The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  This time, instead of tea, I ordered a whiskey from the nasty barista. I’m nasty too, and I’m smoking. I can’t wait for him to come say something to me so I can respond rudely to him. I spent months in anguish before the summer arrived. I reread the pages written after New Year’s, and once again I felt immensely sorry for myself. Every day, until June, I picked up the phone and dialed the number of the Saddlery, at the times when there was the greatest chance of finding Sauro there. Sometimes I stopped at the last digit, sometimes I let it ring just two times, sometimes I waited for the “hello” and hung up; most of the times Miriam, Annamaria, or Manuela answered, he only answered a couple of times, and I made him repeat “hello” two or three times before hanging up. If there’s a god who protects women who’ve lost their minds, I thank him from the bottom of my heart for having stopped me, even if maybe I would curse him for bringing me to the edge of the abyss this way. I’ve walked along the precipice for an immeasurable length of time, in which I sabotaged my life and the lives of others with an unconscious obstinacy, all on my own. I chose an easy lover, it seemed like an escape without consequences; instead I found myself in a fatal trap. I let my body succumb to desire, and only after that did I make my heart follow, and even my head. I lost sleep, and health, and now I realize, looking back, that all that time, this story depended only on me. He contributed sex, which was no small part, considering the person he is, a man whose dick is his spiritual guide, but I built all the rest with a persistence worthy of Penelope, my fanciful mind worked on the tapestry with the thread of imagination, with feelings, with illusions, weaving a drama that had no connection to reality. I started to hear voices. What a moron. He didn’t love me even for one moment. I’m sure he hasn’t devoted even a thousandth of the thoughts I have devoted to him. Now I’m ashamed of what I wanted to do: to call him, tell him everything, confess my passion, propose to him that we start over, go away and live together somewhere, far from everything and everyone. Using the word passion makes me ashamed now: when we saw each other it was clear that mine was nothing but a gigantic illusion. He greeted me coldly. And despite that, I was bold enough to ask him if by chance he’d called me on New Year’s Eve. With a certain sarcasm, he implied that I was a madwoman even to think he could have done that. He looked at me with contempt. The illusion, and all the humiliating wrong paths he led me on, suddenly became crystal clear. It’s almost like I had an unforeseen eruption of pride, a feeling that I thought I’d almost forgotten. I retrieved a fantasy that Filippo and I had chased years ago, when we loved each other and believed we could also do good by adopting an African baby. How comfortable I felt back inside my dear, old hypocrisy about who’s been raised to tell good from bad, according to a simple, automatic, redeeming rule. I was dead inside, and now I am finally reborn into my earlier life. A resurrection is still better than nothing.

  The Seaside Cowboy had resumed activity after the April weekends, and would open permanently in May. Miriam had delegated all the management to Saverio; she had shadowed him, teaching him the trade for several months. Things had gone surprisingly well at the beginning—Saverio was extremely capable and demonstrated great determination. His mother thought that for once maybe she’d done the right thing: her son was keeping his New Year’s promise. He listened to her patiently and let himself be scolded when he made mistakes. Often, at least in the first period, they went together to do the shopping and to speak to the wholesale suppliers, and together they had decided the weekly supplies, the menu, the rotations of the waiters’ shifts, the selection of new wines. Saverio went personally to pick up the fresh fish and to buy the newspapers to spread out in the display rack every morning for the clientele, who were used to breakfasting with the day’s headlines. He also took care of paying the bills, and made sure that the laundry service brought the clean tablecloths back in time. He had re-stained the woodwork by himself, choosing a sage green that was very fashionable that year, and remounted the photos of the VIPs at the opening party in art gallery-style frames. Luca had never interfered in the management, he’d only asked about the framed photos, which in his opinion gave the effect of a “pizza joint with TV celebrities on the wall,” like the one near RAI in Piazza Mazzini.

  Saverio worked, convinced by his mother that this place was his, that it represented his redemption and his future. Unfortunately, Luca arrived every now and then to remind him of the truth; in the end, he was the boss.

