The Niccodemi Variations - 2. Tristan von Aschenbach continues to tell his story

Villa Ginestra's large and historic grand piano, restored and newly tuned to welcome my reverent hands, was there, in front of the window open to the Gulf of Salerno. It was not my personal piano. It would have taken too much money according to my mother to get it from Paris where I had given my last concert, before the panic attacks became unbearable. In my condition I could not play in public, and if I could not play in public, I was not earning enough to afford our usual luxuries. Carrying a large grand piano was considered an unaffordable luxury.

I had claimed to know in advance the characteristics of the instrument with which I was to play for who knows how long. With some excitement I discovered that it was an old piano bought almost a hundred years earlier, in the early 19th century, by Furio Niccodemi's own grandfather. It was one of the first grand pianos built with a metal frame and must have cost a lot of money at the time.

Villa Ginestra had also belonged to the Niccodemi family for centuries. Moorish in style and dating from the 13th century, it was very similar to the nearby Villa Rufolo. They were both perched in the hills of Ravello, above Amalfi, and enjoyed an enviable position for the view and the air. The sea breeze and the aromas and scent of the orange blossoms from the citrus gardens that surrounded it made the place healthy. I hoped it was also soothing to my altered senses.

From the large living room window there was access to a loggia partly shaded by a pergola. Beyond the balustrade there was a precipice that ended on the rocks and directly into the Tyrrhenian Sea. I looked out and shivered, despite the bright sunshine and warm early afternoon air. Below me small waves lapped lazily at those irregular rocks on which on a stormy night fifty years earlier Furio Niccodemi must have smashed. With rough seas that glimpse of paradise was sure to turn into a place of doom. That thought made me shiver, and I turned away frightened from the balustrade. Fortunately, I was alone on the loggia, otherwise my mother would have become agitated and made a fuss about it.

My reaction to that sight was due to the memory of Furio Niccodemi's tragic end. It was reported that, in an excess of madness, Furio had thrown himself from that same loggia to disappear in the waves during a storm. The same sources explained Furio's extreme gesture by the difficulty of worthily concluding the composition of the Variations. But I knew, suddenly I was certain, that nothing like that could have happened. Perhaps it was my sensibility as an artist telling me or the feeling of solidarity with a peer of mine, an artist like me, completely dedicated to music. Furio must have been in a difficult situation to deal with, so unbearable that it drove him to suicide. But it could not have been the artistic inability to conclude his composition worthily.

I walked back into the salon and approached the piano. The butler of the Villa came up to me and, without my asking him or soliciting his loquacity in any way, began to tell me the story of Villa Ginestra. The talk took place, with some difficulty, in French, which was not the mother tongue of either of us.

After all the historical and architectural tidbits he could and, despite my reluctance to listen to him, the butler was prodigal with details about the strange stories circulating about the death he called mysterious of Furio Niccodemi and what had happened in and around the Villa in the following years. They were just stories of imagined rather than seen apparitions, of objects being moved, of repeated night noises.

"'Maestro'..." the man said to me, then quickly returned to his increasingly stunted French "Oh, Maestro," he approached me to speak in a low voice as Italians do when they need to confide a secret or simply tell you something embarrassing "Maestro, everyone knows that Villa Ginestra is haunted by ghosts. That's why none of the servants want to stay in these rooms at night. No one has slept in the Villa for many years, except the guests who know nothing about ghosts!"

"But now I do!"

I wanted to scream, but I didn't, because all that talk had amused me rather than intimidated me.

The good man was certain that the ghost of Furio Niccodemi roamed the Villa Ginestra. His presence could be felt especially on stormy nights. It didn't appear, no one could see it, but you could tell it was there because candles and lamps went out in the rooms. And that was not all. That gullible man was convinced that the ghost of Furio's father was also in the Villa. He was the one who caused the most annoyance, because he was always drunk and bothered the maids, groping them in dark corners.

The man, who had been the last of the Niccodemi family, had died from a hunting accident a few years after his son disappeared. It seemed that the hunting rifle he was loading had exploded in his face.

Finally, as if it were not already crowded and haunted enough, the ghost of a boy also wandered around Villa Rufolo. He was a houseboy, rumored to be Furio's young footman. He seemed to have disappeared into the sea as well, the same night that Furio Niccodemi had disappeared. The boy, like Furio's ghost, appeared only on stormy nights. He was naked and ran through the rooms. When he was seen, his screams and even a howl of dogs could be distinctly heard.

