A Life Apart (7 page)

“Quiet – Mamma's asleep,” Lucilla says as I walk into her flat on a sultry afternoon that summer.

“Is she ill?”

There is a silence that feels unnatural in Lucilla's home.

“No. She had a-wild-night.”

“A wild night?”

“A-hot-night.”

“A hot night?”

“Well … with a man, I mean.”

“Which man? Is your father back?”

“What a shock-ing-i-dea. Rath-er-dead than with him, even if he did come back. No – with a painter, in fact.”

“With a painter. And why?”

“Because ev-ery-one has a man at the right age and with the right-oc-ca-sion. But don't-say-a-word,” she says with her finger across her lips and her face nearly touching mine. “I don't know any-thing-at-all, officially.”

Later her mother got up, switched the radio on in the kitchen, made a chocolate soufflé.

“There's pudding for you two,” she says, walking into Lucilla's room as we sit listening to music. “Vanilla chocolate – just as you like it, Rebecca.”

I look intently first at her mild round face and then at the sweeping curves of her body, huge but supple as it moves in her
golden yellow summer dress: I am searching for the secret of that night I cannot imagine. Then I think, she makes cakes that are like her.

I went back home shortly before supper. There was no-one in. Maddalena was away on some errands I knew nothing about, my father at his clinic or at the hospital as usual.

The silence was plunged in the cool penumbra of the shuttered balconies and drawn curtains. I sat in the little armchair next to the front door. No-one broke the silence until Maddalena's return.

Suddenly I think that we all have the life we deserve, but I do not know why.

That summer, after the end of the school term, my father also disappeared. He would nearly always come home late in the evening, long after supper, when he was sure that I had already started on my unfailing bedtime rituals. He knew that Maddalena kept watch over this orderly sequence of actions as if it were a sacred office, something meant to bring the day to a close with rigour and grace, a reference point over which life's chaos was utterly powerless. And so he would greet me briefly, standing on the threshold of my bedroom, not coming in, not approaching, not looking into my eyes. Sometimes he happened to be home for supper, and then we would eat in a silence even deeper than when my mother had been alive. Only when Aunt Erminia came did our suppers become slightly livelier, turning into the self-conscious and overexcited show of a highly strung actor.

Maddalena and I had learnt from Maestro De Lellis about her roaming from one city to the other, and would let her tell us all about her gruelling orchestra rehearsals without questioning or contradicting her. I have no idea of what my father might have known, but on those evenings he seemed to fear any silent pause, and so filled the moments in which Aunt Erminia was eating with anxious and minutely detailed questions about the scores, the music stands, the acoustics in the auditorium, the colour of the seats, the behaviour of the orchestral musicians.

He spent that whole summer at work. Little by little, his patients
began to call him again, seeking respite from the many fears attendant on pregnancy and birth. By now I too was answering the telephone, and had learnt how to speak to those ladies if my father was away: I knew how to reassure them, telling them that he was bound to be at the hospital, that they would find him there, and if not to call again and we would look for him. I loved that grown-up role: it allowed me to exist while avoiding any exposure to the world's shock, disgust, pain and superstitious reactions. For the first time I found a normal dimension that not even music had given me, because even when I was playing my body would offend the sight of any listener. To be voice and voice alone gave me a whole new and unsuspected range of possibilities: I could be gentle or professional, brisk or relaxed, tentative or self-assured. I felt free to ask, to reply, to play for time. I could try out all the variations, searching for my own style in the voice, since I was not allowed to have one in life.

My voice would obey me exactly as my hands did when I played. It grew deep, resonant, rolling its r's like my father's or quivering with anger or emotion like Maddalena's.

I knew most of my father's patients, and could remember their names, their pathologies and their personalities, because of the way he had described them, with deep humanity and gentleness, to my mother every evening. She might not have been listening, withdrawing perhaps behind the impossibly high, icy walls of her fortress, and the words of that man who was so full of life and sorrow might not even have reached her ears as a sort of tiresome buzzing. But those ladies mattered to me, they who entrusted my father with their hopes and their pain and whom he would shelter
and understand, coming to know them in the end better than they knew themselves, like a musician who, free from all envy and disrespect, rewrites with each concert a truth that the composer is not aware of having committed to the score.

I could imagine them one by one, their bellies swollen with children, or cancers, or fears and desires. One very young, small woman, a chatty, tiny pixie with curly blonde hair who wore flat golden pumps even in winter, had been expecting twins who must have been born that March. I had lost contact with her: my mother's death had interrupted Papa's evening updates. She was back now, with a voice that was fully her own, shrill, precise, imperious with urgency, because of a worrying complaint, described vaguely at first, and then more and more specifically as she responded to my calm voice: a pain between her navel and pubic area.

“Does it seem to be progressively worsening?” I say. I love these terms pregnant with complicity.

“Yes, it does – it's worsening by the day, by the hour even. It's unbearable. I need the doctor, now.”

I make a quick, prudent assessment, then say:

“Perhaps some exertion? Did you have a Caesarean?” I can remember things.

