‘Angelica!’ I whispered fiercely into her ear. ‘This isn’t the way. Don’t let her into you!’
But Angelica was straining toward Lucrezia. As if all her life she’d wanted to arrive here, in this freezing room, to meet this cold witch.
‘How do you think it was for me, the silence?’ she said. ‘At three, to leave Mamma? Nonno watching at first, every movement, every word I spoke, as if I were some kind of bomb about to explode. Oh, there was the half-love, the kindness, so conditional it was like a maths equation – sì, sì, it came out so neatly if I behaved as they wanted. I learned to sedate myself, stuff my magic down deep, way down deep inside so that no one could even smell it. I lived on the surface like a shadow, missing Mamma, missing Roberto, missing . . . myself.’
Angelica was shaking and the shine in her eyes spilled over into tears. They streamed down her face, making warm tracks in the spattered crusts of ice on her cheeks and she reached toward Lucrezia.
Watching the two of them, looking into each other’s faces, I had a sudden, weird feeling that they were the twins. They seemed so alike, standing there, icy and bitter. Only Lucrezia’s ice was hardened, so ingrained that I could imagine her heart was a fist of ice, barely pumping. I looked at my sister, watching Lucrezia, and I wondered if Angelica was seeing the road that she could have taken.
‘The power,’ Angelica was almost whispering to Lucrezia, as if they had their own secret language. ‘The maledetto power. It’s ruined everything!’
Lucrezia stepped forward. Her icy hand shot out like a steel blade and caught Angelica’s arm.
‘It is not the power,’ she rasped. ‘The power is not the curse, you know that, girl.’
The sheets of ice that formed the planes of her face and throat were shifting as her mouth worked. They hung sharp and jagged at crazy angles so that she looked like a grieving figure in a Cubist painting. My hand went to my eyes instinctively. I could hardly bear to watch her.
She let Angelica’s arm fall. ‘It is Papà,’ she said. ‘Papà is our curse.’
She leant forward slightly and reached out as if to touch Angelica’s hair. It was almost a gentle movement, slow and reflective, then her arm dropped back to her side. ‘Allies or enemies,’ she murmured. ‘He breaks up the world, quel mostro, that monster.’
She said nothing for a moment, just examining Angelica’s face intently, the way a child stares openly at a stranger.
‘My little sister’s baby,’ she said. ‘Cornelia.’ Then the ice of her body grated as she turned to me and said, ‘And you, boy. Un maschio. A treasured male. Don’t tell me that you have suffered from this curse, too!’
The sarcasm in her voice was freezing. She looked straight at me, her eyes two icy points burning into my mind. Her words lit up my anger and I flinched inside as if I’d been struck.
‘Is this a contest of pain?’ I said. ‘None of us are winners, not even Nonno. Do you think he has lived a good life? With both his daughters gone, his family separated?’
I couldn’t believe I was arguing for the old tyrant. But I couldn’t stop myself now. I wanted to rant and bellow. ‘Look at you,’ I went on. ‘You’re the one who’s ruined your life. No one made you hole up here, infesting the place with cold, magicking up this frozen hell.’
‘What would you know?’ Lucrezia jeered. ‘What could you know about my life? And don’t think I’m the only one. What about all those other women down through history, destroyed by men like Papà!’
‘But you were prepared to kill with this cold, to kill us, your own sister’s children! What kind of a monster are you?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
At least I think that’s what she said. But her voice was so quiet that I could hardly hear. The halo of cold around her was fading, and the tips of her hair were dripping.
The scene had shifted suddenly, as if we were three characters in a play and our parts had been changed. I didn’t know who the enemy was anymore, or who was to blame, and I wasn’t sure that Lucrezia knew either. It was bigger than any of us, bigger than this room, or the mountain outside, and I saw us all as small beads in Nonno’s chain of history. An almighty shove from destiny, all those years ago, pushed us along, one by one, our shoulders relentlessly shoving the next over the abyss.
But that is how my mother would see it. What about change, the future, the next minute? Couldn’t a lousy bead make some kind of decision on its own?
Lucrezia’s gaze shifted and she looked up over our heads. Her eyes narrowed as if she were seeing something new, far away.
‘Speak of the devil,’ she said and she gave a loud snort, like laughter, trapped.
I turned around, following her eyes, but behind me was only the closed door, dull with ice.
‘There, coming up the hill,’ said Lucrezia. ‘I can see him. He’s lost. Lost in the snow.’
‘Who, not Nonno?’ cried Angelica. She struggled out of my arms and turned to the door.
‘How could he be here?’ I took a step nearer to Lucrezia. ‘Is this another illusion?’
‘No, Roberto,’ said Angelica. ‘I left a note for him. On the kitchen table. I thought,’ she stopped for a moment, then hurried on, ‘I thought if we didn’t come back, he would know where we were. He could . . . help.’
The snort came again. ‘Papà, help? How young you are, little one.’
Angelica faced Lucrezia and she touched an icy sleeve. She drew her fingers back as if they’d been burnt. ‘You have your chance, now,’ said Angelica. ‘Nonno is sick, he’s old, he has influenza. And he must be freezing. You could let him die out there.’
Lucrezia’s eyes flickered. Her face was smearing. She said nothing.
The fading fumes of cold circling Lucrezia’s face and body now began to glisten, wafting away from her toward the door in a path of light. Her face was like the moon shining a brilliant path across the dark sea of the room. I followed her gaze and the line of light beamed through the door and I could see the chestnut tree outside and the snow, and way down there at the end of the light, lit up like a rabbit in car headlights, was the small figure of Nonno.
I saw him start, lift his head and stare into the light. He seemed to smell the air, transfixed, and then he grabbed onto the light as if it were a rope, stumbling quickly through the snow, with his legs diving down knee-deep and up again, thin little scissors cutting across the immense, white mountain.
We waited there in the room. Ten minutes, twenty. I watched the clouds of our breath ribbon through the light streaming from Lucrezia’s eyes. Like dust in sunlight, ice crystals and warm air fought together in the path of light, the dark deepening around it.
And then the door swung open and Nonno came in. He crouched in the full glare of Lucrezia’s light and his eyes squinched up into two slits. He put up his hand to shade them.
He was sopping. His pants were wet up to the thigh, his elbows covered with melting snow. His face was red raw and he began to cough, great hacking coughs like the heaving of tramps who sleep under bridges.
He stretched out his arms to us.
I didn’t know what to do. I felt sorry for the old man, he seemed so helpless, so far from the neat, slippered grandfather that I’d known. I inched awkwardly toward him. He grasped my shoulder and pinched my cheek. He tried to smile. But Angelica stood where she was. I felt like a traitor.
‘I knew it was you,’ Nonno said. He was facing his daughter. ‘That path of light, it looked like magic. Your magic, I suppose.’ His voice was expressionless, but it was like striking a match to kindling.
‘Sì,’ spat Lucrezia, and she took a quick step toward him. ‘And you followed it, Papà.’ The last syllable came out like a swear word. Venomous.
‘Oh, figlia mia, look at you.’
‘Yes, look at me,’ said Lucrezia. ‘Look at what you’ve done.’
They stared at each other. Lucrezia’s face was hardening again, the drips solidifying on her face like tears.
‘You monster, loo
k at what you’ve done!’
Two scarlet circles of colour rose on Nonno’s cheeks. ‘What I’ve done! You are the mad woman, living up here all alone. In this cold.’ He looked around the room, his face creased with disgust. He slid his gloved finger along the surface of the cabinet and shuddered.
Lucrezia snorted. ‘None of life’s little comforts here, Papa. No central heating. No warmth. You took that away from me, remember?’
‘And me,’ Angelica said quietly from across the room.
‘What?’ Nonno swung toward her. ‘What, young lady?’
‘Why do you think we’re here?’
‘You took your brother up here to freeze to death, and I’ve come all this way after you, and you are accusing me?’
‘Sì,’ said Angelica.
‘Sì,’ said Lucrezia.
Nonno stared. His face looked wild, naked in the light fading now from Lucrezia’s eyes.
And suddenly he crumpled. He slid down heavily onto his knees.
Angelica went to him and put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Tell her,’ she whispered. ‘You’ve got to tell her you were wrong.’
