The Life of Elves (22 page)

And yet still they hoped, because they had a magical little child on their side, a leader who knew greatness, and a land that had never betrayed those who served it, and once the initial panic that reduced everyone to an animal state had receded, they even felt a growing sense of indignation, because—no matter how poor—they were not used to being treated like this, and into their rebellious selves they welcomed a reserve of courage, inspired by the long winter hunts and by their poaching and toasts to friendship, and that courage fortified their hearts in the storm. In fact, it seemed as if they owed this bravery to the land, for the land could not harm those who knew how to honor it—and all the cataclysms had come from the vast sky, after all; their surge of courage provided a moment's respite in the course of the disaster, and the wind and rain could go no further, because they had been thwarted by the strength of the land.

 

Yes, the strength of the land. In the clearing where the other battle was taking place, the battle in Maria's heart, André could feel that strength with all the vigor of a life spent standing tall on the marl of his fields, could feel it with all the age-old peasant knowledge that flowed in his veins. He did not know how, but he knew there was a charm, and all that concerned him now was this anchoring, with its knots and lines on the geological map of the lowlands, offering to his loved ones new reserves of determination born of the bare roots of the earth. He also knew that swords were being crossed up there, and the fleet's weapons could not be overcome by the mere weapons of the earth.

He looked at Maria and said, “The sky is yours.”

C
lara and the Maestro watched Maria as she set off with her father to the clearing in the mists, while the other three brought up the rear as if they were escorting Our Savior Jesus Christ himself. The two young lads were as handsome as autumn pheasants, and you could sense in them the vigor of personalities never prone to torment of any kind. The oldest one, his hands in his pockets in a manner that bespoke the jubilation of being free, wore a face furrowed as much by a constant urge to laugh as by maturity. But all of them expressed the same determination, born of their awareness that they were caught up in something much greater than their simple noggins. When they left the cover of the trees to enter the clearing, Clara was struck by the calligraphy traced by the mists. Like Alessandro drawing characters in ink without knowing the language, the mists told a tale, and she was unable to interpret its idiom. But she was concerned above all about Maria, and worried about the new set of her features since the night Eugénie cured Marcel. She could read sorrow there, and fear, as clearly as if they were carved in stone, and she supposed it was the same on the faces of officers who had undergone the loss of their men.

Petrus had not stopped snoring noisily since early morning, and now he yawned repeatedly, and extracted himself from his armchair with some difficulty. He exchanged a look with the Maestro, and something seemed to set him back on his feet.

“I need a drink,” he muttered.

But when he saw the battle through Clara's vision, he let out a whistle under his breath.

“It's not going well,” he said.

“She's thinking about Eugénie,” said Clara. “She's afraid of losing more people she loves.”

“A sad experience of command,” said the Maestro.

“She is not commanding,” said Clara, “and these are her parents.”

“Rose and André are not Maria's parents,” said Petrus.

In the east clearing, Maria had swung around to face the sky of snow, and the men had followed her example, looking up at clouds more opalescent than milk.

“There are many orphans in this war,” said Clara after a pause.

“There are many orphans in the world, and many different ways of being an orphan,” said the Maestro.

There was another pause. In the look Petrus leveled at the Maestro, Clara could detect a hint of reproach. Then he poured himself a glass of moscato and said, “We owe you that story as well. The story of the Clemente sisters.”

 

In his mind he saw two young women sitting side by side in a summer garden. One of them she already knew, her name was Marta, and she had been Alessandro's great love, but as she looked at the other young woman her curiosity was tinged with a sweet sensation, luminous with the sort of hazy clarity you can find in the air on a hot day. She was dark-haired, fierce; she wore two drop earrings made of crystal; her face was a pure oval tickled with dimples; her skin was golden; and her laugh was like a fire in the night. But on her face you could also read the concentration of a soul whose life is entirely inward, and a mischievous gravity which acquires a silver patina with age.

“Marta and Teresa Clemente,” said Petrus. “You cannot imagine two sisters more dissimilar, and yet more united. Ten years between them, but above all a rift of pain. The Clemente family gave receptions, and Marta's sorry little face would wander through them like a ghost; everyone thought she was so lovely, yet so melancholic, and they loved her sad poems—you could have sworn they were written by the hand of an adult, from the heart of an adult. At the age of twenty she married a man with as little talent for love as for poetry, and she used the pretext of her married life to curtail her presence at the soirées. Another little girl was there now, whom they also found very lovely, and very joyous, and she was a young prodigy of the type one rarely encounters. At the age of ten she had a skill and a maturity that was the envy of pianists twice her age—and on top of it she was as mischievous as a magpie and as stubborn as a fox when she did not want to play the pieces they gave her.

“Alessandro had become her friend long before he met Marta, and he often said that she offended the rule according to which artists find consolation for their pain, because it is that very pain that allows their art to take flight. But he was also aware of the dizzying well inside her, and he knew that her laughter had never, not even for a single day, betrayed her mission, which was to delve deep into her art. Sometimes she would look at the clouds and the Maestro could see the shadow of the mists passing over her face. Then she played, and her soul seemed to rise even higher. Marta listened to her and grew vibrant with the love of her younger sister. Then she left again in the evening, after a kiss as she waltzed Teresa around the room. But once the older sister had vanished around the corner of the lane, the little girl sat down on the steps outside the house and waited for her pain to subside, the pain of seeing a loved one suffer so much. She expressed all this in her playing, her talent for extraordinary happiness, and the pain of loving a sister who had chosen to lock herself away in sorrow. I do not know the migrations of the heart between those who share their blood, but I believe that Teresa and Marta belonged to a guild of pilgrims united as a noble sisterhood in an identical quest. Their parents fluttered around them, busy with their grand dinners, which boiled down to nothing more than their fantasies of the privileged class, and they were as unable to understand their daughters as they were to see the human wood for the trees of their drawing rooms.

