The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Sauro was in the stable yard when he saw them come back in.

  “I took her on a gentle, easy-peasy little ride,” Saverio told his father.

  Annamaria dismounted on her own, in silence, using her good hand and keeping her eyes lowered. For a long moment, the children hoped their father would buy it. But when Sauro saw the horse all sweaty, the children’s clothes stained with earth and grass, their messy hair, he understood that they had fallen. And when he saw Annamaria’s crooked wrist, he gave Saverio a severe beating. Sauro was a big man, with hands that could inflict pain even when he meant to caress. Saverio was stiff with rage, red from the effort of not crying.

  Annamaria interrupted: “Babbo, I asked him to do it, I asked him to do it.”

  She was aware that he wouldn’t have done anything to her, that she would always be spared such blows. But Sauro knew that bad ideas always came from his firstborn, even if the little one took responsibility for them.

  He raised his voice.

  “When you two are alone with the horses you must never touch them, do you understand? How many times have I told you that?”

  Annamaria kept quiet. Saverio remained rigid. They left Pinocchio to their father and returned home to ask their mother to take Annamaria to the emergency room, as Sauro had ordered them to do, in between curses.

  Annamaria’s wrist was broken. During the weeks when she had to wear a cast, Saverio helped his sister to bathe, to dress, to cut her meat, continually asking her if she needed help. He would never again in his life take such good care of another human being.

  Lately, Saverio hardly thought about her at all. That afternoon he whistled in the shower. He put on clean, Americanino jeans, cowboy boots, a long-sleeved sweater with three buttons, and, over it, a bomber jacket, military green on the outside, orange inside. He wore his hair a little long in the back, spiky in front. He’d had a girlfriend for six months. Her name was Tamara. She was the daughter of a farmer who’d made his money by robbing graves with his father and brother. They had extensive experience: they could recognize land that had Etruscan tombs hidden beneath it from the way the wheat stalks grew; they knew how to tell the poor tombs—worthless to them because they contained no valuable objects—from the rich ones. The former they covered back up, or sometimes destroyed with a bulldozer. It was said that in the seventies they’d found a grave chamber that contained all the wife’s jewels, intact; and that it may have been the proceeds of that sale that had paid for the family’s two enormous farms. There was also talk of Swiss bank accounts.

  Every time she saw them, Annamaria tried to decide if she believed the rumors or not. It seemed impossible to her that men who were incapable of producing a complete sentence could be experts in archaeology. She didn’t understand that they possessed another set of skills, which were the exact opposite of an archaeologist’s.

  Tamara was universally desired, and hard-to-get. Sixteen years old, with light brown curls, doe’s eyes, and so much money. After three months during which he only kissed her, Saverio had gotten irritated, and told her that if she wanted to stay with him, she had to prove her love. He had taken her virginity one May afternoon on a dune by the sea. He had worn pants stained with her blood for three days as a trophy.

  Saverio was desired, too. Above all, for his independent spirit. He wouldn’t sacrifice it for anyone, not even for Tamara, even if she officially declared herself his girlfriend. People were attracted to him without his needing to seduce anyone, and he took advantage of that. Besides, seduction, at this age and in this environment, was pointless. Some did it, some didn’t. There were the beautiful and the ugly. The cool and the clods, as they said in the village. At a certain age, everyone started to pair off pretty randomly, if only to gain experience.

  Saverio’s sexual initiation, like that of the other adolescent boys in the area, had been achieved through a kind of collective abuse of a mentally retarded twenty-year-old who arranged a tryst with all of them in an abandoned farmhouse, to which a mattress, condoms, and tissues had been brought. She spread her legs and the boys took turns; she said to each one of them, “I love you. Not one of them responded” “Me too,” even just pretending, which had been the only thing she’d wanted in return. In the village they made fun of her and treated her like an animal. When her ancient parents discovered what their daughter was up to, they sent her to a group home in the north; it wasn’t clear if that was to protect her or to get rid of her.

  In the countryside, the young boys were wild and feral. Only when they got a little older did judgment take over, and along with the desire to be superior to other people, and the goal of making an engagement that would be transformed almost automatically into marriage.

  Saverio never had to deal with competition. He was the alpha male in every circle of his peers he happened to enter. Aside from that, there was his father. With him, there was no question of competition, but Saverio wasn’t interested in that anyway—they were already caught up in an endless war on too many fronts. He preferred to relax at home, and he had a young lover in every hamlet of the Maremma.

  He’d showered and gotten ready in a hurry so he could go out and take Tamara to the movies in Orbetello. Usually, when she was in the car, she took off her shoes and rested her feet on the dashboard, which infuriated him, but that evening he bore it in silence. She’d had an abortion the week before. It hadn’t been difficult. Physically, she’d recovered at once; but she kept on crying, and Saverio wasn’t well-equipped to console her, apart from saying that she shouldn’t think of it as a child, but as a mistake of a few minutes’ duration; that they hadn’t killed anyone; and to promise her, without believing it, that they would have a child when they were older and ready to start a family. That seemed to calm her down, but then she started crying again. So, the only thing he could do was to distract her, to take her to movies to see stories about other people, so she would stop thinking about her own situation. He took her to see Rain Man. Afterwards, in the car, as they were driving back, she started crying again, and he said to her, “Tamà, I’ve had it with this. Think about what if the kid turned out to be retarded like Rain Main. It’s better this way, right?”

