The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Settimio found out about her dream of becoming a singer. He decided he would wait her out, and sooner or later, make her change her mind. On Alma’s birthday, he gave her a gramophone that played 78s, with money he had removed, a little at a time, from under the statue of Saint Anthony, and three records that had been recommended to him in a shop in Grosseto, where he rode on horseback (eight hours there and back): a fantasia of Vienna waltzes, “La Strada nel Bosco” by Gino Bechi, and Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin. It was while she was listening to this last one that Alma discovered that her America was right there, in Settimio’s arms. They married when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-two. Thanks to the land reforms that were initiated under fascism, and which continued even afterwards to reclaim the marshes, they obtained a farm and a piece of land from the Maremma Corporation in a few years, which they slowly enlarged. Their holdings would become the house, the land, and the annexes where Sauro was born, where he grew up, and where he later came to live with his own family. Alma and Settimio loved each other very much. To him, it felt like he had had nothing until the moment he met her.

  What was he before Alma? A sad and angry farmer who spent his days exhausting himself. There was land; but with Alma he realized that there was also air, water, fire, and a fifth element that he hadn’t even suspected, which was the sensation of completeness, something that filled him with joy when the rooster crowed early in the morning and woke him, and he saw Alma sleeping beside him, her mouth open; he on his side of the bed, she on hers, next to each other at the moment of greatest vulnerability. Settimio let her sleep. He would have liked to find his breakfast ready and his bread and wine packed for the fields, as it was for the other men, but he prepared them for himself.

  It was Alma who turned Settimio into a communist, by telling him stories about the miners, about her beloved father. Settimio became a communist out of love, because he wanted so much to avenge his father-in-law, to repay Alma for her loss. He had always been indifferent to the world around him; now he began to care about politics. His sincere interest wasn’t in a more just society, but in doing what Alma expected of him. When he brought home his Italian Communist Party card, when he went to party meetings, when he organized the first Unità festival, Alma glowed.

  As long as she lived, Alma had given him everything he wanted without reservation, and with something he’d never known before: happiness. Everything Alma did, from working in the fields to keeping house, from ironing the clothes, running the hot iron across the cloth, to feeding the pigs, she did in song. And she smiled, so much, even though she had overlapping incisors, which other women might have been embarrassed to display so often. Yet she remained frail. Too thin, in an era when the dictates of beauty and health demanded that women be robust. She had trouble sustaining a pregnancy, and she had two miscarriages before she succeeded in carrying Sauro all the way to term. Sometimes she cried, but then she would start singing again, and smiling. Settimio had convinced her that if she prayed more, Saint Anthony could help her. She’d grown up in a family of anarchist miners and atheists, but she knew that when it came to women’s affairs and household matters, it was necessary to turn to Mother Mary. Settimio told her no, Saint Anthony was the most powerful of all. It didn’t take long to convince her—they always tried never to displease each other. And so she learned the prayers and she prayed, she even sang them; she gathered flowers for the saint, kissed Settimio, kissed him and hugged him, and he realized later how happy he was. He remained gruff, but he was content; he worked all day and returned at night to the arms of Alma, who cooked badly, and only on Sundays. Generally, bread, olives, and salami would appear on the table, but it didn’t matter to him, because after the meal they would make love.

  In the spring of ’47, Settimio asked his sister Cettina, who was a seamstress, to sew new clothes for Alma, because, with her belly growing day by day, nothing fit her anymore. She had gained thirty pounds, and her bust had swelled, which made her proud. A photo of a pregnant Alma always leaned against the statue of Saint Anthony. In it she stood under an olive tree behind the house, her hands clasped under her belly, wearing a light dress with little buttons on it, fastened all the way up the front, and a broad smile that showed her crowded teeth. Annamaria, who had only ever heard her spoken of as a marvelous angel and a bearer of joy, prayed to her in times of crisis, prayed to the grandmother, Alma, whom she’d never known, and whose ready laugh she thought she’d inherited.

