The Garden of Letters

by Alyson Richman

  She could envision Luca with great precision. She thought of his full bloom of dark hair, the chiseled features, and the amber eyes. She had noticed the tendons in his neck. Little ribbons of muscle, the blue veins, just under the skin—reminiscent of strings in the neck of her cello. What might it feel like to slide a single finger on one and feel the energy between their skin?

  She heard the pattern of his voice, like notes inside her head. The gentle rhythm of his words; the escalation of his intonation as he revealed his idea of using the books as part of their tactics.

  She had been moved by the way he handled the novels. The respect for these objects that were so clearly precious to him. It gave her comfort to know he appreciated books as much as she loved her cello.

  She fell asleep hearing a melody that was new to her. She heard it in a palette of colors. Rich like the varnish on her instrument. Deep red with long streaks of gold.

  EIGHT

  Verona, Italy

  MAY 1943

  There was a stirring in her body like she used to feel when she was first desperate to play her cello. When the music was so strong inside her, it was almost an ache, a hunger. Elodie told Lena that she was excited to attend another meeting, but what she didn’t say was that she also wanted to go again because she couldn’t stop thinking of Luca.

  She rose early that morning and withdrew her cello from its case. When she played it, the notes now emerged with a sound that was foreign to her. She had learned from her father how the cello could sigh, weep, and make an audience cry. But this time, Elodie played with an intense longing. She could hear the instrument swelling and expanding as she pulled the notes longer and deeper. For the first time, desire infused her playing, a longing for something that was more than music. And as the music flowed through the apartment, Orsina awakened also hearing the difference in her daughter’s music. It reminded her of the way Pietro performed that evening so many years ago when she first heard him play in Venice’s I Gesuiti. When he played with a beauty that pierced her heart.

  That morning, Elodie asked her mother if she could wear one of her dresses. The ones in Elodie’s own closet suddenly felt childish, and she didn’t want Luca to see her wearing her schoolgirl uniform of a white blouse and navy skirt. She wanted to walk into the bookstore in a dress like the one her mother had worn years ago, when Orsina first met Pietro. Pale yellow, the color of sunshine. Spring’s first forsythia, golden and full of light.

  Orsina welcomed Elodie’s sudden interest in her wardrobe. She now connected what had caused Elodie’s playing to change and was relieved to know it wasn’t anything dangerous.

  She opened her closet, her fingers drifting to touch each dress. Some of them contained memories that were secret to her and Pietro. A stolen kiss beneath St. Mark’s Church, or the dress she wore the night he proposed. She could tell a hundred stories just by gazing into her wardrobe; her mind traveling back to the first time her skin slipped against the fabric. Beneath the fluttering hems was her red suitcase, the one she packed with so many of the same dresses when she left her home in Venice to go to Verona all those years ago.

  This moment now with Elodie was a rite of passage, which she savored. It brought her back to her own youth, when she had stood at a threshold that soon brought her into a world of marriage and children.

  She had thought that Elodie would enter this world a few years later than her peers. That her cello would distract her from more simple matters of the heart.

  She watched as her daughter caressed the fabrics with her hand. The lemon chiffon, the red one with the grosgrain sash, and the one with spring flowers, which was Orsina’s favorite.

  “May I wear the yellow one?” Elodie asked. The first threads of maturity were woven into her request. A desire to push the boundaries and be a little less cautious, a bit more bold.

  “Yes, of course,” Orsina said, as she slid the dress off the hanger and handed it to Elodie. She smiled at the choice, knowing full well how a beautiful dress had the power to transform the wearer.

  That afternoon at school, nearly every male student seemed to turn his head as Elodie walked through the halls. Boys who had never noticed her now craned their necks to get more than just a passing view.

  “What’s gotten into you today?” Lena asked her. “You look beautiful, but this isn’t your typical outfit, that’s for certain.”

  Elodie stopped in front of one of the tall windows in the hall. The sun behind her illuminated not just the beauty and angles of her face, but her entire being. She looked celestial.

  “I just felt like a change today. I was tired of always wearing navy and white.”

  Lena nodded. She herself was wearing a very unremarkable gray shirtdress.

  “You know, you can’t attend a meeting wearing a yellow chiffon dress. The whole point is to not attract any notice.”

  Elodie’s entire face fell. “Of course,” and her voice began to shake as she tried to hide her own sense of failure.

  “Well, yellow does become you,” Lena said as she patted her friend’s shoulder. “So next week, just stick to navy or gray.”

  That afternoon Elodie did not accompany Lena to Luca’s bookstore. She knew her friend was right. Already, as she paced through the square, she felt eyes upon her as she never had before.

  In the glass of the storefronts, Elodie saw her reflection. Her dark hair falling over her shoulders. The dress’s long bow, loosely tied at the neckline, the path of white buttons from the top to the hem. There was a lightness to the material that she loved but that also made her feel vulnerable, and she wondered which was more dangerous—the transparency of a fabric or of a soul? Elodie was certain Lena knew why she had chosen to dress that way. After all, as a fellow musician, Lena would have sensed the escalating tension between her and Luca.

