The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery, Alison Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

people went willingly to be buried.
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    The carriage made its way to the top of a hill; here, there were fewer people, and Clara felt she could breathe more easily. During the entire journey, Pietro had attended to her comfort, but he did not try to speak to her otherwise, and she had fallen silent, as she did every day, her mind full of mountainsides, staves, and notes. At last they came to a halt outside a large dwelling with high brown walls, where slender pine trees emerged from an inner courtyard patio, rising above the walls like a motionless fountain. Honeysuckle cascaded down the walls in perfumed bursts toward the cobblestone street, and in the twilight the windows let loose their long transparent curtains.
    They were ushered into a vast vestibule: there Pietro left them, and Clara was guided through gigantic rooms whose walls and surfaces were crowded with paintings and sculptures. Clara looked at them with a trepidation that quickly yielded to hope when she understood that this strangeness might bring consolation for the loss of her mountains. Finally, a door was opened that led to an unadorned white room with a single painting on the wall. They left her alone, telling her they would come back soon to draw her bath and bring her some dinner, and then they would all go to bed early, in view of the tiring journey, and would come again at first light to take her to the Maestro. She went up to the painting, feeling a curious mixture of reverence and fear.
I know you, but I don’t know how.
A long moment passed. Then something changed in the air in the room, and a slight trance came over Clara, also enhancing the layers in the painting, which she no longer saw in two dimensions but with a new depth that opened the door to the realm of dreams. She did not know now whether she was sleeping or awake, only that time was passing with the same momentum as the clouds high in a sky of black ink and silver. She must have fallen asleep, because the scene changed and she saw, in a summer garden, a woman laughing in the evening. She could not make out her face but she was young, surely, and very cheerful; then she disappeared and Clara saw nothing but the shimmering ripples of moving ink before she lapsed into a last visionless sleep.
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    â€œWe are going to see the Maestro,” said Pietro the next day. “He’s not an easy man, but you will play, and that will be enough.”
    The practice room of Maestro Gustavo Acciavatti was located on the top floor of a fine building, with high casement windows that let the sun transform the parquet floor into a lake of liquid light. The man seated at the keyboard seemed both very young and very old, and when she met his gaze Clara thought of a tree she used to go to when she felt sad. Its roots reached deep into the earth but its boughs were as vigorous as young branches, and it seemed vigilant, which allowed it both to observe and to radiate all around, and it listened, although Clara did not need to speak. She could have described the shape of every stone along her walks, and drawn from memory every branch of every tree. Faces, on the other hand, passed her by as if in a dream before they melted into a universal confusion. Yet this man who was gazing at her in silence was as present and alive to her as her trees, and she could discern the texture of his skin and the iridescence of his eyes, so dazzling it almost hurt. She stood before him.
I know you, but I don’t know how.
The revelation that he knew who she was flashed through her consciousness then vanished instantly. Suddenly she noticed a form slumped on a chair in the corner of the room. Her eye had detected a movement and she thought she saw a short man who, as far as she could tell, had a little round belly. He had ginger hair and he was snoring, with his head on his shoulder. But as no one paid him any mind, she ignored him, too.
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    Then the Maestro spoke.
    â€œWho taught you your