Gustavo Acciavatti smiled at her for the second time.
But this time his smile was sad.
“All wars have their traitors,” he said. “As of yesterday, Maria is no longer safe.”
* the hare and the wild boar watch over you when you walk beneath the trees / your fathers cross the bridge to embrace you both when you sleep
VILLA ACCIAVATTI
Inner Elfin Council
Who is the traitor?” asked the Maestro.
“I don’t know,” said the Council Head. “We can no longer be sure about half of the inner sanctum. It could be any one of the ten members. I did not get the impression I was being followed, and my tracks were erased very quickly.”
“I did not see that you were followed. There is after all another bridge and another pavilion,” said the Guardian of the Pavilion. “We must reinforce Maria’s protection.”
“No,” said the Maestro. “Her powers must grow, and Clara must consolidate their bond.”
“We have no idea what we are doing,” said the Council Head. “And yet we are transforming our daughters into soldiers.”
“To say the very least,” said Petrus. “You don’t leave them any time to play with dolls and you don’t help them very much either.”
“You wrote the poem just after Teresa’s death,” said the Maestro to the Guardian of the Pavilion, “and she found it today. I shall send it to Maria.”
“A poem here, a score there, scarcely a glut of explanations,” said Petrus. “How are they to understand who the hare and the boar are?”
“Maria saw me on the day of her tenth birthday,” said the Guardian of the Pavilion, “the wild boar will speak to her. And her people are cut like diamonds. They have exceeded all our expectations.”
“And Clara’s people, what do you think of them?” asked Petrus. “No friends, no family, no mother. An irascible, sibylline professor, and she has work up to her ears. But Clara is the artist on your team of little warriors. You must nurture her heart and her sensibility, and that is not something that can be done by training her like a recruit.”
“Clara needs a woman in her life,” said the Council Head.
“When Pietro is satisfied that her safety can be guaranteed, then they shall meet,” said the Maestro.
After a short silence, he turned to the Guardian of the Pavilion and said, “Did you hear her play . . . yes, I know, she’s your daughter, and you heard her before I did . . . It is heart-rending . . . and so marvelous . . . ”
MARIA
The Hare and the Wild Boar
After the excitement with the gray horse and the assault by tornado, life on the farm returned to its country ways, filled with the hunt, salted cheese, and walks through the woods. Now that the fine season had been confirmed by the farms and the church steeple, everyone could count on it serenely while contemplating the billowy snow which, that winter, would cover the land whenever they were thinking of going to fetch the firewood; or while enjoying the many early mornings that were crisp as a cracker, dawn shooting its rosy fingers into skies more transparent than love; or while salting and preserving the fine hunks of game that seemed in never-ending supply; and when the villagers thought of all this, they never failed to nod and exchange a glance, before returning to work, without comment.
One evening when talking of the hunt, the father made a remark that caused Maria to raise her eyebrows. They were supping on bacon and beets cooked in ash, garnished with a spoonful of cream laced with coarse salt.
“The game’s more plentiful, but the hunt is fairer,” he said.
Maria smiled, then turned back to her steaming beets. The father was a man of the land, rough and taciturn; he walked with a heavy tread and always took his time. When he split logs, he did so at a tempo that anyone in the village could have surpassed, but when they saw that his regularity, together with his tenacity, were even more remarkable than his pace, the widows in the region began to turn to him, requesting he prepare the firewood for them, in return for a modest sum, although they were prepared to pay five times as much. He moved at the same pace in all his activities, including more private ones. He expressed no great sorrow in the face of the ordeals and losses, although they had been terrible, for he and his wife had lost both sons in infancy. But sorrow kept him in its cruel grip longer than it should have. Fortunately, this was also true of joy, and Maria was a blessing late in life, although he never expressed it through any demonstrative display of love; instead, he spread that love equally, in the same manner he used to rake the garden, or plow a field, without haste or interruption, and thus he took pleasure in it as in a gift that graced each year uniformly. Likewise, when he spoke he took care to ensure that his words did not disturb the equilibrium of emotions but rather embraced their contours naturally. Maria knew all this, so she greeted her father’s remark with no more than a smile as it passed over the dinner like a flight of young thrushes.
