It had taken him a while to realize that she wasn’t really reading the music he put in front of her. She was listening and copying. If she didn’t understand something, she would ask Felix to show her. After a few demonstrations she could play bar after bar from memory.
Teaching her to read music had been torture for both of them. She’d hated it, he’d hated it, and they’d hated each other half the time. He made her do everything she despised and rarely let her do what she loved. Long notes and scales and sight-reading, day after day.
“I don’t want to practice long notes! I want to play Chopin.” Eva would stomp her foot.
“You can’t play Chopin.”
“I can too! Listen.” Eva immediately launched into a Chopin nocturne, complete with every variation he’d purposely played, just to test her.
“You can’t. You are parroting. You are not reading. You are listening to me and playing without looking at your music and seeing the music as you create it.”
“I see the music in my head. And it doesn’t look like little black dots and lines! It looks like rainbows and flying and the Alps and the Apennines. Why can’t I just listen and play?” she had whined.
“Because I won’t always be here to demonstrate! You have to be able to read the notes and turn the notes into music, both in your head and on your instrument. You are composing, but the greatest composers can see the notes when they hear music. They don’t see the Apennines! And you will never be able to record your compositions if you don’t understand how to read and write music.”
She had learned, eventually. But she still relied far too heavily on her ability to mimic, to embellish, to adapt.
The word adapt made her think of her grandfather, who hadn’t been able to adapt after all.
“Uncle Felix?” Eva lowered her violin and bow, interrupting her reverie and her freestyle composition to stare at her uncle’s rigid back.
“Please keep playing, Eva,” he said quietly.
“What would you like me to play, Uncle?”
“Play whatever you wish. Something else mixed with Rosselli and sprinkled with Adler,” he said, and his shoulders began to shake. She’d never seen her uncle cry, and in the last months, he’d cried twice. She didn’t know what to do to comfort him. So she played. She played Chopin’s Nocturne in E Flat Major because it was hauntingly beautiful, but she drifted off into her own arrangement and ended up playing something that didn’t sound like anything she’d ever played before. When Eva finally lowered her violin, Felix had sunk into a chair and dried his eyes on a handkerchief he still held wadded up in his hand. He met her gaze, and his eyes were so sad her heart ached in her chest. But he smiled at her with tenderness and began to speak.
His voice was tired, his words measured. “In my life I’ve only been good at one thing. The violin. Not as good as my father. Maybe I could have been. But I drank too much and lost my temper too often. I came to Italy because I failed in Vienna. I came to Italy because I was in love with a woman who wasn’t in love with me. And for the last thirteen years, I’ve taken it out on you. If you hadn’t been so strong, I might have broken you. I might have made you hate me. But you fought back. You shrugged me off. And now I listen to you and I am in awe.”
“You are?” Eva asked in amazement. These were things she had never heard before.
“When you play, Eva, I feel hopeful. They can take our homes, our possessions. Our families. Our lives. They can drive us out, like they’ve driven us out before. They can humiliate us and dehumanize us. But they cannot take our thoughts. They cannot take our talents. They cannot take our knowledge, or our memories, or our minds. In music, there is no bondage. Music is a door, and the soul escapes through the melody. Even if it’s only for a few minutes. And everyone who listens is freed. Everyone who listens is elevated.
“When you play, I hear my life lifting off your strings. I hear the long notes and the scales, the tears and the hours. I hear you and me, together in this room. I hear my father and the things he taught me that I passed on to you. I hear it all, and my life plays on, his life plays on, over and over, when you play.”
Eva set her instrument down and, with tears streaming down her face, knelt in front of her uncle and slid her arms around him, pressing her cheek to his thin chest. He embraced her gently, and they stayed in sorrowful silence, listening to the wind as it wailed a mournful strain not so different from the one Eva had composed, wondering if the wind would be the only witness, the only whisper, when the death in Austria came for them too.
10 August, 1939
Confession: I am nineteen years old, and I’ve been kissed many times. But I’ve never been kissed like that.
It felt like drowning but not needing to breathe. Like falling but never hitting the ground. Even now, my hands are shaking, and my heart is so swollen and fat it feels like it’s going to burst, or I’m going to burst. I want to cry. I want to laugh. I want to bury my head in my pillow and scream until I fall asleep, because maybe when I go to sleep I can relive it.
