The House of Serenades

by Lina Simoni

  That’s all Ivano found out until, on April 2nd, 1908, the news of Caterina’s death spread throughout the town. Ivano was mesmerized. Torn between his inner conviction that Caterina’s family had purposefully exiled her and the meager results of his investigations, he spent the night in brooding agitation, with images of Caterina swirling in his mind. He saw her walking the caruggi with Lavinia, entering the oven room and falling into his arms, flying in the sky like an angel, and lying in a coffin dressed in a tunic of white silk, with her eyes closed and her diaphanous hands laid gently on her chest. Time and again he reviewed the evidence of Caterina being alive versus the evidence of her being dead, but whenever he came to one conclusion, he was unable to keep to it longer than a moment because the other hypothesis became overwhelmingly true to his eyes. As the night progressed, however, his faith in his ability to find Caterina began to vacillate and his mind leaned increasingly towards thoughts of death. By morning, he had surrendered to the idea that Caterina had died. With that thought clear in his head, he ran to the palazzina.

  “You killed her, Giuseppe Berilli!” he shouted under the south windows. “You killed my bride! I’ll kill you before I die!”

  Shortly, the police arrived. Ivano was arrested and spent the night in jail. It was one of the few truthful details in the story Giuseppe had told Antonio Sobrero. When Ivano returned home the following morning, he opened his father’s wine cellar and drank till his head was so clouded by alcohol he could no longer see past the tip of his nose. Then he fell asleep on the cellar floor, waking at dawn in a thick daze. Heavy with despair, he prepared to attend Caterina’s funeral.

  He arrived at the cathedral early and stood outside, amidst the crowd and the flowers, waiting for the casket to arrive. It came a half-hour later, carried by six men in black uniforms and followed by the weeping family members. It was shiny white, and a wreath of red and pink flowers lay on it like a crown. To Ivano, it looked surreal. He watched the casket approach the cathedral, cutting through the multitude of people in mourning: friends of the family, acquaintances, and common people who had never seen Caterina alive but had come to her funeral moved by the tragedy that had hit one of the prominent families of their town. In a corner of the piazza, still as a statue, stood Lavinia. When Ivano approached her, she looked at him with vitreous eyes. Then they hugged and erupted into sobs. He had no heart to stay through the ceremony. As soon as the casket disappeared past the church doors, he walked home, where he locked himself in his bedroom for three consecutive days and three consecutive nights. Lavinia, overwhelmed by a pain too strong and powerful to bear, left town at the end of the funeral without sharing with anyone her destination.

  At the onset of the fourth day, Ivano emerged from his bedroom. Calmly, he told his father he intended to leave his job at the bakery for good. “Forget you have a son,” he said in a hoarse voice Corrado had difficulty recognizing. “You won’t see me again after today.”

