The Maestro

by T. Davis Bunn

  Ephesians 4:20–21

  Chapter 1

  My mother died when I was five. She was an American, born and raised in Ann Arbor, from a strong old family. My father was Italian, born and raised in Torno, a tiny village perched on the side of a mountain that faces straight into Lake Como. He was from a working-class family. His father, my grandfather, was a stonecutter and wall builder. My father met my mother when she came to Italy to study Italian and joined the class he was teaching. They fell in love, and eleven months later they married in a little mountain chapel when they found out she was pregnant with me.

  My mother’s family was horrified at the news, both about the marriage and about the reason, namely me. But faced with the prospect of losing touch with their favorite daughter, they made the best of a bad deal and invited them home. My mother wanted her baby born in America, so they went. They were very, very much in love, my grandmother used to tell me, and little as my father wanted to leave Italy, he agreed to take her home.

  So I was born in America and lived my first five years in a little house my mother’s parents gave her. I don’t remember much about that time. I remember the cold. I remember the way my mother used to rock me in her lap and sing me to sleep. She wanted to be an opera singer; that was why she went to Italy to study Italian and Italian opera, and so met my father, and had me. The misfit.

  I remember, too, the way they used to fight, especially the winter she died. I tried to tell my grandmother about it once, but she said I was mistaken. And if I was not mistaken I should forget it. My parents loved each other very much. That was what I should remember. So I never said anything more to my grandmother about the fights. But I remembered them. I would lie in bed and feel the wall beside my head vibrate to the power of their voices—my mother’s especially. She did not sound like an opera singer then. She sounded enraged.

  I think they fought the night my mother was killed, but I’m not sure; the days and nights around that time are all confused in my head. Perhaps that was the reason my father went so crazy after she died, because they fought and she ran off and died in the snowstorm. Or maybe, as my grandmother said, he just loved her too much. Whatever the reason, my father went a little crazy.

  Before, I remember my father as a strong, gentle, darkly handsome man who used to sit down on the floor beside me and talk with me very seriously. He seldom laughed, my father, but there was a quiet calmness to his strength that made it very nice to be around him. A comfort. He was the strength, the protection; my mother was the light, the song, the laughter.

  In those gray, bleak days after the funeral, I watched my father crumble. Grief furrowed his face with lines that grew deeper and longer with every passing day. The strength became a hard rigidity, the quietness an oppressive silence. His handsomeness melted away, leaving only the darkness. And he began to look at me in a way that made me afraid to be near him. Somehow he made me feel as though I were the one responsible for my mother’s death. Not by what he said, for he never said anything to me. His eyes would rest on me, though, with a weight I could sense. I would look up to find his gaze so filled with pain and fury that I would run away from this man I no longer knew.

  My grandmother, my father’s mother, arrived in America a few days after the car accident and stayed on to look after me and my father. It was the second and last time my grandmother ever visited America. The first time was the week after I was born. Something happened then, something she would never speak of directly. Whatever it was, it embittered my grandmother both to America and to my mother’s parents. Whenever she spoke of my mother’s family she would always become furious.

  I would lie awake in the night and listen to my grandmother talk, her voice growing shriller and louder as my father remained silent. She spoke only Italian, my grandmother, and I knew only a few words, so our conversations were limited to a hello, a pat on the head, an occasional smile. In the dark loneliness that followed my mother’s death, my grandmother became the light I lived by, the rock to which I clung.

  The best time for me to approach her was when she was saying her rosary. I waited until the little beads were dangling from her hand, her eyes tightly shut and her lips moving in silent intensity, and I would sense a peace descending upon me. It was the only time during those dark, lonely weeks when the pain left me, when I caught a glimmer of hope. I did not need to touch her. It was enough to simply curl up in a tight little ball at her feet and experience a calm that I did not understand, a comfort that seemed to pour from her. When she finished she would reach down with strong ancient hands and scoop me up, hold me close, murmur words in a foreign tongue. It was enough.

  My return with her to Italy was never really discussed, at least not with me. One day I found her packing my things into a big trunk, and I knew with a child’s intuition that I would be going with her. I was old enough to understand that my father could not look after me, but I did not want to leave my home. I was afraid of losing touch with the things that kept my mother at least a little alive in my mind. Also, I barely understood a word of what my grandmother said. But I did not want to stay alone with my father. His darkness and his grief and his silence scared me. My mother’s parents were shadow figures who flitted in and out of my life at odd moments and who meant nothing to me. I knew also that my grandmother could not stay. She did not speak English, she did not fit in here, and somewhere far away another grandfather I had never met was waiting for her. So I simply accepted the fact that when my grandmother left to return to Italy, I would be going with her.

  I do not remember my father ever speaking to me about my departure. He may have, but I do not recall it. I do not remember him telling me goodbye. I do not remember my father speaking to me at all after the funeral. I do not remember him holding me, or comforting me as night after night I cried myself to sleep. If anyone came to me, it was my grandmother. All my memories of the time leading up to our departure for Italy are tinged with the darkness that seemed to emanate from my father. If one emotion stood out stronger than all the rest as our plane left Detroit for Chicago and New York and London and finally Milano, I believe it must have been relief.