I laughingly accepted all these confidences and finally managed to get rid of that zealous and chatty man.

There was no room in my life for legends, but, if there really had been the ghost of Furio in the Villa, I would have liked to meet him. I would have asked him if he had ever finished the composition of the Variations and if the manuscript and especially complete score was still around. It seemed that it had never been found.

And I also wanted to ask for some advice on the interpretation of the Variations that I hoped to perform that very autumn throughout Europe, even unfinished, as I thought they were.

Of course, if I was cured of all my anxieties.

I told the butler all this, and the poor man walked away shaking his head and making strange hand gestures. A waiter who was in the room and who fortunately spoke enough German, explained to me laughingly that those made by the butler were gestures to avert bad luck. They were the typical gestures of Italians.

Italians are all like that, I thought. They are all superstitious, but nice. What's more, they believe that the very number seventeen brings bad luck. Like the infamous Variation No. 17 that kept haunting me. If the butler had known about it, he would have done his prayers.

I finally managed to sit down at the stool in front of the piano. I wonder if it was the same one on which Furio had sat first as a child, then as a boy, finally as a young man and above all as an excelling composer.

I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and laid my fingers on those precious keys, touched them reverently and trembling. I closed my eyes and began to play. The Holy Grail theme gushed out like a flooding river from a canyon and resounded in the deserted hall, populated only by the memories of Furio Niccodemi's life. Although Villa Ginestra had often changed hands and it was rumored that Furio's father, before he died, had sold all the objects that had belonged to his son at great cost.

I played for hours, like this, with my eyes closed, with a transport that, for once, I did not have to pretend to feel. I repeated each Variation several times, fearing that I was getting too close to the edge of my personal precipice, to that Variation that generated panic within me.

It was the first night at the Villa and I had sent everyone away. The intrusive mother, the zealous secretaries, the servants who were happy to leave the villa as night fell. I was left alone with the unlikely ghost of Furio Niccodemi. If he was there, I was well determined to summon him with my interpretation of his music.

May the echoes of the Grail reach you wherever you are, Furio! Wherever your soul is, I thought. Reach me, my friend, I am waiting for you! Please!

I took courage and performed the 16th Variation. The piece suddenly ended with a diminished seventh chord progression without a final cadence. I stopped, for I could already glimpse the precipice.

I was intimidated; that was the moment I feared most of all. It had been many days since I had performed that part of the composition and I had been waiting for this moment anxiously. I looked around and saw what perhaps even Furio Niccodemi's eyes had seen when the composer had conceived that divine music.

I concentrated and attacked Variation No. 17. That was the part that, most of all, had bewitched me with its perfection, that both terrified and attracted me, irresistible, inexorable.

Just as the first notes resounded, the lights went out.

It happened often, the butler warned me. If the power went out, for sure, it was not the fault of the ghosts, because the Villa had recently been equipped with a power system, and it happened that the power would go out, leaving the whole house in the dark.

I did not worry. I certainly did not need to see the keys to play even the most complex composition.

I was immersed in darkness softened only by the reflection of a half moon that had risen on the sea in front of me, outside the window. I repeated the theme that I would later vary. Ingeniously Niccodemi had structured the variations with an expertise that Bach himself would have envied him.

If the ghost had passed that way at that moment I would have asked him if he had ever studied Bach while alive, if he had performed it sometimes. It was unlikely that he had (1).

As I inhaled feverishly before launching into a very bold descending scale, I heard something behind me that distracted me. It sounded like laughter.

It was then that the hands of this unworthy 20th-century Mozart trembled and resoundingly missed the passage. A shuddering dissonance resounded in the silence of the dark house, truly unworthy of the infallible interpreter I imagined myself to be.

I froze startled, more by my mistake than by the barely audible laughter I heard behind me. For the very high conception I had of my performing skills, in my inordinate conceit, a performer of my caliber, could not make a mistake, nor make such major errors. It was the mistake that terrified me, not the ghostly sound that I also distinctly heard.

The noise that kept resonating sinisterly.

It was the persistent noise that now came from all over the house that I knew was deserted. I listened to it more carefully, and rather than laughter, it sounded like a metronome, marking time.

Was something or someone suggesting that I change the tempo I had adopted? Or, more simply did he or she find my playing and interpretation of the Variations ridiculous and was trying to give me useful advice?

