The House of Serenades (35 page)

“I thought I’d feel nothing for him after what he did to me and to my mother,” she said, staring at the uneven, rippled soil covering her father’s remains. She wiped a few tears. “I was mistaken.”

“What will happen now?” Ivano asked. To break Caterina’s silence, he dared, “I know you have been through a lot, but I would like to ask that you consider leaving your parents’ house. We need to build our life in a different place, maybe away from Genoa and all the bad memories you have.”

“I need time, Ivano,” Caterina said. “My father just died, my mother lives like a recluse. My brothers are gone, and my aunt won’t come out of her apartment downtown. It’s all so confusing. Please be patient,” she begged him. “I want to have a life with you, believe me. But I also want time to sort everything out.”

“Of course,” Ivano said, hiding his impatience.

Within days of Giuseppe’s death, the
palazzina
became a gloomy place. Caterina and Matilda began a new life together, but a life that had little in common with the one they had lived before Caterina’s disappearance. No visits, no dinners, no entertaining. Day and night the
palazzina
was wrapped in silence. Matilda was never again invited to the parties and teas of the upper class, because she had been a Genoese only by marriage and because the story of the dead daughter who wasn’t dead had turned off the few who would have overlooked her husband’s inferior ancestry and lover and continued to ask her to their homes. In Turin, her relatives also found the story of Caterina’s false death despicable and told each other it was time to cut their ties to Matilda once and for all. It was so that Matilda became an internee in her own home, spending her days embroidering linens in the blue parlor. Of all the servants who worked at the
palazzina
, only Viola and Guglielmo remained plus a part-time helper in the kitchen. The other staff members were kindly asked to leave, as there was no reason for having all those maids and cooks now that people didn’t visit or stop by anymore. The only person who visited on a regular basis was Father Camillo, who came on Sundays to hear Matilda’s confession and offer Caterina comfort. Matilda took her relentless, irreversible isolation with courage.

“She was buried when I was alive,” she said of her daughter. “It’s now time for me to fade and let her live.”

Caterina, however, was not living as she had expected she would upon her return home. Saddened by her family’s annihilation, she began to feel responsible for the damage she had caused her own mother. Had she not left the convent with Ivano, she reasoned, had she stayed at the convent one more day and returned home with Matilda instead, the scandal would have played out in a very different way. Perhaps there wouldn’t have been a scandal. The family may have found the strength to overcome its problems. And Ivano, who all along had unquestionably acted out of love and concern for her, had made things worse by involving in her return home the Chief of Police. Had he not rushed to fetch Antonio Sobrero, perhaps her father’s true origins would be still a secret. She cursed herself and Ivano for having stirred the waters.

“It’s our fault,” she often said aloud, wishing she could go back in time and do things in a different way. As guilt took hold of her more and more each day, like her mother, she refrained from public life, although she met regularly with Ivano, who waited patiently for her to feel ready. Their encounters no longer had the same fervor of the early days. Ivano, whose love for Caterina had remained strong and unshaken by the course of events, was baffled. He had looked upon Giuseppe’s death as the last remaining obstacle to his union with Caterina, but soon discovered that the lawyer had created as large an obstacle with his death as when he had been alive. Shattered by Caterina’s increasingly cold detachment, he understood that unless he did something to change the state of things he was bound to lose her again—this time forever.

Though sympathetic towards Ivano’s distress, Caterina spent most of her time with her mother. The two often sat in the blue parlor, looking at each other like two accomplices sharing the weight of sins and secrets. At times they took walks along Corso Solferino, enjoying the beauty of the city down below.

One night, after dinner, Matilda announced she would retire to her bedroom for the night. Alone, Caterina went outside, to the
belvedere
, where she stood breathless at the sight of the city at night. The glow of the streetlights rose towards the sky in a yellow smoke and the moon cast its golden reflection on the sea. Seated alone on a south-facing bench, wrapped in the peace of the night, she thought about her mother, the reclusive life she was now living, the long years she had spent enslaved to her husband, her struggle with her weakness. Then she thought about her own struggles, the long years at the convent, the escape, and everything that had happened since she had returned to town. She tried to imagine what her and her mother’s lives would be had she not met Ivano on that rainy day and had her father not fallen ill and then died. Her heart went cold when she thought of the mysterious person who had sent the anonymous letters and hung the dead cat on the door. Who was he? What wrong had her father done to this person to provoke so hateful a reaction? How many people had her father hurt in his life? She looked out, towards the water, slowly shifting her gaze back and forth over the cityscape, wondering where the writer of the anonymous letters might be, which of the hundreds of houses that lay beneath her eyes he called home, what he looked like, how old he was. Then she thought about Ivano, the colder mood that had set between them recently. Breathing the warm air of early summer, she asked herself whether she still loved him or she held on to him simply because she felt alone. It was past midnight when she returned home. She crossed the foyer, where a sconce of alabaster cast a tremulous shadow on the walls. She walked up the marble staircase, cutting the silence with the swish of her clothes. She undressed in the dark and fell into a dreamless sleep.