Nonno looked up at her, at Lucrezia. ‘But she was the one! She was wild with the power, you didn’t know her. She was a savage beast.’ He began to cough again, his shoulders shaking.
‘No more savage than you!’ cried Lucrezia. ‘You tore us apart, Fabio and I!’
‘Roberto and I,’ Angelica echoed.
‘I was left with nothing! You didn’t trust me. You wouldn’t let me live my life. Fabio was my life, Papa, and look at what’s left of it!’
‘I wanted to protect you,’ Nonno murmured. ‘I didn’t know, how was I to know?’
‘You shouldn’t have played God,’ Lucrezia said.
‘Tell her, Nonno.’
Nonno tried to get up and he swayed as he stood there, facing his daughter.
‘If I could have my life over again,’ he said, ‘oh Dio, if only I could, I would be different. I would do better, Lucrezia. I . . . oh, I made so many mistakes. There, I said it. You were a gift to your Mamma and me. Special.’
‘You only liked the wrapping, Papà.’
‘That’s not true! I loved you, I loved you so much I couldn’t bear you to be changed by the power. It was like a bad gene, the magic, I didn’t want you to inherit it! You were my little daughter, so pure –’
‘Pure!’ Lucrezia spat out the word like a pip. ‘That’s how you wanted to see me. A smiling obedient child to bring you credit – the perfect daughter of the history professor. But I had the power inside me. La magia.’
As she talked I saw Lucrezia’s face emerging from the skin of ice. Like a statue melting, the ice dripped steadily away, forming rivulets from the ends of her hair, pooling at her feet. Her face looked old, much older than my mother’s, but I saw in her almond-shaped eyes and long nose the echo of Nonna. And in that moment I saw what a terrible struggle it was for her, for all of us – this legacy of the family. How our hearts and skin, our eyes and all our cells have at some time belonged together and yet we need to go on, each living a life separately, breathing our own air and making our own decisions second by second, and it suddenly seemed so hard to belong, and to separate.
Nonno took a step toward Lucrezia and he reached for her hand. She snatched hers away.
‘You say the power was like a bad gene,’ she said. ‘You act as if it were some evil, disgusting disease. But your own wife had the power. The woman you chose to marry! And you took it away from her, stamped it out like a fire.’ Lucrezia’s boot came down hard on the ice.
Nonno looked down at the floor where Lucrezia’s foot had splashed a widening puddle.
‘I tried to give her something in return,’ he said quietly. ‘We had love, and two children.’
‘But I got nothing.’
I could almost taste the bitterness in the air. The cold had loosened, the walls seemed fluid now with melting ice, but Lucrezia was still a frozen centre in the room. The fixed eye of an icy hurricane.
She turned and left the room. Nonno started to go after her, but Angelica put her hand on his arm.
Lucrezia returned only minutes later carrying a large case. She knelt down on the slippery floor and prised open the rusty metal latch.
She lifted out a sheet of paper, and then another, holding them up across her chest. ‘This is what it was like for me,’ she said simply.
The paintings were beautiful, painful. They were beautiful in the strange way that dream images are, with everyday things placed in different settings, so that they took on new meanings.
There were lovers fighting wolves, a small figure in a landscape, and a road, just like the one in Angelica’s dream, with a burning house lighting up the hills like a fallen sun.
The scenes were so detailed, it was eerie. They looked like illustrations rather than paintings, as if a text were buried somewhere inside them, and if you leaned close, you just might hear a voice narrating the story. Pictures from a fairy tale, seen from the inside.
In the last picture Lucrezia held up there was a woman and a cat lying in a coffin. The face was Lucrezia’s but it looked two hundred years old.
Nonno reached across the paintings and took Lucrezia’s hand. ‘I’m . . . sorry.’
I held my breath. Lucrezia didn’t take her hand away. It made me glad, that small gesture.
I looked up into Lucrezia’s face. Her eyes were fixed on Nonno. But they were dull, like smoked glass. Her eyebrows held crystals of ice, melting slowly onto the fringes of her lashes, black, and white.
Lucrezia closed her eyes for a second and a sound came from her mouth that made the hairs stand up on my neck. It was the sound of an animal in a trap, wounded, dying. Tears came to my eyes, I couldn’t stop them, they were as instinctive as breathing.