  A dismayed Corrado begged his son to stay, but Ivano remained adamant in his decision to leave. From that day on he spent his time drinking and wandering about town, frequenting the portside brothels and underworld and sleeping in the street or at times in filthy shelters. Before one month had passed, he was involved in gambling, burglary, and counterfeiting, and when he was on break from those occupations, he squatted on the sidewalks or in the alleys behind the fish restaurants along with garbage and leftovers. Indifferent to his own cleanliness and appearance, he stopped cutting his hair and grew a disheveled beard the color of rat fur and the consistency of straw. Day after day he wore the same set of clothes and developed a foul odor that made him one with the homeless and the beggars that inhabited the waterfront streets. At some point he was inducted into a street gang, a cohort of small criminals who terrorized the local merchants with break-ins and assaults and exacted from them monthly payoffs in exchange for protection and peace of mind. Ivano became their most feared collector, mostly because of his repugnant physical appearance, which scared everyone at first sight. Once in a while, when the police presence in the caruggi increased, he and the rest of the gang left the neighborhood. No one, not even his fellow criminals, knew where Ivano hid on those occasions, and no one, out of concern for their and his safety, pressed him for information. While the gang members scattered about town in bars, warehouses, and other improvised shelters, Ivano hiked the hills to the secret hideout he had once utilized as his music atelier. It was an abandoned, small stronghold that had been an ammunition depot in eighteen hundred. There were numerous former military posts along Genoa hilltops, devoted in the past centuries to defend the city from enemy assaults. Ivano had discovered that particular stronghold years earlier, by chance. It was a square room accessible through a rectangular, rough opening in one of its thick stone walls. That opening had once likely hosted a door. All there was inside was a dirt floor and two narrow slits in the south wall, wide enough to insert bayonets or military telescopes. Through those slits one could see far, as far as the port and, beyond it, the sea. That’s where Ivano hid when on the run from the police, without his mandolin, which he had left at the bakery in the care of his father, and without a single thought about melodies or lyrics or rhythms or chords. All he took along were bottles of smuggled whiskey, his desperation, and a relentless desire to die. He spent his time drinking and sleeping, empty-headed and barely conscious when he was awake, unconscious when sleep overcame him. His sleep was deep and dreamless, as close to death as sleep can be. The only thing he kept track of during his dazed wakes was the alternation of day and night, so he would know when it was safe for him to make his way back downtown: the police raids never lasted more than three days. At the end of the third day he rejoined the gang, ready for the next collection or criminal affair. He felt no guilt, no remorse, no shame.

  He maintained so ruthless a lifestyle for one and a half years. One day the gang leader sent him to collect a large sum of money from a baker. Seeing the old, wrinkled man shivering from fear, hearing him explain through sobs and tears that he had no money to give, watching him beg for his and his family’s life, he realized that the man who stood before him could have easily been his father. All of a sudden he saw the ugliness of what he was doing and had a revelation: no matter how hard he tried to erase Caterina’s memories from his mind, no matter how deeply he drowned himself in dirt, alcohol, and criminal endeavors, Caterina’s ghost would haunt him forever. So he washed, shaved, bought a set of clean clothes, and returned to the bakery, where his father welcomed him with open arms.

  “Ivano!” Corrado called out. “I never lost faith in you. I knew you’d return. Now that you’re here, I feel as happy as the day you were born. What have you done all this time? Where have you been?”

  “Do not ask, I beg you. I do not want to talk about things I am ashamed of.”

  It took Ivano two full weeks to adapt to his old life. Slowly, he resumed the rhythms he had known since childhood: bake, sell bread and focaccia, spend time with his father. All along, he kept thinking of Caterina and the days of their love. He remembered all the songs he had played for her, the ones he had composed at the fort on the hill before meeting her and the ones he had created in the oven room, while she drew his face, his hands, his eyes. He could hear the light scratching of the charcoal on the paper, see her grimaces when the results were not what she had hoped for and her bouts of joy when a drawing was finished and approved. He didn’t have a single drawing made by Caterina. She had wanted to take them home, keep them in her room, and look at them when they were not together. He remembered the details of those drawings, the shapes of the lines, the shadows, the gray scales as if the drawings were physically under his eyes. The pain those memories brought about was excruciating. Mornings were bearable, with the baking to do and the long line of customers waiting. But then the afternoons came, when work was slow. The hours felt like days. It was pure agony, a torment. Nights were even worse. The only way he could survive them was if he avoided sleep, because as soo
n as he lay on his bed and closed his eyes visions of Caterina and her drawings appeared. They were like beads in a kaleidoscope, moving around in patterns, switching places over and over at staggering speed. He couldn’t bear them, so he spent the first half of each night out, playing cards, smoking and drinking wine in the company of sailors at Caffe’ del Gambero or Taverna del Marinaio, indulging himself every now and then with prostitutes. He was convinced that a love like the one he felt for Caterina could happen to a man only once in his lifetime. With her gone, he could only be with women who sold their sexual favors. The second half of the night, he sat on his bed in in long wakes, at times brooding in silence, at others talking to invisible companions, arguing with them in the deepest moments of desperation. Despite his knowing that Caterina was dead, he couldn’t stop asking himself and his ghostly alter egos what had caused Caterina to suddenly become ill and so shortly afterwards die.

