The girls thanked him, and with quick steps went up the path that led to the enormous blue face, which, once they’d passed it, they saw could be climbed by azure steps that led to the top, to the mirrored mask. On the right rose another giant cement monster, with seven snake heads. On one flank it had a hole, inside which was placed a stylized statue of colored metal, of a man hanging upside down by one foot. A few steps away from that was an enormous female figure, who was in the process of being dressed, in stripes of white and black tiles. The woman was holding her breasts, which were made of wire and resembled two enormous platters, with an iron scale resting on them that turned each breast into a platform on which something could be weighed. A door opened inside her skirt, barred by a gate. The skirts contained a little room, with a rusted machine in the back, a sheep’s skull tied to a hubcap. In front of that stood a much bigger structure, a kind of uneven plaza, supported by scaffolding, encircled by an arcade of low, slanted cement columns, on which shapes and numbers were painted, like an unsolved rebus. The columns supported a walkway with a parapet that looked like it was made of children’s modeling clay, from which you could look down onto the plaza from on high. The parapet also passed through rocket trails, continuing on under a crooked bell tower to another tower that also was covered in mirrors. They stopped there and looked around them. Reflections of thousands of Lisas and Annamarias surrounded them, observing them from every side. Annamaria was enchanted and horrified by all the fragments of herself flickering into Lisa’s eyes.
“How totally amazing,” said Lisa. “It scares you!”
“Good God.”
“Do you know who the guard is?”
Annamaria shrugged without averting her gaze from the reflections of Lisa. Bits of eyes, of hair, of eyebrow, cheeks.
“He’s the son of the king.”
“That’s strange; my brother is different, and younger.”
“Idiot, he’s the son of the real king.”
“My father’s the real king too, he’s said so himself. And anyway, how do you know?”
“I told you, my family comes here all the time, we know their aunts and uncles.”
“This couldn’t have gone any better. We were received by the prince, in his magic kingdom.”
“He’s a weird guy.”
Lisa let out a yell into the mirrored grotto, so she could hear the echo.
“Stop it. He said we shouldn’t make noise!”
“Um . . . we’ve awoken the Sphinx. Now we’ll be eaten. Let’s get out of here.”
They were excited. Lisa took Annamaria’s hand. “Before we go, we have to see her.”
“You said it wasn’t a Sphinx.”
“I know, it’s a tarot card, but I don’t remember which, maybe it’s the Empress. She lives inside.”
“She who?” asked Annamaria.
“The artist.”
It was one of the largest sculptures. A crouching creature, half woman, half animal. Gigantic and fluid, with enormous breasts, and with two portholes instead of nipples, in between which a door opened. Behind, hair softly covered the back and hindquarters. Above that was a sort of terrace you could walk up onto. The sculpture was surrounded by scaffolding and didn’t have any colors yet. Lisa and Annamaria walked up quickly onto the terrace and, from there, looked out onto the landscape: the sea they’d come from, the alternating stripes of green olive groves and brown-and-green fields, the nuclear power station of Montalto di Castro.
“I heard that she wanted to build the giant hand so it would point towards Montalto, to shut the power station down. Maybe it will work.”
“Could be, could be—fucking Maremma. I’m terrified. In the days after Chernobyl, I didn’t leave the house. You?”
“My mother’s an activist, she’s opposed to the power station. She holds a protest on the Via Aurelia with some other people from around here once a month. She always asks me to go with her, she says it’s a civic duty, for the future of the environment and young people . . . what a pain. Whether it’s the power station or the bomb, what can anyone do about it? We’re all going to die. I like my father’s idea better, building a nuclear fallout shelter.”
“Seriously?”
“My father never jokes about things like that,” Lisa replied.
“I saw The Day After. I’d rather expose myself to radiation immediately than live in a fallout shelter.”
“But what if it’s just for a while, then you can come out and escape to a place that isn’t contaminated?”
“Yeah? And where would that be? There wouldn’t be any place that wasn’t contaminated.”
“But maybe there would be, and then your life would have been spared.”
“All right, go ahead, do what you want. Lucky you, to have the money to build a fallout shelter.”
As they were talking, they had made their way down and found themselves behind the sculpture, at one side. There was a locked door between the animal’s thighs. Nearby was a small chapel, shaped like a colossal pumpkin, its entrance barred with a rope. Inside, the ceiling was covered with a puzzle of colored mirrors, concentric circles, planets, stars, and flowers shaped like hearts. At the center was a small altar that had a ceramic bas-relief stretched across it, depicting a black Madonna with a green child. Two photographs were set out beneath it like ex-voto offerings. Annamaria made the sign of the cross.
Lisa looked at her funny. Then she let out a short scream, so she could hear her voice echo in the little chapel. Annamaria nudged her. “We were told to keep quiet!”
A voice reached them from behind: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
They had woken the Sphinx.
Annamaria looked at the woman and lowered her eyes.
Lisa assumed the ballet dancer’s first position, with her long neck and straight back, and responded promptly: “We are the daughters of the king, and we love art.”
It was the right answer.
3. THE EMPRESS
Motherhood. Creativity. Seduction.
