The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  When she woke up after her stomach had been pumped, she said to her mother, who was looking at her more with anger than sorrow, “I didn’t want to die, I just wanted to sleep, so much.”

  Nobody ever spoke of a suicide attempt. It was “the night of the incident,” and then a generic “after what happened,” a premise that from that day forward took away a great deal of Annamaria’s freedom. Miriam invented a justification and a solution. Poor Annamaria had been bullied at school, where they called her “Cowgirl,” she had complexes about her appearance, she had suffered in silence at being made fun of, and that had resulted in an adolescent depression that was difficult to confide to her parents. They had her transferred to a teacher’s training school, and began keeping her under observation and giving her brief interrogations whose sole object was to make themselves feel better. Annamaria accepted everything; the alibis suited her fine, the protection, the fictional reassurance, not having to go to a psychologist, not having to tell anyone the reason why she had wanted to die. The truth was heavy, for her and for her family. It was better to keep the stone on her heart, to let time erode it, to lock it up in a well-hidden place, hoping it would never get out.

  Miriam and Sauro did not want to know Annamaria’s version; Saverio’s version was suffocated by another silence, somewhere between punitive and resigned. They told the medics at the hospital that the girl had collapsed and they didn’t know why, maybe she’d taken the pills the doctor had prescribed for their grandfather when he couldn’t sleep. The chief physician was a friend of Sauro’s, and the question of whether or not the incident should be treated as an accident didn’t come up, there was no reason to investigate. Annamaria recovered quickly and without physical after-effects.

  Her grandfather had found her, lying on the ground with a stream of vomit by her face. He thought it had something to do with those female troubles that make women sick every month. Sometimes he’d come upon Alma when she had fainted from cramps. He had run to the restaurant to call for Miriam. “Sorry for bothering you, gentlemen,” he had shouted as he entered the Saddlery, heading for the kitchen. Nobody understood if he hadn’t wanted to involve Sauro, or if he thought that the sole person adapted to a situation like this was his daughter-in-law, but he didn’t stop for one second by his son. Miriam was tending a wild boar stew she wasn’t happy with; although it had marinated for a long time, it still tasted gamey, she said. Settimio said to her, “Think about how it tastes later, right now Annamaria is at the house, and I know she needs you. Run.”

  She threw off her apron and cap and fled, ahead of her father-in-law’s halting steps. Annamaria was never sick; Miriam was very worried. Sauro followed them, pissed off at having been ignored, totally ignorant of was going on, but sure in his heart that something terrible had happened.

  Miriam stayed in the hospital overnight, and once she was home Sauro grabbed Saverio by the neck, the box of psychopharmaceutical drugs that he’d found on the floor in his other hand.

  “What the hell is this shit you’re bringing into my house? Throw it all away now and don’t you ever set foot in here again, do you understand? Do you understand?” he screamed in his face. “I don’t ever want to see you again, and if you come near us or Annamaria again, I swear I’ll turn you in. And I will kill you. I don’t give a damn if I go to jail.”

  When Sauro let go, Saverio kicked the door to avoid kicking his father.

  “Babbo, as usual you don’t know shit, you haven’t understood shit, but you insist on putting all the blame on me? What matters to you now? To understand why your daughter wanted to kill herself and to try to help her? Do you want to know that Annamaria has problems? Are you going to figure out why she’s sick? No, you’re always looking for a scapegoat, it’s enough for you to lay the blame on me, and you think you’ll solve every problem by kicking me out of the family. Do what you want, Babbo, do what seems easiest for you, as you always do; just know that I love Annamaria and Mamma, and they love me. You can turn me in or kill me, I will always come back to them. I just wonder why those two poor women always have to be at your beck and call. I don’t know how long it will last, Babbo. Annamaria is a good girl, but she’s smart. I hope one day they will abandon you like a dog, that’s what you deserve.”

