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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Described as a 'truly enchanting story' by the Irish Times, the acclaimed author of The Elegance of the Hedgehog brings us a lyrical homage to the powers of nature and art, told by two young girls who are destined to change the worldTwo foundling girls hundreds of miles apart discover a unique bond that will help them fight the forces of evil.The villagers had never seen anything like it: dense white curtains of snow that instantly transformed the landscape. Not in autumn, not here in Burgundy. And on the same night a baby was discovered, dark-eyed little Maria, who would transform all their lives.Hundreds of miles away in the mountains of Abruzzo, another foundling, Clara, astonishes everyone with her extraordinary talent for piano-playing. But her gifts go far beyond simple musicianship.As a time of great danger looms, though the girls know nothing of each other, it is the bond that unites them and others like them, which will ultimately offer the only chance for good to prevail in the world.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Praise for The Elegance of the Hedgehog
‘Many authors dream of getting their books onto best-seller lists, but few pull it off with the panache of French writer Muriel Barbery.’ Time
‘A profound but accessible book … which elegantly treads the line between literary and commercial fiction … The Elegance of the Hedgehog is, by the end, quite radical in its stand against French classism and hypocrisy … Clever, informative and moving’ The Observer
‘Its appeal is obvious … a feel-good book with philosophical aspirations’ The Guardian
‘At once absurd and lyrical, cheery and bleak, contemplative and tender … It is the revelatory joy the characters afford each other—with recognition, with friendship, with love—that quietly rises to the top.’ New Statesman
‘Muriel Barbery … commands the sophistication, polish and mental agility that often distinguish French fiction … Barbery has a warm heart and a heart moreover that knows that great art and the best philosophy may (just possibly) possess redemptive qualities, or at least make life bearable in a materialistic and self-indulgent world.’ Sydney Morning Herald
THE LIFE OF ELVES
Muriel Barbery
Translated from the French by Alison Anderson
For Sébastien For Arty, Elena, Miguel, Pierre and Simona
CONTENTS
LIST OF CHARACTERS
Burgundy
On the Hollows Farm
Maria Faure
André Faure, her father, a farmer
Rose Faure, her mother
Eugénie and Angèle, André’s aunts
Jeannette and Marie, Rose’s first cousins once removed
On Marcelot’s farm
Eugène Marcelot, known as Gégène, a farmer
Lorette Marcelot, known as La Marcelotte, his wife
In the village
Father François, the priest
Jeannot, the postman
Paul-Henri, known as Ripol, the blacksmith
Léon Saurat, a farmer
Léon and Gaston-Valéry, his sons
Henri Faure, known as Riri, the forester
Jules Lecot, known as Julot, mayor of the village and head of the roadmenders
Georges Echard, known as Chachard, the master saddler
Abruzzo
At the presbytery
Clara Centi
Father Centi, her adoptive father, the priest of Santo Stefano
Alessandro Centi, the priest’s younger brother and friend of Pietro Volpe
An old housekeeper
In the village
Paolo, known as Paolino, a shepherd
Rome
At the Villa Acciavatti
Gustavo Acciavatti, the Maestro
Leonora Acciavatti, his wife, née Volpe
Petrus, a strange servant
At the Villa Volpe
Pietro Volpe, an art dealer, Gustavo Acciavatti’s brother-in-law
Roberto, his father (†)
Alba, his mother
Leonora, his sister
At the Villa Clemente
The Clementes, wealthy patricians
Marta, the older daughter (†), Alessandro’s great love
Teresa, the younger daughter (†), a virtuoso pianist
The Capitol of Rome
Raffaele Santangelo, the Governor of Rome
The World of Mists
The Head of the Council of the Mists (appearing as a grey horse/a hare)
The Guardian of the Pavilion of the Mists (appearing as a white horse/a wild boar)
Marcus and Paulus, friends of Gustavo Acciavatti and Petrus
Aelius, the leader of the enemy
BIRTHS
THE LITTLE GIRL FROM SPAIN
The little girl spent most of her hours of leisure among the branches. When her family were looking for her, they would go to the trees, the tall beech to start with, the one that stood to the north above the outhouse, for that was where she liked to daydream while observing the activity on the farm; then it was the old lime tree in the priest’s garden beyond the low wall of cool stone; and finally—most often in winter—among the oaks in the combe to the west of the adjacent field, a hollow planted with three of the most majestic specimens in all the region. The little girl would nestle in the trees, all the hours she could steal from the village life of book-learning, meals, and mass, and not infrequently she would invite a few friends to come along, and they would marvel at the airy spaces she had arranged there, and together they would spend glorious days in laughter and chat.
