pleasure.
“Bach! A stiff-necked Protestant bigot, prolific as a battery rabbit, who was lucky enough to catch one dead-boring refrain floating around in the
Zeitgeist
and then sanctified it by sticking it full of praise the Lord in the highest, amen!” she declaims, drawing a wide and final sign of the cross in the air.
“What about Wagner?”
“Music for the deaf. Hit the vibrations hard enough, and even the deaf will get the gist.”
“What about Mozart?”
“An incontinent two-timer with delusions of erotic omnipotence. Wrote music for the serial seduction of schoolgirls. Save the ‘Requiem’: the ‘Requiem’ alone is worth the whole insipid life of that powdered coxcomb – the rest can be forgiven. Perhaps, right on life’s threshold, the God of secret designs gave him a glimpse of the abyss he was about to plummet into and allowed him to transcribe one small glimmer for our warning and edification.”
And she stretches her arms in front of her to protect me from that wrathful gaze whose mere mention seems to scare her too.
I adored my evening conversations with Aunt Erminia: the vertigo I derived from familiarity with that perfect body held me high in a sort of free zone where everything was permitted – even forgetting one’s own ugliness.
“We must renew the whole house,” she says over breakfast onemorning, her glossy black hair dark as a moonless night against her bright green dressing gown.
“Things carry the stories they have lived through, and we need space for new stories in here.”
No-one answers. Maddalena places the bread basket on the sideboard with a heavy thump as she stares at my father from behind Aunt Erminia’s back.
“We could start with the colours: they’re too faint. It feels like living inside a box of stale candy. In the long run, colours like these make people weak,” she says undaunted, her hands miming a jittery shake.
What happened to me at that moment was like what we sometimes live through in nightmares, when we want to speak and are unable to: the mouth gapes in the painful physical effort to utter a sound, the eyes open wide as if staring straight at some terrible danger. But I could say nothing, and felt myself suffocating from a violent contraction inside my throat.
All I wanted was to speak and say that those colours were my colours too, that nothing in the world would induce me to part with the yellow of my bedroom or the sky-blue of the curtains in the salon, the walls in the hall, the kitchen fixtures. Those colours belonged to me more than my name that no-one ever used: they wrapped themselves around me, enfolding me whenever I moved from one room to the other or fell asleep at night. They were the colours my mother had chosen and not changed after my birth. They were the thread of continuity leading back to her own dreams, they were what she was before I was born. But these were not conscious thoughts for me – only a hard knot stopping my breath.
“I don’t think so,” my father says very quietly. “I really don’t think so,” he repeats in a louder voice as Aunt Erminia stalks out, shaking her shoulders as if to shrug off some noisome weight.
After Aunt Erminia stopped giving me piano lessons, I began to compose my own music. I only did it when she was not around, and often in the presence of Lucilla, who came to visit in the afternoon and knew how to bring out my playful mood.
“Imagine you’re at the Teatro Olimpico,” she says, intoning her words like a hypnotist. “That’s right. Or better still, at the Arena, in Verona. Can you imagine?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been there.”
“Oh my God, then you must-ab-so-lu-tely come with us next time we go. I’ve been a-ny-num-ber of times! My mother takes me every summer, for the opera, you know, the shows – and also if she’s got something serious to make up for. Anyway, imagine an amphitheatre like the Romans’: it’s e-nor-mous, very dark and
“Bach! A stiff-necked Protestant bigot, prolific as a battery rabbit, who was lucky enough to catch one dead-boring refrain floating around in the
Zeitgeist
and then sanctified it by sticking it full of praise the Lord in the highest, amen!” she declaims, drawing a wide and final sign of the cross in the air.
“What about Wagner?”
“Music for the deaf. Hit the vibrations hard enough, and even the deaf will get the gist.”
“What about Mozart?”
“An incontinent two-timer with delusions of erotic omnipotence. Wrote music for the serial seduction of schoolgirls. Save the ‘Requiem’: the ‘Requiem’ alone is worth the whole insipid life of that powdered coxcomb – the rest can be forgiven. Perhaps, right on life’s threshold, the God of secret designs gave him a glimpse of the abyss he was about to plummet into and allowed him to transcribe one small glimmer for our warning and edification.”
And she stretches her arms in front of her to protect me from that wrathful gaze whose mere mention seems to scare her too.
I adored my evening conversations with Aunt Erminia: the vertigo I derived from familiarity with that perfect body held me high in a sort of free zone where everything was permitted – even forgetting one’s own ugliness.
“We must renew the whole house,” she says over breakfast onemorning, her glossy black hair dark as a moonless night against her bright green dressing gown.
“Things carry the stories they have lived through, and we need space for new stories in here.”
No-one answers. Maddalena places the bread basket on the sideboard with a heavy thump as she stares at my father from behind Aunt Erminia’s back.
“We could start with the colours: they’re too faint. It feels like living inside a box of stale candy. In the long run, colours like these make people weak,” she says undaunted, her hands miming a jittery shake.
What happened to me at that moment was like what we sometimes live through in nightmares, when we want to speak and are unable to: the mouth gapes in the painful physical effort to utter a sound, the eyes open wide as if staring straight at some terrible danger. But I could say nothing, and felt myself suffocating from a violent contraction inside my throat.
All I wanted was to speak and say that those colours were my colours too, that nothing in the world would induce me to part with the yellow of my bedroom or the sky-blue of the curtains in the salon, the walls in the hall, the kitchen fixtures. Those colours belonged to me more than my name that no-one ever used: they wrapped themselves around me, enfolding me whenever I moved from one room to the other or fell asleep at night. They were the colours my mother had chosen and not changed after my birth. They were the thread of continuity leading back to her own dreams, they were what she was before I was born. But these were not conscious thoughts for me – only a hard knot stopping my breath.
“I don’t think so,” my father says very quietly. “I really don’t think so,” he repeats in a louder voice as Aunt Erminia stalks out, shaking her shoulders as if to shrug off some noisome weight.
After Aunt Erminia stopped giving me piano lessons, I began to compose my own music. I only did it when she was not around, and often in the presence of Lucilla, who came to visit in the afternoon and knew how to bring out my playful mood.
“Imagine you’re at the Teatro Olimpico,” she says, intoning her words like a hypnotist. “That’s right. Or better still, at the Arena, in Verona. Can you imagine?”
“I don’t know, I’ve never been there.”
“Oh my God, then you must-ab-so-lu-tely come with us next time we go. I’ve been a-ny-num-ber of times! My mother takes me every summer, for the opera, you know, the shows – and also if she’s got something serious to make up for. Anyway, imagine an amphitheatre like the Romans’: it’s e-nor-mous, very dark and
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