  * * *

  When my grandmother told me the following autumn that my father had moved to Germany, among my many mixed emotions was relief that he was not going to come and disturb the peace I had discovered in my grandparents’ home. Fearfully I waited for them to tell me that I must go to live with him in Germany, but they never did. I wondered why at times, and I was sad about it at times, but mostly I was relieved. The little stone cottage nestled two hundred meters above the lake had become home for me. With a child’s ease I was learning Italian; it was the only language I had heard since my arrival nine months earlier. I had even started school that September, gathering in the village square every morning with the other youngest students and following the nun down the steep stone steps to the tiny elementary school by the lake.

  There I was taught in the Catholic tradition, with chapel every morning and prayer all the time. We prayed before class, we prayed before recess, we prayed before lunch, we prayed after lunch, we prayed before we went home. After my seventh birthday, I went to Confession and took my first Holy Communion. I went to Mass with my classmates on Wednesday, and with my grandparents on Sunday. I knelt with the others and learned all the words and did what I was told to do and felt nothing at all, save a constant anxiety. I was terrified of burning in hell. The church made fear and sin and hell so real for me, much closer than goodness or God or heaven. It was a menacing presence, a threat which shadowed me daily.

  I had a lot of questions. The only time my grandmother ever lost patience with my constant inquiries was when I asked her why I had to pray to someone up in the sky that I could never see, and how I was to thank the one who had taken my mother away from me.

  Once in those early years I asked my grandmother why my father had moved to Germany. Because your father hated America, she replied. He found a good job in Ann Arbor teaching Italia
n and German at a local high school, but he never felt comfortable with the Americans. So why did he stay there, I asked, tying one question to the next as I often did. Because your father was so crazy in love with your mother he couldn’t even remember his own name, my grandmother said. He loved your mother ten times more than he hated America. Ten thousand times more. I asked, but why Germany? My grandmother’s face suddenly looked very tired. She said, your father feels he needs to make a new life for himself. He needs someplace without memories. My grandmother asked if I understood. I did not, but I nodded yes. I was tired of talking about my father.

  Later that same winter I asked my grandmother why my father hated me. She looked at me a long time, her eyes glittering, then replied in a very quiet voice, what a question for a son to ask. Your father doesn’t hate you. I found myself suddenly shivering very hard. I did not feel any emotion, but I could not stop my trembling. My voice quivered as I said, but he never writes, he never calls, he never comes to see me. He must hate me. My grandmother was quiet a very long time. Then she said, you cannot understand how much you are like your mother. I only knew her for a short time, your mother, but I see her in everything you do. The way you talk, the way you act, the way you love music—everything.

  My grandmother smiled, her eyes still glistening, and stroked the hair that was always falling in front of my eyes. Even the way you ask your questions, she said. Your father does not hate you, figlio mio. He loves you very much. But it hurts him more than he can bear to see you right now, because he cannot look at you or speak with you without seeing your mother. His wound must heal, Giovanni. It is a deep wound that pains him very much, so we must be patient and give him time to heal.

  So I waited as patiently as any child of seven can wait for anything he wants very badly. Eventually I found that the ache was easing, and as more time passed I noticed it did not bother me much anymore. Then I simply stopped thinking about him entirely.

  * * *

  For as long as I can remember I have filled the silence in my mind with music. Anything could trigger it—the wind whispering through trees, a passing car, a dog barking, a boat chugging its way down the lake, or nothing at all. At night the tiny attic that was my room in my grandparents’ cottage became the center of an orchestra. I would stand in front of the mirror dressed in my nightshirt and slippers, conducting symphonies that only I could hear.

  A few months after my arrival in Italy my grandfather had started me on the accordion. At five years old my right hand was not large enough to make proper chords on the keyboard. My left hand could barely reach over to the knobby buttons on the instrument’s other side. I did not have the strength to draw the bellows. I was just barely able to peek over the top of the accordion and get my nose caught in the bellows as my grandfather cranked them back and forth. The instrument’s weight was enough to cut off the circulation in my legs. Still, it was a glorious machine, glittering with inlaid mother of pearl and possessing more levers and buttons and handles and gadgets than my wildest fantasy. And it was music, and one day I would play it like my grandfather did.

  My grandfather could make that accordion do anything but grow legs and dance. His stubby fingers would stab and weave and slide and tremble, his great arms would heave the machine around as though it were made of feathers, and music would pour out in a torrent. He could play anything, my grandfather, but his favorites were songs from his youth, folk songs and old dance tunes that I would listen to for hours while my grandmother stomped around the cottage in a huff.

  My grandmother was an educated woman, a rarity for her generation in Italy. When most older women in our village would have long since retired to black nun-like dresses and black lace-up shoes and black shawls, my grandmother continued to dress in her severe classical style. Her own father had been a pharmacist in Como. Her marriage to a simple village peasant boy had been a major scandal. But she had loved her man, and she had married him, in complete disregard of her family and centuries of tradition, and whatever second thoughts she might have had later on she had kept to herself.

