“Are we the two children of November and snow?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the Maestro.
“There are other children born in the November snow.”
“There are no other children born elfin and human in the November snow. But for all that, we do not know what to do with this miracle.”
Clara thought of the men haunted by bridges and by mountains that could save them from being born far from their hearts, of those elfin painters, sweepers, and musicians, who were fascinated by the creative genius of humans; she thought of those footbridges crossing between two worlds through a vastness crisscrossed with art’s glowing lights. And above those lights shone a more intense clarity, supplanting music and forms and inspiring them with its superior strength.
“The universe is a gigantic story,” said Petrus. “And everyone has their own story, radiating somewhere in the firmament of fictions and leading somewhere into the sky of prophecies and dreams. In my case, amarone shows it to me. After two or three glasses, I always have the same vision. I see a house in the middle of the fields, and an old man on his way home after work. Do that man and that house exist? I don’t know. The old fellow puts his hat on a large dresser and smiles at his grandson, who is in the kitchen, reading. I can sense that he wants the boy’s life and work to be less exhausting than his own have been. And so he is glad that the boy likes to read and to daydream and he says, Non c’è uomo che non sogni.* Why do I always return to that same story? Every time, when the granddad talks to his grandson, I weep. And then I dream.”
“Your powers are connected to the power of fiction,” said the Maestro, “and alas, we do not understand it very well.”
“There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life,” said Petrus, “when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.”
Clara felt an ancient consciousness quiver inside her, a consciousness that resembled the connection between women that existed beyond space and time and that she had experienced with Rose. This time, however, it connected beings to the creations of the mind. A vast constellation appeared before her mind’s eye. She was able to map out souls and works of art on a brilliant globe, whose projections of light went from one end of the cosmos to the other, in such a way that a canvas painted in Rome in this century led the way to hearts and minds in a distant era and a faraway place. The combined frequency of earth and art became one, uniting distant entities that were similarly attuned. This frequency was no longer limited to her perception, but crossed different levels of reality, and spread like a network that lit up as the distances dissolved. It was powerfully natural and powerfully human. Similarly, it recorded a succession of images that lasted no longer than a few seconds, but where Petrus’s empathy conveyed a story as lyrical and complex as those he had already told her, because they were both connected to this infinity of bonds in the ether, and they could see the footbridges over the void where others saw only solitude and absence.
Then she saw a little boy sitting in his country kitchen, in the evening shadows. An old man with a face furrowed by labor is placing his peasant’s cap on one side of the dresser, and wiping his brow in a gesture of repose. The church tower is striking the seven o’clock angelus; the day’s labors are over; the old granddad smiles and his smile lights up the entire land and then, beyond his mountains and his plains, lights up unknown regions and even farther still, exploding in a spray of sparks, illuminating a country so vast that no man could cross it on foot.
“Non c’è uomo che non sogni,” she murmured.
“No one has ever penetrated my vision in this way,” said Petrus. “I can feel your presence at the heart of my dreams.” Then gently, visibly moved: “You and Maria are the totality of two worlds, that of nature, and of art. But you are the one who holds the possibility of a new story in her hands. And if so many men have been able to live for two millennia in a reality shaped by belief in the resurrection of a crucified man wearing a crown of thorns, it is not absurd to think that anything is possible in such a world. It is up to you now. You see souls, and you can give them their stories and their dreams, which build footbridges that both humans and elves aim to cross.”
“You have to help me,” she said.
“I am just a simple sweeper and a soldier,” he replied, “and you are a prophetic star. I don’t believe you need me.”
“You were a soldier?”
“I was a soldier and I fought in my native country.”
“The elves have armies?”
“The elves have wars, and they are as ugly as human wars. One day I will tell you the story of my first battle. I was drunker than a skunk. But you can do a great deal of damage if you fall over.”
“Have you ever killed someone?”
“Yes.”
“What does it feel like to kill someone?”
“You feel fear,” he said. “Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. I am with you and I won’t leave you, either in war or in peace. You haven’t had a family, but you have a friend.”
She thought: I have a friend.
“But now it’s the first battle,” he said. “There’s no going back.”
“The snow,” she said. “That is Maria’s dream. The earth, the sky, and the snow.”
She got up and went over to the piano where she had often played pieces whose stories she could not hear. But Petrus’s dream had forged the key to her hours of work with the Maestro. Inside every score was the story from which the composer’s heart was spun, and all those stories, right from the start, scrolled through her memory, taking on the color of those dreams which, splendid or dull, were written in the great constellation of stories. So she played again the hymn of the alliance, which she had composed in a desire for union and forgiveness, but she added a new spirit and words that came to her from Maria’s heart.
*There are no men who do not dream.
PAVILION OF THE MISTS
Half of the Council of the Mists
We are withdrawing our protection. They will have to rely on themselves from now on. Soon we will find out.”
