The Garden of Letters Read online

  “I wish you’d come, too. Berto’s sculptures are beautiful . . . sensual in a way I’ve never seen before. Brigitte Lowenthal is his girlfriend and muse. God, Elodie, if you could see her! She has bobbed hair; her features are so sharp, she looks like a fox.”

  “Sounds like the opposite of you, Lena . . .” Elodie raised an eyebrow. “If she’s the fox of the group, are you their kitten?”

  “Hardly!” She laughed and Elodie noticed how alive Lena seemed since she began going to the meetings. “Really, they barely even notice me . . . Brigitte’s the one with the dramatic story. She’s the daughter of one of Verona’s wealthiest Jewish families. They came here from Germany.”

  Elodie shook her head. “What you’re describing to me sounds more like you’re attending an art salon, not an anti-Fascist meeting. Soon you’ll be talking about music from the Liceo and playing chamber music for them.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous! I’m just giving you a little background on some of the more interesting members. There are others, too, Beppe and many of his friends from the university, and a bookseller by the name of Luca who owns Il Gufo, the shop on the Via Mazzini.

  “But we’re all committed in our united goal to liberate Italy from the Blackshirts . . .”

  Luca, Berto, Beppe . . . all these men’s names that Lena was mentioning, they were all new to her.

  “Of course, some of them are communisti . . . their satchels filled with the books of Marx and Lenin. They’re even printing their own newspaper, borrowing one of the presses from one of Brigitte’s contacts. But they’re looking for other women to help them . . . we can move around more freely. No one thinks we’re up to anything more than playing the instruments in our cases or going home to boil water for pasta.”

  Elodie walked home that afternoon by herself, her heavy cello case strapped to her back. She studied the men around her. The Blackshirts congregating in the corner, the police, and the young men smoking cigarettes in the café. She wondered if it was true that she was invisible to them. Her face was unremarkable, her body so slight that she caused no distraction.

  I am invisible, she thinks. And suddenly, in a way that surprised her, she felt exhilarated by this transparency. It made her feel strong.

  Elodie couldn’t get what Lena told her out of her mind. Part of her was impressed with Lena’s courage, while another part was concerned for her friend’s safety. It was no secret what the Fascist police would do to her should she get caught. Their beatings and torture were a well-known threat to everyone in the city. Many people had simply vanished after being arrested, while others were sent back to their homes severely beaten, their scars a visible reminder of who was in charge of Italy. It was reason enough to stay away. That, and the fact that Elodie could only imagine how devastated her parents would be if anything happened to her.

  For several days, Elodie found herself distracted by the knowledge of Lena’s clandestine activities. Over dinner, her father, having sensed the recent lack of focus on her playing, tried to pull Elodie back to her music.

  “Elodie, you need to devote even more time to your playing this year. You have to work harder than everyone else, even if it comes easily to you,” her father told her. “You don’t want people to accuse you of benefiting from the fact I teach at the school.”

  Elodie nodded her head, aware that she was clearly distracted by her conversation with Lena. “I know.”

  She tried to appear focused, but her head was spinning and the words of Lena kept resurfacing, like a song she couldn’t ignore. She could feel her body moving and her voice responding to her parents, but her mind was truly elsewhere.

  “You have a great career ahead of you. It may be a bit unconventional for a woman, your mother and I realize this, but you were born with a gift.”

  “Several gifts,” Orsina added.

  “Yes. I wish I had your memory, Elodie,” he uttered. Pietro never ceased to be amazed that no matter how complex the score was, his daughter already knew her part by heart.

  For several weeks, Elodie tried to refocus her attention on her music, but she continued to find herself distracted. Every Tuesday, Elodie and Lena would exit the school; Lena walked one way, to a meeting for the nascent Resistance, and Elodie would return home to quietly practice her cello and have dinner with her parents. But, still, she felt an increasing restlessness. Now everything that she saw on the streets seemed to be in high relief to her. The Balilla banner. The gangs of Blackshirts with their motorcycle brigades, threatening innocent people in the street. Terror was all around, if you opened your eyes and saw things clearly.

  Her father, too, seemed to be increasingly angry when he returned home.

  But it was the change in Elodie’s playing, not her husband’s behavior, that alarmed Orsina. There was an agitation to it that she had never heard before. A restlessness.

  “Don’t you hear it, Pietro?”

  “We’re all unnerved, Orsina. We’re at war. The Fascists are ruling the country. Mussolini is getting into bed with the Germans. My Jewish colleagues have been arrested; some have been transported to work camps. Why wouldn’t there be a restlessness to her playing? Even fear!”

  “But does she also seem distant at school?”

  He sighed. It was clear he was preoccupied with something else.

  “I saw Moretti near Piazza Erbe today. He was gaunt. I hardly recognized him.”

  Orsina didn’t seem to hear him. “Do you think you could watch her after school . . . See if she’s meeting anyone? What if she has a boyfriend we don’t know about?”

  “Did you hear what I just said, Orsina?” His whole face was twisted in disbelief, bordering on anger. “I just told you that a colleague of mine, Professor Moretti, looked like he was on death’s door. God knows how his family is faring since he was forced to resign from school! What’s the matter with you?”

