Last Tales (22 page)

So she was to take up her voice of olden days and to make it perfect as it had once been. She was to teach the boy Emanuele to sing.

She knew that she would have but a short span of time before her, for within three or four years the voice would break. It was before the end of that time that the voice of Pellegrina should be heard again by the world, in that heavenly
da capo
which is also called resurrection. Christ Himself, she remembered, when risen from His grave had dwelt for only forty days among His disciples, yet upon these forty days the whole world had built up its creed. Her audience, her gilt boxes and her pits and her beloved galleries would hear Pellegrina sing once more, would bear witness, with its own ears, to a miracle, and would build upon it its hope of salvation. Would she herself, she wondered, on the first night of Emanuele’s appearance, be hidden away in the gallery, an old unknown woman in a black shawl, the corpse in the grave witnessing its own resurrection?

She again wondered: “Have I been for thirteen years
traveling, not as I told Niccolo, in flight, but in reality—and in a beeline—toward a goal?”

Slowly and carefully, as in former days with Marcus Cocozza for her counselor she had gone through and taken possession of a new part of hers, she went through and took possession of the task before her. For this last part bestowed upon her by the director of her theater was the greatest of her repertoire and in itself divine. In it she must allow herself no neglectfulness and no rest. Were she to die at the end of the respite granted her it would be but a small matter.

She had a piano sent from Rome. It arrived on the same cart, with a horse and a mule to it, which had brought herself to the town, had to have its legs unscrewed to be taken up the stairway, and caused a stir in the street below. She looked at it for some time and struck a triad. Within the next few days she took to playing on it; then small crowds would gather on the narrow terrace, behind the house to listen.

She still sat waiting up in her rooms. She, whose nature held so little modesty, was timid at the idea of facing the child from the church with her own voice, and was preparing herself for the meeting by cleansing her nature of any hardness unworthy of that refound voice.

At the end of the week she made up her mind to act and, in all she did, to behave like a reasonable person.

She wrote to the Podesta that she would pay him a call, put on a fine frock and bonnet and walked to his house. She gave him her name and her situation as she had given it to Eudoxia, and told him that she had heard his foster son sing in church, and that she was, for the length of her stay in the village, offering to take on the boy as a pupil, free of charge. For it would, she said, be a great thing to him, should he become a priest, to sing well in church. She spoke in the light manner of a great lady from Rome, and the Podesta listened to her in the reserved and respectful way of a villager. But with the importance of her errand in her mind Pellegrina wondered whether Emanuele’s foster father was not, deeper
down in his own mind, aware that the two of them were here closing a bargain upon the possession of a chosen vessel. She made him promise to bring the boy to her house.

So Pellegrina and Emanuele met in the room of the piano. For the first few minutes she spoke without looking at him, steadying herself with her hand on the table and keeping her eyes on Pietro. When at last she turned her eyes to the figure who had lived so intensely in her thoughts, and there had had existence partly as a singing voice and partly as a divinity, she saw that he was a child. He had a round, clear face, blue eyes and a mass of dark hair. He was sturdily built, with long arms and short hands, and held himself straight. He was, she felt, less timid of her than she herself was of him.

But as again, after having talked to Pietro for a while, she took a longer glance at him, a deep and sweet satisfaction filled her. She knew that before starting their lessons she would have to find out whether the chest of her pupil was wide enough, his mouth large enough and its palate high, the lips sufficiently soft and sensitive, the tongue supple and neither too long nor too short. She saw now that in all these things the young singer before her was without blemish. His chest was like an osier basket filled with lettuce and herbs; his throat was a strong column. She felt her own lungs drawing breath in his body and his tongue in her own mouth. A little later she made him talk and made his eyes meet hers, and she sensed, as she had often done before, the power of her beauty and her mind over a young male being, her heart cried out in triumph: “I have got my talons in him. He will not escape me.”

In this their first meeting she struck a number of notes on the piano and made her pupil take them up. The sound of his voice moved her as deeply as it had done in the church, but this time she was prepared for it, it fell like rain on parched, plowed land. A day was fixed for Emanuele’s first lesson, and the man and the boy, still with their caps in their hands, walked down her stairs.