  Sauro was already huge inside his mother’s belly, and when slender Alma gave birth to him, he took everything out of her, including her uterus. The night she went into labor they had to rush her to the hospital in an ambulance. As soon as he saw the obstetrician make a strange face, Settimio raced on horseback to the community center to telephone the Red Cross. In the hospital, they instantly transferred her to the operating room and left him alone, telling him nothing. On the ground floor there was a little chapel. Settimio spent the whole night there, praying that Alma would not die like his mother, and vowed to go to mass every Sunday, to resume being a devoted Christian, and to blaspheme no more. When day broke, he stood up carefully, his knees stiff, his spine practically paralyzed, and climbed the stairs with tremendous effort. Once he was on the next floor, he asked a nurse for news of his wife, and she showed him where she was. He opened the door of the room and found them in bed, his wife and his son, the little one sleeping on her chest, with a chubby, rosy face that looked bigger than hers, which was pale and drawn, with purplish eyelids, dark circles around the eyes, her skin yellowish from the blood loss of childbirth. But her chest rose regularly as she breathed in sleep. It was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. Two tears unexpectedly fell from Settimio’s eyes. He wiped them away, and without even looking to see if there were others in the room, he went to a chair between the two beds, leaned his forehead on the mattress beside the living, breathing Alma and their child, and fell fast asleep.

  Alma died six years later of pneumonia. The doctors said she had latent silicosis, contracted in childhood, from inhaling pyrite dust in the mines (every day until she was eighteen, she had brought in lunch to her father), and the pneumonia was more serious than they had anticipated. What little happiness Settimio had experienced while he lived at her side expired forever with the last, short breath Alma exhaled on an autumn day in 1953.

  The first thing Settimio did was to smash the statue of Saint Anthony and resume blaspheming. Work still remained, then wine and politics, which, more than anything, was an excuse for venting his anger and frustration at everything that was going wrong in the world. But he took no interest in Sauro. That warred with his love for Alma. Even though both of them were children who had been prematurely deprived of a mother, even though the child was all that remained of her, he could not manage to love him. He could not bear that the boy had outlived her. Having only been loved by Alma, Settimio had never learned that another form of affection might exist, like love between father and son.

  He asked Cettina, his seamstress sister, to look after the child while he was working in the fields. He paid her, even though she was a loving aunt to whom the child was hopelessly attached. So much so that she refused to marry or to have children of her own, so as not to leave her nephew all alone. During the boy’s adolescence, the relationship between father and son deteriorated even more. Sauro wanted to study, Settimio considered that a waste of time. Unlike Alma, who believed that learning brought emancipation, in his opinion books were only good for muddling ideas and for producing impractical men who behaved arrogantly to people less educated than themselves. Aunt Cettina always defended him; she was the one who provided his school supplies and sewed his uniform. Sauro was permitted to study agriculture on the condition that he help his father with the horses. Every afternoon, before and after his lessons, he went to the stables, gave the horses their fodder, and cleaned up. A couple of times, especially during night chores, he’d come across his father crumpled on the stor
eroom floor, drunk and overcome with sorrow. At such times he went away without letting himself be seen.

  Settimio never showed tenderness or compassion in his interactions with Sauro. The older the boy grew, the less he forgave him for having inherited his mother’s beautiful smile and crooked teeth, which revealed themselves beneath the young man’s first moustache. He couldn’t bear it that lips so similar to Alma’s could not produce her voice, her laughter, and her song. Their orphan pasts had left both men incapable of showing affection to anyone but women, always loving them in a way that was connected to an infant’s need for nurturance; to nostalgia for a mother whose loss, having come too soon, could never stop being mourned.

  The night of Alma’s death, another husband accompanied his wife to a hospital, in Nice. It was Harry Mathews, taking his wife Niki to see a psychiatrist. That afternoon, Niki had kicked her husband’s lover and swallowed an entire box of sleeping pills that she’d been given that very morning by a doctor they knew, a gynecologist who had ignored the reason for the appointment—a request for a medical prescription for insomnia—and had subjected her to an uncomfortable, invasive visit. Niki was in such a distraught state that the sleeping pills had no effect. After discovering an arsenal of sharp objects under the mattress of their marital bed, Harry had hugged his wife close. He was frightened by her expression, he didn’t know how to help her, and he told her he would do anything to make her better again. Leaving their young daughter Laura with the nanny, they went in the middle of the night to the office of a psychiatrist, Doctor Cossa. Upon entering, the first thing Niki did was open her purse and dump out all its contents on the table: knives, scissors, a small hammer. All the weapons she had at her disposal. The doctor thanked her, nodding, and asked to speak privately with Harry. He told him that she needed to be admitted to the hospital at once, but that there were no beds available. To get started, he gave her electroshock right there in the office, leaving her totally dazed and weak, then sent her home for a few days to wait for a bed to open up. Doctor Cossa advised Harry to remove all sharp objects from the house, and to make sure his wife was in the company of friends who would monitor her at all times, so she wouldn’t try to commit suicide.

