The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Then she told him that the most recent time she’d been angry was when Joan Mitchell—who, by the way she didn’t rate highly as a painter—had asked her which art school she’d gone to, and when she’d replied, “none,” had dismissed her as “another wife-of-a-writer who paints.” She had felt all her muscles tense, as if she were preparing to leap at her jugular.

  They laughed. Beneath Jean’s eyebrows, something caught fire every time she laughed.

  “Jean, but it’s the truth, I didn’t go to any school, and I don’t know how to draw.”

  He told her the most important thing she would ever hear in her life. As she listened, she sensed something powerful in his voice, and a thought came to her: Jean’s words were not compliments, they expressed his genuine desire to encourage her not to obey expectations, not to betray herself. He was the first man, perhaps the first human being, who had invited her with all his force to totally believe in what she felt she was.

  He said to her, “Niki, you don’t have to know how to draw, you have to know how to dream. And that you know excellently how to do. Dreams are everything. Technique isn’t nothing, but technique can be learned. You are an artist.” And as he was saying this, he had stamped out his cigarette butt in the butter dish, creating an amalgam of blackish ashes in the melted fat. It was the kind of thing nobody had ever done at any table where Niki had dined up to this moment. Jean came from a world far removed from hers. The anarchy behind that distracted, disgusting action made her heart flip. She averted her eyes for a moment. She had found something that she had never had before. She leaned across the table, coming nearer to him, and with her thumbs, smoothed his bushy eyebrows. He took advantage of that to kiss her wrists.

  They fell passionately, instantly in love. Long before they told each other so.

  They talked about their friends. About Brancusi. They talked about projects they were working on. Niki talked to him about her children, about how much she missed them, and she talked to him about herself, about her pain, her anxiety, about the psychiatric clinic, about painting, which was the only medicine that had worked.

  He listened to her.

  “You don’t have to justify yourself, Niki. You’re looking for a reason to devote yourself to art? Be an artist. Do the only thing you can do.”

  “I’m also a mother, and, supposedly, a wife.”

  “You still will be.”

  “No, those are roles that require a kind of commitment that I’m in no condition to sustain.”

  “Nobody will die from that.”

  “Someone will suffer.”

  “Less than they would if you’d stayed with them, unhappy and angry.”

  “I don’t know, you can’t measure suffering. The consequences of the loss can’t be foreseen. But I know what you’re talking about. My mother’s frustration destroyed her. Her unhappiness devoured me and my siblings. I didn’t want to be like her.”

  “Mothers are unforgivable by definition. You will be another unforgivable mother. Even more unforgivable because you’re an artist. You have to start dealing with that at once.”

  Niki fell silent. He had said it again. “You’re an artist.”

  She started to draw on the tablecloth.

  “See, I can never get the proportions right.”

  “Who cares about proportions? Are you trying to do geometry? There’s something strong in your line, it comes from inside. You’re angry, you’re presumptuous, you’re full of fantasy. You can become a great painter if you want, Niki. But that’s your business. It doesn’t depend on anyone else.”

  They wouldn’t make love that night. They had drunk too much.

  Jean had had a chocolate cake made for her with thirty candles. It was a struggle for her to blow them out; even then her lungs had limited capacity. He let out a sigh at the sight of her face illuminated by the candles, her lips in an O, her eyes lowered.

  He smiled at her. “There will never be a more wonderful year than this one. I promise you.”

  He had no gift for her, but in truth, he had given her the most precious gift of all: he had told her what she was.

  They walked together to the entry of the studio she had rented near Jean’s atelier. They hugged. He gripped one of her hands hard, then touched her back but quickly broke off. “Good night, Niki.”

  She watched him go, he walked so well, he moved like a panther. His legs were walking farther away, hers were paralyzed with desire. She thought that she and Jean were the two bravest people she had ever known.

  In his atelier, Jean found his wife Eva sleeping next to her young lover, separated and tragic like a botched Pietà. He noticed a big bag, already packed, next to them. He didn’t remember quite where, but he knew they were going south the next day. He hurried up to the loft and threw himself onto the mattress of his insomnias.

  Niki didn’t sleep much either. The morning of the next day, unable to concentrate, she ruined a canvas. She decided to go out. She started walking toward the Impasse Ronsin. At that moment it was the only thing to do.

  She found Jean assembling a creature made out of a carburetor with mechanical arms. The atelier was very cold. He was wearing the same shirt as the night before.

  “I was waiting for you,” he told her.

  She looked at him and walked toward him. He rose and went to wash his hands. She followed him. Without giving him time to dry off, she used his shoulders to hoist herself up and sit on the stone sink he’d just used. She pulled him to her and kissed him on the mouth. She wrapped her legs around him.

  They gripped each other tightly. He lifted her up without moving his lips from hers, then laid her down on the mattress. He was concerned above all with her pleasure, as if there were no other happiness than to see her enjoy herself. She watched him come and thought in that moment that he was the one, her love, her inspiration. She thought of something she would do in her paintings, but she would start that the next day—this day was only for making love. They didn’t get up even when it was dark outside and the lights of Paris came in through the high windows of the atelier, even to turn on the heat. It was freezing, but they didn’t notice, caught up in their bodies. They didn’t speak anymore. Only Niki, at one point, had interrupted the silence: looking at the clock she had said, “How wonderful, it’s only five o’clock.” They had made their choice. They had all of life before them. They would never let each other go.

