The Watercolourist

by Beatrice Masini

  Even Donna Clara and Donna Julie, who are so at ease in the country in their uniforms of ordinance – black for one and a lighter colour for the other – are more worried about their appearance in Milan. They correct – or perhaps pollute – their usual sobriety with certain bold touches that make them stick out. All they need to do is put on a turban wrapped in a complicated way or wear a waterfall of frills on their sleeves to set the children off in giggles. They stare at the two women, puzzled, and then make their inevitable remarks.

  ‘Where’s the rest of the bird?’ Enrico asks when his grandmother comes down to dinner in a feathered headdress.

  All the credit goes to Gandini, the seamstress, who has been summoned to the confused household and put to work. Bianca is unable to hide her dismay when the ladies appear wearing the craftswoman’s most recent creations. It seems as though elephant sleeves are the latest trend, puffy at the top and narrow at the wrist, like a trunk, in the Kalmuk style. On the delicate arms of Donna Julie the styles derived from the Russian steppes look graciously frivolous, but on Donna Clara they look comical, though no one smiles when they see her. And in fact, her guests’ compliments are futile. It is clear that neither of the two ladies are emblems of avant-garde fashion. They let themselves be convinced by the skill of the seamstress and are only vaguely aware that her adaptations of French fashion aren’t perhaps all that successful.

  When Carola Visconti makes an entrance into the living room one day wearing a light green spencer with egg-yellow braided decorations, a long, fitted, dark green dress, and a nocked bow and heron on her head, Donna Clara suddenly looks like grey wattle. And Donna Julie, wearing a fichu over the square neckline of an old emperor-style dress, appears no more than a provincial girl who has just left the convent in her dead mother’s clothes.

  Bianca discovers with a mix of delight and chagrin that the city is full of things to buy. Many of the generous guests to the house offer her gifts with a joy that appears authentic. She receives a small crystal phial containing the essence of fraghe by Giuseppe Hagy – three drops to be sprinkled inside the folds of one’s handkerchief, like the three distilled droplets of the queen’s blood. She accepts many boutonnières of greenhouse violets too to decorate her jackets. She enjoys the desserts of the Galli – dates sliced vertically and filled with bits of pink and green marzipan, and pralines from Marchesi wrapped in brown paper and entirely delectable. And finally, she receives four brand-new outfits sewn by Signora Gandini. These come as a complete surprise. They are carried into the house for a fitting and then taken in accordingly. Bianca’s face lights up when she sees them arrive.

  When the time comes for the fitting, the smell of the new fabric is intoxicating and their rustling sounds are music to her ears. As she looks at her reflection, she discovers details about herself that she didn’t even know existed. Her décolletage and her tiny waist are prominent in the two evening gowns. The seamstress has to fold and take in the fabric.

  ‘You know, my dear, that your hourglass figure is most esteemed,’ she says.

  She also has a round and svelte derrière. It is strange how the French language can make any word sound pretty. A charcoal-blue outfit in ‘a colour made for you’ wraps around her waist and draws attention to her curves, thanks to a short blazer that ends just above her lower back. Naturally, Donna Clara and Donna Julie are privy to the entire fitting – front-row audience members – muttering comments under their breath that Bianca chooses to ignore.

  A few days later, in addition to the new outfits, she also finds three complete sets of undergarments from Ghidoli, everything from long underwear à l’anglaise, which combines modesty and elegance, to exquisite lace undershirts. Bianca puts her pride aside and is overcome by vanity and pure joy. She thanks the ladies with her heart, her eyes, and with words, too.

  ‘Go and get changed. Seeing you well dressed will be the greatest thanks of all,’ Donna Clara says.

  That evening, she comes down to dinner in her favourite outfit: a pinstriped dress of white and light green silk that reminds her of daffodil stems and makes her feel just as delicate. In the large and somewhat cavernous living room it feels cold, despite the lit fireplace, and Donna Julie runs upstairs to fetch her a white cashmere shawl. At times, the house still feels like an invaded fortress, leading Bianca to think that it was happier before they arrived – sealed, empty, and alone.