But he was right: the hunt had become fairer. Anyone who might have thought that the abundance of game would lead to the pleasure of indiscriminate killing must consider the facts: this was not the case. The generosity that was flooding their woods and offering them a more bountiful catch than their ancestors had ever known also instilled restraint in the men of the village, and they chose their prey with care. Over recent winters they had put a stop to a few routs of boars that had been unearthing the potatoes; they had filled their cellars with salt meat for storing; and each had taken his share of fine victuals, but no more than what was required to replenish the body for the cost of its labor. What was more, they had the feeling they were sending the whips as emissaries rather than scouts, having them order the positions with unusual gentleness, which turned the hunt into a new art of exchange. Oh, of course the men did not start their prey in the thickets waving a white flag and politely asking the rabbits to assemble in front of their rifles, but still: they drove them out respectfully and did not do away with a greater number than was reasonable. In truth, the father’s comment was inspired because that very morning they’d had to chase some hunters from the neighboring canton out of the municipal territory. Due to a penury of game these neighbors had come to poach from our hills, where they had found an abundance of hare and pheasant, and even a few deer, which they sniped at like savages, their rough laughter disgusting the villagers, who reacted in kind by pelting them with lead shot. But the worst of it was that this time their ploy did not elicit the virile vainglory which was ultimately its true purpose, because our men felt somehow defiled, a defilement which one of them (Marcelot, appropriately) summed up very eloquently once they got back to the farms after they’d chased out all the ruffians and checked every corner of the woods: bloody miscreants, they’ve no respect for work. Whence the father’s remark; but Maria could tell that the conclusions he had drawn from the day’s events surpassed indignation.
Maria did not suffer from any lack of affection, however, for the women in the village were as generous in lavishing it as they were in dispensing the Lord’s Prayer and helpings of milk in their relentless efforts to strengthen the little girl, who was too thin (but so pretty): she could not remember ever coming back to the farm without being met with a serving of rillettes. But what Maria liked best of all was the cheese from their cows, and to Jeannette’s everlasting despair, she who was the best cook in the six cantons, Maria was not fond of stews or anything that was prepared by mixing ingredients together. She would go up to the stove and help herself to her share of dinner in the form of separate products: she would nibble on a carrot, and they would grill a little piece of meat for her that she ate on its own with a pinch of salt and a sprig of savory.
The only exception she made to this diet of wild rabbit and twigs was for Eugénie’s marvels, for Eugénie was mistress thereabouts where jams and decoctions of fine flowers were concerned. But who, indeed, could have resisted her masterworks? Her quince jam was brought to holy co
mmunion and even spousals; her very infusions seemed to be imbued with magic; how else could one explain the sighs of contentment that were uttered at the end of each meal? What’s more, Eugénie was gifted with a knowledge of simples, and the priest often consulted her and respected her greatly, for she had a way with an impressive number of plants and therapeutic applications whose origins could be traced back to remote antiquity, an epoch about which Eugénie, in splendid indifference, knew nothing. She tended, however, to favor those plants that grew abundantly in the region, and that had proved their effectiveness over the years, and she had settled on a successful triad that seemed, at least on the farm, to have demonstrated its virtues: thyme, garlic, and hawthorn (which she referred to as the noble thorn or the thornapple, names which the priest had verified and which were, indeed, the most popular designations of the shrub among the common folk). Maria passionately loved hawthorns. She loved the shrub’s silvery gray bark, which only turned brown and gnarly with age, and the light flowers of a white so delicately tinged with pink it could make you sob, and she loved to go picking them with Eugénie in the first days of May, taking care not to crush them, then putting them to dry in the shade of a cellar now bedecked like a bride. Last of all, she loved the infusions they made every evening by dropping a spoonful of flowers into a cup of boiling water. Eugénie swore that this fortified the soul and the heart (which has been proven by modern medicine) and that it also conferred a new flush of youth (something which has not been demonstrated in books).
In short, while Eugénie might not have been the same age or had the same eye of the Lord as Angèle, she was nevertheless a granny whom you could not try to hoodwink with impunity. And while Angèle may have presumed very early on that Maria was cut from a magical cloth, since the events in the cluster of trees, Eugénie had, with growing intensity, also perceived as much. Early one morning as she was going down to the kitchen after her first prayers, she stopped short next to the big wooden table where they had their meals. The room was silent. The other old women were feeding the hens and milking the cows; the father had gone to inspect his orchards and Maria was still sleeping beneath the big red duvet. Eugénie was alone next to the table; on it there were only an earthenware coffee pot, a glass of water for a thirsty soul in the night, and three cloves of garlic left over from dinner. Her efforts to concentrate only conjured the very vision she wished to put out of her mind, then she relaxed and endeavored to forget what she was looking at.
