“So, what did the two of you end up doing, if I may ask?” said Sauro, without removing his cigar from his mouth.
“We stopped to see the Monsters. We also met the artist. Just think—she lives there; she built a house inside one of the sculptures. It’s a crazy place, Babbo, the rooms are all covered in mirrors, and she’s fantastic, we talked, she was so nice.”
“Annamarì, how did you get in?”
She hated it when he called her that.
“Uh, it’s not important, we . . . we ran into a guy who knew you. A skinny guy who was tall, who had a beard, and Swiss ‘Rs’.”
“Ran into . . . You climbed over the fence. It must have been Edoardo.”
“I think so, Lisa told me he was someone important, and that they know him.”
Sanfilippi interrupted to confirm. “Yes, we’re friends with Edo.”
“But we weren’t with him, we met the artist.”
Sanfilippi continued, “I can’t stand her. And that place looks to me like a giant pile of shit, pardon my French.”
Gianmaria Molteni, an ever-present fixture in their circle, concurred. He was a wealthy art history professor and critic who was becoming something of a celebrity, thanks to television.
“Actually, she doesn’t strike me as very talented. She wanted to remake Gaudí’s Parc Güell in Barcelona, to give it the appeal of the Park of the Monsters in Bomarzo. But it doesn’t seem to me that the synthesis has worked out for her. Sadly, she’s done it at the expense of a marvelous hillside in our region. Wishful thinking combined with gigantism are the evils of the wannabes of contemporary art. And honestly—it was bad enough when they were just iron and cement, but now they’ve been completely covered in those horrendous mirrors. Those primary colors . . . The poetry of our Mediterranean landscape has been disfigured by the clay figurines of a retarded little girl.”
Filippo’s wife, Giulia, disagreed mildly. This was the way she always argued with people who knew more than she did, almost excusing herself for having an opinion, searching with false modesty for someone else to affirm the correctness of her point of view. With more ignorant people, however, she acted the opposite way: speaking in pedantic tones, with ill-concealed arrogance.
“I don’t consider myself an expert on contemporary art . . . but I think it’s a brave and interesting effort. As for the aesthetics of it . . . I don’t know, but the idea of the mirrors is pretty, they reflect the light, and those sculptures gleaming in the woods exert their own fascination. I don’t have much imagination, so I can’t picture how it will look when it’s finished. Genni, who’s a close friend of the artist, showed me sketches of how it’s supposed to look, it looked good to me . . . But if Gianmaria says it’s in bad taste, I’ll take his word for it. Regardless, she seems like a special person.”
“She really is a special person,” Annamaria said. “And besides that, she’s beautiful, the Garden is amazing, and the house of mirrors is the coolest place I’ve ever seen.”
“Cool, hey? Certainly, for you two, if something’s cool it’s automatically beautiful. But that’s a little reductive, don’t you think?”
Annamaria clammed up. As usual, the right comeback only came to her an hour later.
Miriam interrupted; she was leaning against the doorframe of the kitchen in her white apron, a cap on her head, her face pretty but shiny, like any cook’s after three hours at the stove.
“She really must be a special lady, but you know what she did, right? She abandoned her children so she could become an artist. I don’t know . . . maybe she’s brilliant, but that’s something even a dog wouldn’t do, I mean . . .”
“Oh my god,” Giulia retorted. “‘Abandoned.’ The reality of the situation is that she and her husband separated, and he took the children. She sees them regularly. I know that she also sees her grandchildren. I would hold off on calling her a monster. For once, it’s the mother who left the house, and the children stayed with their father,” she said.
“Look, I know he was a great guy. Still, I can’t understand how a woman could think of leaving her home to go play with paintbrushes. She must not be right in the head.”
Annamaria wanted to get up, but she was trapped between her father and Giulia. Everyone’s smoke was getting to her, she wasn’t hungry anymore. She would have liked to scream that they didn’t understand anything, that if all of them put together had half the courage and creativity that that woman possessed, then maybe they would be entitled to say half a word about her. But how dare this bunch of lazy, conceited drunks criticize the work or the life of an artist? She wasn’t even able to formulate the thought. It gave her stomach cramps to hear the adults attack the Empress. She hated them.