“So the Clemente sisters grew up among their servants and two ghosts who wore tail coats and organdy gowns; they lived on an island, and in the distance you could see the ships sailing to their destinations, never stopping to call at the pier where people lived, loved, and went fishing. Perhaps Marta, because she was born ten years before her sister, had absorbed all the indifference of her mother and father; consequently the strength that came from their lineage, from an ancestor, perhaps, or from more ancient times when money had not yet corrupted a taste for the gentle life, had been embodied in Teresa's tender flesh where, shielded by the older sister's melancholy, that strength had been able to blossom. But in return, this created an alliance in which Teresa's vital principle took its source in the sacrifice that Marta had agreed to make of her own life force, and it was no surprise that the death of one sister was closely followed by the death of the other—whatever the circumstances that made it so difficult to determine the causes and the machinations. Indeed, I would not be surprised if, in the end, we find out that we are all the characters of some meticulous but mad novelist.”

Petrus fell silent.

“You play the way your mother did,” said the Maestro, “and it is your playing that invokes her ghost—a ghost to whom I have not yet been able to tell the story properly. Do you know the reason for which a man cannot find the words inside himself that would free both the living and the dead?”

“Sorrow,” she said.

“Sorrow.”

For the first time since she had known him, she could see the imprint of pain upon his face.

“It was already an era of unrest and suspicion, and your father often came to the villa during the night,” he continued. “One evening Teresa was there, playing a sonata.”

The Maestro fell silent and Clara immersed herself in his remembering. They had left the windows open onto the balmy summer air, and it was the same sonata, the one where she'd found the poem in the margin of the score, the one that united hearts and pierced the space of visions. When she had played it two years earlier, on the evening that had taken her in her dreams to Maria, there had been a perfume of currents and damp earth in the air, but she had not been able to decipher the story told by the score, and the poem had curled up into a bubble of silence. She listened to the young woman playing, and the same bubble formed in her chest. Then a man appeared in the room. He had come out of nowhere and he was focused intensely on a place inside himself revealed to him by the music. She could see every detail of his features, transfixed as he was by the music, and on his face, luminous with youth, was the serenity of a thousand years, reflections of moonlight and thoughts of a river.

“She has the inspiration of our mists,” said the man to the Maestro, as they stood facing each other in this memory from ten years earlier. “But she combines it with a beauty that comes from her land.”

“Her land inspires her but the source of her gift at the piano and her intoxicating playing remain a mystery, which we commonly refer to as woman,” answered the Maestro.

“Not all women play the way she does.”

“But all of them possess that essence you can detect in her playing.”

 

Then the vision passed and Clara was once again with the Maestro in the present day.

“There was a year when they were happy,” he said, “and then Teresa found out she was expecting a child. It was a devastating revelation.”

“A devastating revelation for the Council?”

“Your father did not inform the entire Council. As I told you, it was the era of the first unrest, because Aelius's ambition and influence had been constantly growing, and this was a source of great concern to us. We were subjected to far-reaching internal dissent, and we witnessed betrayals of a sort we would never have deemed possible. So when we found out about Teresa's pregnancy, we decided to keep the secret of this miracle to ourselves, as inexplicable as the extinction of our mists, the secret of a child conceived between a human being and an elf. It was the first time, and to this date, the only time. All the other mixed marriages have been sterile.”

“Teresa let it be known that she wanted to devote a year to meditation, and she withdrew to a family estate in the north of Umbria,” said Petrus. “No one knew about it.”

Clara saw a villa with austere walls set amid a large garden overlooking a valley of gently rolling fields and small ridges, and she heard the notes of the sonata drifting from an invisible room, embellished by a new depth, a vein threaded with silver, with summer rains.

“The day before you were born, Marta threw herself into the Tiber. Then Teresa gave birth to a daughter. Teresa died the following night. She fell asleep and never woke up. But your father had already crossed back over the bridge because another birth was calling him to us. Another girl had been born in the home of the Council Head, on the same day and at the same hour as you, and she too was proof of an impossible miracle, because although she had been conceived by two elves, she had come into the world with a perfectly human appearance, something which had never happened in our scheme of things, and has never happened since. We are born in a symbiosis of essences and we only acquire a unique appearance when we leave our own world. But this little girl, no matter which way you turned her, no matter which way you looked at her, this girl resembled every other little human being. We were in the presence of two impossible births, on the same day and at the same time. Therefore it was decided we must hide them, for clearly they were part of a powerful plan, and we knew we had to protect them from Aelius's camp.”

“So you sent us far away from our roots,” she said.

“Alessandro had once told me about the village where his brother lives,” said the Maestro, “and so I had you sent to Santo Stefano. Maria's journey was more complicated, for she went through Spain, and ended up on Eugénie's farm. But she must learn of it first, so we won't share it with you now.”

“Does she know she was adopted?”

“Your father showed her how she arrived at the farm,” he said. “She had to know it, too, in order for her powers to be released.”

“Of the two of you, you are the one with a human part,” said Petrus, “and that is why you create bonds and build bridges. You have your mother's gift for the piano, but you have an added strength that comes from your father's power. You can see, the way your father does, but you also have bonds that take their source in your mother's humanity.”

Clara was overwhelmed by a vision. Its texture was finer and more vibrant than the reminiscences in her mind, and she knew she was looking at Teresa's face as she was playing the sonata threaded with silver and summer showers. Upon the final note, her mother raised her head, and Clara was overcome by the dizzying awareness of a living woman's presence.