A Strange Country Read online

  So many makeshift lodgings in the wanderings to come—we are leaving behind the territory of the story that was told elsewhere7 to return to our own story for seven long years, six of them years of war. Danger was everywhere, the enemy could spring out of nowhere. Clara had stayed behind at the Villa Acciavatti, Maria had gone to a region she immediately took to, with its vast plateau swept by raging winds and thick snowflakes.

  “It is a magical land,” said Alessandro as they crossed the plateau, “a land of solitude and the mind.”

  There was a farm where they could take refuge for the coming year. Clara would join them there, escorted by Pietro Volpe’s men. In his youth, the dealer’s hatred for his father had turned him into a hooligan, a young man who fought bare-fisted in the street. Now he commanded a secret militia of men more loyal and dangerous than Templars.

  “What is this place called?” asked Maria.

  “The Aubrac,” answered Father François.

  And, looking all around him:

  “It would be a good place to retire.”

  Clara arrived very early in the morning. On the horizon, the hills of the Aveyron, green and gentle to the gaze, shone intermittently, brushed with dawn; a few shreds of mist drifted by; the world seemed austere and watchful.

  A bird sang.

  No one understands what happens in the fleeting instant of an encounter—eternity contracts into a divine vertigo, then takes a lifetime to unfold again on a human time scale. The little girls studied one another as if they were meeting for the first time. The tiny dark veins of the first battle throbbed on Maria’s face, and Clara raised her hand to touch them gently with her index finger. Then they embraced as sisters but, beyond the enchantment we feel at the sight of fraternity, there was also something else happening in those unfathomable depths which, for lack of a better name, we refer to as the life of the soul. Maria had always been a joyful, mischievous child, quick as a flash and happier than a lark. But she also knew how to feel sorrow and anger, and she wept more tears when Eugénie died than the host of adults on the farm. As for Clara, before she came from Rome, she had not smiled more than twice in ten years, any more than she had learned to feel emotion or to weep. Leonora had begun to soften her neglected heart and Petrus, in turn, had done what he could, in his shambolic way, but the little girl from Italy still lacked that which is received through the grace of a mother and father. In particular, there had been a moment during the battle when the Maestro had said to her: one day, you will go back to your community—and she had understood this as meaning, you will go back to the community of women. In a burst of empathy that had reversed the equation of her life, she had had a vision of her mother’s face, then of a long line of women singing lullabies in the evening, or screaming with pain on opening the letter from the army. This procession made her understand war, peace, love, and mourning in a way that forged a heart too long deprived of gentleness.

  When Maria opened the sky above the fields of Burgundy, the little French girl became every particle of matter and every acre of nature in a sort of internal transformation that terrified her and increased her remorse over Marcel’s miraculous recovery. Clara knew all this, and she took her hand in the only way that might calm her. She looked at the little dark veins throbbing beneath Maria’s skin, and she promised to prevent anything like this ever happening again in the future. With what steel are deep friendships forged? They require pain and fervor, and perhaps, too, the revelation of lineages; in this way, a fabric with neither desire nor debt can be woven. Her compassion—because she knew the cross Maria had borne since Eugénie’s death—rounded out Clara’s character and made her a fully-fledged member of her own community, crystallizing the women’s message, which in turn opened inside her an awareness of the grandeur and poverty of the female domain. But while Maria sensed, gratefully, that Clara understood her burden, a strange transfer of personalities occurred, and the mischief and joy of her character passed to the other side of their sisterhood. Now it was often Maria who was seen wearing a face that was stern and inscrutable, while at her side Clara, released from the austerity and solitude of her childhood, was loving and mischievous. It is this light irreverence which, despite the depths of her gaze, will bewitch Alejandro de Yepes eight years hence, and it is this irreverence, too, which everyone will soon be needing, if it is true, as the writer said, that gaiety is the most amiable form of courage.

  A few days after Clara’s arrival, Tagore and Solon came over the bridge of mists to the farm in the Aubrac. It was a strange feeling—for Maria, who had other parents, and for Clara, who had never had any—to acknowledge these fantastical strangers as their fathers. While the men were strangers to them, they loved the horses, the hare, and the wild boar, with the kind of love only our childhood selves permit. Finally, they walked hesitantly toward them, then Maria ran her hand through the hare’s fur, while Clara caressed the boar’s spine.

  The next time, Tagore and Solon came to the farm in the company of a female elf whose white mare turned first into an ermine. Her gleaming fur enchanted Maria, and then her human features left the girl speechless. Everything was the same: her eyes, her black hair, her golden skin, her oval face, her rather Slavic cheekbones, and her well-defined lips: all the same as her daughter’s. Maria studied her in awe; she knew this was her mother she was looking at, but the knowledge poured over her like a rain shower on a roof.

  The elf smiled at her through her tears, then changed into an ermine, as the tears vanished.

  “I learned a great deal from Rose and Eugénie while watching them bring you up,” she said. “I shared their joy as they cherished you and their pride in seeing you grow up, and I’m glad you like violets, and that they taught you the use of simples.”

  Sandro took a step forward and bowed.

