The Watercolourist (46 page)

‘So, basically, I have to leave with a burden – a debt to you. That’s not light luggage, you know.’ Innes’s voice is sarcastic but his tone is serious.

‘Not even all my money can make good what I am contracting with you today.’

‘So handle your fortune with caution, because we will need it. Goodbye . . . and thank you.’

She hears footsteps on the stairs. Outside there is silence. And then she hears Young Count Bernocchi walk back down the gravel path, slowly and heavily. Not young any more.

It is a torment to say goodbye. Things go unsaid, the grief is challenging, blessings and smiles and questions are uttered and hinted at. Don Titta embraces Innes tightly and
gasps with emotion. Donna Clara’s eyes are glassy and almost frightening. Nanny, with tears in her own eyes, whispers, ‘In the end you managed to take him from me.’ Minna stands
shyly behind everyone. She holds a silk kerchief with a handful of coins in it under her apron. The others are awkwardly absent. They won’t have understood. What will they choose to believe?
Bianca no longer cares.

Soon after they have said their goodbyes and just before departing she turns to Innes, won over by a crumb of her old curiosity, which lifts her spirits.

‘What did Bernocchi want from you?’

‘He wanted to commend me his soul. Not his own, of course. And anyway, since I am no priest, I suggested that he look elsewhere.’

‘And what about the money? He did offer you money, didn’t he?’

‘Bianca, you are incorrigible. Let’s say that it was his modest contribution towards the creation of a better world. It was just a start. The rest of it will come a little at a time,
once we settle down. No, he hasn’t converted to our cause; he likes his world the way it is. It was an act of contrition, late but well timed. I doubt that he could ever consciously be
generous: he would find it too banal. He feels only slight regret.’

Bianca stares at him without understanding.

‘Enough with the secrets,’ Innes says clearly. ‘The money is for Pia.’

A spark flares in Bianca’s mind. Is it possible? Is young Pia pregnant, too? That’s why Pia had understood. If only she had been more vigilant, wiser, more careful. Bianca’s
expression must reveal her thoughts, because Innes is staring at her, perplexed. He shakes his head.

‘No, Bianca. No, no. What on earth did you think? Pia is Bernocchi’s daughter.’

So she is
his
daughter. The truth hangs like an empty nest in the bare branches of a tree in winter. It has been there all along, well hidden, but there.
You didn’t see
it
, she thinks.
That possibility didn’t even exist to you.
But when finally it comes forth in its naked simplicity, she recognizes it, nods, and accepts it. It is no less true
because she hasn’t thought of it. She leaves the fact suspended there, austere and pure. And everything goes back to its place.
Pomo pero, dime’l vero. Dime la santa
verità.
(Apple-pear, tell me the truth. Tell me the blessed truth.)

‘You really didn’t know?’

It is all so simple in the end. All she needed to do was look at things with the right perspective, without letting herself be blinded by the light of misunderstanding. Don Titta could never
have been an unknowing father, or even worse, a knowing accomplice. Don Titta is a man who honours his children, although perhaps a little more in death than in life.

Innes looks at her indulgently and with mild surprise. She hopes he cannot read her mind. She has been so silly. She has been stupid. She has no defences now and carries the burden of
nobody’s child.

‘For what it’s worth . . .’ Innes says, and then turning around, he asks, ‘You are in agreement, aren’t you, Pia?’

She comes towards them from the kitchen with two heavy baskets of provisions for the first leg of their trip: fruit, biscuits, cordial. Without knowing what they have been discussing, the girl
smiles at them. Innes takes her burden and she curtseys her thanks.

Of course Pia is in agreement. All that has happened before means nothing, even if it has led to her being there now. She might never have been born. She might have been sent back to where she
came from when she was still an infant. She could have remained entangled with her destiny as a servant. She’d be lining up with the rest of her peers for that sad and indifferent goodbye,
and then she’d have to hurry back to her poorhouse duties. Instead Pia now stands on the right side of the wall. She climbs in, situates herself in the corner, fixes the folds of her skirt,
and waves her hand out the window even before leaning out to show her face to whoever wishes to remember it. It is as if she has rehearsed this act of liberation thousands of times. She is going
out into the world and the world is ready to unfurl before her. This is only the first act. Pia is going to London. She, who has never been anywhere, is going to London. So everything truly is
possible after all.

Everything
is
possible, including dying in an ice storm in the Alps, the coach tipping over on one side, like a ship on a wave, the wind whistling by them, the wheels
barely making it through the two feet of snow, the cold scratching deep into the dark cabin. Snow in summertime is far worse than in winter because it is unexpected.

They could be caught by a band of French highwaymen in their capes and cone-shaped hats, grim characters who come down from the mountains with their rifles to impose a harsh sentence in the name
of black hunger. They could be chased and finally captured by the Austrian forces, the kind that shows no compassion, and sent to Spielberg.

Everything is possible. But nothing happens. These three beings have already been part of a storm; they have already confronted and defeated their own bandits, let themselves be manipulated by
suspicion, ill will, and hearsay. The trip is as smooth as the crossing of multiple borders can be, with exhausting interactions at customs, exchanges of documents and money; with the lice in the
cold inns, the greasy food and greasy bowls; with drunkards’ songs that sound the same in all dialects. The late-summer rain diligently beats its meek song down on the rooftop of their
carriage; they see the occasional comrade whose eyes are sharp and who wants to peer in. Outside, postcard images roll by, postcards no one cares to write. There are damp rice plains, solid
mountains and pure blue skies. There is France, with its damp haystacks and fairy-tale castles surrounded by woods of marzipan.