Her father came to her aid, the way he knew how to do, with his coarse pragmatism.
“I don’t understand a fucking thing, but let a moron speak: that monstrosity brings loads of people to these parts. Annamaria is right, it’s cool. And she truly is a beautiful woman.”
“But what does her being beautiful have to do with anything, Sauro?” Giulia countered. “You men judge women only on that basis. We’re talking here about a work of art. And it’s not like, since she’s beautiful, her work will automatically be beautiful. That’s just the typical masculine way of judging women and what they do.”
“What’s it got to do with masculine? I love women; I like them much more than I like men,” Sauro replied.
With that, a ruckus erupted that settled the mood. People laughed, and the conversation downshifted to a calmer register, to sexism, over glasses of red wine that never remained empty. Sauro was banging Giulia, which everyone knew, except their respective spouses.
Annamaria saw Lisa, who was coming back inside. Serious, her eyes puffy from crying. Annamaria crawled under the table to get out, and went up to her.
“Do you want something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry.”
“The tagliatelle is good.”
“Tagliatelle makes you fat.”
“You’re incredibly thin.”
“Exactly. I want to stay that way.”
“Did you fight with Flaminia?”
“Yes. She wants to get out of here, and she says we’re not friends anymore. You landed me in shit.”
“I landed you in shit? Me? I saved your life, when you were stranded at the Via Aurelia!” Annamaria said, giggling.
“It’s not funny. It was your idea for us to go off on our own.”
“You could have said no.”
“I hate horseback riding. You’re the only person who understood that, but you landed me in shit all the same.”
“I thought that at least you might thank me. Instead, now it’s totally my fault that your friend is a bitch.”
“She’s not a bitch. She was left all alone. You could have called her.”
“You could have called her, given that she’s your friend.”
“I wasn’t being very logical. I was afraid. Also, I didn’t think we’d be so late.”
“But you’re the one who wanted to go into the Garden.”
“That’s not true at all, you were the first to climb over.”
“Do you want me to go talk to her? I’ll take the blame.”
“I already blamed you, thanks. Now she’ll hate you most of all.”
“It’s mutual. You can both go to hell.”
This time it was Annamaria who went out, slamming the door.
“What’s going on?” Sauro asked, looking at his wife.
“She’s fifteen, Sa’. She’s fifteen.” Miriam fanned away the smoke and went back into the kitchen.
Nobody followed Annamaria. Lisa and Giulia started talking in low voices.
Flaminia was outside. Annamaria passed her by without saying a word and walked into the barn. Tiburzi came up to her, tail wagging. After a fight, there
’s nothing better than an affectionate dog to reinforce your negative thoughts about the entire human race. And your self-pity. Annamaria bent down to let him rejoice and lick her cheeks. She thought it was horrible that her own home had become a place where you felt ill at ease around everyone except a mutt like Tiburzi.
Then she went to Samba. She was still sweaty. She brought her some fodder and rubbed her down. She always felt a sensation of great relaxation when she energetically groomed a horse’s coat. She could tell that it made the horse happy, and it felt as if the animal’s sense of well-being transferred to her, like a vapor.
In the course of ten minutes, her anger faded. She decided to go home and study her Latin for the next day. She wanted to take advantage of the empty house to recite her lessons out loud. As she walked past the restaurant, she heard the voices and laughter of the men. Their alcohol-fueled bluster had devolved into innocuous fake fights.
In the driveway she saw the Sanfilippis’ BMW. Giulia was in the driver’s seat and Flaminia was in front. Lisa was getting into the back seat. When she saw Annamaria she ran up to her.
“Sorry about before. And the visit to the Garden really was an amazing adventure. We did the right thing, getting away from everybody. Maybe one of these days I’ll call you from Rome.”
Annamaria smiled at her. “Give me your address, maybe I’ll write to you.”
