A Strange Country Read online

  “I trust Sandro,” said Tagore. “Teresa loves him like a brother.”

  He bursts into tears.

  “Loved him like a brother,” he says.

  Everyone is silent, sharing his sorrow.

  “I will take your daughter to Yepes,” Petrus says to Solon. “Maybe that is where fate is telling us to go.”

  In the November night, it is snowing on all the paths of fate.

  It is snowing on the steps of the church in Santo Stefano di Sessanio, on the slopes of the Gran Sasso, where the daughter of Teresa and Tagore has been left in warm swaddling clothes, while they wait for the priest to find her. A few seconds later, the priest takes the little bundle in his arms and disappears around the corner of the nave.

  It is snowing on the castillo in Yepes where, for the first time, Tagore has been able to gain entrance for Petrus, but for only a minute, alas, after the assassination of the family at the castle. The elf is about to leave for the pavilion again when suddenly it seems to him that the tiny girl is shivering. On an old chest, there is a blanket of fine cambric, and he wraps her in it with care. Then he asks the red bridge to take him to The Hollows. Before long it is cousin Angèle who, on her way to feed the rabbits, finds the tiny high-elf on the steps, looking just like every other little baby girl on earth. Petrus watches as the granny takes the bundled infant in her arms and disappears back into the farm, dries his tears mingled with snowflakes, walks for a while through the snowy countryside, then leaves again for the land where his own kind live.

  The night of snow is over, a fine dawn spreads across the heavens, and the peasants of The Hollows discover the embroidered inscription on the poor little girl’s white cambric blanket: mantendré siempre. A little girl from Spain! they all exclaim in wonder once Jeannot, the son, who was a messenger in the war and went a very long way, right to the bottom of Europe, has confirmed that it is Spanish—and so they baptize her Maria in honor of the Holy Virgin and the words on the fine Castilian linen. At that very moment, in the Abruzzo, the priest’s old servant brushes the locks of hair blonder than little springtime grasses from the infant’s brow, and marvels at the clarity of her ice-blue eyes which stare at her as if they want to eat her. Ti chiamerai Clara, she said.

  And so, Maria and Clara, the two extraordinary children, would grow up under the protection of the ordinary souls who had adopted them, and as wards of the trees and mountains in their respective lands.4 In Burgundy, the coming of the little girl embellished the seasons and caused the crops to prosper, and everyone suspected she was magic—although, deep in their Christian selves, they refused to entertain the idea. But there was a moving halo around her, and they could see she knew how to talk to the trees and the animals in the forest. She was a joyful, affectionate child, who brought happiness to the old grannies on the farm, and warmed the heart of André and Rose, her adoptive parents. They had lost their own children in infancy, and didn’t know which saint to thank for the late gift of this child who was so lovely and cheerful. In Santo Stefano, Clara spent most of her time in the kitchen with the old housekeeper, listening to her tales of the Sasso. The priest treated her like his daughter, but he was a man of little depth, for whom she felt polite indifference, and the joy she took in her mountains meant this did not matter. All day long, she ran up and down the slopes and learned the only maps that mattered to her heart, those of the stones on the paths and the stars in the broad sky. The girls grew, one darker than twilight, with brown eyes and skin of honey, the other heart-stoppingly fair, with her sky-blue gaze and complexion like hawthorn blossom—and until they turned ten, nothing noteworthy happened beyond the confirmation of their grace, so that those who loved them could sleep in peace and perform their consecrated devotions before the Lord.

  Then they turned ten, and the wheels of fate began to turn more quickly before resuming a falsely peaceful pace. In Burgundy, the villagers obtained the confirmation that the little girl was magic when a fantastic beast appeared one snowy night—that of her birthday—as they were searching for the child in the dark, for she hadn’t come back to the farm. The men found Maria on the hill in the middle of a clearing, in the company of the creature, which initially appeared to be a big white horse, then turned into a wild boar, and finally a man, and so on in a circle dance of species that left them all gasping for breath. Finally, the creature vanished before their eyes, and they went back down to the farm holding the little girl tight in their arms. Now, we know that this was Tagore, who’d come to give Maria the vision of her arrival in the village, because he thought, as did Solon and Petrus, that the powers of the children would be nourished by the knowledge they would gain from their own story as they grew up. The little girl from Spain learned that she’d been adopted and saw her special skills grow ever stronger—for talking to the animals in the fields and shelters, for discerning the pulsations and figures the trees traced in the air of her countryside, for hearing the song of the world in a symphony of energy that no human being has ever perceived, and for increasing the talents of those men and women who shared her life. The day she turned eleven, finally, another fantastic beast appeared before her in the shape of a mercurial horse combined with a hare and a gray-eyed man, whom we recognize as Solon, come in daylight for the first time to meet his daughter.