  His face was now rushing with blood. She could see small, blue veins swelling by his temples.

  “Orsina, where has Italy’s honor gone? Has everyone lost their sense of decency?” The striking of his fist against the table sounded like a gavel.

  Orsina fell quiet. The intensity of Pietro’s anger seized her. She had not meant to sound unsympathetic to Professor Moretti’s plight. She was sympathetic. More than her husband could imagine. She, too, felt betrayed by Fascism, but unlike her husband had learned to keep these thoughts silent, for fear of someone overhearing her. She always felt a wave of fear come over her when Pietro voiced his true feelings. How many people had been turned in by their neighbors or friends, just for a better job or a bigger apartment?

  No, she hated the Fascist regime as much as Pietro. It had been more than twenty years that Italians had been living under Fascism, but in the past five, it had become unbearable. Now, when she sees photographs of Mussolini in the papers with his bald head and bulging eyes, ranting in one of his speeches, it was hard to remember those first years of his leadership, when everyone was so hopeful he’d return Italy to its former glory. He spoke of a united Italy—one of efficiency and strength—where women were lauded for their contribution to the family and the moral values of the country. But Mussolini’s insatiability for more power overtook him. There was his pursuit of Ethiopia, now for Greece. How many mothers had seen their sons drafted and killed for his territorial gains?

  And if that wasn’t enough, his alliance with Hitler, passing over the Jews he had previously promised were safe. He betrayed these men and women and their children, too. Orsina knew it all, even if Pietro thought she was ignorant.

  In truth, Orsina sympathized deeply. She knew several Jewish families who were struggling to make ends meet. She never told Pietro that she often made extra tortelli for Anna Bassani’s family. Whenever she arrived with her basket of food, she marveled at how Anna still managed to keep her household so calm even with everyone living in such close quarters and under so muc
h stress.

  But at the same time, her daughter’s change in behavior was a new source of fear and tension for her. And perhaps Pietro didn’t notice this change in Elodie, because his own behavior mirrored their daughter’s. Orsina detected the same agitation in his playing that she had heard in Elodie’s. They shared an impatience with their bows, as if they couldn’t wait for it to strike hard on the strings.

  The following evening, Orsina tried her best to bring harmony back to her household. Hoping to erase the memory of the previous night’s outburst, Orsina cooked a full Venetian banquet of Pietro and Elodie’s favorite dishes: baccalá with polenta, a risotto with squid and shrimp, and a cake seeped in honey. After dinner, their stomachs full and their appetites sated, Elodie and her father went to the living room to rehearse. Midway through, however, they were forced to stop their playing because the Fascist youth battalion in the square was so loud, their cheering and drums rolling overpowered every other sound.

  Pietro walked over to the window, where below he could see more than twenty grade-school boys dressed in their Balilla uniforms singing “Giovanezza” and other Fascist songs.

  “Agh, mini Fascists!” Pietro’s voice was filled with disgust.

  Elodie walked over and peered down at the square as well. She could see the boys dressed in their uniforms, nearly identical to the grown-up Fascist police: the eponymous black shirt, the fez with the fasces emblem, the gray-green shorts and the bright blue kerchief, which was knotted around their necks.

  They were Mussolini’s little army, happy to have a chance to leave their homes for a few hours and make some noise.

  “I can’t hear a damn thing!”

  “I know,” Elodie said, placing down her bow. “How can they continue with such stupidity? Crying at the top of their lungs. ‘Duce! Duce!’. . .”

  Orsina stood in the middle of the living room, her hands fingering to untie her apron strings. “These boys should be in bed sleeping. Where are their mothers?”

  “Their mothers?” Pietro laughed.

  Orsina shook her head. She was grateful that she had a daughter. Every boy in Italy had to be enlisted in the Balilla, then onto the Gioventú Fascista. It was a governmental decree.

  Elodie and her father tried to resume their playing, but the noise was unbearable. “I can’t take it anymore! It’s bad enough they’ve ruined the Liceo Musicale, now they’re poisoning these children, too!” Pietro stood up and walked over to the record player. Underneath there was a small stack of records. He reached for one and pulled a black disc from its sleeve.

  He placed down the needle and turned the dial to increase the volume.

  The chorus “Va, Pensiero” from Verdi’s opera Nabucco began to play.

  “It’s too loud,” Orsina reprimanded him.

  “Which do you prefer?” replied Pietro. “This or the sound of the Balilla downstairs?”

  “You know the answer to that!” Elodie said confidently.

  Pietro smiled. Then he dialed up the music even louder.

  The next day, Pietro did not return home at his usual hour, and Orsina continually glanced at the clock near the dining room table.

  “Your father is never late,” she said to Elodie. “I’m becoming worried.”

  It was true. Her father was like clockwork. He had his coffee in the morning every day at the same time, left the house one hour later, and returned home each evening by six o’clock.

  “I made his favorite risotto, and it will be ruined if he doesn’t come home soon.” Orsina stood by the pot and added one more cup of stock. She lowered the flame.

