The Life of Elves

by Muriel Barbery

  She played slowly, without looking at her hands, and never making a single mistake. Alessandro turned the pages of the score and she went on playing with the same inexorable perfection, at the same speed, and flawlessly, until silence fell again in the transfigured church.

  “Are you reading the notes?” asked Alessandro after a long while.

  She said, “I’m looking.”

  “Can you play without looking?”

  She nodded.

  “Are you just looking to learn?”

  She nodded again and they gazed at each other indecisively, as if they had been given a crystal so delicate that they didn’t know how to hold it in their palms. Alessandro Centi had once been well acquainted with the transparency and dizzying purities of crystal, and he knew both its exaltation and its depletion. But the life he now led no longer resonated with the echo of past moments of exhilaration, other than the trilling of birds at dawn, or the grand calligraphy of clouds. Therefore, when the little girl began to play, the pain he felt courted a sorrow he no longer knew still lived inside him, a brief reminiscence of the cruelty of pleasure. When Alessandro had asked, Are you just looking to learn, he had known what Clara would say.

  Father Centi and his housekeeper were sent for, and they had with them all the sheet music Alessandro had brought from the city. The priest and the old woman sat on a pew in the front row and Alessandro asked Clara to play the piece again from memory. When she began to play, the two newcomers were stunned, as if struck by a hammer on the head. Then the old woman made the sign of the cross innumerable times, while Clara went on playing twice as fast as before, since now she was truly celebrating the nuptials, and she read, one after the other, the scores that Alessandro handed to her. The tale will soon be told of how Clara played, and in what manner the rigor of her execution was not the true miracle of these July spousals. All one need know for now is that the moment she started on a blue score which Alessandro had solemnly set before her, she took a deep breath which caused the others present to feel as if a mountain breeze had lost its way among the arches of the great vaulted ceiling. Then she played. Tears were streaming down Alessandro’s cheeks, and he did not try to hold them back. There was a fleeting image, so precious that it could go through him without him ever forgetting it again, and in the fugitive vision of this face, against the background of a painting where a woman sobbed as she held Christ to her breast, he realized it had been ten whole years since he last wept.

  He left again the next morning, saying he would be back in the first days of August. He went away, and came back as he had said he would. One week after his return, a tall, rather stooped man knocked on the door to the presbytery. Alessandro went down to welcome him into the kitchen, and they embraced like brothers.

  “At last, Sandro,” said the man.

  Clara stood motionless on the threshold of the back door. Alessandro took her by the hand and led her up to the tall, stooped man.

  “May I introduce Pietro,” he said.

  They looked at each other with a mutual curiosity born of opposing reasons: Pietro had heard about her, while she knew nothing about him. Then, never taking his eyes from her, Pietro said to Alessandro, “Will you explain it to me, now?”

  It was a lovely, late afternoon and there were people outside their houses as the trio made their way down the street to the church. They stared at the two men: although they knew one of them, both were rather singular, not only in their garb but also in their demeanor, and once they had gone by, some people stood up, the better to follow them, thoughtfully, with their gaze. Then Clara played, and Pietro understood the reason for the long road that had brought him from Rome to these steep and godforsaken escarpments of the Sasso. Just as she was playing the final note, he felt a dizziness of prodigious intensity that left him reeling before it burst into a spray of images, only to vanish again almost at once—but the last image remained etched on his mind long after he left the village, and he looked respectfully at the frail child thanks to whom the miracle of this rebirth had come about: superimposed on her face was the face of a woman, laughing in the chiaroscuro of a forgotten garden.

  She played until nightfall. Then a great silence cloaked the vaults of the church where a shipwrecked piano had come to her in the summer of her eleventh birthday. You see, this is a tale, of course, but it is also the truth. Who can unravel these things? Not anyone, in any case, who heard the story of the little girl found in a isolated village in Abruzzo between a country priest and his ignorant old housekeeper. All we know is that her name was Clara Centi and that the story did not end there: Pietro did not go all that way to hear an untamed little girl play the piano, only to leave again for Rome as if nothing had happened. Therefore, we will say one more thing before we follow them to the big city, where some are now preparing for war; we will repeat what that same Pietro said to Clara in the privacy of the church after she had played the last score:

  Alle orfane la grazia.*

  *To orphans let there be grace.

  ARCHERS

  the rootless the last alliance

  ANGÈLE

  The Black Arrows

  The little girl, whom they had baptized Maria in honor of both the Holy Virgin and the words that had come from Spain, was growing up on the farm under the protection of four formidable old women. These grannies had their rosary beads ever at the ready, along with the eye of the Lord, or so people called it when referring to old women who did not miss a thing for miles around, even though they only ever left their homes to bury a cousin or marry a goddaughter, and for as long as anyone could remember, they had never crossed the borders of the region.