  It was on that day that proof of treason was found. The Head of the Council had been spied on, and the enemy launched an intimidating attack in the form of tornadoes and arrows of smoke. And this confirmed what we had known ever since his cursed soul had passed through the human world and he had become the leader in Rome: Aelius was in possession of the gray notebook; another pavilion and another bridge had been built; he could move back and forth between the two worlds and play with the climate as he liked. The only good thing in all this misfortune was that Aelius had never had any faith in the prophecy Petrus had unearthed in the library and, during the Council sessions, he’d always sat there scornfully disregarding the wild imaginings of that elf from an obscure house. So he was not the least bit interested in Maria, and the little girl was able to stay for another year in the village, carefully watched over by Nanzen and, before long, by Clara.

  Clara, the orphan of genius. In the Abruzzo, a piano had come to meet her the summer before she turned eleven, bequeathed to Father Centi by an old aunt in L’Aquila, and brought to the presbytery by Sandro. They set it up in the church and sent for the piano tuner at the beginning of July. The first notes played on the untuned keys sounded to Clara like a sharpened knife, a luxurious swoon; one hour later, she knew how to play and Sandro was giving her musical scores which she executed to perfection, never making a single mistake, and with a technique that caused the mountain wind to blow through the church.

  Sandro Centi had been living with his aunt in L’Aquila for nine years. All that remained of his extravagant youth in Rome were painful memories that still woke him at night, to crucify him, heart pounding, on a cross of regret. His entire life had been one of doomed, tragic love affairs and dissatisfaction with his art. He’d been a great painter, but he burned his canvases and stopped painting forever. He’d been madly in love with a woman, and prized friendship as a sacrament, but the woman had died and he turned his back on all his friends in Rome. However, after the episode in the church, he had a messenger take a letter to Rome for him and, at the beginning of August a tall, rather bent man came to the door of the presbytery. His name was Pietro Volpe, he was the son of Roberto Volpe and an art dealer like his father. He was a friend of the Maestro, who had married his sister Leonora, and he had gone through life tortured by the hatred he felt for his late father. He had come all the way from Rome at Sandro’s request; he had once helped Sandro build his career, and he loved him like a brother. Clara was asked to play for him on the fateful piano and, the next day, Pietro left for Rome again, with the virtuoso orphan in tow.

  Rome, loathsome city. Clara was inconsolable over the loss of her mountains, and now s
he studied music with the Maestro, who had taken her on as his student as if he didn’t know her. Every day, he told her to listen to the stories that were hidden in each score; every day she found it harder to grasp what he expected of her. At the Villa Acciavatti, she saw Sandro, Pietro, and Leonora, the first woman she had ever loved. The rest of the time she was shadowed by a bizarre chaperone called Petrus, who didn’t seem terribly in the know about things, and was invariably to be found sleeping off the previous night’s wine in a comfortable armchair.

  She studied, relentlessly.

  The Maestro asked her questions which induced her to describe the wooded countryside or the plains of poplars she had seen in visions while playing, because these landscapes were engraved upon the composer’s heart and memory—until, one day, the music opened a path to Maria in faraway Bur­gundy and, very quickly, she learned to see her, simply by thinking, and to follow every one of her movements, effortlessly. Her magical gaze embraced Maria’s companions at the farm, and she grew fond of Eugénie, Marguerite’s daughter, but also of André, Jean-René’s son and Maria’s adoptive father and, finally, of the village priest, who was as different from her own priest as an oak is from a hazel tree.

  It was now clear that the two children were miraculous, not only because of the circumstances of their birth, but also because of their own genius. Although elves lose their animal essences on human earth, when they are in the proximity of Maria they appear in all their triplicate splendor. As for Clara, she could see space and beings from a distance, and exercised her father’s powers of vision and prescience from outside the pavilion at Nanzen. The facts could not be denied: on human earth the little girls created enclaves where the physical laws of the mists held sway.

  A year went by, deceptive strides of peace.

  We are now two years from the start of the war.

  January came, colder than any ice field, gloomier than a dawn without light. It was so abnormally cold that humans came to suspect the Good Lord was punishing them in one fell swoop for a century’s worth of sins, but the elves, well, they knew that the enemy had their own bridge and were torturing humankind with the cruelty of frost. It was during this devilish season that the inaugural event of the disaster occurred, although it appeared quite harmless to begin with: the visit to The Hollows of one of the father’s brothers, with all the honors due a decent man who was also, incidentally, an excellent hunter. As was fitting in the land of Burgundy, honors consisted of a succession of “light, local fare,” which meant they dined on a truffled guinea fowl set amid liver terrine and pot-au-feu en ravigote, garnished with caramelized cardoons, their juice still running down the diners’ throats despite the vin de côte. To make it all go down, there’d been talk of a cream tart enhanced with Eugénie’s quince jellies—but in fact, it had not only been talk, and it was ever so hard to get up off one’s chair when it was time for bed. Then at around two o’clock in the morning there was a terrible stir upstairs: Marcel, who had had more than enough liver terrine, was now at death’s door with a colossal liver infection.

