The Watercolourist (10 page)

Bianca dismisses herself with a curtsey, which always works for a person of her status – somewhere between hired help and guest. But when she realizes that she has left
her mother’s ivory fan downstairs, rather than wait until the next day to retrieve it and risk finding it broken, she returns. Shrewdly, she stops at the threshold. Young Count Bernocchi is
talking about her.

‘It seems as though that awful Albion has given us the gift of an authentic gem. A coarse gem, of course, as brusque as she is pleasant. She needs only to be cleaned and polished with
patience. Do you really think she will stay and draw all your flowers? You, my friend, are an eccentric man. It is you that everyone talks about in the city. Our poet peasant.’

‘It’s a shame she has freckles. She looks like a quail’s egg,’ Donna Annina says.

‘And what about a man? Will you find her a husband? Or is she one of those modern girls who want to be “independent”?’

‘We must marry her off.’

This had been declared at every dinner with both insistence and some menace. Bartolo used to announce it to their father without even looking at her, as if she were merely one of the
furnishings.

‘By all means, we must not,’ her father would reply, steadfast and unwavering. ‘Bianca doesn’t need to be married. We have given her the independence she needs to choose
what she wants, even a husband if she so desires. But only if she desires.’

‘But, Father, really. She is in her prime. Who will want her in five years? She will end up being an independent old maid with ink on her fingers and too much pride.’ Bartolo spoke
with sarcasm.

‘Bartolomeo, I don’t want to discuss this any further. Your sister will do what she pleases.’

Bartolo’s face would redden and Zeno would slump down in his chair, raise his glass towards his brother and gulp down its contents mockingly. She would have given anything to disappear
when she was at the centre of an argument or the cause of one. Her father would look at her with a kind smile but really she didn’t know
what
to do with all her freedom. She wished
she could have chosen to stay in that dining room with its walls of fading colours forever.

She has heard enough. Bianca walks into the room with neither a smile nor a greeting, picks up her fan and leaves again, annoyed. She ignores their surprised gazes. Even Donna
Annina blushes.

She looks at her reflection in the candlelit mirrors in the hallway and sees a delicate face with light freckles and high cheekbones. Wisps of hair fall out of her chignon.
Perhaps I am
odd but so what?
she thinks.
I am me. J’ai quelquechose que les autres n’ont point
, she tells herself snobbishly. Too bad that the mirror in her room, aged by the
modest white candle in its holder, shows only a blurry image of a half-formed woman.

Why should she stay in the house on her own? The night is young and there is another celebration going on, not too far away. All she needs to do is go down the servants’ stairs, sneak
through the small gate, and venture down the dark road with its strange shadows created by strange houses.

The street lamps are illuminated and cast a yellow glare on things, softening their contours. She follows the pounding of a drum and soon finds herself in the piazza, in front of the old church.
A stage has been built and people are jumping about in a kind of dance, offering an enthusiastic, disorderly accompaniment to the violin. Giant torches at the corners of the stage shed light on the
dancers. The musician, who stands on his own platform, has a large nose that looks even larger in the shadows. He has a slender face and wears dirty leggings that lend him an air of scruffy
elegance. He is talented in his own right, even if his instrument screeches savagely. Bianca leans up against a wall in the darkness and watches. The torches reflect the people’s red,
straining faces. It is a revel of witches and wizards, united by the beating of the drum to celebrate Walpurgis Night. It is innocuous but not innocent. Bianca watches a girl jump down from the
stage, laugh, and run, only to be followed by a young man who catches up with her, grabs her, turns her around, and kisses her on the neck and mouth with violent rapture. The girl tries to wriggle
free but that only incites her partner further. He presses her up against the wall with kisses. A tug on Bianca’s sleeve distracts her from the show.

‘Miss Bianca! You sneaked out too?’ Pia laughs excitedly and looks at her in complicit understanding. She follows Bianca’s gaze to the couple and shrugs. ‘Our Luciana,
she never can get enough.’ She laughs again and takes Bianca by the arm. ‘Come with me. Want to dance? Let’s dance.’

She drags Bianca onto the stage, where the dense crowd shifts to make room for them. Bianca knows nothing about this kind of movement. It is some sort of noisy square dancing where couples shift
from side to side, hooked by the arm. Pia guides her expertly, though, and it only takes a few seconds for her to understand the configuration of steps. There is the smell of camphor, leather, warm
bodies and dust; of best outfits and shawls taken out of trunks; of jerkins tarred with sweat and pulled with twisting gestures. The smells mix with the sweet aroma of hay and flowers and the warm
night. Pia laughs. Bianca laughs too, and they dance until they are tired. Pia leads Bianca to a stand resting on two barrels where Ruggiero and Tonio are busy filling mugs with red wine, young and
tart. It doesn’t quench their thirst and it leaves a tinny aftertaste. Pia gulps hers down and slams her mug back on the wood with wilful, masculine violence.

