Chapter 3
CHAPTER 3
PARIS, 12 APRIL 1985 – TWELVE YEARS LATER
LUCREZIA
I stood on the balcony of my apartment, leaning on the wrought-iron banister and watching the sky over Paris turn lilac and pink, slowly swallowed by twilight. A grid of graceful buildings unfolded in front of me like the backdrop of a theatre. Usually I was a restless soul, always busy; it wasn’t like me, to stand in contemplation. I had work to do, but my agenda sat untouched. My thoughts were held captive by the woman I’d seen today.
The woman who was not my mother.
A whole world of yearning had opened before me again: yearning for home. And it had all happened in an instant, barely enough time for the whip of a layered skirt, the glimpse of a face turning away, the glimmer of a red plait…
The first time this happened, in the rose garden at Casalta, my life had fallen apart. This time, I wouldn’t let a figment of my imagination, a daydream or whatever it was, destroy me again. I’d accepted long ago that the trauma and pain of her death had conjured up the image of my mum that night in the rose garden. Even if it seemed so real, it was simply a product of my longing. Finally, I’d come to acknowledge that it had been so.
But now it had happened again, and doubt was worming its way into my mind once more. I knew that the red-haired woman in the crowd was not her, that my mother was dead and gone forever. But …
But oh, the shape of her body, the hue of her plait, now interspersed with silver – and those eyes, as big as Mia’s but blue, Scottish blue. All her family, she’d told us – the family she’d been estranged from and who lived like a legend in her stories – had blue eyes.
And yet, it happened before! I told myself angrily. For a while every red-haired woman you saw had to be your mother. You made a fool of yourself more than once. Nothing happened today, not really. For a split second the memory of your mother’s face was superimposed on a stranger’s, that’s all. You’re not losing your mind again. Don’t let any misgivings ambush you, tear you apart. Not again.
Memories of my mother and my sisters were held back by the wall I’d built around my heart. It had to be this way, otherwise heartache would sweep me away. But thoughts of them were always there, in the back of my mind, like the cosmic sounds that reach our Earth, but we can’t hear – inaudible, and yet pervading everything.
I was alone, but I was still a fourth of something and always would be. While I watched the first stars appear in the evening sky, I saw us four as a little constellation, impossible to break apart.
Bianca, Nora, Mia.
I whispered their names under my breath, and they rolled off my tongue, bittersweet, something much loved and lost.
‘Did you say something?’ I flinched at the sound of Claude’s voice – I’d been far away. The smell of his cigarette reached me, a habit I couldn’t stand, but he couldn’t lose.
‘No, nothing.’
‘Are you not feeling well?’
‘I’m good.’
‘Are you sure? Today at the event, you were all over the place. You were… crying .’
‘I told you, the sun made my eyes water. And the heat made me woozy.’
‘It wasn’t that hot. Or that sunny.’
I sighed. He wouldn’t let this go. I knew he cared, in his own way, but I truly didn’t know what to say.
I thought I saw my dead mother, Claude .
‘We all have our moments…’ he said.
‘I know, I’m sorry.’
‘But we have an image to maintain. I have an image. And you’re part of it. You can’t…’ he made a gesture with his hand to signify tears falling.
It was a sucker punch. Of course, Claude was always Claude. He simply had to remind me that I shouldn’t have had a meltdown thirty seconds before his event, whatever the reason.
I looked at him, and suddenly this person I’d shared my life and my bed with for the last two years, the man I lived and worked with, felt like a total stranger to me.
Likewise, the yellow buildings like dominoes on the boulevard, the rows of urban trees and lampposts – this graceful, enchanting city – was an alien place.
A red-haired woman in the crowd, a glimpse of the past, a flood of memories: and suddenly, in the space of a day, I felt like a stranger in my own life.
Or maybe this wasn’t so sudden. I read somewhere that before an earthquake, strange lights might be seen in the sky – and the letter I received from Bianca, with the invitation to our father’s wedding, had been just that, an earthquake light. Today the tremor had come.
‘It hasn’t happened before, has it? It was just a moment. Now, can we move on?’
