The Life of Elves

by Muriel Barbery

  A moment went by. I know you but I don’t know how.

  There came a discreet knock at the door.

  “Yes?” said the Maestro.

  “Governor Santangelo,” came the reply.

  Clara sat on alone in the room in the company of the fat little ginger-haired man, who had not moved and gave no sign of waking. They brought her some tea, and some unfamiliar fruit with a velvety orange skin, and they gave her still more scores, while insisting that the Maestro had said she was to play only one. The first one seemed like a desecration to her and she immediately closed it, repelled by all the staves—they were like the bombastic effusions of those funeral dirges for the organ. No other score had the same lugubrious effect on her, but she opened a great many of them and did not find what it was that had so enthralled her about the Russian sonata and, in Santo Stefano, about the last piece that Sandro had placed before her in the church. Finally she came to a thin booklet. The first page whirled a new type of arabesque into the air. There were curved lines that took flight like feathers, and that had the same texture as the velvety skin on the lovely fruit. Before, when she had played the Russian sonata, there had been a splendor of trees with silvery leaves, mingled with vast dry prairies where rivers ran and, at the very end, she had the vision of a rushing wind in a wheat field where the stalks were flattened by gusts before springing back up in an animal roar. But this new music brought something amiable to the equation of landscapes, with the sparkle of Alessandro’s stories, and she felt that for such lightness to be possible, there must be deep roots. She wondered if she would ever know the smiling canopies where this amiability was born; at least now she knew that there were places where beauty was born of gentleness, whereas she had only ever known harshness and grandeur, and she loved this, tasting the unfamiliar fruit that told of the land where it was grown through her encounter with music. When she had finished playing the piece, she sat for a moment dreaming of foreign continents, and she began to smile in the noontime solitude.

  An hour had gone by in this luminous reverie when muffled sounds reached her from the room next door. There was some agitation, and among the voices she recognized the Maestro’s, accompanying the visitor to the door, then she heard a stranger’s voice in reply and, although his words were inaudible, Clara stood up, her heart pounding, because it was a voice of death, sending warnings she heard as a death knell—and no matter where she turned in the tumult of what she was hearing, she felt an icy chill as she watched a shadow, like a screen, over an expanse of terror and chaos. Finally, the voice was doubly terrifying because it was beautiful as well, a beauty that stemmed from a former energy, now depraved. I know you but I do not know how.

  “You’re no lazybones, that’s for sure,” said a voice behind her.

  The ginger-haired man had gotten to his feet, with some difficulty, apparently, because he was staggering as he came over, running his hand unsteadily through his hair. He had a round face, a double chin that gave him a childish look, and lively, sparkling eyes, somewhat cross-eyed at present.

  “My name is Petrus,” he said, bowing to her, and immediately collapsing to the floor.

  She looked at him, stunned, while he struggled to his feet and repeated his greeting.

  “The Maestro’s no easy man, but that scoundrel is evil,” he said when he had steadied himself.

  She understood that he was referring to the voice of death.

  “Do you know the Governor?” she asked.

  “Everyone knows the Governor,” he replied, puzzled.

  Then, with a smile: “I’m sorry I’m not very presentable. Our sort doesn’t do well with alcohol, it’s a question of constitution. But the moscato after dinner was divine.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Ah, it’s true,” he said, “we haven’t been introduced.”

  And he bowed for the third time.

  “Petrus, at your service. I act as a sort of secretary for the Maestro. But as of this morning I am above all your chaperone.”

  Then, smiling contritely, “I’ll grant you, a hangover does not augur well for our first meeting. But I’ll do my best to make myself pleasant, especially as you really do play very well.”

  And this was how Clara’s first days in Rome were spent. She did not forget the voice of death, although she was working relentlessly, with no thought for the outside world. Acciavatti had told her she should come to the deserted studio early in the morning, so that no one would know about the little prodigy he had taken on as his pupil.

  “Rome is fond of monsters,” he had said, “and I don’t want her to turn you into one.”

  Every day at dawn Petrus came to fetch her from her room and led her through the silent streets. Then he departed again for the Villa Volpe, where she joined him at lunch; after that he left her in the room on the patio where there was a piano for practice, and she worked there until dinner, which she ate with him and with Pietro. Sometimes the Maestro joined them afterwards, and they worked a while longer, until Clara’s bedtime. She was surprised by how indulgent Acciavatti and Pietro were toward Petrus. They greeted him warmly and paid no attention to his strange behavior. It could not be said, however, that his conduct was at all becoming; when he came to wake her in the morning, he was out of breath, his hair disheveled and his gaze unfocused; she no longer believed that the moscato of that first day was an exception, because he was forever stumbling on the carpet, and while she was practicing he would collapse in an armchair and sleep, drooling; he let out intermittent, unintelligible grunts; when he awoke, he seemed surprised to be there. Then he tried to set the world to rights by tugging with conviction on his jacket or his trousers, but he generally did not manage anything conclusive and eventually gave up, sheepishly bowing his head. Finally, by the time he remembered she was there and sought to speak to her, he had to start over more than once because what initially came out of his mouth contained no vowels. And yet she did like him for all that, without really knowing what he was doing there in her company. But her new life as a pianist absorbed so much of her energy that she had little left over for other aspects of her life in Rome.

