The Life of Elves (6 page)

 

Then the Maestro spoke.

“Who taught you your music?”

“Alessandro,” she answered.

“He says that you learned all on your own. But no one can learn in a day. Was it the priest who gave you lessons?”

She shook her head.

“Someone else in the village?”

“I'm not lying,” she said.

“Adults lie,” he said, “and children believe them.”

“So then you can lie, too.”

“Do you know who I am?”

“The Maestro.”

“What do you want to play?”

“I don't know.”

He motioned to her to take her place, adjusted the stool, sat down next to her and opened the score that was on the stand.

“Come now, play, play, I'll turn the pages.”

 

Clara's gaze swept quickly and intensely over the two open pages of the score—she blinked, once, twice, three times—and an inscrutable expression settled briefly over the Maestro's face. Then she played. She played so slowly, so sorrowfully, so perfectly, she played with such infinite slowness, such infinite softness and perfection, that no one could say a word. When she stopped, no one could speak. They knew of no adult who could play the prelude in this way, because this child was playing with a child's sadness and pain, but with the slowness and perfection of a mature adult, when no adult knows any longer how to attain the enchantment of that which is young and old at the same time.

 

After a long silence, the Maestro asked her to let him sit in her place, and he played the first movement of a sonata. At the end he introduced a tiny change. She was staring at a blind spot, far beyond any vision. He asked her to play again what she had heard. She did as he asked. He went to fetch the score. She followed what was written there, and did not introduce the change, but as she was about to play that bar she raised her head and looked at him. Then they brought an entire stack of scores which they spread out before her. She opened them, one after the other, blinked once, twice, three times, and they all died and were reborn with each blink of her eyelids, as if in a down pouring of snowflakes from a forgotten dream. Finally, everything seemed transfixed in a heavy, tremulous silence. One single blink and Clara was staring at the pages of a worn red score, trembling, until each of them was trembling and an abyss opened inside them. She went over to the grand piano and played the Russian sonata which had gripped her with the elation of heights; and they knew that this was how mankind must live and love, in this fury, this peace, with this intensity and rage, in a world swept with the colors of earth and storm, in a world washed blue at dawn and darkened by rain.

A moment went by.
I know you but I don't know how.

 

There came a discreet knock at the door.

“Yes?” said the Maestro.

“Governor Santangelo,” came the reply.

 

Clara sat on alone in the room in the company of the fat little ginger-haired man, who had not moved and gave no sign of waking. They brought her some tea, and some unfamiliar fruit with a velvety orange skin, and they gave her still more scores, while insisting that the Maestro had said she was to play only one. The first one seemed like a desecration to her and she immediately closed it, repelled by all the staves—they were like the bombastic effusions of those funeral dirges for the organ. No other score had the same lugubrious effect on her, but she opened a great many of them and did not find what it was that had so enthralled her about the Russian sonata and, in Santo Stefano, about the last piece that Sandro had placed before her in the church. Finally she came to a thin booklet. The first page whirled a new type of arabesque into the air. There were curved lines that took flight like feathers, and that had the same texture as the velvety skin on the lovely fruit. Before, when she had played the Russian sonata, there had been a splendor of trees with silvery leaves, mingled with vast dry prairies where rivers ran and, at the very end, she had the vision of a rushing wind in a wheat field where the stalks were flattened by gusts before springing back up in an animal roar. But this new music brought something amiable to the equation of landscapes, with the sparkle of Alessandro's stories, and she felt that for such lightness to be possible, there must be deep roots. She wondered if she would ever know the smiling canopies where this amiability was born; at least now she knew that there were places where beauty was born of gentleness, whereas she had only ever known harshness and grandeur, and she loved this, tasting the unfamiliar fruit that told of the land where it was grown through her encounter with music. When she had finished playing the piece, she sat for a moment dreaming of foreign continents, and she began to smile in the noontime solitude.

 

An hour had gone by in this luminous reverie when muffled sounds reached her from the room next door. There was some agitation, and among the voices she recognized the Maestro's, accompanying the visitor to the door, then she heard a stranger's voice in reply and, although his words were inaudible, Clara stood up, her heart pounding, because it was a voice of death, sending warnings she heard as a death knell—and no matter where she turned in the tumult of what she was hearing, she felt an icy chill as she watched a shadow, like a screen, over an expanse of terror and chaos. Finally, the voice was doubly terrifying because it was beautiful as well, a beauty that stemmed from a former energy, now depraved.
I know you but I do not know how.

 

“You're no lazybones, that's for sure,” said a voice behind her.

The ginger-haired man had gotten to his feet, with some difficulty, apparently, because he was staggering as he came over, running his hand unsteadily through his hair. He had a round face, a double chin that gave him a childish look, and lively, sparkling eyes, somewhat cross-eyed at present.

“My name is Petrus,” he said, bowing to her, and immediately collapsing to the floor.

She looked at him, stunned, while he struggled to his feet and repeated his greeting.

“The Maestro's no easy man, but that scoundrel is evil,” he said when he had steadied himself.

She understood that he was referring to the voice of death.

“Do you know the Governor?” she asked.

“Everyone knows the Governor,” he replied, puzzled.

Then, with a smile: “I'm sorry I'm not very presentable. Our sort doesn't do well with alcohol, it's a question of constitution. But the moscato after dinner was divine.”

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Ah, it's true,” he said, “we haven't been introduced.”

And he bowed for the third time.

“Petrus, at your service. I act as a sort of secretary for the Maestro. But as of this morning I am above all your chaperone.”

Then, smiling contritely, “I'll grant you, a hangover does not augur well for our first meeting. But I'll do my best to make myself pleasant, especially as you really do play very well.”