‘You’re angry,’ Claude said and pressed what was left of the cigarette in the ashtray he kept by the window. He put his hands up. ‘I’ll let you be.’
He disappeared into the kitchen, where he invariably took refuge when things weren’t going his way. With him, I always had to keep my composure. He had no patience for frustration or negativity. He wouldn’t entertain any distraction from his pursuit of both success and life’s pleasures, and to be fair, I’d always liked it that way. Maybe it was the very reason I was with him.
My childhood had enough drama for a lifetime, and I craved his ability to be impervious to distracting emotions. The relationship between us was safe, because we kept our distance. I didn’t want to share my innermost feelings and emotions, and he didn’t really want to know either.
But there was a price to pay. It was safe, but it wasn’t intimate. We were together, and yet we weren’t close.
With a sigh of frustration I took myself to the bedroom, closed the door and fished out from my handbag the letter Bianca had sent me a month ago. I sat on the bed, the letter in my hand. Since I’d received it, I’d carried it with me everywhere I went, like a talisman; but I had never replied.
Bianca had written to me for the first few months of my exile, but she stopped abruptly, and never replied to my missives again. Her silence devastated me. None of them, none of my three sisters, ever wrote after that.
Bianca knew nothing about my life: I had no idea how she’d found my address in Paris.
My dear Lulu,
I know we haven’t spoken in a long time, but I must tell you that our father has decided to remarry. The bride’s name is Gabriella Manto.
There will be an intimate ceremony here at Casalta, in the rose garden, on Sunday, 3 March. All the details are in the invite.
I hope, more than words can say, to see you there. But if you choose not to come for the wedding, maybe you could come and see us anyway?
There’s no need to tell you how much I miss you, and how much I’ve missed you all these years, because you know that.
Your sister,
Bianca
PS Here’s an updated picture of us.
There’s no need to tell me how much she missed me? How was I supposed to know that she missed me, that they missed me, when shortly after I went away they stopped answering my letters, they never got in touch with me again, as if I was dead to them?
I scrunched up the little blue envelope that contained the invitation – I wasn’t interested in my father’s wedding. But the photograph played all the chords of my heart.
It had been taken in the courtyard of Casalta, against the fountain that rose in the middle of it. How many times I’d sunk my hands into that cool sparkling water, glittering in the sunlight – I could almost see my childish hand under the water, on the slippery stone…
My sisters stood in a line, with Nora a little apart from the others. It was a surreal experience to look at Bianca and see my face, framed by strawberry-blonde curls down to the middle of her back – my hair was more the colour of mahogany, and came to my chin. Bianca and I took after our Scottish mum, with our fair skin and freckles, while Nora and Mia looked like our father’s side, with their brown hair and dark complexions.
Nora had become the beauty of the family, I observed, tall and slender, with delicate features exalted by a boyish cut; Mia was as small as a pixie, her black hair down to her waist. She was born with eyes of different colours, one blue and one brown, and this made her look a little otherworldly.
I counted in my mind. Nora was now twenty-one and Mia was twenty, and I hadn’t seen them since they were little girls…
I never could bring myself to go back to Casalta, the place I loved to hate, only to be thrown out again by my father. I couldn’t bring myself to even see his face at all.
But there was more, more than my father’s presence, that kept me away.
My sisters had been allowed to stay there, to be brought up in their own home, while I’d been rejected and left alone. I was jealous of them; I resented them for having been the chosen ones while I was the black sheep. I knew that when I left Nora and Mia were only little, and Bianca not much older. And deep down, I also knew that it wasn’t their fault. It made my resentment ugly and unfair, but it didn’t make it go away. The silence on their part had been the nail in the coffin.
And still, Casalta was… my home .
I longed for it, and yet the darkest part of me also longed to see it disappear, destroyed with all the awful memories it carried.
‘ Lucresiah? ’ Claude’s face peeped round the door. I hadn’t had time to put the letter away, and I sat there with the piece of paper in my hand, almost guiltily, as if it’d been from a lover.
‘I’ve been insensitive. You can talk to me, you know,’ he said and shrugged his shoulders in that very French way of his. His gaze fell on the paper in my hands. Could I talk to him? Could I talk to anyone about my family? Because apart from what I’d confided in countless therapy sessions, the rest was all tangled up and unspoken.