One evening as she sat on a lower branch of the middle oak, while the combe was filling with shadow, aware that they would soon be coming to take her back to the warmth, she decided for a change to cut across the meadow and pay a visit to the neighbour’s sheep. She set out as the mist was rising. She knew every clump of grass in an area extending from the foothills of her father’s farm all the way to Marcelot’s; she could have closed her eyes and known exactly where she was, as if guided by the stars, from the swelling of the field, the rushes in the stream, the stones on the pathways and the gentle incline of the slope; but instead, for a particular reason, she now opened her eyes wide. Someone was walking through the mist only slightly ahead of her, and this presence tugged strangely at her heart, as if the organ were coiling in upon itself and bringing curious images to her: in the bronze glow of undergrowth she saw a white horse, and a path paved with black stones gleaming under foliage.
Who was that child, on the day of this remarkable event? The six adults who lived on the farm—father, mother, two great-aunts and two grown-up cousins—adored her. There was an enchantment about her that was far from that found in children whose first hours have been mild, that sort of grace born of a careful mixture of ignorance and happiness; no, it was, instead, as if when she moved she carried with her an iridescent halo, which minds forged in pastures and woods would compare to the vibrations of the tallest trees. Only the eldest auntie, by virtue of an abiding penchant for anything that could not be explained, thought to herself that there was something magical about the little girl; but one thing was certain: for such a young child she bore herself in a most unusual way, incorporating some of the invisibility and trembling of the air, as a dragonfly would, or palms swaying in the wind.
Otherwise, she was very dark and very lively, rather thin, but with a great deal of elegance; two eyes of sparkling obsidian; olive, almost swarthy skin; high Slavic-looking cheekbones flushed with a round rosiness; finally, well-defined lips, the colour of fresh blood. She was splendid. And what character! Always running through the fields or flinging herself onto the grass, where she would stay and stare at the too vast sky; or crossing the stream barefoot, even in winter, to feel the sweet chill or biting cold, and then with the solemnity of a bishop she would relate to all assembled the highlights and humdrum moments of her days spent out of doors. To all of this one must add the faint sadness of a soul whose intelligence surpassed her perception and who—from the handful of clues that, although weak, were to be found everywhere, even in those protected places, however poor, in which she had grown up—already had an intimation of the world’s tragedies.
Thus, at five o’clock it was that glowing, secretive young sprig of a girl who sensed the nearby presence in the mist of an invisible creature, and she knew more surely than the existence of God proclaimed by the priest that this creature was both friendly and supernatural. Thus she was not afraid. Instead, she set off in the direction she had determined shortly before, towards the sheep.
Something took her by the hand. Something like a large fist wrapped in a soft warm weave, creating a gentle grip in which her own hand felt lost. But no man could have possessed a palm that, as she felt through the silky skein, had hollows and ridges that might belong to the hoof of a giant wild boar. Just then they made a turn to their left, almost at a right angle, and she understood that they were heading towards the little woods, skirting round the sheep and Marcelot’s farm. There was a fallow field, overgrown with sleek serried blades of grass, rising gently to meet the hill through a winding passage, until it reached a lovely copse of poplar trees rich with strawberries and a carpet of periwinkles where not so long ago every family had been permitted to gather wood, and would commence with the sawing by first snowfall; alas, that era is now gone, but it will not be spoken of today, be it due to sorrow or forgetfulness, or because at this hour the little girl is running to meet her destiny, holding tight to the boar’s hoof.
