The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Furthermore, the Wild Boar Festival had a feeling of festive finale about it, because it came after all the other celebrations of the seasons of fertility and harvest: the festival of the strawberry; of the tortello; of the melon; and of the local fish known as ficamaschia—“manpussy”—whose popularity had never really taken off because everyone stole the signs to take to their homes in the city, and hung the “Manpussy Festival” banners in their kitchens. The Wild Boar Festival was the last burst of summer before school, before the season in which nature fell asleep, and with it all the activities attached to tourism, which for many meant the beginning of vacation.

  That year Pro Loco, the local tourist board, had decided to add yet another festival: to invent a tradition and divide the village into different districts, called contradas, as in Siena, where the annual Palio horserace had taken place for centuries. But this part of the country had never had contradas in the middle ages, unlike Siena, so they took their names from streets outside the town walls, and from different housing developments. There would be four districts, four different flags, each with a different pair of colors on it. The villagers liked feeling that they were part of a historical tradition that had taken place near them, more or less, which lived on in the popular imagination. The cowboys’ Palio would feature a demonstration of cattle skills: they would have to guide a calf into a corral; open and close a wooden gate without getting off their horses just by using the mazzarella, a long stick with a little cleft at the bottom and a hook at the top; then there’d be a high-speed gymkhana with a few hurdles and a sort of carousel, on which, while galloping on the horse, they’d have to pierce an iron ring with the mazzarella. All these exercises required great skill, but they were things every cowboy knew how to do.

  The cowboys were randomly sorted into contradas. The deputy mayor, who had instigated the contrada committee, immediately invited Decimo, the oldest man in the community; then Giovanni, the youngest, who was twenty; Bruno, the only one who still had wild cows; and obviously, Sauro, who was the first to decline the invitation, proposing his son Saverio for the spot. Saverio was out of practice as a cowboy, but you couldn’t say he lacked physical strength, or the desire to show off.

  He told him about it at Annamaria’s birthday dinner. Saverio had shown up with a gift for his sister, an envelope with two hundred thousand lira in it. It was important that the girl open it in front of their father, to show him how much he could afford to give her, something he proudly called “a little keepsake.”

  Sauro made no comment; he confined himself to saying, “Savè, would you be willing to compete in the cowboys’ Palio? You still up to the task?” and smiled at him. It had been a long time since he’d done that. For Saverio this was proof that what he’d told the tall man he’d almost run over was true. Your fathers love you if they respect you, your fathers love you if you succeed at something they would like to do, like making money.

  Saverio started practicing early every morning. He rode the most obedient Maremma horse, Brigante, and in the riding arena he recreated the gymkhana course, the ring game. All he lacked was the animal to corral; he practiced with the dog Tiburzi, who was not useful, however, because he instantly obeyed. In the meantime, he practiced opening and closing the wooden gate without dismounting and without using his hands. Around eleven he would finish and go wash up and change clothes to start his rounds. Then Annamaria would arrive and take out Brigante; school hadn’t started yet, and she thought it was fun to do the same game, the gymkhana, the ring, and opening the gate with the stick.

  One morning at the end of August, when the air was clearer and cooler than usual and the colors of the countryside shone in high contrast, Annamaria noticed the presence of Lisa, sitting on the fence, watching her practice. She got off her horse and went up to her.

  “You’re really good,” Lisa said, “you should compete in the Palio.”

  “But there’s no such thing as female cowboys.”

  “There’s you, so yes there is.”

  Annamaria smiled. She was a little sweaty, and her heart was pounding. She was ashamed that her T-shirt was stained under the arms.

  “God it’s hot out. We should go for a swim, right now.”

  “We could go to the pool at my place,” Lisa said without much conviction; maybe she was hoping Annamaria would turn down the invitation.

