry-qui-et in class. Aunt Albertina is ve-ry-strict but ve-ry-good, my Mamma
says. Of course she was ab-so-lu-tely against me being in her class, because we're related obviously, but my Mamma did everything she could, you must have a good education she says. Very high ceilings, aren't they? This school's real-ly-an-cient, but I live nearby, so Mamma doesn't have to take me. You live nearby too – that's why you're also coming here, isn't it?”

Lucilla was the first person outside the family I had ever come into contact with: I was not even sure whether it would be proper to call her by her first name.

“Well? You might answer, you know. Are you worried we'll get told off? All you have to do is not move your lips – and she's not looking anyway. And besides, what can she do to us? She can hard-ly-kill-us.”

Perhaps my father had not taken me because he had decided that I should begin to face the world alone, without the protection coming from his elegant and authoritative persona – or perhaps he had been scared. Scared of his own fear and mine. But I was more alone than I could bear to be.

I cannot say what might have pushed Lucilla to be my friend from the very first day. At times I have thought it might be because of her physical otherness, but I was wrong. She saw herself as beautiful, and in her very special way she really was. Ours has never been a pathetic sum of two misfortunes but a true friendship, born and nurtured at first only thanks to her, since I felt and was utterly unfit for any social relationship. I was unable to answer her that day. I lacked the words to voice my thoughts, perhaps I even lacked the thoughts. No-one had ever sought my opinion on anything, or asked me whether I had been to nursery school, or
how my days were spent. But I did answer Miss Albertina when she asked me, as she had done with all the other children, what I knew about our city. I spoke to her of Corso Palladio, that runs south-west to north-east across the town centre following the line of the ancient
decumanus
, and of Corso Fogazzaro and Contrà Porte, vying for recognition as the ancient
cardo maximus
and dividing urban spaces into a grid that was not always orderly, owing to the presence of the streams that have always graced, and sometimes threatened and destroyed, the life of the city. I spoke of the Basilica Palladiana that casts its austere, watchful countenance over the square where gentlemen and ladies rub shoulders with the poor on festive days. And also of the Basilica at Monte Berico, cradling the secrets of an entire city deep inside the cross-stitched
ex-voto
hearts and the flames of the candles lit by those who climb to the top to pray for grace, as Aunt Erminia had told me. But still I was at a loss when she asked me what I liked best about those monuments. I knew their histories, their outline against the evening sky, their position on the city map, the gossip that had been growing around them through the ages. But I had never seen them.

“Not even Corso Palladio?” Miss Albertina says.

“No,” I reply.

“Each one of you should feel like an important person here,” says Miss Albertina, finally smiling as the bell sounds and it is time to say goodbye. “Some of you might do better than others. Some might understand maths better, some others might be very good at drawing. But you are all clever enough to respect one another, you can all be polite, you can all learn to be generous, and
there is absolutely no reason to accept any slacking on this point. Agreed?”

Miss Albertina always looked at me too: her eyes did not shy away, and neither did they scan the folds of my features in curiosity.

That day at the school gate I found Aunt Erminia looking dazzling: she was wearing a long, tight dress, teal green with a thin gold thread at the neckline, the sleeves and the hem. She was beautiful – much too beautiful for the time and the place.

“Your father behaved shamefully,” she says, scooping me up and kissing me as she always does. “I steamrollered him like a cat under a juggernaut. Leaving you all alone this morning. All alone! How could anyone do that?”

Back home my father was sitting in an armchair in the dining-room, the smart clothes he was wearing in the morning still in perfect order. He had just come back from work, he said, but his briefcase was still at the bottom of the stairs, where I had seen it on my way to school. He probably had not left the house at all. He looked up as I came in and hinted at a movement with his back, as if to stand up and come to meet me. But he stopped, scanning my face for the answer to his fears.

“Indecent,” Aunt Erminia says as she furiously hurls her handbag onto the table.

“What is?” my father says in alarm. “The school?”

“Well, if you really want to know,” Aunt Erminia replies as she storms past him with a harsh clicking of heels, “you are!”

Remorse and rage gave them both the chance to omit asking me about my first day at school.

At the table I suddenly felt like opening the windows. I stood up without asking permission and began with the dining-room windows. I did it slowly, partly because they were high and heavy and I could hardly reach. Then I went into the little drawing-room – two windows. Then the study and the kitchen – four more. On my way upstairs I flung wide the door of the little landing balcony and felt the rush of air coming from the river. Then I went into the salon – six French windows – then into my bedroom – two windows, and two for each of the other rooms. I was counting them out loud: twenty-four in all.

“It's draughty,” Mamma says, staring down at her plate.

