by Michael Pye
Lucia, older now, and such a girl: tiny in pink, being tugged past the glitter of shop windows and the other decent people on the street, very aware that she ought to be marching with proper grace and acknowledging exactly her own kind. But her arm hurt in its socket.
She saw the street filled up with people, banners, people she didn’t know. She heard bawling and whistles and drums. She needed the sidewalk to show off her fine pink dress, and, instead, she found herself being rushed out of the parade of the streets and in through the door that was cut into the front door, into the cool and quiet of the hall.
Her mother said: “There. Dear. Go and change.” Her mother would need a drink now.
Lucia went up the wide marble stairs, pulled herself up on the balustrade since there was nobody to see, like a sailor up the side of a huge ocean ship, like a monkey on its bars.
She’d always lived with the filigree gold, the mosaic floors made up to look like Persian carpet, the carving and the gallery of paintings. But she’d always known there was a world boiling just outside the cool, shaded glass of the windows. Inside, between solid tables and decent velvet, family and servants walked judiciously, guardedly; outside, even on cold lightless days, people milled and muscled into each other, fought and paraded and stopped work and changed party and showed their anger and ambition. She saw riots, she saw funerals.
Inside, Papa like a good banker took orders and made it seem he was in control, listened to what the Germans told him to do and listened to their account of precisely what the Italians needed. Outside, whole orders fell. Governments balanced on a single stone. There were rumors of violence in the countryside, men bludgeoned, rinsed out with castor oil until they were broken and lost, sometimes shot for the wrong attitudes. There were parades of girls and mothers in support of D’Annunzio’s snatch at Fiume, a mad bit of nationalism held together with a few poems and arias and many very inefficient guns. There were trains that did not move because of strikes, streets that suddenly came to a stop, like the moment she remembered from the afternoon movies: when the film stopped running through the gate, when reality froze and began to catch fire from the bottom left-hand corner.
At the top of the stairs, she paused for a moment.
She was eleven years old. She had nowhere to show off her pink dress.
She could hear the men talking: barks and whispers, seals and snakes. She could tell they were keeping their voices down. They fussed over words. They cut up sentences and then sucked in their breath and looked solemn. They even made notes.
Lucia, in her pink dress, danced into the room. They looked up. She swirled her skirt, to the left, to the right, then tugged it up, all graceful like a ballerina, flourishing neat white knickers.
The skirt went over her head.
The men coughed.
She smiled, and then, as a dancer runs with more deliberation than speed, she ran back out of the room.
“Signori,” she heard her father say.
The house was the shape of her life: staircases with marble, the gilt, the verandas at the back looking out onto trees and walks, and the giddy pretension of some of the rooms: maps set in mosaic on the floors, a room named for peacocks. In the best 1900s manner, the house carried a frieze of huge copper bees: a gesture to nature that quickly turned green and sooty. It once had its own stone women by the front door, one either side, but they were too ample and too friendly-looking, so, after some fit of public morality, they had to be taken down.
The house did not impress all her schoolfriends; they seemed to think it was entirely too grand, too new, and they were either amused or intimidated by it. But it was the shape of her life; if they didn’t like the house, they couldn’t like her. She couldn’t be bothered with the children of her father’s colleagues, and she couldn’t make friends with the grander girls.
She floundered until she broke out of the house, afternoon and evenings.
Seventeen, eighteen, she’d go sometimes to the cinema, the afternoon shows, mostly women there. She’d go out like a tomboy in the best American style. She’d go to the Galleria, the great commercial cathedral that stood opposite the Duomo, its high glass and iron vaults inside, all up against the sugar-white mountain of spiky church marble. It was always open.
On her own, this wasn’t easy. A woman couldn’t seem available, but she wanted to know people. The cafés hummed. She heard heels clatter, kept walking. She passed women and men, packages in their hands, heads down. She felt eyes on her; she was decor to the crowd.