  Bianca’s room has a floor made from irregular red tiles. She often trips over them, and it feels as if the whole floor is waiting for her to fall. The pale wallpaper with a pattern of rhombi does nothing to brighten the room, and even with the tall window, the light that seeps in is always greyish and dirty. Pigeons coo on the windowsill, which Bianca does not like. They look like rats with wings, stolid and insistent. They are everywhere here, she soon finds out.

  The city is revealing itself to her little by little, like a bashful and discreet lady batting her eyelashes and playing coyly with her fan. At first she finds it hostile. It is too silent or too noisy or just strange. She doesn’t know many other large cities. Verona, compared to this, is a village, with its semicircle of coloured palazzi surrounding the arena. London, as seen from numerous carriages, is large and grey, white or red. There is nothing mysterious about it, nothing scary or miraculous. Not like this place, which reveals itself slowly, like the closed hand of a child holding a secret, being pried open finger by finger.

  When she applies herself, Bianca sees things she has never imagined. Everything is bigger here. The markets are more market-like. In Verziere, the green stalls are set up at the feet of the statue of the tortured Christ. Apparently it is also the place where witches have been burned at the stake. When Bianca takes walks there, she observes the vendors as they hawk their goods with full-blown obscenities, trying to detect traces of evil on their dishevelled faces. The streets are more street-like, with cracks engraved in the manure and the incessant traffic of public and private carriages. They rumble by like a stormy sea, so loud they bring on headaches. Even the churches are more church-like. Guided more by instinct than piety, she discovers that there is an infinite variety of them. The Duomo, with its lacy facade, reminds her of the evanescent play of sand when it seeps through her fingers. Santa Maria delle Grazie, with its firm, erect cupola and mystical silence, relays the cold numbness of the monks – God’s dogs, as her father used to call them. She watches the monks there walking on the flagstones under which other monks sleep in eternal rest, smiling remotely, their hands hidden under their elegant black-and-cream-coloured tunics. In the cloisters, bronze frogs spit streams of water onto the emerald stone of the fountain. San Lorenzo, with its indoor and outdoor columns, reminds her of a peeling set design. It is like the travel writer, Lady Morgan, said: Milan is a city of bricks transformed into a city of marble. And yet the cement and mud reappear so rapidly, just by turning a corner or crossing a piazza. It makes her think that the city’s transformation has been hasty, or interrupted.

  Bianca wanders alone, relying on her shrewd independence where she can, knowing full well that her behaviour is at the limits of respectability and delighting in the thrill this gives her. She keeps several coins inside the small green velvet purse that came with her new clothes and relies on these to get her out of sticky situations, such as when she gets lost and needs a carriage. She’ll hail one, stare straight back at the suspicious driver and show him the coins in her palm. Bianca gets lost often because she daydreams as she walks. She looks at things without really seeing them, and when she shakes off her daydreams, she no longer has a reference point, no street corner, palazzo or bell tower that she can refer back to. She is like Theseus without his string, reawakened from a nap. She likes it that way. It reminds her of the adventures she had with her father, on foot in London, and the thrill of wandering into neighbourhoods like Soho or Bethnal Green, knowing that, with her arm in his, she could go anywhere. Although now things are different; there is the thrill, but there is awareness too. The open road tempt
s her with the ambiguous lure of adventure.

  In the beginning, the family encourage her to go out for strolls, but when she starts venturing out more frequently, they begin to get suspicious.

  ‘Where has she gone to this time?’

  ‘To look for trouble, that’s what I say.’

  This is the gossip from the kitchen. Donna Clara limits herself to open curiosity.

  ‘What wonderful things have you seen today, Miss Bianca?’

  And when Bianca answers vaguely or simply describes a facade or street corner in her own approximate, particular and distracted way, the older lady just shakes her head and sighs.

  ‘My dear girl, are you sure? I don’t think I’ve ever encountered anything like that.’

  Of course you haven’t, Bianca wants to answer, because you only travel in coaches. Milan has surely changed a lot in the previous ten, twenty, even thirty years too, and Donna Clara no doubt knows Paris better. It was the city of her second youth and the home of her most recent love, and it has a way of always insinuating itself into her conversations. Her tired litany includes references to Carlo, Claude, Sophie, the maisonnette, and then Carlo once more, although any mention of them is quickly brushed away.

