The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Nobody could object to hiring Antonella, the daughter of Porcu the shepherd, who was already twenty, and had experience in restaurants and also as a baker; and in the end she was the one who was assigned the task of making the cake. She created an enormous rectangle of sponge cake filled with crème Chantilly, which was what she did best. It was a pity that her design of the cowboy on the seahorse, piped onto the cake with melted chocolate from a pastry bag, had come out so badly, and looked like a kind of deformed, priapic satyr. In the kitchen, there was no end of joking about it; Antonella was miserable, and tried several times to redo it, scraping off the top layer of whipped cream, but everyone was in a rush, and the results looked worse every time, until finally the girl started crying. Miriam kicked her out of the bar and told her briskly: “Buck up, go on then, what does it matter? Who looks at the design, all that matters is that it tastes good,” and got ready to take it outside. She carried it out with the help of Annamaria and two other waiters, and put it on the table behind where Sauro had been sitting in the meantime with the architect in his lap—who didn’t bother returning to her own seat even when Miriam appeared. Sauro stood up, delicately shifting her aside, and called for applause for his wife. When the jokes began about the design, “The cowboy with the giant erection,” “Ha ha, Sauro, is that you?” Miriam smiled and said, “I’ll go get the knife,” but nobody caught the irony, because everyone was too drunk to notice that she really had come back with a steak knife, not a cake knife, and had served cake onto the plates, stabbing at it as if she would disembowel anyone who came near her to grab their own piece.

  * * *

  Women with knives are afraid. They don’t want to kill but rather defend themselves from someone, or even use the knife on themselves. Being armed doesn’t automatically make them warriors. In her darkest moments, Niki always carried knives, box cutters, screwdrivers, hid them inside her purse, beneath her mattress. She bit her lower lip so hard, and so constantly, that a kind of second mouth opened beneath the first one, and she had to have an operation to stitch it back together. There was a powerful anger in her that could not be assuaged by electroshock, even after she left the clinic in Nice, in ’53. Once she got home she felt weak, but she got better, and Harry embraced her, relieved that she’d been released so quickly, after she’d been diagnosed with schizophrenia that would require years of psychiatric confinement. Their little girl Laura helped her to assemble collages; they spent entire mornings in the park drawing on the ground with pastel crayons. It was on one of those days of her convalescence that Niki found a letter for her in the mailbox attached to the gate. She had just had breakfast. The light was very white, and the sky was oppressive. She took the mail into the house: there was a card, a bill, a newspaper, and a letter from her father that came from the Swiss region where he had retired with his wife, in a Puritan anti-communist community that went by the unsubtle name “Moral Rearmament.” In the letter that André Marie Fal de Saint Phalle wrote to his daughter Niki, the man asked for forgiveness. “Surely you will remember that when you were eleven, I tried to make you my lover.” Niki reread this passage dozens of times. She began to feel a deeply buried suffering that rose from the darkness of her bones into her head and poisoned it. A force that seized her temples so violently that it made her throw up. Her body, poisoned by that old evil—a musty lump that had remained hidden in an invisible corner of her mind and now dispersed itself everywhere—needed to empty itself completely; to stay motionless in the dark, and expel the bile, the disgust, to regain the strength to rise.

  From that day forward, for more than a year, she came down with a migraine every Friday, remembering the letter, which returned to trigger a ferocious headache and vomiting, and had to stay in bed a whole day with the windows closed to chase the memory back into the abyss.

  Harry, shocked by the revelation, didn’t know what to do. He suggested to Niki that she tell everything to Doctor Cossa and ask his advice. The psychiatrist did something unexpected, bending the limits of the law: he burned the letter and refused to believe its contents. He told Niki that it was impossible that a man of her father’s upbringing and status could have done something of that nature. He managed nonetheless to write a response to the letter in his own hand, in which he ordered Mr. Saint Phalle to stop incriminating himself and writing lies if he didn’t want his daughter to spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric hospital, and to seek help himself for having invented such violent fantasies.

  This was how Niki once again found herself compelled to confront a terrible truth that she had unearthed, without receiving the necessary aid from someone who ought to have helped her address the violence she had endured. Struck down by her father’s betrayal, and also abandoned by her psychiatrist. With no right of reply.

  The letter from Doctor Cossa ended up in the wrong hands. Niki’s mother read it. Sometimes fate is much stronger than intentions. There was no forgiveness; the time for forgiveness was past, and dormant wrath never entirely dies. It can be appeased perhaps. Vented. With other weapons besides knives. With guns. Staged in ferocious vendettas, on canvas.