She can see the table now as it was the night before; she was the last to leave, after snuffing out the lamp; she enjoys the silent peace of the room, still warm, where a happy family had its dinner not long since; her gaze lingers in the dark corners which the dim lighting adorns with a few jewels of light, before it returns to the table where there is only a glass of water next to a coffee pot and three forgotten cloves of garlic. And then she understands that Maria, who sometimes walks past the hearth at the darkest hours of sleep, came this night and moved the cloves of garlic—by a few inches—and the glass, too—a few millimeters, rather—and that this infinitesimal transference among five trivial elements has entirely altered the space and created a living painting from a kitchen table. Eugénie knows that she lacks the words, for she was born a peasant; she has never seen a painting, other than those that decorate the church and tell the Sacred History, and she knows no other beauty than the flight of birds and the dawn in spring, or the paths through the clear woods and the laughter of beloved children. But she does know with iron-clad certainty that what Maria has accomplished with her three cloves of garlic and her glass is an arrangement for the eye that pays tribute to the divine, and she now notices that in addition to the changes in the disposition of objects, something has been added, as revealed to her that very moment by the shaft of sunlight, and that something is a fragment of ivy placed just next to the glass. It is perfect. Eugénie may not have the words, but she has the gift. In the same way as she sees the effect of medicinal plants on the body and the quiddity of gestures on healing she can see the equilibrium in which the little girl has placed the elements, the splendid tension that inhabits them now, and the succession of filled and empty spaces against a background of silky darkness through which a space has been sculpted, now enhanced by a frame. So, still without words but through the grace of innocence and gift, alone in her kitchen beneath the ribbons that crown eighty-six years of hawthorn tea, Eugénie, her heart full, receives the magnificence of art.
That morning, Maria went down early to cut her chunk of cheese in the storeroom. But instead of spending her time among the trees before study, she came back to the kitchen where, at her battle station, Eugénie was stirring a mixture of celery tops, periwinkle flowers, and mint leaves in a copper saucepan, to make a poultice for a young mother afflicted with breast engorgement. Maria sat down at the big table, where the cloves of garlic were still in their place.
“Did you add celery?” she asked.
“Celery, periwinkle, and mint,” Eugénie replied.
“The celery that grows in the garden?”
“The celery that grows in the garden,” echoed Eugénie.
“That you took from the garden?”
“That I took from the garden.”
“Which doesn’t smell as bad as the wild celery?”
“Which smells better than the wild celery.”
“But isn’t as effective?”
“That depends, my little angel, that depends on the wind.”
“And isn’t periwinkle melancholic?”
“Yes indeed, it is melancholic.”
“Don’t people give it to show when they are sad?”
“Yes, they also give it to say politely that they are sad.”
“And are the periwinkles from our woods?”
“They are periwinkles from the embankment behind the rabbit hutches.”
“And they’re not as effective as the ones in the woods?”
“That depends, my sweet, that depends on the wind.”
“And what about the mint, Auntie?”
“This mint, my sweet?”
“Where does it come from at this time of day?”
“It comes from the wind, my little angel, like everything else, it comes from the wind, which leaves it wherever the Good Lord asks it to, and where we pick it, in honor of His good deeds.”
Maria loved these dialogues; they were infinitely more dear to her than the ones at church, and she provoked them for a reason that became clear in light of a new event which poured into the farm that day with its exotic effluvia. At around eleven o’clock Jeannot knocked on the door to the kitchen where all the grannies were assembled, busy with the same considerable chore—the end of Lent was approaching and they would soon be eating the feast that made up for all their willing sacrifices. The kitchen smelled of garlic and game and the table was crammed full of magnificent baskets, the biggest one overflowing with the first meadow mushrooms of the year: so many had been picked that they were spilling all around the mass of wicker, and they’d have enough for ten years of aromatic meals and fragrant jars. All this, and only the end of April.
They saw at once that Jeannot was flustered about something having to do with his position, because he was wearing his postman’s cap, and he was holding his leather satchel with both hands. They hurried him into the warmth and, although they were dying of curiosity, they sat him down to a slice of rillettes and a little glass of local wine, because the event deserved the honors which are customarily paid with a little bit of pork fat and a glassful of red wine. He hardly touched them. He did take a polite sip but it was plain to see that he was concentrating on some serious event of great import that was now his responsibility. Silence fell over a room lulled only by the crackling of the flames under the stewpot, where a rabbit was cooking. The women dried their hands, folded their towels, adjusted their headpieces and, still in silence, pulled out their chairs and sa
t down in unison.
A moment went by, brimming like the milk.
Outside, it had begun to rain, a fine downpour, my word, coming from a black cloud that had burst all of a sudden and would provide the violets and of the animals with their water for the day. The room was full of the sound of water and the whispering of the fire, muffled in a silence that was too great for the five humans sitting around the table and feeling the pulse of fate. Because there could be no doubt: it was surely fate that had given Jeannot that solemn expression they’d only ever seen when he talked about the war, where he’d also served as a courier, and where, like the others, he had been forced to inhale gunpowder and endure the misery of combat. They watched as he took another sip of wine, but to give himself courage this time, and they knew he had to muster his strength before he began. So they waited.
“Well now,” said Jeannot at last, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, “I have a letter to deliver.”
And he opened his satchel to reach for an envelope, which he placed in the middle of the table so that everyone could see it with ease. The old women stood up and leaned closer. The silence returned, as vast and holy as in a primitive cave. The envelope, in the darkness from the storm, formed a little well of light, but for now all they were interested in were the letters in black ink that said, simply: