The Life of Elves (3 page)

 

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 two-horse cart all the way from L'Aquila; on the cart was a massive shape harnessed by 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 lit 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 with 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 meanwhile the village began to assemble in the pews of the little church; in the air was 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 fortepiano, as polished as a pebble is by the sea, and it was almost without a scratch, despite having traveled 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 gotten around 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 in the village. But upon leaving her secular life for her final reclusion 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
, wrote the aunt faithfully in her will, bequeathing the piano to whichever of her nephews had children when her time came, and she added:
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 afterward, 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 neighboring 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 neighboring 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 turns toward 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 savoring 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 haughty 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 the town. Ah . . . There was a pause, and a moment to catch one's breath from the unending wheel of labor. 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 hot days 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 in their palms. 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 reminiscence 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 had with them all the sheet music Alessandro had brought from the city. The priest and the old woman sat on a pew in the front row and Alessandro asked Clara to play the piece again from memory. When she began to play, the two newcomers were stunned, as if struck by a hammer on the head. Then the old woman made the sign of the cross innumerable 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 rigor of her execution was not the true miracle of these July spousals. 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, so precious that 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. Alessandro took her by the hand and led her up to the tall, stooped man.

“May I introduce Pietro,” he said.

They looked at each other with a mutual curiosity born of opposing reasons: Pietro had heard about her, while she knew nothing about him. Then, never taking his eyes from her, Pietro said to Alessandro, “Will you explain it to me, now?”

It was a lovely, late afternoon and there were people outside their houses as the trio made their way down the street to the church. They stared at the two men: although they knew one of them, both were rather singular, not only in their garb but also in their demeanor, and once they had gone by, some people stood up, the better to follow them, thoughtfully, with their gaze. Then Clara played, and Pietro understood the reason for the long road that had brought him from Rome to these steep and godforsaken escarpments of the Sasso. Just as she was playing the final note, he felt a dizziness of prodigious intensity that left him reeling before it burst into a spray of images, only to vanish again almost at once—but the last image remained etched on his mind long after he left the village, and he looked respectfully at the frail child thanks to whom the miracle of this rebirth had come about: superimposed on her face was the face of a woman, laughing in the chiaroscuro of a forgotten garden.

 

She played until nightfall. Then a great silence cloaked the vaults of the church where a shipwrecked piano had come to her in the summer of her eleventh birthday. You see, this is a tale, of course, but it is also the truth. Who can unravel these things? Not anyone, in any case, who heard the story of the little girl found in a isolated village in Abruzzo between a country priest and his ignorant old housekeeper. All we know is that her name was Clara Centi and that the story did not end there: Pietro did not go all that way to hear an untamed little girl play the piano, only to leave again for Rome as if nothing had happened. Therefore, we will say one more thing before we follow them to the big city, where some are now preparing for war; we will repeat what that same Pietro said to Clara in the privacy of the church after she had played the last score: