The Watercolourist (24 page)

‘You look delightful,’ Innes whispers into the camellias in her hair. The show begins before her embarrassment can set in. Since the women are seated in a box facing the stage, Innes
chooses to stand in order to see clearly. She feels his gaze on her neck and shoulders, delicate and constant. What is there to contemplate, aside from the performance? Certainly not the armoured
back of Donna Clara, traversed vertically by a row of tiny buttons, ready to burst off like lethal bullets. Nor the white wool and silk that covers Donna Julie’s own petite form. Distracted a
bit by her own self-conscious vanity, Bianca nonetheless enjoys the performance to the very end. She doesn’t know much about dancing, but she has always watched and appreciated opera. The new
fashion of wearing ballet slippers that La Sallé seems to have invented gives the star a lightness in her step and allows her to flutter above everything else. Her veils don’t entirely
conceal her slim and handsome arms, but it is a happy kind of indecency that makes one question why arms cannot be revealed in all their glory. Her long tutu, as it swirls around her, intensifies
her inconsistent character. The dancer is not just a sharply dressed woman gifted with acrobatic talent; she is something else, too. She is an image, a yearning, and a desire for a life where
sylphs truly exist – spirits without a body. During the intermission, Donna Clara comments on the character.

‘Everybody wants a lover like that. Maybe because she’s attractive. But beauty doesn’t last; it’s a moment and then it’s over.’

Bianca imagines the older woman is thinking of herself, and thinks it unfair to assume that ballerinas need to be as light in their everyday existence as they are onstage.

Innes offers all the women rose-flavoured sweets, small crystals filled with faint colours. Donna Julie consumes them with a childlike delight but Donna Clara refuses, asking for the more
mundane pumpkin seeds, toasted and lightly salted.

Bianca peers out at the theatre’s other boxes in search of the beauties that are so often talked about: Signorina Bongi, Signorina Barbesino, Signorina Carrara Stampa. She wonders if there
is a Milanese form of beauty and thinks she identifies it in ladies with light olive-coloured skin, dark eyebrows, large eyes, and rosebud mouths that are full of promise. She wants to sketch these
ladies, one beside the next like a bouquet of flowers in season. But then she thinks of the boredom, the complaining, the empty silence of interminable poses, and realizes she is happy to have more
docile and yielding subjects.

At the end of the performance they linger for a while in the foyer, so that all their lady friends can welcome back Clara and Julie ‘from the wild’. Their friends have white curls
and surprisingly slim frames, notwithstanding their age. They wear dark grey, almost black, velvet dresses.

‘And this is your Miss Bianca, is it not? Why, how precious . . . she doesn’t even look foreign.’

Bianca doesn’t like being talked about in the third person, but she hides her impatience under a slight smile, which pleases Donna Julie.

‘You did well, Bianca,’ she tells her later. ‘Those monkeys can really wear you down.’

‘Come now, Julie,’ Donna Clara intervenes. ‘We shouldn’t speak of our friends like that.’

‘Your friends, maybe,’ Julie whispers snidely as they climb into the carriage.

Again, Bianca is amazed by Julie’s sharpness. If only she would unsheathe it more often. With her sense of irony, she would make an exceptional rival to Donna Clara during their
living-room skirmishes. But she never engages in them. Perhaps her role of model mother is a front to avoid the boredom of society.

‘Now that you’ve been to La Scala, it is safe to say that you’re an official Milanese lady,’ jokes Donna Clara the following day during lunch, which is actually their
breakfast, since they’ve all slept late. Bianca smiles patiently. She doesn’t want to be Milanese any more than she wishes to be Turkish or barbarian. She belongs to her own world and
doesn’t need to borrow someone else’s. But she has learned to keep her mouth shut, remembering with a smirk that silence is one of the virtues that best suits young ladies. Her tendency
to speak her mind, which at first was considered a curiosity, is now the target of reproach. As adventurous as Donna Clara’s previous life might have been, she is – in public and at
home – tremendously conventional. Bianca has learned it is worth adjusting to this situation, even if it means keeping her mouth shut.

Sometimes Bianca wonders whether all this repressed behaviour, hesitation, and silence actually hides a duality that is far from noble. When, in the name of decency, is one supposed to stop
being sincere? To what extent are silence and consent a form of courtesy and not grim opportunism? Bianca thinks about these things over and over. The more she considers, the more her thoughts
darken. She has no one to confess them to and so they get tangled up inside her.

Everyone rejoices when Pia finally joins them in Milan from Brusuglio. She has travelled alone in a carriage. When it arrives in the courtyard and the valet opens the door, Pia
holds out her hand like a lady, but her eyes are full of laughter. The children, who have been waiting for her since morning, run towards her like marbles strewn across the floor. They hang from
her arms and neck, all of them, even the boys. Pia looks charming in her austere jacket, which surely came from someone else’s closet. She is composed and behaves like a proper young lady.
She emanates a sweet haughtiness that she may have picked up from the ladies who visit the villa, serious but not without a trace of affectation. Bianca waits her turn to embrace the girl, and in
so doing discovers that Pia had grown so much that their eyes almost meet at the same level now. Pia reveals her brown-heeled shoes, the tips of which are slightly scuffed and which fasten with a
velvet bow.

‘From the young lady,’ she whispers.

During Pia’s absence Bianca has thought a lot about the different pieces of her puzzle. She has moved them here and there until an image became clear. Of course, there are still many dark
areas: things unsaid and unknown. But there are too many coincidences to ignore it entirely. There are also many fragments. Bianca has the eagerness and spirit of an amateur; she feels an immense,
inexhaustible pleasure in classifying others’ inclinations and passions. It is hard to say if this comes from her habit of considering the genealogical life of plants, which provides
reassurance with its familial divisions and subdivisions and makes everything understandable to the eye, or whether it is a passing fancy of her age, an affectation of a young lady who thinks she
knows everything there is to know about the world, but who cannot truly recognize herself in the mirror. The truth is that the botany of affections is an inexact science, but it is the dearest
thing to her at this time. One day it will pass. One day she will be overcome by her own firsthand passions. But for now, it gives her days both rhythm and meaning. She could have worried about
consequences, but Bianca does not understand herself well enough to worry.

Now Bianca smiles complacently, folds up her imagined composition and puts it away, pleased. She could try to reconstruct it for someone to see how much of it is clear. But whom? Everybody is
already too caught up in the web. Bianca fears, rightly, that her taciturn nature might tangle the threads even further. There is always a third option: delve deeper, continue her investigation
outside of the family, alone. To what end? Just to know. To be certain. Then she will be able to decide what to do. What will it take, really? The courage to ask a couple of questions and trust the
answers. The guests that come to the house are interesting, intelligent and honest people – they will surely be pleased to satisfy the curiosity of such a pleasant and alert young lady. All
she needs to do is guide her conversations with the lawyer, the official, or the full-breasted benefactress in the right direction. Bianca applies herself to this puzzle with the zeal of a young
scholar who wants to achieve excellent marks. She makes witty remarks here and there. She prepares her terrain. If she hesitates, it is only because the timing has to be just right. She knows how
to do it and she enjoys the wait. Also because, whether she likes it or not, she has to roll up her sleeves and work.

Away from the envious eyes of Minna and the silly kitchen maids, Pia blossoms and prospers. It is as if, all of a sudden, she has taken a step forward, detached herself from the
shadows of domestic help and reclaimed her place at the front of the stage in a key role. No one scolds her if she reads or lounges about because that’s what everyone does during that endless
winter. And she doesn’t really lounge about that often. She spends most of her time with the children. She is more joyful than Nanny and more creative at inventing games for them to play,
keeping them happily distracted. The children don’t venture out in the city. Both mother and grandmother are against it. There are vapours from the sewers, they say. There is the danger of
whooping cough. And there are the other kinds of children, hordes of them, ready to attack.

‘But they would have such fun. They could ice skate on the frozen lake,’ Bianca insists, but in vain.

And so the tiny prisoners are kept within their confines. They don’t suffer that much because they don’t realize what they are missing and therefore don’t even desire it. And
Pia does everything she can to make their captivity more enjoyable. Christmas comes. There is the scent of honey from the forced hyacinths that grow along the windowsill and colourful wooden toys
from Germany. There is the medicinal scent of tangerines that lingers so long in the air it becomes bothersome.

A new year comes but nothing changes: the city is still frozen, closed under skies that appear to have forgotten they too once possessed a colour. Everyone remains happily at home. The chimneys
and the fireplaces burn at full force, but Donna Clara doesn’t complain about the bills from the wood and coal suppliers, even if they deliver enough fuel to power a steamboat.

Bianca works hard, like a madwoman, she thinks to herself. It is a happy damnation, because it makes her feel at one with the world, worthy of her place, which belongs to no one but her. Her
work brings her money, too, cash in velvet and damask pouches.

To think that only a couple of months earlier, when winter descended on them all of a sudden, she suffered and thought she wouldn’t make it. She became obsessed with flowers during the one
season that denied her them. For several long weeks she did nothing but colour in corollas, like a child.
Here, do this
,
good
,
fill in the empty spots
,
don’t go
over the lines
. Without the true colours in front of her, though, and because her ruled blocks of paper now seemed pathetic, she got frustrated. What would she do until spring returned? And
what if it never returned, as the lugubrious, short, grey days suggested?

‘If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ Innes quoted to her, in an attempt to console her as she traced the streaks of rain on the window with her finger.

‘Nice. What’s that?’

‘A verse by a friend.’

‘No. Spring, what’s that?’ she replied, depressed, without even looking at him.

A slow, thick melancholy had settled inside her, a profound dullness that could not be dissipated even by the vivacity of the children.
You should go out
, she told herself, as she
ripped out pages from her sketchbook – more images of dead leaves. But where would she go? With her empty pockets and four outfits? The thought only made her angrier, and it was followed by
bitterness and unease.
My dear father, what am I to do now? If I cannot even do this, what place shall I have in this world?
She would have preferred to have an entire army of human
models, male or female, chubby boys or bored ladies, to draw. It would be better than her vain efforts.

One morning though, Pia brought her a vase full of bare branches. Not one leaf on them. Empty and yet full at the same time.

‘What . . . ?’ Bianca stuttered. Then she was silent and looked more closely. She looked harder still and then that was enough. She saw. The tall white vase was simple and lacked
adornment, not even a touch of gold; it had probably been fished out from under some staircase. The branches, in all their bony grace, pushed upwards, reaching out arthritically towards something
– towards the idea of leaves, the leaves that betrayed them, left without warning (as is their habit), at the beginning of autumn.