The Life of Elves

by Muriel Barbery

  “Yes.”

  She felt breathless.

  “But I don’t know what I am supposed to do,” she said finally.

  “You see things when you play the piano.”

  “I see landscapes.”

  “Music connects you to places and beings. These landscapes exist and Maria is real. She lives far away, in France, in a place where we thought she would be protected for a long time. But time is pressing now, and you have to trust in the powers of your people, and in the powers of your art.”

  Then he stood up, and she understood that her time in the practice room was over. But he stopped in the doorway and added, “This evening I’ll introduce you to a lady called Leonora. She reminded us yesterday that your birthday was in November, and you turned eleven and she asked me to invite you to dinner.”

  In the evening, they set off toward another hill. The Maestro himself greeted them on the steps outside a fine villa, at the end of an avenue lined with tall trees of a kind she had not seen before in Rome. As darkness had fallen, she could not make out the garden, but she could hear the bubbling of a stream, its stones composing a melodic motif which aroused in her images of fluttering fireflies and mountains in the mist. She looked at the Maestro and it seemed to her that another man entirely was standing there before her, a man who was neither her music professor, nor a man to whom phantoms gave the face of passion, but rather a man whose soul was shot through with emotion that coursed like arrows in one direction. Then she saw her, dark-haired and very tall, hiding in his shadow; her hair was short and her eyes were immense; she wore a plain outfit that you might even call austere; no make-up and, on her ring finger, a very fine silver band. Age had added wrinkles to her magnificent sobriety, as if to enhance the pure lines of her appearance. You had to admire the slope of her shoulder, clad in a smooth, plain silk, and the pale color of the cloth, the even stitching around the collar, her bare, pearly skin; and the dark gleam of her ingenuous curls made you think of a seascape where expanses of shore and sky call to one another in a refinement of muted colors that only the most essentialist masterpieces could achieve.

  Who was Leonora, then, in addition to being Pietro’s sister and the Maestro’s wife? The house of Volpe was an old dynasty of prosperous art dealers. Before Clara went to live with them, Pietro used to host grand receptions at the villa, but now he had given them up so that Clara would remain hidden; similarly, the leading artists of the era were received by the Acciavatti family, and from their very first visits they fell into the habit of stopping by every day for lunch, or after supper for conversation. So Leonora Acciavatti, née Volpe, had never lived alone. The constant flow of guests in the family home had followed her to the house she shared with the Maestro, and she continued to receive her guests in the same singular manner as in her own home; no one walked behind her through the galleries but rather were arranged employing a geometry that knew nothing of straight lines: you adapted to the rolling and swaying of her movements; similarly, you didn’t sit opposite her, you were seated around her according to geodesic coordinates which imprinted the contours of an invisible sphere upon the private space. Thus, while the guests dined, their gaze followed the network of curving lines embraced by her gestures, and when they left they took away with them some of Leonora’s grace: she may not have been beautiful, but they found her sublime, something which, in this place of art, was highly unusual, because she was not a musician, nor did she paint or write, and she spent her days conversing with minds more brilliant than hers. But despite the fact that she did not travel and did not like change, and that many women of similar station were merely women of fashion, Leonora Acciavatti was a world unto herself. Her caste had betrothed her to the role of bored heiress, but fate had made a daydreamer of her, gifted with otherworldly power, to such good effect that in her presence you felt as if a window onto infinity had been opened, and you understood that it was by delving into yourself that you escaped imprisonment.

  In every person, even those who have never been graced by caresses, there is a native awareness of love, and even those who have not yet loved will know of love from the consciousness of it that inhabits all bodies and all ages. Leonora did not walk, she glided, leaving behind her the wake of a riverboat, and with each gliding motion that broke down and reconstituted ambient air as silky as the sand on the riverbanks, Clara’s heart came that bit closer to the knowledge it had always had of love. She followed Leonora to the dinner table and answered her questions about her piano and her lessons; there was a lovely meal and a joyful celebration of her eleventh birthday; and finally, they parted on the steps outside the villa, in the strange music of the stream, and it was time for Clara to go back through the cold night to the solitary room on the patio. But she felt less alone in Rome than ever before, because in Leonora she had sensed the familiar pulse of her Abruzzo mountains, the same pulse that throbbed continuously from its rocky, steep terrain. For a long time she had not known it in any other way. But after the blue musical score in the church, she had perceived the same vibration as she went along her mountain pathways or played beautiful pieces of music, a vibration that came not only from the places her eyes or her piano connected her to, but also from her mind and her body, illuminated by her playing. And now this combined frequency of earth and art could be found in Leonora’s eyes and in her gestures, so much so that while Roman society may have found it perfectly natural for the Maestro to ally himself with this member of the elite, Clara alone understood what he had truly seen in her.

