The Life of Elves Read Free Page A

one more thing to say, about the two words embroidered on the edge of the white cambric in an elegant Spanish with neither object or logic, and which the little girl would learn about once she had already left the village and set in motion the wheels of fate—and before that there is one other thing to say: we all have the right to know the secret of our birth. This is how you pray in your churches and your woods and how you go off to travel the world—because you were born on a snowy night and you inherited two words that came from Spain.
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    Mantendré siempre.
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    * I will mantain.

T HE L ITTLE G IRL FROM I TALY
    A nyone who doesn’t know how to read between the lines of life need only remember that this little girl grew up in a remote village in Abruzzo between a country priest and his old, illiterate housekeeper.
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    Father Centi lived in a tall building, and below the cellar was a garden with plum trees where they would hang the laundry in the early hours so that in due time it would dry in the wind from the mountains. The house was halfway up the village, which rose straight up to the sky in such a way that the streets twisted round the hill like the strands of a tightly wound ball of wool, dotted with a church, an inn, and just the right amount of stone to shelter sixty souls. After a day spent running around outside, Clara never went home without first slipping through the orchard, where she would stop to pray to the spirits of enclosure to prepare her for her return within four walls. Then she went to the kitchen—a long low room adjoining a pantry that smelled of plums, the old jam maker, and the noble dust of cellars.
    From dawn to sunset, the old housekeeper recounted her stories. She had told the priest she’d inherited them from her grandmother, but she told Clara that the spirits of the Sasso mountain had whispered them to her while she slept, and the little girl knew that this shared secret must be true, because she had heard Paolo’s tales, and he got them from the spirits of the high mountain pastures. But if she valued the figures and turns of speech of those tales, in truth it was for the velvety chanting of the storyteller’s voice, because that coarse old woman, whom only two words rescued from complete illiteracy—all she knew was how to write her name, and the name of the village, and at mass she could not read the prayers but recited them, rather, from memory—that old woman had a manner of speaking that contrasted with the modesty of the remote parish on the escarpments of the Sasso; in actual fact, one must imagine what the Abruzzo was like in those days, in that mountainous region where Clara’s protectors lived: eight months of snow interspersed with storms over the massifs set between two seas where it was not uncommon to see a few snowflakes in summer. Add to that real poverty, the poverty of regions where people till the soil and raise their flocks, herding them at the peak of summer to the highest point on the gradients. Not many live there, consequently, and even fewer when the snow comes and everyone has left with their beasts for the sunshine in Apulia. The only ones who stay in the village are those peasants who are tireless workers, growing their dark lentils, for lentils only grow in poor soil, and valiant women who in the cold weather look after the children, the farms, and their attendance at church. But while the people of this land might be sculpted into jagged rock by wind and snow, they are also fashioned by the poetry of their landscape, which makes shepherds compose rhymes in the icy fog of the high pastures, and storms give birth to hamlets that dangle from the web of the sky.
    Thus, the old woman, whose life had unfolded within the walls of a backward village, had a silkiness to her voice that came to her from the splendor of the landscape. The little girl was sure of this: it was the timbre of this very voice