I was alone at the Villa and I was sure I was. At least until that moment.

The cadenced noise, no longer laughter, persisted, neither louder nor less audible.

"Who's there?" I shouted.

I wasn't scared, not yet. But I was ashamed that someone might have heard my mistake. Who had heard it? I wanted to scream. What are you laughing about? If what I was hearing was laughter. Was I so wrong? I asked myself terrified.

I was answered by absolute silence, broken only by the dull, rhythmic sound of the sea undertow beyond the loggia balustrade. No more laughter could be heard, and the metronome had stopped, if there ever was one. But the suggestion remained, the suggested tempo perhaps the right one for the last known Variation.

I thought of performing that passage one more time following the suggested tempo. I tried to resume playing, but my hands strangely did not remember the position of the keys. I forced my hands and they hit the keys and produced some inarticulate sounds.

"Don't be ridiculous, Tristan," I admonished myself aloud, "move your fingers, play. Now play!" I added louder and louder as if I was trying to convince myself to do something I didn't like, that I didn't want to do.

Childishly I shouted to convince myself.

I was often talking to myself while I was playing, even during my public performances. It was part of my character, and the audience competed to understand what I was saying, and many times I enjoyed misleading them or reciting dirty limericks.

"Don't be ridiculous," I repeated in a lower voice.

"Yes, you are being ridiculous. You're right!"

It was a male voice, firm, audible, right behind me. Or maybe it was inside me?

"Who's there?" I shouted, turning around.

Now I was scared, because I had really heard that voice, loud and clear speaking in Italian. I was not supposed to understand what it was saying, but I understood it just fine.

The laughter rang out and then was lost in the house. The lights came back on. All the lights came back to life and dazzled me.

The Villa became bright again, silent, peaceful and deserted.

I was dazed, I was breathless. Around me, everything was once again exactly as I had seen it before the lights went out. In spite of my fright, I resumed playing with eagerness and, as was to be expected, having arrived at the same point as before, I made the same mistake by playing that descending scale. I froze, no longer remembering the position of my hands, no longer getting my bearings.

I felt lost. I looked at the window, the loggia, and at the end I distinguished the balustrade that Furio had certainly climbed over to kill himself. I contemplated doing so, too.

Despite my despair, I tried to start again, but I was terrified and began to cry. What would become of me if I was no longer able to play? At that point I could only die.

Where had Tristan von Aschenbach gone?

I still tried to force myself, I forced myself to be calm. With difficulty I regained control of myself and especially of my hands. I regained the position of my fingers on the keyboard, reviewed in my mind that part of the score and remembered the chords. I read in my mind all the chords and the notes flowed as they were supposed to. Finally I got to the very end of the known part of Variation No. 17. And I did so without feeling suffocated.

Finally, that last chord resounded charmingly and sinisterly. It was that F, B, D# and G#, just the one.

As I played it and the notes resonated in the deserted house, I did not feel short of breath as I had feared. My fingers did not stiffen, I continued to breathe regularly, and that was already encouraging.

"You are ridiculous..." that voice inside me or behind me was back and repeating those words "you are ridiculous, Tristan!"

"Who's there?" I shouted.

Where was it coming from?

I remembered those stories that circulated about the little incidents that happened in the theater when the Variations were on. I thought about what the butler had told me. I felt myself freezing, although the evening was warm and almost summery.

That it was all true? Was I supposed to believe in ghosts?

Was it the ghost of Furio Niccodemi who was haunting me because I was profaning his Variations and, moreover, in his house, playing his piano? Or was he warning me about something? Perhaps he was trying to tell me that I was not capable of performing his composition worthily. That I wasn't capable? I would have been devastated.

How does one deal with a ghost? Do you blandish it, try to convince it to leave you alone? Do you show yourself friendly?

I breathed deeply, closed my eyes and began to play again. I performed Variation No. 17 one more time from the beginning.

As I repeated the last, fateful chord that did not conclude the Variation but was supposed to somehow introduce an ending that I imagined glorious, I felt weariness assail me.

In the 1920s we men dressed very formally even when we had to stay indoors. Although it was late spring I was not in shirt sleeves, but wore a jacket and also a waistcoat that tightened my chest. A tie tightened my shirt collar, high and starched.

In the physical effort of performing the score, I had been sweating and felt discomfort in my chest and around my neck. I feared that I was running out of air. It could have been the warning of a panic attack. The timing was right. My eyes were closing. I was in danger of falling asleep sitting at the piano.