  Corrado did the best he could to help his son accept the loss. “Illness strikes without notice, son. One never knows why.”

  The unfairness of fate, however, was insufficient reason for Ivano to set his mind to rest. He was perennially troubled and agitated, taciturn and irritable. One morning a bakery client whispered to his wife that those were the symptoms of lunacy. Corrado overheard and at once brought to the bakery a doctor who was famous in Genoa for his understanding of madness. The doctor made casual conversation with Ivano, asking him questions about his feelings. In his apparent detachment from his surroundings, Ivano understood the reason for the doctor’s visit. He grabbed the doctor by the collar and pushed him out of the bakery, screaming that he needed no cure, only Caterina. Then he turned to his father and gave him the angriest look Corrado had ever seen.

  That was the day Corrado became afraid of his own son. By then they hardly spoke to each other, and to relieve the discomfort Ivano’s presence caused him more and more, Corrado assigned to him all the errands and deliveries once carried out by hired clerks, so he would spend more time out of the store than inside. When he was at the bakery, Ivano often sat on the floor, in a corner, and played his mandolin for hours. When he had played all the songs he knew, he composed new ones. He created only the songs’ music at first then added the lyrics, which were all about love. All day long he played and sang love songs, seated in the same bakery corner, or on the floor of his bedroom, or on the sidewalks of Piazza della Nunziata. Every note, every word, was for Caterina. The customers lingered inside the bakery longer than necessary in order to hear the sound of his romantic music, and the neighbors crowded the sidewalks whenever he was there. They came out of their houses on purpose, to hear him singing, for his voice was clear and tender, like, they said, the voice of a cherub.

  As for Ivano, he was so absorbed in his singing that he skipped most of his meals, taking food only occasionally and in quantities that couldn’t have sustained the life of a sparrow. After two weeks of plucking and singing, his health began to fail: his eyes became glazed and red from lack of sleep, his body gaunt from malnutrition. Soon too weak to play or sing, he held the mandolin in his arms, as a mother holds a baby, and hummed the tunes through his nose. He no longer stood up from the bakery floor and no longer spoke. He was in a world of his own, a world populated only by images of Caterina. She was inside him, like a slow-burning fire, long flames licking the bends of his brain, eroding his flesh, eating his life away.

  It took him time to become aware of his inner fire, as the phenomenon had been subconscious in the beginning. At the moment he acknowledged its existence and recognized the flames as an inseparable presence, Ivano knew without a shadow of doubt that those flames were none other than his original belief that Caterina’s illness had been a lie. If the illness never existed, he reasoned, Caterina had to be alive. Of course there was the casket, the funeral, and the people crying. That evidence alone, however, though strong and undeniable, wasn’t enough to extinguish the flames of his belief.

  “Caterina is alive, and I will find her,” he said aloud, and for that he had to use all the voice he had left, which was by then nothing more than a soft, incoherent whisper.

  At peace with himself for the decision he had made, he slept in his bed for a whole day and then ate with the hunger of a pack of wolves. Then he went back to sleep, and when he awoke he ate more, stopping only when the skin of his belly was tighter than the strings of his mandolin. One week later, his strength restored to that of a healthy human being, to the bewilderment of his father, Ivano set out again to look for Caterina.

  Corrado was by then convinced that his son had lost his mind beyond repair. “Are you mad? She’s dead, son. Dead, do you understand? Let her rest in peace.”

  “I must at least learn the name of the sanatorium where Caterina stayed,” Ivano explained. “I want to visit it and talk to the people who saw her sick and were with her when she died. I need to know in order to be able to move on.”

