The next morning he went back to the villa with the patio.
He walked through all the rooms and examined all the works of art. The servants gradually emerged from their kitchens and their rooms, and as he walked by they muttered, Condoglianze—but he also heard, Ecco. Every painting was speaking to him, every sculpture murmuring a poem, and it was all as familiar and happy as if he had never hated or abandoned the spirits of his ancestors. Pausing at a painting where a weeping woman was holding Christ to her breast, he knew at last what it was that he had always loved, and he could foresee, ever so briefly, the great merchant he would become. That same afternoon, Roberto was buried under a blazing sun, in spite of the fact it was November, and the funeral was attended by everyone who was a famous artist or a man of influence in Rome. At the end of the mass they greeted Pietro, and he saw that they accepted that he had taken on the legacy. There was respect in their words of greeting, and he knew that his aspect had changed. The hooligan had died overnight and all he could think of was the art collection.
But his hatred was still alive.
At the cemetery, he saw a man standing behind Leonora, very upright, looking him straight in the eye. There was something he liked about his gaze. When Leonora came up to him, she said, “This is Gustavo Acciavatti. He has bought the big painting. He’ll come to see you tomorrow.”
Pietro shook hands with the man.
There was a brief silence.
Then Acciavatti said, “It’s a strange November, isn’t it?”
Early the next morning the lawyer asked Pietro to come back to his office on his own, and he handed him an envelope which contained two sheets of paper: Roberto had stipulated that only Pietro must ever read them.
“Anyone who violates this wish will undoubtedly suffer,” he added.
When Pietro was outside he opened the envelope. On the first sheet, he read his father’s confession; on the second, a poem he had written. Everything inside him was reeling, and he thought he had never been this close to hell.
At the villa, he came upon Acciavatti, in Leonora’s company.
“I cannot sell you that painting,” he said. “My father should not have sold it to you.”
“I’ve already paid for it.”
“I will reimburse you. But you can come and see it whenever you like.”
The man came often, and they became friends. One day after viewing the painting, they sat down in the room by the patio and discussed the proposition Acciavatti had received to conduct the orchestra of Milan.
“I shall miss Leonora,” said Pietro.
“My destiny is in Rome,” replied Gustavo. “I will travel, but it is here that I shall live and die.”
“Why are you condemning yourself to a place you could get away from? Rome is no more than a hell of tombstones and corruption.”
“Because I have no choice,” said the young maestro. “This painting binds me to the city as surely as you can leave it. You are rich and you can deal in art in any big city.”
“I stay here because I do not know how to forgive,” said Pietro. “So I wander through the décor of the past.”
“Who must you forgive?” asked Acciavatti.
“My father,” said Pietro. “I know what he did but I don’t know his reasons. And as I am not a Christian, I cannot forgive without understanding.”
“So you are suffering the same martyrdom you have endured all your life.”
“Do I have any other choice?”
“You do. People forgive more easily when they can understand—but when they cannot understand, they forgive in order not to suffer. Every morning you will forgive without understanding why, and you will have to start again the next morning, but at last you will be able to live without hatred.”
Then Pietro asked one last question: “Why do you feel such a bond with the painting?”
“To answer that, I will have to tell you who I am.”
“I know who you are.”
“You only know what you see. But now I will tell you about my invisible side, and you will believe me, because poets always know the truth.”
At the end of a long conversation that lasted until dawn on the following day, Pietro said, “So you knew my father.”
“It was through him that I came to know this painting. I know what he did, and I know what it cost you. But I cannot tell you yet either the reasons for his act or why it is so important for us.”
Was it the magic of the ancestor, as they looked at each other? Or a new affinity, born of the urgency of the night? Perhaps one minute had gone by since Clara looked up at Pietro, and although she could name neither the events nor the men involved, she saw what was in his heart. She saw that he had had to fight, and give up; to suffer and forgive; that he had known hatred but had learned to love, yet the pain left him only to come back again, relentlessly; and this was something she knew, because she could sense it in Maria’s heart as well, Maria who could not forgive herself for having given Eugénie the red bridge and the possibility of the exchange. What lay inside a heart was as legible to her as a text in capital letters, and she understood how she could bring them together and offer them peace, because she now had the power to tell stories by playing the piano. She placed the ancestor on the left-hand side of the keyboard, and when she played the first note it seemed to her that they were in tune. Then she imbued her fingers with all her desire to tell a story of forgiveness and union.
Pietro was weeping and the Maestro placed one hand on his heart. Clara was composing as she played, and her fingers gave birth to the miraculous notes that a little mountain girl, who wanted to speak to a little peasant girl from orchards and combes, drew from her own orphan’s heart. How many throats have sung it since, in the fervor of departure? How many battles, how many banners, how many soldiers in the field since that day when Clara Centi composed the hymn of the last alliance? And while Maria was discovering in her dream a little girl with features of purest stone, and hearing her play, Pietro was weeping tears that burned and healed and made him murmur the lines his father had inscribed on the sheet of paper, until he saw the acid of hatred coalesce inside him in a point of unfathomable, blind pain, and the pain he had borne for sixty years disappeared forever.
