‘Have you seen her?’
She cannot imagine which of the three girls is missing.
‘Francesca has disappeared,’ Nanny adds coarsely. ‘I heard a noise; I got up and went to look in their bedroom . . . She’s nowhere to be found.’
They find her body in the brook. She has been carried downstream by the current for more than two miles. Unable to drag her any further, the water has left her there, like a broken doll, her head bumping against the wooden dyke, her nightgown sticking to her skin. Her eyes are open, her tiny face serene. It is not yet dawn.
Later, Giulietta tries to explain.
‘We went down to the brook together yesterday afternoon. Alone. There was so much confusion and no one was looking after us.’
Everyone glances at Nanny but it isn’t her fault. They recruited her in the kitchen and she couldn’t be in two places at once.
‘She wanted to learn how to swim like me so that she could show everyone and prove that she was a big girl. She had almost learned. She almost didn’t sink under the water any more.’
And then? The questioning continues as if adding more details will help clarify, correct and soften.
‘And then we got tired. Matilde didn’t want to walk any more and I had to carry her. She even fell asleep. We changed our clothes. Nanny came and fed us dinner early and then we went down to greet the guests.’
The girls wore identical mauve dresses tied at the waist with violet ribbons. They left their hair down, which was unusual for them, and wore headbands. Francesca’s band kept slipping down onto her face like a pirate’s bandana. Her hair was very fine and had recently been washed by the fresh water of the brook.
‘Mamma let us have one dessert each. I chose the pastry with the raspberries and she chose a petit four with a pistachio on top. She got her whole face messy with cream but no one scolded her.’
Children get lost in the details. Adults are indulgent when they have something else on their minds. Oh, Franceschina, what a messy girl you are! You look like a clown. You’re so funny. Isn’t that right? Isn’t she funny? Our little star. Now up you go. It’s bedtime, girls.
‘And then Nanny came down to get us,’ she continues.
Bianca remembers how Nanny came out of the shadows in her ugly, dark silk dress, not at all fit for a party.
‘And she brought us to bed. I fell asleep right away. I was so tired. Matilde, too.’
There is a pause. She looks at their tense faces, searching desperately for approval.
‘Then the dark man came in. It must have been him.’
If only there had been a dark man. If only one of the statues had awoken and descended from its pedestal to vindicate some ancient wrongdoing. If only there had been a faceless monster that could be held responsible for all of this.
Bianca has no difficulty imagining what happened. The little girl was restless and couldn’t fall asleep because of the sounds from the party: the music, the chatter, the laughter. She got up and went to the playroom window, the one protected by bars – a prudent yet useless measure – and sat on her knees and watched. She looked down on the great lawn from above; a splotch of darkness delineated by stains of light. There was beautiful Mamma, and Miss Bianca in green (a play on words like the ones she always enjoyed). There was Papa, at the centre of the crowd. Everyone looked as tall and dark as he did, as they laughed, drank and talked. Sometimes, my papa makes other people laugh, she must have thought. If I learn to swim, he will be happy. Miss Bianca will be happy too. Everyone will be happy because it’s something only big boys do. I could go and practise and stay up all night trying. No one will see me. I will learn how and then tomorrow I will show everyone. I will say: I have a surprise for you. Come, come and watch me, and everyone will follow me like the children of the Pied Piper, and then I’ll jump in and everyone will tell me how good I am, and that I was brave to learn all by myself. I can do it. The others are sleeping but I’m not scared. It’s a bit dark but I’m not scared. The moon is bright enough for me.
It rains for a full two days. It is as if the sky is crying. If the sun dared come out, someone would extinguish it or shut it down, such is the sentiment in the air.
