Yes, the song had been even more crystalline, more heartrending and expansive, and this warning, accompanied by patience, had opened a diagonal insight that was both magnificent and terrible. And because she was absorbed by her dream-like, misty trance, she had not seen the iris at the decisive moment, but she suddenly heard a hundred horns sounding a deep, powerful note, so beautiful and funereal that the surfaces of reality had trembled in unison and whirled around a fixed point that spiraled in upon itself. How had she been able to do this? How had she not known? And beneath the thick red duvet she wept profusely, although this brought no relief, because the iris that Eugénie had shown her could not console her for the exchange that was depriving her of love.
Then Eugénie came into her room. She sat on the edge of the bed and took her beloved little girl’s hand, all wet that it was with her tears as it clung to her old and wrinkled hand.
“Cry, my sweet,” said Eugénie, “but don’t be sad. There, there.”
She stroked the forehead of the child who had come to them on a snowy night and given them so much joy that she wished she could spread her arms and fill them with a screen, to view a procession of images of happiness.
“Don’t be sad,” she said again, “see what you have done and don’t be sad, my angel.”
Maria sat up all of a sudden. “What I’ve done!” she murmured, “what I’ve done!”
“What you have done,” repeated the auntie.
She felt like a poor peasant without words, who could not share the miracle. In a flash she understood why the words they heard in churches united so many hearts and gathered in so many believers; she knew the gift of language which courts the impenetrable and names everything that weaves and elevates, and at last she saw that she could find a nugget in herself: it might not express the striped irises, or the evenings around Saint John’s Day, but it could, all the same, restore the bare roots of what she had seen and felt. So she looked at Maria, and with a smile that illuminated her whole being she said simply, “You have healed me, my love.”
And she thought of how twice a child had delivered her from the violence made by man.
Something snapped inside Maria, as if walls of frost shattered silently then came to rest on a carpet of velvet, glinting with deep shards of mercury. There were stars and flights of birds slipping soundlessly through a sky of drowned ink, and a stream carrying away the secret of the birth that had blessed her with the power to relieve old women of their burdens. Her tears dried. She looked at Eugénie, at the furrows penciled by time onto her beloved old face, and, gently stroking her hand, she smiled faintly in turn because she saw the joy in the auntie’s heart, and she was learning what it meant to be a soul that has been relieved of its crosses.
Eugénie bobbed her head in assent, and it made you think of an apple left to sour on the rack in the storeroom, then she patted the hand of her lovely magical wee girl. She felt light and proud, with erstwhile appetites whirling in a theater of amiable shadows, tableaux of juicy peaches like the fruit of paradise, and afternoons spent picking flowers along embankments swept by a warm breeze. The taste of things returned to her, from a time when taste buds had not yet been altered by tragedy, so comforting that she felt as if a rush of tears were cleansing the waste from some cluttered inner shore, leaving her as smooth and polished as the skin on the finest of autumn’s pears. Her memory coursed through the orchards where she had spent her daydreaming childhood; in the whirring of the bees it reconnected with the firmament of great hunger; and the fact that before dying she had been able to see the world again with a child’s sensors seemed to her like the ultimate blessing from a God whose greatness she had never ceased to honor. Well now, it was time. Let her take rosaries and ribbons, Sunday petticoats and solstice feasts, and go off to join the great congregation of the dead; and let her sing the psalms of storms and sky before bidding farewell to the coolness of orchards. Eugénie was ready; all that was left was to bequeath what must be bequeathed, and put forever behind her the era of narrow humble rooms. She stood up, went to the door, and turning halfway, said to Maria, “Mind how you pick the hawthorn.”
Then she went away.
Maria stayed on alone in the silence of the era that had just begun. In this peacefulness of orchards and flowers, the world was being reorganized. She stood with her back against the wall and she gathered in the sensations that were spinning in the field of her transfigured life. She saw how the unities in which her life had been confined until now lay within an immeasurable order of size, where superimposed upon the layers she already knew were entire worlds, side by side, touching and bumping up against each other with a dizzying depth of field. The world had become a succession of surfaces that rose to the sky in a complex architecture, constantly shifting, disappearing and reappearing in a new form, in the same manner as the fantastical wild boar, both horse and man, when she was ten, a manner that was both osmosis and disappearance and which used the mists as an alluring screen. She saw cities, their streets and bridges shining in early mornings that seemed to have caught a chill from the gilded fogs disintegrating in successive sneezes then slowly forming again over the town.
Will I see these cities one day? wondered Maria. And she dozed off deep into her visions. First she saw a landscape of mountains and lakes with beehives and orchards of sun-yellowed grass, and a village on a steep hill with houses arranged in curved seashell lines. Everything was unknown, everything was familiar. Then the vision changed, giving way to a large room with a parquet floor like clear water. A little girl was seated at an instrument which made one think of an organ, but she was playing a piece of music, and it did not sound at all like the music at a church service, it was marvelous, without opulence or vaulted resonance, of the same substance as the golden dust in which Maria had discovered the bowl that aroused her desire. But this music also contained a powerful message of sorrow and forgiveness. There was a moment when she simply let herself be taken to the story suggested by the melody, then the little girl at the piano stopped playing, and she heard her murmur incomprehensible words that sounded like a muted warning.
