The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  “Not to worry, blasphemy doesn’t exist for her, she explained this beautiful thing to me, which is that her sense of the sacred isn’t connected to religion. More than that, let’s hope she gets the jokes—Tuscan humor is not in her bones.”

  “If she doesn’t laugh, I’ll redo the sketch with Madonna and her cousins. Dunno dance, and I thawt I was dreamin’ still works.”

  It still worked, and Giovanna burst out laughing.

  It went as she’d thought it would; the joke about Jesus mocking Judas at the Last Supper when he says, “Lord, Lord, is it I who will betray you?” fell flat. The one in which he asks Saint Peter to put him up on the Cross while centurions are violently attacking, so that he can get a better view of the landscape from up high, went over a little better, but the one that worked best was the joke about the three ascetics who go to a mountain to meditate. They remain silent for three years, then one of them says, “Look, a cloud.” After three more years of silence, the second guy says, “Look, another cloud.” Then, after three more years of silence, the third bursts out, “Guys, if you just came here to horse around, I’m leaving!”

  Niki was overcome by a fit of laughter. This time Annamaria made a decisive move: for the first time, she asked Niki to tell her another story in exchange for her joke. She had meant to ask her something about her relationship with her parents, how she had managed to liberate herself from them, instead she asked her why she’d stopped shooting at the canvases.

  “I’m glad to hear you finally asking something, instead of saying you’re sorry. I decided to stop with the shootings because I felt that the performances were becoming a drug: I had become dependent on the ritual, and after every session I felt empty. One of the last shootings, which was titled King Kong, was one of my favorites. There was a dinosaur attacking a city, two airplanes crashing onto skyscrapers, and masks of the faces of politicians from all over the world, while higher up, at the left, there was a woman in childbirth. I shot the last of the monsters that had been my favorite theme. That moment was a watershed: I started reflecting on women, on their roles. My anger had left, what remained was suffering. After a certain period of time, the suffering went away too, and I returned to the atelier to make joyous creatures that celebrated feminine power. It was as if at a certain point, after my death and destruction phase, all at once I had found serenity and a certain stability again. The thing I couldn’t have foreseen is that I had found that stability by stopping pretending, by stopping believing that I could attain it in the ways that are normal for other people. Home, family, conjugal peace. I wasn’t cut out for paradise. I had left paradise and followed the fire of hell. My north star was Jean, he showed me the way, telling me only that I had to stop pretending to be what I was not, to remove my mask and accomplish my projects, however freakish they might seem. We were the enfants terribles of the New Realists. I linked myself to somebody who breaks all chains—wasn’t that a paradoxical stroke of good fortune?”

  “If you say so! But tell me, when did you start making your Nanas? Because those are really different from the bleeding paintings, wouldn’t you say?”

  “When they kicked us out of the Impasse Ronsin, Jean and I decided to buy a big property in Soisy-sur-École in the country about thirty miles south of Paris. It was called the Auberge du Cheval Blanc. It was an enormous place, strange and inspiring: it had been a cinema, a ballroom, a restaurant, a bordello. When we bought it, it was falling into a state of total disrepair, it was overrun by weeds, nettles, and scrap metal, which actually made Jean ecstatic. We renovated it, and I set up my atelier on the ground floor, in the old ballroom, where there were still signs that said “dancing” and “bar.” After a while, the cold became unbearable, and I fought with Jean about putting in heating, but he didn’t want to. We managed to create a stimulating atmosphere, friends came to see us from Paris, we had very long lunches, accompanied by interesting debates. Jean took notes, and I made sketches on sheets of paper. I began a series of collages, of mothers and brides. I stripped away the peaceful part of the sacred and serene image of maternity, the sweetness. Childbirth is an atrociously painful ordeal. My brides were tragic dolls, all dressed in lace, but disturbing; would they end up marrying monsters?”

  “My god, the Nanas don’t seem tragic to me, they seem like fat little dancing girls. Like me when I dance to Madonna’s songs.”

