Authors: Andromeda Romano-Lax
She wasn't depressed to the point of complete inaction. She ate a fair amount: pasta and soup and root vegetables, as mindless as a grazing cow. At the nuns' request, she sewed and washed floors; cleaned, dried, and ground herbs; scrubbed potatoes. She rarely talked, because there was nothing to talk about. One night, the girl who slept in the bed next to her asked in a whisper after lights out what Aviva would name her baby, but Aviva could hardly think what to say. The nuns would decide the babies' names, just as they would arrange the adoptions. She pretended to be asleep.
Each day, the nuns granted the girls free time to read magazines, stroll the vegetable garden, pray, or nap. Aviva didn't care what she did, as long as she could do it alone. All the other girls who were at her stage—five or more months along—had been talking about the first quickening they'd felt. One girl likened it to bubbles popping just under the skin's surface. Another said it felt longer and more continuous, like a slithering snake. Aviva hadn't felt anything. The other girls knew, she was certain; it gave her an aura of contagious bad luck. Even though no girl would be allowed to keep her baby, none of them wanted to lose it to death—not at this advanced stage, anyway.
Two more weeks passed. A nun examined her without comment. Now she was entering her third trimester, still growing, but without any sign of movement inside. Perhaps her baby
was
dead. The nausea had long since passed, but a sourness remained, the metallic taste of sorrow. Two new girls, each in their first trimester, came to the home, and Aviva joined them in scrambling up the convent wall to view the hills beyond—a tricky task, with bellies pressing against the stone wall. They returned with scratched legs and arms, blackened elbows and knees, and Sister Luigia punished them each with a day's solitary confinement. What had they been thinking? Did they realize what might have happened if they had fallen?
As new girls entered, others graduated. A bossy redhead from Firenze had spent her last month reveling in her superior girth and know-it-all status, until the evening her contractions started. They began at lunch, continued through free time and afternoon chores and vespers. Even from the chapel, all the girls could hear her moaning in the infirmary next door. The nuns attempted to keep straight faces, but all the girls' eyes were wide, listening to the moans escalate into screams—even profane curses—to which some responded by crossing themselves and others by covering their mouths, to stifle panicky giggles.
Aviva didn't feel so well herself. Listening to the screaming, her pulse beat faster, and a deep pain rippled across her abdomen. During free time she began to think it was her time, too, even if the nuns had said it wouldn't happen for two months more. She rocked back and forth with the pain until she couldn't ignore it anymore. Then she walked toward the screams and moans to the infirmary. Rounding the corner, she saw red and purple, two nuns holding down the girl's arms, her open legs, silver bowls glinting everywhere like some awful blood sacrifice.
Despite the pain, she managed to climb the stairs to the attic bedroom faster than she 'd ever climbed them before. In the room, she took out her violin without thinking, an automatic motion practiced thousands of times. In the infirmary, her ears had flooded with white static, and she fingered several measures without hearing the sour din she was producing. Suddenly the white curtain of noise parted and she realized she hadn't tuned the neglected thing; it sounded wretched. She twisted a tuning peg, heard the wood of the neck groan in protest, and then the pop of the A string. She fumbled through the case and realized she'd brought no extra strings. Useless. Then she would play without the A string. The second string went the way of the first. She laughed out loud for the first time in recent memory, and mouthed a message to Paganini himself: I know this is the trick you loved best. But I can't play an entire piece on one string. Leave me two at least. The last two held: E and G.
Her violin teacher had encouraged her to stand with heels touching and toes apart, like a ballerina in first position, but she ignored that now and spread her swollen feet shoulder-wide, planted at an ungainly right angle. She rocked side to side as she played, feeling the weight of the baby nestling deep down into her pelvic bones. Her violin wasn't louder than the screams still issuing from the infirmary below, but it was a welcome distraction, a point of focus. At some point, the girl downstairs stopped, but Aviva kept playing—even an hour later, when the nun's handbell rang, calling all the girls together to share with them the bad news. The girl from Firenze was well enough, but her baby had died, and though no one had wanted it, every girl felt death's hand brushing too close for comfort.