  They did not meet again all winter, however. Clara worked hard under the Maestro’s direction, for he kept asking her to increase her powers of vision. But she saw nothing, neither during her dreams, nor during the day. He did not seem impatient for all that, and merely made sure that she continue to play scores which seemed to her as dead as the stones of the city. He never replied when she asked him why he chose these pieces that bored her to tears, but she had learned to discern the elements of an answer in the question he asked her the second she finished. Thus, one morning when she was asking him about a piece that made her yawn continuously, he frowned and asked her what it was that made a tree look beautiful in the light. She changed tempo, and the piece took on an elegance that, initially, she would never have suspected. Another time, when she was falling asleep over a piece that was so pointlessly sad that she could not even weep as she played, he queried her about the taste of tears in the rain and, by making her fingers lighter, she could feel the pure melancholy buried beneath the academic nature of sobs. But the most important conversation came about one April morning: exasperated with having to practice a hollow score, she simply stopped playing.

  “There’s nothing to see,” she said, “there are just people chattering and walking by.”

  To her great surprise, he motioned to her to get to her feet and join him at the table where he was having his tea.

  “You are very gifted, but all you know of the world is your mountains and your goats, and what your priest has told you about it, and he knows even less than the goats. And yet the old housekeeper and the shepherd—they told you stories.”

  “I listened to their voices,” she said.

  “Forget their voices and try to remember the tales.”

  And as she was looking at him, failing to understand, he added, “Where I come from, people are not interested in stories, either, provided there is the song of the earth and sky.” Then, after a slight hesitation: “There is a painting in your room, isn’t there? It was painted a very long time ago by a man who came from my country and who, like me, was interested in stories. Look at the painting again this evening and perhaps you will see what the earth and the landscapes have been hiding in your heart, despite the old housekeeper’s tales and the shepherd’s poems. Without the land, one’s soul is empty, but without stories, the land is silent. You must tell stories when you play.”

  He told her to go back to the keyboard, an
d she played the talkative piece again. She had not understood what he meant, but now she heard a deeper voice beyond those voices holding forth and then passing by.

  She looked up at him.

  “Remember the stories,” he said as he got to his feet. “They are the intelligence of the world—of this world, and of all the others.”

  That same evening, he came to Pietro’s to work with Clara. It was the end of April, and the weather was very mild for the season. There were roses in abundance, as well as lilacs already in bloom, their fragrance rendered all the more sublime by a brief shower before dinner. When Clara came into the piano room, she was surprised to find Leonora there.

  “I’ve just come and I’ll be leaving again,” she told her. “But I wanted to give you a kiss before your lesson.”

  She was indeed dressed to go out, in a gown of cascading black crepe, illuminated by two teardrops of crystal which made her hair and eyes seem even darker. It was difficult to imagine a more absolute refinement than that flowing gown and those dangling pearls of motionless liquid; add to this the arabesques that gave Leonora’s movements a certain rhythm, and you no longer knew whether you were looking at a river, or a flame curling upon itself.

  “I know no one tells you much, and you are made to work in solitude,” said Leonora. She turned to Gustavo and Pietro. “But I trust these men. So I have come to share with you my blindness and my faith, and ask if you would kindly play for me.”

  Her aura wafting into the evening as if it were a rare and light perfume, she continued, “I would like to hear the piece you played in the church the very first time, the one in the score Alessandro gave to you at the end and which was blue, I think.”

  Clara smiled at her. Truth be told, in eleven years of a life with neither conflict nor torment, she had not smiled more than four times. Although she had long been inclined toward nature, she had never penetrated the domain of human affinities. Leonora saw her smile and raised a hand to her chest while Clara went to sit at the keyboard and the men, in turn, sat down. She had not played the blue score again since the day of the great nuptials. She recalled what the Maestro had told her about stories, and now, superimposed upon the piece’s song of silent lakes, was a strange thread which she followed like a trail. Something coiled in the air then uncoiled inside her. It was more than a fragrance but less than a memory, and on it there floated a hint of the earth, the soil, and of the heart, in the form of a story of nocturnal discoveries that her fingers now wanted to tell.

  So she played the piece as she had played it on the first day, at the same tempo and with the same solemnity, but her hands were charged with a new magic that could open up the realm of dreams in the waking hours. An oil lamp lit the table where the family were eating their meal. What crystals did this vision pass through? Clara knew it was no daydream, but the actual perception of Maria’s world, far to the north. The more she played, the more she felt a connection to an immense kaleidoscope, where her heart recognized a familiar iridescence, and her gaze swooped down like an eagle, increasing the details of the scene with every beat of its wings. She was able to examine the faces of these men and women she had seen only fleetingly at the end of the first dream. They spoke little while they ate, and they were sparing with gestures that were governed by the same choreography of everyday life, by the same peaceful supper where the bread was cut in silence, where they made sure the little girl always had enough to eat, and if the father came out with a remark, there was a brief burst of laughter before everyone returned to their soup. Just as she was about to play the last bar, they all laughed uproariously, and the mother got up to fetch a fruit dish of apples from a dark corner of the room. Then Clara stopped playing and the vision dissolved.

