Free A Life Apart by Mariapia Veladiano

chocolate soufflé.
    “There’s pudding for you two,” she says, walking into Lucilla’s room as we sit listening to music. “Vanilla chocolate – just as you like it, Rebecca.”
    I look intently first at her mild round face and then at the sweeping curves of her body, huge but supple as it moves in hergolden yellow summer dress: I am searching for the secret of that night I cannot imagine. Then I think, she makes cakes that are like her.
    I went back home shortly before supper. There was no-one in. Maddalena was away on some errands I knew nothing about, my father at his clinic or at the hospital as usual.
    The silence was plunged in the cool penumbra of the shuttered balconies and drawn curtains. I sat in the little armchair next to the front door. No-one broke the silence until Maddalena’s return.
    Suddenly I think that we all have the life we deserve, but I do not know why.

Fourteen
    That summer, after the end of the school term, my father also disappeared. He would nearly always come home late in the evening, long after supper, when he was sure that I had already started on my unfailing bedtime rituals. He knew that Maddalena kept watch over this orderly sequence of actions as if it were a sacred office, something meant to bring the day to a close with rigour and grace, a reference point over which life’s chaos was utterly powerless. And so he would greet me briefly, standing on the threshold of my bedroom, not coming in, not approaching, not looking into my eyes. Sometimes he happened to be home for supper, and then we would eat in a silence even deeper than when my mother had been alive. Only when Aunt Erminia came did our suppers become slightly livelier, turning into the self-conscious and overexcited show of a highly strung actor.
    Maddalena and I had learnt from Maestro De Lellis about her roaming from one city to the other, and would let her tell us all about her gruelling orchestra rehearsals without questioning or contradicting her. I have no idea of what my father might have known, but on those evenings he seemed to fear any silent pause, and so filled the moments in which Aunt Erminia was eating with anxious and minutely detailed questions about the scores, the music stands, the acoustics in the auditorium, the colour of the seats, the behaviour of the orchestral musicians.
    He spent that whole summer at work. Little by little, his patientsbegan to call him again, seeking respite from the many fears attendant on pregnancy and birth. By now I too was answering the telephone, and had learnt how to speak to those ladies if my father was away: I knew how to reassure them, telling them that he was bound to be at the hospital, that they would find him there, and if not to call again and we would look for him. I loved that grown-up role: it allowed me to exist while avoiding any exposure to the world’s shock, disgust, pain and superstitious reactions. For the first time I found a normal dimension that not even music had given me, because even when I was playing my body would offend the sight of any listener. To be voice and voice alone gave me a whole new and unsuspected range of possibilities: I could be gentle or professional, brisk or relaxed, tentative or self-assured. I felt free to ask, to reply, to play for time. I could try out all the variations, searching for my own style in the voice, since I was not allowed to have one in life.
    My voice would obey me exactly as my hands did when I played. It grew deep, resonant, rolling its r’s like my father’s or quivering with anger or emotion like Maddalena’s.
    I knew most of my father’s patients, and could remember their names, their pathologies and their personalities, because of the way he had described them, with deep humanity and gentleness, to my mother every evening. She might not have been listening, withdrawing perhaps behind the impossibly high, icy walls of her fortress, and the words of that man who was so full of life and sorrow might