  “Maria is the heir to your ermine, is she not?” he asked. “It is through your filiation that she commands the snow.”

  “If Katsura is covered in snow six months a year, it is because we like to see the flowers bloom in it,” she replied.

  “I dream of seeing your world,” murmured Sandro.

  Marcus placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “We dream of it with you,” he said.

  During the trip from Burgundy, and while they were settling on the farm, Father François, Sandro, Paulus, and Marcus had become friends.

  “I understand why you get along so well with Petrus,” said Marcus the first evening, when Sandro was asking for wine at the inn.

  “Don’t you drink?” asked Sandro.

  “We have tried,” said Paulus, “but elves and alcohol don’t mix.”

  “But Petrus drinks,” said Sandro.

  “I don’t know how he does it,” sighed Marcus. “We’re a complete mess after only two glasses, but after three bottles he’s still going even stronger. However, he doesn’t feel too well the following day.”

  “Humans, too, have varying reactions to alcohol,” said Sandro.

  “Do they have remedies for intoxication?” asked Marcus.

  “For intoxication?” said Sandro. “Without intoxication, we could not endure the solitude of reality.”

  “We elves are never alone,” Paulus replied.

  A year passed quickly on the plateau in the Aubrac, often uniting the girls, their fathers, and Maria’s mother, whose presence unexpectedly comforted the young woman. When she turned into an ermine, she gave off a familiar perfume (different from that of real ermines, for elfin animals may look like their species, but lack certain of their characteristics, such as odor, and manners of expression or even washing), the odor of a village woman who sews sachets of lemon verbena in her petticoats, one of those refinements of peasant women, who could no doubt teach city ladies a thing or two. Maria had the power to communicate with animals; she’d always had a particular penchant for hares, which she found rather similar to ermines; the animals her mother chan
ged into gave her a sense of familiar ease that the woman herself failed to create and, most of the time, the elf stayed at the farm in her winter ermine form. Maria would kneel by her side, breathing in her perfume and burying her face in her soft fur. The rest of the time, they talked, and the elf described the world of mists, its channels, liquid stones, and winter plum trees. Maria never wearied of these descriptions; Clara, at her side, also listened eagerly. Ever since a certain night in Rome, the little Italian girl had possessed the gift of reading the minds of the people she was with: the landscapes the elf described were visible to her and, like her father, she knew how to make them perceptible to others around them. Every day, Maria would hold her close as they listened to the ermine, and the elf knew of nothing more precious than these two girls, their arms around each other, who, now and again, would run their delicate hands through her fur.

  Bit by bit, Maria and Clara came to have a picture of the mists, and Tagore, Solon, and Gustavo tried to work out a way to take them there. But every attempt failed, one after the other.

  “What do you feel?” Gustavo asked Maria while trying once again to lead her across the bridge, amid multiple doses of strong tea from the mists.

  “Nothing,” she replied.

  Gustavo turned to Clara.

  “Can you tell Maria a story by playing something, the way you did during the battle in Burgundy?”

  “You want me to give her an instruction manual, but it was really the power of a dream and a story that caused the sky to open,” she replied.

  Gustavo paused thoughtfully for a moment, and Petrus chuckled.

  “She’s your daughter, all right,” he said to Tagore.

  He winked at Clara.

  Petrus and Clara had known each other since her first days in Rome, and he and Maria had greeted one another warmly.

  “He’s never completely sober or completely drunk,” Clara had said at the time.

  And she’d given Petrus a wink that made him flop onto on his squirrel tail. Then the elf turned into the potbellied redhead that most humans found harmless and jovial. Who could have imagined that this clumsy little man was working day and night to organize what, in wartime, would be a civilian resistance so well structured and operational that its mystery would exasperate humans in the highest ranks of army and State? Petrus went back and forth across the red bridge, uniting his future companions at arms, including honest people of both sexes, some of whom, naturally, were winemakers. During the war years they had resisted, and very soon would launch the ultimate operation in support of the League. Alejandro had led the operations with a few of their leaders, ordinary people who had no military experience, but who knew how to say where, what, and how, before returning in silence to their factories or fields. They reminded him of Luis Álvarez, as he’d appeared to him in the vision in the cellar, walking with his comrades in arms through the baking summer heat, and Alejandro knew that that was another sort of resistance, at another time and in another place, but, like this one, it had lived on hawthorns and roses.

  Ultimately, Petrus was not only a glutton and a drunk, but also had a temperament cut out for command. In the mists and in the land of humans he’d had to fight more than once, and his composure, his cool head—from inebriation, awkwardness transformed into strokes of genius—all were roundly hailed. With gratitude they watched him stumble, and they liked his amiability crossed with efficiency; although he fought without hatred, he gave no quarter, and that in itself is the model of fighters who win wars.

  But now opportunities to fight were plentiful. The enemy had troops stationed in Ryoan, not yet an army, but there was nothing about the ever more frequent skirmishes to suggest the war would be a chivalrous one.

  “They behave like orcs,” said Solon with disgust, after an enemy commando raid in the outskirts of Katsura, which set off the interelfin war, just before the first battle on the fields of Burgundy.