  Annamaria accepted, liberated the horse from his saddle and harness, and led him to the stable without taking him on a cooldown walk, without brushing him, duties she’d never skipped before. She got on her moped and made Lisa, who was very light, ride behind. She felt Lisa’s chest against her back; it made her feel uneasy in a very pleasurable way. It felt more charged than on horseback, and she wished the trip would take as long as possible, but in ten minutes they were in the allée of cypresses that led to the Sanfilippis’ place. It was a former farmhouse that retained of its rural heritage only the squat shape and the external brick staircase that characterized those historic buildings. They’d enlarged the ground floor, creating a veranda that dripped with wisteria, to which they’d matched the color of the blinds. They’d converted the pigsty into a guest house. Where once there had been a crude drinking trough, they had dug a pool, around which a terracotta deck held lounge chairs, sunbeds, and wicker armchairs covered in white cushions. There was almost nothing anymore that would distinguish this house from a villa in Provence or Liguria.

  Giulia welcomed her happily. Annamaria was happy to see her, too: she was one of the few adults she could talk to, as opposed to just taking orders from. Giulia asked her how she was doing, what her favorite subjects at school were, and if she had a boyfriend, even though she knew the answer was no. Sometimes she brought her books from Rome, or little presents. She gave her compliments in front of the others, about what a good and willing worker she was. Annamaria found Giulia intelligent and affectionate, maybe a little too formal, constrained by the obligatory elegance of fine families, among whom she’d spent her life. Sometimes she wondered why she took such an interest in her, given that she already had a daughter to talk with, to give books or presents to. But Lisa seemed indifferent to the attention her mother gave Annamaria and treated her with contempt, if not outright disdain. Behavior that Annamaria was so familiar with that she almost took it as the most genuine substance of family ties.

  Giulia invited her to stay for lunch, and she accepted. She asked to make a phone call home, and while she went to the phone in the corridor above an old cupboard, she seemed to perceive Lisa making some kind of muffled complaint to her mother. She turned and saw her with her eyes raised to the sky, her lips forming the words “What a drag!”, screamed voicelessly. Acting like nothing had happened, she called home. Only her grandfather was there, who would probably forget what she was saying: “Tell Mamma that I’ll be back at two thirty.”

  She went back to the kitchen and asked Lisa if she could lend her a swimsuit. “I’ll get you one of my mother’s because you won’t fit in mine.”

  Annamaria was tempted to get on her moped and go. Once again Lisa was the girl who was too good to be her friend. If not too thin. And yet, the letters she wrote her. And above all, her compliments on her horsemanship. She heard Giulia say to her, “Come with me, I’ve got a small one I can give you,” and appreciated the kindness of that lie, wanting Annamaria to think that her ass was smaller than Giulia’s, when it wasn’t true. Annamaria put on the pink bikini with a white lace border, which she never would have chosen for herself, but as she retied the bows on the bottoms to make them wide enough to fit her hips, she thanked her many times. Giulia remembered Sauro’s fingers untying them and closed her eyelids for a second. Luca, Lisa’s brother, was in the pool too, with a girl who was sunbathing and reading Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna. Lisa entered the water probably just as she would have exited a scene onstage, almost without the others noticing her pass. Her slender body penetrated the teal surface of the pool through
the fissure her joined hands had made. Annamaria watched her vanish under the water, without a splash.

  Annamaria, who didn’t know how to dive headfirst, only how to do a cannonball, decided to enter by the ladder. She swam underwater all the way to the other end of the pool. When she re-emerged, she heard Luca telling the girl next to him, “She’s the daughter of Sauro, the horseman.”

