Maria
The Hollows Farm
There was also a stamp the likes of which they had never seen.
“It’s an Italian stamp,” said Jeannot, breaking the silence, because he saw that the old ladies were straining their eyes staring at the mysterious little square.
They all plumped themselves down again on the straw matting of their chairs. Outside, it was raining twice as hard, and it was darker now than at six o’clock. The aroma of the rabbit stewing in its wine mingled with the sound of the rain, and the interior of the farm was a single fragrant psalm in which the little company cloaked themselves as they bent over the envelope from Italy. Another moment went by in this limbo of wariness, then Jeannot cleared his throat and spoke, because it seemed to him that they had allowed a decent lapse of time for observation.
“Well then, shall we open it?” he asked, his voice both neutral and encouraging.
The grannies looked at each other from under their beribboned headpieces, all thinking the same thing, that is, that such an event required the consultation of the entire family, and this could only happen once the father came home from working the fields and the mother from the town, where she had been with her sister these last three days, for the youngest daughter was consumptive. She had gone there with a satchel full of Eugénie’s unguents, which the family was waiting for with impatience, having despaired of any official medication: these had had little effect, and the young woman’s strength was draining away before their eyes. Which meant, according to the calculations of our four old ladies, with their minds all suffused with Italy, in two days and two nights. A kind of torture.
Jeannot, who had been following the ladies’ interior prevarications as well as if he could hear them, cleared his throat again and, in a tone that sought this time to be firm and fatherly, suggested, “It might be urgent.”
The postal routes leading from Italy to the lowlands may be mysterious, but one can at least assume it unlikely they could be covered in less than three hours; consequently, they are not the chosen routes in times of peril. All the more so when there is no address or family name. And yet, over and above the rain and the rabbit stew, the room was suddenly shrouded in a worrying pall of urgency. Angèle looked at Eugénie who looked at Jeannette who looked at Marie, and looks were exchanged in this way until chins too entered the dance and began oscillating gently, as if each were joining in the round with a precision that would enchant the most experienced choir conductor. They nodded their heads for two or three minutes more, with such ever-increasing determination that they carried Jeannot with them, for he suddenly felt he was certainly up to a little serving of rillettes, but he didn’t want to disturb the harmony of this admirable arrangement of chins. Then they decided.
“We could at least open it,” said Angèle. “It’s not going to determine anything.”
“Precisely,” said Eugénie.
“We’ll just open it,” said Marie.
And Jeannette did not speak, but she agreed with them.
Angèle got to her feet and went to fetch from the buffet drawer the slender knife that had once opened many a soldier’s letter. She took the Italian envelope in her left hand, and with her right she inserted the pointed tip and began slicing along the edge.
And everything exploded: the door flew open and there was Maria’s outline in the door against a background of storm-wild countryside; and the rain, which had been falling hard for a good half an hour, was transformed into such a powerful deluge that all anyone could hear was the pounding of the downpour in the farmyard. They had already witnessed torrential rains of the kind that can flood low-lying land in no time at all—but this! This was something else again, because the water did not sink into the ground, but hurled itself against it with a violence that caused an entire expanse of land to thrum as if it were a gigantic drum, before returning to the sky in the shape of gorged smoking waterspouts resounding with the thunder of their impact. Maria stood a moment longer in the door amid the general stupefaction and the terrifying clatter of the waters. Then she closed the door, walked over to the old women and held out her hand to Angèle who, without understanding what she was doing, placed the letter in Maria’s palm. The world spun on itself and all of a sudden everything was right way up again, the rain stopped, and in the return of silence the rabbit stew bubbling in its juice made everyone jump. Angèle looked at Maria who looked at Angèle. No one spoke; everyone appreciated as never before the incomparable joy of being in the silence of a kitchen that smelled of rabbit casserole, and they looked at Maria, at the newfound gravity of her expression, and they felt that something inside her had metabolized into an unknown framework of the soul.
“Well, my girl?” said Angèle eventually, her voice quavering.
Maria murmured, “I don’t know.”
And as no one said a word, she added, “I knew the letter was for me, so I came.”
