The Life of Elves

by Muriel Barbery

  “Well, well,” said the father, “I’m of the opinion that this little girl is at home,” and he looked at the mother who smiled back at him, he looked at every one of the guests, whose satiated gazes lingered on the infants settled on a blanket to one side of the great wood stove, and finally he looked at the priest who, in a halo of hare pâté and goose fat, stood up and went over to the stove.

  They all got to their feet.

  We shall not repeat here the country priest’s blessing; all that Latin, when in fact we wish we knew a bit of Spanish, would be too confusing. But they got to their feet, the priest blessed the infant, and everyone knew that the snowy night was a night of grace. They recalled an ancestor who had told them the story of a cold spell fit to make you die as likely of fright as of frost when they were fighting the last campaign, the one that left them victorious and forever damned with the memory of their dead—the last campaign, where the columns were advancing in a lunar twilight and the ancestor himself no longer knew whether the paths of his childhood had ever existed, and that walnut tree in the bend in the road, and the swarms of insects around the time of Saint John’s Day, no, he couldn’t remember a thing, and all the men were just like him, because it was so cold there, so cold . . . it’s hard to imagine such a fate. But at dawn, after a night of misery where the cold struck down those brave souls the enemy had missed, it suddenly began to snow, and that snow . . . that snow was the redemption of the world, because among their divisions it would not freeze again, and soon on their brows they felt the miraculous warmth of the flakes signaling the thaw.

  The little girl didn’t feel the cold any more than the soldiers of the last campaign, or the lads who had reached the clearing and who were gazing at the scene, soundless as pointing dogs. Later, they could not recall what they had seen clear as day, and to each question they would reply with the vague tone of someone searching within for some confused memory. Most of the time, all they said was, “The little lass was there in the middle of a bloody blizzard, but she was warm and alive as could be and she was talking to some creature that made off afterward.”

  “What sort of creature?” asked the women.

  “Ah, some creature,” they replied.

  And as in these parts where legends and the Good Lord, etcetera . . . they stuck to that reply and went on watching over the child as if over the Holy Sepulcher itself.

  A singularly human creature, that’s how each of them had sensed it, looking at vibrations as visible as matter whirling around the little girl, and it was an unfamiliar sight that gave them a strange shiver, as if life were suddenly splitting open and they could look inside it at last. But what do you see when you look inside life? You see trees and wood and snow, perhaps a bridge, and landscapes slipping by before your eyes have time to grasp them. You see the toil and the winds, the seasons and the sorrows, and you might see a tableau that belongs to your heart alone—a strap of leather in a tin box, a patch of meadow where the hawthorn blossoms run riot, the wrinkled face of a beloved woman and the smile of the little girl telling tales of tree frogs. Then, nothing more. The men would recall that the world suddenly landed back on its feet in an explosion that left them weak and drained—and after that they saw that the mist had been swept from the clearing, that it was snowing so hard you could drown in it, and the little girl stood all alone in the middle of the circle where there were no other footprints save her own. Then they all went back down to the farm where they sat the child in front of a bowl of scorching hot milk, and the men hastily stored their rifles, because there was mushroom stew with headcheese pâté and ten bottles of their wine for laying down.

  There you have the story of the little girl who held the paw of a giant wild boar tight in her hand. Truth be told, no one can really explain what it all means. But there is one more thing to say, about the two words embroidered on the edge of the white cambric in an elegant Spanish with neither object or logic, and which the little girl would learn about once she had already left the village and set in motion the wheels of fate—and before that there is one other thing to say: we all have the right to know the secret of our birth. This is how you pray in your churches and your woods and how you go off to travel the world—because you were born on a snowy night and you inherited two words that came from Spain.

  Mantendré siempre.*

  *I will mantain.

  THE LITTLE GIRL FROM ITALY

  Anyone who doesn’t know how to read between the lines of life need only remember that this little girl grew up in a remote village in Abruzzo between a country priest and his old, illiterate housekeeper.

  Father Centi lived in a tall building, and below the cellar was a garden with plum trees where they would hang the laundry in the early hours so that in due time it would dry in the wind from the mountains. The house was halfway up the village, which rose straight up to the sky in such a way that the streets twisted round the hill like the strands of a tightly wound ball of wool, dotted with a church, an inn, and just the right amount of stone to shelter sixty souls. After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls. Then she went to the kitchen—a long low room adjoining a pantry that smelled of plums, the old jam maker, and the noble dust of cellars.