  Bianca feels that she is on a mission. She wants to fully understand the city on foot, as a woman of the people. This goes hand in hand with her approach to drawing, as it has evolved over time in the countryside and at the end of the autumn. The mission is made possible by their move to the city. She doesn’t speak of it to anyone, not even Innes, who in any case seems to be preoccupied with his own activities.

  ‘Is he writing a novel as well?’ Donna Clara teases on many occasions, making Donna Julie giggle.

  ‘What are you saying, Mother? His novel is his life. He’s not writing it, he’s living it.’

  The thought of Innes competing against the poet makes even Bianca smile. She has noticed a tacit understanding between the two men that she cannot quite fathom. Is it a simple masculine alliance or some other serious passion that they hide under their waistcoats and living-room banter? She never dares ask, even if Innes does treat her with the sort of gentle familiarity that makes him feel like her accomplice in the household that welcomes them with open arms. Arms that grip a little too tightly at times.

  While Bianca is slowly learning about the city, several other fundamental insights come to her, thanks to the family itself. One night, the three ladies, accompanied by Innes, go to see a performance by La Sallé at La Scala. Bianca is not as impressed by the gold and velvet decor as Donna Clara expects her to be. Actually Bianca watches the audience more than the dancers themselves, observing their expressions and reactions. She has already been to La Fenice, Covent Garden and the Opéra, and has told them so, trying not to sound presumptuous. This theatre definitely has a particular charm, but she enjoys spying on people, trying to understand their intentions and conversations – about couples, love and other scandals. Bianca wears her new light blue velvet dress and the diamond necklace that her father gave her mother, which became hers after the inheritance was divided, despite predatory glances from her sister-in-law. A splendid snowflake rests in the hollow of her neck and pulses with her every breath.

  ‘You look delightful,’ Innes whispers into the camellias in her hair. The show begins before her embarrassment can set in. Since the women are seated in a box facing the stage, Innes chooses to stand in order to see clearly. She feels his gaze on her neck and shoulders, delicate and constant. What is there to contemplate, aside from the performance? Certainly not the armoured back of Donna Clara, traversed vertically by a row of tiny buttons, ready to burst off like lethal bullets. Nor the white wool and silk that covers Donna Julie’s own petite form. Distracted a bit by her own self-conscious vanity, Bianca nonetheless enjoys the performance to the very end. She doesn’t know much about dancing, but she has always watched and appreciated opera. The new fashion of wearing ballet slippers that La Sallé seems to have invented gives the star a lightness in her step and allows her to flutter above everything else. Her veils don’t entirely conceal her slim and handsome arms, but it is a happy kind of indecency that makes one question why arms cannot be revealed in all their glory. Her long tutu, as it swirls around her, intensifies her inconsistent character. The dancer is not just a sharply dressed woman gifted with acrobatic talent; she is something else, too. She is an image, a yearning, and a desire for a life where sylphs truly exist – spirits without a body. During the intermission, Donna Clara comments on the character.

  ‘Everybody wants a lover like that. Maybe because she’s attractive. But beauty doesn’t last; it’s a moment and then it’s over.’

  Bianca imagines the older woman is thinking of herself, and thinks it unfair to assume that ballerinas need to be as light in their everyday existence as they are onstage.

  Innes offers all the women rose-flavoured sweets, small crystals filled with faint colours. Donna Julie consumes them with a childlike delight but Donna Clara refuses, asking for the more mundane pumpkin seeds, toasted and lightly salted.

  Bianca peers out at the theatre’s other boxes in search of the beauties that are so often talked about: Signorina Bongi, Signorina Barbesino, Signorina Carrara Stampa. She wonders if there is a Milanese form of beauty and thinks she identifies it in ladies with light olive-coloured skin, dark eyebrows, large eyes, and rosebud mouths that are full of promise. She wants to sketch these ladies, one beside the next like a bouquet of flowers in season. But then she thinks of the boredom, the complaining, the empty silence of interminable poses, and realizes she is happy to have more docile and yielding subjects.