“Write to me? But why? I come back almost every weekend.”
“It doesn’t matter, give me your address.”
“Piazza dei Quiriti, 68. Do you want me to write it down?”
“No, no, I’ll remember it. I remember Quiriti, I remember 68.”
They hurriedly said goodbye to each other.
The rumble of the car starting broke the silence of the gathering autumn dusk. While it wasn’t a sad sound in itself, it felt out of place to her. Annamaria heard all the dissonance that surrounded her, even if she couldn’t clearly identify its origin or intensity. There had been no harmony on this autumn Sunday. There had been beauty and anger, magnificent discoveries for the eyes, and petty cruelties for the ears. Symphonies spoiled by offstage sounds. A bitchy girl with unexpected flashes of kindness.
She hurried home, losing the rhythm of her gait for a moment, thrown forward by her torso. She just wanted to get there before it got cold out. It was true: they’d done the right thing, getting away from everybody.
4. THE EMPEROR
Power. Stability. Father.
Saverio went out late in the morning without saying where he was going. For a long time he hadn’t considered that necessary anymore, and besides, it was something he didn’t know himself, for the most part. When he’d gotten his driver’s license, after qualifying as a chemical lab technician, he’d rewarded himself with a blue Peugeot 205 with a 1.6 liter engine, a supermini. Driving had practically become his raison d’être. He burned up the miles every day without any precise destination, just for the sake of being at the wheel. He left the house and drove into the village, from the village to the sea, from the sea to Orbetello, from Orbetello to Albinia, from Albinia to Porto Santo Stefano, from Porto Santo Stefano to Talamone, and sometimes to Grosseto, or Forte dei Marmi. One Saturday afternoon, with a friend from the gym, he drove all the way to Monte Carlo to gamble at the casino. They returned at dawn the next day, nobody the wiser. His love for driving was wedded to a passion for speed. Toward the end of the eighties, a blue fireball could be seen hurtling up and down the Via Aurelia. It was Saverio, who knew by heart all the spots where the highway police might lurk, and, who, incredibly, had managed never once to get a ticket.
He came home to shower, change clothes and go back out. When he noticed that Annamaria was home, he went to her room to give her a kiss on the head, as he often did, and to ask her for the millionth time if she had made that cassette of hit songs recorded from the radio. She said she hadn’t had time, which he already knew. He gave her another kiss. He was in a good mood, and Annamaria was the only one in the family he showed affection to.
There had been a moment in their childhood when the four years and the gender difference that separated them had melted away, and the two of them had become each other’s best friend, as well as brother and sister. It was when she was six, and he was almost eleven. It hadn’t lasted long, maybe a couple of seasons, but that was the strong foundation on which their relationship was built. They had just moved from the apartment in the village into their grandfather’s farmhouse when their father had started setting up the activities with the horses and the tourists. They had found themselves isolated, with no other kids to play with, and with a lot of time and space on their hands. Saverio, who had been exceptionally strong since he was little, treated Annamaria like a little doll: he would scoop her up and flip her in the air; grab her by the wrists and spin her round like an airplane; at the seaside, he would throw her into the water over and over. He would walk miles carrying her on his shoulders, and sometimes when he was distracted, or sitting down somewhere, she would suddenly leap at him so he would pick her up.
Most of the time they weren’t cuddly with each other: their physical interaction could be rough, one of them plowing into the other, lifting the other off the ground, tugging at one another, and, most of all, wrestling—but almost never hurting each other; it was like the playful tussling of puppies, whose style of play has its own verb: romping.
Annamaria almost never complained. She put up with everything, as long as Saverio didn’t truly hurt her. But even when he did, she didn’t tell on him to their parents, even if she walked away from him in tears. She rode behind him on her bicycle, followed him to the fishpond in San Floriano, doing “dangerous things” out of their mother’s sight.
She loved those secret adventures, jumping from the roof onto a haystack; tying her bike with its training wheels onto his BMX, which pulled her behind him at top speed on the asphalt; jumping off the swing when it was highest off the ground.