  From dawn to sunset, the old housekeeper recounted her stories. She had told the priest she’d inherited them from her grandmother, but she told Clara that the spirits of the Sasso mountain had whispered them to her while she slept, and the little girl knew that this shared secret must be true, because she had heard Paolo’s tales, and he got them from the spirits of the high mountain pastures. But if she valued the figures and turns of speech of those tales, in truth it was for the velvety chanting of the storyteller’s voice, because that coarse old woman, whom only two words rescued from complete illiteracy—all she knew was how to write her name, and the name of the village, and at mass she could not read the prayers but recited them, rather, from memory—that old woman had a manner of speaking that contrasted with the modesty of the remote parish on the escarpments of the Sasso; in actual fact, one must imagine what the Abruzzo was like in those days, in that mountainous region where Clara’s protectors lived: eight months of snow interspersed with storms over the massifs set between two seas where it was not uncommon to see a few snowflakes in summer. Add to that real poverty, the poverty of regions where people till the soil and raise their flocks, herding them at the peak of summer to the highest point on the gradients. Not many live there, consequently, and even fewer when the snow comes and everyone has left with their beasts for the sunshine in Apulia. The only ones who stay in the village are those peasants who are tireless workers, growing their dark lentils, for lentils only grow in poor soil, and valiant women who in the cold weather look after the children, the farms, and their attendance at church. But while the people of this land might be sculpted into jagged rock by wind and snow, they are also fashioned by the poetry of their landscape, which makes shepherds compose rhymes in the icy fog of the high pastures, and storms give birth to hamlets that dangle from the web of the sky.

  Thus, the old woman, whose life had unfolded within the walls of a backward village, had a silkiness to her voice that came to her from the splendor of the landscape. The little girl was sure of this: it was the timbre of this very voice that had awoken her to the world, even though people assured her she was only an infant at the time, lying in hunger on the top step outside the church. But Clara did not question her faith. There was a great void of sensations, an absence festooned with whiteness and wind; and there was the melodious cascade that pierced the emptiness and which was there again every morning when the old housekeeper wished her a good day. The little girl had learned the Italian language with miraculous speed, but Paolo the shepherd had grasped that it was something other than her facility with Italian that had left
a scent of prodigy in her wake, and one evening he whispered to her, It’s the music, little one, isn’t it, it’s the music you hear? In response, she looked up at him with her eyes as blue as the torrents from the glacier, with a gaze in which the angels of mystery sang. And life flowed down the slopes of the Sasso with the slowness and intensity of those places where everything requires effort but also takes its time, in the current of a bygone dream where humankind knew languor interwoven with the bitterness of the world. Labor was intense, and prayer along with it, and they protected a little girl who spoke the way others sing, and who knew how to converse with the spirits of the rocks and the combes.

  One day in June, late in the afternoon, there came a knock on the door of the presbytery and two men strode into the kitchen, wiping their brows. One was the priest’s youngest brother, the other was the carter who had driven the large two-horse cart all the way from L’Aquila; on the cart was a massive shape harnessed by blankets and straps. Clara had watched the convoy making its way along the northern route as she stood after lunch on the steep path above the village: from there the view encompassed both valleys and, on a fine day, Pescara and the sea. When the cart had almost reached the final uphill stretch, she scampered down the slope and arrived at the presbytery, her face lit with love. The two men had left the cart outside the church and climbed up to the plum garden where they were greeted with hugs and a glass of the sweet chilled white wine that was served on warm days, along with some restorative victuals, and then, agreeing to some dinner later, they wiped their mouths with the cuffs of their sleeves and went back to the church where Father Centi was waiting.

  Two more men were needed to help move the big object into the nave, then they set about freeing it from its straps, and in the meanwhile the village began to assemble in the pews of the little church; in the air was a sweetness that coincided with the arrival of this unexpected bequest from the city. But Clara kept well back, motionless, speechless, in the shadow of a pillar. This was her moment, and she had known as soon as she saw the shape moving along the north road; if the old housekeeper saw on her face the exaltation of a bride, it was because she felt as if she were about to partake in strange yet familiar nuptials. When the last strap was removed and the object was finally visible, there was a murmur of satisfaction, followed by a burst of applause, because it was a fine black fortepiano, as polished as a pebble is by the sea, and it was almost without a scratch, despite having traveled widely and experienced much.

  This is the story of the piano. Father Centi came from an affluent family in L’Aquila, but his lineage was declining, since he had become a priest and two of his brothers had died young, and the third, Alessandro, who was now at his aunt’s expiating the errant ways of his former dissolute life in Rome, had never gotten around to taking a wife. The brothers’ father had died before the war, leaving his widow with an unexpected pile of debts and a house that was too opulent for the impoverished woman she had become overnight. Once she had sold all her belongings and the creditors had finished knocking at her door, she withdrew to the same convent where she would die several years later, long before Clara arrived in the village. But upon leaving her secular life for her final reclusion in the convent, she had arranged for the only relic of her past glory to be conveyed to her sister—an old maid who lived near the city walls—a relic she had managed to preserve in spite of the vultures: she asked her sister to look after it for the grandchildren she might one day have on this earth. I will not know them, but they will receive this from me, and now I must go, and I wish you a good life, wrote the aunt faithfully in her will, bequeathing the piano to whichever of her nephews had children when her time came, and she added: Do as she wished.