  She knew Lena was right, that she couldn’t appear in the bookshop dressed like she was about to go to a tea party. She would stand out, draw attention to herself, and not in the way she hoped, but rather as someone who simply didn’t belong. But still, Elodie couldn’t quite convince herself to walk straight home. Instead, she found herself walking in the direction of Luca’s store.

  Her arm ached from carrying her instrument. For the first time, she considered her cello more of a burden than a beloved companion, and wondered if she was making a huge mistake.

  Several times she stopped to catch her breath. Her dress became damp from perspiration. With both hands, she lifted the heavy curtain of hair from her shoulders and knotted it above her head.

  When she arrived at the store, she stood outside the window and stared at the display of carefully arranged books. She noticed her reflection cast in the glass. It was as if she saw herself as an apparition that could vanish at any second, no one ever noticing she had been there, floating against the display of the more permanent books.

  She wondered what was happening inside the store, and whether Luca would ask Lena why Elodie wasn’t there. She imagined Lena looking at him coyly and saying some witty remark about Elodie being overdressed. She tried to push the scene out of her head, embarrassed by her folly. She could always return next week, she convinced herself. She would put the dress back into her mother’s closet and return to her normal uniform. There would be no more walks through town in pale yellow chiffon. “That’s the color of my parents’ love story,” she told herself. “Perhaps gray and blue will be mine.” Elodie picked up her instrument and turned in the direction of home.

  NINE

  Portofino, Italy

  OCTOBER 1943

  In his house, Angelo now has yet another stranger. He picks up one of his books while Elodie’s in the bath and begins to read, hoping to find a comfort there. Looking at the novel, he knows that when he learns her story, it will be more complex, more heartbreaking than what is on the pages between his hands.

  While she bathes, he takes the opportu
nity to examine the old wound to his foot. He leans over and unlaces his black shoes, rolls down his left sock, and sees the four toes and the small nub where the other one was blown off. An injury not from this war but from the one in Africa—Mussolini’s quest for Ethiopia, which took place eight years earlier. He knows what it’s like to carry hidden wounds. His is a wretched, blue stump covered by a cotton sock. At night it throbs. He feels the nerves of the toe that is no longer there. Like the heart, it continues to beat despite all the sadness and loss it endures.

  After she has bathed and changed into clothes, Elodie returns to the room.

  She sits down. Her hair is damp and she has now pinned it upward. She is all bones and angles, while his wife had been an abundance of curves.

  “You like to read,” she says. It’s not said as a question, but as an observation.

  “Yes, very much,” he answers.

  “Will you read to me?” she asks softly.

  The question startles him at first. It’s not something he had expected her to ask, but it pleases him.

  He picks up the book he had just placed down and opens it. He begins to read.

  The words are as much a comfort to him as to her. They fill the space with sound. These two people who know nothing about each other are now entwined in a story that has nothing to do with either of them.

  His voice, his inflection, even his pauses, all become a musical score.

  He reads for nearly an hour, and Elodie inhales his words like air. She gets lost in Angelo’s voice, the rhythm of his speech. She does not notice that his eyes are now weary, and that he rubs them in between turning the pages. It is only when she hears the fatigue slipping into his voice that she looks up and realizes how tired he has grown.

  “You should stop now,” she says, and as she speaks, he is struck by the first note of kindness in her voice. “It must be exhausting to read aloud for so long.”

  “I don’t mind,” he tells her. “It is nice to have an audience again.”

  She smiles, and a memory flashes through her mind of all the audiences she once played for. She sees the men and women in the crowd, their programs on their laps, their eyes focused on the stage. She remembers the sound of their clapping, like a distant thunder. Something from a lifetime ago.

  She wishes she could tell him how much his words calm her. That they are like a verbal embrace. But she remains silent, thinking back to the last time she was read to when she was in Verona. When books were so much in abundance, Luca could spare an entire crate just for the Resistance’s cause.

  The light is changing in the room where they now sit. Shadows are flickering on the white walls. The window that faces the sea shows the horizon. An ink-colored brushstroke, just hovering over the water.

  She believed she would be safe in Liguria, near the Gulf of Poets, where, for years, artists and writers had escaped from the rest of the world, and in winter it was just the villagers and the sea. But Elodie has no sense of where she is.

  “You have been extremely kind,” she says as she places her hands in her lap. “I will not stay too long and be a burden to you. I will try to get to one of the islands as soon as I can.”

  Elba; Corsica; the islands farther west. The three boys who preceded her all said the same thing. The farther they go, the safer they think they will be. They think they can lose themselves in the sand, the blister of the sun. Angelo had helped every one of them, asking for nothing in return. There would always be another one, when the house was too empty and the silence became too loud.