And then the horse. They’d both begun riding so early that they couldn’t remember the first time. But it was only when they moved to the country that the covert escapades began, the memorable afternoons. There was one time that Annamaria would remember later as their moment.
Sauro had recently bought his son a two-year-old colt, which he had just barely tamed. His coat was very fair, almost blond. His name was Pinocchio. In spite of help from older, experienced cowboys, Sauro had a great deal of trouble getting the horse to take to the saddle, and riding him without being thrown. Training him was a difficult job: leading him around the wooden dummy in the riding arena hundreds of times with his lunging cavesson on, trying to harness him, which the young horse made difficult, rearing, squirming, and sinking to the ground. Sauro had to get him accustomed to bearing his weight little by little, climbing up onto the fence and mounting him, putting one foot on the saddle for a few seconds while another horseman held onto him.
The first to mount him after Sauro was Saverio. His father had told him that the horse was all his. They had gotten along from the start, Pinocchio hadn’t kicked him. Besides, the boy’s weight was negligible. Saverio felt like his lord and master, so much so that, right after the colt was tamed, he’d brought Annamaria into the stable and, without saying anything to anyone, saddled up Pinocchio, badly, with his childish strength. When he had touched the colt’s underbelly, the horse had puffed out his stomach, and Saverio had barely managed to tighten the cinch on the saddle to the second hole.
Annamaria, who had brought carrots from the house to keep the horse on good behavior, got bitten, not very hard, but hard enough to make her tear up. Nonetheless, as Pinocchio drooled and chewed on his metal bit, her brother managed to adjust the curb chain under his chin so it wouldn’t bother him too much. After half an hour had passed, the horse seemed to be harnessed and ready.
“Do you want to go for a ride?” Saverio had asked her. The little girl had said she was afraid, but if he
held the bridle, she would ride around the horse yard. He lifted her onto the horse, then he tricked her. Quickly mounting, he pushed her forward against the padded edge of the saddle. He took the reins and told her to hold on tight to the mane. Then he kicked Pinocchio in the flank, who bucked and broke into a gallop. Saverio had no control over him, but he didn’t care. The horse wasn’t afraid, Saverio wasn’t afraid, and Annamaria wasn’t afraid either.
They galloped with the wind in their faces into the field where Porcu’s sheep were grazing. Pinocchio ran straight into the middle of the flock, startling the sheep and terrifying the lambs, then headed off toward the distant scrub. Saverio and Annamaria started laughing and shouting with joy, they held on tight, their cheeks red and their hair tangled, and let loose a kind of battle cry, as if they were at war with those poor peaceful lambs, Sheeeeeee-ep, Sheeeeee-ep! They kept laughing as they held on and galloped, the happiness of the one passing through to the other and to the horse, through the saddle, through the sweat on his coat, through Saverio’s hands that held the reins, through Annamaria’s fingers that gripped Pinocchio’s silky, thick mane.
That was their moment, the one in which the knot of their sibling bond was formed, knotted so tightly that it couldn’t ever come undone. A unifying, pure love. The ride probably didn’t last longer than ten minutes. Because of the horse’s sweat, the saddle, which wasn’t completely secured, began slipping to one side. Saverio tried to stop Pinocchio, pulling on the reins with all his strength, but the colt bucked, throwing them off the other side. They both fell to the ground, rolling many times. Full of dust and fear, they looked at each other for a few seconds to confirm that they were alive, and kept laughing and laughing, unable to stop. Pinocchio had stopped running not far off. He seemed to be waiting for them. Then, all of a sudden, Annamaria began to cry. She had realized that one of her wrists hurt terribly. Saverio ran to get the horse. He put the saddle back on as best he could. He put his little sister back in the saddle at once, because that’s what you had to do after you fell, remount at once. He returned to the stable leading the horse on foot, holding it by the bridle, Annamaria concentrating wholly on not falling again. It was some time before they got there. Time in which they both kept silent. She wasn’t angry at her brother, and even the pain didn’t bother her very much. She was happy.
The Garden of Monsters Page 5
