The House of Serenades

by Lina Simoni

  “Guglielmo!” she called, smacking the table bell. “Mail these letters as soon as possible,” she ordered when the butler arrived. “And send me the head cook. We have a menu to plan.”

  The head cook was a short, stocky middle-aged woman who had served the Berillis for a decade and was faithful to Matilda and her ways. She was not thrilled about Eugenia’s call.

  “I am planning a dinner party,” Eugenia explained. “You will be in charge of the menu.” She looked at the head cook with hawk eyes. “Listen carefully, because I will not tolerate mistakes. There will be at least ten different courses,” she said, “each with its matching wine. Four will be meat dishes, four will be fish, and two will be vegetable tarts. Then you will prepare four different dessert to be served with French champagne and followed by the best coffee you can find. Start washing our best china and take out of the closets the large silver trays. Have Viola clean them until they shine.”

  The head cook lowered her head in assent.

  “Come back with a detailed list of recipes and ingredients,” Eugenia added. “Once I’ll approve, you will go shopping at the market and then begin the preparation.” She turned away. “You can go now.”

  The first five replies to Eugenia’s invitations arrived three days later. Every single one of them was a regret—courteous, kindly written, but leaving no doubt. The twenty-five replies that followed read the same. Mute with stupefaction, staring at the pile of letters, Eugenia was struck by the realization that the recent events had forever changed her social standing within the town. She suddenly noticed how her friends had behaved coldly towards her in the past weeks. There had been no jokes told, no direct talking, and little gossip-sharing during her visits at Klainguti’s, all of which had been no accident but part of a deliberate attempt to cut her out.

  “I’m finished,” she said aloud, then went to her bedroom to pack.

  Later that evening, in the palazzina’s main hallway, with two curt sentences, Eugenia informed Caterina that she would be returning to Via San Lorenzo in the morning. When, through the blue parlor’s open door, Matilda overheard the conversation, she understood at once that Eugenia’s sudden departure had to do with the failed dinner party. The head cook had talked to her about the ten main courses and four desserts, asking for her opinion on the recipes. Stretching her lips in a sarcastic smile, Matilda joined Eugenia and Caterina in the hallway.

  “I hear you’re having a ten-course dinner next Friday, Eugenia,” Matilda said in a sweet voice. “I’m sure it’ll be a huge success. What should I wear? Silk? Velvet?” She walked past Eugenia, towards the front door. “Please, do let me know what material you deem more appropriate for the occasion.”

  As Matilda vanished from sight, next to Caterina, Eugenia stood in a dignified pose, swallowing bile.

  In the morning, while Guglielmo prepared the car for the ride downtown, Caterina offered Eugenia to accompany her.

  “As you wish,” Eugenia said, entering the car. As she ducked her head inside, she took a last long look at the palazzina, its wisteria—sprinkled stone walls, its manicured gardens. Suddenly, while she was still looking, those images disappeared, as if her vision had all of a sudden become impaired. She closed the car door as Caterina entered on the other side. She didn’t acknowledge her at all. Lifting her chin, she said to Guglielmo, “Let’s go.” She spoke no other word during the ten-minute ride.

  On Via San Lorenzo, Caterina accompanied her aunt all the way up to the second floor, carrying her suitcase. In vain she offered to go shopping for food, help her unpack, and keep her company.

  “I don’t need anything,” Eugenia said. Suitcase in hand, she entered the apartment, closed the door, and double-locked it, leaving Caterina on the landing.

  Following her return to Via San Lorenzo, out of an embarrassment she was unable to overcome, incapable of coming to terms with a reality she couldn’t bear, Eugenia refused all visits, including those of her niece, the Mordiglias, and her former friends the Countess Marina Passaggi, Francesca Dodero, and Carlotta Defilla. It was perfectly clear to her that Grazia, Marina, Francesca, and Carlotta were no longer interested in her company as they had been before the scandal and that their rare visits were only motivated by pity and their desire to fuel gossip. She spent all her days alone, locked inside her apartment: life made no sense to her anymore. Her only contact with the external world was Ottavio, who came once a week to her door and picked up beneath it an envelope containing money and a handwritten list of food to buy. Punctually, he did the requested shopping and left the food on the second-floor landing, as Eugenia had instructed him to do on the day she had decided she no longer wanted to be part of the world and of the score of its inhabitants. When four months later, for two weeks in a row, Ottavio didn’t find the envelope in the usual place, he became worried and, accompanied by the Mordiglias, opened Eugenia’s door with his key.

  The moment they stepped in, the three were welcomed by a torrent of screams and slurs: “Get out of my house, you bastards. Vultures. Leave me alone, you blood-sucking parasites. Leeches. You came to suck my blood. Get out of here! Out!”

  What they saw when they entered the living room, seated in an armchair, surrounded on the floor by a confused mass of objects that Grazia Mordiglia recognized as all of Eugenia’s personal belongings—clothes, hats, shoes, makeup, jewelry, paintings, books, china, silverware, ceramic statues, the table clock, and Caterina’s self-portrait—was a skeleton wrapped in a thin, wrinkled layer of skin and topped by a wild mass of tangled, fleecy white hair. The skeleton was Eugenia. She had shimmering big eyes that reminded everyone of the eyes of the devil, so that Ottavio, Grazia, and her husband ran out of the apartment, locked the door, and went to Ottavio’s dwelling to swallow several shots of Glenlivet, the single-malt whiskey that was Ottavio’s favorite companion.

  The following day Ottavio came back with a doctor. Eugenia was still in the armchair, in the exact same position, staring absently and silently about the room, mouth half open. Stepping over the pile of objects that surrounded her, the doctor gazed at her for a long moment, letting his eyes explore her body up and down.

  “She’s ill from malnutrition,” he said, shaking his head twice. “Her skin has a yellow hue, her mouth a foul odor. And she’s thinner than a grass blade. Soon, she’ll worsen, contracting pellagra or scurvy or both. I’m already seeing small skin lesions on her hands. In order to begin to recover, this woman must eat.”

  Suddenly, Eugenia turned to the doctor, setting her shimmering eyes on him. Her pupils narrowed, and for a few moments she looked intently at the man before her, as if she were trying to recall who he was. Then she cried, and her cry was shrill and deafening, so loud it made the chandelier pendants jingle. When the cry died out, an avalanche of insults and slurs came out Eugenia’s mouth like a roll of thunder. Startled, the doctor stepped back and ran out of the apartment as fast as he could, vowing to never return.

  From that day on, Ottavio entered Eugenia’s apartment once a week to check on her health and bring her food and water. Every time, he was welcomed by screams, insults, and cries that became wilder and more vulgar at every visit and by a stench of rotten flesh that became stronger with the passing of time. It wasn’t until one year later, on July 25th, 1911, that Ottavio walked into the apartment and heard no sound. He knew then with certainty that Eugenia had died.

  While Eugenia was starving herself to death in her apartment, the Berilli family saga followed its course. Five days after Eugenia’s departure from the palazzina, in his hospital bed, Giuseppe began to breathe irregularly and in an agitated way. A nurse took his pulse and made a face. She rushed out of the room, calling for help. By the time she returned with a doctor, Giuseppe was no longer breathing. Antonio was the first to be informed; he was also the one who brought the news of Giuseppe’s death to the palazzina. In the blue parlor, Matilda and Caterina listened to his announcement and condolences with marmoreal faces.

  “I decided not to press
charges against you for the mock funeral,” Antonio told Matilda. “In theory you could be prosecuted because you knew the truth and didn’t speak, but given that it was obviously your husband’s idea and he’s dead, I’ll let go.”

  “Thank you,” Caterina said.

  “You are no longer under house arrest, Madame,” Antonio went on. “You can go out whenever you wish now.”

  Matilda gave him a tired smile. “I don’t see any reason for me to leave this house,” she said. “There’s nothing for me out there anymore.”