“We have been getting messages in passing. Those who are in charge of the command must stand ready.”
“Must we gather by the bridge?”
“It hardly matters where we gather.”
WAR
by two children of November and snow
EUGÈNE
All the dreams
In one fell swoop, the land’s defenses collapsed. For Maria it was like a great undertow in the ocean, exposing a shoreline swept with sadness and desolation. She knew that the lowlands had flourished for years because of the power of the fantastical boars and the mercurial horses, but this power was so inseparable from her own, and she was so accustomed to it being her source of song and of nature’s energy, that its sudden disappearance left her as blind and deaf as if she had never heard its operas or gazed at its etchings—and she knew that this was the fate of ordinary humans.
From the clearing in the east wood to the steps outside the church, there was a tide of despair, and everyone felt as if they were standing abandoned on the edge of an abyss. Father François and Gégène stood rooted to the spot; the little girl’s helplessness had destroyed the very thing that had sustained them in their struggle against the storm. The priest in particular could no longer find the corolla that had spread through him, no matter how hard he looked; horrified by the degree of his blasphemy, he resolved to confess to the bishop as soon as he could, once the cataclysm was behind them. I have sinned, he kept thinking, as he shivered with cold and looked all around at a landscape that seemed as wretched as his fervor of a lapsed preacher.
But the good father was not the only one whose enlightened moments as a free man had vanished, for Gégène was now filled with the same old insidious jealousy he had once felt about Lorette’s past love, and
it was the same thing from one end of the land to the other: disgust and bitterness were taking hold, and every soul raged against the baseness of destiny. The men following Gégène no longer knew their own names; there were those at the church who were degenerating into swaggering braggarts, although a warning shot would scatter them like crows; and at the clearing, it took all André’s remaining strength to rescue what was left of the courage of the three others. It was as if scars were re-opening and old wounds they’d presumed were healed forever were becoming re-infected; they felt spite toward that baneful child who was plunging their world into such deadly chaos; people suddenly realized they owed no other fealty than to the duty taught by the priest and the bishop of Dijon; and they believed that their duty did not include saving a stranger with powers that were bound to be sacrilegious. When all was said and done, old resentments were adding salt to their wounds, old resentments which the combined powers of Maria and her protectors had defused for a time—remorse and the legacy of guilt, meanness and fear, the litany of concupiscence and cowardly denial, and an entire string of petty acts that left them trapped within a cellar acrid with terror.
Then in Rome, Clara played and the tide turned. Maria’s sadness and desolation ebbed away and made room for a rush of memories: through the transparency of Eugénie’s face came the mercurial horse, the fantastical boar, the mists that told of her arrival in the village and that sky of snow into which everyone’s dreams had slipped while life opened up and you could look inside. Music and the vibrations of nature became intelligible once again. The first time, the same piece that Clara was playing had eased her heart, burdened with anguish by Eugénie’s death. And now it told her a story that honed her powers.
in te sono tutti i sogni e tu cammini su un cielo
di neve sotto la terra gelata di febbraio
There was a sudden gust of wind in the clearing. The landscape was apocalyptic. The sky became a menacing, deathly lid, shot through with the light and rumblings of the storm. All that was left of the world was a feeling of immense danger.
“All fronts are alike,” said Petrus to Clara. “This storm looks just like war, and what you see is what every soldier before you has seen.”
The mists began a new movement, not swirling around Maria anymore, but emerging from her own palms. A colossal bolt of lightning hung in the sky and illuminated the destruction of the region. Then the little girl began to whisper quietly to the sky of snow.
And then . . . And then from one end of the land to the other there was a flow of all the dreams, in a magnificent symphony that Clara could see on the screen of the sky, and from each soul she could see the pearls of desire embroidered on the taut canvas of the firmament, because each soul, after the despair of their earlier resentments, felt reborn and began to believe in the possibility of victory.
But it was with wonder that she contemplated Gégène’s dream, how he had conjured a great enchanted land for Lorette and himself, with a wooden house surrounded by beautiful trees and a gallery that opened onto the forest. But it was not just the dream of a man who aspires for love and a peaceful existence. It also evoked the vision of a land that would belong to itself, of a hunting tradition that would be fair and bountiful, and of seasons so abundant that a soul would feel similarly elevated. Lost little girls would be left outside the doors of simple folk so they might grow up amid greatness; there were images of old women rich with the austerity of their intimate acquaintance with the hawthorn bush; and there were coarse yokels drunk on the mission of ensuring a peaceful night’s sleep for little girls from Spain; and in this place they lived in a harmony that does not exist in a pure state, but which dreams isolate on the periodic table of desires—and that was how the border between earth and mind could be abolished,—an abolition which, ever since the dawn of time, has been called love.
Because Gégène Marcelot was a genius at love.
