The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Sauro’s stomach was continually seized by spasms, but he hadn’t given up drinking whiskey. He needed indulgence. A Hail Mary set off in his head, as it did every time that he felt bad and didn’t know what to think. His eye fell on the shelf where there was a framed photo of Giulia with the kids, her blond hair gathered in a clip, her broad smile with the little space between her front teeth, the same light in her eyes as when they had just made love. He laid a hand on his stomach.

  When Filippo stopped talking, he nodded. “Thank you Filì, truly.” No other words came from him, just two fat, silent tears. He stood up to go, and Filippo hugged him at the door. Once outside, he couldn’t figure out what to make of this conversation with his business partner, this friend who was doing so much for him. He had feelings that were hard to define, other than alcoholic emotionality. He got into the car and turned on the radio. “La Bamba” was playing: “Io no soy marinero, yo no soy marinero, soy capitàn, soy capitàn.” I’m not a sailor, I’m the captain. He felt like a failure. Then he started once again going over images of Giulia in his mind, of the satisfaction of having held her in his hands, of having shown her how to surrender to her own desire. Satisfaction that seemed to him like revenge on both of them, on Filippo, because he was sure that he was better in bed and better endowed than he was; on her because, in Sauro’s mind, fucking a woman was also a form of punishment.

  When he got home he threw himself into bed without getting undressed, giving way to a hopeless sleep that began with a sigh of resignation, like someone who is dying after a long and painful illness. He didn’t notice that Miriam wasn’t there.

  The night after Saverio returned home as a free and exonerated man, after the embrace in which his mother said to him through her tears, “You are the ruin of our family,” after the horseback ride, Annamaria had witnessed the scene she had anticipated and had wanted to avoid: the longest and most thorough battle of recriminations and accusations of her life, in which she and her grandfather had participated as spectators, referees, peacemakers without hope.

  There had been the moment when Saverio had screamed the truth: “You two have fucked up royally on my behalf, which nobody asked you to do, not only did I not need it, but you let yourself be screwed over like two idiots. Why in the fuck did you make a decision like that without talking to me? I was a first-time offender, I had a terrific lawyer, she would have gotten me off with nothing, two weeks’ house arrest maximum, I was sticking to saying I didn’t know what I was transporting, I had put all the blame on the distributor. I would have come out of it clean and with my head held high. By pulling off this major bribery shit you’ve put yourselves in the hands of that exploiter Sanfilippi, who’ll have you under his thumb the rest of your lives, you’ve given him the restaurant! You’re both morons. What did I do wrong, God, to end up with two parents this moronic?!”

  Sauro started to lunge at his son, but the grandfather got in the way. Miriam sat crying at the table and shouted at him: “You’re the moron! An ungrateful moron!” Saverio shouted: “I’m getting out of here, or this night will end badly!” and went straight to his own room and locked the door. Sauro kept on screaming insults at him, then went for Miriam: “If there’s a huge moron in this family it’s you: I’d told you that as far as I was concerned it would be fantastic if that piece of shit spent ten years in jail.”

  After the shouting and tears were over, everyone had gone to their own rooms, and Annamaria had pulled out the trundle bed under her bed so her mother could sleep there. Before going to sleep, she’d told her mother that maybe that was how things had to be before they could get better: that they had to tell each other everything, to tell each other the truth, everything they thought of each other, which was something you could only do with the people that you knew loved you; and that, all things considered, this is how things were in a family, in every family; they shouted the worst things so that afterwards they could promise themselves the best, taking account of what the others said about them to better themselves, or to discard harsh judgments that were only prejudices.

  Miriam had taken her daughter’s hand in the dark. “At least I have you, Annamarì, at least I have you, you’re the only good thing I’ve done in my life. Men are all egotists, my daughter, all egotists and ingrates; think hard before you marry. It’s good that you’re studying: if you want to, you can leave this shitty village, I’ll only be happy for you. I’ve made my mistakes already, but you still have time. But if one day you leave, I will come join you and . . .” She couldn’t finish the sentence. Annamaria gripped her hand harder. It was so horrible to hear her mother cry, to hear all the discord in the house. She knew that what she had just said was not true, it was a false thought, and not very consoling, since she didn’t believe it herself, for a start. She knew very well that, in her family, at least, no one was equipped to promise anything good to the ones they felt despised by, and that contempt, the sole tangible sentiment that had been expressed by each of them, was hard to transform into something positive: it ruins and destroys every kind of love.

  She cried in the dark, too. She didn’t want to be the only good thing. It was too big a responsibility, it meant that she was surrounded only by people who were worse than her, egotistical and stupid, who didn’t know how to love, and this thought brought her down because she was just a little girl, and the only thing she wanted, like every girl her age, was to be appreciated and loved, not to appreciate and love.

  17. THE STAR

  Nature. Renewal. A gift.

