A Life Apart Read Online Free PDF Page B

common manners. I explained who Maddalena was, and also Aunt Erminia, the lady she sometimes saw waiting for me at the school gate. But I did not dare tell her that the dark, forlorn figure sitting in the little armchair was my mother.
    “Where is your mother then?” she asks, leaning over the bed until her head nearly touches my pillow.
    “She’s not well,” I say quickly.
    “Is she in hospital?”
    “No, she isn’t.”
    But Lucilla was as curious as she was gluttonous. When she got back to her house after eating the vanilla biscuits that Maddalena had brought for us that afternoon, she must have pestered her mother until she finally got to know what the whole town already knew. And so, the next day, she launched into a new sally:
    “My Mamma used to know your mother well, before she … got ill. She says she was beautiful and gentle. Somewhat artistic. She says you won’t talk about her because you might be ashamed ofher. But you mustn’t be. You are yourself, she says. You’re doing very well, you can read and write already, you can play the piano. And then, you have your father, your Aunt Erminia. I don’t have a father and it’s cer-tain-ly-bet-ter that way, seeing as we’re the talk of the town because of him.”
    I was not wounded by Lucilla. It was impossible to take against such an abundance of good will. Her empathy made her unimpeachable. I did not take offence, but had no wish to talk about my mother, and so listened with relief to her account of her father’s misdeeds: he was a two-ti-mer and a pae-do-phile, two new words enticing my childish curiosity, unaccustomed as I was to any sharing of secrets.
    Until Lucilla came into my life, the boundaries of my world had coincided exactly with those of my house: the river at the back, and the neighbourhood of Le Barche, that I knew only from my night escapades with Aunt Erminia, in front: narrow, dark, mostly deserted streets. Lucilla did not have the power to make me beautiful, even though with her I have at times forgotten my ugliness – but she succeeded in shifting my horizon a little further, expanding it to reach her house, which was hardly a few hundred yards away, but appeared to my eyes like a universe seen through a looking-glass. And not only because her house – a three-bedroom flat with a dark narrow corridor, fully taken up by herself and her mother with their ample forms – was tiny compared to mine, or because the kitchen had pink walls and purple fixtures that matched the bathroom tiles or the bedroom curtains. None of the rules and laws that I knew was respected in that house.
    Lucilla was free to leave her jersey thrown on a footstool in the hall, her school bag in the kitchen, her shoes in the bedroom. She was free to scatter traces of herself wherever she went, to vent anger at her mother if she was not allowed another ice cream or a new book. She was free to ask and free to exist. My own existence on the other hand was stained with a sort of original debt due to my horrible ugliness, something that made it natural for me to have no claim to anything more than the miraculous affection that my father, Aunt Erminia and Maddalena were able to feel for me. I was grateful for that, drenched as it were in a sorrowful gratitude that reached so deep into my feelings and desires as to allow them expression only when they perfectly coincided with those of the people around me. But back then I had no way of knowing that, and so would look on in amazement as Lucilla threw a tantrum, or hold my breath listening to the swarm of words with which her mother would chase her around the house. I was frightened by the quantity of feelings that could be expressed in words. In my house, words were as flat as dictionary entries, and were hardly ever used to convey anything other than information, engagements, appointments. On a very few occasions, when the talk was of myself and my future, Aunt Erminia would grow animated and fall with my father into