The Life of Elves (16 page)

 

Then one morning he awoke to an awareness that the lines of time had been reversed. He arrived at the villa just as a priest was leaving, and the priest informed Pietro that his father was dying and that they had been looking for him all night. He went to Roberto's room, where Alba and Leonora were waiting; they withdrew and left him alone with his fate.

He was thirty years old.

He went over to the bed where the man he had not seen for ten years was breathing his last. The drapes had been drawn; unable to see, he tried to make out a human shape, but then he felt a gaze go straight to his gut, a raptor's gaze that shone on him like a gem in the darkness of the end of things.

“Pietro, at last,” said Roberto.

He was shaken as he recognized every inflection of a voice he had long forgotten, and he realized that suffering collapsed the abysses of time, restoring that voice to him now as clear as on the first morning. He said nothing but went even closer, because he did not want to be a coward. Ravaged, his father had the same face he had always had, but his eyes glowed with a fever that conveyed to Pietro he would be dead by evening, and there was a spark in those eyes that made him doubt it would be the work of illness alone.

“In thirty years not a day has gone by where I have not thought of this moment,” continued Roberto.

He laughed. A dry cough racked his chest and Pietro saw that he was afraid. For a moment he thought he didn't feel anything, then a wave of anger washed over him when he understood that death would change nothing, and he would have to live until the end of his own life having been the son of this father.

“So often I dreaded I would die without seeing you again. But apparently fate knows what it has to do.” He was seized by convulsions, and for a long time he could not speak.

Pietro did not move, or take his eyes off him.

What room was this . . . Dark mists came down over the bed, whirling like evil cyclones. His self-enforced immobility detonated every upheaval of his life. He saw again the faces and the blood of his accursed combats, and lines from a poem came back to him. Who had written them? He could not recall ever having read them. Then the convulsions stopped and he spoke again.

“I should have realized that fate would watch over me and that you would be here to watch me die, to hear me tell you why we have not loved one another.”

His face was now the color of ash, and Pietro thought death was imminent, but after a pause, Roberto spoke.

“Everything is in my will,” he said. “The events, the facts, the consequences. But I want you to know that I have no remorse. I did what I did in all conscience, and I have not regretted it even once in all this time.”

Raising his hand, he began to make a gesture that was like a blessing but then, overcome by exhaustion, he could not finish it.

“That's all,” he said.

Pietro remained silent. He was hunting for a tenuous note that had echoed when Roberto fell silent. The intoxication of hatred swept through his soul like a storm, and he had an irrepressible urge to kill his insane father with his own hands. Then the urge receded. Receded with a force as natural and sovereign as the desire to kill that had gripped him just moments before, and when it was over, he knew that something had opened up inside him. The suffering and hatred were intact, but in his breast he felt the other man's death working upon him.

Finally, with a gleam in his gaze that Pietro did not understand, Roberto said, “Take care of your mother and your sister. That is our role, the only one.”

He breathed in, slowly, looked at his son one last time, and died.

 

The lawyer asked to see them that evening. Pietro was sole heir to his father's property. It was dark when they went out onto the steps outside the lawyer's office. Pietro embraced his mother, kissed his sister. She looked at him in a way that said,
There you are.
He smiled and said,
See you tomorrow.

The next morning he went back to the villa with the patio.

He walked through all the rooms and examined all the works of art. The servants gradually emerged from their kitchens and their rooms, and as he walked by they muttered,
Condoglianze
—but he also heard,
Ecco.
Every painting was speaking to him, every sculpture murmuring a poem, and it was all as familiar and happy as if he had never hated or abandoned the spirits of his ancestors. Pausing at a painting where a weeping woman was holding Christ to her breast, he knew at last what it was that he had always loved, and he could foresee, ever so briefly, the great merchant he would become. That same afternoon, Roberto was buried under a blazing sun, in spite of the fact it was November, and the funeral was attended by everyone who was a famous artist or a man of influence in Rome. At the end of the mass they greeted Pietro, and he saw that they accepted that he had taken on the legacy. There was respect in their words of greeting, and he knew that his aspect had changed. The hooligan had died overnight and all he could think of was the art collection.

But his hatred was still alive.

At the cemetery, he saw a man standing behind Leonora, very upright, looking him straight in the eye. There was something he liked about his gaze. When Leonora came up to him, she said, “This is Gustavo Acciavatti. He has bought the big painting. He'll come to see you tomorrow.”

Pietro shook hands with the man.

There was a brief silence.

Then Acciavatti said, “It's a strange November, isn't it?”

 

Early the next morning the lawyer asked Pietro to come back to his office on his own, and he handed him an envelope which contained two sheets of paper: Roberto had stipulated that only Pietro must ever read them.

“Anyone who violates this wish will undoubtedly suffer,” he added.

When Pietro was outside he opened the envelope. On the first sheet, he read his father's confession; on the second, a poem he had written. Everything inside him was reeling, and he thought he had never been this close to hell.

At the villa, he came upon Acciavatti, in Leonora's company.

“I cannot sell you that painting,” he said. “My father should not have sold it to you.”

“I've already paid for it.”

“I will reimburse you. But you can come and see it whenever you like.”

The man came often, and they became friends. One day after viewing the painting, they sat down in the room by the patio and discussed the proposition Acciavatti had received to conduct the orchestra of Milan.

“I shall miss Leonora,” said Pietro.

“My destiny is in Rome,” replied Gustavo. “I will travel, but it is here that I shall live and die.”