  Ah, but they were something else again, those old women. The youngest was just recovering from her eighty-first birthday, and respectfully fell silent whenever her elders gave their verdict on the salting of a pig or the way to cook sage leaves. The little girl’s arrival hadn’t changed much in the routine of the days, devoted to the painstaking, pious activities which, in Christian lands, are the lot of decent women; they simply made sure to have morning milk fresh from the cow for her, and to read her the Sacred History, when they weren’t busy drying the mugwort, and to teach her about simples—listing, in order if you don’t mind, each one’s medicinal and spiritual properties. No, the coming of the little girl did not seem to have changed the configuration of the months and years, filled to the brim with the four staples the people in these parts used as nourishment: devotion, work, hunting and consequently provender; but in reality Maria had transfigured the hours, and if no one had noticed it at first, it was because her action needed some time to take effect, while her own powers were spreading, becoming seasoned, without her even being aware of it. But there came a wealth of bounteous springs and magnificent winters, and no one ever thought for a moment that they might have something to do with that first snowy night, just as the enhancement of the grannies’ gifts was seen as nothing more than a blessing given to those lands where women pray in abundance; it never occurred to anyone that these marvelous old crones might owe their surfeit of talent to two words in Spanish.

  The wariest of the four old women was Auntie Angèle, the sister of the paternal grandmother, from a lineage renowned for its women as tiny as mice but more pigheaded than wild boars surprised by the hunt. Angèle belonged to that same lineage, and she’d even added something of her own to it by cultivating a special form of obstinacy which, had she not been intelligent, might have proven abstruse; but since she was as lively as a stream, her obstinacy liberated a surplus of wisdom which she employed to understand the world, without ever setting foot in it. From the very first—and this we know—Angèle sniffed out that there was something magical about the little girl. After the episode with the creature—when the men were so hopeless they were incapable of saying what it looked like, though she could have sworn it was no animal—she had no further doubt, and she even embraced the certainty, enhanced daily with
new layers of proof, that the little girl was not only magical but also very powerful. And since they were old women who knew as sure as sure could be—even though their entire acquaintance with the world consisted of two forests and three hills—Angèle trembled at the thought that the child’s magical powers made her a natural prey; so every morning before Matins she would say to herself a pair of Hail Marys and an equal number of Lord’s Prayers, and out of the corner of her eye of the Lord she kept a close watch over all the child’s comings and goings, even if it meant the milk soured ten times in a row on a poorly adjusted flame.

  A year had passed since the event in the clearing in the east wood, as if in a dream, in tranquil surges of happiness. Then one morning at the end of November, Angèle turned her eye of the Lord to look for the child, whom they had seen at dawn in the storeroom helping herself to a piece of cheese, then setting off like a whirlwind to her trees and her lessons. Those folk who have forgotten the life to be had in contact with primitive nature will think of the metaphor, and assume that her purpose was merely to go and chat with the neighbors, and in truth the weave of acquaintance in our countryside, as tight-knit as the cells of a beehive, has always existed. But the eye of the Lord sees far beyond any village gossip: if anything, it bears greater resemblance to a probe that allows one to make out—as if in semi-darkness—those people or things that are not immediately apparent to the naked eye. Of course, deep down Auntie Angèle would not have been thinking any of this, and if you questioned any of the old women about their vision they would have fingered their rosaries and muttered something vague about the clairvoyance of mothers—for magic is the devil, and they kept well away from it, even if that meant denying certain aptitudes that, however well-established, were hardly what you’d call Christian.

  The countryside that morning was dazzling. There had been a frost at dawn, and it sparkled from one end of the land to the other; then the sun came up, all of a sudden, above an earth now covered with a cloth that glistened like a sea of light. So when Angèle cast her gaze over the frost-laden fields, and found the little girl almost at once at the edge of a cluster of trees to the east of the farm, she was not surprised by the clarity of her vision, and for a moment, so beautiful was the scene that she was lost in contemplation, because Maria stood out against a background of trees girdled in white that arched above her head like diamond ogives. Therefore to contemplate such a scene is no sin: it is not idleness but praise of the Lord’s work, and it has to be said there was no shortage of such work in those days, in those parts where people lived simply; it was easy to run one’s finger along the cheek of the divine, and the divine came from a daily commerce with clouds and stones and the glorious, dripping dawns that shot salvoes of translucent beams toward the earth.

  Thus, from her kitchen, as she stared into space, Angèle was smiling at the sight of the little girl at the edge of that lovely copse, ringed by ice as if by a prayer, when she was startled by a sudden realization. How could she have failed to notice? It occurred to her, quite abruptly, that such clarity was not usual, and that the luminous arches and cathedrals of diamonds had concealed the fact that the little girl was not alone and, consequently, that she might be in danger. Angèle did not hesitate for a moment. The mother and the other old women had left earlier for a funeral, and would not be back for a good two hours. At the neighboring farm there would only be Goodwoman Marcelot, because all the men in the village had gathered at dawn for the first of the winter’s major hunts. As for the priest, whom she could have gone to fetch from his presbytery, he appeared to her in all the splendor of his fine goose-fat-filled paunch (she promised to do penance later for this ungodly thought), radically unsuited to combat the dark forces of the universe.