After the second lesson Pellegrina thought: “I am like a virtuoso who takes up a unique instrument—he knows it all through; his fingers are one with its strings and he will not mistake it amongst a thousand, yet he cannot tell the volume of its capacity, but must be prepared for anything.”

At the end of the third lesson Emanuele, when about to leave, lingered by the door and stood up straight there, his eyes on Pellegrina’s, but without a word.

“Do you want to ask me anything?” she asked.

He had a way of shaking his head, as if to himself.

“No,” he answered, “not to ask you anything. To tell you something.”

“Tell me, then,” she said.

“I know who you are,” said he.

“Who am I?” she asked.

“You are not Signora Oreste, from Rome,” he said. “You are Pellegrina Leoni.”

These words, which for thirteen years Pellegrina Leoni had dreaded more than death, now in the mouth of the child had lost their bitterness.

She said: “Yes, I am she.”

“I knew,” said he. “My mother’s brother, Luigi, told me of her. He spoke of her to nobody else. He had been a servant in her villa near Milan, and he said: ‘People believed Pellegrina Leoni to have died, but it is not so, for she cannot die. And I shall see her again.’ Later on he again spoke of her and said: ‘Nay, I know now that I have been mistaken. I shall never see her again. But you will see her.’ He explained to me how I was to recognize her. ‘By the way she walks. And by her long hands. And by her kindliness toward all low and poor people. And when you see her, think of me.’ I have remembered, too, to think of Luigi,” the boy concluded, “now that at last you have come up here, to me.”

“Luigi,” Pellegrina repeated. At this moment she realized, in surprise, that the ban on remembrance was lifted when she was with Emanuele. “Yes, Luigi was my servant. He
laughed, all my servants laughed. He put my flowers in water when I came home from the Opera. I recall his face now, laughing, above big heaps of roses. Indeed, Emanuele, you are a little like him. But this is a secret among the three of us.”

“Nay,” said the boy, “Luigi is dead. Now I shall be Luigi. And no one but I will know.”

In the course of the next few months two forgotten kinds of happiness came back to the exiled womah and grew upon her day by day.

The first of the two was this: that hard work had once more come into her existence. For Pellegrina was by nature a sturdy, indefatigable old workwoman, and in the days when she had still been free to make a choice, idleness to her had been an abomination. Now, after those many years in which her one concern had been to leave no tracks in the ground that she fled over, she was again allowed to set her feet in deep and to pull her weight, and toil healed her heart and set it free.

Her singing lessons with Emanuele and her planning of them took up most of her days and kept her awake at night. The very difficulties she met were inspiring to her, and she laughed to herself as she recalled old sayings of Marcus Cocozza: “Sorrow is turned into joy before her. Her heart is as firm as a stone, aye, like the nether millstone. Out of her nostrils goeth fire, and a flame goeth out of her mouth.” She did not, though, meet with many difficulties, her instrument gave itself into her hands unrestrainedly. At times its ready response to her touch even alarmed her a little as a symptom of too much softness in its nature. “Bear in mind, Emanuele,” she admonished the boy, “that only hard metals will give out a ring.”

She no longer worried about the briefness of her respite. For up here in the mountains time itself, like the air, was of a richer substance than in the lowlands, and the more of it she gave away the more she had. It happened that Emanuele
brought the little girl Isabella with him to her house. She then talked and played with the child, and the hour of the lesson was not shortened. Old Eudoxia began to feel proud of her rich and distinguished lodger, she talked much about her to her friends and introduced some of them to her, and the great lady from Rome found time to speak kindly to them all. From Eudoxia’s explanations about her neighbors and their relationship, Pellegrina gathered that the citizens of the small town had been intermarrying for many hundred years. As she got to know them she saw that they had all of them become alike, their skulls slowly growing narrower and their faces more wooden; many of them squinted a little. One day the old squinting parish priest himself paid her a call, and became eloquent on the needs of his poor and sick, on his way down the stairs the old man was filled with bitter regret that he had not asked for twice as much from a person of so much wealth, and so ready to give.

Once she saw Niccolo in the street, walking along slowly and evenly in the cloak that he had on when she first met him. But he did not see her.

The second happiness which, up here in the wide mountain landscape, came to Pellegrina, was her love for her pupil.