I stood up slowly. I was shaken by tremors. I barely went to the window and stepped out onto the loggia. I thought I heard shouting. I fearfully approached the balustrade. I leaned out and, in the darkness of the night barely illuminated by moonlight, I thought I caught sight of arms flailing in the waves, then another insistent noise, right behind me. It sounded like the howling of dogs. It couldn't be, I said to myself. It's the butler's fault and his stories. It's all suggestion.

It's the ghost story, Tristan. You are reliving it. Wake up!

Then I heard, I thought I heard, a man shouting something from afar. It seemed to me that he was coming from the rocks just below the lodge. I looked out, it was indeed a man, a human form. He was shouting and flailing. From inside the house I heard a loud, dry noise, like a gunshot. It was terrifying and came from inside the house, where I was sure there was no one there.

A mad terror took hold of me. I was about to faint. Or to throw myself into the abyss.

It was then that the illusion ceased. It had been a dream, in which I had relived the whole story the butler had told me.

Now I was wide awake and conscious, I took courage and looked over the balustrade again. Only small lazy waves were moving below me, breaking on the rocks. The sea was deserted. The talk of ghosts made by that gullible man had affected me. It had all been an illusion, a daydream.

Everything was back to normal. I was alone, looking out from a loggia suspended over the Gulf of Salerno. I could smell the sweet smell of the citrus garden reaching out to me and subduing me. In front of me was a dreamlike scenery. I could see from afar the lights of Amalfi and offshore other lights, it could have been a ship or a ferry going to or coming back from Capri.

I was excited and sweaty, my heart was still pounding and I didn't understand why. I suddenly felt all the weariness in the world on me. I decided to go to sleep. I had had enough practice for that day. Meanwhile, Variation No. 17 with its fatal chord no longer made me choke, and that was already a good result.

Villa Ginestra was already taking effect.

When I arrived in my bedroom, which, I knew, had been Furio's, I moved mechanically as if guided by something external to myself.

I undressed completely. This was something I never did, because although I was already eighteen years old, my mother had a habit of entering my room at any time. That night I did another thing I never did. I locked the door to the room, even though my mother would make a big deal out of it the next day.

Suddenly I realized that I was too hot. The temperature of the room became almost unbearable. Naked and sweaty I lay down on the cool sheets, blessing the sea that brought such pleasant air between those thick, ancient walls. I smelled the scent of orange blossoms again and fell into a deep and, perhaps, dreamless sleep.

In the morning, I awoke to the warmth of the sun that flooded the room and had come right up to the bed to kiss my still sweat-soaked skin.

I was restless and quickly realized the reason for that uneasiness. On the sheets were the marks of my nocturnal dreamy adventures. I did not remember dreaming, but the marks were there. It had been fortunate that I had locked up. As was her custom, my mother would have entered the room and discovered the traces of my impure dreams, as she still called them.

At my age it may have been a little late to call them that, but I was still her child, she said, and good children only have chaste dreams. To watch her tell it, one would have believed her. Except that I had already grown up and was aware that hers was just one of the many ways she controlled and managed my life.

What she did in her room with the secretaries and undertakers who came around to take care of my career and business was never discussed. It was not discussed, but it was many years that I knew what she did. She knew that I knew, but we didn't talk about it. Since my father had disappeared, my mother had begun to console herself with other men. She usually did it with employees whom she paid with my money and whom she always chose rather pleasing and to her taste. After all, my father had run off with a woman much younger than my mother, a pianist.

The only other issue we discussed among ourselves, in addition to music and my ability to perform it better and better to earn more money, were my impure thoughts. The idea that I was becoming an adult bothered her. Keeping control over me seemed vital to her well-being.

And she had to be understood, since she depended in every way on my earnings.

I worked hard to hide the stain I had left behind, trusting in the discretion of the service personnel. And in the meantime I tried to recall the dream I must have had. I retained only a pleasant memory of it that was too vague to relive. I could not focus on any details, nor could I go beyond that feeling of pleasure that I had certainly experienced.

When I finally opened the door, as I foresaw, my mother was there waiting for me, asking me about my evening, the night, and what I had certainly hidden from her.

"Tristan, you are exhausted and have dark circles under your eyes! You look flushed!"

"Mother, I'm perfectly fine!" I tried to shield myself, to evade her insistences.

"Have you succumbed to lust again?" she said almost laughing.