  The following day Il Secolo XIX published a small article about Giuseppe Berilli’s death, commenting also about the subdued funeral his family had decided to give him. The ceremony didn’t take place in the cathedral, where a Berilli would normally be celebrated with pomp and circumstance. It was carried out at the cemetery, in a small chapel where an old priest said lackluster masses for deceased men and women who were either poor, or unknown, or criminals. Matilda didn’t attend. Umberto had by then left town, unable to find the strength to ignore the gossips about him being a mezzo sangue and his father being a prostitute’s lover and possibly having fathered an illegitimate child. Crushed by the collapse of the law firm he always imagined one day would be his, he moved to Venice with the intent of rebuilding his professional life amidst people who had never heard the name Berilli and didn’t care who his father had been or what he had done. He left Genoa without ceremony and without saying good-bye to his mother. Costanza had left him days earlier. Her parents had come to Genoa to get her shortly after Caterina’s return home.

  Costanza’s parents, the Manginis, were a well-to-do family from Savona, a coastal town forty kilometers west of Genoa. When fifteen years earlier a young Umberto had told his parents he intended to marry Costanza, Matilda and Giuseppe had regarded the announcement with perplexity, as they had never heard of the Manginis before. In order to find out who they were, they had both traveled to Savona by coach. There they found a church down the street from the Manginis’ residence where they asked to see the parish priest. He was an older man by the name of Father Marcello, who was very eager to talk about the Manginis. He told Matilda and Giuseppe all he knew, that the Manginis were a good, old family—wealthy and respectable—and everyone in the parish thought very highly of them. He said that Costanza, in particular, was a wonderful young woman, serious and devoted to God, and he could vouch for that, for he had known Costanza since the day she had been born. At the priest’s flattering words, Matilda and Giuseppe felt comfortable with Umberto’s choice of spouse and gave him and Costanza their blessings. One Sunday, after Mass, Father Marcello related to the Manginis the conversation he had had with Matilda and Giuseppe, and the Manginis, who were as stuck up and proud of their family name as the Berillis were, voiced their resentment publicly and loudly:

  “How dare they doubt our daughter’s suitability for marriage! How dare they investigate us and ask questions about us in our home town! Their son may be marrying our daughter, but we don’t have to talk to them or see them socially past the wedding day!”

  For years there was little contact between the Berillis and the Manginis. The relationship changed when Caterina supposedly died. On the day of Caterina’s funeral, saddened by that horrific disgrace, the Manginis had decided to forgive Matilda and Giuseppe for the intrusion. From then on, for a little over two years, the two families entertained civilized conversations. The moment the Manginis got wind of the scandal surrounding Giuseppe and what he had done to Caterina, they asked their butler to drive them to Genoa and stormed into their daughter’s house.

  “Pack your things!” Costanza’s mother shouted, and less than an hour later a teary Costanza and her parents were on their way to back Savona.

  As for Raimondo, he had quietly vanished. A distraught Matilda couldn’t find the strength to worry about the whereabouts of her perennially-drunken son; and Caterina, who still felt uneasy in Raimondo’s presence and had hence pretended since her return to Genoa that her brother wasn’t there, didn’t notice his absence for some time. When she did notice, she decided to ignore it. In the end, no Berilli ever knew where Raimondo had decided to go or why. While the scandal raged, he had sold his apartment in Genoa and bought a shack on one acre east of town, on a stretch of rugged and solitary coastline, where he spent his days drinking, sleeping, and staring at the sky. What no one knew was that he was a full-fledged pedophile. In his lifetime, he had molested two young girls: the daughter of an employee and Caterina. The mere sight of children aroused him, forcing him to fight his darkest desires. Ever since puberty, his life had been a long, painful, nightmare. He knew his vice had no cure. He also knew that pedophiles were emarginated, classified as insane, and often locked in the asylum. So he fought the debilitating vice alone, with alcohol, brawls, and a lifestyle more suitable for a sailor than for a prominent lawyer. In the end, once the firm closed down and he no longer had a job to go to in the morning and keep him busy, he decided to remove himself from society or he would spend all his time and energy pursuing young girls. He would live in the solitary shack for eight years, returning to Genoa at a time when the Berilli saga was forgotten and no one could possibly recognize him. He was, indeed, unrecognizable. Once stocky, he was all bones, and his eyes were set deep into his face and cavernous. He looked like a walking skeleton wrapped in wrinkled skin and topped with wiry hair glinting like silver. He’d die two years later, his body found face down on a beach, lapped by the waves. Because he had no identification on him and no one ever claimed his body, the police assumed he was a traveler or perhaps a thug involved in some misdeed.