This genius of his gave birth to the vision that shone brighter than all the others, through the circulating of dreams with which the sky of snow was flooding the land. Life was hard, and they were so happy! That was what every man said to himself, and every woman even more so, while the lads were marching against the devil’s archers with renewed cheer, and the priest looked up at the clouds and felt strengthened by the restoration of his faith. Everywhere the same joy that came from the rebirth of dreams was accomplishing its work of courage and hope. Jeannot gazed from the farmyard out at the battlefield, and through that war for the first time he could see his brother as he had been as a child. For so many years a grimace of excruciating suffering had possessed his brother’s face and prevented Jeannot from knowing the taste of happiness, but now on this day happiness took the shape of a woman’s body and a white shoulder on which to weep his pent-up tears, while all his former taboos went up in the smoke of the storm. He knew then that he would soon be married and beget a son, and with that son he would talk about his brother and about the blessed hours of peace; turning to the mayor, he slapped him joyfully on the back.
“Ah, doesn’t it make you feel young again,” said Julot in response to his warm gesture.
The mayor was savoring the remembered poetry of the moment before the hunt, when the forest belongs to the tracker preparing it for the others. But the cold dawn paths had been infiltrated with a new magic. He saw a man with a painted brow speaking to a motionless deer, and the animal’s coat radiated perfection. Finally, since all of them had the same revelation of their dreams, in the sky of Burgundy there was an almighty commotion: porcelain eyes mingled with richly colored partridges, and with sprints through the woods and kisses in the night and blazing sunsets echoing with stones and clouds, while in the prism of every image and every wish all life could be found. So many tears held back, so many secret sorrows . . . They had all known the salt flavor of tears, they had all suffered from loving too greatly or not loving enough, and locked away a part of themselves behind the protective yoke of hard work. And every one of them felt, nailed to the tender wall of his heart, a sinister burden of regret or a dusty way of the cross, and every one of them knew what the constant hammering of remorse will do to a man. But this day was different. Somewhere deep inside they had shifted three forgotten cloves of garlic, and everyday scenes had been transfigured into pictures of beauty. Each one of them had recognized his dream in the sky and found determination and strength in it, and the most powerful dream of all, which was Gégène’s, made an offering containing still more bravery and splendor, so much so that the lads who were following him told themselves that their martial quest was esthetic, too, and that their killing would be without mercy but without rage, so that the land might regain its innocent splendor.
They reached the fallow fields in the east, then went around the hill whence the arrows had come flying over their heads before entering the flow of the storm to be transformed into lethal bombs. Now these were arrows made of good wood and feathers, and they were all glad to be doing battle with an actual real enemy whose fighters were sheltering like cowards behind the black wall. At that moment, Gégène gestured to them to position themselves in such a way that their quarry would neither hear them nor sense their approach. So they went as close as they could and dealt with the archers as if they too were archers, but with the instruments of modern hunting in their hands: they let their bullets fly out on the wind. Oh, the beauty of the moment! It was combat, but it was art, too. For a second, as they stood facing the mercenaries, they saw a vision of naked men whose breath embraced the breath of a land scarcely touched by their light stride; then each of them became clearly aware of his nobility as an archer, the honor they owed to the forests and the fraternity of trees, and they knew that for all their fingernails might be black, they were the true lords of these lands.
Only he who serves is a lord, Gégène might have said, if it had been time to pull out a cork rather than shoot a villain. The moment passed but the awareness remained and, in the meantime, in the
space of two minutes, the surprise of the attack got the better of half of the bad lot, while the other half retreated as quickly as they could and disappeared around the other side of the hill. In actual fact, the enemy hightailed it like rabbits, and in spite of the villagers’ initial urge to give chase, they decided not to, because their main concern was to get back to the village. They cast only a quick glance at those who had fallen, and they found them to be as hideous as any mercenary had ever been. Their skin was white, their hair dark, and on the back of their fighting uniform was a Christian cross, and the lads could not rally until they had closed the eyes of all the dead. Then they tried to make their way as quickly as possible to the church. But the waters barred the roads and there were no more paths they could follow safely on foot.
In the clearing, the story Clara had given to Maria took the shape of a sentence she murmured to the sky of snow, and it spread into three tree-like branches, the three powers of her life. It was neither in Italian nor French, but only in the stellar language of stories and dreams.
in you are all the dreams and you walk on a sky
of snow under the frozen earth of February
Maria knew the earth through the man who had taken her in as his daughter on the first night, she knew the sky through the woman who loved her like a mother and connected her to the long line of women, and she knew the snow through the fantastical mists, an offering from the original story of births. But Clara’s words had freed the formula of earth, sky and snow, and Maria could see her dream taking shape. The red bridge flashed in her vision, glittering with the force fields of the unknown world, whence the misty cities drew their light and their life force. An ethereal joining took place inside her. Her inner worlds reconfigured, their junctures absorbed in the birth of an organic wholeness dissolved from every layer of reality.
The Life of Elves Page 20