As I tried to escape this predictable and awkward exchange of sentences, I suddenly remembered my dream. It was as if someone in my head had opened a drawer and memories of my dream flew out of it.

I knew what that dream had consisted of and blushed violently.

My complexion is very fair and has always been my worst enemy. As a child I would always blush for any reason. As I grew up things did not improve much. My blushes always continued to betray me. Of course, my mother was the best interpreter of those emotional reactions of mine.

At that moment, under his inquisitive gaze, I remembered dreaming of Furio Niccodemi. I saw him approaching my bed, I resented his caresses, how and how much he cuddled me. And I also knew that what had happened in my dream had not, at any time, been against my will.

Focusing on those memories was a good reason to continue blushing and thus reveal to my mother that an infinity of impure thoughts, as she called them, had really disturbed my sleep.

"Tristan..." she cried out, but I hardly noticed, because meanwhile the memory of my dream continued to form in my mind, adding detail upon detail. And all of them quite pleasant and finally exciting.

I had dreamed that Furio was with me in bed. I remembered very well his scent, of orange blossoms, maybe even jasmine, and then his smell, so manly. In the dream we had been sweating. What we had done certainly had not been against my will, because I remembered having in every way facilitated the act and the actor performing it.

I had been so happy to indulge him during my dream that at that moment everything seemed infinitely real to me. As if I had really experienced it. And I longed to relive it as soon as possible.

My cheeks were now on fire, my breath was short. My attitude betrayed my excitement.

"Who was with you last night?" my mother meanwhile was getting more and more agitated, shouting already "You got rid of us to do this, didn't you? What a fool I was! Tell me who was in this room? Who's come?" she cried by now prey to one of the hysterical fits she used to stage at times when she seemed to lose control over me.

"Mother..." I stammered.

She tried to tug at me; I knew she was going to hit me. It was a script repeated over the years. My cheeks had suffered endless attacks from her. But this time I shirked, pulled away from her. I had to think.

"And who did you fuck with? You're a pig! Tell me!" she screamed, now out of control, approaching me one more time, her hands ready to hit me "Who did you do it with, a maid? A whore? Tell me!"

Could I tell her that Furio Niccodemi, fifty years after his death, had possessed me, but only in a dream? And that I had been more than happy to welcome him into my bed and lie with him, again in a dream?

Had something like that really happened?

I leaned against the wall to keep from falling, and at that moment I miraculously regained control of myself. My redness suddenly vanished, so much so that it worried her. I may have paled. Leaning against the wall I had to seem suffering to her.

"Tristan...are you all right?" she asked suddenly coming to her senses.

Seeing the source of her large earnings faltering always caused concern in her.

I, meanwhile, had unexpectedly regained control of myself. But I was still not in control of my life. I gave her a grim look. Which she immediately returned. We were challenging each other.

"Yes, Mother, I am all right now. To answer your other question, unlike you, Mother, I spent the night alone!" I said, punctuating the words well.

We had never discussed her nighttime and often daytime company. She pretended to be upset by my words and was about to hit me with a slap, but I grabbed her arm and squeezed her wrist.

Our exchange of glances continued. We were trying to incinerate each other with our eyes.

Until the day before I would have accepted her slaps and run away crying. Even at the age of eighteen, I'm still ashamed to confess, I would have cried disconsolately for making her upset. I certainly would not have responded that way. I would not have been able to respond, nor would I have offended her. I would have just mumbled an apology as she laughed at my inability to control my instincts.

And then I would run to the piano and start playing that Chopin Nocturne. The memory of what it had meant to us would usually calm her down, make her smile again. At that point she would pretend to be moved and say she forgave me. And I was happy, reassured that my life had overcome another jolt.

That had always been my way of apologizing for making her so upset.

So much succubus was I to that woman, to my mother.

That day I challenged her instead.

What had gotten into me? Who had I become? I no longer recognized myself. How could I try to resist my mother, the woman who had begotten me and then also created me as an artist?

The enormity of my act assailed me and I ran crying to the piano. I was harried, on the verge of another crisis, but I began to play anyway. I was so certain of what I was going to play that I surprised even myself when I recognized the music my hands were producing on the piano.

I was performing with unusual fury, for I played more than the Chopin Nocturne that I had strummed when I was just three years old.

