A Life Apart Read Online Free PDF

furiously hurls her handbag onto the table.
    “What is?” my father says in alarm. “The school?”
    “Well, if you really want to know,” Aunt Erminia replies as she storms past him with a harsh clicking of heels, “you are!”
    Remorse and rage gave them both the chance to omit asking me about my first day at school.
    At the table I suddenly felt like opening the windows. I stood up without asking permission and began with the dining-room windows. I did it slowly, partly because they were high and heavy and I could hardly reach. Then I went into the little drawing-room – two windows. Then the study and the kitchen – four more. On my way upstairs I flung wide the door of the little landing balcony and felt the rush of air coming from the river. Then I went into the salon – six French windows – then into my bedroom – two windows, and two for each of the other rooms. I was counting them out loud: twenty-four in all.
    “It’s draughty,” Mamma says, staring down at her plate.
    “Never mind,” I say as I return to my place and with a sideways glance catch sight of my father and Maddalena, who both at the same time stop short from getting up and closing the windows again.
    “Well done,” Maddalena says, drying her tears, as we stand in the kitchen afterwards. “We need some fresh air in here.”
    That day I played all afternoon with the windows of the salon open wide over the river and the curtains whipped into a wild dance by a rainstorm that no longer felt like summer.
    “They’re getting wet,” Maddalena says, standing at a loss in the middle of the room.
    “Like the sails of a ship,” I say, raising my voice slightly.
    “Have you ever seen one?”
    “No, I haven’t.”
    “Then I’ll take you to Venice this Sunday.”
    “In the daytime?”
    “In the daytime.”
    “They won’t let me.”
    “Yes they will! You opened the windows, didn’t you?”
    “But are there sailing ships in Venice?”
    “Perhaps a few little sailboats. And liners, cruising ships. And gondolas with little seats of red velvet with golden tassels. They slide away, silent as tears.”
    “How many people are there in Venice?”
    “The whole world.”
    “Then we can go.”
    I did not go to Venice that Sunday. After sleeping all week with my bedroom windows open wide to the damp cold of the river, I fell ill and was forced to stay in bed for a few days.
    That was my first illness, and turned out to be as instructive as it was pleasant. My father looked after me, and above all would stay up late to play chess with me, neglecting his monologues with Mamma. Aunt Erminia gave me a record player and a little yellow rocking chair to sit in as I listened to music. Maddalena brought me meals in bed and kissed me on the forehead at regular intervals on the pretext of checking my temperature.
    “It’s nice to be ill,” I say to her in the evening.
    “It is at first. But after a while people get fed up. Compassion is like fish: after three days it rots.”
    On the third day Lucilla came to visit. She appeared on the threshold of my bedroom door in mid-afternoon one day, looking enormous in a white tracksuit.
    “Hi. I should have an-noun-ced-my-self, as my Mamma says – but I don’t have your phone number, and it’s not listed. And anyway, I thought it would be ab-so-lu-tely impossible for youto be out if you’re ill. Maybe you don’t feel like talking, in which case tell me straight-a-way and I’ll disappear. Your Mamma was e-ver-so-kind. She kissed me again and again, and said that I was blessed: could she have been crying? And she told me to come up – oh, I saw your grandma too, on my way up: she was sitting in a room next to the staircase. Perhaps I should have gone up to her, but I wasn’t sure that would be the right thing. My Mamma says I must-not-be-a-nuis-ance, and that what counts is doing the right thing.”
    Hard to imagine anyone who at her young age could be so far from doing the right thing according to