The Garden of Letters (8 page)

Portofino, Italy

O
CTOBER
1943

In his house, Angelo now has yet another stranger. He picks up one of his books while Elodie’s in the bath and begins to read, hoping to find a comfort there. Looking at the novel, he knows that when he learns her story, it will be more complex, more heartbreaking than what is on the pages between his hands.

While she bathes, he takes the opportunity to examine the old wound to his foot. He leans over and unlaces his black shoes, rolls down his left sock, and sees the four toes and the small nub where the other one was blown off. An injury not from this war but from the one in Africa—Mussolini’s quest for Ethiopia, which took place eight years earlier. He knows what it’s like to carry hidden wounds. His is a wretched, blue stump covered by a cotton sock. At night it throbs. He feels the nerves of the toe that is no longer there. Like the heart, it continues to beat despite all the sadness and loss it endures.

After she has bathed and changed into clothes, Elodie returns to the room.

She sits down. Her hair is damp and she has now pinned it upward. She is all bones and angles, while his wife had been an abundance of curves.

“You like to read,” she says. It’s not said as a question, but as an observation.

“Yes, very much,” he answers.

“Will you read to me?” she asks softly.

The question startles him at first. It’s not something he had expected her to ask, but it pleases him.

He picks up the book he had just placed down and opens it. He begins to read.

The words are as much a comfort to him as to her. They fill the space with sound. These two people who know nothing about each other are now entwined in a story that has nothing to do with either of them.

His voice, his inflection, even his pauses, all become a musical score.

He reads for nearly an hour, and Elodie inhales his words like air. She gets lost in Angelo’s voice, the rhythm of his speech. She does not notice that his eyes are now weary, and that he rubs them in between turning the pages. It is only when she
hears
the fatigue slipping into his voice that she looks up and realizes how tired he has grown.

“You should stop now,” she says, and as she speaks, he is struck by the first note of kindness in her voice. “It must be exhausting to read aloud for so long.”

“I don’t mind,” he tells her. “It is nice to have an audience again.”

She smiles, and a memory flashes through her mind of all the audiences she once played for. She sees the men and women in the crowd, their programs on their laps, their eyes focused on the stage. She remembers the sound of their clapping, like a distant thunder. Something from a lifetime ago.

She wishes she could tell him how much his words calm her. That they are like a verbal embrace. But she remains silent, thinking back to the last time she was read to when she was in Verona. When books were so much in abundance, Luca could spare an entire crate just for the Resistance’s cause.

The light is changing in the room where they now sit. Shadows are flickering on the white walls. The window that faces the sea shows the horizon. An ink-colored brushstroke, just hovering over the water.

She believed she would be safe in Liguria, near the Gulf of Poets, where, for years, artists and writers had escaped from the rest of the world, and in winter it was just the villagers and the sea. But Elodie has no sense of where she is.

“You have been extremely kind,” she says as she places her hands in her lap. “I will not stay too long and be a burden to you. I will try to get to one of the islands as soon as I can.”

Elba; Corsica; the islands farther west. The three boys who preceded her all said the same thing. The farther they go, the safer they think they will be. They think they can lose themselves in the sand, the blister of the sun. Angelo had helped every one of them, asking for nothing in return. There would always be another one, when the house was too empty and the silence became too loud.

Elodie turns the key again and locks the door of her new bedroom. The noise is heavy and clunking, the sound of brass against wood. She realizes Angelo will interpret this sound as fear on her part. But that is not the reason she turns the key. She does it not because she fears him, but because she doesn’t want him to know what she is carrying.

She knows he would not understand the loose pages of musical score. He would not have the ear or the breadth of musical knowledge to understand these notes on the page. Even if he could read music, he would not be able read these particular sheaves of paper like she can. To her, the hurried way the notes are written, the shakiness in parts of the handwriting tell another story. She can detect the fear in the melodies. But the amulet and the book are objects that connect her to Luca.