  During this waiting period, Niki confessed to Harry that she’d been having an affair with the English lord who was married to Harry’s lover. Even though he hadn’t kept his own adultery hidden, Harry was hurt and upset to learn of his wife’s. Years later, Niki would say that this was, in part, the origin of her anguish: although she had married a man who was open-minded, who called himself a feminist, and who even energetically performed many household chores—something that was extremely rare in those days, particularly for a man from a wealthy family—she had found herself in a situation similar to her parents’, in which the man felt entitled to cheat with impunity, but would not tolerate his wife doing the same thing, and in fact considered it disgraceful. Harry was a modern man, but not modern enough.

  By the time Harry and Niki moved from the United States to Paris, and from there to the south of France, something inside her was already broken. Discovering that her husband was cheating on her with an older woman had weighed on her, but perhaps worse still was being drawn into the unhealthy, destabilizing practice of partner-swapping, which had thrown her together with the English lord, a war veteran who was extremely cultured but death-obsessed, and two years older than her father. All they did was talk about death. It was a destructive relationship. At the outset, she was intellectually stimulated by speaking in two languages, listening to him recite by heart all the poems he’d memorized in school, long swathes of Shakespeare. But erotic tension knocked her off balance, unleashed harmful impulses. Niki began to tell him her suicidal fantasies. In that period, she was constantly trying to come up with a way to die that would leave no trace of the self behind, not even a feeling of guilt in others. She imagined lying down in the sea on an inflatable raft, letting herself be borne away by the current, then puncturing the raft once she was far enough away from shore. The lord found this idea very compelling, and even proposed other means of effecting the suicide. While for Harry and his lover everything was about attraction and seduction, Niki had been drawn to her lover by Eros and Thanatos. The fact that this man was older than her father had likely contributed to the reawakening of her suppressed memories—the anguish of incest, and a grown man’s forbidden desire—which had traumatized her since she was a little girl.

  Things began to get much worse. She felt she was losing control over her own thoughts, and later she would always say that the feeling of losing her mind, piece by piece, had been the most hideous, frightening, and painful experience of her life. Worse than any illness, worse than any physical pain. Years later, she would tell Giovanna that even arthritis—“such a funny word isn’t it? A disease with “art” in its name,” she’d said—which often left her unable to sleep or made her weep with pain, could not compare to the anguish that gripped her breast and never left her at that time, a continual internal scream that tormented her day and night. From her youth, she’d been able to control and conceal her fears and anxieties. But at this point, she was no longer capable of hiding anything.

  She ended up back in the psychiatric hospital, a place surrounded by barbed wire, with metal bars in the windows. When she asked Harry what they were for, she heard him reply: to catch butterflies. She was so frightened that she found this answer comforting: maybe she had turned back into a child and needed to trust someone.

  They subjected her to extremely violent treatments, including insulin therapy, which provoked intense convulsions, and ten more electroshock treatments, which produced such powerful spasms that she had to wear a mouthguard to keep her teeth from breaking during the jolts. Doctor Cossa, who was absent during those days, had left her in the hands of a less qualified assistant. Harry didn’t know what to do, but deep down he didn’t believe in substitutes. Each treatment made Niki lose memory, and this lack of control terrified them both. They were afraid she would never completely be herself again. They also used dream therapy, so she wouldn’t remember the pain.