  7. THE CHARIOT

  Action. Victory. Conquest.

  Sauro and Sanfilippi’s little restaurant had met with greater success than they themselves had anticipated. People came from the villas of Ansedonia, Porto Ercole, and Porto Santo Stefano to get there. The Saddlery was always so crowded that they’d had to expand the annex in great haste to create an extra room, and widen the deck, where small sofas were set out. At the end of the season they were all so worn out that they decided to open only on Saturdays and Sundays during the winter months. But if the director general of the state-run television network, RAI, wanted to bring friends by on a Thursday; if Gianmaria Molteni’s wife, or the countess, wanted to throw a birthday party there on a Friday; if some director had friends from abroad he wanted to take out riding then bring by the restaurant to unwind on a weekday, you couldn’t say, “Sorry, we’re closed.” In this way, Miriam and the kids had not managed to get a day off for six solid months.

  The structure was just a glorified wooden shack with a thatched roof made of long, dried reeds from the marshes, which offered protection from the rain, and in theory also served the purpose of letting out the smoke from the fireplace in wintertime. In theory. In certain winds, the fireplace would not draw, and the Saddlery filled with dense smoke that rose about six feet from the floor, sometimes making it impossible to see anyone’s face. Then, the two doors would be opened, and at that point, the smoke would disperse but the cold would come in. It was a place where in winter you could re
ally suffer a lot, but that didn’t hurt its popularity. Giulia Sanfilippi often complained to her husband about having to go there every weekend, disguising her happiness at seeing Sauro so soon. Conducting her clandestine romance under her husband’s nose gave her an added pleasure, which was heightened by her ostentatious display of a kind of contempt for her lover’s uncouthness. She called him “the cowboy,” never “the King,” and declared it was impossible to have a conversation with him of more than three sentences, omitting the fact that, in private, she kept him from finishing his sentences by covering his mouth with hers.

  Miriam was always exhausted. Shut up in the kitchen. She continually got compliments from everyone for the food, but towards the end of August she came down with an illness that sent her to bed for two days. Talking with the local country doctor, to whom she was distantly related, she’d decided that this was no life, and that if she withdrew from the Saddlery, it would be good for her health and also for family harmony. Sanfilippi got alarmed, and, unbeknownst to Sauro, gave her a check for two million lire (which she accepted without blinking an eye, believing she legitimately deserved it), and promised her he’d find a capable cook as soon as possible to help her and occasionally fill in for her. “That way you can take yourself on a cruise with no worries,” he told her, not knowing that she wouldn’t even take herself willingly to the train station.

  It was not Sanfilippi who convinced her to stay of course, but Sauro. He devoted an afternoon to her. He brought her medicine, bought her a fan, which he placed beside the bed. He turned it on and got into bed with her; they had been keeping different schedules for too long, living at a different pace. He fucked her with dedication. Afterwards they talked, and he showered her with promises. He told her that their success was all due to her, that she was the agent of change not only for their family, but for the village; that she had gained prestige and attracted a select breed of tourist, thanks to her legendary wild boar ragù, and that if he was “the King,” she was the Queen. But she couldn’t bear hearing herself given the nickname that had belonged to her cousin.

  Sauro continued, saying that soon they would have enough money to hire a chef and would at last be able to live off the rent from the Tiburzi farmhouse and their other small ventures; the children were grown now and soon would be self-sufficient. “Remember, Miriam, when we didn’t have a penny, and I couldn’t even buy a pair of new socks, and I had to go out to do piecework? That won’t happen anymore. You’ll be able to buy all the clothes you want, and before long we’ll also get a new car.”

  She always liked believing whatever he told her, she had never questioned any of his words. She gave in at once, and the next day she put her chef’s hat and white apron back on. Miriam knew in her heart that her ragù was a marginal factor in the restaurant’s success, but it didn’t matter to her. What mattered to her was Sauro. It mattered to her not to lose him.

  The attraction of the Saddlery was the combination of cowboy and deputy, Sauro Biagini and Fillippo Sanfilippi, stars of the Maremma nights. With Sauro at his side, Sanfilippi felt like Robinson Crusoe and Friday, but with a much larger audience, and in civilization, with money, and power. He counted on the contrast between them to magnify his own refinement, eloquence, skills. It was a studied and willing snobbery. Sauro kept up his role, knowing in turn how to work the imbalanced friendship to his own advantage. Sanfilippi saw him as Friday, but in reality, he was Lady Chatterley’s lover. Women spread the cowboy’s fame. It signaled a kind of proof of membership; if you hadn’t gone to bed with him at least once, even if you didn’t talk about it, even if you didn’t brag about it, it was tacitly understood that you couldn’t be a woman who mattered in the Saddlery circle.

