The Garden of Letters Read Online Free

life. She still marveled that the child she created from her own womb had such a capacity to awaken things inside her. She had listened patiently as the girl first learned her scales, then graduated to arpeggios and more difficult études. Now she was playing full sonatas and concerti. Her daughter was on the cusp of adulthood, and Elodie’s playing became more nuanced and a certain sensuality infused her music. Her fingers now moved with confidence, a nimble precision as they danced up and down the strings. Her bow alternated from long, ribbonlike strokes to gentle caresses.
    Elodie grew her hair past her shoulders, and occasionally, when she was fully engaged in the drama of her playing, her hairpins would come undone and her face would become hidden in a curtain of hair. But when her hair was pinned high and in place, she was a striking presence. She had her mother’s china-white skin and Venetian green eyes. And when she performed, she appeared celestial.

    “She is not only a gifted player,” her father told her mother. “She also has a rarer gift in that she can hold the notes inside her head.”
    Her mother didn’t seem to understand at first. “What do you mean, Pietro?”
    “What I mean is that she has an extraordinary ability to memorize the musical score.” He shook his head. “She doesn’t get that from me, Orsina.”
    Elodie’s memory was something her mother had noticed quite early on. The girl rarely ever needed to write anything down. She could also remember with great clarity what she had been wearing on a particular day, even several years after. She could read a book once and remember with ease its entire content without having to refer back to a single page.
    “It’s the Venetian in her,” Orsina said. She knew that her daughter’s memory came from her bloodline. Venetians had spent centuries navigating a floating city of mazes. One needed to remember pathways, landmarks, or even anecdotes of particular places in order to find one’s way.
    Orsina couldn’t remember things that were written down like Elodie but she did have a strong visual memory, which she knew she had passed to her daughter. When the child was just four, she had directed Orsina home, telling her to turn left at the grocer, right at the park, and straight on the road with the gelato store in the front. She had smiled, knowing her daughter gave directions like her own mother had, and hers before her.
    But Elodie’s memory was even more astonishing than a typical Venetian’s, and Orsina was happy that it would serve her daughter well in her music.
    “This will set her apart from her peers,” Pietro told his wife. “She’ll be the one the professors want for their string quartets or for piano duets. It looks very impressive not to need to have the music in front of you when performing.”

    From the time she is ten years old, Elodie attends classes after school at Verona’s Liceo Musicale,
on the corner of Via Roma and Via Manin. By eighteen, however, she studies there full-time. Her lithe frame carries her cello case to the school’s cloistered walls. Everything around her cast an impression. The blue-gray plaster walls, the stark practice rooms. The smell of dry leaves meeting moist air.
    Her memory is like soft, red clay. A face on the street. The pattern of a dress. All that she encounters remains fixed inside her mind, like a web of permanent fingerprints.
    She plays Vivaldi, Albinoni, Beethoven, Bach, and, the music flowing through her, her body soaking up each note. Her body is just another part of her instrument. Her legs are strong like a colt’s; her lean arms have the quiet strength of a dancer.
    When she plays, she closes her eyes. She hears the fire. She senses the water. Her bow is like lightning. Striking. Flashing. Touching down sometimes for just an instant, and other times moving back and forth like a saw. She does not play with any sense of fear.
    Outside, the world is blackening with the