  She got out to dry off. The contact of her cool feet on the hot tiles was intoxicating, the towel she was wrapped in was clean and soft. There were pleasures for all the senses. For the sight: Lisa herself, on an inflatable yellow lounger, in the middle of the azure of the pool; in the distance, fields of round, golden hay bales that only stopped when the hills of olive trees began. For the hearing: the keening of the cicadas, which all fell silent together at one stroke. For the smell: the aroma of tomato and basil sauce coming from the kitchen. Yet she felt ill at ease. From the French doors she heard music playing, the guitar riff of a famous song whose name she didn’t know. She asked Lisa, who replied, raising her eyes skyward, “My god, it’s ‘Brothers in Arms,’ by Dire Straits, you don’t know the most fundamental things.” Annamaria went to lie down on the hammock tied between an olive tree and a slat of the pergola. She wondered if she should have asked permission. She closed her eyes, tried to rock.

  She wanted to convince herself that she felt fantastic. She felt like she was sliding into sleep, but suddenly she started, because she’d stopped breathing for a moment. Apnea. A thought had stuck in her subconscious. “The daughter of the horseman,” “What a drag,” “My god, you don’t know the most fundamental things.” What was she doing here? Her presence clashed, and she didn’t feel welcome. She went in to get her clothes and told Giulia she had remembered she had to do something urgent for her father.

  “Can I do it? What do you have to do for your father? In my opinion you shouldn’t let yourself be treated like a servant. Are you really sure you can’t stay a little longer? We’ll have a quick lunch, it’ll be ready in five minutes, and then I can drive you.”

  “Giulia, I’m sorry to have made you cook extra. But it’s no use, I’m the one who forgot that I’d promised to do something for him, to write the menus out prettily by hand. I know it seems unlikely, but I’ve got beautiful calligraphy.”

  “You should just say ‘calligraphy’ or ‘beautiful handwriting’, beautiful calligraphy is redundant,” Giulia said critically.

  “I know, you’re right. ‘Calligraphy’ comes from the Greek, kállos and gráphein. Beautiful and write. I know some Greek, too, I study Classics in school,” she smiled, blushing. Giulia blushed too, ashamed of herself. Annamaria felt bad to be leaving, she felt bad for Giulia, even if, after all, she was a total bitch, always there with her red pen ready to correct you, and to show off how much more she knew; but she felt even worse about her badly brought-up children, who hadn’t given her one glance, not one decent greeting, had treated her with contempt. Why had Lisa invited her if she was going to be annoyed by her presence and treat her this way? Lisa only realized what had happened when she heard the sound of the moped accelerating toward the gate, disappearing in the cloud of dust it had raised.

  The day of the Palio arrived. It was the last Sunday before the start of school, one of those cool days when the melancholy of summer’s end is as clear as the sky. In the grass playing field outside the village, everything had been set up for the challenge: a round corral made of wooden stakes; a kind of pitchfork that held up a chain from whose tip hung the ring that was to be pierced. There were hordes of people, villagers and tourists, everyone there to enjoy the show by the cowboys who had bested Buffalo Bill in the ring on his 1890 tour, when a cowboy from the Pontine Marshes named Augusto Imperiali, a cowboy who couldn’t be thrown by even the wildest Appaloosa colt, had sent the American packing. The Maremmans were so proud of that story, it made everyone so happy to see the men with their animals, half of them horsemen, half of them herdsmen, prepared to translate the archaeology of their profession into spectacle.

  The first to enter the field was Saverio, who was competing for the contrada of the Old Town. He was wearing the complete outfit of brown moleskin with leather trappings, but he hadn’t taken into account that his bodybuilding had changed his physical shape. He was squeezed into the jacket, which gave him little freedom of movement, but he smiled smugly from beneath his black cap. He executed a perfect gymkhana, at a good pace, and pierced the ring on the first try, but he had difficulty making the calf enter the corral, the herding exercise. Saverio managed to open the gate handily, but then the calf took fright and started running. Saverio chased him from one end of the sports field to the other for a good ten minutes, while the timekeeper on the microphone limited his comments as much as possible (“Here’s Biagini, attempting a save with the mazzarella”) to avoid making the situation worse; the calf got more and more terrified, and would have run into the road if the other horsemen hadn’t blocked him. As the minutes passed, Saverio became visibly irritated, shouted at the beast with no effect, and took off his jacket so he could be freer in his movements, but when his awareness of the disaster became too sharp, with all those eyes upon him, the echo of laughter landing in his ears, it made him want to give up the whole thing and shout: “Damn it, you assholes! Come out here yourselves and see if you can convince this demented calf!” When he’d finally stopped in the middle of the grounds with a defeated look, the calf, on its own, had gone into the corral. Saverio quickly rode off on Brigante and closed the gate with the mazzarella. Abundant applause followed, but he was shaking his head as he dismounted his horse.