It had in it both adoration, triumph and an infinite tenderness. All obsessed by her longing to give, she behaved to the child who was to receive like a lioness to her cub. She could not keep her hands from his thick hair, but pulled it and twisted it round her fingers; she folded his head in her arms and pressed it to her breast. Pellegrina had never yearned to have children of her own, but had, long ago, jested with Marcus Cocozza about the idea of the mighty singing bird surrounded by a nestful of young squallers with open beaks. Now she thought: “It is, then, in this mountain village that I am to lay babes to the breast and to give suck. But what curious sucklings have I got up here: an old toothless shark, and a cygnet!” Then after a fortnight the boy grew to her eyes
and became her young brother, the precious Benjamin whom she was to lift up into the splendor of Egypt. During this period of brother- and sisterhood she was struck by a new family likeness between herself and him—from the beginning they had had but one voice. As now the voice day by day pervaded Emanuele’s whole being his face took on a sweet and pathetic resemblance to her own. Again he grew, and she thought: “In three years we two will be one, and you will be my lover, Emanuele.”

A few times a particular trait in the boy’s character puzzled her or vexed her: his fondness for laughter. She was herself a laughing person, and Marcus Cocozza had quoted Homer to her, on the goddess Aphrodite, who loved to laugh, but she would find, or create, something to laugh at Emanuele, now, might laugh for no apparent reason and apparently without being able to stop, like a kind of music box run riot. Sometimes these golden peals of laughter charmed her, like the exuberant warbles of a bird in a tree; at other times, when each word spoken by her or by himself set him laughing she frowned at him and told him: “Stop that laughter, it is silly. It means nothing, and turns you into a clown”—in her heart adding: “You village idol—are you in reality nothing but the village idiot?”

The boy abandoned himself to her tenderness as he did to her teaching, without surprise or reserve. In spite of the wildness of their embraces there was ever in them great dignity and deep mutual reverence; the giving and receiving was a mystic rite, and an initiation.

Once, at the end of a lesson, she thought: “If he were to die now, I should die with him.” At that same moment he went down on his knees before her, raised his eyes to her face and said: “If you were to die, I should die too.”

All the same she would from time to time find herself wondering as to how well she did in reality know her pupil. There was always in his bearing and in his attitude to his surroundings the grandeur of that faith in which he had
grown up: that in all his world he was the Chosen and Elect. In such a young person it was curiously impressive and moving. Behind it was his rare gift and feeling for music, the thorough, extraordinary musicalness of his nature. She could not tell whether there was much more, neither could she tell whether she herself wished for more to be there.

She had heard his voice before she had heard his story; to her from the first the two had been one, and his singer’s career his vocation. But she came to doubt whether it was so to him himself. Possibly he would have welcomed any call from outside with equal frankness and candor, and would innocently have expected a fanfare to await him in whatever field he entered. Once, when he had sung with particular sweetness and purity, he told her that he wanted a flute with silver keys.

During these months of work and love, in which she was rendering her pupil ageless, Pellegrina became ageless with him. At one hour she would look bent, withered and infinitely wise like an old grandmother, at others she had the face of a girl of seventeen.

One day she spoke to Emanuele of the greatness and glory awaiting him. Since the day when he had told her that he knew who she was, although none of them had pronounced the name of Pellegrina Leoni, she had talked to him freely of the past, had compared his voice to her own, and his work to her own at the time when she had been taught to sing. But the child Isabella on this day happened to be present, so she spoke in an impersonal way of the triumphs of a great singer, of his power over the mighty of the earth and of the gold and the flowers flung before his feet. She recounted to the children how an enthusiastic audience had unspanned the horses from a beloved singer’s coach and had drawn it through the town themselves. She saw that her visions of his future fascinated and amused the boy, but that they did not really mean much to him. He had no knowledge of the big towns that she named and but little of the worlds of princes, cardinals, and
courts, the mountain town to him was the world, and it was up here that he meant to fulfill his destiny. With Isabella her words went deeper, she grew pale under them and her dark eyes were very big. Maybe, Pellegrina thought, the child was alarmed at the idea of a mighty lady carrying her foster brother with her away from her own world. “But let her go with him!” she thought. “Let her follow him about wherever he goes. Her innocence and gracefulness will make a sensation at all the courts of Europe!”