A Life Apart (9 page)

I was alone in Contrà Riale. I no longer had any news of Lucilla.

One morning, in the summer months between primary and secondary school, I had found Maddalena in the kitchen, slumped at the breakfast table and sobbing breathlessly.

“You're not going to see Lucilla for a while,” she says, her nose plunged in the large, pink polka dot handkerchief she keeps for the occasions that require many tears.

I did not know what to think: I had seen Lucilla only the day before. My startled movements had the tea rocking in my cup as I replaced it on the table and sat down.

“What do you mean? We're all going to the Arena this evening. You're coming too …”

“She went away. Miss Albertina called at six o'clock this morning.”

“Went away? At six o'clock in the morning?”

“She did. May the good Virgin of Monte Berico protect her. Her Mamma was arrested.”

Maddalena sits up, props her elbows on the table and takes her head into her hands.

“Arrested.”

“Miss Albertina said that her husband, Lucilla's father, the one who'd been making love to a lass who wasn't yet of age, came back last night, and she killed him.”

“Killed him! But how?”

“Threw him from the balcony. He fell into the river.”

“The river!”

“The other river,” Maddalena says, hearing the words I have not spoken. “The Bacchiglione. It was in self-defence, Miss Albertina says. He was drunk. But even so they've arrested her, of course. It's always a woman's fault over here.”

“Over here?”

“Yes, over here, in our saintly-Catholic-apostolic-gossip-holic town of priests and nuns. Did you know that in proportion we have more of them here than there are in Rome? One day the Holy Virgin will look down and turn us all to ashes, just like Sodom and Gomorrah. For all its shop windows and great houses gleaming like crocodile scales, this town has a soul black as the waters of the Retrone that swallowed up your Mamma, the poor young Signora, so young and so unhappy.”

“What happened to Lucilla?”

“Miss Albertina sent her away to take her out of the storm. Much too much talk.”

“Away where?”

“
Mah
!” Maddalena says by way of an answer.

“How long for?”

“Who knows?”

“What about school? Is she not coming to secondary school with me?”

“I'm afraid the waters will hardly be any calmer by September.”

“What about me?”

“To the house of Maestro De Lellis? Why on earth? He does after all share his art with you during your lessons, twice a week …”

My father was displeased with that first visit to the Maestro's house. Over the last few months, he had been paying more attention to my life than usual. I could sense that he too was frightened of secondary school. He was trying to understand what missing Lucilla might mean to me, and perhaps to himself as well. Lucilla had been for him a guarantee that he would come to know everything, absolutely everything, that might happen to me. Whenever she stayed with us for supper, she would talk with the same ardent gusto that she showed for food. Displaying the wide-eyed innocence of a Tiepolo
putto
, she would mix in a totally unmediated way what may be said, what is best left unsaid and what must absolutely not be said, and no-one seemed to find anything inappropriate in her unconventional talk.

“Pick's Disease,” Maddalena says, reading from a note she has made on a scrap of paper after returning from our visit. “Is it dangerous?”

“Not to others,” my father says, addressing Maddalena's fears more than her words. “She will get lost if she goes out, won't be able to find her way, might even forget her own name. There are some who have been found miles and miles away from their homes.”

“The old Signora has something inside her that's more frightening than what the young Signora had,” Maddalena says. She
looks at my father, who is waiting to hear the rest. “The young Signora, who is surely sitting next to the Virgin as we speak, she knew everything, saw everything, never missed even one single word, I know that for sure. She was just sad, that's all: sadness had wormed its way right through her soul without anyone realising, not even you, our poor Doctor. Like furniture that has only a few holes you can see from outside, but inside it's been eaten through by woodworm and will crumble into pieces if you so much as touch it. That's how it happened. Truth is, the soul of your young Signora just crumbled to pieces that night on the balcony, and she fell, she just fell. But old Signora De Lellis, her mind is withdrawn, like a snail in its shell. And no-one knows what might be inside.”

“And my Signora – what was in her mind?”

“Everything. She knew everything, and her head was full of fear. You can't know everything and carry on living.”

“In any case it is not necessary for you to go and see Signora De Lellis again,” my father says conclusively.

I went back the following day, as she had asked. The chandelier was trembling but there were no lights on. Someone opened the gate as soon as I rang the bell. I climbed the three steps to the front door. She was there, hardly any distance back from the threshold. I could see the whiteness of her dress from behind the opaque glass panes. Either she had been waiting, I thought, or she was far more agile than she showed herself to be. At the last moment, I hesitated, slightly afraid, and so she opened the door.

“Here is Rebecca – she who snares all men!” she says with a smile.

I do not understand her: the words she is articulating, very clearly, in a loud voice and with perfect rhythm, frighten me as if they had been conjured through some unknown sorcery. Neither am I clear about their meaning.

“Rebecca is a Hebrew name, it comes from the Bible: she was Isaac's wife, a young and very beautiful woman. It means ‘a woman who is well-liked by men'. That's what your name says.”

I am at a loss, and suddenly feel hurt at the thought that my name carries my mother's sorrow.

“Did your mother choose it?” she says, as if she were looking through a window into my feelings.

“I don't know.” It is true that I know nothing of my own name. Aunt Erminia told me no stories about it. But I think, perhaps Signora De Lellis does know something.

“Hush! All in good time. All in good time. Things are not always as they seem.”

As she spoke, she led the way up the staircase. She moved with ease despite her age, and not even the fact that she certainly was heavier than the pictures on the ground floor showed could stop her walking as if dancing, gliding just above the floor.