  At the end of the performance they linger for a while in the foyer, so that all their lady friends can welcome back Clara and Julie ‘from the wild’. Their friends have white curls and surprisingly slim frames, notwithstanding their age. They wear dark grey, almost black, velvet dresses.

  ‘And this is your Miss Bianca, is it not? Why, how precious . . . she doesn’t even look foreign.’

  Bianca doesn’t like being talked about in the third person, but she hides her impatience under a slight smile, which pleases Donna Julie.

  ‘You did well, Bianca,’ she tells her later. ‘Those monkeys can really wear you down.’

  ‘Come now, Julie,’ Donna Clara intervenes. ‘We shouldn’t speak of our friends like that.’

  ‘Your friends, maybe,’ Julie whispers snidely as they climb into the carriage.

  Again, Bianca is amazed by Julie’s sharpness. If only she would unsheathe it more often. With her sense of irony, she would make an exceptional rival to Donna Clara during their living-room skirmishes. But she never engages in them. Perhaps her role of model mother is a front to avoid the boredom of society.

  ‘Now that you’ve been to La Scala, it is safe to say that you’re an official Milanese lady,’ jokes Donna Clara the following day during lunch, which is actually their breakfast, since they’ve all slept late. Bianca smiles patiently. She doesn’t want to be Milanese any more than she wishes to be Turkish or barbarian. She belongs to her own world and doesn’t need to borrow someone else’s. But she has learned to keep her mouth shut, remembering with a smirk that silence is one of the virtues that best suits young ladies. Her tendency to speak her mind, which at first was considered a curiosity, is now the target of reproach. As adventurous as Donna Clara’s previous life might have been, she is – in public and at home – tremendously conventional. Bianca has learned it is worth adjusting to this situation, even if it means keeping her mouth shut.

  Sometimes Bianca wonders whether all this repressed behaviour, hesitation, and silence actually hides a duality that is far from noble. When, in the name of decency, is one supposed to stop being sincere? To what extent are silence and consent a form of courtesy and not grim opportunism? Bianca thinks about these things over and over. The more she considers, the more her thoughts darken. She has no one to confess them to and so they get tangled up inside her.

  Everyone
rejoices when Pia finally joins them in Milan from Brusuglio. She has travelled alone in a carriage. When it arrives in the courtyard and the valet opens the door, Pia holds out her hand like a lady, but her eyes are full of laughter. The children, who have been waiting for her since morning, run towards her like marbles strewn across the floor. They hang from her arms and neck, all of them, even the boys. Pia looks charming in her austere jacket, which surely came from someone else’s closet. She is composed and behaves like a proper young lady. She emanates a sweet haughtiness that she may have picked up from the ladies who visit the villa, serious but not without a trace of affectation. Bianca waits her turn to embrace the girl, and in so doing discovers that Pia had grown so much that their eyes almost meet at the same level now. Pia reveals her brown-heeled shoes, the tips of which are slightly scuffed and which fasten with a velvet bow.

  ‘From the young lady,’ she whispers.

  During Pia’s absence Bianca has thought a lot about the different pieces of her puzzle. She has moved them here and there until an image became clear. Of course, there are still many dark areas: things unsaid and unknown. But there are too many coincidences to ignore it entirely. There are also many fragments. Bianca has the eagerness and spirit of an amateur; she feels an immense, inexhaustible pleasure in classifying others’ inclinations and passions. It is hard to say if this comes from her habit of considering the genealogical life of plants, which provides reassurance with its familial divisions and subdivisions and makes everything understandable to the eye, or whether it is a passing fancy of her age, an affectation of a young lady who thinks she knows everything there is to know about the world, but who cannot truly recognize herself in the mirror. The truth is that the botany of affections is an inexact science, but it is the dearest thing to her at this time. One day it will pass. One day she will be overcome by her own firsthand passions. But for now, it gives her days both rhythm and meaning. She could have worried about consequences, but Bianca does not understand herself well enough to worry.