  Aelius’s elves had killed irrationally and ruthlessly. Consequently, the defense of the provinces was reinforced, but hearts were heavy at having to reason like the adversary.

  “There is no reason for such squeamishness,” Petrus protested. “The only purpose of a fight is victory, by any means and any scheme possible. The spirit of chivalry is incompatible with good strategy.”

  “To what do we owe these exalted military reflections?” asked Solon.

  “To the greatest war novel ever written on earth,” retorted Petrus.

  “Might that be War and Peace?” suggested Solon.

  He was not a great adept of human fiction, but Petrus suspected Solon had read at least as much as he had.

  “Gone with the Wind,” he replied.

  The next day, Solon convened a select elfin council to decide how Nanzen would make the main channels impassable to the enemy.

  “What does Scarlett think of our plan?” he asked Petrus at the end of the session.

  “That Atlanta was lost when the Yankees captured the channels of communication,” replied the squirrel.

  Tagore burst out laughing.

  “In short,” said Petrus, “we shall win if we control the channels. I’m not sure the enemy’s pavilion and bridge have the power to do so.”

  “We don’t know their strength,” said Tagore, “but what worries me more than anything is that we cannot see them. Ryoan appears to us with neither pavilion nor bridge.”

  Petrus filed his report on the search for the gray notebook. He had gone to Amsterdam, but the archives he collected there revealed little about the son of the former Guardian of the Pavilion. He’d resided there, become a renowned painter, then died in his house on the Keizersgracht in 1516, at the respectable human age of seventy-seven. All that remained of him was the canvas which Roberto Volpe had committed murder to obtain.

  A year went by and war broke out.

  Petrus, Marcus, Paulus, Sandro, and Father François further reinforced their indestructible faith in the strength of their community. They had to change locations often, for fear of being found by the enemy. Petrus continued to travel and unite the forces of resistance. They tried unsuccessfully to get the two little girls, the painter, and the priest over the bridge, and everyone wondered with little success where that damned gray notebook might be. Battles were fought in succession and all they had in common was the scale of the carnage. Europe was nothing but one gigantic battlefield, and the war spread to other continents. Purges of all sorts were taking place in the countries of the Confederation, more terrible than terror, more despicable than horror: Raffaele Santangelo had succeeded beyond his own expectations in putting to fire and sword countries that desired nothing but peace. The elves of the last alliance remained in the shadows and did not show themselves to the League. As it happened, they had their work cut out for them in the mists, now split into two fratricidal camps.

  Sixth year of the war. The last battle is drawing near, and night is falling in the upper chambers in Katsura.

  “What will be left of the worlds when it is all over?” Solon asks bitterly.

  “Worlds are born because they die,” replies Petrus.

  Of solitude and the mind

  Furious winds and downy snowflakes

  Book of Paintings

  4This is where the story told in The Life of Elves begins, covering the period from 1918 to 1931.

  5all dreams are in you, and you walk on a sky/of snow under the frozen earth of February

  This is the story that Clara forms spontaneously while composing, which comes to her from Maria’s heart and from her own poetic powers.

  6The hare and the wild boar watch over you when you walk beneath the trees/Your fathers cross the bridge to embrace you both when you sleep

  A poem written by Tagore in the margins of a musical score of Teresa’s that Clara found in Rome. It was on reading this that the path was opened to Maria’s vision.
The poem was then sent to Burgundy by Solon.

  7This is where the story told in The Life of Elves comes to an end.

  NOTEBOOK

  Then Petrus found the gray notebook. You see, it just so happened that Roberto Volpe had a little vineyard in Montepulciano that was cultivated on his behalf by devoted tenant farmers. He produced respectable vintages which, in his youth, would have earned him the right to go to Yepes. It was there that, unbeknownst to all, he had taken the gray notebook he had inherited along with the painting.

  The guardian thought he was sending Petrus to stand as usual outside the fortress of the castillo, but the elf found himself in the cellar, peering at a bottle of 1918 petrus. Just next to it was the notebook. Twenty years earlier, thanks to the indiscretion of one of the Volpes’ clerks, Santangelo had sent a winemaker to Yepes who had copied out the contents.

  The gray vellum booklet contained only a few lines: The gray tea is the key to mutations. It builds bridges and transforms passages. The first bridge is the work of gray tea and a single brushstroke. Ink and gray tea are the pillars of all rebirth. Above the door in the cellar, carved in stone, was this motto: Mantendré siempre. And next to it, an inscription in the hand of the painter from Amsterdam: I came here first.

  There are eight days remaining until the last battle.

  BRIDGE

  Alessandro Centi knew the red bridge without ever having set foot on it. Thirty years earlier, he’d painted it without ever having seen it. The canvas displayed only a large splash of ink and three pastel strokes of scarlet. But those who had crossed the bridge were stunned by this miracle, which reconstituted the bridge without representing it realistically.

  Similarly, the first canvas that Sandro had shown Pietro upon his arrival in Rome did not represent anything known, but the dealer knew it was the ideogram for mountain used jointly by elves and by populations in the East of the earth.