“Yes, I did. And I did clear out one of my bookcases, and then shifted some boxes of books. But the Caesarean was five months ago …”

“Perhaps you had several stitches, the tissue is still fragile.” I can remember exactly: a haemorrhage, a long long railway line of tiny stitches, as Papa had told Mamma one evening.

“That's true,” she says with relief.

“I will pass your message on anyway, and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.”

The new voices effortlessly matched the images that my father had conveyed of his patients, and gave fresh life to this world of ladies who surely did not know the person they were addressing on the telephone: I was extremely careful to modulate my very young voice, preserving intact the form of the play-acting that allowed me to move in my father's adult world. At first, if Maddalena was at home, I let her answer the telephone, only taking calls when she was out shopping: I would sink into the beautiful navy blue jacquard armchair in my father's study, with the nape of my neck over the edge of the back, one hand holding the receiver and the other relaxed on the armrest, and I would speak, listen, reassure, mentally take notes, extend polite greetings.

One day it happened: when Maddalena came back I was engaged in a call and could not alter my voice or the register of that conversation. I sensed her standing still on the stairs and listening, I imagined she might be uncertain as to whether to intervene or not. She did not say anything, and from then on I also took calls when she was at home. We never spoke of that between ourselves, nor with my father, who certainly must have understood what was happening very quickly, piecing together his patients' accounts with the messages I would leave as notes on his desk or telephone memos dictated to his secretary at the clinic.

Only when Lucilla was there would I keep away from the telephone: much as I adored her, I knew that no promise or solemn
undertaking would ever rein in her powerful need to live by communicating all things to all people. One day I stopped taking calls, but by then I had discovered a way to be in the world, a possible existence. Beauty wants to be seen, but for me, the saving grace was invisibility.

Adolescence took my life by storm, ambushing it and then smashing it open with the wholesale, indifferent rage of a hurricane, without anyone noticing. By then I had already lost Lucilla – or so I thought at the time – and also Miss Albertina, who had been replaced by a cohort of ashen professors with voices that cracked like whips, who called their students by surname, mistook them for one another as if they were pawns on a chessboard, and in fact did move them like pawns around the classroom each time a buzz of chatter was deemed in any way subversive.

I had to cross a small part of the city to make my way to Contrà Riale: I would walk past the Retrone, then in Piazza Matteotti pass the snow-white columns of Palazzo Chiericati, walk up Corso Palladio as far as the austere Contrà Porte that held the most precious buildings in the city, and then down Contrà Riale, towards the “good school” of Vicenza. An ungainly grey building, it had a huge entry gate with peeling paint, but only a tiny door cut inside this gate would ever open for the children to walk in single file into a gloomy, dimly lit hall. Nothing in that building complied with any existing norm – indeed nothing was even simply normal. The stairs curled and coiled up three storeys with their high steps of polished and slippery marble worn down by the passing generations. Each year, as punctual as the autumn rain, some of the children would fall and fracture an arm, a kneecap, in one case even a vertebra. The rooms were too high, and there was no
system capable of heating their stone floors, from which a bitter, paralysing cold rose all the way to our knees.

Maddalena had an apparently unwarranted aversion for that school, but had not stood against Aunt Erminia's wish – certainly not out of fear of her, but rather because of a sense of awe for what she, as a person of little formal education, felt was a high and sacred ideal to which one could sacrifice the wish for a healthier and better attended environment.

“Holy Virgin of Monte Berico! What happened to you?”

There is no hiding from Maddalena: she can hear the unusual hesitation with which I am opening our front door, the heavier thump of my school bag onto one of the little armchairs in the hall, the jittery, slow pace at which I am climbing up the stairs, leaning on my right foot as if it were a walking stick, my hand crawling up the banister and not finding a way to lift itself.

But there are no words to tell everything – not at that age. Sometimes one learns them later, when they have lost their smell, their colour, and above all their sorrow.

“The needle's eye” – that was the name I gave to that narrow fissure that swallowed me into its blackness each morning and then, once digested, vomited me out after the day's lessons.

To the very last day, I walked through the school gate exactly like the camel in the Gospel, constricting myself in the effort to shrink, grow thinner, disappear. I had not learnt the art of rebellion, and walked through the darkness of the hall in full knowledge of what lay in wait for me, without that knowledge ever diminishing the terror I felt. One cannot forestall the offence that drives a nail into the body and the spirit, piercing the spirit through the body.

The first to begin was the beadle, Albina. She was perched on a sort of huge wooden trestle at the bottom of the stairs so she could warn the children to take care while climbing up, “else you will slip on the steps and
breakyourneck
.” She was tacitly exonerated from any type of work because of her excess fat. The trestle on which she was balanced like a medieval monk on the misericord of a choir stall had no back or armrests, so as to allow her hips to ooze out over the three sides and tumble down all around her into a flabbergasting heap, made even more monstrous by the enormous black smock that covered it.

Whenever I passed her, she took special care to avoid looking at me, and never spoke to me, but after I had climbed the first few steps, she would furtively cross herself, in a sort of pagan ritual of her own which would exorcise the evil that surely must emanate from a graceless, monstrous creature such as I.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could just about catch a glimpse of her hand lifting in a quick movement that would readily turn into a gesture of annoyance against some non-existing insect if I happened to slow down, giving her the impression that I might be turning around. But I never did.

