The House of Serenades

by Lina Simoni

  As for Eugenia, she spent the night at the palazzina, ignoring Matilda’s shouts that she should leave.

  “How dare you give me orders,” she snapped at Matilda. “This is my house! You married a bum, who didn’t even have the right to inherit from my parents in the first place!”

  She stood in front of Matilda hands on her hips, taking in every inch of her sister-in-law’s petrified face. Then she retired to a guest bedroom, where she fell into an agitated sleep. She hadn’t slept in the paternal home in thirty-one years. Tossing and turning, she began little by little to realize the magnitude of what had just happened that night. By the stroke of midnight, the truth had sunk completely into her: a stranger under the false pretenses of a brother had ousted her from her house; this stranger had treated his own daughter like a disposable object; the family name was ruined; and the Berillis would soon be the joke of the town. Shortly, she began to scream. Viola rushed in and saw Eugenia lying on the bed in disheveled clothes and with her eyes fixed on the ceiling. She was clutching the sides of the bed with both hands as she kept screaming. Nothing Viola or the rest of the servants did could stop Eugenia’s bestial shouts.

  From her bedroom, Matilda heard the screams but did nothing other than continue to cry. When around three in the morning Eugenia began to vomit, Guglielmo, despite the whiskey he’d consumed, dragged her downstairs and drove her to the hospital. When they arrived, Eugenia was still vomiting and screaming. The doctors who admitted her had never seen such a condition before and didn’t have the faintest idea how to cure it. They placed Eugenia in the isolation ward and kept her under tight observation. She would spend two weeks there. During the first week she had continuous vomit attacks and difficulty breathing, screaming at night as if she were prey to nightmares from which she couldn’t escape. Her symptoms subsided during the second week. When they disappeared, the doctors discharged her with moans of relief.

  The morning after her return to the palazzina, Caterina awoke in her bed unsure of where she was. Then she recognized her bedroom and heard the cooing of the turtle-doves. She remembered what had happened, and was once more overcome by disbelief. She dressed quickly and rushed down the stairs. All the rooms in the house were silent as the servants had unanimously decided to sleep in after the scare Eugenia had given them in the middle of the night. That unexpected silence frightened Caterina: it was deafening, like the silence she had breathed for two years in the corridors of the House of Hope. It was with a mix of joy and fear that she toured the first floor: the two living rooms, the reading room, the dining room, the hallways, the kitchen, and at last the blue parlor, where she saw Matilda on the loveseat. She wasn’t embroidering, only staring out the window with vitreous eyes. Her body was rigid, her face marmoreal. Without redirecting her gaze, Matilda knew her daughter was in the room. She murmured, “Good morning, Caterina.”

  Caterina sat on an armchair. One minute went by before Matilda spoke. “Would you please listen to what I have to say?”

  Caterina nodded.

  Slowly, Matilda turned to her daughter. At first she spoke calmly, her voice becoming more and more flustered as her speech progressed. She told Caterina about the threatening letters and the cat on the door, and how Giuseppe had fainted at its sight. After that, with a torrent of words she was unable to dam, she confessed to all the falsehoods. She told how Giuseppe had spread the news that his daughter was first sick and then dead and how everyone–Raimondo, Umberto, Aunt Eugenia, their close and far friends, the city authorities, the clergy, and the entire town–had been led to believe those lies. Then she told her own secrets. She spoke about Arnaldo Della Tessiera, her missing hymen and the humiliating visit she had endured as a young bride, and the pact between her parents and Filiberto and Giulia Berilli. She told about Giuseppe’s threats to drag her and her family in the mud had she dared disobey him.

