the painting and the wave withdrew, then froze. Tears were flowing down the Virgin’s cheek, water in water forming drops that caught a blurred reflection, and what was vibrating below the scene took refuge in these moving pearls.
“The pavilion is revealing the essence of the painting, its internal power of transformation,” said Solon.
They all felt their hearts beating as if at the moment of a new birth.
Tagore handed each of them a flask.
“Let us see what the gray tea can do,” he said.
When they’d all drunk, Maria and Clara looked at each other.
“First Pietro,” said Maria, “then the other battles.”
“I would like a piano,” said Clara.
A piano appeared in the room.
It was a fine student’s piano, smooth as a pebble, although it had traveled far and gone through a great deal. Clara went closer to the object that had come to meet her the summer before her eleventh birthday, and which had initiated her into the profound delight of music, taken her to Rome under Pietro’s protection, and led her to the painting which Roberto had acquired by committing murder.
When she ran her fingers over the keys, the notes made an interval that tore the silk of time and revealed a beach swept by mountain winds. You must understand who Clara Centi was, the orphan from the Abruzzo who had learned to play her piano in one hour and was acquainted with the stones of the mountain slopes the way sailors are acquainted with the stars in a black sky. The daughter of Tagore and Teresa knew the path to spaces and souls; through her music she was connected to landscapes and hearts, and this made her a ferrywoman, assembling spirits beyond their regions and their ages and, in the end, giving shape to the dreams that Maria would incarnate in the world.
The music told the story of the father and the son who had hated one another, even though one never knew why and the other would not say why. But Clara played and, through the power of the gray tea, all those present heard Roberto’s confession to his son.
Which said: the night before your birth, I killed a man who wanted to sell me the Flemish painting. When he showed it to me, something glittered, but I felt he had been sent by the devil and, on a sudden impulse, I killed him. A murderer has no right to love and I did penance by forbidding you to love me. I have no regrets, because if I hadn’t had this determination, the murder would have led to other murders. Farewell. Love your mother and your sister and live honorably.
In the end, moved by one last thought, he added:
May the fathers bear the cross
And the orphans, grace.
The piano fell quiet.
Tagore shared the vision of a great hall filled with paintings and sculptures. The art dealer was on his knees, weeping, the way one weeps in childhood, huge sobs as tears rolled down his cheeks like dewdrops and fell, with a cheerful little bounce, in keeping with the words that came to him in the hour of knowing. As mad as you are, he said, I love you and you will never know it.
Then he disappeared from the mind of the humans and elves in Nanzen.
Against the partition, the painting was changing. Again, water was flowing, erasing the scene of lamentation. The faces trembled before they were washed away by the wave and, before long, all that remained on the canvas were Mary’s tears. After a moment, when the tears had swelled to the extreme, there was only one left, a transparent, rounded setting for a new scene, hidden behind the first. Beneath the lamentation, the same elfin hand had painted a verdant, bluish landscape, with hills, cliffs by the sea, and long patches of mist. The Flemish masters are the only ones who have ever attained such perfection in the execution of scenes, which their mastery of light infuses with the glistening of the world, but in this painting, there was an additional sense of soul and beauty, given the fact it had been started in Nanzen then painted over in Amsterdam with the scene of the pietà. It had remained as it was until the conjunction of the pavilion and the gray tea brought it back to light in its dual stratification, offering the visual symbiosis of human and elfin lands and mist.
“It looks like Ireland,” said Petrus.
A strong earthquake shook the pavilion, and Tagore shared other visions.