  “I’m sure he’ll be home any minute,” Elodie said, trying not to share her mother’s alarm. “He probably got stuck talking to someone outside school.”

  Forty minutes later, Orsina was sure there was something wrong. She had turned the stove off minutes earlier and the risotto was now a sticky mass.

  “He shouldn’t have played the record player so loudly last night.” She sat down at the table and placed her head in her hands. “It was defiant. What if someone reported him?”

  “I don’t think someone would do that, Mother. It was only some opera music . . .”

  Elodie saw her mother’s back stiffen. Her face was so visibly strained with worry that she looked like a bridge of an instrument, with strings pulled to the point of breaking.

  “Elodie . . .” Orsina said in the faintest whisper. “People would report their neighbor for a few extra grams of butter.”

  Elodie looked down. She felt a wave of shame wash over her. Shame that she had been so naïve to dismiss her mother’s worry so quickly. Shame that she had not joined Lena in a group that was trying to eliminate the fear, which had now penetrated her own family. And shame that she was now helpless to find her father.

  She found herself walking around the apartment like a trapped animal that didn’t know how to make use of its nervous energy.

  “You need to stop moving around so much, Elodie.” Her mother’s voice strained to emerge politely from a web of fragile nerves.

  Elodie tried to bring a small measure of comfort to her mother by making some coffee. She heaped two spoonfuls of the chicory and added the water. But when they each sat at the table, their hands around the small porcelain cups, neither of them could manage a single sip. They sat there like two cats staring into the air, each taking up space in the same room without uttering a single word.

  She and her mother sat at the dining room table for what seemed like hours. They didn’t eat. They didn’t drink. The only movement between them was when they both turned their heads to watch the clock.

  They fell asleep where they sat with their heads on their arms, both waking at dawn with no sign of Pietro.

  “I’m calling the police,” Orsina said, shaking her head. She looked out the window to the piazza; the first light of the morning flooded through the room and Elodie squinted. “Something terrible has happened! I just know it.”

  Elodie didn’t know how to respond. She was just as weak and as worried as her mother.

  Orsina reached for the phone and dialed the exchange for the police. Elodie heard the excruciating sound of her mother’s plea for someone to listen to her, desperately begging for more information.

  “They told me nothing. They insulted me and told me to check the bars or the whorehouses,” she said in tears.

  Elodie reached to embrace her mother. “I just know he’s going to come through this door any minute, demanding breakfast.”

  Her mother shook her head. “I pray you’re right.”

  Two days later, after Elodie and her mother were besieged with worry and had received not a shred of information from the police, there was a faint rapping at the door.

  When Orsina went to answer it, she discovered a very badly beaten Pietro, with one arm draped over the back of their neighbor, Giacomo.

  It was clear by the way his right leg dangled that it was broken.

  “Oh my God,” Orsina gasped, covering her mouth with one hand. “Pietro!”

  Giacomo helped bring him into the living room.

  “I found him outside your apartment just a few minutes ago. They must have dumped him there and sped off.”

  “Who?” Orsina said in disbelief. She couldn’t believe anyone could do something so savage to her gentle husband.

  Pietro looked up at her with his swollen eye and bloody lip.

  “Four Blackshirts in the Squadrisiti confronted me outside the music school as I was on my way home. They told me I was under investigation and took me to a place near the Roman theater. I think it was somewhere on Via Redentore where they interrogated me.

  “They bound my wrists and covered my eyes. They called me a Communist. They said I had no loyalty to my country . . . that I’ve never worn a Fascist party pin on my lapel.”

  “This is sheer cr
aziness!” Orsina cried. She looked to Giacomo and Elodie to agree with her, but both of them were transfixed on listening only to Pietro recount his story.

  “I told them my only sin was that I played a record. I tried to tell them it was by Verdi . . . one of Italy’s greatest composers.” His tone, even through his wounds, was unmistakably sarcastic.

  “I insisted I was not anti-Fascist. That I was only a musician, just trying to listen to my record.

  “But whatever I said, they ignored my reasoning. They just kept beating me, and kept smashing me in the ear every time I mentioned music . . .”

  “They are nothing but bloody savages!” Orsina cried.

  “Orsina, please . . .” Giacomo whispered. “We don’t need them knocking on your door again. Or heaven forbid, mine . . .”

  Orsina tried to regain her composure. “No, of course not.”

  “You should call a doctor for him,” Giacomo suggested. “Do you have one you can trust?”

  “Yes, yes. Of course. We’ve used Doctor Tommasi for years.”

  “Good,” he said. “Call him and take good care of Pietro. Maria and I look forward to hearing him play his violin again soon . . .”

  “Giacomo, we are indebted for you bringing him home to us. What can we do to thank you?”

  “Nothing, Orsina. Just keep him safe and keep him away from the record player.” He kissed her on both cheeks, then squeezed her hands in his.

  “I must get back to my family now.” He shook his head and lowered his voice. “This is not the country of my childhood . . . to beat an innocent man like this makes me sick to my stomach. I fear for myself and my children now.”