  A few weeks after those disastrous days for her family, Annamaria had received a letter with a foreign stamp.The waters had calmed a little—Sauro had kicked off horse season by forcing himself to proceed as if nothing had happened, trying to ignore Miriam and Saverio’s partnership ahead of the summer opening of the Seaside Cowboy. His wife had already begun taking their son there on Saturdays and Sundays, when it was open for lunch. Sauro’s absence meant nothing more to the regulars than the official justification suggested: he was a cowboy and preferred being around horses, at the restaurant by the stables; he was tired of the seaside and would rather send his son there, “who made a better lifeguard,” went the official joke.

  Annamaria, back from school, found the letter under her plate. She opened it distractedly while the others were watching a music video program.

  She recognized the handwriting at once.

  Dearest Annamaria,

  I waited such a long time to write to you, and now that I’m doing it I’m not sure it’s the right thing to do; maybe you’ll just want to rip up the envelope without opening it and if so, I’ll understand. The fact is that I need to apologize to you. I feel the strongest remorse, not one day passes that I don’t miss you terribly. So many things have happened since last autumn, so many times I was tempted to write to you or phone you or come find you, but your father forbade me to reach out to you, and I respected that, understanding his state of mind and yours, the sense of betrayal that you both felt for something that was born completely out of good faith, in the frame of the pure affection I’ve always felt for you.

  Since then, I’ve realized that good faith alone doesn’t fix anything, that even if you have the best intentions in the world your behavior can be harmful, and that’s what happened. Over the course of a few months, I laid waste to everything that was dearest to me, from myself, my peace of mind, and the equilibrium of my family to the joyful harmony of the time our families shared in the country and by the sea. I questioned everything. Intending to strengthen our ties, I tied knots that were too tight, that made the rope break. They broke something in me first, but my greatest regret is if by chance they also broke something in you. Apart from trusting in your capacity for forgiveness, your willingness to believe me, I also trust in your youth; everything that is happening to you now will be nothing but a step in your growth, something that can help you and be useful to you, and which you will have time either to for
get or to process. I think I will take advantage of this destruction to build something new. That’s one of the thoughts that have obsessed me here in Berlin. They sent me here to write a report on Germany after the fall of the Wall, and I noticed something extraordinary. My best thoughts, the best things I write—now that writing seems like the only good thing left in my life—are the things I write as if I were writing to you. I’ve sent you hundreds of mental letters these last months, drafted dozens of articles with the same fervor that I brought to the letters I wrote to you about Cuba, about life in Rome, about dance, about school as I saw it, putting myself in Lisa’s place.

  Here in Berlin it’s been overwhelming, I’ve recognized that you’re the primary audience for the stories I want to tell; and beyond that, I’ve understood that, in the end, my idea that I was undertaking that correspondence to cement the rapport between you and my daughter was just an excuse. There’s something more. Now that everything seems foreign to me, I can see the exhausting hypocrisy of human interactions, the empty superficiality of everything that surrounds me, the ridiculous childishness; and the only person I feel I can talk to in a context of total purity is you. I saw you when I was standing on the remnants of the Wall, I took a piece for you as a souvenir. In every kid your age in East Berlin, I saw something of you. The power of something new being born, transforming itself, becoming aware of itself, after having been kept down by a suffocating reality that we, outside, had idealized, needs to be revealed to the world. We had regarded communism as immortal, but we didn’t envy the lifestyle of the communist countries. Now we’ve come to envy the citizens of the East, who are undergoing a moment of change and liberation. We watch them entering the shops of West Berlin, and we feel emotion for their terrible clothes and their hunger to buy things. In only a moment that emotion will morph into disapproval or shame at the thoughtless way that they’ll squander their liberty, which we’ve prepared for them, and which we have already spoiled. We would like for them to remain pure and communist, with no interest in material goods beyond having them available, even though we ourselves are lightyears away from that. I can already see my colleagues on the Left thumbing their noses, “The ex-communists are on the way to becoming the most rabid consumers of all!” I, however, am more focused on thinking about what we ourselves are; the lack of hardship that has defined our era has turned us into people who can no longer take pleasure in anything. We’ve cut ourselves off from reality and would like to trade places with the ones who are enjoying this opportunity for freedom that my generation hasn’t experienced, or that we badly underappreciated. But I’m going off topic, and once again abusing your patience and your ability to listen. In spite of all the good things life has held in store for me, my fate now seems to be to apologize for myself, and it is to you that I make my sincerest apologies.

  The best thing I can think of would be to get a response from you. I would like to continue writing to you and to send you that crumbled piece of the Wall that holds so many meanings, for the world and for us. I would be sorry not to be able to see you grow, to see the marvel that is within you bloom.