She was serious. She was dressed in a padded floral jacket with a faux fur collar, and soft trousers of damask silk with an emerald-green and black pattern. Dark-blond bangs emerged from a shapeless red velvet cap, a kind of oversized beret, but you couldn’t really focus on all of that, because her blue eyes were so intense that you couldn’t help quickly averting your gaze. Annamaria had never seen anyone dressed like that. In truth, she had never seen such a magnetic woman.
She looked them over. She rebuked them with a raised eyebrow and a curl of her lip that said, “You can’t stay here.” But that was just for a moment, and then she quickly responded to Lisa in a strange accent, “I am the Empress, and the mother of this place. You may come see my home if you wish, but then you must leave—I am expecting visitors.”
Annamaria apologized for them both and thanked her for showing kindness to strangers.
The Empress set off. They entered through the door on the back of the big statue shaped like a Sphinx. On the outside it was covered in cement; inside, it was an actual home. But it looked like no other home. The walls and ceilings formed sinuous waves; they seemed to have been molded from some malleable material, which also had been used to make the fireplace, the bench, a column. Everything was entirely covered in a mosaic of mirrors, including the cover of the gas stove, located inside of one of the Sphinx’s breasts, whose porthole window was the nipple. You climbed ten mirrored steps into the other, larger breast to reach the bedroom. The bathroom, a small grotto built in the round, held a red bathtub bordered in blue majolica tiles that joined together, climbing to form a massive, vertical snake from whose open mouth, red and pointed downward, the shower’s water fell.
The girls moved slowly through the space, looking around at the thousands of fragments of their bodies reflected in the glittering light that came from every direction. The dining table, s
urrounded by metal and ceramic chairs, was also covered in mirrored glass. Overhead hung a chandelier shaped like a bicycle crankset; rusted pieces of iron, a chain, an animal skull, colored bulbs. The whole scene was reflected, fragmented, on the ceiling.
To the right of the entrance stood a sculpture of mirrors and ceramic tiles, a kind of cart pulled by two half-horses, one of them gold, the other black. Rusted metal wheels. A black and white canopy framed a queen with wide hips, dressed in blue, with breasts painted like targets, a yellow crown with three convex spikes on it, a red scepter.
“This represents the Chariot, the seventh card of the tarot,” said the Empress. “It’s the card of triumph over your enemies, the card of victory; but it also warns you that you must be careful, because it is precisely in the moment of triumph that one becomes, comme on dit, vulnérable.”
“Vulnerable,” Lisa translated.
“Exactly. Do you speak French?”
“A little.”
“Et toi, petite?” she said, turning to Annamaria.
“No, she doesn’t,” Lisa answered. “She speaks the language of the Maremma.”
Annamaria felt her cheeks flush. Then she broke in, “I am Giovanna’s cousin. Excuse us again for bothering you.”
“Ah, Giovanna—without her I’d be lost. What a marvelous woman. I didn’t know she had a cousin who was an art lover.”
“We don’t see each other very often. Pardon me for asking, but do you live in here all the time?”
“Stop apologizing so much! It’s not right for girls to always be apologizing.”
“You’re right, sorry.”
All three of them started laughing. Annamaria was purple.
“Yes, I live in here all the time. It’s my refuge, my enchanted house.”
“But isn’t it a little . . . well, strange . . . ?”
“It’s the only way I can track the growth of my creations. It’s a little cold in winter, but it’s a womb. And then, someone always comes along and finds me. There are many of us working here.”
“But the light, all the reflections? Doesn’t it ever make you dizzy?”
“I have other problems with my head, but it’s not the mirrors that bother me. I’m used to them, in any case.” She smiled. She had the perfect nose for that smile, and teeth, and jaw.
“I really have to tell you, Ma’am, you are truly beautiful.”
“Thank you, you two also are beautiful, and very young.”
“No, we are not beautiful. Lisa maybe, but not me.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I know it, I can see it for myself.”
The artist made them sit down.
“It is not at all true that you are ugly. People have so many bêtises in their heads at your age, but at my age, I can tell you with certainty: beauty can be helpful, but it does not shield you from pain. And that also holds true for art: my feminist performances were probably well-received because I was beautiful. I suspect that if I’d been ugly, they would have said I was frustrated, that I made my “shooting paintings” with masculine symbols in them because I resented men, because men didn’t want me. At least they couldn’t accuse me of that. But then there’s the flip side of the coin. If you’re beautiful, you’re always struggling to be taken seriously. People don’t look at what you do—it’s taken for granted that anything you happen to do, you’ve done because some man fell in love with you and let you do it, they don’t give you any credit. In any case, the two of you said that you like art. Which artists in particular?”
Annamaria was happy that the speech about beauty had been cut short by this question; as for the rest of it, she appreciated it up to a point: this divine apparition could not have the faintest idea what it meant, at fifteen, to be ugly, insignificant, and invisible.
Lisa said she liked Roberto Matta, and that her father knew him well. The artist knew him well, too; she often went to see him because he lived nearby, in Tarquinia. But she had met him years before in New York City, where he had lived in exile.
Annamaria felt left out again. She had never heard the name of this “Matta.”
