Read Online The Bottom of Your Heart by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar - Free Book Online Page B

promise and you broke it. I swore an oath, too. And oaths aren’t something you break.
    Her nose, Rosine’. You ought to see her. She has an adorable little button nose.
    You ought to see her.

X
    S itting at her vanity, Livia was brushing her hair and absentmindedly singing
    Â 
    There once was a Vilia, a witch of the wood,
    A hunter beheld her alone as she stood!
    The spell of her beauty upon him was laid,
    He looked and he longed for the magical maid!
    Â 
    There’d been a long period during which singing had been an important part of her life. From her earliest childhood, in the quiet city of Pesaro, Livia’s voice had grown up with her, turning rich and nuanced. As her voice grew, so did her beauty. Her parents, wealthy aristocrats, quickly realized that, given the varied talents that had been bestowed upon their daughter, who seemed every day more like a princess in a fairy tale, the sleepy little city on the Adriatic coast would be too small for her; and so they packed her off to Rome to study under an aunt who was an opera singer.
    It was then that singing became her passion and her profession. As a contralto, Livia toured the world, embarking on an extremely promising career. Then she met Arnaldo Vezzi, and she had sung no more.
    Certain men, Livia thought to herself as she continued to brush her hair, burn everything they touch to the ground. They’re like uncontrollable fires. Certain men cannot have anything but themselves in life. Vezzi was a genius, perhaps the greatest tenor of his time, and a genius’s wife couldn’t have a career of her own, or even a personality of her own. She had to be the wife of a genius and nothing more: smile, be beautiful, and keep her mouth shut.
    But Vezzi’s life had ended as perhaps he deserved, with his throat cut in a theater dressing room, there, in that city whose torrid heat was now pouring in through her open window. And it was in that same city that she had decided to live.
    Of course that was strange, and she realized it. Some of her girlfriends, in the phone calls from Rome during which they updated her on the latest gossip from the highest social circles, circles in which Livia had once traveled and which she didn’t miss in the slightest, had informed her that this decision of hers had generated its fair share of bafflement.
    As she sang, she reconstructed the chain of ideas that had led her subconscious mind to select that aria:
    Â 
    For a sudden tremor ran,
    Right thro’ the love-bewilder’d man,
    And he sigh’d as a hapless lover can
    A never known shudder
    Seized the young hunter,
    Longingly he began quietly to sigh!
    â€œVilia, O Vilia! The witch of the wood,
    Would I not die for you, dear, if I could!”
    Â 
    Not a romanza for a contralto, but for a soprano. And it wasn’t from an opera, but an operetta. Sung by Hanna Glawari, Franz Lehár’s
Merry Widow
, from the start of the second act.
    â€œThe Merry Widow.”
    Livia knew perfectly well that that had become her nickname in the drawing rooms of her new city, where her arrival had caused an uproar. The fact that she had refused to dress in mourning, in spite of her recent loss, had caused a scandal.
    The protocol of grief was a rigorous one. The first year, black dresses and hats, with no ornamentation of any kind, except for a horrible string of beads in dark wood, with the addition of a black veil for the first six months; no jewelry except for simple earrings, best if they were pearl; in the summer, white with black accessories; no luncheons or dinners, no theater, no movies, no concerts. In the second year, a few small concessions: tea was acceptable, and some color could be added to one’s dress, provided it was relatively drab.
    Livia thought it was awful that tradition should force a woman to sacrifice two years of her life just because her husband had gotten himself killed, and that it was unbelievable that the loss of a child