And this on the mildest autumn evening anyone had seen for many a year. People had delayed putting their apples and pears to ripen on the wooden racks in the cellar, and all day long the air was streaked with insects inebriated with the finest orchard vintage. There was a languidness in the air, an indolent sigh, a quiet certainty that things would never end, and while people went about their work as usual, without pause and without complaint, they took secret delight in this endless autumn as it told them not to forget to love.
Now just as the little girl was heading towards the clearing in the east wood, another unexpected event occurred. It began to snow. It began to snow all of a sudden, and not those timid little snowflakes that bob about in the gloom and scarcely strive to settle, no, heavy snowflakes began to fall, as big as magnolia buds, and they fell thick on the ground, forming a thoroughly opaque screen. In the village, as it was nearing six o’clock, everyone was surprised; the father in his simple twill shirt, chopping wood, Marcelot warming up his dogs over by the pond, Jeannette kneading her dough, and others who, on this late autumn day that was like a dream of lost happiness, were coming and going about their business, be it leather, flour or straw; yes, they had all been surprised and now they were closing the latches tightly on the stable doors, calling in the sheep and the dogs, and getting ready for something that brought them almost as much well-being as the sweet languor of autumn: the first evening they’d spend clustered around the fireside, when outside there was a raging snowstorm.
They were preparing, and thinking.
They were thinking—those who remembered—about an autumn day some ten years earlier, when the snow had suddenly begun to fall as if the sky were peeling away into immaculate white strips. And it was at the little girl’s farm in particular that they were thinking about it, for her absence there had just been discovered, and the father was pulling on his fur cap and a hunting jacket that stank of mothballs from a hundred metres away.
“They’d better not come back for her,” he muttered before disappearing into the night.
He knocked on the doors of the village houses where other farmers were to be found, along with the master saddler, the mayor (who was also the head roadmender), the forester, and a few others. Everywhere, he said the same thing: the wee girl has gone missing, before he set off to the next door, and behind him the man of the house would shout for his hunting jacket, or his thick overcoat, and he’d put on his gear and hurry into the tempest towards the next house. And eventually there were fifteen of them gathered at the home of Marcelot, whose wife had already fried up a panful of thick bacon and set out a jug of mulled wine. They polished it off in ten minutes, calling out their battle instructions, no different from the ones they reeled off on the mornings they went hunting—but a wild boar’s trail was no mystery to them, whereas the little girl, now, she was more unpredictable than a sprite. Only, the father had his opinion on the matter, as did all the others, because in these parts no one believes in coincidences, where legends and the Good Lord go hand in hand and where they are suspected of having a few tricks city people have long forgotten. Around these parts, you see, it’s a rare event to turn to reason in a shipwreck; what’s called for are eyes, feet, intuition, and perseverance, and that is what they mustered that evening, because they remembered just such a night only ten years earlier when they’d gone up the mountain pass looking for someone whose traces led straight to the clearing in the east wood. Now the father feared more than anything that once they got up there the lads would be bound to open their eyes wide, make the sign of the cross, and nod their heads, just as they had done that time when the footprints came to a sudden stop in the middle of the circle, and they found themselves staring at a carpet of snow as smooth as a newborn’s skin, a place of pristine silence where no one—and this all the hunters were prepared to swear—no one had set foot for at least two days.
Off they go, up through the blizzard.
As for the little girl, she has reached the clearing. It’s snowing. She’s not cold. The creature that brought her here is speaking. It’s a majestic, tall white horse, its coat steaming in the evening air, spreading a light mist in every direction on earth—to the west, where the Morvan is turning blue; to the east where the harvest was brought in without a single drop of rain; to the north where the plain stretches for miles; and to the south where the men are struggling through the snow up to their thighs, their hearts twisted in fear. Yes, a fine tall white horse with arms and legs, and dewclaws too, a horse that is neither a horse nor a man nor a wild boar but a combination of all three, although not wholly assembled—at times the horse’s head turns into a man’s while its body expands and is fitted with hooves that shrink to little trotters then grow again until they are those of a wild boar. This goes on unendingly, while the little girl contemplates the dance of essences greeting and mingling as they trace the steps of knowledge and faith. The creature speaks gently to her and the mist is transformed. And she sees. She does not understand what he is saying but she sees a snowy evening just like this one in the same village where she has her farm, and on the porch there is a white shape against the whiteness of the snow. And she is that shape.