  Filippo, without anything truly having been agreed upon with his son, had decided to hand him the reins. When he arrived at the village on weekends—practically all of them—he spent his time at the farmhouse, on horseback, or at the Saddlery with Sauro. Not that he’d given up networking; he’d simply diverted it from the Seaside Cowboy to his own home. He’d hired a new Filipino couple, Màlia and José (rebaptized Malìa and Giusè), who lived in the annex of the farmhouse, in front of which he’d placed a table of raw wood that seated twenty-four, with an outdoor oven set in brickwork near it. When the Sanfilippis arrived with their friends, all summer long, the couple was not granted any days off. Màlia knew how to cook very well, especially Roman dishes she’d learned from the lady she worked for before. When the lady had died, she had been left without savings and without any of the things the old lady had promised her when she was alive, which the heirs had refused to recognize (“The mink coat? I mean, can you imagine? Besides, what can she do with it, she’s under five feet tall!” the granddaughter, one of Giulia’s best friends, had said to her), and she had returned to the Philippines. For long enough to marry José and have a son, and then they had moved back to Rome, finding work with the Sanfilippis.

  “They hit the jackpot with us!” Giulia thought to herself every time she paid them their salary at the end of the month. At the beginning she’d thought it might have been nice to let them bring their child, too, who had stayed back in Manila with his grandmother, but soon she took care not to propose that; it seemed to her that she was already doing too much for them. If the whole family were brought over, who would ever have been able to pry them out?

  That summer, the beautiful allée of cypresses that led to the Sanfilippis’ farmhouse was trod by the choicest leather loafers. The outdoor oven was perfect for lavish fish dinners, consumed in the shade of the olive trees, amid the droning of the cicadas, where there would be digestifs after dinner based on limoncello that had been made in the house, where the guests would throw off their elegant linens and do battle with watermelons in their bathing suits, finishing with a swim in the pool. Glasses clinked around Filippo, forging tacit alliances. Endless arguments went on, often about food, the best wines, and private access to the sea, which allowed you to be on the beach with nobody else around, even to go nude. There was always someone among them who occupied one of the twenty estates in the region with more than twenty-four hundred acres, which had been bought by Milanese businessmen in the twenties who had privatized everything in the area between the countryside and the sea. They were happy to find themselves among their own kind, just them. Filippo liked to teach everyone how to make the best salmoriglio marinade for the sea bream: to warm the oil in a bain-marie, not to use too much grated garlic, to add parsley and oregano in place of rosemary, which he considered banal. Only occasionally were there political debates, usually empty battles over principle, which Filippo liked very much and knew how to lead without getting into too much hot water. His manner of shutting down arguments, with a cutting, “Let’s talk about this again when you know more about it,” slowly lowering his eyelids and inhaling on his cigar, often irritated some of his guests, usually women or men who were younger than him, who had renamed these evenings “the Communist Lunch Salons.” Later the expression was abbreviated, and when Giulia’s friends ran into her in Rome they would ask her, “When are you giving the next C.L.S.?” A young Milanese fashion photographer had had his assistant make audiocassettes, which he had distributed to every couple at one of the lunches: Side A, titled “C.L.
S.,” were songs written by Italians: De Gregori, De André, Dalla; Side B, titled “Communists Just Want to Have Fun,” had dance tracks.

  Even if the members of the Sanfilippi entourage kept on going to the Seaside Cowboy for the beach and the sun umbrellas, the regular patrons of the restaurant, especially the night crowd, had gradually changed since Sauro and Filippo had left the management to their sons. There were younger patrons, mostly friends of Luca’s, but also friends of Saverio’s, who didn’t shy away from the bar or the company of the waitresses, all of them local girls, to whom he gave brusque orders, alternated with occasional treats, like the fifty thousand lira Saverio tucked into the back pockets of the prettiest ones, at the end of one of the nights when the earnings had been high, and, as a result, so had his spirits.

  The first month after school was out, things had gone really well at the place, in part because of the idea, which the fathers had criticized fiercely as an unacceptable loss of tone—of putting a big television on the veranda so people could watch sporting events. The profits were still high, and Saverio was sure he was doing the right thing, that he would pay his mother back for all the moral and material debts he owed her, even if—he repeated this as often as possible—he certainly hadn’t asked her to take them on.

  The greatest effort Saverio had to make to perform his job, reassuring himself and the others that this truly was the right path for him, had nothing to do with hard work. The greatest effort was hiding the hatred he felt for Luca. Unlike his father, who had found in Filippo a friend he could envy but also admire, and whose reflected status he enjoyed, perfectly at ease in the light that fell on foot of his pedestal, Saverio saw in Luca everything he’d always hated: the arrogant way he emphasized the differences between them, his ill-concealed braggart’s manner of waving in Saverio’s face all the things he would never be able to have. Even though he was definitely more buff than his Roman contemporary; even though he’d learned to dress like him—Levi’s 501s, Timberland deck shoes (no more cowboy boots, not even in winter), solid-color shirts, strictly linen, rolled up to the middle of the arm (never T-shirts, those were just for sleeping), a steel Rolex Submariner watch (which had replaced his more vulgar gold version from the gym days); even though he had given up his mullet haircut, he remained less desirable, nonetheless. Of the two, the alpha male was indisputably young Sanfilippi.