  Seven years later, in the full flush of her personal renaissance, when she left her first life behind to dedicate herself to art, distancing herself from her family and going alone to Paris, Niki began her experiments with sculpture. Once again, there was a liberating event that propelled her. Before she got together with Jean, she had found herself again in a toxic relationship with a lover she could not get rid of. She returned to her old habit of carrying a weapon in her purse, even if it wasn’t loaded. It made her feel better. But she needed a stronger ritual. One day she asked that man for one of his shirts, and stuck it to a canvas, with a target in place of the head. She began to bombard the painting with darts, feeling lighter with every strike; it was a kind of voodoo ritual, not against a man, but against the ghost of him inside her. The execution succeeded. Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri decided to exhibit the work in a show of the New Realists, a movement in which Niki began to take part, the only woman. The relief she felt each time she struck one of her works exhilarated her. She began affixing objects onto canvases, hiding sacks of dye beneath layers of white gesso, then shooting them so they would explode, making the canvases bleed with the dye. She confessed, “I feel wounded, and I want everything around me to bleed. The paintings have to bleed to atone for living beings. I don’t want darts anymore, I have more rapid means. Rage! Fascination, vendetta, immense pleasure, black, white, red, magical blue! I shot my father, my brother, men, my mother, the Church, school, conventions, myself.” Art for her was a way of settling scores with the monsters she had inside her, as if at a certain point she had begun to exhort herself: “Shoot, Niki, shoot. Create, destroy, be reborn. In this way you will find your place. The newspapers will do nothing but talk about you. Your apprenticeship is over. You have turned your bad luck into something good; in your abyss, you have found a source of inexhaustible energy. With your paint, you have annihilated fear.”

  8. JUSTICE

  Decision. Judgment. False Perfection.

  Annamaria helped her parents full time every summer. Once school was over, it was taken for granted in the family that the girl would continue her duties as assistant horse trainer, assistant stable hand, kitchen helper, and assistant waitress. And she did it, with no thought of an eventual alternative, she was used to it, used to not having real vacations. It was after the millionth fight between Saverio and their father that she suddenly recognized the injustice. Paradoxically, it was her own brother, the lucky one, who opened her eyes.

  Saverio had lashed out at their father when he found out about the opening of the Seaside Cowboy. “Dad, I truly don’t know how you can fail to see that you’re being shafted. Sanfilippi has saddled you with debts; your clients, who you even have the gall to call friends, just want to act like bosses, to be served, all those smiles and all that laughter, but who is it that cleans up the horse shit, who gets s
tuck in the kitchen? You, your wife, your daughter. It’s bullshit. I pity you all for how important it makes you feel to carry off the dirty dishes of those fucking VIPs, and to have your picture taken with them. You’re idiots; and you, Babbo, are the worst of all, because you’re dragging Mamma and Annamaria into it, too.”

  Sauro no longer bothered to respond to him. Miriam weakly chided him, “Saverio, don’t be disrespectful to your father.”

  “Look, he’s the one that’s disrespecting you, and you ignore it, you big dummy.” A few years earlier, Sauro would have slapped him. Now, not only was Saverio too old for that, but Sauro had given up; it seemed futile to him to argue with this son who had never supported him, who had never admitted he was right, who had never valued him, he felt. And Saverio ought to have been able to see how well his businesses were doing. Sometimes Sauro thought his son put him down sheerly out of jealousy.

  “Get out of here, Savè, before I kill you. Get out of the house, you’re old enough by now. If there’s anyone here who deserves to be criticized it’s you, who jerks around, being cooked for, cleaned for, and never lifts a finger. We may be idiots, but you’re a parasite on us idiots, and that doesn’t make you better than us.”

  “Look, do you think I don’t know it’s time for me to clear out of here? I’m just sorry for Mamma, because now there’ll be nobody left here to defend her, to truly love her.”

  Sauro had said calmly, “You don’t know shit about what it means to love someone, Saverio.” Upon those words, Saverio had gotten up and walked out, leaving Miriam in tears and Annamaria shifting the debate to herself.

  “There’s something I’d like to bring up. It’s one thing if you don’t get along with him. But why do I always have to help out with every task, while he’s exempted? To what does he owe this privilege? Is it just because he was against opening the restaurant? Because he doesn’t like your customers? Or because you guys fight? I think it’s just leftover male chauvinism, like in Grandfather’s times: Saverio is a boy, free to make his own decisions, I’m a girl, who has to obey. And I’m not all right with that.”