  “You’re so goofy. I was inspired very much by Clarice, a friend of mine who was pregnant at the time. I saw in her round, proud body the inspiring idea of a woman who was no longer dominated, who creates and rules the world. Nana is a word that means “girl” in slang, but I always liked the way the name sounded like “Inanna,” the goddess who’s the daughter of the moon, who can assume a thousand and one forms and embody all feminine roles. I liked it that they became big, bigger than men, and colorful. The first time I showed them, in Paris, I took them wrapped in plastic to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, loading them into my convertible Deux Chevaux with the top down. The exhibition was called Nana Power. That happened more than twenty years ago, and I still see it as the portent of a new matriarchy, the only possible response. I replaced all the sad wives and the mater dolorosa with joyful, exaggerated, liberated generous mothers, proud of their rotundity, ready to dance. Of course, not everybody liked them: to a lot of people they had a terrifying aspect. My granddaughter Bloum even said they looked like an army, and as an army, they provoked fear. They’ve got small heads, and they’re monstrous, creatures outside the ordinary. One of the first models for the Nanas was my sister Elisabeth, when she was pregnant. When she committed suicide, everyone in the family hid it from me for more than a year, telling me it had been an accident.” Niki paused, looking into space. “How shocking to think that you could protect people with lies. When the truth comes out it’s a thousand times worse to bear, because it adds to the betrayal.”

  Annamaria got distracted, thinking of those words, then asked, “What was your mother like?”

  “She was more beautiful and elegant than me. From her I acquired my love of clothes, hats, music, fine food, art. She had a cabinet filled with colored glasses that I always adored, and I realized that I’ve used the same colors in this Garden. Her house was full of mirrors. Years later, I noticed that I’d filled the Garden with mirrors, I was even living in a house whose walls were made of mirrors, but in which I couldn’t see myself all in one piece. Everything reflected me, but I can only see myself in shards. Doesn’t that have to mean something?

  “I loved my mother besottedly, I craved her attention, and at the same time I hid from it. I wouldn’t have wanted to be her for anything in the world. I didn’t want to end up with a life like hers: outwardly perfect, full of privilege, but in truth a trap of hypocrisy, devoid of choice. Her frustration served as a perpetual warning to me: I had to do everything I could to not become like her. She had no way of freely expressing herself, and that fact made her devour her own family. But I was at risk of following her path. When I recognized that, I made the decision to separate myself from my children. It was painful, but it was also the only way to not devour them in turn. My mother was a prisoner of rigid rules that could not be questioned. A woman pays for the well-being she acquires from a rich family with her own freedom. Only the men had freedom. I wanted to be a woman and to have the same power that men had, but without becoming a man. I’ve devoted my entire life to that, it has cost me enormous effort, and I don’t even know if I’ve achieved it.

  “You, Annamaria, need only to understand what you want, and to do everything you can to get it, without letting anyone tell you what you should be. Freedom is something you have to take: you can’t wait for it to be handed to you. You must try to be true to yourself. We women can do everything, even if now you’re looking like you don’t believe me.”

  “Of course I don’t believe you, Niki. Women like you are only born once a century, and I, in all modesty, was not born one of them. You can�
�t understand this, it’s like Totò, an actor from Naples, who was a member of the nobility like you but made people laugh.”

  “You see? Noble like me, but he can make people laugh like you. You and I have more in common than you think.”

  “Sure, hand me a trowel so I can build a palace shaped like a horse and live inside it. Actually, maybe the idea of living in a horse isn’t so original . . . Can’t you see that I’m not creative at all?”

  “What does that matter, if you make me laugh. You can be an actor, like Totò.”

  “An actress? With this ass? Actresses are beautiful—have you even looked at me?”

  “Was Totò good looking?”

  “No.”

  “See?”

  “What does that have to do with anything? He was a man. Men are forgiven for being ugly if they make people laugh; women, no.”

  “That’s your own idea, you should get rid of it immediately.”

  “Fine, I can make people laugh, and I can ride horses. I’ll invent a cabaret rodeo for myself. You know what I’ll call it? “Cackles with the Cowgirl.” “Unrein Your Laughter with Annamaria!” “The Ugly Cowgirl Live: A Gymkhana of Laughter!”