‘We are all equal on the night of San Giovanni,’ she says. Bianca doesn’t understand what she means by this: men and women? Noblemen and country folk? Pia and Bianca? She
doesn’t ask because it isn’t important. Pia takes her by the hand and then leads her down an alley. They turn a corner and continue along the side of a house. Bianca is silent,
bewitched by the young girl’s initiative. She has the feeling that they are being followed but when she turns around there is no one.

They continue on, through the wild undergrowth, where it becomes increasingly dark. Bianca calculates that this path must lead towards the fields. And precisely where the shrubbery ends and the
great stretch of cultivated land opens up, a wonder lies waiting for them. Fireflies. There are hundreds, thousands, millions of them, suspended between sky and land, busily flying to and fro. They
are dancing, too, guided by the instinct to draw circles, arcs, vaults and volutes in a breathtaking spectacle. It doesn’t matter if there is no music here. The delicate singing of the
crickets is all they need, the perfect accompaniment for the procession of tiny floating candles.

The shadow, if it is a shadow, leans upon a tree trunk and sighs.

The following day, in the kitchen, all the talk is about Saint Peter’s ship. The ship sits in a bottle, slightly chipped at the top. It has, as every year, been set up on
the high windowsill so that people can parade beneath it. It has sails made of egg whites, and inside the bottle are thousands of bubbles. It is a ghost ship that has been caught in the fury of the
northern seas, and has survived thanks to a miracle. Tradition has it that the family and staff consign their wishes to this small boat before it ferries the wishes off somewhere secret where they
will be kept safe.

It is always this way and in the morning everything is as it should be; the servants have cleared away the remains of the party but something still lingers, something unfinished, which the fresh
morning air cannot dissipate. Life goes on. Real life, not shiny or flashy, but a life that nonetheless emits its own pale radiance. It is like a replica of a precious jewel worn by a lady who
keeps the original locked up in a safe for special occasions.

‘I wish I could travel,’ whispers Minna, contemplating the egg-white ship on the windowsill.

‘You’re not supposed to say what you wish for, silly, otherwise it won’t come true,’ Pia says, berating her with the wisdom of a thirteen-year-old.

‘It won’t come true, anyway,’ Minna mumbles, before heading down to the laundry and the mountain of tablecloths that need washing.

‘I don’t care.
I’m
not going to say my wish out loud anyway,’ Pia insists, looking for Bianca’s approval.

But Bianca only smiles. What can she say to these girls? They have essentially been born prisoners. How can she console them when their future is already laid out? It is written in the stars. It
cannot be any other way.

Bianca hovers there for a bit and considers.
Each and every one of us makes our own destiny. But this is only really true for men
.
Am I different?
she thinks. It is a pity that
the great equality they experienced the night before disappears with the light of day. It is a pity it isn’t contagious, that it cannot be gifted, a little bit at a time, like a mother yeast
that is passed from home to home, making different doughs rise in the same way. Whoever has the power to transform things, or to transform themselves, doesn’t share it.
Come dawn, we were
all Cinderellas
, Bianca says to herself.
We had to slip back into our grey rags, pick up our brooms, and clean up the shards of our dreams before we stepped on them and wounded
ourselves.

The thought makes her furious. She storms outside, forgetting a hat, swooping the rest of her things up along the way. The gardeners mumble veiled greetings and then watch her lewdly. She
notices nothing, just keeps on walking, up and down the hills and then beyond the ditches. Despite the water and mud, it isn’t hard to find what she is looking for: those strange, small, wild
orchids – the sweet peas. They crawl up and around the big bushes of lavender and across the elastic slouch of lespedeza, which in its current flowerless state looks mute but is still
beautiful. The jasmine, likely not happy with the fact that the sweet peas have bloomed, proposes its own new reddish shoots like fumbling hands moving towards new adventures. She stops and
sighs.

On closer inspection, she discovers new details. The garden is so big and variable that the poet’s experiments overlap and get confused. Even those left unfinished – and there are
many of them – reveal their own kind of harsh and rebellious grace, the secret charm of possibility. Bianca begins to draw and soon everything is restored to its place, at least for now.