  Thus the notary, who had heard about the orphan’s arrival at the presbytery, thought he was doing the right thing by asking Alessandro to escort the inheritance to his brother’s home. As the piano had stayed in the attic during the war and no one had thought to bring it back down afterward, the same lawyer informed them by letter that on its arrival it would need tuning, to which the priest replied that the piano tuner, who made his rounds through the neighboring towns once a year, had been summoned to make a detour through the village in early summer.

  They gazed at the fine piano that shone beneath the stained glass windows, and they laughed, talked about it, and succumbed to the cheer of this lovely evening in late spring. But Clara was silent. She had already heard the organ played at funerals in the neighboring church, where the God-fearing old woman who performed the liturgical pieces was as hard of hearing as she was hopeless as a musician—and anyway, those chords she thumped out, without hearing them, were probably not worth remembering either. Clara preferred a hundred times over the threnody which Paolo coaxed from his mountain flute; it was so much more powerful and true than the fracas from the organ devoted to the glory of the Most High. So when she saw the cart begin its climb up the long road of hairpin turns toward the village, her heart leapt as if to signal an extraordinary event. Now that the object was there before her, that feeling grew all the stronger, and Clara wondered how she would ever be able to bear the waiting, since they had been told, to the regret of those who would have enjoyed a foretaste of the pleasures in store, that the instrument was not to be touched until it had been tuned. But they respected what the shepherd of their consciences had decreed, and prepared instead to spend a fine evening savoring some wine under the benign gaze of the stars.

  And a splendid evening it was. The table had been laid beneath the plum trees in the orchard and Alessandro’s old friends had been invited for supper. He had once been a very handsome man, and beneath the marks of time and past excesses you could still see the fine features and haughty contours of his face. What was more, he spoke Italian with a smoothness of tone which in no way diminished its melodiousness, and he always told stories about very beautiful women and endless afternoons where people sat smoking under the awning while conversing with wise men and poets.

  That evening he began to tell a story that took place in perfumed salons where the men smoked fine cigars and drank golden liqueurs; Clara could make no sense of it, so foreign to her were the settings and the manners. But just as he was about to begin the part about a mysterious thing known as a concert, the old housekeeper interrupted him and said, Sandro, al vino ci pensi tu? And the affable man whose entire life had been consumed in just a few years of incandescent, luxurious youth, went off to the cellar to fetch a few bottles which he opened with the same elegance he had displayed while ransacking his life, and on his lips he wore the same smile with which he had always faced disaster. Thus, as the light of a warm moon incrementally set portions of the dinner table at the presbytery aglow, stealing them from obscurity, for a brief moment he was the flamboyant young man of his past. Then the ashes of the night veiled his expression, on which everyone had been focusing their rapt attention. In the distance they could see lights suspended in the void, and they knew that others were drinking the summer wine and thanking the Lord for this offering of a warm twilight. There were new poppies all over the mountainside, and a little girl whose hair was lighter than the meadow grass, and very soon the priest would be teaching her to play the piano, just like a young lady in the town. Ah . . . There was a pause, and a moment to catch one’s breath from the unending wheel of labor. It was a special night, and everyone there knew it.

  Alessandro Centi stayed at the presbytery on the days that followed the piano’s arrival, and it was he who welcomed the piano tuner in the first hot days of July. Clara followed the two men to the church and watched in silence as the man took the instruments from his bag. The first notes that came from the untuned keys produced in her the sensation of a sharpened blade together with a delicious swoon, and while Alessandro and the piano tuner talked and joked amid the trial and error of ivory and felt, her life was changing forever. Then Alessandro sat down at the keyboard, placed a score on the music stand and played well enough, despite the years
of neglect. At the end of the piece, Clara came and stood next to him and, pointing to the score, motioned to him to turn the pages. He smiled, amused, but something in her gaze struck him, and he turned the pages as she had requested. He turned them slowly, one after the other, then started again at the beginning. When they had finished, she said, Play it again, and he played the piece one more time. After that, no one spoke. Alessandro stood up and went to fetch a big red cushion from the sacristy, and placed it on the velvet stool. Would you like to play? he asked, and his voice was hoarse.

  The little girl’s hands were slender and graceful, rather big for a child who had only turned ten in November, and extremely nimble. She held them above the keys in the proper way to begin playing, then left them there for a moment, and the two men felt as if an ineffable wind were blowing through the nave. Then she lowered them to the keyboard. And a tempest swept through the church, a veritable tempest that ruffled the pages, and it roared like a wave that rises and crashes up to the seamark on the rocks. Finally the wave ebbed away and the little girl began to play.