They made it clear, though, that they would be sleeping late, that I was to have breakfast on my own. Sophia, plump and sleepyeyed, showed me how to shave off just the right amount of chocolate from the slab, how to melt it with a bit of water and a good dose of sugar before slowly pouring in the milk. In the mornings I rose early and took my steaming chocolate and some of Sophia’s homemade crusty bread to the banquette by the kitchen window where I could look out over the garden awash with pink and white anemones. It was so beautiful, but it hurt to sit there alone. In those earliest hours, I thought only of my family, and I felt the tightness in my chest would stop me from breathing entirely.
After breakfast, I’d run straight to the art shed to get my supplies. I was happiest working outdoors, surrounded by the palms and orange trees and bushes thick with wild beach roses. Almost as soon as I set up my easel and began to draw, the lump of homesickness broke apart, dancing away and disappearing as quickly as dropped mercury.
Just as Daddy had predicted, I was drawing new things. But my inspiration was probably not of the sort that my father had envisioned.
Vittorio and Sophia had taken me along with some of their friends one night to the Casino, a local theater, to see a tall, raven-haired singer named Garden Rose. Garden Rose flashed over the stage in swirling silk skirts with embroidered sashes, shining layers of necklaces cascading over her breasts. And her headdresses! Dazzling networks of marcasite and colored beads and sequins splayed out around her head in a geometric sunburst. I was mesmerized by Garden Rose. I began to draw women and girls with fantastic intricacies of dress and hair decoration. And I began to dream of dancing. When I was alone in my bedroom I’d leap and kick, and pirouette until I was dizzy. I dreamed of being a famous ballerina.
Those dancing dreams never left me. Later, when I was so ill in the hospital, they were sad dreams. Visions of a dark and joyless Garden Rose filled my head. And I knew I’d have to paint her like that. The sad dancer, poised to step off into the abyss.
I would have been desperately lonely in San Remo if it had not been for Mimmi, the little girl who lived down the street. With her ruddy cheeks, coal-black eyes, and mop of twisted curls, she looked to me exactly like the Raggedy Ann doll Aunt Cecil had sent me from America. Even her checked gingham dresses seemed doll-like. Her hair was black, though, not Raggedy-Ann red. I was happy when Mimmi was around. It was as if I had a little sister, and I felt almost like myself again.
Mimmi was only five years old, but the fact that I was so much bigger didn’t intimidate her in the least. She was very bossy, which made me laugh. She’d arrive with an armload of dolls and together we’d make clothing for them out of the bits of fabric from Sophie’s “rag bag.”
No, she doesn’t need a hat!
No, Pamela—the bow should go in the back, not the front!
Not the pink one, the yellow one!
None of my suggestions were ever any good. I always did whatever Mimmi wanted.
I couldn’t get her to sit still, but I drew her once, just her face. The Strong Child, I called the picture.
It was Mimmi who rescued me the day the letters came.
pamela
I was outside, painting the riot of anemones. Seeking shade, I had set up my easel under a grape arbor. Vittorio came out the kitchen door and headed towards me with a more purposeful step than usual. He had two envelopes, and I could see he was excited.
“You will be happy with this news from your father, very happy!” he said. “He wrote to me, too—the English, they love you—you are a grand success!”
One envelope was quite large and bulky, the other one letter-size. I took them, thanked Vittorio, and ran straight to my room. In the dim bedroom I sat on the cool stone floor and opened the big envelope first, the one with the London postmark.
This wasn’t the first time I’d heard from Daddy. He had written me often, telling me all about the plans for the exhibition, how my reputation had reached London long before he had, and the great success he’d had when he called on many old friends of his and Mam’s to help. Jimmie Manson—Royal Academy artist and respected art critic, had secured the prestigious Leicester Galleries for my show and had agreed to write an essay for the catalog. William Nicholson said he’d be delighted to print two of my studies in The Owl, his journal of art and literature. A third friend was the novelist and children’s poet Walter de la Mare. My parents called him “Jack.” Jack had befriended my mother years earlier when, at the age of nineteen, she had published her first novel. Mam was exceedingly fond of him. He truly understands children, she would say. Jack had, in a way, lived with us for most of my life. How many times had Cecco and I heard our mother’s voice softly chanting: “There is a wind where the rose was;/Cold rain where sweet grass was;/And clouds like sheep/Stream o’er the steep/Grey skies where the lark was.”
Daddy said that Jack responded with a childlike glee when he asked him to write the introduction to my catalog. The introduction turned out to be a poem. A lovely poem, ending with these lines:
This happier child at peace in that first home,
As yet untravelled, need no further roam;
But over her paper and her colours bent
Can paint the bliss ’tis to be innocent.
Life add thy wisdom, and at length bring us
Where springs the fountain of her genius.
Genius. The word was so often attached to my name in my childhood that I never thought it extraordinary. Pamela, the little genius . . . well, it was the same to me as Caroline, the girl with the red hair, or Edward, the boy who plays the violin.
The envelope from my father was stuffed with newspaper clippings. I shook them out impatiently. I didn’t have to read them very carefully to know that my show—Daddy had titled it “Babes and Fairies”—had caused a sensation.
“Child Prodigy Shows Rare Gift.” “Pamela Bianco, Child Miracle, Dazzles Art World.” “‘Miracle’ Artist Draws Crowds at Leicester Galleries.”
In the Weekly Dispatch, beneath a photograph of one of my drawings, was a quote from Langton Douglas, director of the National Gallery of Ireland.
I have very little sympathy with rhapsodies over infant prodigies . . . but the earliest drawings of this girl can be judged without consideration of her age. She has an extraordinary quality of line and a natural gift for composition.
The heaps of praises fell around me like confetti. It was wearying to read all these strange things about myself—they seemed to be about some other child, a child in London, far away in a world that Daddy had created all on his own.
I wanted my old world back. I longed only for the sound, the touch of my family.
I pushed the articles aside and drew out what I was really looking for. Daddy’s letter. His elegant handwriting covering the thick stationery seemed larger than usual. Perhaps it was a sign of his enthusiasm.