Who can help but recall the event whenever they meet that little girl, as full of life as a chick whose pure vitality you can feel beating against your shoulder and within your own heart. It was Auntie Angèle who, when the time came to go and round up the hens, found the poor thing staring at her with her all-engulfing black eyes and her little amber face, so visibly human that Angèle stood poised with one foot in the air, until she got a hold of herself and began to shout a child in the night! and lifted her up to take her inside, this little girl whom the snowflakes had spared even though it was still snowing a blizzard. Not long afterwards, that same night, the auntie would say: ’Twas as if the Good Lord was speaking to me, then fall silent, troubled by the sensation that it was impossible to describe how the shape of the world had been distorted by the discovery of the infant swaddled in white, the dazzling splitting of possibilities into unfamiliar pathways howling in the snowy night, while time and space retracted, contracted—but still, she had felt it, and she left it up to God to understand it.
One hour after Angèle had come upon the little girl, the farm had filled with villagers who stood deliberating, and the countryside with men who were following a set of footprints. They were tracing the solitary footprints that left the farm and went up to the east wood, scarcely sinking into the snow, although the men were in up to their hips. What happened after that, we already know: once they reached the clearing, they stopped their tracking and headed back to the village, their minds heavy with dark thoughts.
“So long as …” said the father.
No one added anything but everyone was thinking about the poor woman who, maybe … and they made the sign of the cross.
The tiny girl observed all of this from deep within the fine cambric swaddling decorated with a sort of lace unknown in these parts: there was an embroidered cross, which warmed the hearts of all the old ladies, and there were two words in a foreign tongue, which terrified them. They all focused their attention on those two words, in vain, until the arrival of Jeannot, the postman; because of the war, the one from which twenty-one of the village men did not return, and the reason for a monument opposite the town hall and the church, he had once descended deep into that territory they called Europe—which was located nowhere else, in the mind of the rescuers, than in those pink, blue, green and red patches on the map in the community hall, for what might Europe be when strict borders separated villages only three leagues from one another?
So this Jeannot, who had just come in with his hair covered in snow, and had been served a coffee with a big splash of brandy by the mother, now looked at the embroidered inscription on the satiny cotton and said, “Upon my word, it’ll be Spanish.”
“Are you sure?” asked the father.
The lad nodded vigorously, his nose glowing with brandy.
“And what’s it mean?” asked the father.
“How am I supposed to know?” answered Jeannot, who didn’t speak barbaric tongues.
They all nodded, and digested the news with the help of another encouraging shot of brandy. So the little tot came from Spain? Well, I never.
Meanwhile, the women, who weren’t drinking, had gone to fetch Lucette. Lucette had recently recovered from her confinement and was now nursing two little ones nestled against her bosom as white as the snow outside, and all those present looked without an ounce of spite at that bosom as fine as a pair of sugarloaves—they could just lap it up!—and they felt that a sort of peace had come over the earth because there before them were two little babies clinging to those nourishing breasts. After she’d had a good feed, the little lass let out a sweet little burp, as round as a ball and clear as a bell, and everyone burst out laughing and gave each other a fraternal tap on the shoulder. They relaxed, Lucette buttoned up her bodice, and the women served up some hare pâté on big slices of bread reheated in goose fat, because they knew that this was the priest’s favourite and they’d got it into their heads to keep the young miss in a Christian home. What’s more, it didn’t cause the problems they’d have had elsewhere if a little Spaniard suddenly showed up just like that on some fellow’s porch.
“Well, well,” said the father, “I’m of the opinion that this little girl is at home,” and he looked at the mother who smiled back at him, he looked at every one of the guests, whose satiated gazes lingered on the infants settled on a blanket to one side of the great wood stove, and finally he looked at the priest who, in a haze of hare pâté and goose fat, stood up and went over to the stove.
They all got to their feet.