“I'm not as old as you think,” she says with amusement, turning to look at me. “You see me as old because you are so young, and also because Maddalena, like everyone in town, calls me ‘the old Signora'. And don't ask me how I know – the world is full of people who want to know everything, absolutely everything. Wives want to know about their husbands' cheating. Do they feel any better for it? Absolutely not. People who are engaged try to find out about any previous love stories. What vulgarity! As if we were not born anew each day, each moment. That's what sets us apart from animals, the ability to change constantly. If there is one true thing the Gospel says, it's that there is a new life behind every corner. It's never over, never – remember that.”

She sits on the top step, spreading her dress out around her.

“I do get tired climbing the stairs, as a matter of fact. If only I could go out like I used to! But they won't let me, you see. Because of this Pick's Disease thing: they say I would get lost. Just imagine! I know this town like my own piano. But do take your coat off: it's hot in here, because I don't like heavy clothes. It's really hot today.”

I helped her to get up. Her hands were as soft as her son's, and the contact left a scent of lavender and vanilla on my fingers.

She smiled at me again, complicitously, and started playing a Chopin prelude. At the end of that first one, after a brief pause, she played the second, then the third. I already knew how to recognise greatness: she was still an outstanding concert pianist, and would easily have been able to tour the world if she had wanted to. Or else to teach.

I wait for the next pause and say:

“It's always you playing in the afternoon. They're not records. Sometimes you play normally and sometimes you … you don't.”

“Ah-ah! You understand. Between pieces, I try to play regularly, so those who hear me from the street will think it is a recording. But not when Aliberto is here.”

“Why not?”

“You play now!”

She got up to let me sit at the piano. The scent of talcum powder.

“I like mixing perfumes,” she says as she sinks into the armchair beside the piano.

“Can you read people's minds?”

“I too am sensitive to smells.”

And so when it happened there was no-one for me to turn to. Ironically, it was in the music room – a room that stood isolated on the first floor landing, its name written in faded China ink copperplate on a label stuck to the old wood that no-one ever cared to polish. It was not used very often, and that was why it had been chosen. The first thing one could notice on entering was a set of slender fold-up music stands. That day I counted them, there were twenty-five. They were ranged in a semicircle on the left-hand side of the room, precariously balanced on their brittle metal legs. Mutilated spiders, I thought. They could be folded and taken to a concert, but there was no music group in that school – perhaps there had never been one. Perhaps some eager teacher had ordered them just before being sent away. On the right, tucked away in a corner, was an old harmonium resting on a valuable little table that had somehow remained in the school. It was a mirror-topped art deco table, its curved legs tapering down with slightly canine grace. I knew its style, it was the same as the little dressing table in my mother's bedroom. Absurdly enough, there was a teacher's desk in that room, and a wooden chair complete with armrests. On the teacher's desk was a basket with six pairs of colourful maracas, of the kind used in nursery schools, with little enamelled pictures. One pair had two stubby Latin American dancers, dressed in red on a yellow background and wearing large brown sombreros. Their bellies coincided with the widest part of the maracas, which

made them look obese. The other maracas were bright green with red, blue, purple and orange four-leaf clovers. Disused toys more than musical instruments.

All students to assemble in music room during break for update
.

The notice on the blackboard is from the class prefect: I recognise his spiky scrawl.

I had hardly ever entered the music room during my three years at secondary school. One more week, and I would never have entered it again. If I had happened to fall ill during those last days of the school year, no-one would have been able to entice me into that place again. There is no master plan, life happens by chance, it is by chance that life may be good, decent, bad, unspeakable. One is saved because of a key that might not have been in the lock that day. One is ruined because Albina the beadle has left it there by mistake, or out of indolence, or sloppiness, or excess fat. The idea came that morning, because the key was seen in the lock. An idea without a starting history.

“If I'd been in class with you that would never-ev-er-have-hap-pened.”

Lucilla is pale, and life has made her incredibly slimmer than she once was. She appeared on my doorstep one day, quite unexpectedly, after everything had happened, and here she is now, more than ten years late for our outing to the Arena. She is sitting on the armrest of the little chair placed between the piano and the enamelled wood stove, a lovely girl dressed in an acid green skirt suit so full of character that it manages not to clash with the dark and light blue tones in the room. Her hands are abandoned on either side of the armchair, and she is listening to what I am telling her as the cool, almost autumnal wind blows the curtains in and out of the windows. She is listening and waiting, because I am speaking and playing. More playing than speaking.

She never failed to know anything even before people finished thinking of it. Curious, nosy, gossipy, healthy, beautiful, round Lucilla. Nothing would have gone wrong if she had been with me, I know.

“Shut the door, monster.”

The music room also had thirty ugly, green formica chairs, disused and dumped there from some other classroom. They could be counted quickly, in rows of five, in the middle of the room. In the glass cabinet propped against the right-hand wall, scattered haphazardly on three grimy shelves, were three metronomes, one clarinet, three oxidised transverse flutes, seven worthless white and brown plastic recorders. I could see their black finger stops, level with my eyes, on the second shelf from the top.

“Shut the door, you hairy monster.”

On the bottom shelf of the cabinet, a wooden xylophone, its black paint chipped away at the striking points.

Not all of them have come: some did not dare. Or perhaps felt pity. I can count seventeen shadows: three are missing.

A beam of light comes through the high window over the door and dies on the dusty glass pane of the cabinet. On the left, just above the lock, the print of five fingers: one boy has tried to open the cabinet by putting his hand on the glass.

“I have beautiful hands,” I am thinking. I try to look for my hands but cannot see them: they are behind my head, where they have told me to put them.

There are days born under the sign of a promise, but that means nothing at all. That morning the sun was shining, and before
leaving for school I had opened the windows wide in the salon, so as to let in the midsummer heat that would dry the damp rising from the black river.

I have no theories about God, I cannot say whether or not he exists. Nor do I know whether he is good rather than almighty. Surely, if he is there at all, he is at times desperately absent-minded.