Finally, everything disappeared and Maria woke up.
PIETRO
A great merchant
Clara looked at the two men who had suddenly appeared in the room and thrown their arms around Petrus.
“Friend of long evenings!” exclaimed the first.
“I’m so happy to see you again, you old madman,” said the second, patting him on the back.
Then they turned to Sandro, and the taller of the two, who had black hair and very dark skin, bowed and said, “Marcus, at your service.”
“Paulus,” said the other one, also bowing, and Clara noted with interest that he had ginger hair, like Petrus.
They were very different from the Maestro, even though she detected a kinship among them from certain rhythms and the intonation of their voices, and she thought their background must be similar to the Maestro’s, which was evocative of hordes of wild horses, ample and dark in the one whose name was Marcus, and whose solid stature made him a full head taller than Pietro; furtive and golden in the other man, who was not much taller than Clara herself and seemed as light as a feather.
Alessandro, not the least bit surprised to see them, now studied them with a curiosity mingled with a palpable liking.
“I am sorry about this sudden departure,” said the Maestro.
“She is weeping,” said Paulus, “but we cannot change what comes.”
Clara understood that he could see Maria. At that moment, Eugénie entered the little bedroom, sat next to her little lass and, with a smile, gently took her hand. Clara’s heart grew heavy.
“What is going to happen?” she asked.
“There are many things we do not know,” answered the Maestro, “but there is one thing of which we are certain.”
“Eugénie has no more strength,” she said.
r /> “Strength can be exchanged, but not created,” said the Maestro.
“I won’t see her again?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“And in the next life?”
“There are several worlds but only one life,” he said.
She lowered her head.
“She has made her choice in all conscience,” he added. “Don’t be sad for her.”
“I am sad for myself,” she replied.
But he was already holding a campaign meeting. “Maria lives in France, in a village where the enemy is about to strike,” he said to Alessandro.
“Will we get there in time?”
“No. You will arrive after the battle, but if she survives, you will take her to a safe place.”
“Where is that safe place?”
The Maestro smiled.
“I’m not a warrior,” said Alessandro.
“No.”
“And you’re not sending me into battle.”
“No. But it’s dangerous all the same.”
Alessandro smiled in turn. “I fear only despair,” he said. Then, again serious, “I hope that Maria will survive.”
“I hope so, too,” said the Maestro. “Because if she does we won’t have to weep, and if we are not mad, perhaps we will be able to reverse fate.”
Clara looked at Maria and tried to understand what she must do so that Maria would be able to see her. But the little French girl cast all around her the bronze of infinite solitude.
“You will find the way,” Paulus said to her.
The five men got to their feet and Clara felt more bereft than a rosebush in winter. But Alessandro turned to her with a smile and said, “You can see Maria, can’t you?”
She nodded.
“And can you see the people around her, too?”
“Yes,” she replied, “I see the people she sees.”
“Then you will see me again soon,” he said, “and I will know that you are looking at me.”
Before leaving the room, Marcus went up to her and reached into his pocket for something. He then solemnly held out his closed fist. She opened her palm and in it he placed a very soft little ball. When he withdrew his hand, she marveled to find a sphere roughly four inches in diameter, covered with fur not unlike a rabbit’s. The fur was somewhat irregular, flattened in places and more prominent on one side, but despite this unevenness there was something joyful and pleasing about the ball.
“It is fitting for an ancestor to go with you,” said Marcus. “Your father entrusted it to me at the time of the handing over. Naturally, it’s inert.”
This mention of her father was eclipsed by the sensations aroused in her by her contact with the sphere.
“What must I do?” she asked.
“Always keep it with you,” he replied. “It must be in constant contact with one of our people, otherwise it will die.”
Clara was delighted by the frequency radiating from the fur. It seemed to her that a muffled voice was speaking to her, but it sounded like a baby’s babbling, or a suite of unclear words mingled with strange, gentle growls. Pietro came over to observe the object in her palm. So she looked up at him and their eyes met. In spite of her long months at the villa with the patio, they had never truly met. But as they bent over the sphere, they saw an abyss open in each other.