She walked more quickly, not wanting to seem as though she, Lucia Rossi, was unsure of anything.
It was tough just to overlap with others. She was the great banker’s daughter, but it wasn’t such a grand thing to be a banker; banks did not yet have the kind of power that interested people, not like the makers of cloth or cars or steel. She was too grand for some parties, not quite grand enough for the best parties. She saw the girls linger at the shop windows, chatting. She saw the police smile under their black helmets. She wanted to flirt, but correctly.
At least in the Galleria she felt a little insulated: no weather, no stench from the engines in the street, no beggars, no truly poor people. She could find, in the echo and bustle, all those men who’d be happy to talk, but she had no excuse to talk to any one of them in particular.
She thought how much easier it would have been if she had brothers, who could lend her their friends.
A young man stopped in front of her. She failed to dodge him. He said: “Signorina, I am a singer.” She said nothing. “I am a singer,” he said, “who has heard the applause of the French.” Since he blocked her, she looked him over: tall, narrow shoulders, too much chest, pipe legs, and all wrapped in a cloak that could have warmed half a chorus. “Unfortunately,” he said, “at this particular season, the impresarios have chosen not to favor talent. Not at all.” She thought of kicking him. “I was wondering,” he said, “if I could buy you a coffee.”
She stared at him. She had already, in her mind, counted the change in her purse.
They sat in the way of the crowds, a table by potted plants. Lucia told the man nothing, which did not seem to matter since he told her everything about a brilliant career now briefly and only temporarily spoiled by unemployment. His name was Giorgio. He was, of course, a tenor.
She bought him pasta in the end. She thought of him as a clue: how to find a different city, how to get out and not just to wait for her life to begin. And for a little while, quite chastely, she did move out into a city she had only glimpsed as she walked past the cafés: a minor Bohemia of resting musicians, all waiting for the next season’s contracts, all hungry to go sing in some tiny box of a theater in far Piedmont rather than live without an audience at all.
She went to his house one afternoon when her parents assumed she was with friends at the cinema. Giorgio lived off the main avenues, down cobbled streets with no sidewalk, on the wrong side of an unused church.
She sat on the edge of a chair and drank coffee he made with a metal espresso pot on a gas ring. She could smell stale water somewhere.
She learned that the stars her parents followed at La Scala were all fakes and frauds and failing, that only the conspiracy of managers stopped a whole new generation showing them up. She learned a little, too, about singing Pagliacci, but she got the impression Giorgio had never actually done that in public.
She heard voices, one after another, through the whole afternoon: uncertain sopranos, rustbucket basses, a mezzo whose breath swelled and failed like a graph. There was a double bass being bowed, a sound just under her conscious hearing. There was a harpist, not good.
One of the two shutters on Giorgio’s window slammed into place.
“Don’t worry,” Giorgio said.
Lucia wondered why the half shade was supposed to make her anxious.
“There’s still light enough,” Giorgio said.
She used to think she learned everything that mattered in that moment: that Giorgio cou
ldn’t go on, could hardly think until she gave him an excuse. He wanted her, but he couldn’t place her: not a working girl, clearly of good family, and so dangerous. She couldn’t possibly want what he wanted. But then, why was she there?
Lucia didn’t move.
“Unless,” Giorgio said, “you’d like me to close the other shutter.”
But she had learned her lesson already. She remembered that she had to meet someone, so she said, and she left, and after that Giorgio hailed her in the Galleria any time she wanted, presented her to his friends, sometimes took her to a party, once took her to a tiny theater where the lights and the seats squeaked with rust and made her sit through an evening of mangled lieder.
They were never again alone in the same room.
She watched the others flash their reviews, the reviews that Giorgio still sent home to his family in the Veneto even when they were bought notices, two lire a line, of some minimal performance. She got to know one older man, who talked about the Paris Opera and the velvets and silks he wore to sing something in Faust, about the sound of applause in London and the prospects in Leipzig, but who was now working part-time as a slow, shuffling butt among waiters in a trattoria.