The music that flooded the room was the majestic introduction of the Niccodemi Variations that required the controlled fury of the pianist to render the full force of those chords. I played all sixteen known Variations uninterruptedly and then hesitated for only a moment before beginning to play the unfinished Variation No. 17. After the last chord, instead of stopping intimidated and gasping, I played new chords, some passages I did not know I knew.

In my stunned excitement I realized that that was indeed the unprecedented conclusion of Variation No. 17 and, finally, the introduction of something new and never heard before.

In the silence of the hall the Grail theme resounded for once more and then it was varied in a new, brilliant, impossible way, completely different from all the previous Variations.

What was happening? What had I done? Had it been me playing? Those were my hands on the piano, but was I really playing?

As I said before, I never ventured into composing musical pieces, so I was certain that I was not inventing anything. I would not have been capable of it. My qualities always stopped at the ability to remember and interpret other musicians' compositions correctly.

I shook myself, coming out of the sort of trance during which I had been playing up to that point. My hands froze on the keyboard, unable to articulate, unable to find the right keys, no longer knowing what keys to press. I was trembling with my whole body. I would have liked to repeat those new passages, but I couldn't. I tried to remember those chords that had come so spontaneously to me before, but it seemed that they had never existed.

Normally, I would just play anything and memorize it and repeat it over and over again. Almost all of my sheet music was intact because it was used only once.

My mother had stood in the doorway. And she had been there the whole time, well over an hour. She had listened to the sixteen Variations, she had watched worriedly my excitement, the breathlessness, the emotion that had assailed me, that would not leave me.

Now she was looking at me worriedly. She understood that something had happened, but she was very far from imagining the exact nature of my turmoil. I was also quite confused. From what I remembered dreaming and what I had just played and especially from the unusual way I had done it.

To calm myself, I closed my eyes, caressed the ivory of the keys, almost cuddled them, perhaps begged them to help me. Only in this way could I calm the agitation I felt inside and the trembling of my hands.

Then I tried to play Variation No. 17 again. I took it again from the beginning and came to play the last known chord. At that point, I now knew, the music did not stop, but continued with the conclusion and then after an imperceptible pause began Variation No. 18. When I reached that moment, my hands froze one more time, but they did not tremble. They repeated the last the chord and I felt something brush against my cheek. I turned sharply, thinking that my mother had approached, but I was alone in the living room. She had gone who knows where.

I went back to staring at the keyboard. I needed to look at something real, something true. The sun was coming into the room, illuminating it. I told myself that nothing bad could happen to me as long as that bright sun was in the sky.

I remembered that once, at his home in Torre del Lago, Tuscany, Giacomo Puccini had confided in me that when it is sunny in Italy, everything is beautiful and healthy and alive. I was just a child prodigy and he was one of the most famous musicians in the world.

"If there is sunshine, nothing bad can happen to you, Tristan!" the composer of Tosca, Boheme and Madama Butterfly had laughingly told me. He had shown me the glorious view from his garden over the placid lake that faced it. And the scenery was all lit up by the setting sun.

These thoughts distracted me, that memory comforted me. I felt that gentle caress touch my face again, and my hands moved. They went back to playing, but I was not the one moving them. After playing again the unpublished conclusion of Variation No. 17, my hands inexplicably repeated the first chords of what I was sure must have been the lost Variation.

How could I be so sure?

"I composed it, I'm the one playing it."

I heard that voice again. I already knew it, I had heard it the night before and also during the night we had spent together.

Was it me who said that? Was it my voice that I heard? Did I just think it? Did someone think it for me and I said it to myself?

I blushed because I suddenly remembered other details of my night, of my dream, of that romantic adventure. I remembered still more details and smiled contentedly to myself. I was content and fulfilled.

"Yes, it was good," said the voice in my mind.

My hands were once again motionless on the keyboard, trying to form the next chord. They were not trembling, but a kind of struggle was taking place in my head. It was between me who, not knowing which keys to play, did not want to move my fingers and a stronger external will that demanded to be able to move my hands and fingers, to let them fly across the keyboard.

"Tristan, please let me play these impossible chords--I waited so long before I found someone like you who could do it!"

"You are Furio..." I managed to stammer, and so I yielded to his will and my hands moved. The music began, but I was no longer the one playing. My ears heard music that perhaps no human had heard before.

The piano emitted sounds that were elegiac and vibrant, deafening and harmonic. For a few minutes in that elegant and somewhat unfashionable room, notes resounded in a perfect concatenation and fusion of heaven and hell, love and pain, suffering and pleasure.