  While Ivano battled his father’s incredulity and persevered in his search for evidence of Caterina’s illness and death, at the convent Caterina fought her own battle against her reclusion. On the day her parents’ coach had slushed through the mud and disappeared in the mist of the countryside, she had stood by the convent gate, under the drizzling rain, unaware of the nuns pulling on her arm. She had followed them eventually along a graveled path, unable to comprehend fully the meaning of the place. The path cut through an oak and pine grove, and on the other side of the grove were buildings, which to Caterina, through the mist of rain and tears, looked like dragons. The largest building was an imposing three-story ornate construction of stone surrounded by porticos. Above the portico that led to the entrance door, written in shiny characters that could have been gold, was a large inscription that read Casa della Speranza, House of Hope. As she approached the convent door, Caterina’s legs became light, as if she were gliding instead of walking. Inside, Caterina saw a corridor with floors of polished white marble and closed doors on each side. A pungent scent of incense tickled her nostrils. Unhurriedly, the nuns followed the corridor, the hushed echo of their steps the only sound, until they reached the foot of a wide staircase. One of the nuns waved for Caterina to follow her upstairs, the other two continued on. Caterina climbed the stairs slowly, her head empty, her feet stomping in a rhythm she couldn’t control. On the third floor, she followed the nun along another mute corridor bordered by windows on the left and by closed doors on the right. Only the last door was open, and the nun pointed at it, inviting Caterina inside. The room was small and scantily furnished, with a twin bed, a nightstand, and a crucifix as its only fixtures. On one of the walls was a minuscule window, shaped like an upside-down U. The walls were whitewashed, the floors shiny. The nun left. Moments later two different nuns entered, carrying Caterina’s trunk. They were veiled and dressed in black, exactly like the nuns who had met Caterina at the gate. They placed the trunk at the foot of the bed and, as silently as they had arrived, left.

  For several minutes Caterina stood still in the middle of the deserted room, hearing no sound. Then she dashed out of her cell, running along the corridor, down the stairs, and along the first-floor corridor towards the door of the House of Hope. She rushed outside, following the gravel path and crossing the grove, stopping in front of the locked gate. Through the posts, she stared at the stillness of the countryside and had once more the premonition that the convent of the Sorelle Addolorate would be her grave. She heard footsteps behind her and when she turned and saw three nuns looking at her through the thickness of their black veils, she grabbed one of them by the shoulders. “Let me go!” she shouted. “Let me go!”

  She fought her reclusion the only way she knew: with outbursts of rage. Her childhood tantrums returned, sudden and forceful, like explosions. While the nuns showed her around the convent in an attempt to familiarize her with the topology of the place and their habits and routines, Caterina burst out in sudden screams, suddenly and for no apparent reason, and continued screaming until her throat became mute from
the strain. In the kitchen she smashed a pile of dishes on the slate floor. In her cell she kicked the nightstand out the door, along the corridor all the way to the top of the stairs and down to the first floor. In the garden she yanked flowers and dug holes in the grass, like a dog. Astonished at first, the nuns soon grew accustomed to their new guest’s theatrical performances and watched her without judging her, limiting their intervention to repairing the damages after the facts and praying for her troubled soul.

  Over the course of two weeks, Caterina’s tantrums became less intense and less frequent. Then they stopped, replaced by a stubborn silence that masked the earthquake that shook her inside. All she could feel was hatred. She hated her father, but most of all she hated God for creating such a dreadful place of solitude and allowing her parents to dispose of her by taking her so far away from everything she loved: her city with its green hills and blue water, the good comfortable life she had lived as the daughter of one of the most important men in her town, her beautiful home on Corso Solferino, Lavinia, and above all Ivano. The more she thought about his face, his eyes, his music, and the two and a half months they had spent together, the stronger her hatred became. There were moments when she was so consumed by it she entered a state of trance, in which she no longer knew who or where she was. She often refused to leave her cell and spent most of her time lying on her bare bed, a rigid cot that was such a far cry from the plushness of the canopy bed her parents had bought for her on the day she had been born. One day, she refused food and water, continuing to fast until she became emaciated and pale, thin as the stem of a rose. Within days, she was gravely ill.