We shall not repeat here the country priest’s blessing; all that Latin, when in fact we wish we knew a bit of Spanish, would be too confusing. But they got to their feet, the priest blessed the infant, and everyone knew that the snowy night was a night of grace. They recalled an ancestor who had told them the story of a cold spell in which you could just as easily have died of fright as of frost; it was during the last campaign, the one that left them victorious and forever damned to remember their dead—the last campaign, where the columns were advancing in a lunar twilight and the ancestor himself no longer knew whether the paths of his childhood had ever existed, and that walnut tree in the bend in the road, and the swarms of insects around the time of Saint John’s Day, no, he couldn’t remember a thing, and all the men were just like him, because it was so cold there, so cold … it’s hard to imagine such a fate. But at dawn, after a night of misery in which the cold struck down those brave souls the enemy had missed, it suddenly began to snow, and that snow … that snow was the redemption of the world, because among their divisions it would not freeze again, and soon on their brows they felt the miraculous warmth of the flakes signalling the thaw.
The little girl didn’t feel the cold any more than the soldiers of the last campaign, or the lads who had reached the clearing and who were gazing at the scene, soundless as pointer dogs. Later, they could not recall what they had seen clear as day, and to each question they would reply with the vague tone of someone searching within for some confused memory. Most of the time, all they said was, “The little lass was there in the middle of a bloody blizzard, but she was warm and alive as could be and she was talking to some creature that made off afterwards.”
“What sort of creature?” asked the women.
“Ah, some creature,” they replied. And as in these parts where legends and the Good Lord, et cetera … they stuck to that reply and went on watching over the child as if over the Holy Sepulchre itself.
A singularly human creature, that’s how each of them had sensed it, looking at vibrations as visible as matter whirling around the little girl, and it was an unfamiliar sight that gave them a strange shiver, as if life were suddenly splitting open and they could look inside it at last. But what do you see when you look inside life? You see trees and wood and snow, perhaps a bridge, and landscapes slipping by before your eyes have time to grasp them. You see the toil and the winds, the seasons and the sorrows, and you might see a tableau that belongs to your heart alone—a strap of leather in a tin box, a patch of meadow where the hawthorn blossoms run riot, the wrinkled face of a beloved woman and the smile of the little girl telling tales of tree frogs. Then, nothing more. The men would recall that the world suddenly landed back on its feet in an explosion that left them weak and drained—and after that they saw that the mist had been swept from the clearing, that it was snowing so hard you could drown in it, and the little girl stood all alone in the middle of the circle where there were no other footprints save her own. Then they all went back down to the farm where they sat the child in front of a bowl of scorching hot milk, and the men hastily stored their rifles, because there was mushroom stew with brawn and ten bottles of wine in the cellar.
There you have the story of the little girl who held the hoof of a giant wild boar tight in her hand. Truth be told, no one can really explain what it all means. But there is one more thing to say, about the two words embroidered on the edge of the white cambric in an elegant Spanish with neither object nor logic, and which the little girl would learn about once she had already left the village and set in motion the wheels of fate—and before that there is one other thing to say: we all have the right to know the secret of our birth. This is how you pray in your churches and your woods and how you go off to travel the world—because you were born on a snowy night and you inherited two words that came from Spain.
Mantendré siempre.1
1. I will maintain.
THE LITTLE GIRL FROM ITALY
Anyone who doesn’t know how to read between the lines of life need only remember that the little girl grew up in a remote village in Abruzzo cared for by a country priest and his old, illiterate housekeeper.
Father Centi lived in a tall building, and below the cellar was a garden with plum trees where they would hang the laundry in the early hours so that in time it would dry in the wind from the mountains. The house was halfway up the village, which rose straight up to the sky in such a way that the streets twisted round the hill like the strands of a tightly wound ball of wool, dotted with a church, an inn, and just the right amount of stone to shelter sixty souls. After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls. Then she went to the kitchen—a long low room adjoining a pantry that smelled of plums, the old jam cupboard, and the noble dust of cellars.