  “We could take him to the casino to count cards and we’d get rich.”

  “But in our case, it wouldn’t turn out to be a retarded genius, we’d just get a retarded moron, like us. And anyway, you’re already rich.”

  She started to laugh. Still driving, he put a hand on her leg; she took it and kissed it.

  “We can always have other moronic children, right, Savè?”

  “Whatever.”

  After the visit to the Garden with Lisa, Annamaria had thought for days about the meeting with the sculptor, and what it had been like being in that place and talking to her; and the strange effects produced by a world in which everything was so altered from normality. There were the disorienting perspectives produced by the reflections of the concave little mirrors; the things that were said about art, beauty, the power dynamic between men and women—things so different from everyday conversations about food, transportation, who was doing what for their grandfather, for the horses; the progress of the dogs and the chickens; and where were the keys? Physical contact with objects, the earth, the backpack, the silverware, the brown cabinets, and all the other inanimate colors of the furnishings of home. She remembered all the other times they’d visited the Garden, it was always her father who took her, because he was curious about what was going on there, and he liked to see his little girl’s astonishment. He had fun with her, they told jokes in the car and laughed about everything, even about the way his daughter stumbled on the stairs, because there weren’t any right angles to help you get your bearings.

  Sauro had a weakness for Annamaria; it’s easy to have one for little girls, especially when the older brother is a big, argumentative boy; but Annamaria knew how to be sweet to her father, how to awaken tenderness. Sh
e knew that for him, carrying her on his shoulders after she’d stumbled for the thousandth time was the most satisfying way for him to feel like “the King,” because nobody else saw him the way she did. But there was more to it than that.

  She sensed vaguely that there was a kind of anxiety in the tender looks her father gave her. She tried to reassure him by laughing and making him laugh, but the vague sensation remained that she was his princess, yes, but that this magic did not extend beyond his gaze, and that in some way he was aware of this at all times. Could it be that he was ashamed of her? He had taught her to ride horses early, because horses didn’t stumble, he took her to see the Monsters. But he didn’t introduce her to the countess. They greeted the cook, never the artist. He didn’t treat her like a princess when anyone was around whom he wanted to impress.

  At the Garden they would play with her favorite toy, the welding machine. Once, when she was about five, a blacksmith had come to repair the barn door, and she’d been enchanted by the experience: the flame that melted the metal, the welding helmet with the smoked visor that shielded the face, the fact that it was really dangerous, and you had to keep far back, because the fire that fixed the iron door could harm the eyes at the same time. It was Christmastime, and Annamaria had made a helmet for herself from the cardboard of a panettone box, into which she’d cut a window for the eyes. She went around the house in her rubber boots, wielding a gas lighter with a long barrel, and pretended to weld everything; doors, chairs, beds. They let her do it; her grandfather would suggest all kinds of things that needed welding: “Come here, Annamarì, the television is broken,” and she would run up with her make-believe blowtorch to repair the set. At the Monsters, as Sauro called it, it was almost always Guido, the local mailman, who brandished the blowtorch, who always delivered the mail a few days late so he could help with the construction of the reinforced concrete scaffoldings. The last time she’d gone there with her father she’d been ten years old, and Guido had let her try it. She wasn’t as drawn to it anymore, but Sauro was still into it. And it genuinely was fun. They’d climbed up the structure that had been erected, a kind of small castle with arcades that only recently had become recognizable as the figure of the Emperor in the tarot. On that occasion, Annamaria had been happy to be there, but she had not completely perceived the magic that permeated the place. It was just a strange building site filled with unsettling shapes made of reinforced concrete, a place where you went with your dad so he’d lift you up on his shoulders, and where you could weld things.

  The other times, she hadn’t met the artist, just the workmen: someone from the area, some stranger with an odd way about him, the cook from the estate, and also Giovanna, who was her second cousin, though they barely greeted each other. Annamaria knew there was bad blood with those relatives, though she wasn’t clear on the reason. In the car she said to her father, “Doesn’t it seem to you that Giovanna looks a whole lot like Mamma when she was young?” And he replied, “I thought that immediately when I saw her, my god she’s beautiful—she’s like my Miriam when she worked in the eyeglasses boutique.” Annamaria was glad he thought the same thing she did, and made him retell the story of how he’d broken the arm of his Lozza sunglasses on purpose so he could see her again. A story that Sauro always told without mentioning the presence of Miriam’s cousin Adriana, and the betrayal.

  5. THE HIEROPHANT

  Tradition. Guidance. Marriage.