“Never mind,” I say as I return to my place and with a sideways glance catch sight of my father and Maddalena, who both at the same time stop short from getting up and closing the windows again.

“Well done,” Maddalena says, drying her tears, as we stand in the kitchen afterwards. “We need some fresh air in here.”

That day I played all afternoon with the windows of the salon open wide over the river and the curtains whipped into a wild dance by a rainstorm that no longer felt like summer.

“They're getting wet,” Maddalena says, standing at a loss in the middle of the room.

“Like the sails of a ship,” I say, raising my voice slightly.

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No, I haven't.”

“Then I'll take you to Venice this Sunday.”

“In the daytime?”

“In the daytime.”

“They won't let me.”

“Yes they will! You opened the windows, didn't you?”

“But are there sailing ships in Venice?”

“Perhaps a few little sailboats. And liners, cruising ships. And gondolas with little seats of red velvet with golden tassels. They slide away, silent as tears.”

“How many people are there in Venice?”

“The whole world.”

“Then we can go.”

I did not go to Venice that Sunday. After sleeping all week with my bedroom windows open wide to the damp cold of the river, I fell ill and was forced to stay in bed for a few days.

That was my first illness, and turned out to be as instructive as it was pleasant. My father looked after me, and above all would stay up late to play chess with me, neglecting his monologues with Mamma. Aunt Erminia gave me a record player and a little yellow rocking chair to sit in as I listened to music. Maddalena brought me meals in bed and kissed me on the forehead at regular intervals on the pretext of checking my temperature.

“It's nice to be ill,” I say to her in the evening.

“It is at first. But after a while people get fed up. Compassion is like fish: after three days it rots.”

On the third day Lucilla came to visit. She appeared on the threshold of my bedroom door in mid-afternoon one day, looking enormous in a white tracksuit.

“Hi. I should have an-noun-ced-my-self, as my Mamma says – but I don't have your phone number, and it's not listed. And anyway, I thought it would be ab-so-lu-tely impossible for you
to be out if you're ill. Maybe you don't feel like talking, in which case tell me straight-a-way and I'll disappear. Your Mamma was e-ver-so-kind. She kissed me again and again, and said that I was blessed: could she have been crying? And she told me to come up – oh, I saw your grandma too, on my way up: she was sitting in a room next to the staircase. Perhaps I should have gone up to her, but I wasn't sure that would be the right thing. My Mamma says I must-not-be-a-nuis-ance, and that what counts is doing the right thing.”

Hard to imagine anyone who at her young age could be so far from doing the right thing according to common manners. I explained who Maddalena was, and also Aunt Erminia, the lady she sometimes saw waiting for me at the school gate. But I did not dare tell her that the dark, forlorn figure sitting in the little armchair was my mother.

“Where is your mother then?” she asks, leaning over the bed until her head nearly touches my pillow.

“She's not well,” I say quickly.

“Is she in hospital?”

“No, she isn't.”

But Lucilla was as curious as she was gluttonous. When she got back to her house after eating the vanilla biscuits that Maddalena had brought for us that afternoon, she must have pestered her mother until she finally got to know what the whole town already knew. And so, the next day, she launched into a new sally:

“My Mamma used to know your mother well, before she … got ill. She says she was beautiful and gentle. Somewhat artistic. She says you won't talk about her because you might be ashamed of
her. But you mustn't be. You are yourself, she says. You're doing very well, you can read and write already, you can play the piano. And then, you have your father, your Aunt Erminia. I don't have a father and it's cer-tain-ly-bet-ter that way, seeing as we're the talk of the town because of him.”

I was not wounded by Lucilla. It was impossible to take against such an abundance of good will. Her empathy made her unimpeachable. I did not take offence, but had no wish to talk about my mother, and so listened with relief to her account of her father's misdeeds: he was a two-ti-mer and a pae-do-phile, two new words enticing my childish curiosity, unaccustomed as I was to any sharing of secrets.

Until Lucilla came into my life, the boundaries of my world had coincided exactly with those of my house: the river at the back, and the neighbourhood of Le Barche, that I knew only from my night escapades with Aunt Erminia, in front: narrow, dark, mostly deserted streets. Lucilla did not have the power to make me beautiful, even though with her I have at times forgotten my ugliness – but she succeeded in shifting my horizon a little further, expanding it to reach her house, which was hardly a few hundred yards away, but appeared to my eyes like a universe seen through a looking-glass. And not only because her house – a three-bedroom flat with a dark narrow corridor, fully taken up by herself and her mother with their ample forms – was tiny compared to mine, or because the kitchen had pink walls and purple fixtures that matched the bathroom tiles or the bedroom curtains. None of the rules and laws that I knew was respected in that house.