She was studying, not living; she knew that. She went home to salons, dinners, weekends in the country, weekends at Lake Como, to being discreet around a house where politicians now quite often dined with bankers.
Then Giorgio produced his friend Paolo, from somewhere in Umbria, who played the cello. He was skinny, quick, and small. He fixed on the cello like prey, hunched forward to play, as though the bow might fall short of the strings. Then he extended himself by sheer will, made the body of the instrument sound out.
“He shouldn’t play cello,” Giorgio said. “Really.”
“He plays very well,” Lucia said.
That was when she started asking her friends about birth control. She thought they were stalling, since the whole subject had just been put outside the law, but in fact they did not want to show how little they knew. They’d skim the movie magazines, see two people in the same frame, and they could usually tell biting from kissing, the lovers from the heroine’s last-reel struggle with the villain, but not always.
Paolo danced well, but he danced rather under her chin. He danced with her in the Blu-room, in the Golden Gate, between swirls of cigarette smoke, where a little perfume did battle with cheap soap. He moved busily, immaculately, while she reared up above him, shaking out the red hair that smothered and bound him in his dreams. He orchestrated a grand turn, and his sigh tickled her breasts.
She went home to dinner with her family. There had to be a way out.
She tried to listen to Paolo’s story, when he volunteered it. A little farm near Todi, indeed. Olive trees; there had to be olive trees. Hunters out with guns, high moon, nightjars singing. More pudding-basin hills, all green. A father who worked on the roads, a mother who sold mushrooms in the market. It was too picturesque to be real, and she could not imagine what it would be to come from such a place, and never to be able to shut a good door on the world.
“One day,” Paolo said, “you’ll have to come to Todi.”
A long, rough table, with big plates covered in cooked tomatoes. She imagined herself smiling: the exemplary mother, the exemplary wife who might one day be. There would be all those hopeful faces.
This trip to another class was growing tedious.
“We should go for a walk,” Paolo said.
She said good-bye to Giorgio. She looked back at him, once: he was holding forth on the late music of Rossini, and nobody was listening.
She walked beside Paolo and, together, they demanded space from the people who walked, heads down, toward them. She put out a hand, took his; it was an experiment, to see what walking this way on a public street would feel like. It felt fine. Paolo and she became a couple: a ceremonial fact on narrow pavements, to be respected and indulged. As a couple, she noticed that his palms were wonderfully dry, and that his hands did not quite enclose hers.
They turned off the street of bright windows. They bundled together along the side of narrow streets. His eyes turned up to her, hungry and almost dependent eyes: like some sort of child.
“We could walk in the gardens,” Paolo said. “In the moonlight.”
She saw the family house on the Corso. They passed under its windows, by the heavy portico, with the heavy stone cherubim looking down. Far up the facade, she wanted to giggle at the thought, those great copper bees were watching too. She thought of saying “Good night” and turning in through the narrow doorway, but she didn’t want her name and address to be known, and the price of anonymity was walking on.
Tall iron gates, but with a gap to the side. They took the gap. Paolo could smell the lindens in flower; she saw sad parched shapes on either side of an avenue of stone and sand. Behind the trees, residual light and shapes of green bushes. The garden felt on the edge of everything.
She watched herself walk into the dark between the patches of faint light. Paolo tugged at her hand.
They sat on a wood bench for a moment. Since Paolo couldn’t speak, she kissed him.
He tugged at her hand again. He led her back behind the avenue trees, behind the bushes, to a patch of grass. She sat down. He lay down. She lay down now, and he kissed her left breast through the cotton of her dress. She liked the rasp, and then the wetness. He said: “Ti voglio bene.”
Her skirt had ridden up as she lay down, and she helped it ride higher. She smelt dust, felt tiny sand against her bare legs and buttocks. She was waiting now, to be shown.