  Niki couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed so hard. This girl was a gift.

  Annamaria didn’t remember when or how, but during the course of these afternoons, she had learned so much about Niki’s life, and picked up so many insights. Partly from her stories, and partly from Giovanna’s, which her cousin explained and interpreted for her.

  “You see, Annamarì, that’s how Niki is, you can’t expect anything from her that you’d expect of a normal person. Sometimes she makes absurd requests, as if she were a child. She shouts orders, gets mad, acts up. She heads off someplace and wants me to sleep here, not knowing that I’m afraid to be in here on my own; I can’t take a day off because she wants me to spend all my days cooking for her, she doesn’t like what other people make for her . . . But she’s an enchantress, she’s generous, she understands everything. The other day a box arrived in the mail, samples of all the things she sells to finance the Garden—her perfume, the scarf with Nanas on it. She was behind me, and without even seeing that I was watching, she took the fuchsia scarf, and said, “You’ll like this one, it has your favorite colors, I’m giving it to you.” In other words, she had understood my desire even when I was behind her, you understand? Then again, sometimes she seems like a little girl; and other times I want her to be my mother. Once she got it into her head that she needed to use the lace the women around here use to stamp into the clay, to give a local identity to her High Priestess statue. She ordered me to go out and gather panties and other things made of lace, but think about it—who would want to give me that? I had a fit and made Rico go with her to personally visit the countrywomen and ask for their things. In the end, her haul was as meager as mine: the aunties she asked to take part in the project wanted to hold on to their doilies and lace.

  “Obviously, she doesn’t like Rossano, she says he’s too jealous—that he has a negative influence on me, that he clips my wings and makes me feel like I’m always wrong. But when you come down to it, she has nothing to teach me about jealousy— just imagine, she told me that when she and Jean were in Paris, he made absurd scenes, like, when she went to visit her friend Clarice who lived near them, he fired shots in the air with his rifle to make her come home: he fired until she came back. She tells that story as if it were some kind of game they were playing, partly for themselves, partly for their friends, but all the same I know that she was incredibly jealous of Jean. Just think, he had a baby with someone else the year they got married. He’s always been a major skirt-chaser, then he actually got back together with that other woman, and went to live with her in Switzerland. She’s always had a weakness for that kind of man, womanizers, as she calls them in English. Even when she was married, she and her husband didn’t ever think of acting like a normal couple, who either stay faithful or secretly cheat on each other. No, they said to each other, let’s do it openly. They only had one rule, which was that if a potential lover truly bothered one of them, they would tell the other to avoid them. For example, Niki’s husband had said to her, ‘Listen, among all those artists you hang out with, go with whoever you want, but please keep away from Jean Tinguely. That one seems dangerous to me.’ And actually, he was right . . . you see how it’s turned out.”

  “Gosh, even the husband was far-seeing. Excuse me, but what does Niki know about Rossano? That is, does she know him? Has he been here? Do you tell her things that even I don’t know?”

  “No, not really. He’s never come. Every now and then I’ve mentioned his existence to her, every now and then he calls me here. But Niki knows and takes an interest, but in a rather strange way. She never gossips, she almost never talks about herself, and she only asks me questions occasionally, when we’re alone. Actually, I’m pretty amazed that she’s told you all these things, that she’s revealed so much. With me, it’s like she senses things, and knows what’s happening with me. She knows Tiberio, because he’s come a few times, I listen to him on the radio, so she knows who he is. When Tiberio calls, she notices immediately. She says that I respond cheerfully and instantly start laughing, and then she says to me: “See? That’s the man for you. As soon as he starts talking you start laughing, he makes you feel good, he puts you in a good mood.” I’ve told her so many times: “Niki, but we’re just good friends, I’m not in love with him,” and she tells me: “You’ll see.” If he calls and she picks up, he starts kidding around and telling her all the words he knows in French: abat-jour, madame, consommé, vol-au-vent, and she starts to laugh.”

  “Well, you know, it’s obvious she has a weakness for people who make her laugh, it’s part of her cure.”