  The hearths of progress had not yet produced their culpable heat in that era, so Angèle wore three bodices and seven skirts and petticoats, to which she added a heavy woolen cape. In this armor, with her headpiece pulled tight around her remaining meager strands of hair, she strode out into the treacherous light of that perilous day. In all—in other words, Angèle, along with her eight winter layers, her clogs, her three rosaries and a silver cross upon a chain, not forgetting the headpiece with its ribbons, over which she had placed a thick felt headscarf—in all she could not have weighed more than ninety pounds; hence, her ninety-four summers seemed to soar above the dirt track, so much so that you could not even hear the crunching of wooden sole against frost, and she rushed almost soundlessly, short of breath, crimson-nosed, to the patch of the meadow she had contemplated earlier. She scarcely had time to catch a glimpse of the little girl, who was shouting something in the direction of a big gray horse with a coat that glinted of unpolished silver, and she tried to utter a sound that meant to say, By all the Saints and the great mercy of the Virgin Mary! but it only emerged as oh oh oh!—before darkness fell over the meadow. Yes, a hurricane swooped down upon the little girl and the intruder, and would have knocked Angèle onto her behind, had she not held fast to one of her rosaries and, believe it or not, the beads were instantly transformed into a walking stick. A miracle.

  The little auntie brandished her rosary in the storm, cursing the barrier of opaque swirls that kept her from approaching Maria. She had lost her headscarf and her beribboned headpiece, and her two white braids with strands as fine as a spider’s web stood straight up on her head, which she shook in frustration at the tumultuous wind. Oh oh oh! she said again, and this time it meant, Don’t ye dare come for the little lass or I’ll skin yer ugly villainous mugs. Let it be known that a clog thrown straight ahead by an indignant old granny can part the waters of a downpour, not unlike Moses who may also have had all his robes blown inside out, right down to the last one which was as red as the sea in the Holy Book. When she saw the breach her clog had made in the weather, Angèle hopped into it like a young goat and landed head over petticoat in a furious maelstrom, wind and currents hurling all around her. But the downpour that obscured her view and prevented her from reaching the little girl was now swirling around this magma of energy (this she understood in a flash of awareness which could never be translated into words) and kept it constant, as if in a pressure cooker. Angèle opened wide her near-sighted eyes, and using her rosary stick, tried to get to her feet and tidy her petticoats. Maria’s clothing was spinning in the screaming air, and she was shouting something to the gray horse, which had withdrawn to the edge of the trees, because between them there was a black column of smoke that rumbled like thunder and grew thicker as it spun on itself. But the horse, too, was wrapped in a mist that swirled delicately before his noble head; he was a beautiful horse, with glossy nostrils and a coat of shimmering mercury, and his mane was streaked with fine threads of silver. The auntie, for all that she was as blind as a mole, was hardly surprised that at twenty paces she could make out that fine mane (after the business with the rosary, this was small beer). The little girl went on shouting something she couldn’t hear, but the black smoke was stronger than the horse’s desire to reach Maria, and in the movement he made in her direction, his neck arched with compassion both to reassure her and bid her farewell, she could read sadness but hope, too, something that said, We will meet again—and quite stupidly (they were surrounded by lightning, after all) she wanted to weep and blow her nose profusely.

  The horse vanished.

  For a few seconds the fate of these two souls trapped in their dark maelstrom seemed uncertain. Then there came a terrible whistling, the clouds grew lighter, the black smoke rose skyward like arrows of death then dissipated in a raging splash. In a petrified silence the countryside returned to its finery of gems and salt, until the auntie regained consciousness, and squeezed the little girl fit to stifle her against her heavy woolen cape.

  That evening the men were summoned to the farm. The women made dinner, and they waited for the father, who had put in a brief appearance earlier (in addition to bringing two hares and the promise of some fine cuts of wild boar) and heard the others tell
of the day’s extraordinary events. Consequently he had gone away again to knock on a few doors while the women laid the table for fifteen. Ordinarily they would have supped on soup, bacon, a half-cheese per pair of feet, and a smidgen of Eugénie’s quince jellies, but instead they were busy preparing a stew and a chanterelle pie: they’d just opened three jars from that year’s harvest. On Maria’s plate was a big pear drowned in honey fragrant with the thyme the bees had frequented all summer long, and she was silent. They had tried to ask her a few questions, but they’d given up, worried by the feverish gleam in her dark pupils and wondering what she had shouted to the gray horse of the mist. But no one doubted Angèle’s story, and the supper began in a great hubbub, talking of rosaries, storms, and days in late November, and through it all Angèle had to tell her story in detail half a dozen times, making it a point of honor not to change a single thing.

  An elaborate story, but not altogether complete, or so Maria noticed as she sat unspeaking and thoughtful, eating her pear. She thought Angèle gave her a sidelong glance as she was about to begin a certain part of the story, when the black smoke formed long thin arrows, and when you looked at them you knew they were deadly. You looked at them, and you knew, that was all there was to it. And Maria noticed, for a slew of reasons that offended Angèle’s love of truth, that the auntie said nothing of the horror etched in her breast by the baleful vision. All she said was, And the smoke went up to the sky like that and exploded all of a sudden up there and the sky turned blue again—and then fell silent. Maria went on thinking. She thought that she knew many things these fine folk knew nothing about, and that she loved them with all the strength a child of eleven can place in a love born not only of early attachment but also of an understanding of others in their moments of both greatness and unspeakable misery.