What is one to do when the pulse of fate beats faster like this? What was so fine about the naïveté concentrated in that farmhouse kitchen bubbling with wine stew was the fact that naïveté accepts what it cannot control. Maria’s words befit the age-old belief that the world was older than its inhabitants and, consequently, it stubbornly resisted any exhaustive human explanations. All anyone wanted was for the wee girl to be all right, and while Eugénie began preparing some hawthorn tea, they all sat down again on the chairs they had so abruptly left when the fury was unleashed, and they waited quietly for Maria to open the missive herself: this time it did not breathe a word in response to the offending knife. Once she had unsealed the envelope, Maria took out a sheet of paper folded in four, its texture so fragile that the ink had seeped through to the other side, though the lines had been written on one side only:
la lepre e il cinghiale vegliano su di voi quando camminate sotto gli alberi
i vostri padri attraversano il ponte per abbracciarvi quando dormite
Maria knew no Italian, but just as she loved Eugénie’s echoing answers because they brought with them a distillation of the world that made it more lyrical and pure, so now, simply by looking at them and without understanding a thing, she could sense the breath of these lines vibrating in her ear like a canticle. Until now the most beautiful hymns had been those of the violet and the hawthorn, hymns that Eugénie sang in her capacity as gatherer of plants; and if they got mixed up with rabbit hutches and celery from the garden, Maria did not find this made them any less divine—on the contrary, it made faith far more intense than any Latin in the church ever could. But from these Italian words, which she could not even pronounce, was emerging a new terrain of poetry, and an unprecedented hunger was being hollowed out in her heart.
And yet Maria was close to the religion of poetry every day, whenever she climbed a tree or listened to the song of the branches and foliage. Very early on she had understood that other people went about the countryside as if they were blind and deaf, and the symphonies she heard and the tableaux she embraced were, to them, mere sounds of nature and mute landscapes. When she wandered through her fields and woods she was in constant contact with a material tide in the form of intangible but visible lines which enabled her to know the movement and radiation of things, and if in winter she liked to go to the oak trees in the combe in the neighboring field, it was because the three trees liked winter too, and made vibrant sketches whose strokes and curves she could see as if they were an engraving embodied in the air by a master’s hand. Moreover, Maria conversed not only with matter, but also with the creatures of the land. She had not always known how to do so with such ease. The ability to see the past in images, to discern the suitable disposition of things, to be warned of a remarkable occurrence like that of the letter’s arrival and the imminence of danger if she did not open it herself and, finally, the ability to talk with the animals in pastures, in hollows and in shelters, had increased after her escapade to the eastern clearing. Although she may have
always seen the grand magnetic glittering of the universe, it had never been so sharp, and she did not know whether this sharpness came from the revelation of the fantastical wild boar or from something in her that he had changed that night. Perhaps the shock on learning the secret of her arrival in the village had enabled her to acknowledge the existence of her gifts to herself, or perhaps the magic of this supernatural creature had blessed her with new talents and transformed her into a new Maria whose blood now flowed differently. What was certain was that she could speak to the animals with an ease that grew with each passing day, and, as with the trees, this was made possible through the capture of vibrations and the currents that emanated from the creatures themselves: she could read these emanations like topological reports, and distorted them slightly in order to make her own thoughts heard. It is difficult to describe something one cannot experience oneself; in all likelihood Maria played with waves in the air the way others fold, unfold, bring together, tie and untie ropes; thus, with the force of her mind she weighed upon the curve of the lines in which her perception of the world was caught, and this produced a breeding ground of unspoken words that allowed for an entire range of potential conversations.
Of all the animals, Maria liked conversing with hares best of all. Their modest radiance could be easily shaped and their light-hearted conversations provided information to which other more pretentious creatures paid no heed. It was to the hares that she turned for news about the gray horse, after the day of the black arrows, and it was with them that she had begun to suspect that a form of protection had been lost—how and why, she could not say, but the hares spoke of an ebbing of the seasons and a sort of shadow which, at times, came to drift over the woods. Above all, they had not been able to tell her how the horse had come there, but they had perceived his distress at not being able to go to her. And in answer to her cry—What is your name?—they had no response either, but they sensed that the horse had been prevented from revealing his name by a force that was neither good nor, alas, powerless.
And more and more often Maria could see the traces of that force in the lovely countryside. One evening in the fallow field when she was lying on her belly in the grass, letting her thoughts wander to the rhythm of the cantos which rose here and there on that March evening, she suddenly sprang to her feet, as lively as a spooked cat, because the music of the trees had stopped abruptly and yielded briefly to a great icy silence. She could have died from it. Worse still, she was sure that it was not natural, that there was a hidden and very determined power behind it, and that this power burned with the desire to carry out a very dark and deadly plan: what had lasted hardly three seconds would happen again, with still more force. Maria also knew that she was too young to understand the rivalry between great forces, but she could perceive the stirrings of an imminent panic that everyone had clearly hoped lay farther in the distance. She could not penetrate the substance of this intuition that sent her to the woods in search of a hare with whom to share her helplessness, but she was certain that a disturbance in the firmament of powers was provoking these never-before-seen occurrences.
It was during this time, this spring season that was not quite as splendid as the previous ones (where it did not rain exactly when one wanted it to, and froze slightly later than necessary for the apricot trees in the orchard), that Maria had a dream from which she awoke with mixed feelings of elation and dread.
