The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Luca, once he’d established that the director was in fact on vacation in a villa in Ansedonia, spent the rest of the summer telling everyone the anecdote, bragging that he’d “saved” Kubrick’s dog, letting it be known that the master had called him, overflowing with gratitude, and that they’d spoken at length, like old friends, and that he’d even come to eat at Seaside Cowboy, albeit on a day when he wasn’t there. Saverio let him do it, shaking his head at his nerve, without giving any more thought to how much of the glory of this success he was taking from him. He was only sorry that he’d given back the dog without even getting a tip; he didn’t even know who he was, this Kubrick. When they explained it to him, he remembered having seen 2001: A Space Odyssey on video with Tamara. He’d thought it was deadly dull, he’d probably slept through the whole movie because he didn’t remember a thing about it.

  But it was another incident that brought about the definitive rupture between Saverio and Luca. For the full moon at the beginning of September, the Seaside Cowboy organized a Night of the Full Moon celebration. It was one of the events that Sauro and Filippo had inaugurated, but much bigger, because Luca and Saverio were able to attract people of all kinds. Before it started, they held a big, private dinner for the Biagini family, along with the Sanfilippi men and some of their friends, for Settimio’s birthday. Nobody ever thought about the old man, but he’d always been there, from the times of the first horse rides to the rise of the Saddlery. He had attended every meal, gone to every barbecue, raised his glass with his calloused hands from the nook where he sat at every drinks gathering. And when you came down to it, everyone was fond of him. The idea had come from Luca, who wanted to do something nice for Francesca, with whom he was infatuated. “Tonight, we celebrate a true man of the soil, a true communist,” he’d told her.

  Settimio was moved. Nobody had ever done anything for his birthday. Miriam ironed his good pants for him, Sauro lent him a light-blue shirt, Annamaria helped him shave himself with the straight razor, which she knew how to use with precision and skill. Once he was shaven and rinsed, she kissed him on the cheeks, and Settimio felt his chest fill with tenderness for this granddaughter who caressed him with her soft hands, which looked like those of his poor Alma. The birthday meal was to be followed by a party with local DJs, the speakers cranked to maximum volume from the terrace facing the sea, the dance floor set out on the beach with plastic pallets positioned underneath to keep it from sinking into the sand, the bar fully stocked with rum, gin, vodka, and tequila, which Saverio had known to do, having foreseen what was in store: he knew his people, their desire to get flaming drunk on a hot night at the end of summer, with the full moon and the dance floor.

  The dinner was cheerful and pleasant. Despite his daughter-in-law’s recommendations, Settimio had started drinking immediately. Sauro and Luca sat next to him, one on his right, the other on his left. Luca refilled his glass for him, Sauro emptied half of it into his own, and Luca topped it up. Before dessert all three of them were drunk.

  At a certain point, Luca tapped his knife on his glass to attract the attention of the onlookers. When he got it, he stood up and said, “I’d like to make a toast to this man, who is a great example of work and strength. Congratulations to Settimio, farmer, great drinker, and above all, a tremendous communist!” Applause broke out, Francesca sang the old Partisan anthem ‘Bella Ciao’, which nobody joined in on, and she stopped at the word “invader,” as the others shouted, “Speech, speech!’ at Settimio. Confused, and drunk enough to have completely lost the power of speech, the grandfather unexpectedly spoke while seated, the capillaries in his cheeks aflame with wine and emotion: “Don’t ask me to give speeches, because I don’t know how. And I wasn’t even a communist, my wife taught me to be a communist. Before her, I would have gone to war to stop working in the fields. I never understood much about politics. I did it for her, made pork chops for the Unità festivals, and she was happy. For her father the miner, who was killed by the Fascists at Niccioleta. Don’t you know about the massacre? They wiped out ninety people, all at once. I can only tell you that when you people act like communists you make me laugh, it’s true. Because you don’t know shit, fucking Maremma. I know you people by now, you could never truly be communists because you don’t know what hunger is, what war is, what it is to battle with the earth every day. You don’t know what it means to have a boss because you are the bosses, fucking Maremma. And you don’t want to be equal to the servants or to the farmers because it’s worse to be workers than to be bosses, and you know it, it’s useless for you to pretend, damned Maremma. You don’t even want us to become like you, because not everyone can be bosses. You want us at the table with you, but only sometimes, to make the gesture. For me this is the first time, and it’s also the last. You’ve cleared your consciences, I’ve celebrated, and I’m content, and everything’s in order. You know what I’ll tell you? I don’t understand a fucking thing, because I’m old and senile, but you don’t look like communists to me. When I look at you, I know that you’ve ruined communism, and that’s that. Because you’re not interested in changing your situation, in fact. You’re interested in keeping it the way it is. Communists are people who fight for change, and the only person who fights is someone who wants to change for the better, who wants to be better than he is. You’re already fine. You were born comfortable, and sitting down, and what you’re interested in is staying seated, eating and drinking. You’re lucky, you’re not communists. And you’re worse than the fascists, because fascists you can recognize, they’re enemies, but you people act like friends. And as my poor father used to say, who believed in God, unlike me, who doesn’t believe anymore, ‘God, protect me from my friends, I can protect myself from my enemies!’”