When the music ended and the play concluded, my hands stopped, I was exhausted. My forehead was dripping and I was as if feverish.

"Tristan, Tristan! What did you play? Tristan, what did you play?"

It was my mother's alarmed voice. During the execution, in what had been a kind of possession, I had heard her screaming behind me. Even though she had not dared to come closer. I must have seemed to her as if possessed. And she had no idea how close she had been to the truth.

I dropped my hands to the sides of the stool and slowly slumped down, cautiously laying my head on the keyboard. I remember thinking with satisfaction that, unlike Hoffenstein, I did not produce any dissonant chords when I passed out.

Many hours later I came to my senses and was in my bed. Evening had fallen. My mother was holding my hand. On the other side of the bed a doctor was trying to auscultate me, then took my pulse.

"I'm fine," I said, trying to get up.

"You'd better stay in bed, young man! Get some rest! Your brain is very fatigued!" this was the doctor's peremptory reply, albeit said in stunted French.

My mother pushed me forcing me to lie down one more time.

"You let the music overwhelm you, Tristan. It was the emotion, the transport. You were upset and had a terrible anxiety attack. You were, you looked hysterical as you played. You were possessed, you looked obsessed. Your eyes, Tristan, your eyes were blazing! They seemed to come out of their orbs. It was like diabolical! And then you passed out, there, on that damn piano!" my mother was babbling disconnected phrases that nevertheless described well my last moments of consciousness.

I, by then, knew well what had happened. It was hard to accept, even though I had experienced it myself. I could still hear Furio's voice loudly inside me, asking me to return to the piano as soon as possible, and especially that I was alone.

We have to talk, Tristan, Furio repeated insistently and was almost insistent.

"I'm fine!" I said with much more conviction than I had ever done in my life "Mother, remember that that piano pays for the luxuries you live in! I must get back to playing as soon as possible!"

I rudely pushed away my mother's arm that was preventing me from getting up.

"Young man, you can't," the doctor began to say, but a peremptory gesture from me silenced him.

"Thank you, doctor, I'm fine now! You may go!"

Perhaps he understood who would pay his bill and did not argue back.

I stood up determinedly. I grabbed my robe, put it on and walked confidently toward the toilet.

"Everyone please get out. Leave this room immediately," I said without even turning around. I hoped I had been convincing.

"Furio!" my mother shouted.

"Everyone leave, I have to dress!" I shouted and locked myself in the small room of decency. I slammed the door and waited.

I wanted them to leave me alone as soon as possible, because I had to avoid further confrontation with my mother. I wasn't sure I could prevail one more time. I heard them confabulating, and then they finally indulged me. They left my room in silence.

While I dressed, I thought about all those speeches I had heard attending the salons in which I had performed for so many years. I had little experience of the life that went on in the world outside, on the streets, but I was a child who had quickly learned to listen. Being endowed with a prodigious memory, I knew how to place all my memories to dredge them up at the right time.

In those years, mediums who claimed to be able to communicate with the souls of the departed were very popular. I had listened to many conversations and had often heard discussions about life after death and also about possession, about disembodied entities taking possession of the most sensitive or willing souls. I had always considered those conversations ridiculous and the people who believed in them stupid. I was convinced that even those who only talked about it were either gullible or a fraud who exploited the weaknesses of others.

But that evening I definitely changed my mind on the subject.

Life after death and possession suddenly seemed to me two topics quite consistent with my experience of the last twenty-four hours. My hands playing unfamiliar music, my dreams eerie and so pleasant. I realized that, up to that moment, the spirit of Furio Niccodemi had indeed possessed me, and in more ways than one.

I tried to reason, to explain my experience to myself. I told myself that I had been influenced by the place where I was, the environment had fascinated me. Villa Ginestra was the house where fifty years earlier Furio had lived and composed his Variations. The living room loggia was the one from which he had thrown himself and then disappeared into the waves. The chronicles of the time that I had consulted reported that his own father had seen him jump the balustrade and throw himself into the void. That same overhang was now there, almost drawing me in as well.

Furio had made a flight of more than fifty meters and had surely smashed on the rocks. His body had been swallowed by the sea, which was stormy that night. The corpse had never been recovered. The next day, just under the loggia, in more than one place there were stains that may have been blood. And also a scrap of cloth, which might have been from the shirt Furio was wearing when he had thrown himself.