The Italian poem had already been the cause of considerable emotion. There was no one who could translate it, and the priest had been very perplexed, because although his knowledge of Latin enabled him to guess certain words, he could not understand the intention of the whole any more than he could fathom the circumstances of its arrival by post. He weighed the decision to present the ecclesiastical authorities with a range of facts that neither reason nor faith could explain satisfactorily, but in the end he resolved not to write to them; for the time being he would keep to himself the list of the astonishing things that had happened in these days. Instead, he sent to town for a fine Italian dictionary: its red cover, the texture of petals, brightened up the clerical austerity of his tired old desk blotter. The beauty he discovered in the sounds of that language far exceeded in beatitude any verbal trance he had ever known—including that of Latin, for all that he did love that language tenderly. No matter how he pronounced the Italian, his mouth filled with the same taste of clear water and moist violets, and before his eyes he had the same vision of cheerful rippling on the surface of a green lake. Long after he had translated the poem and pondered its arrival at the farm, he went on reading words in the dictionary, and within a few months he had acquired the rudiments that enabled him to understand the quotations that sometimes accompanied the definitions—all the more so in that at the end of the volume there was a summary of conjugations, and although it caused him some difficulty, it did not dampen his enthusiasm for all that. In short, in six months our priest was speaking Italian—hesitantly, with turns of phrase that in Rome might seem unusual, and with an accent the phonetic key could not completely vouchsafe, but also with the solid foundation of knowledge one acquires when one studies hard and cannot practice elsewhere.
He had shared the results of his translation and no one could draw any conclusions beyond mere nods and conjectures: they believed the letter had not arrived there by chance and it was indeed intended for Maria; they wondered what the hare and the boar were doing in the landscape; and if you went walking under the trees, well, what could you expect . . . and sighs all around. But helplessness is not tranquility, and all this unfolded in silence in the hearts of those who wondered what the next hurly-burly would be, and whether the little girl was still safe.
So Maria, who knew all this, said nothing of her dream. A big white horse came toward her in the mist, then went by, and she was walking beneath an archway of unfamiliar trees along a path of flat stones. The music began. How many singers there were, she could not say, or even whether they were men, women, or children, but she could hear the words quite clearly, and she repeated them fervently to herself in the darkness of dawn. A tear slipped down her cheek.
the rebirth of the mists
the rootless the last alliance
At the end, when the choir had fallen silent, she heard a voice repeating the last alliance, then she woke up under the spell of music, and the sadness of that voice which was neither young nor old and which contained all the joys and all the sorrows. Maria did not know why she had wanted to know the silver horse’s name, but for a few minutes it had seemed to her to be the most important thing in the world. Similarly, there was nothing that counted more that morning than hearing the voice of pure silver once more. And while the prospect of having to leave her village one day filled her with grief that was all the greater because she sensed it would come before the time when children normally leave the place where they have been loved and protected, the impact of the voice on her heart’s desire also showed her that she would leave without hesitation—no matter how wrenching the parting, no matter how many tears were shed.
She began to wait.
LEONORA
So Much Light
Following the discovery of the poem in the margin of the score, and the revelation of an obscure betrayal threatening a strange girl named Maria, several days passed before Clara once again saw the Maestro, and it seemed that Pietro must have gone with him because he reappeared at the villa one evening when they informed her that her morning lessons would begin again the following day. Clara was surprised by how glad she was to see him again, although they still abided by their laconic contract established the first day, whereby they exchanged hardly a word before going to their rooms. But there was something familiar about the voice and gestures of the tall, slightly stooped man, something that made her feel as if she were at home again, and she was surprised that in such a short amount of time, interspersed with such rare displays of tenderness, the only two gentlemen she ever saw in Rome had b
ecome dearer to her than all the people she had lived with until then. This was not the richly colored glow that enveloped the people who gathered around the table at the farm, but the wild horses and rocks in the woods engendered a gentle affection which resonated all the way to Pietro Volpe. The following morning she went to the practice room, and the lesson began in the same way as all the previous ones. But just when she should have been on her way, the Maestro sent for some tea.
“Have you had more dreams?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“True visions do not come by chance,” he said. “Those who want to see them, control them.”
“Can you see Maria?”
“I am told where she is and what she is doing. But I don’t see her the way you saw her in your dream, or the way you could see her simply by deciding to.”
“How did you know that I could see her?”
An expression came over the Maestro’s face, and all her cells of flesh and blood cried out to her that it was an expression of love.
“I know because I know your father,” he said. “He has great powers of vision, and I believe that you do, too.”
A bubble of silence like the one on the evening of the poem burst painfully in her chest.
“You know my father?” she asked.
“I have known him for a very long time,” he said. “He wrote the poem on the score for you. Once you had read it, he led you to Maria.”
For a long moment the bubble formed again then burst, a dozen times.
“Are the boar and the hare our fathers?” she asked.
The Life of Elves Page 7