  Luca had stiffened, he was poised to protest and retort, but Francesca applauded and shouted, “We should take him to Parliament! He’s right!” And everyone started laughing and toasting, and people came out with the cakes. Settimio blew out the candles, extinguishing himself in the process, because he’d never given such a long speech in his life. All at once, he fell silent, spent. Francesca wanted to interview him so much, to get him to repeat what he’d said so she could write a piece for the newspaper, but he pulled back. “I’m just an old drunk, I don’t know how to say any of that again, leave me alone, fucking Maremma.”

  21. THE WORLD

  Plenitude. Attainment. Salvation.

  The air was charged with erotic tension. The DJs had arrived right at the moment of the cake. They’d turned on the inside speakers at eleven, when people were still coming in. To start, they’d mixed a row of the latest R&B releases that made the knees go weak and the hips loosen; Lisa Stansfield, Soul II Soul, voices that whispered sensually that this was the night to touch each other, to find someone to make love to, to keep moving, to come to life, to take a spin around the world.

  Everyone was looking forward to the party: it was the collective culmination of the carefree mood that had accompanied the summers of recent years. There was the kind of ageless happiness of having a taut, suntanned body, of being able to move, and to enjoy every movement. There was emotion, exaltation. But there was also the hatred that the country boys felt for the Romanetti, the “little Romans,” which is what they called them, wanting to express their contempt by using that diminutive, rather than the more common word for Romans, Romanacci, which meant something completely different. The expression “little Romans” connoted wealth and idleness, which to the country boys were offensive symbols of homosexuality. On the Romans’ side, however, there was contempt for the provincials, who seemed to want to keep their distance, but in truth tried desperately to imitate them or to join them, and when they failed to succeed, revealed all their intrinsic and invincible inferiority. In the exaltation of that night, there was also a desire for fistfights, which presented itself as an alternative to the desire to have sex.

  Unexpectedly, after more than a year’s absence, Lisa had had
also shown up. More beautiful than ever, slender, blonde, in a dress of extremely sheer linen without a bra underneath, flat leather sandals, no makeup, new glasses that looked fake. Even Fabione was there, in his torn jeans, a black shirt with a double collar in two different colors, Nikes with a phosphorescent swoosh, his knuckles primed to deliver all the punches he hadn’t thrown.

  Normally Annamaria would have been working at the bar, but she’d let it be known that after midnight she didn’t want to hear about it, she was going to go dance, like everyone else. When she’d seen Lisa again, her heart had leapt into her throat and the blood had rushed to her extremities as if it all wanted to flee at once. She had paused for a moment, but felt her head turning, then, in fact, it really did turn away to avoid greeting her. Lisa had also pretended not to see her, flinging herself blatantly into the arms of someone who probably was her new boyfriend, a guy older than her, who affected the phony air of misery of a philosophy student. After midnight, when Annamaria was heading to take off her waitress uniform, she’d bumped into her as she was leaving the bathroom and there was no way to avoid it. Lisa had said “Hi” in an undertone, and had hurried to get away; Annamaria, jeans and tank top in hand, had raised her head with a jerk that was meant to be a greeting, but her voice hadn’t allowed the words to escape.

  She’d spent the whole night like that, her heart racing, hating herself for still reacting so strongly to the sight of Lisa, when so much time had passed, when she’d felt the conviction that she’d grown up, become more in control, more knowledgeable. She had changed quickly, looking at herself distractedly in the mirror to take off a ribbon that held a half-ponytail on her head, she had refreshed her curls, and drawn a double line of kohl under her eyelids. She was happy with the way the tank top looked on her—she had small breasts, but if she stood straight you could see her broad shoulders and her firm abs. Plus, her ass wasn’t visible in the mirror.

  She hurried to go, making her way with a certain weariness through the people at the bar. Francesca, who Luca now regarded as his girlfriend, was behind the bar; as the boss’s girlfriend she was entitled to be on the other side. She mixed cocktails, giggling as her knife slipped on the peel of a lemon she wasn’t managing to cut. “My god, I’m begging you, I’m totally useless, you do it,” she said to some boy she’d invited to serve himself. Annamaria passed her by without saying anything. Her shift was over, and she just wanted to go dance.