These are things she carries. The story of how they each came into her hand is still locked deep within the channels of her mind.

Verona, Italy

J
UNE
1943

This much is certain: After Lena chastised her for wearing the yellow dress, Elodie wouldn’t be asking to borrow her mother’s clothes again. She returned home and immediately peeled off the dress.

“I miss hearing you play,” her mother said gently. “Your father has been in agony all day. Won’t you help clear my head with something beautiful?”

At first, Elodie wanted to resist her mother’s maneuverings. She didn’t need another person directing her actions, but her frustration caused her entire body to stiffen. She knew the music would be the only thing that could pacify her.

Elodie unsnapped the case, withdrew her cello, and settled into a chair. For a second, there was a silent exchange between the girl and her instrument, the privacy upheld through a curtain of her black hair. Orsina held her breath until her daughter finally lifted her bow.

She started with the main theme from the second movement to
American
String Quartet, and did not look up once to meet her mother’s approving gaze. She played with her head to the side and her eyelids closed.

Orsina felt a sensation wash over her, as if she was moved by the current or pulled by an invisible tide. Within the poignancy of the notes, she sensed a plea for peace by the composer. She wondered if more people were exposed to beauty like this, would the fighting lessen? Would wars subside?

If only things were that simple.

She had been distracted all afternoon by the newspapers. The Allies had just bombed Sicily. She felt it in her bones: more bloodshed was to come.

She wondered if she could convince her husband to move someplace safer, perhaps to pack up the household and move back to Venice. She could not imagine the Blackshirts who had brutalized him finding their way among the canals and cloak of fog.

The time to travel from Verona to Venice was not terribly long, less than three hours by train. But since her parents’ death, Orsina had difficulty returning to a place with so many memories. But the city still pulled her, especially during moments when she felt lost.

She had buried both her parents during the flu epidemic of 1918, just two years after she had married Pietro, and when she was five months pregnant. She had returned to her native city only to bury them, her heart heavy that she was forbidden to care for them while they were still alive because of the risk to her and the baby.

Pietro had traveled with her for the funeral, although he wished she had adhered to the Italian tradition of pregnant women being forbidden to attend funerals. But since her brother had died in infancy, Orsina was an only child and felt the full weight of her responsibilities.

The stench was horrific. Every day, boats traveled from the hospital to the cemetery to deliver the dead.

The island of San Michele, the city’s ancient burial ground, was directly across from the hospital. Orsina had received letters from her father before he fell ill, detailing how the gondoliers had wrapped their faces with muslin as they were forced to ferry the dead.

The sensation of feeling like she was floating, which she felt most of her life there, had completely vanished. Now when they arrived at her childhood city, it felt like they were all suffocating. Orsina felt like she was sinking, being pushed into a cloud of blackness.

“We shouldn’t have come,” Pietro whispered to Orsina on the boat. He pulled a shawl over his wife’s shoulders and wrapped an arm around her, drawing her closer as if to shield her from the invisible, infectious disease.

“How can a daughter not bury her own parents?” she protested. Pietro shook his head. He could feel his wife trembling. Her body was rail thin except for the soft swelling of her stomach. On top of the morning sickness, the stress of being unable to see her parents, to care for them as they were dying, had taken its toll.

“I won’t abandon them to be buried by strangers in some mass grave.”

He had weakly tried to put his foot down and forbid her from coming. But the sight of her crying and pleading with him had made it impossible for him to insist. Still, he knew that the frail and the weak were even more susceptible to infection.

“We must leave the same day as the funeral” was his only demand. “I don’t care if we have to take a night train home, I will not have you sleeping there.”

She nodded, her throat too tight from choking back the tears to talk.

That afternoon, they stood by the graves. The rest of the cemetery was filled with families all silently connected in a weary haze of funeral rites.