  He took his gym bag from the closet, the one with the outfits and the drugs hidden in it, and left, giving a thump on the shoulder to his grandfather, who was sitting alone at the dinner table with his coat still on, an empty bottle in front of him, putting apple peels in a paper bag to put aside for the rabbits. An air of hopelessness. “Bye, Nonno, don’t worry, Annamarì will be fine. Have a good time with your jackass of a son, who I can see cares a lot for you, as he does for all of us.”

  He went out into the night; smoke still came from the roof of the Saddlery. Saverio would have bet that the Romans had gone, leaving the lights on and the fireplace going, because nothing mattered to any of them.

  To friends who heard about Annamaria, Sauro said it was nothing, a little meltdown; to the women he spoke of the pain of the monthly periods of virginal girls—a man who knew about things like that and who felt compassion for his daughter awakened their understanding and tenderness. The efforts of the following months were all channeled into an attempt to bury the story as soon as possible, in order to return to the equilibrium that had always existed. It wasn’t clear whether it was the effect of the overdose of benzodiazepine or some form of repression, but Annamaria remembered next to no details of that night. The last images she retained were of Saverio and Lisa semi-naked in the barn, of the dog jumping up on her, then Lisa screaming in her face. Words she couldn’t recall, but which she knew had wounded her.

  She had started going to school again after a week. At the teacher’s training school she studied less and got higher grades. To escape interference from her mother, who otherwise would have wanted to do her homework with her, she had pretended to need help with different programs and learning tools. She often went to the little country library where Lorenzo, the nearly blind librarian, helped her a little, knowing that she didn’t need his help, but that she liked to stay there in silence, reading without being disturbed. Actually, nobody ever came into the library. It had been established through a legacy from a philosopher who had died not long before, and whose descendants frequently visited the area. A few years later, when Lorenzo died, he wasn’t replaced; the place was sold and the books thrown into a cellar, inside boxes that were never opened again.

  And so, Annamaria spent her afternoons with Lorenzo, who was perpetually bent over a book in his thick glasses, forehead leaning in so he could read, in a state of silence that was only interrupted when she asked him to listen when she read her lessons out loud. He told her she was terrific, but it was empty praise. He recommended other reading that might interest her—he had her check out Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, not suspecting the distress it would inflict on her, in the form of the protagonist, Cécile, who was so much like Lisa in her thoughtless amorality. She brought the book back to Lorenzo two days later. He asked her if she’d liked it. Maybe he had hoped to spark a titillating conversation. She shut him down with a “Good book, shitty characters.” She thought about Lisa every day. She tried to distract herself by keeping mind and body occupied: she studied, went riding, watched television. But every now and then, all of a sudden, Lisa came to mind, laughing at her, the tight hug after the cowboy competition. Her eyes. Images that were so powerful that she felt her stomach clench.

  At the new school, nobody made fun of her, and the fact that almost everyone in class was female allowed her to test her doubts every day: whether it was Lisa, specifically, that she liked, or whether she liked women, not men, in general. She still didn’t understand it. Even when the obsession and the rage had abated, she felt like she wouldn’t ever be attracted to anyone but Lisa. She was totally uninterested in the relationships that couples had, thought she would never have a love like that
. Her jealous reaction at Lisa’s involvement with her brother had turned into a kind of lingering envy. Lucky him for getting to kiss her, touch her, penetrate her. How Lisa could be attracted to someone like Saverio was a question she could not answer. But there was an answer, and it was very simple: Lisa liked men, and women liked the men in Annamaria’s family, including the lovely and refined ladies of the Sanfilippi family.

  The anger of the first days was followed by a profound sense of disappointment at the thought of Giulia writing those letters to her, at the falseness that permeated all the ties that bound their two families, so apparently united and full of common interests, but which ultimately came down to two: food and sex, with nothing fairly divided; it was just a power game in which the Biaginis lost miserably. In both cases, her family gave the lion’s share and the other family took, as they were used to doing. They paid with money, sometimes, but they didn’t contribute in any other way. She’d begun to think the way Saverio did, that their interactions would always be hollow. She had lost the will to joke, she never felt like laughing or making anyone laugh. Her castle in the air had crumbled, and out of the rubble she had built a monastery, in which she cloistered herself to recite prayers of mistrust of the outside world.