  Luca arrived from Rome with groups of friends who belonged to families like his, well-dressed, with big cars; students who were taking a few extra years to finish law school, or who would eventually get PhDs in literature, all of them destined to be called “Doctor” one day. For years they had completely ignored Saverio. Then, when he started running the restaurant, they’d become almost too friendly, with a succession of pats on the back, and “Terrific!” and “Well done” and “Hey handsome, how are you?” Luca never showed up with the same girlfriend three times in succession. He never let anyone at his table pay: they were “my guests,” it went without saying. Saverio never protested, confining himself to putting aside all the orders and the related bills, which he totted up on a printing calculator, his method of avoiding tax receipts. Then he would staple Luca’s bills together, intending to show them to the accountant when the time came to sum up the expenses and earnings. Saverio had a salary, and he also pocketed a few banknotes under the table every day, which made a difference at the end of the month. It seemed to him like he deserved it, given how much he had to put up with. All July, Luca had done nothing but show up with hordes of friends and give them free lunches and dinners in his restaurant. After all, he already had another job; for a year he’d been the personal assistant to a government minister, the same one who was a fixture at the dinners at their country place, and who’d given Luca a small statue by Pino Pascali for his graduation, which Giulia had installed in the former pigsty that had become a winter garden.

  Saverio attempted a weak smile; it cost him enormous effort to remain patient and smiling every time Luca arrived with his plethora of pals, who always spoke loudly in Roman dialect, not because they were badly brought up, but out of their habit of letting everyone hear their brilliant pronouncements. “Savè, today there are only seven of us, bring us a coupla bottles right away, and some of those good antipasti your mom makes, the hot ones, with fish,” Luca said to him, pointing to the kitchen with his hand, as if Saverio were his Filipino, as if he were incapable of going to get those “coupla” bottles himself. But Saverio kept his temper.

  Before the decisive break, there were two episodes that brought them one step away from a fight.

  Every June, a dozen little kids from a group home came to spend their vacation in a residence run by nuns, a mile away from the restaurant. The house, which belonged to the diocese, was big but was in a state of semi-neglect. Uninhabited for most of the year, it had big dormitories with windows that had no blinds, and bunkbeds for the children; a room with cots for the nuns; a living room with plastic tables and chairs of the lowest quality whose legs continually broke; and a kitchen with two broken-down cabinets, a recycled stove, and a stone sink covered in ineradicable mold. As there was only one bathroom for twelve children, the nuns only bathed four of them a day, since there was only enough hot water for a few showers; and there was a rule that you could spend no more than three minutes in the toilet. The courtyard of the home had been invaded by underbrush, which the sisters would clear away little by little with the children, while year after year they attempted to revive the vegetable garden. The nuns and the older guests made sandwiches in the morning, and then they all headed off to the beach on foot. They set out two beach umbrellas there, beneath which the nuns sat, all dressed in white, to pray as they sweated and watched the children play in the sand and in the waves, without ever losing sight of them, and shouting at them if they went too far away. The group went to the Seaside Cowboy every day to use the bathroom, but every other day, the nuns bought ice cream for the children. Every time he saw them arriving, Saverio raised his eyes to the heavens: “Here they come again, the procession of snot-nosed kids.” He never gave them a hard time, but one day, when the bathroom line was very long, and his favorite customer, a young mother divorced from a semi-famous film director, had complained, he went to chase them away, and told the nuns that this was not a public restroom.

  “No offense, but when they’re all here together they make a mess, they leave the place dirty, they bother the customers. What do you think we are, the Salvation Army?”

