Her destination was to her left, but she didn’t glance that way, preferring as always to proceed by indirection. She walked along the gravel path winding beneath the tall sycamores and holm oaks, nodding in a familiar, slightly bored manner to the mould-stained bust on its plinth, as one did to a servant, before moving on towards the pond where obese carp glided past below the screen of water lilies.
Ahead of her now was the line of cypresses that she had planted to prevent the garden being overlooked from the new apartment block beyond. They were ugly beasts, but had grown out fast over the years, just as the nurseryman had promised, shooting up and filling in so as to completely conceal the high wall that she had insisted that the developers build to seal off her remaining parcel of property. Such had been her idea, and it had worked perfectly. The line of trees served its purpose, but in another sense it didn’t really exist at all, any more than the backdrop at the theatre that everyone is aware of but which no one looks at. What counted was what lay in front of it, not the painted curtain or the strident barricade of bare concrete behind. Only the stage mattered, and that was set, lit and glowing with atmosphere.
Now it was time to turn back, crossing the grassy sward to reach another path strewn with a thin layer of blackened gravel. The two branches had originally met, further up the property, and had led to the double glass doors of the villa which gave out on to the garden. Her destination was in sight now, but she still didn’t look at it, keeping her eyes on the ground before her or the trees above. Every step she took, each move she made, was strictly choreographed, a ritual dance. For this was sacred ground. The usual rules were suspended here, supplanted by a much more rigid set.
Once she had passed the huge elm tree that dominated this corner of the garden, it was permissible to look up and take in the miniature house with its green door and shutters. One rationale for this ritual was that she was always irrationally convinced that the house wouldn’t be there. The villa had gone, as had so many other things, and all of the people concerned. Why shouldn’t this, in many ways the most unreal of all, prove to have been just another of the false memories that her imagination was throwing up with increasing frequency these days, in its vain attempts to explain the inexplicable?
She got the key out of her pocket with her right hand, then transferred it to her left. This too was part of the ritual, for when the little house had magically appeared, on her seventh birthday, she had been mancina. It had taken a lot of time, and much pain, for her parents and teachers to cure her of her perverse left-handedness, with its implication of being one of the sinister, of having been touched by the Adversary.
But her parents had also given her this house, perhaps in part as recompense. Many of her memories might have been falsified, but not those of that birthday. The work had been done secretly, over the winter, and her parents had played their part to the hilt. When the day came, they had tied a length of muslin across her eyes and then led her down the garden of the villa amid a banter of jokes and teasing phrases, before placing her just right and then removing the blindfold. And she literally had not been able to believe her eyes. Nothing in the rest of her life — not even Leonardo — had been as magical and as sweet as that moment.
As the front door creaked open, the odours leapt up and assailed her. She stooped to pass under the lintel, then straightened up as much as she could, her hair brushing against the ceiling. The first time she had taken him there, Leonardo had immediately banged his head on a beam and fallen against her, perhaps in surprise. They were wearing only their swimming costumes, and both had laughed excessively at this bizarre accident befalling two adults in a house made for a child. A light sprinkle of plaster dust had coated Claudia’s bare shoulders and the upper slopes of her breasts. Leonardo had solicitously brushed it away, with many apologies for his clumsiness.
Against the wall to her left, between the windows, hung a blank banner of black satin. Her mother had not permitted mirrors in the family apartment in Verona, except in the bathroom, claiming in her sometimes slightly creepy Sudtirolisch way that they stole your soul. But in the case of Claudia’s playhouse her father had prevailed, arguing that it would make the main room seem lighter and bigger. After Leonardo’s death, she had not been able to bring herself to remove or destroy this mirror which had witnessed so much, but neither could she bear to meet its implacable gaze, so she had covered it over with a layer of cloth.
Below it stood a tiny dresser, a perfectly proportioned miniature replica of the one in the living room of the apartment, and indeed by the same manufacturer. She opened the cupboard and retrieved one of the bottles of Cinzano Rosso she kept stacked there, then took a glass from the shelf above. The sweet red liquid, tinged with bitterness at the edges, flowed down her throat and brought a summery glow to her body. The light glowing through the squat four-paned windows was thin and weak, but with the help of the alcohol it created the right effect. The angle of the sun around the equinox was of course identical at either end of the year, but autumn had all the momentum of summer behind it, while winter’s exhaustion held spring back.
Now she moved across the room, past the fireplace, the table and chairs, and the pretend stove on which she had lovingly cooked pretend meals for her dolls. The door at the end led to the bedroom where she had taken a nap after lunch every summer day as a child. The rules had been clear. Nights had to be spent in her room at the villa, but this house was hers during the day. Her parents were not permitted to intrude, although Claudia had contrived to invite some of her schoolfriends. She had made the most of that privacy and freedom then, and even more later.
She closed the door behind her and hung her coat on the peg behind it, despite the fact that the lower half trailed on the tiled floor, then lay down in a foetal crouch on the tiny wooden bed. The pillow absorbed her head and released its own hoarded scents in return. This bedding had never been washed since the first time that she and Leonardo had lain there. She could still smell the hair lotion he had used, and more, the very scent of him. Curiously, her own she could not distinguish, although it must profusely have been there.
But how had it all begun?
Her glib memories, when she consulted them, tended to unreel the affair like a film or a play, where every action and phrase is foreknown and inevitable, but they were false. It hadn’t been like that. It couldn’t have been. On the contrary, not the least of the thrills involved had been that they were both finding their way all the time, each of them anticipating an excruciatingly embarrassing rebuff at any moment.
The very fact that Leonardo had come out from his barracks in Verona to the villa, one weekend when he must have known that Gaetano was away at a NATO conference in Brussels, ‘in order to return some books on military history that Colonel Comai was kind enough to lend me’, incurred a slight risk in itself.
Claudia had received him on the patio behind the villa. She had been swimming in the small pool that had now been buried beneath the concrete parking lot of the new apartment block, and was wearing her bikini with a towelling robe over it. It was an August afternoon, a still, massy heat that threatened thunder.
He had apologized profusely for disturbing her and kept rather distractedly insisting that he should leave at once. Claudia had invited him to stay for tea, and had succeeded in making him feel that it would be impolite to refuse. She had then removed the towelling robe, with the excuse that it felt clammy, and clad only in the bikini had basked in the sun for some time, prompting the tongue-tied young lieutenant with a series of questions about his family, background and aspirations. She had not looked at him, but had felt very strongly his eyes upon her. When tea was brought, she had slipped back up to her room in the villa and returned wearing a silk wrap that she allowed to fall open from time to time, particularly when she leaned forward to pour the tea. When he finally left, she had told him that he was most welcome to return at any suitable time.