  From that night on, Lisa and Giulia had not returned to the village. But Filippo came back every week—there wasn’t the slightest change in his routine. Annamaria had asked if she could keep helping out on Sundays with the horseback rides: that was something that always made her feel good. On horseback there wasn’t time to think, she had to make decisions, give orders, and lead, and there were the paths, the low-hanging branches, the wind, the mud, the brackish lake, the sea. The time that passes month after month, which is the only cure for heartbreak.

  One afternoon, instead of going to the library, she kept going straight and went all the way to the Tarot Garden on her moped. She hadn’t planned it: she’d come to the stop sign and thought she didn’t want to shut herself up in that silent room with that disturbing blind man who didn’t bathe very much and whose T-shirts were covered in dandruff. The air was crystal clear and cold, she wanted to talk a bit with somebody, and realized it had been months since she’d gone to see Giovanna. She crossed the path in the bushes. The abandoned chapel had been transformed into a completely new structure. The arbutus was in fruit, and it looked so beautiful to her how the berries had ripened, they were like Christmas decorations, gracefully dispersed among the branches. She heard gunshots in the distance, the barking of dogs, the scent of the underbrush and mushrooms, a smoking chimney. All at once she felt something she hadn’t felt for ages: like she was in the right place, comfortable in all five of her senses. She recognized that her land was a beautiful and comforting place, when it wasn’t infested by alien presences.

  Giovanna was busy when she found her. She’d had to cook at the last minute for two people who then became six; as usual she was knocking herself out to please Niki, who continually changed plans and had no idea what it meant to cook a meal.

  Giovanna was glad to see her. She asked her to give her a hand with the dishes—she was curious to hear about Annamaria because she’d vanished for such a long time.

  “Have you become a snob like your girlfriends, now that you’ve been in the newspaper?”

  “Actually, I’ve been going through a really shitty time. It’s in part because of those friends . . . that is, basically, it’s hard to explain, but one night, I felt so bad that I swallowed half a box of sleeping pills.”

  “What in the hell are you saying, Annamarì?”

  “No, no, calm down, I didn’t want to die, I felt sorry for myself and I felt useless . . . I just wanted to sleep . . . that is, basically, to forget that I was alive.” She giggled as she said it.

  “You haven’t lost your sense of humor. Now let’s go out and smoke a cigarette and you can tell me more.”

  “The cigarette, OK, but talking, no. That’s over. I’m fine now, and I’m happy to see you. My mother’s a little anxious these days. I changed schools. So that I won’t always have her on my case, I go to a library to do my homework, but today I didn’t feel like it, so I came here. Tell me about yourself, about her, and about that asshole we all know you’ll never leave.”

  Giovanna did as her cousin had asked; she talked, without ever losing track of what she was doing. It was Annamaria’s problems that she cared about. But she talked about her own, she spoke to her about Niki in a way that she knew might help her. When they’d finished their smoke, they went back into the Sphinx. Niki wasn’t there. Annamaria’s eye fell on a catalogue. It was a photo of the artist with a rifle in her hand, shooting a painting; she was wearing a fitted white jumpsuit, red hair. “Why on earth isn’t this woman our undisputed idol, the Madonna that we pray to, seek advice from, take as our role model? Why don’t we carry her in a procession through the village?” Annamaria asked.

