The Watercolourist (7 page)

The last time she heard about world events directly was from her father. She no longer has anyone who will explain things to her. Zeno, in his letters, writes only about parties, hunting scores,
or young ladies named after flowers.

Now Don Titta frowns at his mother as if he is surprised to see her sitting there, like she is a fly on a glazed cream puff.

‘You know, the Oriental screen, the one we put in the boudoir up in the gallery,’ Donna Clara insists.

‘Indeed, it’s incredibly useful,’ her son observes drily. ‘You never know when a gust of wind will blow in and hurl you across the room like a balloon.’

‘Speaking of that, you know, I read in the
Gazzetta
that you can take a day trip by hot-air balloon from Morimondo now. You just need to book in advance.’

‘It’s not for me,’ Donna Julie chimes in. ‘I’m not going all the way up there. I’m too scared. If man were born to fly, our Lord would have designed us with
wings like birds.’

‘And a beak to peck with,’ little Pietro interjects. Out of place and largely ignored, he chuckles to himself.

‘To fly . . . what a dream,’ Innes adds. ‘We have no idea what feats man is capable of. This is the mystery and the miracle of science, is it not?’

‘I prefer poetry,’ observes Donna Clara. ‘And not just because it provides us with food on our plates and a roof over our head. I’ve always admired it.’ Placing a
hand on her heart, she starts to recite:

‘How lovely, Mother dear,’ Don Titta says with a sigh, tossing his napkin onto the table in an act of surrender. ‘Balls, screens and musty rhymes . . . I can’t take this
any longer.’

‘Well, taste is taste. Poetry doesn’t have to make us laugh, now, does it?’ objects Donna Clara.

‘Ask our Tommaso what he thinks of poetry when he arrives.’

Donna Clara can’t resist the urge to get in the last word.

‘Wonderful idea, my dear son. I will ask our Tommaso. That boy needs to have his head examined. You know, you are setting a terrible example for young people who aspire to an artistic
life.
You
were good enough to succeed, but art is not meant for all. Let’s just say that not all buns come out perfect.’

‘Interesting. First I am told I am an artist and now I’m a pastry chef.’

‘Well, what difference does it make? You knead with words, you knead with flour. People are as greedy for verses as they are for cream puffs. Luckily!’

Titta and Innes laugh heartily. Donna Clara looks around proudly, to see the impact of her witty remark. Donna Julie and Bianca only smile weakly. To Bianca, the thought of poetry being bought
and sold like pastries – verses on a platter to be picked up with two fingers and eaten – disturbs her profoundly. It seems out of place and hateful, and she wonders why Don Titta is
laughing.

‘Our Tommaso’ arrives to stay. Tommaso Reda is also a poet. His family wanted him to read law, but he was against the idea and felt summoned to a higher calling.
Somewhat of a dreamer, he had even been locked up in prison for several nights on account of his erratic behaviour. Finally, Don Titta offered the boy help – and shelter too – something
which angered Tommaso’s father. Donna Clara explains all of this to Bianca without hiding her disapproval.

‘It’s not like his poems are as good as my son’s. In my opinion, he doesn’t even have a voice,’ she says, stressing her words. ‘He’s just a figurine, a
gros garçon
used to having anything and everything. And Titta, God bless him, took him in like a stray cat only because he pities him. But this isn’t a hotel. Not at
all.’

Why the younger poet evokes such compassion in the master escapes Bianca. He is a young man of medium height, elegant and intense, with a worried look in his deep, dark eyes that contrasts with
a cockiness stemming from the privileged status into which he has been born. He wanders indifferently about the home in which he is a guest. He has been coming here ever since he was a child, knows
the estate inside and out, and everyone knows him. He eats little and drinks a great deal. He sleeps until late and his candle is the last to go out at night. This moderately excessive lifestyle
blesses him with a feverish air and a pallor suited to the role he has chosen for himself. Bianca cannot decide if she likes him or not.

‘Nature really does provide us with the most delicious things,’ comments Donna Clara at the table one day. Her son nods in agreement as he enjoys the last glossy grains of rice from
his plate.

‘And the most beautiful,’ adds Bianca impulsively.

‘You are absolutely right,’ Donna Julie agrees, looking over at her children all seated in a row.

But Bianca meant something else. She looks out of the French window again and admires the imperfect contours of the poplar trees, their tips like brushes painting the deep blue sky.

Don Titta leans forward.

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and art is the attempt to imitate the inimitable. There’s something frustrating about that, isn’t there? I obviously speak for myself, Miss Bianca.
Perhaps it comes easily to you?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she answers, her mind returning to the table. ‘My aim is more one of interpretation.’

‘Which inevitably means transformation,’ he remarks.

Bianca purses her lips into a smile.

‘Perhaps. But that doesn’t worry me. Mine is purely an attempt.’

‘The advantage is that no poppy or anemone will complain about their portrait not looking like them. Or rather, I should say that
I’ve
never heard them complain,’
Tommaso intervenes, smiling coyly. Bianca ignores him. ‘But, who knows? Maybe they do complain,’ he says, pursuing the fantasy.

‘What? You think flowers can speak?’ intervenes Giulietta, the only child to have followed the conversation, with all the attention possessed of a nine-year-old.

Enrico and Pietro chuckle.

‘And you can hear them,’ Enrico says, making a circular gesture with his index finger near his temple.