On the afternoon of the second day, Bianca finds herself in the nursery playroom without realizing how she has got there. It is empty. Donna Julie and Donna Clara don’t want to leave the children. Bianca, though, doesn’t think that being with two crying women will be good for them. If adults cry, there are no more rules; the world is upside down. Innocence is gone from the nursery. No one feels safe anywhere. Nothing is sacred; nothing can remain untouched, not even childhood. Bianca straightens an overturned chair. She closes the doll’s house by shutting one of its facades onto the bewildered faces of its inhabitants. She goes over to the window with bars on it. There are fingerprints on the glass, a small hand, a palm print and five little fingers, open wide. There is no need to measure it to know that it is Franceschina’s. She is the one who, on the night of the big storm, found the courage to look out at the world. Her sisters covered their ears with their hands, trying to shut out the sounds of thunder. Bianca tried to calm them down.
‘It’s just angels moving furniture. Even they get tired of the sky and like to change things around sometimes.’
Francesca was the only one who listened to her.
‘What is their furniture like? Is it made of clouds? And if it is made of clouds, why do they make so much noise?’
She pushed the chair forward to test its own sound, until it bumped into an uneven brick and tipped over.
Farewell, Franceschina. You died young. You didn’t have time to learn much. If you ever feel like moving a bedside table or chair, we will listen for the soft, distant thunder, not the frightening kind, and know that it is you.
For a moment Bianca thinks of calling in the child’s mother and grandmother to show them that last trace of her, but then decides against it. There are already so many signs to erase: her doll, Teresa, with her dishevelled head of hair; her clothes in the wardrobe; her little shoes under the bed. Traces of her that need to disappear. They lead nowhere; there is no mystery to solve. They only speak loudly and boldly of the little girl’s absence.
Bianca returns to her senses. As if awakening from a difficult sleep, she feels a moment of confusion. She senses that something is not right. There is something else, she remembers, and she feels embarrassed. She feels like a monster. That death, ugly and unjust to the umpteenth degree, is, in that instant, merely a painful distraction. It is like a terrible headache, the kind that makes her eyes hurt, that forces her to press her index fingers into her lids in order to feel more pain, hoping that one grief will cancel out the other.
By thinking about Franceschina, she does not think of herself. And, of course, there is no comparison. Franceschina is gone. There will never be another Franceschina. She, on the other hand, is alive. Thank God. Alive. Everything is still possible – forgetting and forgiving. Although these both seem so remote, she thinks of them as old accomplices that support and encourage one another. Certain wounds heal, she thinks. And some do not. Downstairs is a woman with a wound that will never heal
Guilt hits her again like a backhanded slap, a kick in the stomach, a hand clenched around a heart. These feelings come to her cruelly and regularly. When it seems as though her cheek has lost its sting, her eye burns in its socket. When the depth of the punch has tapered off, her stomach is seized by anxiety. Although no one has ever accused her, she cannot forget that single playful swim that took place almost a year ago. Once she thinks she sees a slight look of disapproval in Pia’s eyes. Although perhaps it is just fatigue. The meeting of two exhausted beings. Her eyes burn constantly. As soon as she finishes crying she is ready to start up again, to spill tears that can never wash away the grief, tears that fall like alcohol onto an open wound; that burn like fire in her flesh.
‘What does the death of a child really mean? When they’re little, they’re all the same: all childre
n are promises. Whether the promises will be maintained, no one can know for certain. And how many did Donna Julie lose already? Two? Three? That didn’t prevent her from bringing more life into this world. Isn’t this a woman’s trade? Everyone, ultimately, is capable of being a mother. So come now, all of us, let us remember that life awaits us.’
Fortunately, very few people actually hear Bernocchi’s grim funeral oration. He mumbles it in a low voice from a pew at the back of the church. A few do hear, though, and no one wants to add anything.