May the fathers bear the cross
To orphans let there be grace.*
*Ai padri la croce / Agli orfani la grazia.
VILLA ACCIAVATTI
Inner Elfin Council
She is remarkably mature,” said the Maestro, “and her heart is infinitely pure.”
“But she’s only a child,” said Petrus.
“Who composes like a fully grown genius,” said the Maestro, “and who has her father’s power.”
“A child who has had no parents and who languished for ten years between an idiotic priest and a backward old woman,” mumbled Petrus.
“There were trees and rocks during those ten years, and the stories of the old housekeeper, and of Paolino the shepherd,” said the Maestro.
“An avalanche of benefits,” sneered Petrus. “And why no mother? And some light in the darkness? She has the right to know. She cannot go forward blindly.”
“We ourselves are going forward blindly,” said the Council Head, “and I tremble for the girls.”
“Knowledge feeds stories, and stories set the powers free,” said Petrus.
“What sort of fathers are we?” asked the Guardian of the Pavilion. “They are our daughters, and we are sharpening them like blades.”
“Then leave the idea of the stories to me,” said Petrus.
“Do as you like,” said the Council Head.
Petrus smiled. “I’m going to need some moscato.”
“I’ve a furious desire to try some,” said Marcus.
“You will experience joy,” said Petrus.
“Bodyguard, storyteller, and drinker. A
regular little human being,” said Paulus.
“I have no idea what is going on,” said Alessandro, “but I am honored.”
FATHER FRANÇOIS
In this land
Eugénie died the following January night. She went peacefully to sleep and did not wake up. Jeannette came and knocked on her door on her way back from the milking, surprised not to smell the aroma of the first coffee of the day from the kitchen. She sent for the others. The father was chopping wood in the pre-dawn darkness, where the frozen gloom seemed to shatter into sharp segments of ice. But he split the logs in his regular, placid manner, wearing his fur hat and trapper’s jacket, and the cold slid over him just as the events in his life had done, biting deeply, and he paid it no mind. But from time to time, all the same, he looked up and breathed the petrified mass of air, and thought to himself that he knew this dawn, but was unable to remember why.
The mother came to fetch him. In the sparkling light of the rising day her tears shone like somber, liquid diamonds. She gave him the news and gently took his hand. Even as his heart was breaking, he thought she was more beautiful than any woman, and he squeezed her hand in return, in a way that was worth all the words. When the time came to decide who must go to inform the little girl they did not hesitate, and that was proof of the sort of man the father was. André—for that was his name—went into Maria’s room and found her more awake than a battalion of swallows. He shook his head and sat down next to her, in the indescribable way he had that was the talent of a poor peasant made of a king’s cloth—which went to show that it was not by chance the little girl had ended up in that place a little over twelve years earlier, however coarse the strange farm might have seemed. For a few seconds Maria did not move, or even breathe, apparently. Then she gave a sorrowful gulp and, like all little girls, even those who speak to fantastical wild boars and mercurial horses, she collapsed in desperate sobs, of the kind that come so easily to a twelve-year-old, and so hard to a person of forty.
The desolation was immense in those lowlands, where for nine decades darkened by two wars Eugénie had lived, haunted by two deaths and honored by innumerable acts of healing. The mass held two days later was attended by every able-bodied man and woman in the six cantons. Many of them had to wait outside the church until the end of the service, but all of them joined the funeral procession to the cemetery, where they posted themselves among the graves to hear the priest’s prayer. In the terrible cold of noon, high black clouds hurried above the mourners, and they began to hope that those clouds would bring some fine snow and restore some of winter’s more gentle side, instead of this relentless ice that wearied hearts with its endless burning; and all of them, in coats, gloves and black mourning hats, secretly invoked the snowflakes, thinking that this would honor Eugénie better than any words the priest would waste in his Latin of crypts and naves. But they all remained silent, and prepared to listen to the truth of faith, because Eugénie had been a pious woman and they too were pious, however bred for wild freedom the folk in these lands of powerful nature might be. They looked at the priest as he cleared his throat, and in his immaculate chasuble, his fine tummy offered to the cruelties of winter, he paused for a moment of inner contemplation before beginning to speak. His mass had not digressed into a liturgy of texts and sermons, but he had known how to honor an old woman gifted with the science of simples, and everyone had been moved for no other reason than that it rang true.
Father François was fifty-three years old. He had devoted his life to Jesus and to plants, without ever considering them to be anything other than a part of the vows he had taken at the age of thirteen. He did not know how the vocation had come to him, or whether its Christian form, which seemed the most natural, would also be most appropriate. For the sake of this mission he had agreed to a number of sacrifices, not least of which was to give up the intuition that had made him speak to trees and paths in a language other than that of the church. He had endured the absurdities of the seminary, and the dismay of a servant of the Lord who can find no one in his hierarchy who might reflect his own way of feeling. But he had gone through it all as if walking through a sudden rain shower, finding shelter in the faith he preserved toward the rough men who were his responsibility. And if he had not suffered from the incoherence he detected in the speech of authority, it was because he loved both his Lord and those to whom he preached His word.