‘I’m not crazy,’ retorts Giulietta, offended, ‘but I do listen!’

‘And you’re right to do so. Of course flowers can speak,’ intervenes Bianca. ‘But they have such tiny, soft voices that all the other noises drown them out. They are
born, they live, and they die; why shouldn’t they be able to speak?’

‘This conversation is nonsense,’ says Donna Clara, who has a fondness for eccentricities but only those she champions. ‘Have you ever considered painting children’s
portraits rather than likenesses of flowers? There’s a business in that.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ intervenes Tommaso, ‘given that everyone is convinced that their child is the most beautiful in the world. Surely you would find clients in Milan. Rich men who
marry beautiful women in order to breed well. Men who don’t always get it right the first time, but try and try again . . .’

‘We can help you, if you’d like,’ Donna Clara adds, not picking up the irony of Tommaso’s comment. ‘We know people, I mean.’

‘No, that is not my profession,’ Bianca says firmly.

‘But you are so talented,’ Donna Julie adds.

‘And, anyway, Miss Bianca,’ says Donna Clara with a laugh, ‘if, in the end, you find that painting a convincing, realistic portrait of a child is impossible, you can always
create one of your own instead.’

Her son and daughter-in-law laugh. Bianca blushes. She hates being the centre of attention but smiles nonetheless. Sly old lady. She certainly knows how to lead a conversation. It is an art that
Bianca still has not mastered, and perhaps never will. It is easy to imagine Donna Clara perfectly at ease in a Paris salon, surrounded by beautiful minds, an elegant and respectable man at her
side listening to her playful quips complacently. What sort of man was Conte Carlo, her lover? Why is there not even one portrait of him in the entire home? After all, the house was originally his.
The older woman inherited it when he died. Perhaps they are hidden away like relics in the secrecy of her private chambers, or inside the locket around her neck, shut away like prisoners within her
bosom . . .

‘Miss Bianca? Miss Bianca? Where did you disappear to?’ It is Innes. ‘Our little dreamer,’ he jokes.

‘I wasn’t dreaming. I was just thinking. Is it not allowed?’ she answers, thrown by his intimate manner.

‘If it takes you away from us, then no, my dear, it isn’t. You must remain here. Propriety imposes this on us.’

Bianca looks at Innes in confusion. It’s something Donna Clara would say. She wonders whether Innes is mocking the mistress.

Don Titta intervenes.

‘Personally, I don’t mind. You are free to go where your heart and mind take you, on the condition that you will come back and join us here on earth occasionally. I
understand.’

‘Of course you do! You love to visit that secret place that Miss Bianca disappears to, isn’t that right?’ laughs Donna Julie. ‘Far away from here, from us, from our
incessant voices, the buzzing disturbance that we are.’

‘But I love my crazy bees, too, and you know it,’ he says, smiling. ‘And love has the right to disturb me whenever it feels like it.’

He said, ‘Whenever
it
feels like it.’ He should have said, ‘Whenever
I
feel like it.’ If she hadn’t heard him with her own ears
and seen how pleasant and serene he is, Bianca would never have identified this as the man who walks indifferently past his children while they call out for his attention, eager to show him their
recently finished drawings. At other times, he shuts himself in his studio for days, refusing trays of food placed at the door. He won’t even open the window of his study. Donna Clara paces
beneath it, looking up, waiting for a nod, for some sign of life. Sometimes the poet has nightmares and calls out during his sleep. She has heard him. It isn’t a dog or a local drunk, Minna
tells her. It is him.

‘He does that sometimes when he is writing,’ she says.

Bianca begins to understand why the children are always so insecure in front of him. They are stuck between shyness and the urge to reclaim his other, kinder side, the side that sends the
gardener to plough the grounds at the confines of the estate into five parcels so that each child can have their own garden. Each area is labelled with a wooden tag and the children have their own
set of miniature hoes and spades and tiny bags of seeds to plant. Don Titta is a complicated man, this much is certain. One moment he is there and the next he is gone. He isolates himself for weeks
so that he can pursue, capture and tame his muses. And then, all of a sudden, he resurfaces: a pale and serene convalescent. He becomes that other self then, the man who joyfully goes out on a limb
for everyone. The man who kneels down next to Pietro and Enrico, fascinated, as they watch a watermill churn over the brook. Who admires the girls as they dance to the rhythm of Pia’s drum,
smiling so sweetly he looks almost foolish.

If their father is either fully present or fully absent, their mother, delicate and devout Donna Julie, is a constant source of love. It bubbles up from deep inside her. Precisely because of her
uninterrupted presence, though, she runs the risk of going unnoticed. It is her daily devotion that watches over the children’s health and their metamorphoses, providing woolly sweaters,
poultices, decoctions or mush as needed. She offers them all the nurturing that they require. But the children, observes Bianca, are no longer so young that they need such doting attention. They
are at a point when they desire something else: games, friendships, stories and laughter. Kisses and hugs are excessive. They reciprocate with swift pecks on the cheek and then wriggle free, the
same way they do from unwanted scarves and sweaters. Although when Donna Clara offers herself to them, they greedily take everything they can get their hands on. They adore Innes too, like little
puppies. He is the only one who can get respect from the two boys, and the girls love him unconditionally – maybe because he is as tall as their father but not as distant; maybe because he
swings them around him as if on a wonderful carousel ride.