The House of Serenades (13 page)

The following morning, in the twilight, when everyone was still asleep, Lavinia snuck out of the
palazzina
and headed downhill at a speedy gait. She arrived at the bakery at six, when Piazza della Nunziata was quiet and its sidewalks deserted. The front door of the bakery was locked, but a light was on inside, so Lavinia kept knocking until Corrado, Ivano’s father, came to the door, saying, “We open in half an hour. Come back later.”

“I don’t want bread,” Lavinia explained. “I’m here to see the mandolin player regarding a private matter. Is he here?”

Corrado let her in. “He’s baking,” he said, pointing to a half-open door. “Go ahead.”

Gingerly, Lavinia walked into a room that was darker and much warmer than the storefront and smelled strongly of butter and baked dough. A bulky table and two chairs occupied the center of the room; shelves storing loaves lined the left wall; and on the right wall two large wood ovens were at work. Next to the ovens, Ivano was buttering a large baking pan. “Good morning,” Lavinia said.

He started at the sound of a woman’s voice. “You are the blonde lady’s friend!” he exclaimed, staring at the unexpected visitor.

“I’m her chaperone, not her friend,” Lavinia specified. In a few words she explained the reason for her visit.

When Ivano heard that the blonde girl wanted to see him again, his surprise grew even stronger. He had flirted with her without imagining even for a moment that such a beautiful, elegant young woman, clearly out of his reach, would give his flirtation more than a superficial thought. As Lavinia went on explaining that the appointment was set for Sunday at four in the afternoon in the gardens of San Nicolo’, he felt a pang in his belly and his breath became quick in his throat. Lavinia noticed his emotion.

“Don’t get too excited, young man. I’ll be there, watching you like a hawk.”

He nodded, “Of course.”

“Is this a yes?” Lavinia asked.

“It is,” he babbled. “Four o’clock. San Nicolo’.”

“What’s your first name?” Lavinia asked as she headed for the door.

“Ivano,” he replied. “What’s hers? And her family name?”

“Her name is Caterina, and for the time being it’s all you need to know.”

On Sunday, following Lavinia’s instructions, Ivano waited for Caterina in the most secluded section of the gardens. He had brought his mandolin along. The instrument had a calming, soothing effect on him, and it had been that way ever since he had held it in his hands as a child. He squeezed it as he wondered if the meeting had been prompted by an attraction the young lady had for him or it was the pastime of a bored upper-class girl with nothing better to do on a tedious January Sunday. Despite the comfort of the mandolin, his hands were shaking with doubt and fear of being deceived.

Caterina arrived shortly, followed at close distance by Lavinia. She walked up to him in small steps, slowing her gait as she approached. A few inches from him, she opened her face in the sweetest smile. Looking into her glittering green eyes, at the glossy blonde hair dancing on her shoulders, at the fullness of the heart-shaped lips, and at the watery grace of her gestures, Ivano understood in an instant that he was in love. He took her hand, thin and shaky, and felt a flow of heat enter his flesh and spread inside his bones. She blushed at his touch, and they both stood there a long time, he unable to let go of her, she incapable of taking her eyes off his, both helpless and powerless and without the strength to move or speak.

They snapped out of their trance when Lavinia cleared her throat. Then they strolled hand in hand along a path until they reached a rotunda shaded by tall trees. There, without having said a word to one another, they stopped, looked into each other’s eyes, and fell tenderly into each other’s arms.

Lavinia approached them and broke up the embrace. “Watch yourself, young man,” she said in a piercing voice, “or this will be the last you see of my mistress.”

He smiled. “If this were the last I’m allowed to see of Caterina,” he said, keeping his eyes on her, “I’d have little reason to keep living.”

It was the first time he had pronounced her name, and the effect on Caterina was disastrous. If she had had any doubt about her feelings for him, any concern about his social place, hearing him pronounce her name cleared her mind of questions and misgivings. She lowered her eyes.

“I want to see you every day,” she murmured. “And I want to hear you play the mandolin again. Your music is amazing. I love the piece you played at the bakery.”

“What you heard at the bakery wasn’t my music,” Ivano said. “It was Mozart’s. But this piece is mine, music and words.” He leaned against the back of a bench and played a ballad he had composed a year earlier on a night he hadn’t been able to sleep. He sang along, and it was so that Caterina and Lavinia discovered that Ivano was also a composer and a gifted singer with a deep, endearing voice.