  One night, a group of people from Milan at a table with Giulia were talking about him, about what an incredible, generous, practical man he was, how rich he was in the country wisdom that makes pragmatism an intellectual gift. Giulia nodded, she wanted to add, “And he knows how to fuck!” But she held back, not out of modesty but out of fear that the other diners might respond with a sneer, “We know, we know.”

  After that season went so fantastically well, Sauro decided it wasn’t enough anymore.

  “We should do something else, something bigger,” he kept saying.

  He had a vision of the future, and of all the accumulated potential the season held; but the Saddlery remained a shack without enough seats at the table, with smoke in the winter, a rustic menu.

  “Higher quality than this?” Sanfilippo said. “I brought you the crème de la crème of the Italian Left. Politicians, journalists, professors, artists, prominent businessmen. The best of the intelligentsia that’s out there, along with a quantity of exquisite ass that has never before been seen in these parts.”

  Sauro remembered the first time he had heard the word “intelligentsia.” He had asked himself, wasn’t the word “intelligence?” Why did they always have to mangle everything, make it harder? Over time he had learned all the key expressions and enhanced his vocabulary, by trying to emulate the better clients. But they tended to prefer his free-form way of talking, which amused them, like when he called the horse that a descendant of a pope had baptized, in French, “Éperon” (spur), with the handier and less pretentious name, “Pepperoni.”

  He smiled at Filippo.

  “I don’t mean an increase in quality, but in quantity. We have to expand, to grow. The potential is there. I also need to set aside some money; it’s not like I’ve got a parliamentary salary and a millionaire wife. To keep it going, we’ve got to offer something new, shinier, and bigger. To stay on the crest of the wave, we’ve got to have the wave. We need to open something by the sea, a beautiful restaurant, with cotton tablecloths, not butcher’s paper under the plates, and to hire a chef who knows how to cook fish. The first time, we’ll take everyone on horseback rides. We’ll also create a kind of stable on the beach near the changing rooms, with refreshments for the horses. Think of all the stuff: besides the parking for the cars, we’ll offer a corner in the shade, fodder and water for the horses while they’re all eating spaghetti alle vongole and drinking chilled white wine. Who’s ever heard of anything like that? They don’t even have it at Forte dei Marmi, or Monte Carlo, where those bastards have terrible parking problems, traffic and giant buildings, apartments, see what I’m saying? While we’ve got farmhouses, hills, the sea—and we ride to the restaurant on horseback, where we cook with oil from our own olive trees. We’ve got the best of everything there is in the world.”

  When confronted with an ambitious project, Sanfilippi never backed off, provided it wasn’t political. They decided to invest all the money they’d earned from the Saddlery, along with another little portion from Sanfilippi, who had become a fifty-percent partner in the business with Miriam, then a mortgage, which they calculated would be paid back within three years, for the purchase of the beach hut where they usually went riding in the low season. The old owner knew he could demand an exorbitant sum and held out until they gave him what he wanted: many, many millions of lira.

  In the summer of 1989, they inaugurated the Seaside Cowboy. The logo, designed by Flaminia Ranieri della Corte, who once again was Lisa Sanfilippi’s best friend, after the incident that had made her so furious, was a seahorse being ridden by a cowboy in a ten-gallon hat and boots, with half a cigar in his mouth. An architect friend of the Sanfilippis who specialized in seaside villas had transformed the beach hut into an elegant structure of stone and wood, painted white and sky blue, with a pergola, and a walkway that went to the water’s edge. “It was inspired by the structures on Martha’s Vineyard, where rich, intellectual New Yorkers go, which is what you should aim to become, but with better, more authentic food, and more beautiful surroundings,” the architect had said as she unrolled the blueprints for them. “We’ve already become what we want to be,” Sanfilippi responded, even though he was pleased that she had interpreted their idea so well.

&n
bsp; The opening was a memorable occasion, so much so that photos from the evening not only ended up in all the newspapers but were framed and hung on the inside of the place, as a memento of the first stone laid on the monument of their own personal mythology. And so it was that, for many years to come, the images remained frozen in time: of Sauro and Filippo, glasses raised, sweatily hugging each other, their shirts unbuttoned, cigars in hand, their faces contorted with laughter and alcohol; of the countess emerging from the nighttime sea in a lowcut white dress that clung to her and was almost see-through—a photo that she herself had approved and had enlarged; of the night-time rowboat race whose teams included a government minister and a member of Parliament, the director of the national post office, a bank president, and Sauro the King at the oars, leading his crew to victory. There were many photos of exuberant, suntanned women, in colorful dresses and elaborate hairdos, photos in which the local women were entirely absent, except by accident, or, in the background, wearing white shirts and black pants of synthetic fabric, the unisex uniform of the waiters.

  That night, too, Miriam was in the kitchen and Annamaria waited tables. They had needed more staff for the occasion, and Annamaria had asked her father if she could tell her cousin Giovanna about it. She would have liked to share the experience with her, and maybe later, a cigarette and tips. And then to ask her about the artist. To find out how she lived, what they were doing in the Garden. Sauro had responded, “Ask your mother,” and Annamaria had understood that the issue wasn’t resolved, and completely avoided bringing it up with her mother.