  “Sure. But it’s also obvious that Niki sees things that we don’t.”

  Annamaria would remember that conversation on the day that Giovanna asked her to be a witness at her wedding to Tiberio, five years later.

  18. THE MOON

  Intuition. Femininity. Mystery.

  When a stubborn woman gets it into her head to rearrange her life, there’s no escape for anyone. Miriam decided that the best thing to do was to restore the necessary balance to make them at least look like a happy family. That wasn’t easy, and it couldn’t happen immediately, but during the months of armed peace that elapsed after Saverio’s release, she tried to clean up dirty laundry at home and to keep her husband and son as far apart as possible throughout the course of that busy summer.

  In the winter, when the Seaside Cowboy was closed, Miriam decided they should all go someplace together over the holidays, and made plans for spring, too. She and Sauro would return to looking after the Saddlery; as for Saverio, he would work as the manager of the Seaside Cowboy, because in her opinion he’d already learned everything. “You and Luca Sanfilippi are both the bosses, don’t you forget it,” she always told him, leaving out that his ten percent of the profits came to little more than a month’s tips, and that he was far from being the boss.

  Annamaria would help out wherever Miriam decided, according to which place she was needed to diffuse tension. She said this straightforwardly: “My daughter is like the dog in the stables, she brings peace, she’s like the roses in the vine rows, she catches the grape blight first, so you can catch it before it spreads elsewhere.” Miriam knew that Annamaria was the only one who was capable of dispersing the atmosphere of reciprocal condemnation that the men in her family created when they were together. But she didn’t know that she herself had a neurosis that made her see the dark side of everything, that her motherly countenance bore an eternal expression of worry, imbued with implicit grievance and devouring anxiety.

  Because of that, to placate her, her husband and son did not oppose her idea of going to the mountains at New Year’s. To Sauro, the idea of leaving the Saddlery in the hands of the waitresses at New Year’s
seemed absurd, but he knew he owed Miriam some of the bourgeois normalcy he’d never given her. They had a Land Rover, and a reservation at Madonna di Campiglio, the hotel where the Sanfilippis usually went, but they’d been going to Cortina for a few years. Miriam had bought ski suits and Moon Boots, snow hats and gloves, a hairband of fuchsia wool trimmed in badger fur that brought out her highlights—she’d spent a fortune in the best-known sporting goods shop in Grosseto. Besides, even if they still had debts and had practically lost one of their restaurants, the flow of revenue had stayed high, they had rented out the old farmhouse under the table, and they kept practically no receipts for the horseback rides and the meals at the Saddlery. At that time, and in their region, money changed hands quickly, and in cash; it went out, came back, and even the farmers in a lot of places had started to have liquidity. You had the impression that almost everyone had money, and they attested to that with their clothes, cars, watches, second homes, exotic travel.

  The truth was that it was only Miriam who wanted to take this vacation. She was ready to enjoy a week as a fine lady. Full board, a hotel with a sauna and hot tub, a shuttle bus to the slopes, and ski school already reserved for Annamaria. Not for Saverio, no, he would ski with Sauro, who got by because when he went to see his mother’s relatives in Amiata they always did a little skiing. It might have been a good moment for the two of them to come together. She, on the other hand, would have basked in the sun holding a foil reflector, waited for the others in the armchairs at the outdoor bar at the top, read The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, which Annamaria had given her for Christmas, and she’d also have bought fashion and gossip magazines, maybe she might see the singer Mina Mazzini there—didn’t she have a house in Madonna di Campiglio, Mina? She would have waited for the slopes to close so they could all drink hot chocolate with whipped cream together before going to shower and heading down to dinner. It was the second trip they had taken in their life together; the previous one had been a cruise to the Canary Islands for their fifteenth wedding anniversary. That hadn’t gone too well: both she and Sauro had gotten food poisoning, probably from the shrimp cocktail in the buffet. They didn’t have good memories of those days, spent in large part sitting on the toilet while their children were entertained by the cruise directors with amateur theatricals, in which Annamaria and Saverio played a magician and his dog.