of the story that was told elsewhere7 to return to our own story for seven long years, six of them years of war. Danger was everywhere, the enemy could spring out of nowhere. Clara had stayed behind at the Villa Acciavatti, Maria had gone to a region she immediately took to, with its vast plateau swept by raging winds and thick snowflakes.
“It is a magical land,” said Alessandro as they crossed the plateau, “a land of solitude and the mind.”
There was a farm where they could take refuge for the coming year. Clara would join them there, escorted by Pietro Volpe’s men. In his youth, the dealer’s hatred for his father had turned him into a hooligan, a young man who fought bare-fisted in the street. Now he commanded a secret militia of men more loyal and dangerous than Templars.
“What is this place called?” asked Maria.
“The Aubrac,” answered Father François.
And, looking all around him:
“It would be a good place to retire.”
Clara arrived very early in the morning. On the horizon, the hills of the Aveyron, green and gentle to the gaze, shone intermittently, brushed with dawn; a few shreds of mist drifted by; the world seemed austere and watchful.
A bird sang.
No one understands what happens in the fleeting instant of an encounter—eternity contracts into a divine vertigo, then takes a lifetime to unfold again on a human time scale. The little girls studied one another as if they were meeting for the first time. The tiny dark veins of the first battle throbbed on Maria’s face, and Clara raised her hand to touch them gently with her index finger. Then they embraced as sisters but, beyond the enchantment we feel at the sight of fraternity, there was also something else happening in those unfathomable depths which, for lack of a better name, we refer to as the life of the soul. Maria had always been a joyful, mischievous child, quick as a flash and happier than a lark. But she also knew how to feel sorrow and anger, and she wept more tears when Eugénie died than the host of adults on the farm. As for Clara, before she came from Rome, she had not smiled more than twice in ten years, any more than she had learned to feel emotion or to weep. Leonora had begun to soften her neglected heart and Petrus, in turn, had done what he could, in his shambolic way, but the little girl from Italy still lacked that which is received through the grace of a mother and father. In particular, there had been a moment during the battle when the Maestro had said to her: one day, you will go back to your community—and she had understood this as meaning, you will go back to the community of women. In a burst of empathy that had reversed the equation of her life, she had had a vision of her mother’s face, then of a long line of women singing lullabies in the evening, or screaming with pain on opening the letter from the army. This procession made her understand war, peace, love, and mourning in a way that forged a heart too long deprived of gentleness.
When Maria opened the sky above the fields of Burgundy, the little French girl became every particle of matter and every acre of nature in a sort of internal transformation that terrified her and increased her remorse over Marcel’s miraculous recovery. Clara knew all this, and she took her hand in the only way that might calm her. She looked at the little dark veins throbbing beneath Maria’s skin, and she promised to prevent anything like this ever happening again in the future. With what steel are deep friendships forged? They require pain and fervor, and perhaps, too, the revelation of lineages; in this way, a fabric with neither desire nor debt can be woven. Her compassion—because she knew the cross Maria had borne since Eugénie’s death—rounded out Clara’s character and made her a fully-fledged member of her own community, crystallizing the women’s message, which in turn opened inside her an awareness of the grandeur and poverty of the female domain. But while Maria sensed, gratefully, that Clara understood her burden, a strange transfer of personalities occurred, and the mischief and joy of her character passed to the other side of their sisterhood. Now it was often Maria who was seen wearing a face that was stern and inscrutable, while at her side Clara, released from the austerity