  “I’m a coward, Caterina,” she said at the end of the story, “and I’m ashamed. I sacrificed you to save myself. I deserve your contempt. But I didn’t do what I did because I don’t love you. On the contrary, my love for you is so deep I have no words to describe it. I acted this way because I’m weak and incapable of standing up for what I believe. Night after night, for months, I dreamed I’d get up in the morning and tell Giuseppe what a despicable man he was and explain to the world that you were alive and well in a convent, and then I’d travel to it, all by myself, to take you home. When morning came, however, I couldn’t talk. I wanted so much to hate your father; instead, I always cared for him like a devoted spouse. I can’t explain why, but there’s a part of me that lives only in my dreams and I’m incapable of expressing with my actions or my words. I can’t fight my husband, Caterina, as in my youth I couldn’t fight my father. It took Giuseppe’s near death to give me the strength to undertake a trip to the convent. When I arrived, the nuns told me you had fled with a man the day before.” She brushed her forehead with the tip of her fingers. “I’m not asking you to forgive me or understand my struggle. I’m asking you not to hate me, if you can.” She paused. “I missed you. I know it must be hard for you to believe me, but I thought of you day and night while you were gone.”

  Then Matilda became silent, and Caterina felt helpless in that silence, as she had felt in her childhood at the end of Raimondo’s nightly games. Her throat closed up and her lips trembled as her eyes filled with tears. “I missed you too, mother,” she said in a broken voice. They stood up in unison and embraced.

  Matilda was the first to speak again. “I must ask you questions, darling. Who’s the man you fled the convent with?”

  “Ivano. Remember him? Yes, I still love him.”

  “Oh, darling,” Matilda moaned. She wanted to explain to Caterina how misplaced her love was, but swallowed that thought and asked instead, “How did he find you?”

  Caterina shook her head. “I’m not sure. What I am sure of is that he never stopped looking for me. Wouldn’t you say that’s love?”

  Matilda grazed her daughter’s cheek. “I guess it could be.”

  “My turn to ask,” Caterina said. “Where’s Lavinia? What happened to her?”

  “I don’t know,” Matilda replied. “She left this house on the very day your father found you with,” she paused, “the baker. We never saw her again.”

  “His name is Ivano. You can say it,” Caterina nodded. “It won’t bite you.”

  Matilda lowered her eyes, unable to bring herself to call Caterina’s loved one by his first name.

  “Does Lavinia have any family, someone in town who may know where she is?” Caterina asked.

  “I wouldn’t know. But you could ask the servants. They may know something about her.”

  An uncomfortable silence settled between mother and daughter. Caterina couldn’t find anything else to say. As for Matilda, she was gathering the courage to ask the next question, the one she dreaded the most. Her voice came out raspy, unsure.

  “What you said when we left you at the convent, about Raimondo … Is there truth to your words? Did he do things to you?”

  Caterina squeezed her fingers around the armrests while visions Raimondo’s body crowded her thoughts. She wanted so much to tell someone about Raimondo’s sick games, share the burden that had weighed on her for so many years. A wave of sounds rose inside her throat, crawling into her mouth and pushing against her lips. As much as she tried, she couldn’t speak. She looked at her mother’s distressed eyes, at the pain painted on her face as she anxiously waited for her reply. When she finally spoke, her words sounded to her as if they had been uttered by a third person, a stranger who stood by her side.

  “I made that up,” she murmured with the air of a guilty party who is confessing her misdeed. “I didn’t know what else to say to make you and father change your mind and take me back to Genoa with you.”

  With a deep sigh of relief, Matilda took Caterina’s hand. “I am so glad it’s not true,” she said. “But if it’s not true, who were you intimate with as a child?”


  “Don’t ask,” Caterina murmured. “I beg you.”

  Matilda caressed her on the cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she repeated over and over.

  Later, in the privacy of her room, looking out the window at the stately pink oleanders that had been a symbol of her childhood, reliving the conversation with her mother, Caterina realized she was incapable of begrudging the woman who had brought her into the world and suffered at the hand of so many people. She should talk to Antonio Sobrero right away, she decided, and ask him not to press charges against her mother. She was on the way out of the palazzina when Viola stopped her in the foyer.

  “There’s someone in the kitchen you should see before you leave,” she said with a cunning smile.

  The someone Viola was referring to was Ivano. He had arrived at the palazzina hours earlier, mandolin in hand, anxious to see Caterina. No one had answered his knocks. The reason was that the servants, Guglielmo included, were all asleep, but he didn’t know.