She felt fingers, working into her. She heard Paolo’s breath. And then:
“Gesu!” Paolo said. He had red on his fingers.
She stared at him.
“I didn’t know,” Paolo said. He had pulled a handkerchief from his trousers, and in doing so he had bloodied the opening of his pocket, and he was wiping his fingers and his trousers.
She said: “Ti voglio bene.” He looked funny, trying to shake his hand dry, trying to shake it loose.
He couldn’t bring himself to listen. He was up now and panicking. He was signing that she should wipe herself, bring down her skirt, prepare to return all proper to the streets. She wanted to ask: But what would they think we were doing in the bushes except this?
At the park gates, Paolo said: “I’ll find a taxi for you.”
“I don’t need a taxi,” she said.
She watched him disappear into the light between the trees.
And she walked.
She didn’t want to go home at once. She would give everything away; her mother would know. She thought she might wander back into the side streets, away from the Corso, where the musicians lived.
There was overlooked washing still on the balconies, crowded together. There was talk in the windows and the doorways, as though the houses had no depth and no light and everything happened just off the road. And she heard the musicians all around her, heard the untuned jar of wind notes, piano, forced soprano scales, of clarinets wailing, of trumpets blasting over violins and the thumping chords of some other bad cello player. She felt the noise now like a wall, and even when she stood still, as she did when she waited to cross a street or catch her breath, it was as though she was running faster and faster into that wall. Or else the music was massing against her, each half aria, each unaccompanied Bach piece, each mutant arpeggio played on a keyboard in the damp, was forcing her back and away.
She stopped her ears. She started running.
At home, she washed and washed.
For as long as she was panicking, she stayed in her nice gilt box. And then it was winter, and a Milan winter, mostly mist and soot and half-light. So everyone talked about leaving, skiing, and she just couldn’t face being sportive with all those other good local families, being the one to whom everyone was polite.
Her mother fixed the invitation: foreign associates of her father’s, bankers’ kids, nothing in common except the fact tha
t their fathers handled money for respect. One shining winter day, she was driven to Central Station. The trees were gold and the shadows so deep they could drown people. And the driver carried her cases, and she could stride out up the station steps and the whole station was one great new tunnel of glass and light, marble and stone, like a church, with pictures in tiles; and the smells, leather and creams and fish, suits and skirts that hadn’t been washed recently, coffee, cheap soap, wet paper. Then the tracks spread out beyond the great hall into a huge and brilliant sky.
She was exhilarated by Monza, which is not what people usually make of Monza, and she loved passing through Como. She’d been too often to Como in the summers. If she could just get past Como, she wouldn’t be a banker’s daughter anymore, wouldn’t even be Milanese.
And then she was past the border, the uniforms, the questions from the customs officers; and the train was still moving, she was on her own and it didn’t matter if these lakes and Alps were the ones she already knew, which she’d seen years before with her parents. She changed trains, and changed trains again, always in the glamour of steam and smoke, and each time she was further from cities she knew, names she knew. She wasn’t responsible to the world outside the windows anymore.
Then she was on a train that had a snowplow up front, shining curtains of frost either side of the line, and the windows were open for the cut of the clean air. She watched out for the station, and it was the perfect model of a station in the perfect model of a village.
The sunset on the mountain blinded her, great flares of red and silver. She got vertigo in the cable car going up to the chalet. “It’s a very international party,” said the wife of the colleague of her father’s. “People from everywhere. Some English boys. Very clever. Some of the Jewish persuasion. No Italians, I’m afraid.”
She first saw Hans Peter Müller against the light. He might as well have been naked in his close clothes.
She’d seen so many poses, and so many suits, and so many people wrapped in cloaks and talking about their futures; and here was a man whose skill was written on his body. She watched the power and the elegance of his legs, so sure on the snow even when it sifted like sand on a mirror. And he was magnified by the thin brilliance of the mountain air.