  Her lessons with the Maestro were not at all as she had imagined they would be. Most of the time, he talked to her. When he gave her a score, he never told her how to play it. But then he would ask questions, and she always knew how to answer, because he did not want to know what she had thought but rather what she had seen. She told him that the Russian sonata had inspired images of arid plains and silver rivers, so he spoke to her of the steppes in the north and the vastness of those territories of willow and ice.

  “But the energy of such a giant goes hand in hand with his slowness, and that is why you played so slowly.”

  He questioned her, too, about the village where she was born, and she described the vista of mountains between two tiled roofs, and how she knew the names of every valley and every peak by heart. She loved these hours she spent with him, so much so that, at the beginning of November, two months after her arrival in Rome, her sorrow for her lost mountains had ceased to torment her. Yet the Maestro showed her no particular affection, and she had the feeling that he undertook his questions not so much to instruct her as to prepare her for something he alone understood, just as from time to time she had an intuition that he already knew her, even though they had only met that September. One day when they were studying a terribly boring score, and she betrayed her mood by suddenly and absurdly accelerating the tempo, he told her, irritated, “That’s typical of your lot.”

  She asked him the name of the fruit of the first day, and said, “Then give me some peaches, instead.”

  He looked at her, still more irritated, but set a score down in front of her and said, “For his sins, the man was German, but he knew a thing or two about peaches.”

  As she played and renewed her bond with the ethereal scrolls of pleasure, Clara pondered what m
ight lie behind the Maestro’s irritation, that surge of feeling aimed at someone whose indistinct silhouette had drifted briefly through the atmosphere in the room. And while the days that followed were not unlike those that had preceded, they bore the trace of this jeer directed at a phantom.

  Very often the Maestro also came to join her at Pietro’s after dinner. The piano was in the big room on the patio and, while they were working, the windows were left open to the cool evening air. Pietro listened to them, smoking and drinking a liqueur, but he would not speak until the lesson was over. Similarly, Petrus dozed or snored in a large wing chair until the music ceased and the silence woke him up. Clara would listen to them conversing while she read or daydreamed, then they took her back to her room; whereas they would go on talking late in the night, the timbre of their voices rising across the patio, lulling her to sleep. Thus, one night in late November, when the French windows to the patio had been closed because it was raining hard, Clara listened to them conversing while she leafed through some scores they had brought her to study. She heard Acciavatti say, “But will they ever play it at the right tempo?” and then she opened an old, dog-eared score.

  In black ink, someone had written two lines in the margin next to the opening staves.

  la lepre e il cinghiale vegliano su di voi quando camminate sotto gli alberi

  i vostri padri attraversano il ponte per abbracciarvi quando dormite*

  There was a moment drained of all sensation, and Clara watched as a bubble of silence spread at the speed of waves before bursting in a soundless climax. She reread the poem and there were no more explosions, but something had changed, as if space had doubled and beyond an invisible frontier lay a country where she longed to go. Although she suspected the score had nothing to do with this magic, she went to the piano all the same, and played the piece which only brought to the room a perfume of currents and damp earth, and a mystery in the shape of wooded trails and stolen emotions.

  After she played the last note she looked up and saw standing before her a man she did not recognize.

  “Where did that score come from?” asked the Maestro.

  She pointed to the batch they had brought to her earlier at his request.

  “Why did you play it?”

  “I read the poem,” she said.

  He walked around the piano and came to look over her shoulder. She sensed his breathing, the waves of his mixed emotions. Seeing him now in the harsh light that surprise cast over his feelings, she was struck by the images that unreeled, transparent, from his tall person—first of all a herd of wild horses, leaving behind them an echo that remained long after they had vanished into the distance; then, in the shadow of undergrowth whose pathways were gilded with bursts of sunlight, a large boulder rising from the moss, all its angles and hollows, all its noble crevices the product of the common labor of floods and centuries, and she knew that this magnificent, living boulder was the Maestro himself, because an inexplicable alchemy had perfectly superimposed the man and the rock upon each other. At last the images faded, and once again she was face to face with a man of flesh and blood, now looking at her gravely.

  “Do you know what war is?” he asked. “Yes, of course you do . . . Alas, there is a war coming, a war that will be even longer and more terrible than any that has gone before, a war desired by men who are even stronger and more terrible than in the past.”

  “The Governor,” said Clara.

  “The Governor,” he said, “and others, too.”

  “Is he the devil?” she asked.