“And you?” asked the lady. Out of nervousness, she couldn’t even remember Botticelli. “Um, I’m not sure, I like what you do, I like this place.” Her cheeks were still flushed, she felt even more awkward.
The door opened, and a tall boy came in, speaking Spanish. The artist replied to him in French and asked the girls to leave, because now they had things to do. It was if they suddenly didn’t exist anymore.
Once they were outside, Lisa spoke to Annamaria mockingly: “You were such an idiot, you acted like a stupid child: ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Ma’am,’ ‘You are beautiful,’ ‘I like everything you do . . .’ What’s wrong with you, are you five years old?” Then, looking at her Swatch, she started to run. “Shit, it’s two o’clock! My mother will be so worried.” She left the Monsters behind her and ran towards the gate. There was no sign of the skinny guy who had greeted them.
“I can get you there quickly if we go at a gallop,” Annamaria said.
“I really can’t fall.”
“So, hold on tight to the reins, and grip the horse’s mane in front of the saddle.” Annamaria helped Lisa mount, and showed her how to hold on. “You’ve got muscles; squeeze this damn saddle like . . . like you wanted to stay a virgin forever.”
“I’m not a virgin anymore.”
“It was just a figure of speech.”
“You?”
“Mind your own business and hold on tight.”
“Ha, ha, little virgin, I knew it.”
Annamaria gave a quick kick to her horse’s flanks, and it set off at a smooth trot.
Behind her, Lisa held on but bounced in the saddle; she couldn’t find the rhythm. Too bad she’s a ballerina, Annamaria thought. It would have taken very little to make her fall. A sudden swerve, a run through the rough, or just taking off at a gallop, leaving her behind to chase after her with no control. But she didn’t do that.
They cut through an area of scrubland, and by the time they arrived everyone was already at the table. Over the preceding years, her father had transformed the saddlery into a kind of dining room, with tables, benches and an illegal fireplace. At the beginning, they only served salami and cheese, bread and wine. Later, for the better clients, the ones who’d become friends, he’d asked Miriam to cook something, and she would carry in big pots of acquacotta soup, and stewed wild boar and beans in tomato sauce, kept warm on an electric hot plate. At the end of the meal she served cake and biscotti, “because if you’re going to eat, you might as well go the whole hog,” she had told her husband. In this way, the saddlery had become a kind of illicit trattoria, which Sauro described as “informal;” but which became so in-demand that telephone calls started coming in for reservations for “horse rides followed by lunch,” and the place was fully booked for months in advance. First, Sauro had raised the prices, and then, at Filippo Sanfilippi’s suggestion, he’d decided to transform it into a true, proper restaurant. Sanfilippi had insisted on being a partner—he’d invested money in expanding the property, installing an industrial kitchen and an accessible bathroom, and getting everything into good shape. Sauro had had to get the licenses taken care of—nothing could have been easier, he was friends with everyone in town—and to convince Miriam to become the official cook—which also was easily done. Miriam had always done everything he asked her to do.
“Let’s give her a small salary,” Sanfilippi had said, “because women always like to be paid; nothing makes them feel more emancipated than a little cash. So, pretend like she’s the boss, and give her your share. It’ll work out for you financially; you’ll have the power and the land, the country girls who’ll help her out, your daughter will serve tables, and . . . you’re golden.” He said it with a smile, sure of himself, in the manner of someone who�
�s always giving you a wink.
The restaurant project had gone off without a hitch. The incorporation of the company with Miriam, the licenses, the jobs, the country girls. In the course of six months, everything was ready. Saverio, Sauro’s son, was the only obstacle. He was contrarian as a matter of principle (“Your partner is a member of the Roman Parliament? I don’t know what you’re thinking, you’ll end up totally screwed, Babbo”); egotistical (“Mamma won’t take care of us anymore”); misanthropic (“just picture the people who’ll come, we’ll always have cretins underfoot”); and lazy (“I won’t help you”). Sauro was not remotely put out: he responded to every protest from Saverio with one single, unchanging sentence: “If you don’t like what we’re doing, find another job, like you should, anyway, and get out of here, you’re a grownup.”
Upon their arrival at the Saddlery, Lisa and Annamaria were scolded good-naturedly, everyone was relieved to see them safe and sound, and above all, not to have to leave the table to go look for them, given that they were more than an hour late. Flaminia was the angriest. Getting up from the corner where she was eating, next to Lisa’s mother, she went over to the girls.
“You two are absolute bitches. You stranded me and went off to do your own stupid thing without telling me anything. Anyway, I know who the moron behind this was,” she said, turning to look at Annamaria, “but you, Lisa! I’m only here because you invited me to this shitty weekend on horseback. You and me are over. Over, do you understand? I’ve already asked your mother to take me to the train this afternoon. I wouldn’t stay here tonight if you paid me. You loser bitch who starts crying when a horse stops to eat. Go to hell, get lost.” And she went out of the restaurant, slamming the door. Lisa went out after her, mortified. When Annamaria tried to follow her, Lisa gestured rudely for her to go away. Annamaria went back in and sat down beside her father, who quickly had the pasta brought to her that they’d kept warm for the girls.
The Garden of Monsters Page 4