 

And this was how Clara's first days in Rome were spent. She did not forget the voice of death, although she was working relentlessly, with no thought for the outside world. Acciavatti had told her she should come to the deserted studio early in the morning, so that no one would know about the little prodigy he had taken on as his pupil.

“Rome is fond of monsters,” he had said, “and I don't want her to turn you into one.”

Every day at dawn Petrus came to fetch her from her room and led her through the silent streets. Then he departed again for the Villa Volpe, where she joined him at lunch; after that he left her in the room on the patio where there was a piano for practice, and she worked there until dinner, which she ate with him and with Pietro. Sometimes the Maestro joined them afterwards, and they worked a while longer, until Clara's bedtime. She was surprised by how indulgent Acciavatti and Pietro were toward Petrus. They greeted him warmly and paid no attention to his strange behavior. It could not be said, however, that his conduct was at all becoming; when he came to wake her in the morning, he was out of breath, his hair disheveled and his gaze unfocused; she no longer believed that the moscato of that first day was an exception, because he was forever stumbling on the carpet, and while she was practicing he would collapse in an armchair and sleep, drooling; he let out intermittent, unintelligible grunts; when he awoke, he seemed surprised to be there. Then he tried to set the world to rights by tugging with conviction on his jacket or his trousers, but he generally did not manage anything conclusive and eventually gave up, sheepishly bowing his head. Finally, by the time he remembered she was there and sought to speak to her, he had to start over more than once because what initially came out of his mouth contained no vowels. And yet she did like him for all that, without really knowing what he was doing there in her company. But her new life as a pianist absorbed so much of her energy that she had little left over for other aspects of her life in Rome.

 

Her lessons with the Maestro were not at all as she had imagined they would be. Most of the time, he talked to her. When he gave her a score, he never told her how to play it. But then he would ask questions, and she always knew how to answer, because he did not want to know what she had thought but rather what she had seen. She told him that the Russian sonata had inspired images of arid plains and silver rivers, so he spoke to her of the steppes in the north and the vastness of those territories of willow and ice.

“But the energy of such a giant goes hand in hand with his slowness, and that is why you played so slowly.”

He questioned her, too, about the village where she was born, and she described the vista of mountains between two tiled roofs, and how she knew the names of every valley and every peak by heart. She loved these hours she spent with him, so much so that, at the beginning of November, two months after her arrival in Rome, her sorrow for her lost mountains had ceased to torment her. Yet the Maestro showed her no particular affection, and she had the feeling that he undertook his questions not so much to instruct her as to prepare her for something he alone understood, just as from time to time she had an intuition that he already knew her, even though they had only met that September. One day when they were studying a terribly boring score, and she betrayed her mood by suddenly and absurdly accelerating the tempo, he told her, irritated, “That's typical of your lot.”

She asked him the name of the fruit of the first day, and said, “Then give me some peaches, instead.”

He looked at her, still more irritated, but set a score down in front of her and said, “For his sins, the man was German, but he knew a thing or two about peaches.”

As she played and renewed her bond with the ethereal scrolls of pleasure, Clara pondered what might lie behind the Maestro's irritation, that surge of feeling aimed at someone whose indistinct silhouette had drifted briefly through the atmosphere in the room. And while the days that followed were not unlike those that had preceded, they bore the trace of this jeer directed at a phantom.

 

Very often the Maestro also came to join her at Pietro's after dinner. The piano was in the big room on the patio and, while they were working, the windows were left open to the cool evening air. Pietro listened to them, smoking and drinking a liqueur, but he would not speak until the lesson was over. Similarly, Petrus dozed or snored in a large wing chair until the music ceased and the silence woke him up. Clara would listen to them conversing while she read or daydreamed, then they took her back to her room; whereas they would go on talking late in the night, the timbre of their voices rising across the patio, lulling her to sleep. Thus, one night in late November, when the French windows to the patio had been closed because it was raining hard, Clara listened to them conversing while she leafed through some scores they had brought her to study. She heard Acciavatti say, “But will they ever play it at the right tempo?” and then she opened an old, dog-eared score.

 

In black ink, someone had written two lines in the margin next to the opening staves.

 

la lepre e il cinghiale vegliano su di voi quando camminate sotto gli alberi

i vostri padri attraversano il ponte per abbracciarvi quando dormite
*

 

There was a moment drained of all sensation, and Clara watched as a bubble of silence spread at the speed of waves before bursting in a soundless climax. She reread the poem and there were no more explosions, but something had changed, as if space had doubled and beyond an invisible frontier lay a country where she longed to go. Although she suspected the score had nothing to do with this magic, she went to the piano all the same, and played the piece which only brought to the room a perfume of currents and damp earth, and a mystery in the shape of wooded trails and stolen emotions.

 

After she played the last note she looked up and saw standing before her a man she did not recognize.

“Where did that score come from?” asked the Maestro.

She pointed to the batch they had brought to her earlier at his request.

“Why did you play it?”

“I read the poem,” she said.

He walked around the piano and came to look over her shoulder. She sensed his breathing, the waves of his mixed emotions. Seeing him now in the harsh light that surprise cast over his feelings, she was struck by the images that unreeled, transparent, from his tall person—first of all a herd of wild horses, leaving behind them an echo that remained long after they had vanished into the distance; then, in the shadow of undergrowth whose pathways were gilded with bursts of sunlight, a large boulder rising from the moss, all its angles and hollows, all its noble crevices the product of the common labor of floods and centuries, and she knew that this magnificent, living boulder was the Maestro himself, because an inexplicable alchemy had perfectly superimposed the man and the rock upon each other. At last the images faded, and once again she was face to face with a man of flesh and blood, now looking at her gravely.