  Grandfather Settimio emerged from his alcoholic silence and backed up his granddaughter without fully grasping the nature of her declaration. “Bravo, Annamarì, your brother is a no-good slacker. Back in my day, you would have been happy to be a woman, that is, to stay at home—our father took us boys out into the fields every morning before dawn. I give it two days before you see Saverio at the door, ready to take the horses out on rides, and carry plates to the table.”

  The issue was resolved with an economic agreement: Annamaria would receive her first, small, salary, which didn’t completely rectify the situation, but at least took a little of the sting out of her brother’s preferential treatment.

  Besides, Annamaria liked working there in the summertime. Her friends went on study trips, or on vacations with their parents, visiting grandparents in some little village in the mountains or somewhere by the sea. They had relatives too, in Monte Amiata. But she preferred to stay put—there was her mother who needed help, and above all, there was Lisa.

  Lisa, a mystery that always seemed on the brink of unveiling itself. They’d been exchanging long letters for ages, and they also saw each other at least once a month, at the weekend. They wrote about school, Lisa wrote about her dancing, Annamaria about the horses, Lisa wrote about her boyfriend (a little), and Annamaria about a guy she liked, from a nearby village, who had long, blond hair, so everyone called him Sandy Marton, like the pop star, but he was too old and didn’t know she existed.

  Lisa wrote beautifully, with an abundance of detail, and so many insights that seemed brilliant to Annamaria. She relished the task of responding to the letters, she tried to bring out her best thoughts, she wanted to make Lisa laugh. Once she also sent her a little package with the lambswool she’d asked for the first time they met, to stuff into her pointe shoes. Annamaria couldn’t hide the importance she gave to any request from her friend, how everything she said was imprinted on her memory. Lisa was undeniably gratified by this. After the launch of the Seaside Cowboy, she’d gone to Cuba with her mother for two weeks. Through his political contacts, her father had managed to get her admitted to a summer session of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba in Havana. She had written two long letters to Annamaria from there, which she had delivered by hand because she didn’t trust the Cuban postal system, and had written things that maybe wouldn’t have pleased the censors. “Censors?” Annamaria had asked. “Oh please, think what it would mean to censor every letter! Like, right now, people are being paid to waste their time reading a young girl’s letters? I think you’ve seen too many spy movies.”

  “You’re naïve, Annamaria. Living in this little corner of the country has given you an amazingly narrow outlook. The outside world is much more complicated than a stable.”

  That’s how Lisa was. When she talked with her, she could be caustic, when she wrote to her she was thoughtful and generous. When they were together, sometimes she was warm, more often she was indifferent. Annamaria never felt confident when she was with her, and she liked that. She kept her letters in the hollow of the mended statue of Saint Anthony, which her grandfather had given her as a christening gift.

  Dear Annamaria,

  I got here five days ago and went to the ballet school for the second time. I’ve never had such exhausting lessons. It probably was the jet lag, which I still haven’t recovered from, or the unbearable heat and humidity, and the fact that they don’t have air conditioning, only fans, which feel like dragon’s breath, I couldn’t do the right steps, couldn’t get in sync with the choreography, the simplest moves, too, I even messed up the bar exercises, and felt like crap. The others are all incredible, maybe they’re used to the heat, but I think there’s something more. Maybe dance is truly a way of life for these girls. But not the way it is for me, I mean, it’s the thing I like doing best in the world (all the same, there are many, or at least several, alternatives I can consider, I’ve got the ability to choose), for them I think it’s different, they dance as if it were a question of life or death. And maybe it is. If they become outstanding ballerinas, they will have the opportunity to travel, to leave this island, they can go to Paris or New York, something I’ve already done without the least worry. My father keeps on holding up Cuba as a perfect model of a society where the communist revolution has succeeded and is strenuously resisting American imperialism. But I’d like to see him living with as little to eat as they do, and such bad food (since my arrival I’ve had only chicken, fish and tomatoes at lunch and dinner, and bland bananas and coffee at breakfast, you don’t know what I’d give for a spoonful of Nutella), and not owning a house, not having money, and most of all, not having the freedom to leave, to choose a different life for yourself. When I come home I’ll tell him how they live in this land of the perfect revolution, where, yes, everyone can study and gets medical care for free, but gets arrested if they speak badly of Fidel Castro, the supermarkets are empty and above all, you can’t leave, and if you do, you can’t come back. So many women, even girls our age, readily sell their bodies to decrepit old Italian men who come here on vacation to smoke cigars and drink rum all day, and to tap tight asses on the beaches of Varadero for a couple bucks. I’m telling you, Annamaria: at the moment, I fail to see the beauty in this communist paradise. And he sent me and my mother here as if it were some fantastic reward, something he’d managed to obtain for me at enormous sacrifice. His grand prize, a unique experience at the communists’ ballet school. If he’d sent me to La Scala, it would have cost him less, and it definitely would have been more fruitful for me. Meanwhile, he’s back home, nice and cool in a linen shirt, eating lobster, drinking wine at your place and taking a trip to Porto Ercole (speaking of which, do you know that our boat is called “Granma,” like the one Che Guevara and Fidel Castro came over on from Mexico to begin the revolution in Cuba? I found that out here—what a modest guy my d
ad is, no?) My mother is acting all positive, but you can tell that inside she’s freaking out. She doesn’t even have the dancing. She collects postcards of Che Guevara and takes photographs of everything, but you can tell she can’t wait for us to leave. I’ve got a few more days left. Take care of yourself and have a nice swim at Macchiatonda, which, when it comes down to it, is much better than the Caribbean.