And then there were the other children. I realise now this must be an inaccurate memory, because three years at school are a very long time for such a relentless exercise in sadism, but I cannot think of one friendly, polite or even neutral expression ever addressed to me by any of them. I think they must all have perceived me as a black hole in the continuity of the classroom space.

Yet they could see me very well indeed, since on the first day of school I had found the seats already allocated, and the white card
with my name had been placed on the desk in the middle of the first row, right in front of the teacher's desk. And there it stayed, the only pawn to remain fixed, cemented, unmoved in its place for three years.

“The witchie. The ootlin. She's a craw-bogle.” The few who can resort to the dialect spoken by their country grandparents bring out expressions that have not often been heard under the noble eaves of the time-honoured school of Contrà Riale.

“You suety, putrid little hair tuft.” Some play with cultured alliterations.

“
Homuncula, foetidissima
.” Some with the Latin overheard from older siblings.

Their words came hissing, sharp as pins, or shouted, like spikes stabbing my back. I recognised their voices: like the blind, I got my bearings through sound in that universe teeming with treacherous life behind me, and more than the god Janus I knew the past and future of each one of them, because I could also hear the whispers addressed to a favourite friend, or the sighs they would keep to themselves.

No-one took the place of Miss Albertina in ensuring that the world in which I spent half of my days would retain some form of order. Anything could be said, anything could – and did – happen.

“Who can tell me where the Pamir range is? Does anyone remember the date of the Battle of Hastings? The name of the last Catholic king to rule over England? The symbol for carbon? The rules of badminton? How many miles of coastline does Italy have? How many does Sicily have? What about Veneto? When was the Republic of Venice founded?”

At school I did well out of desperation, so that I could impose some boundaries on chaos and somehow avoid being cut adrift and falling off the edge: the last mooring. If I know things nothing will go wrong, nothing bad will happen if every little piece of science and knowledge is in its proper place, with its own name and surname.

I was not really interested and would never show off, but only answered out of necessity, so as to stop up the holes into which I might have fallen. And also because, through my voice, I could feel that I existed.

On the other hand, and for the same reasons, my words went to swell the resentment that the other children felt against me.

They were not generally very gifted for school work. The girls might have been more diligent, or at least known how to look like they were, and if they were caught unprepared, they were ready to gracefully repeat that they had studied ever so much, but really, really did find the subject so hard to understand. The teachers would play the game and exhort them to try again – that paragraph was very, very easy after all. The boys would just not study, making a show of defiance. But like the girls, they were all somebody's children, and the teachers' subservience towards fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts or grandparents would take different forms, showing now as indulgence, now as debonair paternalism, and sometimes, with the weaker teachers, as downright fear.

This explains why no-one wanted to see or hear anything of what happened.

Some of the girls might have wanted to pass through the cone of shadow inside which I was moving. Sometimes I would catch a
glance recognising me as a human being, a smile tinged with confusion, uncertainty, anxiety: shall I speak to her, what shall I say, what will the others say, no I shan't. And for my part I would not encourage anyone to approach in any way. Not out of choice – out of incapability.

I too was somebody's daughter, but my father was unpractised at the art of bestowing favours with the calculated precision that ensures one's position in a small-town world of privilege, the world that counts and shelters its own from offence. His was an extravagant, mindless generosity that prevented him from keeping count of who and how much, and even kept him safe from having to suffer gratitude.

“He's with the daughter of the newspaper lady of Piazza Matteotti – she had a crisis at seven o'clock. Perfectly capable of not coming back till the middle of the night. He's burning out like a stook of dried stubble left in the middle of an August field!”

A furious Aunt Erminia takes her seat in front of the asparagus mousse especially prepared for their birthday supper and starts noisily drumming her fingers on the table.

“She's very ill,” Maddalena says as she serves the croutons. “She has cancer at the final stage, the poor young thing. He's been taking care of her ever since he found it in her breast. By now it has spread to her bones – she'll be gone in a breath leaving three little orphans, if the Virgin of Monte Berico doesn't look down in a hurry.” And she wipes away her tears.

“The city is full of tragedies,” Aunt Erminia shoots back furiously, thumping the table with her open hand. “Must my brother shoulder them all?”

But hers is not meanness, only something that Maddalena calls “the tantrums of Madama Erminia”: summer lightning, excess energy, no storm afterwards. It is her need for perfection and her powerlessness in the face of a world that will not match it, that will allow evil, allow her twin brother to miss their birthday supper. It is also a kind of self-centredness that has the transparency and solidity of diamond carbon, so pure that it can make those around her blind to discriminating judgement. Those who damned themselves to grant her a favour, no matter how capricious, always felt as if they were receiving one from her.

My father could move around the city unfettered by gossip, and although he knew so much about everyone, since his patients would entrust him with their bodies and their sorrows as if he had been a confessor, the idea of cultivating a hierarchy in his relationships never even touched his mind.

That is why his name did not protect me and, afterwards, did not ensure that justice would be granted to me.