  Settimio was born a farmer and would always be a farmer. In those days it was an occupation that never began and never ended; there were no holidays or Sundays off, nobody got fired, no one retired, it was a permanent state, like being a parent, or having a congenital illness. Settimio said, “When you have the land and the land has you, that’s forever.” His father had been a sharecropper for the prince on estates that had belonged to the Papal State for centuries. He had managed to liberate himself, to buy his own acreage, thanks to his wife’s inheritance. He had a farm in a valley, with wheat, olives and vineyards. A garden for his domestic needs, twenty Maremma cows that continually got lost in the fallow scrub, a pen for a couple of pigs. The horses only came later. He sold whatever he could, and firewood, too. They had enough to eat, but nothing more. Settimio, the seventh of eight siblings, had started working as a kid, which was normal, and he had never stopped. Three of his siblings had died of malaria; their mother died when he was so little that he couldn’t remember her. It happened with the eighth child, an enormous boy, born breech, whose labor took so long that the local midwife was called in, far too late, and could not save her.

  At that time, the countryside was not yet the poetical realm of fresh air, organic food, and artisanal honey that it would become many years later. It was exhaustion, hernias, and sweat, alarm clocks set before dawn, the stench of manure. It was a place where you were always dirty, tired, weathered by the sun, with calloused hands incapable of caresses. The farmsteads were not sunlit houses with sage-green sashed windows and vases of fresh flowers on the tables, but fly-filled ruins, cold in winter and hot in summer, with pails of dirty water, food hanging to dry in the rooms, and floors encrusted with mud.

  His father had joined the fascist party and had made his children who were of age sign up, too. Without conviction, under duress. So that they could live together in peace, out of self-interest. They had sold six horses to the army for the Ethiopian campaign. During the Second World War, their widowed father had made sure that none of his sons was called up. Settimio would have liked to join the army. He was comfortable with rifles, he hunted wild boar. But he’d been told he was of no use to the king, or to the queen either, which frustrated him very much.

  After he’d lost his wife, Settimio’s father had strengthened his religious faith, which already had been strong. He made his children go to mass on Sunday, and, without discussion, they prayed every morning, and every night before the evening meal. He was devoted to Saint Anthony above all, to whom he prayed for grace, and for miracles for himself, his children, and the livestock. In the kitchen, next to the fireplace, he’d built a niche where he installed a terracotta statue of the saint, with a hollow underneath where he stowed money. His children had accepted, to different degrees, the transformation of their home into a kind of monastery where only work and prayer took place. Luigina became a nun so she could get away and stop having to take care of her little siblings. Settimio became a communist heretic, though he’d never managed to deny the existence of God, so the more he blasphemed the more he believed in Him—to such a point that, as he’d grown older, he’d taken to violently denouncing the amorality of atheists, and their total lack of values. But since they were all under their father’s thumb, nobody dared dispute his decisions. In any case, he beat them so soundly when they disobeyed that they tried not to cross him. They all left home fairly early.

  Settimio left when Alma entered his life.

  She came from the mountainous province of Grosseto. She had been sent to the countryside to live with an aunt after her father, a miner, was killed in the Nazi-Fascist massacre in Niccioleta, on the road to Larderello, in June of ’44, along with eighty-two other miners. When she arrived, she immediately became the main attraction of the surrounding area. She was exotic because she was new, and because of her mountain origins and her blond hair, which were completely unfamiliar to the farmers at the time. There was also her slenderness, definitely a defect, which suggested fragility and malnutrition, but which conferred an unusual grace upon her. Her aunt and her cousins always came to the Biaginis’ farm for the grape harvest, and in September they brought Alma to help. The war wasn’t over yet, so women and children had to do the hard work. Alma was sunburned and got exhausted when she cut the larger bunches of grapes. The most they could make her do was to carry the filled baskets. It was clear from the start that her job among the vines would be to go through and pluck out immature grapes, to carry drinks, and to help prepare food for the harvesters; but cooking wasn’t her forte
, either. In the course of two days, they discovered how she could be useful. Alma could sing beautifully, so they sent her to pass through the vine rows like a goldfinch. She knew arias from classical operas, popular songs, the folk ballads of Monte Amiata. There were songs about miners, wine, anarchy, but most of all, about love. The festival of the grape harvest took place only after the harvesting was finished and the first wine had been pressed; but with Alma it felt like it was celebrated every day.

  Settimio fell in love with her even before he heard her sing. He had brought her an old apron and boots that had belonged to his dead mother, to wear in the vine rows. They were enormous on her; she started laughing. “They’re fine!” she said, while he tried to tighten the cloth bow, which he didn’t know how to do. It was an excuse to keep her close to him for an extra moment. Her hair smelled of ashes and baked apples. Settimio had no particular gifts. He was gruff, he couldn’t dance, or make a woman laugh. But he was tall and sturdy, and his face somehow had a kind of somber beauty, with thick eyelashes and extremely dark eyes. He wanted this girl even though he was younger than her. He had never wanted anything so much in his whole life. She had told her cousin that she didn’t want to get engaged or to get married, and she didn’t want children either. Now that the war was over, she wanted to get out of here and go to America, to sing with colored women. That’s how she put it. She had never seen a black person, and the longest journey she’d ever made was fifty miles, from a village in the mountains to a village between the hills and the sea, in the same province.