  She looked up. Leonora had laid her hand on the dark wood, and her cheeks were streaming with tears. On Pietro’s face there was also the trace of a sob, and Petrus seemed as moved as he was awake. But the Maestro had not wept. Leonora came over to Clara and leaned down to kiss her on the forehead.

  “I’m leaving now,” she said, drying her tears, “but I thank you for what you have given us this evening.”

  And turning to the Maestro, she added, “Now there will be many more hours.”

  Later, in her room, Clara did not fall asleep. She felt the breach within her that had opened when she was playing for Leonora, and she wanted to go back to Maria’s farm once again. For a long time she gave herself over to the silence and let her mind wander aimlessly among the snatches of stories that her old housekeeper used to tell, and after a while, she was bathing in a liquid layer of reminiscence, in which all of history was contained in the little stories of the Sasso. She did not try to follow them, or to truly piece them back together, but she saw now that she could transcribe their texture to music—an unusual kind of music where, added to the sound and the tonality of forms, there would be the same layer of apprehension that sometimes emerged from her dialogues with the Maestro, and which she had perceived on the first evening as she stood by the painting in her room: the stories that blended with the intoxicating colors. She saw the old housekeeper sitting and darning while she told her a story of children lost in the mountains, or shepherds who had strayed in the combes, and she felt herself following the thread of a meditation that had neither direction nor consequence, its melody carrying beyond the temporal and the physical. And then more stories, more lands were set ablaze, and the same radiance kindled earlier by the score now flooded her mind without her having to make any effort to maintain the light it cast. Oh, so much light! Night has fallen, too, over the little world of the farm, and in the silent room the last embers are dying. She can feel the power of the stones, encircling and protecting the people, and the power of the wood spreading its limbs invisibly through the walls. In spite of the darkness, the mineral and organic vibrations weave a luminous web: Clara is enchanted as she deciphers the outlines, for Maria is there, in the strange brightness, gazing motionless at the table where there is an earthenware pot, a glass half filled with water, and some garlic cloves left over from the meal. Then, in the endless, blazing suspended moment while the little French girl’s hand moves the glass and adds a fragment of ivy, there is a redeployment of the entire universe, and Clara can hear its titanic creaking, the shifting of ice floes—then everything grows still and falls quiet and embraces the spirit of blissfulness. And so it was on the night of the great beginning. Clara followed Maria through the sleeping house to her bed, where she slipped under a large red duvet. But before falling asleep, she opened her eyes wide to stare at the ceiling, and Clara took her gaze right into her heart. Was this the magic of the link between music and stories? She was as touched as she might be upon a first intimate moment with a person who expected nothing from her in return, and in the silence of her room on the patio, for the second time that day, she smiled. Finally, just before sleep, she had her last vision of a farmhouse table, where the precise tension between a glass, an earthenware pot, and three cloves of garlic graced by a fragment of ivy, captured the magnificence and barrenness of the world.

  “I saw her when I was playing,” she told the Maestro the next morning, “and I saw her again during the night.”

  “But she cannot see you.”

  He listened while she described the dinner, and the men and women around Maria, their shared laughter and the stones that were alive and protective. Then they began the lesson with a piece which seemed more flat and dreary to her than the open plains.

  “Concentrate on the story and forget the plains,” said the Maestro. “You’re not listening to what the score is telling you. Travel is not just through space and time—above all, it is in the heart.”

  She made her playing slower, more delicate, and she felt that a new channel was opening inside her, overflowing the landscape of the plain, tracing a network of magnetic points around which a story was wound, a story that only music could unwind. And so she found Maria again. She was runn
ing beneath clouds so black that even the rain was dark silver. She saw her fly like an arrow across the farmyard, fling open the door then stand for a moment facing the dumbfounded company of a postman and four little old ladies. Finally she went in, held out her hand and took hold of the letter. Clara saw the downpour suddenly retreat skyward and evaporate in the return of silence and sunshine, and Maria read the two lines that were inscribed on the paper in the same manner as on the musical score from the patio.

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

  i vostri padri attraversano il ponte per abbracciarvi quando dormite

  Clara felt the emotion that Maria had yet to discover in the poem, then she looked up at the Maestro and held the two perceptions together in a union through which she could see both here and elsewhere, the practice room in town and the foreign farm, like motes of dust in a beam of light.

  “That is your father’s power,” said the Maestro after a moment’s silence.

  She felt something brush by her, light but urgent, an unaccustomed presence.

  “Do you see what I see?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “I see Maria just as you see her. Whoever sees also has the power to make others see.”

  “Was it you who sent the poem?”

  “It establishes the connection between you,” he said. “But the poem means nothing without the gift thanks to which your music connects souls that are seeking one another. The wager we are making may seem mad, but every new event seems to confirm that we are right.”

  “Because I see Maria.”

  “Because you see Maria outside the Pavilion.”

  “Outside the Pavilion?”

  “The Pavilion where our kind can see everything.”