From dawn to sunset, the old housekeeper recounted her stories. She had told the priest she’d inherited them from her grandmother, but she told Clara that the spirits of the Sasso mountain had whispered them to her while she slept, and the little girl knew that this shared secret must be true, because she had heard Paolo’s tales, and he got them from the spirits of the high mountain pastures. But if she valued the figures and turns of speech of those tales, in truth it was for the velvety chanting of the storyteller’s voice, because that coarse old woman, whom only two words rescued from complete illiteracy—all she knew was how to write her name, and the name of the village, and at mass she could not read the prayers but recited them, rather, from memory—that old woman had a manner of speaking that contrasted with the modesty of the remote parish on the escarpments of the Sasso; in actual fact, one must imagine what Abruzzo was like in those days, in that mountainous region where Clara’s protectors lived: eight months of snow interspersed with storms over the massifs set between two seas where it was not uncommon to see a few snowflakes in summer. Add to that real poverty, the poverty of regions where people till the soil and raise their flocks, herding them at the peak of summer to the highest point on the gradients. Not many lived there, consequently, and even fewer when the snow came and everyone left with their beasts for the sunshine in Apulia. The only ones who stayed in the village were those who were tireless workers, growing their dark lentils, for lentils only grow in poor soil, and valiant women who in the cold weather looked after the children, the farms, and their attendance at church. But while the people of this land might have been sculpted into jagged rock by wind and snow, they were also fashioned by the poetry of their landscape, which made shepherds compose rhymes in the icy fog of the high pastures, and storms give birth to hamlets that dangled from the web of the sky.
Thus, the old woman, whose life had unfolded within the walls of a backward village, had a silkiness to her voice that came to her from the splendour of the landscape. The little girl was sure of this: it was the timbre of this very voice that had awoken her to the world, even though people assured her she was only an infant at the time, lying in hunger on the top step outside the church. But Clara did not question her faith. There was a great void of sensations, an absence festooned with whiteness and wind; and there was the melodious cascade that pierced the emptiness and which was there again every morning when the old housekeeper wished her a good day. The little girl had learned the Italian language with miraculous speed, but Paolo the shepherd had grasped that it was something other than her facility with Italian that had left a scent of prodigy in her wake, and one evening he whispered to her, It’s the music, little one, isn’t it, it’s the music you hear? In response, she looked up at him with her eyes as blue as the torrents from the glacier, with a gaze in which the angels of mystery sang. And life flowed down the slopes of the Sasso with the slowness and intensity of those places where everything requires effort but also takes its time, in the current of a bygone dream where humankind knew languor interwoven with the bitterness of the world. Labour was intense, and prayer along with it, and they protected a little girl who spoke the way others sing, and who knew how to converse with the spirits of the rocks and the combes.
*
One day in June, late in the afternoon, there came a knock on the door of the presbytery and two men strode into the kitchen, wiping their brows. One was the priest’s youngest brother, the other was the carter who had driven the large twohorse cart all the way from L’Aquila; on the cart was a massive shape secured with blankets and straps. Clara had watched the convoy making its way along the northern route as she stood after lunch on the steep path above the village; from there the view encompassed both valleys and, on a fine day, Pescara and the sea. When the cart had almost reached the final uphill stretch, she scampered down the slope and arrived at the presbytery, her face glowing with love. The two men had left the cart outside the church and climbed up to the plum garden where they were greeted with hugs and a glass of the sweet chilled white wine that was served on warm days, along with some restorative victuals, and then, agreeing to some dinner later, they wiped their mouths on the cuffs of their sleeves and went back to the church where Father Centi was waiting.
Two more men were needed to help move the big object into the nave, then they set about freeing it from its straps, and in the meantime the village began to assemble in the pews of the little church; the air held a sweetness that coincided with the arrival of this unexpected bequest from the city. But Clara kept well back, motionless, speechless, in the shadow of a pillar. This was her moment, and she had known as soon as she saw the shape moving along the north road; if the old housekeeper saw on her face the exaltation of a bride, it was because she felt as if she were about to partake in strange yet familiar nuptials. When the last strap was removed and the object was finally visible, there was a murmur of satisfaction, followed by a burst of applause, because it was a fine black piano, as polished as a pebble is by the sea, and it was almost without a scratch, despite having travelled widely and experienced much.