  XXX Lisa

  Dear Annamaria,

  Today I finally managed to truly dance. At first, I’d just been trying to keep up with the others and barely managing, but the difference between doing the right steps and dancing is something that you feel inside, and that others can see. Today Alicia Alonso came to give lessons in person, she’s the school’s founder, and she was recognized as a prima ballerina assoluta. She’s in her sixties now and doesn’t dance any more, but just think, she’s been practically blind since she was nineteen years old, and she still managed to dance in duets in the corps de ballet, and to perform as a soloist, too. She danced Giselle for New York City Ballet, and her Giselle is considered one of the most successful interpretations ever. It was really moving to see her and to take lessons with her. I think she’s developed a particular sensitivity that allows her to perceive the space around her even though she can’t see it, like a bat that moves incredibly quickly, anticipating exactly where it will want to be among the others when it flies past. She was a hero, both for that and because of the fact that, even though she could have stayed in New York, she came back here to found a national school of ballet in Havana. I thought I’d be intimidated by her, instead, she made me dance much better than the other, younger teacher did, with whom I couldn’t get in sync. Actually, I think she despised me. Dance is strange, they put you in front of a mirror with all the other girls, all of us performing the same movement, but you can instantly see the difference between us. And you look at yourself, you confront yourself, always judging yourself, and being judged. Dancing might look like an activity for fragile, pampered girls who like wearing pink tulle, but in reality it’s a ferocious discipline that demands muscles of steel, and nerves even stronger. To look like a butterfly on the stage, you have to execute a series of terribly difficult exercises, smiling the whole time; then there’s the ordeal of the workouts, the physical pain of the constriction of the toes in the pointe shoes. There’s a lot of silent suffering in classical dance that you can’t even imagine. Then there’s the competitiveness, the disapproval of the teacher if you don’t do well, the constant judgments on your body, because there’s always someone who has thinner thighs, more flexible arms, a longer neck, a more beautiful face. There are ballerinas who are gifted with an undeniable grace who dance in a way that shows they’ve got something inside them that’s perfectly wedded to the music, but maybe their boobs are too big, or their ass is too low, and you know that they won’t get anywhere and that it’s extremely unfair. Classical dance is the antithesis of communism, we are not at all equal in front of the mirror or onstage, and it’s funny that there would be such a prestigious school here. It’s a cruel discipline, and every day I see, positioned in front of the mirror or lined up in the corner, a lovely group of graceful masochists who pirouette, one after the other, and sometimes it makes me weary, really so weary, to recognize myself as one of them. I’ll pay a price for this weariness, I know. There’s no such thing as a star who is lazy, or pleasure-seeking, and I get tired, and I want to have fun, and I miss Dario and pizza, and my brother Luca pisses me off every time he says to me, “A dancer like Carla Fracci is all right, but what you want to be is Maradona.” He can go to hell. Anyway, with Alicia Alonso I saw myself in the mirror and saw myself through her eyes, even if the others didn’t see me, and when she nodded after I did my diagonale, I was on cloud nine, I was terrific! Think what I’ve come to. Taking the approval of a blind woman as the maximum satisfaction possible.