The priest in his dark robe raised the crucifix over both graves and recited the Prayer for the Dead. Two boys hovered to the side with oversized shovels in their hands, like staffs that seemed incongruous to their childish frames.

Orsina nearly fainted as the first shovel of earth fell upon her parents’ black coffins.

On the way home, she did not stop crying.

They returned to Verona exhausted and Orsina took immediately to her bed.

For three days she slept, only waking occasionally to drink water and eat a few bits of boiled rice.

Then the fever began.

“It will be a miracle if she survives.” The doctor stood outside their bedroom, looking grave.

Pietro, already pale and exhausted with worry, became chalk white. “She will make it. The baby, too.”

“The baby?” The doctor shook his head. “Just try and care for your wife. Wash your hands. Keep your face covered. Get her to drink as much as you can.” He snapped his leather bag shut. “The rest is in God’s hands.”

For days Orsina was on fire, her black hair wet with perspiration.

Pietro lifted his wife’s head every two hours, imploring her to take even a few sips of water. Twice a day he took a moistened sugar cube and placed it between her lips.

He had never been one to seek the mercy of God, but now he hung a crucifix over their bed and lit candles at church. He begged for his wife and child to be spared.

Five days later, Orsina’s fever broke. She shot straight up in bed with her eyes suddenly alight with a completely different pain.

Pietro rushed into the room at the first sound of her cries. The linen in their bed was covered with blood.

He pulled the sheets away from her and saw her nightgown soaked in red.

She was hysterical, her hands pushing into her stomach. Her pain was excruciating.

“I’m going to get the doctor,” Pietro told her as he lifted her in his arms and brought her into the bathroom. She did not answer. She did not need him to tell her what she already knew: The river of blood that flowed out of her no longer contained any life.

Orsina survived, but they had lost the baby. The tragedy hit them both so hard they could hardly speak.

Grief washed over Orsina like a dam breaking. There had been too much death to comprehend. World War I had just come to an end, and suddenly she found herself orphaned and having lost her first child, too. She hadn’t even properly grieved for her parents, and now she struggled to come to terms with her miscarriage.

“We will try again,” Pietro said, trying to soothe her. “When you feel ready.”

She could not utter a single word, only the faintest sound. A whimper.

He looked at his violin case in the corner. The piano with its cover closed over the keyboard, the viola that rested in the corner near the window.

He had absolutely no desire to play.

That spring, he returned to Venice with Orsina to pack up her parents’ belongings and place flowers on their graves.

The hat shop had been shuttered closed. Several months were owed on the rent, but the landlord had also died in the epidemic, and his wife, a longtime admirer of Orsina’s mother’s hats, had shown them some mercy. They had to clear out the shop by May.

A girl by the name of Valentina had assisted her mother in the shop for years. She had been caring for her own mother when Orsina’s parents had fallen ill, so they hadn’t seen each other for close to a year. But now that the sickness had left the city, Valentina had returned to help Orsina pack up the shop and sell off the remaining inventory.

The women spoke little at first between themselves, though Orsina did try and express her gratitude for the help. But slowly, as the days progressed, they became closer.

“What will you do now?” Orsina had asked.

“I hope to open my own shop.”

The girl took one of Orsina’s mother’s hats and lifted it to the light.

“I will never have your mother’s vision. But she taught me how to sew. To use judgment and proportion with the materials.” She stroked a feather on one of the hats with her finger.

“I never saw an egret or ostrich feather in my life before I came to work here.”

Orsina smiled.

“My mother loved to give a little flight to all her clients.”

“Yes, she did.” Valentina smiled.

“I wish I could give you everything. But take this and consider it my mother’s blessing.”

Orsina lifted a large box filled with spools of velvet and trimmings and brimming with silk flowers and feathers.

Valentina turned scarlet, embarrassed by the gesture.

“I can’t take the feathers. They’re too expensive.”

“Yes, you can,” Orsina insisted. “Use them like my mother would have. That will make me happy.”