“Have you composed many pieces?” Caterina asked at the end of Ivano’s performance, her voice dampened by emotion.

He nodded. “There’s a place at the top of this hill where I go when I want to be alone. That’s where I compose most of my pieces. It’s a beautiful spot, with views of the whole city. I’ll take you there some day.”

Lavinia made her opinion clear. “Don’t even think about it.” She took Caterina’s hand. “Time to go home.”

Incapable of moving even the tiniest muscle in his body, Ivano watched Caterina walk away alongside her chaperone. He remained in the gardens a long time, occasionally grazing the strings of the mandolin. He had courted several women before, but not one of them had made him feel so lost, so out of control, so moonstruck.

As for Caterina, she kept silent all the way back to Corso Solferino. “Thank you,” she said to Lavinia as they were entering the
palazzina
. “I’ll always be grateful to you for what you did today.”

“I am not so sure this was the right thing to do,” Lavinia commented, holding back a smile, “but I know for a fact that I’ve never seen you this happy before.”

Doubts and remorse kept hunting Lavinia on a daily basis. Caterina’s showings of happiness, however, infected her, weakening her remorse for being an accomplice in an adventure the girl was not supposed to have. It was a different Caterina she was seeing. Before meeting Ivano, Caterina had been, in everyone’s opinion, a happy girl. Her childhood tantrums had subsided, replaced by a polite stubbornness everyone seemed to accept as an intrinsic part of her being. She was courteous and kind, with big smiles for everyone. Nevertheless, Lavinia had often asked herself if Caterina was truly as happy as everyone—her parents, her brothers, and the house guests—seemed to believe. Something about her outgoing attitude seemed forced, unreal, as if Caterina’s enticing smiles were a device meant to cover up a second reality, perhaps a tragic secret. Lavinia never mentioned her thoughts to anybody, because she couldn’t have explained them rationally and because she had no proof whatsoever that her suspicions were real. But after the meeting at the gardens of San Nicolo’, for the first time Lavinia saw Caterina express a true happiness, genuine and unhindered. The difference was astounding. Lavinia knew then that Caterina’s happy life up to that point had been in all probability a lie. She asked the girl one day if something unpleasant had happened to her and if she wanted to talk about it. Caterina reacted with rudeness and sarcasm at first, then with indifference, as if Lavinia had brought up the evening menu or a new store opening in town.

“Since when do you ask personal questions?” she said dryly. “I thought my father hired you to keep me company, not to pry.” Then she went on to talk about the weather and the hydrangeas needing fertilizer and more water.

Looking past the sarcasm, the rudeness, and the idle conversation, Lavinia noticed how Caterina hadn’t found the question unusual or asked why Lavinia had formulated it or come up with such a thought. Caterina had skillfully dodged the topic, confirming Lavinia’s suspicions that something in the girl’s life was not as it seemed.

Lavinia nurtured Caterina and Ivano’s love story for two and a half months. The faithfulness to her employer she had paraded on so many occasions was forgotten, her affection for Caterina being only one of the reasons. The other was Ivano’s music. It had put a spell on Lavinia as well. It was a different kind of spell than the one he had bestowed upon Caterina—it was the enchantment an older woman feels in the presence of a young artist’s display of skills. In all her life Lavinia had never been exposed to classical music or to popular music performed by its composer. She had always thought those forms of art were the prerogative of the rich, not of a working woman. Ever since Ivano’s first performance at the bakery during the rain storm, she had secretly felt thankful for the opportunity to listen to such an extraordinary artiste, and from then on had looked at Ivano’s music as a special treat life was finally giving her after many years of hard work. When he played, she observed his facial expressions and the movements of his hands in wonder, as a baby watches an event for the first time. She marveled at the speed of his right hand and the precision of the left one, registering the tilt of his head, the patterns of his breathing, and the stretching of his vocal chords when he sang. She knew, of course, that he wasn’t playing for her and that he would rather be alone with Caterina, but none of that mattered to her. Every time she heard him play or sing, she was transported to another world.