But the mask of ice had gone; Lucrezia’s face was moving, surfacing. I saw years flashing by in her mind, wasted, frozen years like the terrible wilderness of an empty tundra. And now her own eyes were filling, dissolving the dull glass, forming deep ponds that rippled and moved with reflected light. The tears washed over the rims of her eyes, flowing in rivers down her cheeks.
Nonno stepped toward her, beginning to speak, but a fit of coughing shook his body. He leant against her, his head bowed, and Lucrezia was holding him, holding herself.
But then, slowly, we became aware of a new sound. I realised that it had been there for a while, and now it was growing to a rumble, low and distant like thunder. I waited for a sudden clap, or break, but the noise droned on, building, until it filled all the space in the room.
I looked at Angelica. She turned to me. Her face was white.
‘Avalanche!’ she said quietly. ‘An avalanche has started.’
I saw that Lucrezia had withdrawn a little from Nonno, and she had closed her eyes. She nodded.
‘I see it,’ she said. Her voice was raw. ‘At the eastern face of the mountain, the snow is lifting off, I can see boulders of ice and snow. It’s coming.’
‘Will it . . . will it get us?’
Lucrezia opened her eyes. The rumbling stamped out the air in the room. Lucrezia looked at me, and then at Nonno. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And it will smother the village of Limone.’
I had a sudden picture of Nonna. Sitting up in bed, waiting for Nonno. Could she hear it? Or was she asleep, unaware that he had gone – would she ever know?
Lucrezia must have thought of her too. ‘Mamma,’ she whispered.
Angelica ran to me and clasped my hand. ‘We’ve got to stop it,’ she cried. ‘We must try! Can’t we use our power? Really use it. Dio, what else is it for?’
She looked at Nonno. We all did.
His face was white and as he lifted his hands in a shrug, I saw his fingers trembling. The rumbling grew louder.
‘Close your eyes, and look,’ Angelica said to me.
We stood close and held hands. At first I only saw the blackness behind my eyelids. I searched frantically inside my head, but I o
nly found pictures, stills of crumbling mountains that I’d seen in books. Virginia Westhead’s awesome facts. My hands were sweating. And then, behind the photos, there was a swirling and rushing like waves. I saw walls of snow breaking off, encrusted with rock and ice. They were moving, groaning, shifting. I tried to imagine them still, frozen like the photos, but they wouldn’t stop.
Angelica’s hand squeezed mine. Her power was seeping into me, like a white hot light. Beyond the skin, into my veins. Sweat ran down my chest – my skin felt far away, separate, something outside of me. I was so deep down in myself, hunched down in there, with her.
Now I could see the boulders of snow moving down the mountain. I tried to see them sinking back, like pillows without stuffing, weightless, but the cracks of fear kept opening up, widening, and the tumble of snow kept coming.
I opened my eyes. Without thinking, still deep inside myself, I called out to Lucrezia. ‘Help us, come and make the circle. We’re going to die!’
I saw her hesitate. She looked at Nonno.
Do something, bring your power, let us live, I pleaded with her in my head.
I don’t know if she heard me. But she came and stood in front of Angelica and me, and she held out her hands, palms upward, like an offering.
Her hands were cold. So cold they numbed my own. But as I held on, the pictures in my mind grew sharper, so vivid I could hardly bear it. It was like a camera lens coming into focus. And I saw the walls of snow coming down, they were going to crash down, now, over our heads. She was going to let it happen! The rumble became a roar, deafening.
And then, slow as a sunrise, I saw the balls of snow harden. Contracting into itself, drawing up, the tumble of snow slowed as if another force were rushing back up the mountain, meeting it with incredible resistance. The power flowed through my body, I felt fluorescent.
I was aware of the mountain, and aware of our circle. I knew, with such perfect certainty, that our minds were connected. We were living the same seconds, each seeing the same thing. The power rose up into my throat and I let it come, it was a volcano of power and there was nothing to stop me and I had to sing it out.
We were singing and crying, there in the room, all three of us. No boundaries existed any more, my skin was theirs, their fingers were mine, and the joy of the power was so fierce that it stung us like fire.
Power to Burn Page 12