But Claude was there, waiting for me to confide in him; he was making a gesture of reconciliation after our little spat and rejecting him again felt unfair. I tried to find the words that would tell him what was going on, but that would allow me to remain in not-too-deep waters.
‘It’s a letter from my sister. My father remarried.’
Claude came to sit on the bed beside me. ‘And that’s… good? Bad?’ He paused. ‘Of no importance?’
Option A, B or C? How could I fit the whole story and the complexity of my feelings in a little box? I imitated him, and shrugged my shoulders, too.
‘You know, you never speak about your family.’ Claude wasn’t that close to his parents and his only brother, but we still saw them once in a while. We never saw my family, so I’d had to explain to him that they weren’t in the picture, but I’d kept it vague. ‘You don’t have to, if you prefer not to…’ He took my hands in his – his palms and fingers, and the backs of his hands, bore little scars from cuts and burns. A chef’s hands. ‘But it’s quite clear that you’re not at peace. Is there anything I can do?’
Efficient as ever. Pragmatic.
‘I appreciate it, Claude. I really do. But no, thank you.’
‘Are you going to go to the wedding? I’ll come with you, if I’m free, of course. Why don’t you check my diary…?’
‘It was a month ago.’
‘Oh…’
All of a sudden, I felt my hair standing on end, as if cold fingers had just tapped on my neck and run down my spine. The air seemed static – I thought that had I been a cat, my tail would have been twice its normal size. I was sure I’d see lightning through the window at any moment…
Something was coming, but I didn’t know what.
The phone rang and I jumped, startling Claude.
He turned around and grabbed the receiver on my bedside table. ‘ Allo? ’
A suspended moment, and then – ‘It’s for you.’
I was still feeling my skin tingle when I brought the receiver to my ear.
‘This is Lucrezia Falconeri,’ I said while Claude hurried to smooth the creases on the covers where we’d sat. He needed everything to be just so, unlike my messy self.
‘ Lulu? ’
When I heard the voice at the other end of the line, and a name no one here called me by, a wave of emotion engulfed me, before I could raise all my walls up and harden my heart. My eyes filled with sudden tears, pouring out without warning. Claude gasped at seeing me unravel so suddenly, so incongruously. For the second time that day.
‘It’s… Bianca,’ the voice said.
A pause, while I tried to get my breath back.
‘I know. How did you get this number?’
My harsh words hid the storm raging inside me, a mixture of yearning and joy and anger and regret, regret, regret . My twin, the girl who was knitted with me in our mother’s womb, who slept beside me in the same cot, whose scent I’d breathed since I was born. Her breath mixed with mine on the same pillow; we spoke a secret language before we had even learned to talk.
While I was exiled and alone, she was allowed to stay home. She was able to sleep in her bed and play in our garden, to see our sisters growing. When she was sick, she was given Matilde’s soup and felt Matilde’s hand on her forehead. When she cried, our sisters or Matilde comforted her. She went to the local school with our friends and neighbours, she played in the village square, she walked the streets of home.
When Bianca missed our mum, she could go to her rose garden. Or open her wardrobe and smell our mother’s scent from her dresses, read her books, sit at her desk. She could go into her studio and gaze at her paintings, breathe in the scent of paint and turpentine that was so much a part of our childhood. She slept in the room our mother painted for her.
Bianca had the chance to see Vanni, my best friend – a friendship that had been on the cusp of turning into something else… And, as she wrote in the letters I received in the first few months of exile, she did see him.
‘Madame Aubert,’ she said in the sweet, soft voice I remembered so well. The head of the boarding school I’d been sent to, after I recuperated. ‘I know you didn’t want to be in touch again…’
Me ? She’d stopped writing. She never replied to my letters. They forgot about me! I steadied my voice. She couldn’t know how upset I was. ‘But our father remarried. I know, Bianca, I read the letter. You didn’t think I would come, did you?’
‘No. But I’m not calling about the wedding, Lulu. I’m calling to say that our father is dead.’