The encounters between Ivano and Caterina, which couldn’t possibly occur in public venues, took place in the bakery’s oven room, in the afternoon, when Corrado had left for the day and customers were rare. Tony, the hired help, dozed off on a cot behind the counter, awaking briefly when the occasional shopper came in. Of the two entrances to the oven room, one was off the bakery and one off a blind alley bordering the rear of the building. The alley ended with a wall, against which stood several boxes utilized by the local stores to dispose of their garbage. Several times a week Lavinia and Caterina entered the oven room through the alley door and, unseen by customers or passersby, met Ivano. In the privacy of those four walls, Caterina and Ivano talked about their lives and their dreams, he played the mandolin and she listened with her heart racing. She often brought paper and charcoal along, and while he played she drew him, over and over and over. The drawings cast a spell on Ivano, as much as his music cast a spell on Caterina. He looked at the lines and the shadows in amazement, incredulous of the fact that anyone, especially such a young girl, could so faithfully reproduce his features and expressions.

“I’m composing a special song,” Ivano told Caterina one day, during one of their clandestine visits. “I’ll play it on the day your family will accept our love and we’ll begin our life together.”

Caterina turned to Lavinia. “Should I talk to my father?”

Lavinia shook her head, horrified. “Not unless you want your friend banned from this town,” she said, half seriously, half jokingly.

Caterina looked at Ivano with eyes full of sadness.

“Don’t be sad,” Ivano told her, caressing her hair. “I’ll find the way for us to be together.”

He leaned towards her and slowly kissed her on the lips. She kissed him back. It was their first kiss, and after it Caterina felt more in love with Ivano than ever before. When she was not with him all she could do was relive in her mind every moment they had spent together and dream of the next time she’d see him and ease into in his arms. She often imagined how wonderful it would be if her love for Ivano could be made public and be accepted by their respective social milieus. They would go to the theater together, to dinners and balls, hand in hand and proud of each other. She would go to the hilltop with him, to his secret place, and she would watch him compose new music and sing it for her with his beautiful, warm voice.

“You know that this will have to end sooner or later,” Lavinia would tell her on occasion. “He’s from a different world. My world, not yours.”

“Don’t say that!” a terrified Caterina would exclaim. “Different worlds don’t need to be apart forever.”

“They do, my child,” Lavinia would nod. “It’s always been that way.”

“No,” Caterina would say. “The only difference between Ivano and me is that he needs to work to survive and I don’t. We were both born in the same town. Why would there be a problem?”

“You are so naïve, darling,” Lavinia would comment with a sad smile. “So innocent. I’ll hate it when you and Ivano will have to say goodbye.”

While Ivano and Caterina grew their love in the oven room, Lavinia answered Matilda’s and Giuseppe’s questions about where she and Caterina would go on their next outing or where they had been the day before with clever lies, inventing visits to new stores, parks, and museums, always adding to the list, always smiling. No one at the
palazzina
ever suspected that those reports were the fruit of Lavinia’s vivid imagination.

Despite their precautions, it wasn’t long before Caterina and Ivano became the victims of curious eyes. Over the course of several weeks, Tony, the hired help, an observant and greedy fellow, had noticed how Ivano left the bakery every other day always at the same time and returned one and a half hours later. Intrigued, he took advantage of a particularly slow day and followed Ivano outside, keeping a distance so Ivano wouldn’t notice him. It was with surprise that he saw Ivano turn the alley corner and enter the oven room. Why would Ivano leave the bakery and reenter it from the back door? Puzzled, Tony retraced his steps, returning to his post behind the counter. He sold bread to a woman, focaccia to a couple of kids. Alone again, he set his ear against the oven-room door. He heard muffled voices, then the sound of strings being plucked, and then voices once more. In a matter of moments he realized that Ivano’s companions, whoever they were, were female. He had no reason to enter the oven room as baking was not part of his duties. He also knew it would be inappropriate and counter effective for him to barge in with an excuse. So he waited until it was almost time for Ivano to return to the store front. Then he left the bakery again and again turned the alley corner, hiding behind one the garbage boxes. A few minutes went by before the oven-room door opened and a young lady came out, followed closely by an older woman. Perhaps an aunt, Tony thought, or a chaperone. Behind them, Ivano stepped into the alley as well, where he caressed the girl’s hair and kissed her on the forehead.