A Life Apart Read Online Free PDF Page A

is not move your lips – and she’s not looking anyway. And besides, what can she do to us? She can hard-ly-kill-us.”
    Perhaps my father had not taken me because he had decided that I should begin to face the world alone, without the protection coming from his elegant and authoritative persona – or perhaps he had been scared. Scared of his own fear and mine. But I was more alone than I could bear to be.
    I cannot say what might have pushed Lucilla to be my friend from the very first day. At times I have thought it might be because of her physical otherness, but I was wrong. She saw herself as beautiful, and in her very special way she really was. Ours has never been a pathetic sum of two misfortunes but a true friendship, born and nurtured at first only thanks to her, since I felt and was utterly unfit for any social relationship. I was unable to answer her that day. I lacked the words to voice my thoughts, perhaps I even lacked the thoughts. No-one had ever sought my opinion on anything, or asked me whether I had been to nursery school, orhow my days were spent. But I did answer Miss Albertina when she asked me, as she had done with all the other children, what I knew about our city. I spoke to her of Corso Palladio, that runs south-west to north-east across the town centre following the line of the ancient
decumanus
, and of Corso Fogazzaro and Contrà Porte, vying for recognition as the ancient
cardo maximus
and dividing urban spaces into a grid that was not always orderly, owing to the presence of the streams that have always graced, and sometimes threatened and destroyed, the life of the city. I spoke of the Basilica Palladiana that casts its austere, watchful countenance over the square where gentlemen and ladies rub shoulders with the poor on festive days. And also of the Basilica at Monte Berico, cradling the secrets of an entire city deep inside the cross-stitched
ex-voto
hearts and the flames of the candles lit by those who climb to the top to pray for grace, as Aunt Erminia had told me. But still I was at a loss when she asked me what I liked best about those monuments. I knew their histories, their outline against the evening sky, their position on the city map, the gossip that had been growing around them through the ages. But I had never seen them.
    “Not even Corso Palladio?” Miss Albertina says.
    “No,” I reply.
    “Each one of you should feel like an important person here,” says Miss Albertina, finally smiling as the bell sounds and it is time to say goodbye. “Some of you might do better than others. Some might understand maths better, some others might be very good at drawing. But you are all clever enough to respect one another, you can all be polite, you can all learn to be generous, andthere is absolutely no reason to accept any slacking on this point. Agreed?”
    Miss Albertina always looked at me too: her eyes did not shy away, and neither did they scan the folds of my features in curiosity.
    That day at the school gate I found Aunt Erminia looking dazzling: she was wearing a long, tight dress, teal green with a thin gold thread at the neckline, the sleeves and the hem. She was beautiful – much too beautiful for the time and the place.
    “Your father behaved shamefully,” she says, scooping me up and kissing me as she always does. “I steamrollered him like a cat under a juggernaut. Leaving you all alone this morning. All alone! How could anyone do that?”
    Back home my father was sitting in an armchair in the dining-room, the smart clothes he was wearing in the morning still in perfect order. He had just come back from work, he said, but his briefcase was still at the bottom of the stairs, where I had seen it on my way to school. He probably had not left the house at all. He looked up as I came in and hinted at a movement with his back, as if to stand up and come to meet me. But he stopped, scanning my face for the answer to his fears.
    “Indecent,” Aunt Erminia says as she