Pietro Volpe had lived through three decades of hell and three of light. His memories of the decades in hell were intact, but he only preserved them, piously, in order to celebrate his decades of light. Every morning upon awakening he saw his father, hated him again, forgave him again, then relived the hours of his childhood so sharply that it would have driven him mad if had he not acquired the power to suffer and heal in a single gesture. He still lived in the house where he was born and grew up, and while the décor may have been changed, the walls were the same that had witnessed his hatred as well as his drifting, and the patio was haunted by the ghosts of the people who had lived there. Why had Roberto Volpe failed to cherish the son he had so fervently desired? He was an elegant man, who loved what he did because he loved beautiful things and prosperous trade; and because he knew men well, his conversation, while not elevated, never lied; no doubt the entire individual was in this paradox, which meant he was neither superficial nor deep. But when the father and the child saw each other for the first time, they despised each other in a way that was total and irreversible—and if anyone is surprised to find such a young person so capable of contempt they would do well to remember that childhood is the dream that allows us to understand what we do not yet know.
At the age of ten Pietro was always fighting, like any hooligan from the slums. He was tall and strong, and he had that sense of rhythm that is akin to an exacerbated sensitivity. But it made him as invincible as he was cursed, and his mother Alba languished in sorrow, unconsoled by the daughter born to her subsequently. By the time ten more years had gone by Pietro had learned all the combat techniques from the street. At the age of twenty he did not know whether he was a dangerous man or a furious animal. He brawled at night, reciting poetry; he read voraciously, fought lugubriously, returned intermittently to the villa with the patio, always careful not to run into his father, and he watched as his mother shed her tears and his sister acquired her elegance. He said nothing, but he held Alba’s hand until her sobs were exhausted, then he left again, somber, in the same silence he had walled himself up in all his life. There were ten more years of despair as evanescent as the voice he sometimes heard in his head; his mother grew old and Leonora bloomed, looking at him in silence, and smiling in a way that said, I’ll wait for you. But when he tried to return her smile, he froze with pain. So she would squeeze his arm, then walk away, moving according to whichever circular stride took her fancy that day, but as she was leaving the room, she cast him one last look that said, yet again, I’ll wait for you. And her constancy buoyed him and crucified him at the same time.
Then one morning he awoke to an awareness that the lines of time had been reversed. He arrived at the villa just as a priest was leaving, and the priest informed Pietro that his father was dying and that they had been looking for him all night. He went to Roberto’s room, where Alba and Leonora were waiting; they withdrew and left him alone with his fate.
He was thirty years old.
He went over to the bed where the man he had not seen for ten years was breathing his last. The drapes had been drawn; unable to see, he tried to make out a human shape, but then he felt a gaze go straight to his gut, a raptor’s gaze that shone on him like a gem in the darkness of the end of things.
“Pietro, at last,” said Roberto.
He was shaken as he recognized every inflection of a voice he had long forgotten, and he realized that suffering collapsed the abysses of time, restoring that voice to him now as clear as on the first morning. He said nothing but went even closer, because he did not want to be a coward. Ravaged, his father had the same face he had always had, but his eyes glowed with a fever that conveyed to Pietro he would be dead by evening, and there was a spark in those eyes that made him doubt it would be the work of illness alone.
“In thirty years not a day has gone by where I have not thought of this moment,” continued Roberto.
He laughed. A dry cough racked his chest and Pietro saw that he was afraid. For a moment he thought he didn’t feel anything, then a wave of anger washed over him when he understood that death would change nothing, and he would have to live until the end of his own life having been the son of this father.
“So often I dreaded I would die without seeing you again. But apparently fate knows what it has to do.” He was seized by convulsions, and for a long time he could not speak.
Pietro did not move, or take his eyes off him.
What room was this . . . Dark mists came down over the bed, whirling like evil cyclones. His self-enforced immobility de
tonated every upheaval of his life. He saw again the faces and the blood of his accursed combats, and lines from a poem came back to him. Who had written them? He could not recall ever having read them. Then the convulsions stopped and he spoke again.
“I should have realized that fate would watch over me and that you would be here to watch me die, to hear me tell you why we have not loved one another.”
His face was now the color of ash, and Pietro thought death was imminent, but after a pause, Roberto spoke.
“Everything is in my will,” he said. “The events, the facts, the consequences. But I want you to know that I have no remorse. I did what I did in all conscience, and I have not regretted it even once in all this time.”
Raising his hand, he began to make a gesture that was like a blessing but then, overcome by exhaustion, he could not finish it.
“That’s all,” he said.
Pietro remained silent. He was hunting for a tenuous note that had echoed when Roberto fell silent. The intoxication of hatred swept through his soul like a storm, and he had an irrepressible urge to kill his insane father with his own hands. Then the urge receded. Receded with a force as natural and sovereign as the desire to kill that had gripped him just moments before, and when it was over, he knew that something had opened up inside him. The suffering and hatred were intact, but in his breast he felt the other man’s death working upon him.
Finally, with a gleam in his gaze that Pietro did not understand, Roberto said, “Take care of your mother and your sister. That is our role, the only one.”
He breathed in, slowly, looked at his son one last time, and died.
The lawyer asked to see them that evening. Pietro was sole heir to his father’s property. It was dark when they went out onto the steps outside the lawyer’s office. Pietro embraced his mother, kissed his sister. She looked at him in a way that said, There you are. He smiled and said, See you tomorrow.