  My grandmother had retained something of her past, a vestige of her breeding and her attitudes that had set her apart from the other old women of the village. She had been isolated from her class by her choice of husband, and from her husband’s people by her heritage. It was not until I was much older that I began to realize what a lonely life my grandmother must have led in that tiny tradition-bound Italian village on the steep-sided lake of Como.

  When my grandfather brought home a miniature accordion for my sixth birthday, my grandmother was horrified. She saw it as a step backward into lower-class imprisonment, a retreat away from the struggle to ensure that her children would be properly educated. For my grandmother, a proper education was one that would give her children the opportunity to rise above the station she had chosen for herself.

  My grandfather was a simple happy man, content with his ways and his village and his life. And his wife. My grandfather never tried to change my grandmother, but neither did he allow her ways to affect him. As far as my grandfather was concerned, my grandmother did what she did for a good reason. The children would make up their own minds when they were older.

  My two uncles learned ambition and determination from my grandmother. Seeing they would remain frustrated and chained in Italy, they immigrated. They chose Argentina for the simple reason that a distant cousin wrote and offered to sponsor them, on the condition that they work in his restaurant for five years. Ten years later they opened their own restaurant in Buenos Aires.

  My father, on the other hand, was content to live and teach in Como. He was the one more like my grandfather, my grandmother often told me, a lover of hiking and history and Italy in general. Then he met my mother, and his world was overturned as only love can do.

  My grandmother did not have the heart to make a scene over my learning to play the accordion, not after seeing the joy that shone in my eyes when I held my grandfather’s gift. So she adopted another strategy, and pushed me to learn a classical instrument as well.

  There was no room in our tiny cottage for a piano. That would have been my grandmother’s first choice. But she was afraid I would not study if she was not there to watch, so no piano. Brass and woodwinds she did not especially like. Percussion did not even enter into the picture with my grandmother. That left the strings. The cello was too big for a child. The violin was an instrument of torture in the hands of a beginner. But there happened to be a fairly famous guitarist who had retired to a villa by the lake at the edge of our village. My grandmother went to see him, then came back and asked if I would like to learn guitar.

  It did not occur to me that six years old was too young to be learning two different instruments. I loved my grandparents very much, and if learning these two instruments would please them, then I would learn. I had few friends and little interest in outdoor games. My happiest moments during those years in Italy were spent with my grandmother, listening to classical music on her radio, or sitting with my grandfather by the fire as he played the accordion. I saw no conflict between the two directions. It was music. I loved it all.

  * * *

  My life continued on this course until my grandfather died eight years after my arrival in Italy. I was thirteen. My grandmother never said anything to me, but I knew she was very upset that my father had not come to the funeral. Once again there were angry voices in the night, but this time my grandmother was shouting over the phone, and this time I understood what she was saying. A boy needs a man in the house, she kept shouting over and over. A boy needs a father! So it came as no surprise when she told me that we were moving to the city in Germany where my father now lived—a town far, far to the north, a place called Dusseldorf.

  It took my grandmother seven months to arrange her affairs. My grandfather’s will and pension had required much time and many meetings with various officials. My two uncles, my father’s brothers, had traveled over from Argentina for the first time in many years
to be at my grandfather’s funeral. Once my uncles and their families had arrived, there had been no question of our leaving Italy before they did.

  Many angry telephone calls passed between my uncles and my father, especially late in the night after I had gone to bed. There were shouts and curses when he refused to join them in Como, then a second phase of angry quarreling toward the end of my uncles’ stay. I followed my grandmother’s example and said nothing, giving no sign that I had even heard. If she was strong enough to keep her thoughts to herself, so was I.

  ****

  We took an early morning train to Dusseldorf, my grandmother and I, seven months after my grandfather’s funeral. My grandmother wanted us to take the early train so we would arrive in Dusseldorf before evening. It was not a good way to start a new life, my grandmother told me, arriving in a new home after dark.

  A warm May wind greeted us with the fragrance of spring when we locked the cottage and loaded our bags into the waiting taxi. Dawn had just begun to paint the faintest tinge of light above the mountains as we took the winding road along the lake to the Como train station. The lake was forty kilometers long and one of the deepest in the world. Our village was located on a steep mountainside eighteen kilometers from the city. As our taxi sped through sleeping villages, I watched the mountains across the lake take form in the growing light like jagged shadows. When we drove around outlying points of land, I could see the city up ahead, a kaleidoscope of lights reflected in the lake, shining gold and red and white.

  Once we were settled in our train compartment with the baggage stored over our heads, my grandmother turned toward the window with an expression on her face that told the world she did not want to be disturbed. I sat beside her and listened to the train sounds around me. A deep basso drummed and throbbed, with little staccato beats interspersed as we passed over crossings. Doors opened and closed along the corridor outside our compartment. Voices high and low sounded through the thin wall behind my head. Two children ran past our seats; their laughter chimed in my head, their footsteps a snare drum beating time. Soon I was lost in my private world of music and memories.