The lady in white became part of my life at once. School, meals and homework now were for me only interludes between visits. I would go three times each week, on the afternoons that Maestro De Lellis spent teaching at the conservatoire, to play and to listen to her. At a stroke she had replaced Lucilla, Aunt Erminia and even my mother. The little black dot in the corner of my eye turned into the white cloud of her light garments made for an everlasting summer.
My father did not know, and neither did Aunt Erminia, who often would not come back until late in the evening. Maddalena did know, but she kept the secret, albeit with much anxiety.
“What is it you do all afternoon with the old Signora? She’s not all there, and can’t play very well by now, the poor thing. Does she give you tea at least? What about Maestro De Lellis? Is he there too?”
“She’s not that old, and she plays very well sometimes. I talk to her about school, about music – and I play too, you know. I go on the days when the Maestro is at the conservatoire. And anyway, what are you scared of, Maddalena?”
“You never know what people might have in mind,” she says sharply.
In actual fact, it was Signora De Lellis who did all the talking. She told me the story of each and every one of the pictures on the wall. The one from the Concorso Busoni, the competition she had won at eighteen, which had taken her “around the world on the wings of a score”: Milan, Vienna, Berlin, Paris. And then New York. Next to it were pictures from all the concerts in that year, she standing radiant to the left of the piano, her hands open in front of her in a gesture of greeting but also of self-protection. The dress was always the same: white tulle, with a narrow waist and the skirt fanning out around her tiny, fairy-like feet.
“My parents tried to make me change it, because it would always look like the same concert in the press. But I said it brought me good luck and absolutely refused,” Signora De Lellis says as she strokes the dress in the photographs.
In New York, the dress was different: a white satin fabric sliding loosely over her body and highlighting the soft curve of her hips. Her hands too were in a different position, joined in front of her chest as if in prayer.
“I had to change my dress that time,” she says with some amusement. “I was pregnant already, and could no longer fasten the other one. Luckily my parents only realised when it was too late – or God knows what they would have forced me to do! I was under age at the time: it was a scandal. Uh! What a scandal! A ruined career, they all said. A wasted promise. It was the talk of the town, and the province, and eventually the national press. And they all wanted to know about the child’s father – to hold him to his duties, they said. His duties! What petty, office-clerk language to speak of love and life. What they really wanted was to find him and throw him into jail. Back then, it was a crime to seduce – that was the word – an under-age girl. Unless the man was rich, of course, in which case, provided he married the girl, honour was saved, or just about. Honour. My mother was so ashamed that she never set foot outside the house again, and she locked me up too.”
“Like my mother,” I say, interrupting.
“Not yet, darling, not yet. All in good time. It’s a matter of understanding whether the truth will do good or just hurt. Truth is not as necessary as priests would have us believe, you know.”
But she liked to speak. So I learnt that her mother had not died “of a broken heart”, as everyone had said, but of alcoholism. The shame she felt when her daughter became pregnant might have worsened things, but she had been drinking for a long time, at least since “marrying up” and becoming the lady of the ancient villa that dominated the city from its high position, just as its owners had. They had been notaries, in the profession for generations, calculating keepers of the hatreds that set whole families and estates crumbling. And her father had died for the same reason: he had not killed himself for love, but crashed drunkenly into the glass cabinet in the salon. It was she who had found him, already dead at the bottom of the stairs: he had fallen and bled to death while looking for help. One could certainly not speak of such an improper thing. The suicide for love was a story she had invented: she the young, romantic pianist who had just become a mother and was now suddenly orphaned, rich and free. Free to go out, to play music and to create a legend that might have her pilloried in our small town, but gave tragic stature to her concerts abroad. “The sad angel” of the keyboard. In its craving for sorrowful narratives, the town soon reversed the sequence of events, and the pianist with the melancholy touch, orphaned and then seduced and jilted, finally won its narrow provincial heart, erasing any memory of past shame.
“I returned to the New York stage two years later, with a light, brilliant Mozart programme – but even then the papers said that my interpretation revealed to the sensitive listener the sorrow at the source of my talent,” she says with amusement one day, showing me a photograph taken from the corner of the stage, in which the corolla of an almost nuptial white dress opens out around her as she bows in front of an enraptured audience.
I know I will never in my life play on a stage, and for once, treacherously, the thought stabs its way into my feelings.
“Success is like a river in spate,” the old Signora says. “It will burst into your life out of the blue, and when it’s gone, you’ll have to rebuild everything.”