I.
I will not deny that I have always been fascinated with puppets.
Perhaps because I was born on a farm in Saint Siméon, a forgotten town west of Valence in southern France named after the patron saint of puppets. Despite the frequent puppet shows—many families considered themselves extraordinarily lucky if a child were accepted into the Lycée Avancé des Marionettes to study such puppetry—not all were enthusiastic. Neither my father, Patrick Clermont, nor my mother, Anne Belleau, ever bought me a puppet.
I sulked over this injustice. At the age of four, I could only watch my sister, Sonja, play with Angélique, a fairy marionette with long red hair that our Uncle Pavan had bought her.
Occasionally, when she noticed me moping, Sonja would let me pull at the strings. Although I could get Angélique to do a flopping walk, I never could make her glide gracefully as my sister did. Sonja’s twirling flourishes of thumbs and rippling fingers gave Angélique life.
“Such talent, such polish.” Uncle Pavan rubbed his thumbs together as he watched Angélique slide amid potted plants in the garden and float up to the doll’s house to join Sonja. She played at the strings like a harp by whose invisible sounds Angélique moved with buoyant grace, almost hovering at times, as if her delicate azure wings could truly fly.
Uncle Pavan’s own prowess at puppetry was marvelous. Some whispered he could literally bring puppets to life. He took a dedicated interest in Sonja’s future. That is why I have so few memories of her. She left for the advanced arts of puppetry.
I was left alone.
I longed to play with Sonja as we had on brighter days of jumping on piles of autumn leaves or racing through fields with the spring winds—chasing harvest mice and Swallowtail butterflies between stalks of shuddering wheat or corn. When I brooded and stroked Sebastian, our silky-furred black cat, who had also been the playmate of Sonja, I decided that if I showed myself particularly adept at puppets like my sister, then I would be reunited with her.
Despite Father’s refusal to buy me a marionette—though I bawled for one during walks down cobblestone streets in the marketplace of Saint-Siméon—Uncle Pavan, who was half-Italian, brought back from a summer trip to Italy one of its most famous puppets, Gianduja. Uncle Pavan’s passion for puppetry extended to his purse strings. He spent much wealth to sponsor children to master the art of rods and strings.
As Uncle made Gianduja bend and hop about with herky-jerky motion, I laughed.
My father scowled but then accompanied Gianduja’s antics with violin.
Once I began dancing, Father smiled.
“Look, Elias loves to dance with music,” he told Mother, who smiled thinly back at him.
But it was not the music that made me laugh, jump, and frolic. It was the puppet.
This new marionette looked sharp in his black coat with red fringes, and the Ferrari family (most famous of Italian puppeteer-dynasties) had added dark blue trim to the red-and-black tricorne hat that sat upon the puppet’s frowning and sour face. That red-button-eyed grimace made the mannequin look like he must be about to speak.
And speak he did, though only in my dreams since Uncle took Giandjuja away with him.
“I can show you how to really play the violin,” the diminutive Gianduja mouthed at me in a dream upon a beach of black sand beneath red lights that spiraled into an indigo sky.
Play we did. Together we sawed and wailed across a stage where insect-headed people chirped, and countless puppets of every shape and size and color hummed and sang. Before sleep, I imagined the nightly concerts—I’d stare at my bedroom wall, which would shiver with grainy but vivid phantasmagoria.
Two years later when my father, stooped of back and calloused of chin, proposed to teach me the violin in waking life, he was astonished to find my uncanny facility with the bow.
“Gianduja plays even better than you, Papa. He shows me how at night.”
Father gently adjusted my right arm. “Ah, but he does not hold the bow properly.”
My improper posture continued to vex my father, but he was always patient with me because of my impeccable sense of rhythm and my powerful feelings that occasionally surfaced in a rousing crescendo or heartbreaking diminuendo.
I remember one day as I pined for Sonja, he told me to use my melancholy on the strings. “You are already good, but you can be a great musical performer, my boy! You must harness your passions. Now, that elbow, keep it under the violin. Yes, better, better. Ah, you make each note sing.”
“It’s as though the boy feels the strings right up his bones, into his ribs and heart,” Father told Mother, who didn’t look over at our practice sessions while she sewed up a ripped cravat for one of her few clients.
She pressed her thin lips together. “Let the boy be what he is. No more no less.”
“So you said about his sister.” Father’s smile collapsed into drooping marionette lines.
Mother did not even glance at his crumpled face. She stared out the window at the corn and wheat bending beneath the evening breeze and the setting sun. ...
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