and how it had been the landscape of her dreams when she discovered it, and her husband, ever gentle with her, had taken her everywhere, letting her sketch and paint as she pleased.
For a while Tonio knew where they were, not far from the Contessa’s villa, but then they moved on, farther south and towards the sea, and were soon passing down a long avenue of barren poplars that lifted their thin spikes to the blue sky.
A house lay ahead, stretching its long rectangular façade straight to the right and the left, its surface variegated with weather and deep cracks, all of the ocher paint that had once covered it soft now and peeling so that here and there it fluttered like the petals of a vine. Yet it gleamed in the drenching sun, blind windows gaping dark as they neared it. And Christina, taking Tonio’s hand, led him through the open front door.
Leaves swept across the dark stones. Rustling came from the shadows as fleet little hens scurried out into the light. And the bleat of sheep could be heard rising hollow and haunting under the high ceilings, and here and there straw was thrown in stacks against painted walls, and a river the rain had made cascaded down through murals to the wreckage of old furniture.
“What house is this?” he asked her. She had wandered ahead of him, her height giving her a majesty as she lifted her skirts just above the floor, the ripples of her hair flowing down her back below her waist.
He stood still. Almost trembling he looked at this vision of ruin and it took him back, back over the years to some sunlit moment in Venice when he had stood in empty rooms such as these, his tambourine in his hand; and the music rose, rhythmic and fierce for the moment, only to die away as he shut his eyes and felt the sun on his eyelids in a melting warmth.
The air was stirring about him. He felt no sorrow, no regret. And when he opened his eyes again he saw the day cutting shafts through the windows, and the earth rising and tilting in the distance, and he felt this place like a great skeleton of a house thrown open to the rains and the breezes and the smell of green things and things growing in the earth.
She was beckoning him from the stairs.
“It’s my house,” she said as he followed her, her hand resting on his arm, “if I choose. Do you give it your blessing?” She gave him the most innocent and suddenly vulnerable look. “I can go all over Europe painting; I can do portraits everywhere, and maybe even the great church paintings of my dreams; but then I can come back, here, to this house, my home.”
He followed her up the stairs, and into a vast salon from which he could look down on the countryside below. The grass grew as high as wheat blowing away from the long gray lattice of the poplar trees. The low-hanging clouds were tinged with gold.
She was standing before him, very still, her face round and small, the cheeks so soft to look at he wanted to hold her face in both his hands.
But he felt her vitality in this moment; he had felt it keenly when only moments ago she had spoken of her dreams. And it struck him now that all around him were men and women, a great society of beings, who knew nothing of such vitality, such dreams. Guido knew, of course; Bettichino knew; all those who worked and lived for music knew. And she knew.
And it separated her from the contessas, the marchesas, from the counts, from all those exquisitely draped and ornamented humans who made up the audience that nightly cheered him and applauded him. And he felt himself on the verge of understanding her, the things she said, the things she did, the sheer force of her, and how she had always seemed so alone to him even when she was dancing years ago in those crowded rooms.
He was looking at her, staring into her darkening and troubled eyes.
And he wondered what he had thought she would be, some carnal loveliness that would give him a great lost strength? And here she stood, that shell of what she had seemed to him—mindless and beautiful and beyond reach—broken open to reveal her in her shuddering completeness. And now seeing what seemed sorrow in her face—what must