  The nun apologized and called the children to order. By chance, the scene was overheard by Francesca, the girl Luca had brought, a young staffer for the newspaper Manifesto, who reported the scene indignantly to her boyfriend, who was beyond distracted, checking her out in her bathing suit. Luca jumped at this opportunity. He got up from the table, found the nun, and, in a loud voice, looking at Saverio, not at her, said theatrically: “Sister, pay him no mind. There are some people here who don’t know the meaning of the word compassion. But don’t you worry, we’re not all like that. I am the owner. Consider this place your home. If the children want ice cream, they can have it whenever they like. In fact, starting tomorrow, the children can come here for lunch, as my guests. Is it all right if we make pasta al pomodoro and cutlets for them? If you tell me how many days you’ll be staying here, we can see to the menu; I’ll let you speak to our cook, who’s excellent.”

  Saverio swore softly. As Luca approached, he said, “It’s easy to be generous with other people’s work, isn’t it? You’re the guy who made the grand gesture, but who will cook, who will serve at table, who will clean up? The nice boss has come to save the day, here he is. Why don’t you go and clean the bathroom after fifteen of them have been in there? I’ll show you what they leave behind.” Luca remained impassive behind his sunglasses, picked up the bundle of newspapers the girl had left on the table, and left with her.

  The next day, Luca and Francesca returned to Rome, and the children appeared reliably
after that for a whole week. Saverio seated them at noon, and even though he didn’t give them more than half an hour to eat, they got into everything. Really, he was perfectly happy to feed them, but they got over-confident. One of them in particular, a little boy of twelve, black as pitch, acquired the habit of going to the ice cream freezer and serving himself on his own—getting ice creams for himself and the others. The third time, Saverio came up to him and said in his ear, “Listen, blackie, that’s stealing, and your nun didn’t teach you that, right? If I catch you one more time with your hands in that freezer, I’ll cut them off like they do in your country. You got that?”

  The little boy nodded yes. He was alarmed by all the muscles, but he could tell that Saverio wouldn’t have done anything to him. The times after that, he showed up with a smile, in a faded swimsuit and multi-colored flip-flops, asking, “May I take an ice cream cone?” Saverio raised his head. “Take it and get lost.”

  A few days later an article come out in Manifesto describing the generous act at the Seaside Cowboy—refreshment from the “Little Athens” of the Maremma, which was a place of great compassion, and offered warm meals to the orphans of Sant’Eusebio.

  That was the last summer for the nuns and the little kids. The next year, the diocese’s farmhouse was bought for a laughable sum, and elegantly renovated by the brother of the government minister Luca worked for as a personal assistant.

  One other event over the course of that summer tested the rapport between Saverio and Luca, and it involved a dog. One night, Saverio was coming back from the restaurant Da Vinicio di Ansedonia. The manager was his friend, and was the only one who could get a couple of boxes of Capsula Viola chardonnay for him, which the Seaside Cowboy had unexpectedly run out of. It was already almost three in the morning, and he was on the road near the archeological site of Cosa, when Saverio had suddenly seen a dark shape emerge from a ditch and stop in the middle of the road. There were a lot of roe deer in this area, that went in and out of the pine forest of Feniglia, but upon braking and seeing it in his headlights, Saverio realized that the creature that had appeared was not a deer but a very big dog, a beautiful Irish setter, the biggest one he’d ever seen. He got out of the car, approached, and saw that he had a collar but no tag. He said to him, “Come on, handsome,” and stroked his head behind his ears. The animal let him do it, wagging his tail, just a little bit wary. Saverio carried him to the car and put him into the back without meeting any resistance. He was too beautiful to leave there, he would have ended up on the Aurelia, and besides, he surely was worth a lot of money. At his family’s farm, they would give him something to eat and drink, then they would set him up in an empty stall in the stable. After two days the area was filled with signs with photographs of the lost setter, who answered to the name Kubrick. A reward was promised to anyone who had found or seen him. The telephone number corresponded to Vinicio’s. Saverio called, but his friend wasn’t there; he left his name with someone, and said he would keep the dog at the Seaside Cowboy all day, in case anyone wanted to come pick him up. That afternoon, a foreign lady arrived, middle-aged, maybe German, who thanked him profusely and took back the dog, but to Saverio’s great disappointment did not give him a reward. The next day a call came from a man who spoke English; by complete chance Luca was around, and Saverio asked him to take the call, because he didn’t understand a word. The man introduced himself, it was Stanley Kubrick, and he wanted to personally thank him for having found his dog, and also to compliment him on their fresh ice cream, he’d come by the place once to get some (he probably didn’t even know which restaurant it was, given that the Seaside Cowboy didn’t serve homemade ice cream). He said goodbye and hung up without giving Luca time to say anything but, “Thank you, sir.”