  “In a way, yes, you could say he is the devil, but it’s not the name that is the most important.”

  As an orphan raised in the presbytery of a mountain village, Clara had already heard about the devil, and all the inhabitants of the Apennines knew of the battles that had been waged and they all crossed themselves when they heard talk of those who had perished. But beyond the stories she had heard in her childhood, Clara thought she knew where the devil’s desire for war came from. Living in tombs all lined up one after the other—that seemed enough to explain the intrigue in the voice of death, and she wondered whether the Maestro, this living rock, thought the same thing.

  “Wars take place on battlefields, but they are decided upon in the chambers of those who govern, men who are expert at working with fictions. However, there are other places, too, and other fictions . . . I want you to tell me what you see and what you hear, the poems you read and the dreams you have.”

  “Even if I don’t know why?” she asked.

  “You must trust music and poetry,” he replied.

  “Who wrote the poem?”

  “A member of our alliance.”

  After a long silence he said, “I can only tell you that it is addressed to you. But I did not think you would be able to read it so soon.”

  At that moment, she saw that Pietro was looking for the poem on the score, and from the way he was looking at them, she realized that he could not find it.

  Across from her, Gustavo Acciavatti was smiling.

  Before long Petrus led her back to her room; the windows had been closed, because the rain continued its stubborn percussion.

  “They’re not letting me do my work,” he said, as he was taking leave of her.

  “Your work?” she asked.

  “My work,” said Petrus. “They are all so serious and cold. I am here because I am sentimental and talkative. It’s just that they have you playing all day long and in the evening they bore you to death with wars and alliances.”

  He gracefully scratched his scalp.

  “I like my drink and maybe I’m not so clever. But I at least know how to tell a story.”

  He went away and she fell asleep, or at least she thought she was asleep until, with a clarity that cared little for walls or closed blinds, she heard Pietro say, all the way on the far side of the patio, “The little one is right, it’s the devil.”

  And the Maestro’s voice, in reply, “But then who tricked the devil?”

  Then she fell into a deep sleep.

  It was a strange night, of strange slumber. Her dreams were unusually vivid, turning to visions rather than nocturnal chimeras. She could let her gaze encompass a vista in the way one takes the measure of a panorama, and she found herself exploring the byways of a foreign land as if she were setting off along the passages of her familiar slopes. Although there were no mountains to be seen, there was a pervasive charm about the landscape, and she could feel the force of its prosperous terrain and enjoy the variety of its trees. While its gentle attraction was not like that of the lovely peaches, there was a sort of suppleness about it that was unknown in the mountains, and ultimately this conferred an equilibrium which Clara found exhilarating—a vigor without harshness, a rigor that, deep down, was favorable. Consequently within two months she had seen the entire spectrum of geographies—neatly tilled fields, velvety peaches of pleasure and, at the opposite extreme, her rugged and proud-standing mountains. What was more, while she was admiring the careful juxtaposition of the enclosures she became aware of a powerful, invisible enchantment that went well beyond the favor granted more opulent regions, and which transformed the landscape of thriving trees and shady paths into a scene of foliage and love. She also saw a village that was halfway up a hill, with a church and houses whose thick walls testified to the harshness of the winters. And yet you could tell that in the spring a fine season would begin, and last until the first frosts of autumn, and perhaps it was the absence of mountains, or the profusion of trees, but you knew that there would always come a time when you could rest from your chores. Finally, she perceived fleeting shadows, neither forms nor faces, that passed by indifferently while she would have liked to ask the name of the village, and what fruit grew in its orchards.

  It was like an arrow. She didn’t know where it had come from nor where it went, but she had seen her flash by an
d disappear around the corner. However fleeting the apparition might have been, its every feature had been etched upon her with a painful precision that caused her to see that face again, with its dark eyes and sleek, yet thin, features, and golden skin with lips like a splash of blood. She searched for its trace and discovered the little girl at the edge of a plantation of trees, just as a tall gray horse approached. The entire panorama lit up, and superimposed on the frosty countryside was a landscape of mountains and mist. They did not overlap but were enmeshed, rather, like clouds: she saw panoramas coiling together but also weatherscapes merging—clear skies, and snow falling from a storm tossed above a clear sky. And then a tornado funneled into sight. In a blazing vision that condensed action and time Clara could see the great stormy turmoil, the evil whirlwinds and black arrows that rose raging toward the sky, while a little old woman brandished a stick above her disheveled crown. Just as dream tipped into waking she saw another scene, where the little girl was eating her dinner in the company of six adults who surrounded her with a shimmering peaceful halo, and for the first time in her life, Clara beheld, in that halo, the material manifestation of love. Finally everything disappeared and she lay there awake in the silence of the dark room. In the morning she told the Maestro what she had seen in her dream. At the end of her story she added the name of the little stranger, because it came to her in a sudden flash of clarity.