  With all my heart,

  Giulia

  Annamaria reread the letter three times. She was sorry she’d burnt up the others. She wanted that piece of the Wall, and she wanted to get more apologies and encouragement like this. Then she thought more deeply about it. What were Giulia’s true intentions? She believed that she acted in good faith, she accepted that her apologies were sincere. But she remembered what had happened because of those letters, because of the illusion they had created, and how bad she had felt when she had believed in Lisa’s love, and when she had discovered that it was all the fruit of a misunderstanding, a game that had been plotted behind her back by a woman who now was begging her forgiveness, but in a way that seemed like a request for an audience because of her own fear of solitude.

  She was very surprised when she realized that her father knew about the letters but hadn’t said anything to her about it; she was even more surprised when she realized that she had been the object of so much of attention from two older women, far removed from her world. She was surprised that both of them had spoken of her as a marvel, when she felt so far from being that, or from becoming it. She was an ugly girl with an unremarkable mind and zero ambition. Where was the marvel? Was it pity? In Giulia’s words she recognized one thing. Her compliments resembled the ones her own mother gave her: attempts to pull her towards them out of personal need, to draw comfort from her presence, from her attention. In her letter, she was giving a sociopolitical lesson, knowing that Annamaria wouldn’t understand it in depth, but she was lucky to be able to do that for her, so she could feel like someone who could make a person gape in admiration at what she was saying. A mild form of oppression.

  Niki wasn’t like that. If Niki needed something, she said so explicitly. She gave curt orders to Annamaria: “Make me laugh! Now go away.” But when she told stories from her own life, it wasn’t to get consolation, or to give facile encouragement, or to feel superior to or stronger than a village girl, or to someone uglier than herself. It wasn’t ever so she could be pitied, either. It was just to give her the gift of her story, to give her true help, the example of something that had gone badly or had gone well for her, depending on how she’d worked through it, so that Annamaria could make something of it herself, so it could serve as an instrument of understanding, of rebellion, of growth, an opportunity to write another personal story, one of her own jokes. Niki was her mentor.

  She put Giulia’s letter back in the envelope and pulled out a box that she kept under the bed. She had put her most precious things inside it: a diary, Dante’s Inferno, the Madonna cassette, leather bracelets. It was her magic box, like Niki’s.

  The artist had given her the idea in one of her personal stories.

  “When I was born, I received as a gift, I never knew from whom, two tarot cards: the Magician, which is the card of creativity and energy; and the Hanged Man, which signifies sensitivity, receptivity, the ability to understand everything and everyone. I believe they were my symbols. I’ve always hated the injustices I saw around me. The racism that the nuns showed at Christmas when they gave donations to the poor families in Harlem; my aunt Gioia who came from Georgia, and who wouldn’t let me sit next to colored people when I went out with her; the difference in the ways that the rich and poor were treated; the disparity between men and women. In the world I lived in, from the time I was little, I had nobody who understood my sense of unease. I learned to play on my own, to live in my own world, a magic world. I had a secret box under my bed. A box of precious wood, inlaid and enameled in intense colors. It was my spiritual refuge. The beginning of a life into which my parents could not enter, not them or anybody else. Nobody could see it. I kept my writings there, my projects, all the magical things that helped me create. I deposited my soul in that box. Since I couldn’t manage to have a deep relationship with my family, I began talking to myself. This is where my need for solitude began, which is as necessary to me as air is to the lungs. You have not suffered my kind of solitude, Annamaria, I needed to isolate myself, to separate myself from the world around me. You have the privilege of having grown up amid all this beauty. I open it every night, that box. Maybe you could make one for yourself.”

  At that moment, Annamaria had wanted to tell her that she was a girl with no imagination, and that there weren’t any magic boxes you could use to save yourself. That she had experienced the beatitude of solitude and the ultimate feeling of escape from her family only once, when she had taken the medicine that she thought would help her sleep better. That her childhood had been void of cultural stimulation, that her family had not accustomed her to beauty, elegance, travel, foreign languages, and fine literature. The nature that surrounded her didn’t seem exceptional to her at all, it was a normal countryside, with manure, insects, the animals covered in ticks. She would have liked to tell Niki that in order to rebel
, you have to be conscious of what you have and what you lack. If you lack everything, you also lack the courage to imagine what you would like. “It’s easy for you,” she had wanted to say. But she had confined herself to nodding and responding, “A magic box. What a nice idea.” And then she made one.

  She put Giulia’s letter at the bottom of the box and never responded to it. To hell with the piece of the Wall, she told herself; and I forgive you, Giulia, there was no need to ask for my forgiveness, I know you didn’t have bad intentions. But simply put, I don’t want to listen to you anymore, I understand that, once again, what you have to tell me is just for your own benefit.

  With more joy than usual she got on the moped and went to the Garden. As soon as she saw Giovanna she said to her, “I’ve got a couple of new jokes to tell Niki—they’re both about Jesus, let’s hope she doesn’t take me for a blasphemer.”