there scornfully disregarding the wild imaginings of that elf from an obscure house. So he was not the least bit interested in Maria, and the little girl was able to stay for another year in the village, carefully watched over by Nanzen and, before long, by Clara.
Clara, the orphan of genius. In the Abruzzo, a piano had come to meet her the summer before she turned eleven, bequeathed to Father Centi by an old aunt in L’Aquila, and brought to the presbytery by Sandro. They set it up in the church and sent for the piano tuner at the beginning of July. The first notes played on the untuned keys sounded to Clara like a sharpened knife, a luxurious swoon; one hour later, she knew how to play and Sandro was giving her musical scores which she executed to perfection, never making a single mistake, and with a technique that caused the mountain wind to blow through the church.
Sandro Centi had been living with his aunt in L’Aquila for nine years. All that remained of his extravagant youth in Rome were painful memories that still woke him at night, to crucify him, heart pounding, on a cross of regret. His entire life had been one of doomed, tragic love affairs and dissatisfaction with his art. He’d been a great painter, but he burned his canvases and stopped painting forever. He’d been madly in love with a woman, and prized friendship as a sacrament, but the woman had died and he turned his back on all his friends in Rome. However, after the episode in the church, he had a messenger take a letter to Rome for him and, at the beginning of August a tall, rather bent man came to the door of the presbytery. His name was Pietro Volpe, he was the son of Roberto Volpe and an art dealer like his father. He was a friend of the Maestro, who had married his sister Leonora, and he had gone through life tortured by the hatred he felt for his late father. He had come all the way from Rome at Sandro’s request; he had once helped Sandro build his career, and he loved him like a brother. Clara was asked to play for him on the fateful piano and, the next day, Pietro left for Rome again, with the virtuoso orphan in tow.
Rome, loathsome city. Clara was inconsolable over the loss of her mountains, and now she studied music with the Maestro, who had taken her on as his student as if he didn’t know her. Every day, he told her to listen to the stories that were hidden in each score; every day she found it harder to grasp what he expected of her. At the Villa Acciavatti, she saw Sandro, Pietro, and Leonora, the first woman she had ever loved. The rest of the time she was shadowed by a bizarre chaperone called Petrus, who didn’t seem terribly in the know about things, and was invariably to be found sleeping off the previous night’s wine in a comfortable armchair.
She studied, relentlessly.
The Maestro asked her questions which induced her to describe the wooded countryside or the plains of poplars she had seen in visions while playing, because these landscapes were engraved upon the composer’s heart and memory—until, one day, the music opened a path to Maria in faraway Burgundy and, very quickly, she learned to see her, simply by thinking, and to follow every one of her movements, effortlessly. Her magical gaze embraced Maria’s companions at the farm, and she grew fond of Eugénie, Marguerite’s daughter, but also of André, Jean-René’s son and Maria’s adoptive father and, finally, of the village priest, who was as different from her own priest as an oak is from a hazel tree.
It was now clear that the two children were miraculous, not only because of the circumstances of their birth, but also because of their own genius. Although elves lose their animal essences on human earth, when they are in the proximity of Maria they appear in all their triplicate splendor. As for Clara, she could see space and beings from a distance, and exercised her father’s powers of vision and prescience from outside the pavilion at Nanzen. The facts could not be denied: on human earth the little girls created enclaves where the physical laws of the mists held sway.
A year went by, deceptive strides of peace.
We are now two years from the start of the war.
January came, colder than