Aviva felt no guilt in not rushing to join them then, or at the ensuing chapel service; there would always be bad news, there was no hurry. For now, she felt stuck to the floor—not glued but pierced—as if an iron shaft had descended through her pelvic bone, numbing the pain there and anchoring her to the floor, easing her need to rock. During a Vivaldi sonata, when she had played for perhaps two continuous hours, she felt the first stirrings of the baby inside her. Not deep in her pelvic bones, but higher up, just under her right ribs. Looking down, she saw the fabric of her jumper move, an elbow or knee pushing against the surface, followed by a deeper, indefinable gaseous shift, smooth and yet unexpected, like an ice cube rolling in a glass. "Vivaldi woke you up, not Paganini," she whispered. "I'm glad."
From that moment forth, she played every day. One girl complained that Aviva's use of the attic during free time infringed on others' rights to nap, but several other girls stepped forward to say they liked the music, and Sister Luigia allowed it to continue, even climbing the stairs to listen on occasion. Another nun brought her new strings after a trip to town. The strings were appreciated, but the praise meant nothing to Aviva; she would have preferred to play alone. Or not really alone, because she knew now for whom she was playing. Her baby never failed to move when she played—a percussive pummel, a sudden stretch that took her breath away, a slippery shift that gave it back.
One night two weeks before Aviva was due, the girl in the next bed whispered to her again. "I'm going to name mine," she said. "I will insist on it."
"Against the rules," Aviva yawned.
"I have a boy's name chosen and a girl's name, though I'm sure it's a girl. I won't push unless they say they'll agree to use it on the forms. The sisters will agree."
"Won't push?" Aviva laughed into her pillow. "You'll be dying to push. It's like going to the bathroom; that's what Elena said."
"That's disgusting," said the girl, and rolled away.
But she did not sleep, and neither did Aviva. A shutter was drawn over the attic's only window, but she could see the bright glow of a moon beyond the slats, until the moon had moved and the slats gradually darkened. Aviva whispered across the room, "Why do you want to name it? You'll never see it again."
"Maybe in a few years, maybe later, when I'm married and have a family, and I'll be shopping for a hat somewhere, and a beautiful young girl will enter the shop with her nanny..."
Unlikely, Aviva thought, but she had asked.
"...and I'll recognize the shape of her eyes, or her nose," the girl continued. "I'll pretend not to know her but I'll ask her to tell me her name. They'll place her only among good people—that's what the sisters have promised. And if I get along with her mother, I might ask her to tea."
From across the darkened aisle, a voice shushed them both.
"But what if the new mother decides to change her name? Parents can do that."
The girl pulled her sheets to her chin and answered with exasperation, "I'll choose a good name. It will fit her, and they won't change it."
"But how do you know it will fit your baby if you've never seen her?"
More shushing, aggrieved now.
The girl's insistence dismayed Aviva; it made her feel as if she'd spent no time considering the future. Certainly, she'd felt she had no future just a few months ago; but now that she was nearing pregnancy's end, the baby felt disturbingly real. When it nestled its hard round head against her abdomen, she could place a hand there, and it was almost the same as rubbing a fully developed baby's head; she could almost feel the fine hair, the soft skin, almost smell it. She longed to watch her baby's eyes open. She longed to see the small clenched fists that had been playing dotted rhythms against her lungs.
The nuns didn't allow the girls to nurse their babies. Following birth, mother and child were separated. Some preselected babies were delivered directly to wet nurses hired by prospective parents, upper-class couples who concealed all signs that the babies had not been born to them. Other babies were moved to a second home, where they were raised through early infancy and adopted out in less-predictable fashion. All the girls had agreed, upon entering the convent, not to attempt any contact with their children.
But how not to forget, how to forge a bond, leaving open the possibility of later breaking that agreement—that was the question. A name was nothing, the first thing another person could take away. She would have to give her baby something more lasting.