Now on this day Father François looked at the community gathered in the modest cemetery, where they were laying to rest a poor old woman who had lived all her life on a farm, and he felt something was welling up inside him, demanding to be said out loud. He was not unquiet, yet troubled by a feeling that was similar to the one that had kept him from writing to his superiors after the miracles of the rosary and the letter from Italy, and which had shown him that it was preferable to speak to Maria; she had repeated the same words as her grannies with impenetrable ingenuousness, and this convinced him that although she might know more, there was no place for evil in her crystalline heart. The priest looked at the little wooded cemetery, with the rows of graves of so many ordinary people who had only ever known the country and its labors, and the thought suddenly occurred to him that the people who had lived in this land of forest and silence, where one could hope for no other abundance than that of rain and apples—these people had never suffered from the terrible isolation of the heart that he had witnessed all around him as a seminarian in the city. Thus, beneath the omen of clouds as big as oxen gathering above the cemetery more crowded with people than with linden trees, Father François understood he had been blessed with the gift that people of little means give to those who accept their sorrow and pain, and that there had not been a single evening when, as he consigned to paper the day’s work on lemon balm and mugwort, he had not felt the warmth of men who, with their hands in the soil and their brows to the sun, have nothing more and can do nothing more than know the simple glory of being among others.
The memory of Eugénie took on another dimension, as if it had been multiplied to infinity, inscribed in unknown spaces and times which his spirit now probed through the prism of the old granny and a land as harsh and limpid as the skies of the beginning of time. He did not know how his perception had changed, but he had never viewed the world from such an angle as on this day of Eugénie’s funeral, an angle that was vaster and more open, imbued with the ruggedness of a terrain both barren and full of grace.
Yes, everyone was there, an entire village, an entire region, an entire canton; they had put on their mourning clothes, which cost more than the wages they gleaned from the land, because it would have been inconceivable that day not to wear their kid gloves and their dresses of fine cloth. André Faure, in a black hat, stood next to the grave, hard-dug in the frozen earth, and Father François saw that the entire region was there behind him, that he was one of those men who embody the spirit and who are steadfast, through whom a community feels more sure of its existence and arrives more easily at pride in itself than through any decree or edict handed down by those on high. Maria stood to his left, in silence. He felt a corolla spread through his entrails. He looked around him in this February light, so severe even for a land that was used to the hardship of winter; he looked at these proud but humble men and women who stood in unspeaking contemplation, paying little heed to the hostile wind, and the corolla continued to bloom until he began to explore a new continent of identity, a dizzying extension of himself about to be born despite the confines of this primitive country cemetery. An icy gust swept through the enclosure of the dead and caused a few hats to go flying, and the children scurried to catch them as quickly as they returned to their elders’ sides, and Father François intoned the beginning of the ritual prayer.
Show us the way out, dear Lord,
All through the day of this tormented life,
Until the shadows grow longer and evening falls,
And the restless world grows quiet
A
nd the fever of life abates
And our task is over.
He fell silent. The wind suddenly dropped and the cemetery was silent along with him, in a rustling of piety and ice. He wanted to speak, to go on with the prayer—Thus, Lord, in Your mercy / Grant us a quiet dwelling / Blissful repose and, finally, peace / In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord—but he couldn’t. By all the angels, he could not, for the simple reason, which will also show what sort of man that priest was, that he could not remember what the Lord Jesus Christ and all the saints together had to do with the story he owed his departed sister. There was only this corolla, expanding and rippling and eventually filling an entire place in his flesh that was both tiny and boundless, and all the rest was empty. Father François took a deep breath and searched inside himself for the anchor dropped by the corolla. He found a perfume of violets and resin and a wave of sadness so intense that for a moment he felt nauseous. Then it was over. Finally everything was mute again. But he felt as if he were looking at the cemetery, the people, and the trees without a screen, as if someone had washed a windowpane for him, where previously there had been all the dust of the road. It was marvelous.
As he was silent for an unusually long time, people began to look at him, astonished. André, in particular, grasped something in the priest’s physiognomy that made him stare for several seconds with the unfathomable gaze of the taciturn. Their eyes met. They had little in common, these two souls whom fate had brought together in these austere parts: the smiling pastor who loved Italian and wine had little in common with the heavy, secretive peasant who spoke only to Maria and the earth in his fields; nor finally, was there a great deal in common between the religion of the educated and the faith of country folk, for they only understood each other out of their need to weave together the fabric of their community. But this day was different, and their eyes met as if for the first time. Now they were simply two men, one who brought together the earthly souls whose destiny was in this place, and the other who understood this, today, and was preparing, with his words, to honor the bond of love. Yes, love. What else do you think it was about, in this hour of fierce wind and black clouds, what else could carry a man so high above his roof? Because those who love do not show much concern for the Good Lord, as was the case on this day for the priest, who could no longer find either his Lord or his saints; but by the grace of a magic he knew nothing about he had just discovered what the world is when it is illuminated by love. One last time before he spoke he gazed out at the tide of humble souls who were waiting for him to give the signal of farewell; he looked at every face, every brow and, finally, he returned to himself and found a trace of the little boy who used to play in the tall grasses by the stream—and he spoke.
The Life of Elves Page 13