  It was in that hospital prison that she was struck by the overwhelming desire to paint. In the first days, she had no materials with her, so she started making collages with leaves she found in the clinic’s garden. At her request, Harry brought her drawing paper and colored pencils, which were probably her salvation. She drew open heads from which body parts emerged: a face covered in a constellation of eyes, with a question mark in the center of the forehead, and phrases like “Do I exist?” “Where did you put my knife?” “Pieces of my head.” She drew mice around the border of a self-portrait that showed her lying on a bed like a corpse; the barred window with the sun behind it was surrounded by words that read “Are the mice inside me, or are they devouring me?” and “Today they gave me another electroshock. Will it help me?” and “Will the teeth of the mice tear me to pieces?” and “Harry is coming this afternoon. In a few hours. Will he bring Laura?” Whenever she could, she painted and drew. The doctors told her she should stay there for five years; instead, she was out in six weeks. She had found her cure: painting. From that moment on it was clear to her that artistic creation would save her. She would use her art to free herself from evil.

  6. THE LOVERS

  Eros. Love. Choice.

  Nobody will ever read what I write in this diary. I don’t know why I’m writing it, maybe just because putting my thoughts down in black and white has always helped me clarify them, and costs less than psychoanalysis. I will probably destroy it, or maybe I’ll leave it to my children after my death. I imagine that at a certain stage, the things they read won’t hurt them anymore, they will just understand that I was a person, apart from being their mother. Maybe they will judge me differently, with the indulgence that mothers never get while they’re alive. But I’m not sure that’s the reason why I’m writing about myself. It feels more like a redemptive experience that lets me kee
p a record of my life in a totally sincere way, especially of the last few years, when my marriage became a masterpiece of hypocrisy, in service to my sacred well-being; to Filippo, to our children, to the stability that Luca and Lisa needed. In my situation, I really can’t talk to anyone about what I feel. I tried going to therapy for a while; it seemed like wasted money to me, because, at heart, I didn’t go there to understand or to resolve anything, but to satisfy my need to vent, to have the freedom to talk badly about myself and my family, which is something I can do very well on my own with this diary, which I keep in a safe-deposit box, along with my grandmother’s jewelry and the golden sovereigns Papà gave me when I graduated. It’s a secret ritual that helps me feel good. A couple of times a month I come to the bank, pick up this diary, and sit in a hidden corner of this horrible bar across from the bank branch, where I come only for this purpose. Also, this time, I ordered a tea with lemon and bought a box of cookies because their pastries are always stale. You would never come here for breakfast or for a drink, that’s why I come here to write, and only for that: none of the people I know would ever set foot in here, so I’m safe. Every now and then the owner of the bar, who’s ancient and crabby, asks me, “Would the lady like something more?” He intends to be confrontational, he doesn’t want me taking over the table without buying anything. I would like to tell him straight to his face, “Don’t interrupt me, asshole, you should thank me—nobody ever sits in this shitty table near the bathrooms, much less a lady like me.” Instead I’m nice, I order another tea, even though I won’t drink it. In these few lines I’ve already summarized what I have to say for myself: I’m a woman above suspicion in a place above suspicion, who thinks things through, and never says anything that would compromise the public image of who she should be, what others expect of her, what she has become identified with. The cliché “be yourself” is so ridiculous. Nobody wants to let anyone see what they really are; we all hide behind whatever we want others to see in us. And so, here I am: a cultured lady, wealthy, elegant, the wife of a member of parliament, who’s also a journalist, a feminist, and ecologist, not to mention financially independent. Of course, my father’s rich. The pennies I get from the newspapers wouldn’t even pay the Filipina who cooks, does the washing, and walks the dog for me. It’s wonderful to be in my position, to be able to take part in environmental and democratic battles, ignoring all the potential contradictions; because even if we lose these battles nothing will change for me. Therefore, I don’t want my life to change. I’m fine with my two houses, one in town, one in the country, and maybe a third in Kenya. I can permit myself to consume less because I already have all the essentials. I’m against exploitation because I have enough money to pay the taxes for my domestic help; I’m against nuclear energy because expensive bills aren’t a problem; I’m feminist because I can make my own decisions, even if my son has never held a broom in his hand, and has never seen his father do that, either—but what does it matter, since we have another woman who does it for us?