  They are beautiful indeed, those women who launch a crusade against evil, of that beauty that expresses the essence of their sex: from her mother, Eugénie had inherited a love of flowers, a talent for quince jelly, and the gift of healing. Maria, as it happened, had the power to enhance that gift, and, splendid and dangerous as are all handmaidens to great causes, they formed a league, joined in secret by Clara, who was watching them from her Roman villa. The alliance of the two little magicians’ powers was placed at the service of Eugénie’s gift, and, against all expectation, Marcel was saved. But while the forces of our worlds may be exchanged, none can be created and, too late, Maria realized that Eugénie must die in order for her godson to live. Is it any surprise to learn that the auntie herself had received the message of this pact between life and death in the form of an iris with petals streaked pale blue, a deep purple heart, an orange-tinted stamen? The red bridge of concord provides the images of truth with strength, and it knows how to signify important moments. It is from the bridge that Petrus, one hundred and thirty years earlier, had received the tea poem, as well as the premonitory vision of Eugénie and her iris, for he knows what has occurred and what will occur at all times and on every level of that strange thing we call reality.

  Alas, Maria was convinced she had killed her granny and, in truth, such a young soul could not understand what she had actually given her. Before being told of her imminent death, Eugénie had a vision of the son she had lost in the war, sitting before her at the feast of St. John, at the table decorated with solstice irises. He was just as she remembered him, although he had already fallen in battle along with so many of our young men, and she said to him: Go my son, and know for all eternity how much we love you. And then the sorrow of thirty years had been transformed into an explosion of love so intense that Eugénie had thanked the Lord for this final, generous gift to his pious lamb. In the end, she died happier than she had ever been.

  But Maria didn’t know this, and the first battle was looming. Marcel’s miraculous recovery had drawn Aelius’s gaze upon the farm, and he unleashed on the low country the controlled anger of a raging storm, a wall of cyclones and floods, masking human mercenaries at the ready. It was the first battle of a notorious war that wouldn’t begin until two years later, and it was fought on the marl of the February fields, its officers country bumpkins transformed into strategists, with two twelve-year-old girls for generals, one all the way in Rome communicating mentally with the other. What was even more remarkable—although Maria wanted no more of miracles that would cost the lives of loved ones—was that there would be three more miracles, at least as far as human standards for marvels went.

  The first was with the telepathic communication between the two girls: Clara had learned how to compose and play in such a way as to create a bond with Maria that connected them mentally day and night.

  The second miracle resided in the power of the stories and dreams that were catalyzed by the children of November and snow—something neither humans nor ordinary elves could do, for while the former know how to dream, they do not know how to turn their daydreaming into reality, whereas the latter are incapable of fiction, but do know how to influence the forces of nature. Clara and Maria, now united by a shared language and story,5 opened a breach in the sky through which a troop of elves entered the human world and, preserving their powers, fought alongside the bumpkins until they defeated the commando of villains. In the end, a sky of snow ordered by Maria defeated the storm and gave way to a firmament of a blue so pure that all the men sobbed with happiness. In the persons of the little girls, the elves now had a new bridge between magic and poetry at their disposal, and they also revealed a beyond-princely valiance to a handful of yokels—the last alliance was alive.

  The third miracle concerned the ancestor Solon had spoken to Petrus about, and who had briefly come back to life when the girls opened the sky to the company of elfin combatants. But we shall not speak of him just yet, for the matter of the elves’ ancestors requires an intelligence which, paradoxically, we can only see in the deepest night.

  That same day, Sandro, Marcus, and Paulus left Rome and set off for Burgundy. No one could determine how powerful the enemy’s pavilion and bridge were, but they suspected that they harbored neither clear vision nor prescience, and that for the moment, the overland route would be safer than trying to cross the red bridge. Besides, Sandro couldn’t cross it, because every attempt to do so with a human had ended in failure. When the companions arrived in the devastated village, three days after the battle, Maria and Father François were waiting for them. Sandro immediately took to the peculiar priest, who was loved by his flock because he respected them and valued their hare pâté and indulgence in goose fat. Moreover, the priest had known the sky of dreams Maria and Clara had opened, and he now felt an earthly fervor supplanting the God of his confession within him. He’d always thought tha
t he must accomplish his mission through preaching, but the words that came to him now at funerals and services no longer owed a great deal to the religion of the Churches. He’d devoted his life to the superiority of the mind over the body, and was discovering that he was a man with a deep nature, a messenger of the indivisibility of the world and the unity of the living. He learned Italian because he wanted to understand the girl to whom they’d sent a poem in that language6, and he had long been torn between his Christian incredulity that she could be magical and his love of the truth. Now he was resolved to accompany her wherever she went. In addition to his conviction that this was his destiny, he wanted to be at her side, a spokesman for those who could not speak, as he’d been once already on receiving the words of one of the village lads, wounded in the battle, who had confided in him as he was dying. To be more precise, he hadn’t received those words directly: Maria was holding the brave man’s hand and listening to his dreams while Clara transcribed them into music. Through the bond between the two girls, the priest had been able to hear those dreams and transmit to the courageous man’s widow the words the melody had given him. They were fine words, that came from a humble heart and a mind deprived of book-learning, but which spoke of the glory of days standing tall under the sky because one has loved and been loved. And Father François wanted to live like that from now on, in the wake of those little girls who had given life and sparkle to love, and it mattered little to him that this distanced him from his Church and his cozy presbytery.