This is the story of the piano. Father Centi came from an affluent family in L’Aquila, but his lineage was declining, since he had become a priest and two of his brothers had died young, and the third, Alessandro, who was now at his aunt’s expiating the errant ways of his former dissolute life in Rome, had never got round to taking a wife. The brothers’ father had died before the war, leaving his widow with an unexpected pile of debts and a house that was too opulent for the impoverished woman she had become overnight. Once she had sold all her belongings and the creditors had finished knocking at her door, she withdrew to the same convent where she would die several years later, long before Clara arrived at the village. But upon leaving her secular life for her final seclusion in the convent, she had arranged for the only relic of her past glory to be conveyed to her sister—an old maid who lived near the city walls—a relic she had managed to preserve in spite of the vultures: she asked her sister to look after it for the grandchildren she might one day have on this earth. I will not know them, but they will receive this from me, and now I must go, and I wish you a good life, the aunt had faithfully transcribed in her own will, bequeathing the piano to whichever of her nephews had children when her time came, and adding: Do as she wished.
Thus the notary, who had heard about the orphan’s arrival at the presbytery, thought he was doing the right thing by asking Alessandro to escort the inheritance to his brother’s home. As the piano had stayed in the attic during the war and no one had thought to bring it back down afterwards, the same lawyer informed them by letter that on its arrival it would need tuning, to which the priest replied that the piano tuner, who made his rounds through the neighbouring towns once a year, had been summoned to make a detour through the village in early summer.
They gazed at the fine piano that shone beneath the stained-glass windows, and they laughed, talked about it, and succumbed to the cheer of this lovely evening in late spring. But Clara was silent. She had already heard the organ played at funerals in the neighbouring church, where the God-fearing old woman who performed the liturgical pieces was as hard of hearing as she was hopeless as a musician—and anyway, those chords she thumped out, without hearing them, were probably not worth remembering either. Clara preferred a hundred times over the threnody which Paolo coaxed from his mountain flute; it was so much more powerful and true than the fracas from the organ devoted to the glory of the Most High. So when she saw the cart begin its climb up the long road of hairpin bends towards the village, her heart leapt as if to signal an extraordinary event. Now that the object was there before her, that feeling grew all the stronger, and Clara wondered how she would ever be able to bear the waiting, since they had been told, to the regret of those who would have enjoyed a foretaste of the pleasures in store, that the instrument was not to be touched until it had been tuned. But they respected what the shepherd of their consciences had decreed, and prepared instead to spend a fine evening savouring some wine under the benign gaze of the stars.
And a splendid evening it was. The table had been laid beneath the plum trees in the orchard and Alessandro’s old friends had been invited for supper. He had once been a very handsome man, and beneath the marks of time and past excesses you could still see the fine features and proud contours of his face. What was more, he spoke Italian with a smoothness of tone which in no way diminished its melodiousness, and he always told stories about very beautiful women and endless afternoons where people sat smoking under the awning while conversing with wise men and poets.
That evening he began to tell a story that took place in perfumed salons where the men smoked fine cigars and drank golden liqueurs; Clara could make no sense of it, so foreign to her were the settings and the manners. But just as he was about to begin the part about a mysterious thing known as a concert, the old housekeeper interrupted him and said, Sandro, al vino ci pensi tu? And the affable man whose entire life had been consumed in just a few years of incandescent, luxurious youth went off to the cellar to fetch a few bottles which he opened with the same elegance he had displayed while ransacking his life, and on his lips he wore the same smile with which he had always faced disaster. Thus, as the light of a warm moon incrementally set portions of the dinner table at the presbytery aglow, stealing them from obscurity, for a brief moment he was the flamboyant young man of his past. Then the ashes of the night veiled his expression, on which everyone had been focusing their rapt attention. In the distance they could see lights suspended in the void, and they knew that others were drinking the summer wine and thanking the Lord for this offering of a warm twilight. There were new poppies all over the mountainside and a little girl whose hair was lighter than the meadow grass, and very soon the priest would be teaching her to play the piano, just like a young lady in town. Ah … There was a pause, and a moment to catch one’s breath from the ceaseless toil. It was a special night, and everyone there knew it.