The sun was shining when she awoke. Matilda was already in the blue parlor, embroidering a new set of handkerchiefs.

Caterina said, “Good morning, Mother.”

Matilda lifted her head. “Good morning, darling. Are you going out? You are so well dressed.”

“I’m meeting Ivano downtown. I’ll be back soon.” She leaned towards her mother and kissed her on the cheek.

She was surprised to see Ivano waiting for her across the street rather than at the café by the port they had chosen as their meeting place.

“Caterina, we must talk,” he said.

She was struck by the expression of misery in his eyes. She said, “I’m listening.”

“I can’t go on like this. I love you, and you are colder towards me every day. I don’t want to lose you after what I went through to find you. You’re the only woman I ever loved. Tell me why you don’t love me anymore.”

“Things are not as they used to be,” Caterina said. “I still love you, but the tragedies that unsettled my family affected me as well. I’m not the same person, Ivano. My heart is not the same.”

“You must set yourself free from the past,” Ivano insisted. “Your return to your parents’ home was necessary, I know, but it’s not necessary for you to remain here. Why do you insist on staying in this big empty house filled with sad memories? These memories are keeping you away from me. They are pushing us apart, don’t you see?”

“You may be right, Ivano,” Caterina said, “but I can’t leave my mother alone.”

“Why?” Ivano exclaimed. “She left
you
alone for over two years! How can you feel obliged towards the mother who imprisoned you in that convent?”

“My father was responsible,” Caterina stated. “My mother did what he told her to do.”

“That’s no excuse. How can you sacrifice your happiness to hers? You already sacrificed so much of your life! Don’t you think it’s time for you to be happy?”

“What would make me happy, in your opinion?” Caterina asked.

“Being with me.” He looked straight into her eyes. “Caterina, I wish to marry you. I am asking you, right here, right now. Be my bride. Leave that house of sorrow. Let’s start our lives over.”

With her fingers, Caterina grazed his cheek. “My place is with my mother at this time. The time will come for us to be together, I promise. Please, understand. There have been so many changes in my life and in the lives of others in such a short time. I caused a tempest in my family with my return. I need to see the tempest off before I can devote myself to you.”

“Don’t do this,” Ivano begged as Caterina turned away from him.

“I told you how I feel, Ivano,” Caterina said, reentering the house. “I won’t change my mind.”

The tempest Caterina had alluded to was far from over. One day, somehow, the tale of Giuseppe’s love affair reached Matilda’s ears, despite Caterina’s efforts to spare her mother the embarrassment and the pain. Perhaps Viola and Guglielmo had talked to each other too loudly, or perhaps one of Matilda’s former lady friends had visited and told her everything, unable to pass up the opportunity to hurt her. On the evening Matilda learned that her poorly-born husband had also been Francesca Barone’s lover of a lifetime and that the two had likely conceived a child, she said to her daughter, “I love you, Caterina. Goodbye.” Caterina waved at her without seeing the hidden meaning in her mother’s words, interpreting them as a different way of saying good night. Without turning back, Matilda climbed the staircase to the second floor, the hem of her long silvery dress gliding over the steps as she walked. In the morning, Viola opened her mistress’s bedroom door and, as usual, placed a tray with coffee and milk on the bedside table.

“Good morning, Madame,” she murmured, pouring half a spoon of sugar in the espresso. And then she saw her, lying still amidst the disheveled linen sheets, white foam dripping from her mouth. A doctor was called, who explained that Matilda had committed suicide by ingesting a large quantity of rat poison she had likely taken from the kitchen during the night. She was buried in desecrated land, as the Church stated that suicides shouldn’t be awarded the privilege of Christian burial: no Mass, no Requiem Aeternam, no other prayer.