Bianca has been sleeping through a great deal of the journey. She blames it on travelling sickness, but is seized by a strange sort of lethargy. Her body has advised her to rest because she
knows that later on the creature will steal her sleep away. Therefore, in the final scenes of this story – or of this episode at least – we shan’t look at the world as we would
normally, over her shoulder, trying to make sense of things through her eyes. No, Bianca’s eyes shall remain shut in an imitation of rest that absolves her from the effort of paying
attention. Ultimately, it is better that she does not look outside. Otherwise her memory might tease her into remembering that she has seen these lands before with an unnameable, now-departed
companion, and she would feel sadness, great sadness. In recompense, she now has a different companion inside her, an unknown parasite who has turned her life upside down. She doesn’t know
where she is going. Or rather, she knows but doesn’t want to imagine it. She will have all the time in the world soon, and more. Is it any wonder that she avoids looking out at the landscape?
This journey isn’t one of pleasure. It is necessary. Let’s leave her to rest, or pretend to sleep, and let’s move quietly away so that we can obtain that tiny bit of perspective
that changes everything.

At last, the moment arrives. As if in a dirty dream, the dusty profile of a thousand rooftops and a million chimneys appears outside the sweat-glazed windows of their final coach ride.

‘Is this London?’ Pia asks, with a dazed look.

‘This is London,’ Innes replies without even looking out of the window.

It feels to him like the trip has been far too short. He will never go back. He can’t. It is only a small consolation to know that he is now safe. He didn’t even go to Rome. He would
have liked to die in Rome. Not deliriously lost, like Keats. He’s had his fill of poets. No, he wishes he had become the head of a group of intrepid, uniformless men, out waving a flag that
has yet to be imagined. It is still early days, though; he needs to be satisfied with being alive and elsewhere.

‘Where are we going now?’ asks Pia.

‘Home,’ Innes says.

Pia draws closer to the window.

He thinks back to what he has left: a locked door, a few things, things he can’t have and can’t be, now or ever. He looks over at Bianca, who is as pale and parched as a flower that
has been without water for too long. She is alive, though. Alive for herself and for the unnamed creature. Pia’s not even pretending to be tired. Her eyes shine with the future. A young
woman, a girl, and an unborn baby – for the first time Innes feels old. The three of them need him. And he, a new kind of man, will always be there for them.

The Watercolourist
was inspired by voices and places, by the voices that places own. Places are characters. First of all, the garden at Villa Manzoni in Brusuglio,
near Milan. As the plaque at the front gate indicates, this was the summer residence of Alessandro Manzoni: writer, poet and statesman. The novelist of Italian literature. The villa was a place of
leisurely activities and bucolic interests, where the writer grew cotton, planted rare grape cultivars that he ordered from afar, attempted to make wine, took an interest in silkworms, tended to
exotic plants, and christened his favourite catalpa tree ‘Hippopotamus’, due to its enormous size. It is a fascinating place for children, who have always wished to trespass, to climb
the wall and enter that charming park, as vast and as obscure as a jungle.

The Watercolourist
was also inspired by a town house: Casa Manzoni, on Via Morone in Milan, the winter home of Alessandro Manzoni. Here, people skilled in the art of conversation
gathered to discuss the future: whether it was the Great Novel that Manzoni was working on, or the Republic of Italy, a daring idea which was taking shape at that time.

A third inspiration came from the city of Milan, and in particular those neighbourhoods where so little has changed that it is easy to imagine what life was like two hundred years ago. A city of
brick that was transformed into a city of marble; a ‘city of contradictions’, as the keen traveller Lady Sydney Morgan once described it.

Fifteen years ago, while working on a children’s book project about foster parents, I had the chance to visit the historical archives of the Brefotrofio, the former orphanage of Milan.
There, inside those large sliding shelves, surrounded by the smell of metal, moisture and dust, rest the traces of many lives, summarized in the dry language of bureaucracy. Everything had its
origin there: the church documents that attest to a state of poverty, which in turn justified the need to resort to institutions; the requests and promises of parents (‘that she may be named
Luigia’, ‘we are giving her up out of poverty; I beg your kindness; we will come back and get her’); and especially the tokens and keepsakes – medals and medallions, little
images cut in half, embroidered pillows, crucifixes, anything that would allow the parents to deposit and reclaim their children in months or years, and always under the mask of anonymity.
Sometimes, when the parents were finally ready, it was too late. The children might have died as infants of smallpox or infection, or from an epidemic or ailment in the distant homes of those who
raised them. The antique pages of those ledgers are misshapen and deformed by the objects they contain; they press at the pages as if struggling to tell their own stories.

It was a place where one didn’t want to be alone. Both Pia and Minna’s stories started there.

It took me about ten years to pull the stories together, to let them breathe, to find a way to cut, paste and sew them, and to understand how they could become a work of fiction. Everything
finally clicked in place thanks to Bianca Pietra. Twenty years old at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Bianca is the true creator of the story, which takes shape in her hands; literally, as
she is the watercolourist.