Chapter Text
From the personal memoirs of La Fata Lillà, opera diva
April 16, A.D. 1980
Reykjavik, Iceland
How serendipitous. Just as I place pen on paper I am struck by another consuming state of wonder at how perfectly beautiful he is. He has impulsively taken it upon himself to illustrate how he imagines Italy will be. Fingers smudged with graphite, his pale little brow knotted in concentration, I can see he is yet again using an excessive amount of purple. Ah, now he moves onto the orange. He remembers what I told him about the warm weather. Oh, dear Odin, what a crime that it is so far past his bedtime – I’ll have to drag him away from this soon. His father’s temper is sure to arise in him again.
Some days he has been excessively giddy at the prospect of traveling, drinking in my descriptions of Covent Garden and La Scala. Strangely, his bad days manifest in silent resentment against me for parting him from his childhood home. Instead of his usual rages, he takes to hiding, often in our little secret gully below the copse of birch trees at the playground. I take a guilty pleasure in this – I feel vindicated at every little display of his elven blood winning out. However, it is far too much to bear in the moments when despair is the emotion that overrides all others. He lasers into me with my own grey-green eyes, asking me why we have to leave. The sooner he is enthralled by the sensuous crafts of the opera backstage, the better. In such a milieu, I can be absolutely certain, he will take after his mother.
Mercifully, his eyes are currently twinkling with glee, fixed on the paper before him. It is simply irrefutable: he was born an artist. I have seen other children in similar acts of creation at his kindergarten. Their attention is diverted by the slightest waft of breeze, building blocks and crayons sent to scatter as they head off to chase their whimsies. Robbie will sit there with the same drawing, his aura of concentration simply dazzling, until he has caked every inch of the page with bright waxy colour. The seeming explanation is the shadow of Ignatius’ temperament, but as I cast my mind back down my own lineage I count dozens of elves who shunned the typical sanguine fickleness of our kind to enrich our dominion with their talents. Ah, I was truly born in the wrong age.
All the same, I am glad he has been spared the burden of inheriting my pointed ears. I have been lucky that my place in the human world has facilitated wearing long hair and the ridiculously large hats of high fashion, but it is a difficulty all the same. If my prayers for Robbie are heeded, he will comfortably mix with the hoi polloi of the continent, seen as a charming, perfectly normal little human boy (save for perhaps possessing rather otherworldly beauty – I laugh at my own vicarious vanity!), and will grow up to be a well-respected man about town, completely at ease with the people and society surrounding him.
Shall I ever reveal to him the truth? It may be an issue relying on his own curiousity… many times I have envisioned him toying with my ringlets to discover the reason why Mamma hides her ears. If most children have a flair for coaxing out secrets, my intrusive little Robbie is the definitive authority. I only hope that finding out won’t hurt him.
But what awaits us in the immediate future – after the inevitable morning tantrum – is a new world of labyrinthine hallways, the touch of opulent fabrics (many of them purple), the spectacle of the set designers and stage magicians assembling their elaborate mechanisms, and most importantly, the echo of rich beautiful voices ringing throughout cavernous theatres.
Oh, how splendid! He has slumped over the table, his soft, high breath calm and slow. I won’t have to drag him into his bedroom. The Gods have been kind and another little tempest has cleared before it could begin. So perfectly beautiful, perfectly unaware, my angel.
I must tuck him in quickly lest he wake and grab angrily at the hem of my frock with those clever little hands.