  “This can’t be,” he uttered, almost in tears.

  Sometime later, Viola, the first one to wake, heard his call. “Stay in the kitchen,” she told him, “until the time is right for me to fetch Miss Caterina.”

  So Ivano had sat at the kitchen table for most of the morning, nervously changing positions on the chair, crossing and uncrossing his legs, occasionally grazing the mandolin strings, waiting for Caterina to arrive. The moment he saw her at the kitchen door, he rushed up to her.

  “I was worried sick about you!” he exclaimed, taking Caterina in his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” Caterina said. “I had a very eventful night and a revealing morning.”

  “Tell me everything,” Ivano said.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Caterina proposed. “I haven’t been to the belvedere in a long time.”

  Ivano nodded and slid his arm around her elbow.

  “It’s all so confusing,” she lamented as they crossed Corso Solferino.

  It was a beautiful sunny morning, and not a single cloud was in sight. The view of the city from the belvedere was astounding. Leaning against the railing, gazing in awe at the rooftops, the docks, and the blue water, she related to him the events of the previous night.

  “I have no idea what will happen now,” she concluded. “My father is hospitalized. My mother is under house arrest and in a horrible state, as are my brothers. Antonio is doing his job yet making things even more complicated.”

  “Give it some time,” Ivano consoled her. “You have been back less than a day. I know what you need,” he added, noticing Caterina’s sad face. To her delight, he placed a knee on a bench, the mandolin on the knee, and began to play. He played three songs in a row—Caterina’s favorites. She listened quietly, letting the melodies and the lyrics fill her head to toe, thinking of how many times at the convent she had longed to hear that voice, how many times she had shivered at the thought of having lost it forever. At a certain point she said, “I remember you telling me that you composed a special song for me. Would you play it? Please?”

  Ivano thought a moment. “That’s a song I’ll play for you when I’ll be sure that nothing and no one will stand between us in any way,” he said. “Remember? I composed it for the day you and I will begin our life together.”

  “Does it have a title?” she asked.

  “Not yet,” he replied. “I’ll think of one the first time I’ll play it.”

  At the hospital, Giuseppe, who was gravely paralyzed but had most of his intellectual functions intact, was realizing little by little that he was disgraced. He stared at the empty room: none of his relatives were there to take care of him, a clear sign that his plot against Caterina had become public domain. To upset him even more, the words Antonio had read from Federico Sciaccaluga’s birth document echoed in his head without respite. He felt like crying, screaming or kicking his sheets, but he could do none of that because he no longer had control over his body. He began to breathe fast and make deep noises with his throat. Those were all the sounds he’d able to utter for several days, until his paralysis would worsen and he’d become still and silent, as if petrified.

  The press, meanwhile, had been busy. Over a few days, Il Secolo XIX published several special editions in a row, filled with what details the reporters had been able to gather about Caterina, her time at the convent, the mock funeral, Giuseppe’s plot, and the complicity of Doctor Sciaccaluga. Then the reporters found out that Giuseppe was not a real Berilli after all. An angered Antonio had mercilessly made public that information after ascertaining that a woman named Mercalia Parenti had indeed lived in Genoa years earlier and that her birthdate was appropriate for her to be Giuseppe’s mother. Furthermore, the investigators confirmed that the handwriting in the document was Federico Sciaccaluga’s. Immediately, all the firm’s clients tore up their contracts with Berilli e Figli, placing the care of their legal matters with lawyers who met their standards for social status and respectability. And the talk of the town became even louder:

  “I always said it that there was something wrong with that Giuseppe.”

  “I never liked him in the first place.”

  “How could we have not guessed the truth? Eugenia is twenty centimeters taller than him, and her waist is one third the size of his. I’ve never seen two siblings more different from each other.”

  “He looks like a peasant. So fat. So bald.”

  “You know how it is with men of that ancestry. They can dress up all they want but they remain villains.”