I can’t believe it happened, yet I think I’ve been waiting for it to happen for the last seven years, ever since I conned Angelo into kissing me the first time. I’ve been waiting for him for so long, and for a couple of hours tonight, in a little world that was only big enough for the two of us, he was mine.
But I don’t know if I will be able to keep him. I’m afraid when tomorrow comes, I’ll be waiting for him again.
Eva Rosselli
CHAPTER 4
GROSSETO
Angelo had been surprised when Camillo announced he was still taking the family to the beach house, considering the new set of Racial Laws that had been passed earlier that summer. But Camillo had made the reservation before the law was passed, and he stubbornly maintained that he had been renting that particular lodge from the same family for twenty years, and he would keep on renting it for twenty more. So that August, only months before the war broke out, they all boarded the train for Grosseto, confident in Camillo’s ability to make everything all right.
The first few days of Angelo’s planned five-day retreat were spent sleeping, eating, playing checkers, and debating everything and nothing, simply because Camillo and Augusto enjoyed discussion, and Angelo enjoyed listening to them argue. In the last few months they argued less, as Fascism had revealed itself and Augusto had been proven wrong. But they still found points of disagreement and seemed relieved that they had.
Eva walked a lot, her feet flirting with the surf, dancing in and out of the waves until she was wet and cold. Then she would lie on her big white towel and fall asleep in the sun until she was almost dry. Then she would repeat the process. Her porcelain skin had grown rosy and brown, making her look decidedly more Italian than Austrian. Her hair and eyes were dark, but her skin was unquestionably less olive than Angelo’s was. His skin turned smoky after an hour in the sun, and within a few days, he looked like he’d spent his life casting nets with the fishermen of Grosseto.
Umbrella-shaped maritime pines fringed the beaches, and one afternoon Angelo found himself stomping around in the cork-oak woodlands, where aristocratic families still hunted for wild boar, losing himself in the shade and the scents and the quiet. As the shadows grew longer, and his skin grew sticky with sweat, he tromped out of the woods and headed back toward the beach, eager for a quick swim in the cool, clear waters.
Clouds had rolled in, and the sky was no longer the guileless blue it had been earlier in the day. Still, even with rain threatening, Angelo shrugged out of his shirt, removed his shoe and his prosthetic, and hopped through the waves until he could immerse himself in the Tyrrhenian. Before too long, Eva was treading water beside him, and they kicked and splashed and floated on their backs until distant thunder rumbled and urged them back to the shore.
Rain was coming, but the air was still warm, and they toweled themselves off and let the heat dry their hair as they watched the storm move toward them.
“What’s that?” Eva inclined her head toward his pile of abandoned clothing and forest finds. He rarely saved anything, impatient with clutter and generally unsentimental, but he’d thought maybe his nonno would like that afternoon’s discovery.
“I found a quiver of black-and-white porcupine quills.”
“Hmm. Well, I saw some spotted pink flamingos in the lagoon,” Eva countered, her eyes on the water. She was smiling slightly, letting him in on the game.
“That’s nothing. I woke a barn owl and he dove at my head,” he shot back. “And I killed a wild pig with my bare hands. I thought about bringing him back for dinner, but then I remembered pigs aren’t kosher.”
Eva pursed her lips, clearly trying to come up with a better story.
“Well, I found this.” She handed him a shell, still completely intact, still hinged at the back. He took it and peered inside. The interior was smooth and empty, the life inside long gone.
“No pearl?”
“No. Just sand.”
“But the sand can become a pearl,” he offered, handing the shell back to her.
“The sand doesn’t really become a pearl, silly. It doesn’t become something else. It’s just hidden. The grain of sand is still there beneath the layers of nacre—”
“Nacre?” he interrupted. It wasn’t a word he’d heard before.
“The mineral substance that the oyster coats the grain of sand in.”
The mention of the oyster had its same old effect, and Eva’s eyes touched on his briefly before she glanced away. Another time it probably wouldn’t have registered. But here they were, sitting in roughly the same spot where they’d sat seven years before when the skies were clear and no storms threatened.
“You mean mother-of-pearl? How did you know that?”
“Babbo. He is a chemical engineer, Angelo. He knows the actual name of every substance known to man.”
“So the little irritant becomes a beautiful pearl.” He winked at Eva and tapped her nose.