Aviva's family had changed its surname once, attempting to assimilate into the region where her parents had settled. She had been told her great-grandmother's maiden name, but couldn't recall it. She had never asked her great-grandfather's trade. The nuns' rules aside, her sense of family was foggy, eroded by her parents' early deaths, dislocation, simple forgetting.
And yet consider how lovingly her music teacher, scoundrel that he was, had tended Paganini's grave. Consider what she herself knew of Vivaldi, eight generations removed from her own life. Aviva's memory of her own mother was a still portrait—the shape of a woman standing, hands on hips, in an open doorway. But Vivaldi was a living presence to her, a life that continued past that door, with whom she could spend a day, a season, a year. Playing the violin part of
Le Quattro Stagioni,
Aviva could sit on a rain-drenched hillside next to him, or walk in the paths of goatherds and laugh upon finding them asleep beneath a massive tree, their light snores accompanied by the buzz of sun-drunk flies. Those who loved his music need never be alone. And so she played the same measures again and again for her unborn child in those final two weeks, standing for hours until she thought her pelvic bones would split under the deepening weight.
The baby was taken away, but not adopted out immediately. Three months later, when Aviva moved away from the convent, she knew only that it had been a boy, and that the nuns had listed his religion on the form. She hadn't thought they'd do that; surely it lowered his chances of being placed into a good home.
She tried to put the idea of him behind her. She moved south to Bologna and spent two years studying violin and piano with a Madame Borghese, who also arranged a place for Aviva with a local family, in exchange for occasional help with their four children.
As her eighteenth birthday approached, her career prospects improved. Several people seemed to think she'd make an ideal musical nanny—thus, the short interview with Mussolini. But Aviva was not interested in tending others' children as a lifelong pursuit, and Madame Borghese had higher hopes for her as well. Aviva spent a season performing solo recitals and began to garner favorable publicity, publicity that might increase, Madame Borghese implored, if only Aviva would dress better, cultivate more eye contact with the audience, narrow her stance slightly, and so on, listing the recommendations that Al-Cerraz would echo in a year or so.
At an intermission during one of these recitals, in Padova, Aviva spotted Sister Luigia in the audience. To her surprise, she was happy to see the music-loving nun.
"When we last knew one another, you would not accept requests," Sister Luigia said. "Play one for me now."
"The program is already established," Aviva said, confused.
"As an encore, then. I will wait."
Aviva leaned closer and said, "The encore is established, too. Madame leaves nothing to chance."
"You can't allow yourself to be spontaneously inspired?"
"Madame doesn't believe in spontaneity." Aviva tried to smile. "Which is for the best. I am not consistently inspired."
Sister Luigia frowned. "No requests for an old friend? Well, what can I do? Punch is no substitute, but I'd accept some at this moment."
Aviva hesitated. Madame didn't allow Aviva near the refreshments table, for fear of something—a ruined dress, or the temptation of marzipan, which might lead to sticky fingers or the temptation to imbibe, which might lead in turn to a full bladder at the wrong moment. But Madame, immersed in a discussion with a small circle of well-dressed women, had her back to the two of them.
When she returned with Sister Luigia's punch, the nun did not immediately take it. Aviva stepped closer, and held the cup forward again. Only when they were toe to toe did Sister Luigia reach forward, wrap her hands around Aviva's and say, "You play too well for this local audience. Madame must know it, too. Is there a reason you haven't gone to Rome, or to Paris?"
Aviva nodded.
"You're feeling bound to your past, aren't you? You're staying around in case you catch word that he finds no home." Her grip tightened around Aviva's. "He
did
find parents. Two and a half is old for that—no one wants a child who is old enough to remember, who can speak. Your child didn't speak, actually—that was the problem, the appearance of a delay of some kind. But a very special Jewish gentleman came and took an instant liking to him."
"Tell me more," Aviva whispered, just as she saw over the nun's shoulder Madame's group breaking up, the accompanist entering the room.
"I said you played well—and you did,
certamente,
but I sensed hesitation. It was technically impressive, of course, but I remember how you played at the convent once you were willing to play—through the roof, like a bird! I thought I should say something. My intention was to help you to stop worrying, to free yourself—"