“Why are you condemning yourself to a place you could get away from? Rome is no more than a hell of tombstones and corruption.”

“Because I have no choice,” said the young maestro. “This painting binds me to the city as surely as you can leave it. You are rich and you can deal in art in any big city.”

“I stay here because I do not know how to forgive,” said Pietro. “So I wander through the décor of the past.”

“Who must you forgive?” asked Acciavatti.

“My father,” said Pietro. “I know what he did but I don't know his reasons. And as I am not a Christian, I cannot forgive without understanding.”

“So you are suffering the same martyrdom you have endured all your life.”

“Do I have any other choice?”

“You do. People forgive more easily when they can understand—but when they cannot understand, they forgive in order not to suffer. Every morning you will forgive without understanding why, and you will have to start again the next morning, but at last you will be able to live without hatred.”

Then Pietro asked one last question: “Why do you feel such a bond with the painting?”

“To answer that, I will have to tell you who I am.”

“I know who you are.”

“You only know what you see. But now I will tell you about my invisible side, and you will believe me, because poets always know the truth.”

At the end of a long conversation that lasted until dawn on the following day, Pietro said, “So you knew my father.”

“It was through him that I came to know this painting. I know what he did, and I know what it cost you. But I cannot tell you yet either the reasons for his act or why it is so important for us.”

 

Was it the magic of the ancestor, as they looked at each other? Or a new affinity, born of the urgency of the night? Perhaps one minute had gone by since Clara looked up at Pietro, and although she could name neither the events nor the men involved, she saw what was in his heart. She saw that he had had to fight, and give up; to suffer and forgive; that he had known hatred but had learned to love, yet the pain left him only to come back again, relentlessly; and this was something she knew, because she could sense it in Maria's heart as well, Maria who could not forgive herself for having given Eugénie the red bridge and the possibility of the exchange. What lay inside a heart was as legible to her as a text in capital letters, and she understood how she could bring them together and offer them peace, because she now had the power to tell stories by playing the piano. She placed the ancestor on the left-hand side of the keyboard, and when she played the first note it seemed to her that they were in tune. Then she imbued her fingers with all her desire to tell a story of forgiveness and union.

 

Pietro was weeping and the Maestro placed one hand on his heart. Clara was composing as she played, and her fingers gave birth to the miraculous notes that a little mountain girl, who wanted to speak to a little peasant girl from orchards and combes, drew from her own orphan's heart. How many throats have sung it since, in the fervor of departure? How many battles, how many banners, how many soldiers in the field since that day when Clara Centi composed the hymn of the last alliance? And while Maria was discovering in her dream a little girl with features of purest stone, and hearing her play, Pietro was weeping tears that burned and healed and made him murmur the lines his father had inscribed on the sheet of paper, until he saw the acid of hatred coalesce inside him in a point of unfathomable, blind pain, and the pain he had borne for sixty years disappeared forever.

 

May the fathers bear the cross

To orphans let there be grace.
*

 

 

 

*
Ai padri la croce / Agli orfani la grazia.

S
he is remarkably mature,” said the Maestro, “and her heart is infinitely pure.”

“But she's only a child,” said Petrus.

“Who composes like a fully grown genius,” said the Maestro, “and who has her father's power.”

“A child who has had no parents and who languished for ten years between an idiotic priest and a backward old woman,” mumbled Petrus.

“There were trees and rocks during those ten years, and the stories of the old housekeeper, and of Paolino the shepherd,” said the Maestro.

“An avalanche of benefits,” sneered Petrus. “And why no mother? And some light in the darkness? She has the right to know. She cannot go forward blindly.”

“We ourselves are going forward blindly,” said the Council Head, “and I tremble for the girls.”

“Knowledge feeds stories, and stories set the powers free,” said Petrus.

“What sort of fathers are we?” asked the Guardian of the Pavilion. “They are our daughters, and we are sharpening them like blades.”

“Then leave the idea of the stories to me,” said Petrus.

“Do as you like,” said the Council Head.

Petrus smiled. “I'm going to need some moscato.”

“I've a furious desire to try some,” said Marcus.

“You will experience joy,” said Petrus.

“Bodyguard, storyteller, and drinker. A regular little human being,” said Paulus.

“I have no idea what is going on,” said Alessandro, “but I am honored.”

E
ugénie died the following January night. She went peacefully to sleep and did not wake up. Jeannette came and knocked on her door on her way back from the milking, surprised not to smell the aroma of the first coffee of the day from the kitchen. She sent for the others. The father was chopping wood in the pre-dawn darkness, where the frozen gloom seemed to shatter into sharp segments of ice. But he split the logs in his regular, placid manner, wearing his fur hat and trapper's jacket, and the cold slid over him just as the events in his life had done, biting deeply, and he paid it no mind. But from time to time, all the same, he looked up and breathed the petrified mass of air, and thought to himself that he knew this dawn, but was unable to remember why.

The mother came to fetch him. In the sparkling light of the rising day her tears shone like somber, liquid diamonds. She gave him the news and gently took his hand. Even as his heart was breaking, he thought she was more beautiful than any woman, and he squeezed her hand in return, in a way that was worth all the words. When the time came to decide who must go to inform the little girl they did not hesitate, and that was proof of the sort of man the father was. André—for that was his name—went into Maria's room and found her more awake than a battalion of swallows. He shook his head and sat down next to her, in the indescribable way he had that was the talent of a poor peasant made of a king's cloth—which went to show that it was not by chance the little girl had ended up in that place a little over twelve years earlier, however coarse the strange farm might have seemed. For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.