Francesca was unique, as we all are. She had the right to become her own person, as we all do. Bianca casts a glance at Bernocchi, who looks as empty as the void she feels inside. She then goes back to staring at the backs of the people in the front row, their shoulders hunched over, locked in their grief. Visitors have come from the city in a melancholic procession similar to the one of two nights earlier, wearing crêpe instead of muslin, black instead of white and pink. They come with puffy eyes, burning eyelids, and irritated skin due both to their suffering and to the cruel light of morning. But they will leave their grief there, with the flowers, the too-many flowers, all of them white and destined to wither under the too-brilliant sun. Once the guests return to their homes, they will feel discomfort mixed with relief; they will throw themselves with new vigour into everyday tasks because Death has passed them by. Father, mother and grandmother speak to no one after the ceremony. They walk slowly to the cemetery behind the coffin, which has been hoisted onto the shoulders of four peasant men but which is so small that one of them alone could carry it under his arm. Don Dionisio shields the family and shakes his head.
‘I beg of you, please. The family wishes to be alone.’
Some guests climb back into their carriages immediately, a touch disappointed by the lack of show. Others linger in the church piazza, engaging in brief circumstantial conversations – they can’t even remember which one Franceschina was. As Bernocchi has said, she was only a little girl.
‘Shall we go to the tavern to drink something and refresh ourselves?’ Signor Bignamini proposes.
Attilio is pleased to receive so many clients at such an odd hour. He hasn’t even opened, but he quickly pulls the chairs down, pours some wine, and slices up some bread.
Bianca stands to the side with Innes and Minna. Pia whispers something into the elderly priest’s ear. He nods and they hug farewell. He goes then to the cemetery while she stays behind.
‘He says we should pray for acceptance,’ she says. ‘That the Lord sometimes does things that we can’t understand. Things that not even he understands.’
The four of them quietly make their way back towards the villa. What is there left to say? Afterwards, the pall-bearers are given a glass of wine in the kitchen. They recount the devastating story of the cemetery. The tomb, which already houses the children Bernocchi spoke of that Donna Julie has lost – Battista, Andreina, and Vittorio: which makes three, not two as Bernocchi had suggested – had been opened to make room for the small coffin. Donna Clara gasping with tears and Donna Julie and Don Titta’s frightening silence. The good-hearted maids cry when they hear this. The image of the little one, her habits and her fixations, is all too clear in their minds.
‘She loved my almond pudding so much,’ sighs the cook. ‘She could have lived off it. She ate barely anything else, poor babe.’
‘Do you remember when she didn’t want us to break the chicken’s neck? Remember how she tied a bow around it and looked after it as if it were a puppy?’
‘And what about when she asked me if I would make a dress for her dolly that was identical to hers?’
Children’s fancies are different, and yet all the same. Bianca walks out then and sits on the steps, her elbows on her knees, and looks at the garden and its unresponsive beauty. A small cloud hovers alone above the sycamore tree.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asks Innes, who in the meantime has sat down next to her.
‘I don’t know. We will keep on, I suppose. He has his novel, and thank goodness for that. A big world to fill his mind. She will become all the more apprehensive, poor thing. And Donna Clara . . . well, she will reclaim her post at the rudder. It will come easily to her. It’s a big estate – there is so much to watch over and debts to oversee. She will put on her accounting gloves and her owl eyeglasses. That will be her distraction.’
Bianca wishes she could smile. She tries to but she feels as though her lips would crack. So she stops.
‘And what about you?’ she asks.
‘Let’s talk about you. Are you all right?’ he says, changing the subject. Bianca feels him staring at her. She knows his gaze well. Without waiting for an answer, he continues. ‘Sometimes the best way to confront grief is to stand still and wait for it to subside. To agitate oneself, to flee, is not worth it; it doesn’t get rid of grief. It is better to give oneself time. Often, time can cure a wound that reason can’t bring back to health. Seneca said that, not me,’ he concludes and then looks straight ahead.
What if it really was that way? What if we could go back to our previous lives, to our habits, and to the natural rhythm of things, and let the tears slowly dry? In that very moment, Bianca wants only for nothing else to change. She wants her world to freeze, to be held still under a sheet of glass, like her leaves and flowers. The two of them look at each other. Perhaps he understands. Maybe not. He must be thinking back to her first question.
‘I think that it would be a bad idea if I left now. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is a bad idea in itself
Ah, here we go. Bianca knew it.
