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

music?”
    â€œAlessandro,” she answered.
    â€œHe says that you learned all on your own. But no one can learn in a day. Was it the priest who gave you lessons?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œSomeone else in the village?”
    â€œI’m not lying,” she said.
    â€œAdults lie,” he said, “and children believe them.”
    â€œSo then you can lie, too.”
    â€œDo you know who I am?”
    â€œThe Maestro.”
    â€œWhat do you want to play?”
    â€œI don’t know.”
    He motioned to her to take her place, adjusted the stool, sat down next to her and opened the score that was on the stand.
    â€œCome now, play, play, I’ll turn the pages.”
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    Clara’s gaze swept quickly and intensely over the two open pages of the score—she blinked, once, twice, three times—and an inscrutable expression settled briefly over the Maestro’s face. Then she played. She played so slowly, so sorrowfully, so perfectly, she played with such infinite slowness, such infinite softness and perfection, that no one could say a word. When she stopped, no one could speak. They knew of no adult who could play the prelude in this way, because this child was playing with a child’s sadness and pain, but with the slowness and perfection of a mature adult, when no adult knows any longer how to attain the enchantment of that which is young and old at the same time.
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    After a long silence, the Maestro asked her to let him sit in her place, and he played the first movement of a sonata. At the end he introduced a tiny change. She was staring at a blind spot, far beyond any vision. He asked her to play again what she had heard. She did as he asked. He went to fetch the score. She followed what was written there, and did not introduce the change, but as she was about to play that bar she raised her head and looked at him. Then they brought an entire stack of scores which they spread out before her. She opened them, one after the other, blinked once, twice, three times, and they all died and were reborn with each blink of her eyelids, as if in a down pouring of snowflakes from a forgotten dream. Finally, everything seemed transfixed in a heavy, tremulous silence. One single blink and Clara was staring at the pages of a worn red score, trembling, until each of them was trembling and an abyss opened inside them. She went over to the grand piano and played the Russian sonata which had gripped her with the elation of heights; and they knew that this was how mankind must live and love, in this fury, this peace, with this intensity and rage, in a world swept with the colors of earth and storm, in a world washed blue at dawn and darkened by rain.
    A moment went by.
I know you but I don’t know how.
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    There came a discreet knock at the door.
    â€œYes?” said the Maestro.
    â€œGovernor Santangelo,” came the reply.
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    Clara sat on alone in the room in the company of the fat little ginger-haired man, who had not moved and gave no sign of waking. They brought her some tea, and some unfamiliar fruit with a velvety orange skin, and they gave her still more scores, while insisting that the Maestro had said she was to play only one. The first one seemed like a desecration to her and she immediately closed it, repelled by all the staves—they were like the bombastic effusions of those funeral dirges for the organ. No other score had the same lugubrious effect on her, but she opened a great many of them and did not find what it was that had so enthralled her about the Russian sonata and, in Santo Stefano, about the last piece that Sandro had placed before her in the church. Finally she came to a thin booklet. The first page whirled a new type of arabesque into the air. There were curved lines that took flight like feathers, and that had the same texture as the velvety skin on the lovely fruit. Before, when she had played the Russian sonata, there had been a