Alessandro Centi stayed at the presbytery on the days that followed the piano’s arrival, and it was he who welcomed the piano tuner in the first heat of July. Clara followed the two men to the church and watched in silence as the man took the instruments from his bag. The first notes that came from the untuned keys produced in her the sensation of a sharpened blade together with a delicious swoon, and while Alessandro and the piano tuner talked and joked amid the trial and error of ivory and felt, her life was changing forever. Then Alessandro sat down at the keyboard, placed a score on the music stand and played well enough, despite the years of neglect. At the end of the piece, Clara came and stood next to him and, pointing to the score, motioned to him to turn the pages. He smiled, amused, but something in her gaze struck him, and he turned the pages as she had requested. He turned them slowly, one after the other, then started again at the beginning. When they had finished, she said, Play it again, and he played the piece one more time. After that, no one spoke. Alessandro stood up and went to fetch a big red cushion from the sacristy, and placed it on the velvet stool. Would you like to play? he asked, and his voice was hoarse.
The little girl’s hands were slender and graceful, rather big for a child who had only turned ten in November, and extremely nimble. She held them above the keys in the proper way to begin playing, then left them there for a moment, and the two men felt as if an ineffable wind were blowing through the nave. Then she lowered them to the keyboard. And a tempest swept through the church, a veritable tempest that ruffled the pages, and it roared like a wave that rises and crashes up to the seamark on the rocks. Finally the wave ebbed away and the little girl began to play.
She played slowly, without looking at her hands, and never making a single mistake. Alessandro turned the pages of the score and she went on playing with the same inexorable perfection, at the same speed, and flawlessly, until silence fell again in the transfigured church.
“Are you reading the notes?” asked Alessandro after a long while.
She said, “I’m looking.”
“Can you play without looking?”
She nodded.
“Are you just looking to learn?”
She nodded again and they gazed at each other indecisively, as if they had been given a crystal so delicate that they didn’t know how to hold it. Alessandro Centi had once been well acquainted with the transparency and dizzying purities of crystal, and he knew both its exaltation and its depletion. But the life he now led no longer resonated with the echo of past moments of exhilaration, other than the trilling of birds at dawn, or the grand calligraphy of clouds. Therefore, when the little girl began to play, the pain he felt courted a sorrow he no longer knew still lived inside him, a brief recollection of the cruelty of pleasure. When Alessandro had asked, Are you just looking to learn? he had known what Clara would say.
Father Centi and his housekeeper were sent for, and they came with all the sheet music Alessandro had brought from the city. The priest and the old woman sat in a pew at the front and Alessandro asked Clara to play the piece again from memory. When she began to play, the two newcomers were stunned, as if struck on the head by a hammer. Then the old woman made the sign of the cross a hundred times, while Clara went on playing twice as fast as before, since now she was truly celebrating the nuptials, and she read, one after the other, the scores that Alessandro handed to her. The tale will soon be told of how Clara played, and in what manner the rigour of her execution was not the true miracle of this July union. All one need know for now is that the moment she started on a blue score which Alessandro had solemnly set before her, she took a deep breath which caused the others present to feel as if a mountain breeze had lost its way among the arches of the great vaulted ceiling. Then she played. Tears were streaming down Alessandro’s cheeks, and he did not try to hold them back. There was a fleeting image that was so precious it could go through him without him ever forgetting it again, and in the fugitive vision of this face, against the background of a painting where a woman sobbed as she held Christ to her breast, he realized it had been ten whole years since he last wept.
He left again the next morning, saying he would be back in the first days of August. He went away, and came back as he had said he would. One week after his return, a tall, rather stooped man knocked on the door to the presbytery. Alessandro went down to welcome him into the kitchen, and they embraced like brothers.
“At last, Sandro,” said the man.
Clara stood motionless on the threshold of the back door.