  Elodie turns the key again and locks the door of her new bedroom. The noise is heavy and clunking, the sound of brass against wood. She realizes Angelo will interpret this sound as fear on her part. But that is not the reason she turns the key. She does it not because she fears him, but because she doesn’t want him to know what she is carrying.

  She knows he would not understand the loose pages of musical score. He would not have the ear or the breadth of musical knowledge to understand these notes on the page. Even if he could read music, he would not be able read these particular sheaves of paper like she can. To her, the hurried way the notes are written, the shakiness in parts of the handwriting tell another story. She can detect the fear in the melodies. But the amulet and the book are objects that connect her to Luca.

  These are things she carries. The story of how they each came into her hand is still locked deep within the channels of her mind.

  TEN

  Verona, Italy

  JUNE 1943

  This much is certain: After Lena chastised her for wearing the yellow dress, Elodie wouldn’t be asking to borrow her mother’s clothes again. She returned home and immediately peeled off the dress.

  “I miss hearing you play,” her mother said gently. “Your father has been in agony all day. Won’t you help clear my head with something beautiful?”

  At first, Elodie wanted to resist her mother’s maneuverings. She didn’t need another person directing her actions, but her frustration caused her entire body to stiffen. She knew the music would be the only thing that could pacify her.

  Elodie unsnapped the case, withdrew her cello, and settled into a chair. For a second, there was a silent exchange between the girl and her instrument, the privacy upheld through a curtain of her black hair. Orsina held her breath until her daughter finally lifted her bow.

  She started with the main theme from the second movement to American String Quartet, and did not look up once to meet her mother’s approving gaze. She played with her head to the side and her eyelids closed.

  Orsina felt a sensation wash over her, as if she was moved by the current or pulled by an invisible tide. Within the poignancy of the notes, she sensed a plea for peace by the composer. She wondered if more people were exposed to beauty like this, would the fighting lessen? Would wars subside?

  If only things were that simple.

  She had been distracted all afternoon by the newspapers. The Allies had just bombed Sicily. She felt it in her bones: more bloodshed was to come.

  She wondered if she could convince her husband to move someplace safer, perhaps to pack up the household and move back to Venice. She could not imagine the Blackshirts who had brutalized him finding their way among the canals and cloak of fog.

  The time to travel from Verona to Venice was not terribly long, less than three hours by train. But since her parents’ death, Orsina had difficulty returning to a place with so many memories. But the city still pulled her, especially during moments when she felt lost.

  She had buried both her parents during the flu epidemic of 1918, just two years after she had married Pietro, and when she was five months pregnant. She had returned to her native city only to bury them, her heart heavy that she was forbidden to care for them while they were still alive because of the risk to her and the baby.

  Pietro had traveled with her for the funeral, although he wished she had adhered to the Italian tradition of pregnant women being forbidden to attend funerals. But since her brother had died in infancy, Orsina was an only child and felt the full weight of her responsibilities.

  The stench was horrific. Every day, boats traveled from the hospital to the cemetery to deliver the dead.

  The island of San Michele, the city’s ancient burial ground, was directly across from the hospital. Orsina had received letters from her father before he fell ill, detailing how the gondoliers had wrapped their faces with muslin as they were forced to ferry the dead.

  The sensation of feeling like she was floating, which she felt most of her life there, had completely vanished. Now when they arrived at her childhood city, it felt like they were all suffocating. Orsina felt like she was sinking, being pushed into a cloud of blackness.

  “We shouldn’t have come,” Pietro whispered to Orsina on the boat. He pulled a shawl over his wife’s shoulders and wrapped an arm around her, drawing her cl
oser as if to shield her from the invisible, infectious disease.

  “How can a daughter not bury her own parents?” she protested. Pietro shook his head. He could feel his wife trembling. Her body was rail thin except for the soft swelling of her stomach. On top of the morning sickness, the stress of being unable to see her parents, to care for them as they were dying, had taken its toll.

  “I won’t abandon them to be buried by strangers in some mass grave.”

  He had weakly tried to put his foot down and forbid her from coming. But the sight of her crying and pleading with him had made it impossible for him to insist. Still, he knew that the frail and the weak were even more susceptible to infection.

  “We must leave the same day as the funeral” was his only demand. “I don’t care if we have to take a night train home, I will not have you sleeping there.”

  She nodded, her throat too tight from choking back the tears to talk.

  That afternoon, they stood by the graves. The rest of the cemetery was filled with families all silently connected in a weary haze of funeral rites.

  The priest in his dark robe raised the crucifix over both graves and recited the Prayer for the Dead. Two boys hovered to the side with oversized shovels in their hands, like staffs that seemed incongruous to their childish frames.

  Orsina nearly fainted as the first shovel of earth fell upon her parents’ black coffins.

  On the way home, she did not stop crying.

  They returned to Verona exhausted and Orsina took immediately to her bed.