  Oddly enough, Caterina was the only family member to attend Giuseppe’s burial ceremony. Ivano was at her side. They watched the casket being lowered into the ground—not in the family mausoleum—alongside the tombs of perfect strangers. They exchanged no words until the burial was completed.

  “I thought I’d feel nothing for him after what he did to me and to my mother,” she said, staring at the uneven, rippled soil covering her father’s remains. She wiped a few tears. “I was mistaken.”

  “What will happen now?” Ivano asked. To break Caterina’s silence, he dared, “I know you have been through a lot, but I would like to ask that you consider leaving your parents’ house. We need to build our life in a different place, maybe away from Genoa and all the bad memories you have.”

  “I need time, Ivano,” Caterina said. “My father just died, my mother lives like a recluse. My brothers are gone, and my aunt won’t come out of her apartment downtown. It’s all so confusing. Please be patient,” she begged him. “I want to have a life with you, believe me. But I also want time to sort everything out.”

  “Of course,” Ivano said, hiding his impatience.

  Within days of Giuseppe’s death, the palazzina became a gloomy place. Caterina and Matilda began a new life together, but a life that had little in common with the one they had lived before Caterina’s disappearance. No visits, no dinners, no entertaining. Day and night the palazzina was wrapped in silence. Matilda was never again invited to the parties and teas of the upper class, because she had been a Genoese only by marriage and because the story of the dead daughter who wasn’t dead had turned off the few who would have overlooked her husband’s inferior ancestry and lover and continued to ask her to their homes. In Turin, her relatives also found the story of Caterina’s false death despicable and told each other it was time to cut their ties to Matilda once and for all. It was so that Matilda became an internee in her own home, spending her days embroidering linens in the blue parlor. Of all the servants who worked at the palazzina, only Viola and Guglielmo remained plus a part-time helper in the kitchen. The other staff members were kindly asked to leave, as there was no reason for having all those maids and cooks now that people didn’t visit or stop by anymore. The only person who visited on a regular basis was Father Camillo, who came on Sundays to hear Matilda’s confession and offer Caterina comfort. Matilda took her relentless, irrever
sible isolation with courage.

  “She was buried when I was alive,” she said of her daughter. “It’s now time for me to fade and let her live.”

  Caterina, however, was not living as she had expected she would upon her return home. Saddened by her family’s annihilation, she began to feel responsible for the damage she had caused her own mother. Had she not left the convent with Ivano, she reasoned, had she stayed at the convent one more day and returned home with Matilda instead, the scandal would have played out in a very different way. Perhaps there wouldn’t have been a scandal. The family may have found the strength to overcome its problems. And Ivano, who all along had unquestionably acted out of love and concern for her, had made things worse by involving in her return home the Chief of Police. Had he not rushed to fetch Antonio Sobrero, perhaps her father’s true origins would be still a secret. She cursed herself and Ivano for having stirred the waters.

  “It’s our fault,” she often said aloud, wishing she could go back in time and do things in a different way. As guilt took hold of her more and more each day, like her mother, she refrained from public life, although she met regularly with Ivano, who waited patiently for her to feel ready. Their encounters no longer had the same fervor of the early days. Ivano, whose love for Caterina had remained strong and unshaken by the course of events, was baffled. He had looked upon Giuseppe’s death as the last remaining obstacle to his union with Caterina, but soon discovered that the lawyer had created as large an obstacle with his death as when he had been alive. Shattered by Caterina’s increasingly cold detachment, he understood that unless he did something to change the state of things he was bound to lose her again—this time forever.