17

IF CATERINA HAD SHOWN ENOUGH strength and willpower to survive her reclusion and the discovery of her father’s true identity, her mother’s death sent her into an agony too strong for her to fight. She had become close to Matilda after her return. They had conversed often while strolling in the garden during the daytime or seated in the blue parlor in the evening while Matilda embroidered her handkerchiefs. In the solitude they had experienced after acquaintances and relatives had unanimously pronounced Matilda an accomplice in Giuseppe’s scheme and hence as guilty as he was of her daughter’s death charade, united by their roles of victims of the same tyrant, Caterina and Matilda had shared the parts of each other they didn’t know. Caterina had spoken at such length about her time in the convent and with such precision of detail that Matilda had felt as if she had lived there herself for two years. And Matilda had described so accurately for her daughter the life of the family and that of the city–the people, the theaters, the balls, the parties, and the political changes–that Caterina had had the impression that she had never left Genoa at all. It was as if the months mother and daughter had been apart had shrunk more with every day that went by, until they became intangible and one day ceased to exist.

Now, with her mother dead, her father dead, her brothers vanished, and her aunt in voluntary reclusion, Caterina felt like a tree uprooted by a hurricane, surviving only because of an accident of nature. She lived her life mechanically and in the present moment, without giving a shred of thought to the past, close or far, or to the future. She ate, washed, slept, and nothing more. Guglielmo and Viola took care of her, and she let them dress her, feed her, and move her from room to room with the passivity of a stone.

One evening, alone in her bedroom, Caterina resumed her imaginary drawings on the wall. She straightened her index finger, touching the white surface with the tip of it, and then moved her hand about, slowly, accurately, never covering the same area twice. Whereas at the convent she had found comfort in drawing a variety of subjects that reminded her of her hometown, the only subject she drew now was her mother’s face. She drew it tirelessly, every night, at times small, the size of letter paper, at times as large as the wall allowed. She always began by drawing the eyes, taking time to include the details of the pupils, the eyelashes, and the brows. Then she moved on to Matilda’s small ears, French nose, and silvery hair. She could never bring herself to draw the mouth, for all she could remember about it was the white of the foam.

Ivano came daily to the
palazzina
and spent hours playing the mandolin and talking to Caterina about various topics—the sun that was shining outside, the ships that had docked in the harbor, and the new stores that had opened in town. He held Caterina’s hand while he talked and caressed it with so deep an affection that Viola, who was always present during those visits, would occasionally burst into stifled sobs that increased in frequency with the buildup of her emotion. From behind the barrier she had built around herself since the day of her mother’s death, Caterina felt the touch of Ivano’s hand, saw the movements of his lips, heard the sound of his words and that of the mandolin, but didn’t grasp their meaning. Shattered by her silence, Ivano prayed silently to the God he had hardly ever prayed to that He see Caterina through her pain.

A second visitor came to the
palazzina
daily: Father Camillo. Whereas Ivano tried to reach Caterina with his caresses, his music, and the colorful descriptions of the external world, Father Camillo talked to her about faith and hope and God and the Virgin Mary. He recited prayers in her presence, hoping that those sounds, which were so familiar to Caterina, would help her overcome her inner pain. It is unclear whether it was thanks to Ivano, his music, and his tales of the world or to Father Camillo’s prayers that she lowered, one day, her barrier. Perhaps she had needed both voices, or perhaps her condition had come naturally to the end of its course. Whatever the reason, a little over a month after her mother’s burial, Caterina snapped out of her apathy, much as she had returned to life from her near-death condition at the House of Hope: the ghosts of her past dimmed, her mother’s face became a blurred vision. Struggling, she resumed life. She devoted herself to charity, spending a considerable amount of the family money helping the poor and buying land and buildings she subsequently donated to the city for use as hospitals, schools, and shelters. She saw Ivano on a daily basis and began to feel for him an affection that, though different from the passion she had felt for him in the past, gave her reassurance. She clung to him as a shipwrecked sailor clings to wreckage that can keep her afloat. He was her anchor, her safety net. He was her only link to her roots, the only steady presence through her present and past life. He knew a great deal about her, what she had been before going to the convent, what she had become after her return, and what she had gone through during and after the scandal that had shattered her family and her heart.