  Raimondo and Umberto, in particular, became the target of pointed fingers, whispers, and laughs:

  “And those sons of his, what are they?”

  “They are mezzo sangue: a crossbreed between aristocracy and plebs.”

  The gossip raged on for days. When the outrage and the jokes seemed to have subsided, Francesca Barone, the owner of Caffe’ del Gambero, came forward to reignite them. Proudly, she showed everyone a pearl necklace Giuseppe had given her in recognition of their long-lasting relationship.

  “We were lovers for twenty years,” Francesca explained, “and we remained lovers until the day Giuseppe fell sick. We met once a week in a small apartment on Vico del Ferro,” she said, “only a few blocks away from Berilli e Figli. Giuseppe bought that apartment for me. It’s time for the world to know about us,” she continued, “because a love this long and strong is a miracle.”

  Everyone was stunned at how that might have happened without anyone knowing about it in a city where even the color of one’s pajamas was discussed at the cafés tables.

  The principal reason Francesca Barone had decided to share her secret, Antonio found out, was a paper she had. The paper was handwritten and signed by Giuseppe and stated that he left the apartment on Vico del Ferro to Francesca together with the sum of five thousand liras.

  “I want to be sure I get what’s mine,” Francesca told Antonio with a cold smile. “I don’t trust Giuseppe’s family members.”

  Caterina was the one who took charge to give Francesca her dues, even though Giuseppe was technically still alive. She did so calmly one week later, despite the protests of her brothers. Her calm and poise were, however, only a carefully constructed façade. On the day the rumors about Francesca Barone had spread, Caterina had been overcome by an intestinal rage that kept her in bed for many hours, feverish and fighting cramping pains. It was only when she rose from her bed the following morning that she was lucid enough to piece together the sad truth: the man who had sacrificed her and locked her in a convent for two years in order to save appearances and his social status was in fact the lover of a famous prostitute and of even lower lineage than Ivano, who was at least the son of an honest and successful merchant. Rage caught her again from inside. Without a word, she walked to the dining room, opened a cabinet, and smashed all the china in it, one piece at a time. She left the palazzina when the cabinet was empty and the floor covered with debris, under the stunned eyes of Viola, Guglielmo, and Matilda, who had all rushed to the l
iving room attracted by the noise of the broken china and couldn’t think of a single reason for Caterina’s suddenly violent behavior. Of course they all remembered the temper tantrums of Caterina’s childhood, but even so they couldn’t imagine what had brought back a behavior everyone considered a thing of the past.

  A flustered Caterina wandered all day in the old town: up and down the carrugi, along the waterline, and then amidst the loud traffic of Piazza De Ferrari and Via Carlo Felice. When at eight in the evening she returned home, tired and covered in dust from head to toe, her rage had given way to a subdued sadness. She apologized to her mother for the damage to the family china and explained how she had acted in a moment of frustration. Matilda, who hadn’t yet heard about her husband’s long-lasting extramarital affair as she no longer read the newspapers or received visitors, caressed her daughter’s cheek and returned to the blue parlor to embroider handkerchiefs.

  To shelter her, Caterina ordered Guglielmo and the rest of the staff not to talk to Matilda or to each other about the relationship between Francesca Barone and her father.

  “We must make sure my mother never finds out,” she said. “We should also keep an eye on visitors and ensure no stranger is ever left alone with her.”

  Both Viola and Guglielmo were moved by Caterina’s protective attitude towards a mother who hadn’t protected her at all when she most needed it.

  That night, on her way to her bedroom, Caterina looked at herself in the large mirror set at the top of the staircase and was frightened by what she saw: a tired face scarred by grief and two small colorless eyes. She turned away from that image and told herself that the past was past and no matter what she thought or did and who her father had been, the time she had spent in the convent would not be returned to her, ever.

  “I will no longer feel sorry for myself,” she said aloud. “My father ruined twenty-five months of my life, but there’s no reason I should allow him to ruin everything.”

  On that note, she resolved to live a normal life, a life with friends and shopping outings in the carrugi and love, and not to give her father, the press, or the gossips another thought.