  Then the other cowboys took their turns, faring better with the animal, having understood the strategy. Saverio came in third all the same, because Decimo, the oldest cowboy, who didn’t want to compete with his glasses on, missed the ring three times in a row and came in last. The awards ceremony took place amid a torrent of furious off-field arguments.

  In the general chaos, Lisa went to the emcee and, when everything was over and people were beginning to get moving to go eat, she asked him, “Could you please let a girl have a try?” The presenter gave her a bewildered look and said, “No, you see, we don’t have any unscheduled activities, and people are already leaving. I’m sorry. Besides, you girls do other things, and you’d be wonderful at the hurdles, but this is a different expertise.”

  “I didn’t want to participate myself, I don’t ride. But there’s a cowgirl among you, and nobody knows it. It’s Annamaria, Sauro’s daughter. I’m telling you for the sake of the event, and for you personally—it will make a good impression, and my mother could write an article for La Repubblica about the little girl who challenged the cowboys.”

  Upon those words, he gave the matter no further thought. Turning the microphone back on, he shouted, “Annamaria Biagini is expected on the stage!” as if he were calling for a child who’d gotten lost. Then he asked everyone not to leave, because there was to be an unexpected, unscheduled event. Annamaria had come to the Palio on horseback, but she wasn’t dressed as a cowboy, she didn’t want to do the trial, she was ashamed, she hadn’t trained, it would be better not to.

  “But they’ve already announced you,” Lisa said. “You can’t turn back. Go out and win!” And unexpectedly, she gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  Annamaria felt like she was on fire. She took Brigante’s reins from her brother’s hands. She felt her heart in her throat as she adjusted the straps. She thought it would be a disaster, that she would fall, that she’d never pierce the ring, that she would be forcing the crowd to stay till the end of time to watch the calf, who would run from one end of the field to the other, resolute in its disobedience. She could have cried at the disappointment she was about to give Lisa. She was convinced she was about to endure the greatest catastrophe of her life, but once she was on the horse, she stopped thinking. She heard her name announced over the loudspeakers but was deaf to the encouraging applause that had
been requested, deaf to her brother’s words, she didn’t even understand what Lisa was saying.

  She spurred the horse and took off, her head completely empty and her heart racing. She felt like a single unit with Brigante, her muscles effortlessly commanding the horse’s feet. She felt like she was the horse itself. She completed the gymkhana without any errors. The moment came with the ring. She’d tried it before a thousand times, she missed it on the first try; on the second, she pierced it skillfully. She confronted the calf, opened the gate with the stick, then followed the animal, slowing Brigante, showed the calf the stick, while gently saying, “Come on boy, go in, be good,” and she didn’t know if it was that voice that calmed him, or just the fact that the animal now knew what it was supposed to do, but it trotted into the corral at once. Annamaria shut the gate and dismounted from her horse in one leap that ended in a bow.

  The stands of the sports field resounded with applause that never ended. The emcee shouted into the microphone: “Exceptional! Exceptional! The best trial at the end, the shortest time of any of them, let’s hear more applause for this girl who’s shown that she’s at the level of all the other outstanding cowboys!” Lisa, who was standing beside him the whole time, reproached him: “It’s not that she’s at their level, she was better than them. Say it! Say it! Better than the men!” The presenter didn’t say it, but the audience’s enthusiasm soared.