  Like a sympathetic schoolteacher, Giovanna kept on smiling at her. “Because she’s too different from us. And there’s nothing about her that could serve as a positive example for the women in the village.” She continued, because she wanted the story to serve as a kind of lesson: “There’s a strong destructive impulse at the root of Niki’s creativity, too. I know this from her stories: she’s always had a death wish, suicide fantasies. Her last attempt was only a few years ago. It was when she was in St. Moritz, right before she met Marella, she had planned an artistic suicide, she wanted to go to the hairdresser, do her makeup, put on a beautiful dress, and then get herself some caviar and champagne on ice, her favorite book of poems, the Duino Elegies by a certain Rilke—which she later gave me—then take herself off with a bottle of sleeping pills, so they would find her beautiful and frozen, like Sleeping Beauty. Does that seem like healthy thinking to you? Someone to emulate? And then, luckily, even if she says it was bad luck, two days before her “adventure” on ice, they took her to Bern in an ambulance because she had pneumonia. Dying in a hospital bed wasn’t the way to go about it, that death would have been too inelegant for her, so she recovered, and a few days later, her casual get-together with the princess was her permanent salvation. She began the Garden project, and her thoughts of death were transformed into something else. The same thing was at work when she did the shooting paintings: she used art as a kind of pressure-release valve, she killed her own obsessions. She killed the canvases to keep from shooting herself or other people; men, her father. She shot them, and in the end that made her feel better, she felt vindicated in her own way, fulfilled. She had done something, rather than destroy someone. It’s a very interesting thing.”

  “Cathartic acts. Aristotle talked about that, too. He thought that theater, through enacting tragedies, could help the spectators cleanse themselves. Something like that.”

  “Mamma mia, you know so much.”

  “Now that I’m going to the teacher-training school I’m forgetting the four scraps of Greek I learned at my old high school, and soon I’ll be as ignorant as before, don’t worry.”

  “Who’s worried? The more you know, the better. It’s just people in the village who think that knowing things only confuses people’s ideas, and that being ignorant is the best way to keep in touch with the true things in life. That’s idiotic. Staying ignorant is staying ignorant. Keeping in touch with the most primitive things, with no possibility of elevating yourself. Niki’s always telling me, you’ve got to study, read, and travel.”

  “Yes, Giovà, but how can we take advice from a woman who’s so different from us, who comes from such a privileged background compared to us? What does she know about what it is to be like us? A noble, incredibly rich artist, a model, half American and half French, who grew up in castles between two continents, without ever having to worry about having to work, to clean, to cook. What does she know about what our life means, country girls born to humble parents, without travel, without stimulation, with only the pressure to help Mamma and Babbo in t
he barns, at the restaurant, in the fields, to clean other people’s houses?”

  “Annamaria, you don’t know her. But you have to have faith, if not in her, then in me. She knows very well what suffering is, it has nothing to do with money. Maybe the same thing that we feel, you and I, that all of us feel, the same thing that made you take the sleeping pills. If she tells you to try and perform some ritual, do it. If there’s something that bothers you, a thought that obsesses you, free yourself of it by taking some action. Ghosts don’t exist, but if you pretend to shoot them, they can die.”

  Giovanna had succeeded in saying what she wanted to say, without digging too deeply into the nature of her cousin’s problem, as she’d been asked.

  Annamaria left the Garden with the usual sensation that this place was magical, and that entering it had put her in contact with a truth, with a project to put into action.

  And that’s what she did. She returned home and took Giovanna’s advice. She took the letters from Lisa/Giulia that she’d kept, because they were the most beautiful things she possessed, the things that had moved her the most, and which, reread after the fact, were even more wounding. She took them to the barn. Getting an empty can of peeled tomatoes, one of the big ones that they used first for making the sauces at the restaurant and then for watering the horses. She threw the letters into it, and with a Zippo she’d found on the bar counter, which had a Gothic capital A inscribed on it, and which she’d immediately kept as her own, she set fire to everything. She watched the flame of the letter that was written in pink ink make a blue peak. She repented her action. She felt her stomach clench. What a waste. Once everything was reduced to ashes, she took the can and emptied it into the straw in the middle of the barn, along with Pallino’s shit, the horse that had made Lisa cry. And then she started laughing, all by herself, and felt better. It would have been marvelous to tell Lisa and Giulia what had become of their heartfelt testimonials. Thinking of the faces they would have made, she kept on smiling to herself, flicking the Zippo on and off as she went back to the house.