The knowledge of this, combined with my obsession with the Niccodemi Variations and the butler's telling, might have made me momentarily lose my mind.

This was my last attempt at a rational approach. Two unexplained facts remained, however, at least for the moment. I was certain that the composition I had performed, as if in a trance, was the 18th Variation of which there was no trace anywhere in the world of the living. It had probably never been written and Furio had left no notes of any kind. He used to compose like Mozart. He wrote notes on the score and rarely went back to correct or reread. I, however, was absolutely certain that I had performed something new and unheard. And it was certainly amazing music that only Furio Niccodemi would have been able how to compose.

The other fact that I found incomprehensible were the strange feelings I experienced that night and upon waking up. I had experienced pollution; it was something that happened to me often because of my involuntarily chaste life. But there was another circumstance that I could be sure of. During the night my dreams had been all too real and detailed. In my lonely life it had never happened that I felt so close, intimate with another person. And a boy my age certain feelings, that tenderness, that affectionate kindness, he remembers and could recognize them. I couldn't have been wrong. I had really experienced them and it could not have been just a dream.

The door was certainly locked from the inside, and no one had climbed the cliff entering through the window. That left only one explanation that trespassed into the supernatural, into life after death and the possession of my body by a spirit. I began to accept the idea that the ghost of Furio Niccodemi still inhabited his Villa. And I felt proud that his spirit had chosen my humble earthly body to materialize. And especially that he had chosen my hands to play his sublime music.

I was distracted from my thoughts. There was a violent knock on the door; it was obviously my mother, who, a moment after knocking, tried to enter, but I had locked the door one more time. I smiled to myself at my foresight.

I heard her shouting phrases that came to me disconnected given the considerable thickness of that door at least a century old.

I opened it only when I thought she had calmed down. I walked past her without looking at her. I was dressed conveniently for a young man who in 1920 wished to dine at home and then spend the evening playing the piano only for himself.

It was my agenda that I did not intend to discuss with anyone. Without even looking back, I communicated this to my mother, who began shouting again. She was shouting disconnected phrases that I was now forced to hear but did not listen to. I was very surprised by this unprecedented nonchalance of mine.

In those years among aristocratic or bourgeois, but above all wealthy women, hysteria was, in a sense, fashionable and served as an explanation for all behaviors that a man considered unacceptable in a woman. There was even a tendency to treat it as if it were a disease. Then medicine and psychology advanced. But in those days the male householder had an undoubted advantage over his female counterpart in any relationship.

In interpersonal relationships, it was almost axiomatic that if a man lost his temper it could be for a sacrosanct, possibly justified, reason. If it was a woman who went into a rage, the poor woman was generally considered hysterical.

Unpredictably and unintentionally, I exploited this advantage.

"Mother, I will no longer accept any of your hysterical behavior," I told her in a scornful voice and always without dignifying her with a glance, "I have decided that tonight I will have dinner alone, and I will. Then I will play the piano as long as I feel like it, maybe until nighttime, and I will be doing it by myself all the time! I want to be alone, do you understand? I forbid you even to come near me!" I concluded in a voice that was ever firm.

"Tristan, I" she tried to grab my arm, but I shrugged disdainfully.

"Mother, leave this room and this house immediately! You and your friends! Immediately! And do not return until I have stopped playing and retired for the night! That's an order!" I said it without raising my voice too high, but the tone I used shut down the argument.

It was a small victory, the first of many in the process that later led to my being freed from the guardianship of my mother and her lovers, my alleged employees.

After having dinner, I dismissed the servants, who went away glad that they did not have to stay at the Villa for the night. I returned to the piano. I had ordered the lights to be all on and had also asked to have two large chandeliers placed on the piano. If the power had gone out, it would have been complicated to put out twenty-four candles all at once, even for Furio's ghost.

The window was open in the spring night. The cool sea breeze and the smell of orange blossoms penetrated and sweetened the atmosphere.

I was finally alone. I put my hands down on the keyboard and waited.

I don't know what I was waiting for. Maybe Furio's ghost, maybe an inspiration.

I waited.

****

(1) After his death, for reasons attributable both to objective technical-performance difficulties and to the change in prevailing taste, Bach's work was essentially forgotten for more than a century, although famous composers such as Mozart and Beethoven got to know and appreciate his style. It was not until 1829 that the performance of the St. Matthew Passion, conducted in Berlin by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdi, brought the very high quality of Bach's compositional work back to public awareness.