‘You will be the first to know my decision, if this is indeed the case,’ he concludes. ‘We are fortunate: we can leave when we like, if we want to. This isn’t our life. Turning our backs on all of this will be painful. But possible.’
He takes her hand and squeezes it. She does not pull away. She loves this tall, long-limbed man with his tumultuous thoughts and distracted gaze. She loves him and she trusts him more than any other man in this world.
Zeno, her adorable little brother with eyes as bright as the buttons on his uniform, left the night of the party, avoiding the tragedy. Nittis, with eyes like spilled ink, promising and elusive, left with him. Perhaps soldiers are all like that: they grab what they can find, take it with them, and run away. They are forgivable thieves, aware that sooner or later a bullet could catch them. We have to let them go. Innes, too, is a soldier, only he is in a dress shirt. He won’t flee though; he is heading towards something that he desires, that still does not exist but which is possible. That is the difference. And Don Titta, so carefully drawn to his own standards, can go nowhere.
Bianca recalls a fragment of a conversation that took place one spring afternoon in the living room when all the windows were open.
‘A writer or a poet possesses words, and for this reason he also possesses the things his words define,’ Tommaso said, pressing the fingertips of his hands together in concentration.
‘Correct,’ Don Titta replied. ‘If to possess is to know, then we who work with words understand and possess the world, or at least we make this ambition our daily goal. But to give things a name, my friend, makes us neither wise nor happy. If anything, it only makes us more aware.’
‘You don’t really think that we are put on this earth to be happy?’ Tommaso asked almost scornfully.
‘Every so often,’ Don Titta replied, staring at his children as they ran on the gravel path. ‘Every so often I like to deceive myself that it is so.’
‘But if your happiness depends on others,’ Tommaso countered, following his gaze, ‘then you have little chance of preserving it.’
‘What are you suggesting? That’s it’s sufficient for a stylite on top of a column to be happy? Or a monk in his hermitage? I want to be happy in the world,’ Don Titta said.
‘I on the other hand, am content with the small world that is my study,’ Tommaso replied.
‘And here,’ concluded Don Titta
, ‘our thoughts diverge. Believe me, we are nothing without love. And I speak of pure love, not the love that asks or deceives, but the love that gives and commits. We end up depending on it, it’s true. And it depends on us. It creates connections. And connections are complications. But I want to be complicated, and of this world.’
He then stood up, opened the French window, and called out to Giulietta, who stopped what she was doing and ran into her father’s arms.
In ‘this world’ Don Titta is the master of words, but in love he isn’t any more a master of himself. He cannot go anywhere. Maybe he would like to, but his world is calling him, holding him back – it needs him. And now that world is inhabited by one small shadow more.
Bianca leafs through her folders, prepares her charcoals, ties on her apron, and sits down at the table inside the greenhouse. Nobody has repaired the damage to the glass yet and therefore it is still miraculously cool with currents of fresh air. But what is the point of portraying the lightness of the honeysuckle now? There are other things out there: the stain of lichens on the stone cheek of a putto; the sick symmetry of mushrooms that crawl like insects on a severed trunk; the vibrations of a spider’s web, magnified and yet endangered by droplets of rain. A dirty, fragile, poisonous kind of grace. She wished that nothing would change; instead everything has been transformed. Maybe it is her perspective, but suddenly she sees other, darker things where before there was only the pure, mild grace of a garden, cultivated with love. Beauty does nothing but take risks.
It is strange how time ungoverned dilates and expands indifferently, stretching out and emptying the hours. Whereas before it was so important to fill time with rituals and rhythms that are just and necessary, now nothing matters. There is no work, there are no errands to run. They wait.
It is too early for people to force themselves to forget; the grief is so fresh that one can only relive it, amazed by its everlasting energy. Days and weeks go by. Not one event can disturb the surface of this void. What matters lies beneath and within, and it grows incessantly.
The Watercolourist Page 27