  The dance floor was full. People moved their hips and twirled their sweaty arms as Jill Jones asked, “Tu vuole la mia bocca?” It was great to see them from up high. She might never have seen so many people together at one time. She stopped at the fence to single out her friends, Sara and Betta, Duran. She couldn’t find them. Luca Sanfilippi was next to her. He was also watching the people dance, looking the same direction as Annamaria, at the part occupied by the “locals.” How ugly their girls were! As they bobbed around, flaunting their asses, he thought they looked like a bunch of monkeys. All those hideous women and all those stupid men, those two boastful sexes. He found himself regretting these thoughts, telling himself that, even if he was more intelligent, more attractive, certainly more cultured, and surrounded by more beautiful women, he needed to show solidarity with these people, because they were all cut from the same cloth, when you came down to it. After having formulated these thoughts he had decided to go home. Annamaria, for her part, had spotted Lisa, who, on the right side of the floor, was dancing sinuously, surrounded by an adoring throng. She couldn’t stop looking at her. She felt paralyzed by the magnetism of her long neck, which rose to her tiny little ears, a loose strand of her blond hair. Annamaria wasn’t aware that she was near the speakers, she felt the bass rumbling inside her; heat spread from the center of her chest and made her ribcage pound. She was still in love, fucking Maremma, and she couldn’t deny it anymore. She looked at Lisa and thought she would have loved her forever, that she would have loved only her, because she was the only creature on earth who could be loved, her body was nothing but the obvious symbol of that unique possibility, which held her hostage. She didn’t know whether it was anger or love that was making her stomach seize. And yet, if at that moment she had been told, “Press this button and you will completely forget about Lisa, you will erase her from your life and your memory forever,” she wouldn’t have done it, even though her love was not returned. Silently and with frustration she had shielded her heart from any form of happiness, because she didn’t want to give up on that creature and the invisible weapons of fate she had once received in her arms, she didn’t want to stop looking at her, or to stop remembering that one day when she had used her legs, her lips, her hands, her voice, to do something nice for her.

  The reserved tables were behind Annamaria. Director’s chairs, and bottles of champagne inside buckets loaded with ice. Luca was at the nearest table with his group of friends. “My god it’s insane here in the village! The girls are all sluts . . . you won’t find a thirteen-year-old among them who’s a virgin.” Then it was on to the waitresses: the tall, horse-faced one had a brown bush; the blonde one was totally hairless. “Can you understand what impression that makes? She looked like a little girl, I asked myself, am I committing a crime?” The other one, Sonia, had “a champion clit,” you know, that half-Romanian one from last year—I must say, she was cute, but she didn’t bathe, I had to drop her.”

  “And that one?” said his friend Marco, pointing at Tamara, who was a little ways away.

  “I see that one all the time, but she doesn’t work here and she’s hot stuff, but maybe she’s frigid, I haven’t done her yet. She’s sleeping with Saverio.”

  “But that one works here,” Marco went on, pointing at Annamaria, who had her back turned to them. “Isn’t she the one who was serving tonight?”

  “Oh yeah, her, she’s Saverio’s sister, and she’s improved a lot, but every time she moves, I keep expecting to see her scratch her balls.”

  Everyone burst out raucously laughing. Luca hadn’t realized that standing behind him, an inch from his seat, were Fabione and Saverio, who said in a thundering voice, “I’m going to kill him.” Fabione, who expected no less, though he hadn’t fully understood the situation, raised the stakes: “Fucking Maremma, let me do it, I’ll smash his head in with one punch.” He had already drawn back his arm when Tamara, who had seen the movement, let out a scream that made everyone turn around. Fabione, who by then couldn’t hold it back, discharged his fist on the table in front of Luca, breaking it in two, and sending glasses, bottles and ice flying. The young people sitting at the table instantly got up and formed a circle around Luca, who, drenched in champagne and water, took a second to realize that the situation might degenerate into one of those legendary brawls between the Romans and the locals that raged across different areas of the Argentario, and which he’d always kept his distance from.

  “What in the fuck are you doing?” he shouted, turning to Fabione. “Are you looking for a fight? You’re insane, get out of here right now, I’m calling the cops, and they will arrest you! You’ll pay me for the table. Who the fuck is this psycho?” He looked at Saverio with a perplexed air, who, as he was being held by the shirt by the terrified Tamara, stuck his arm out in front of Fabione and said, “He’s a friend of mine, he just heard what you said about my girlfriend and my sister.”

  “Why, what did he say about me?” said Annamaria, who had turned around when the commotion at the table had drowned out the music, and had stayed motionless, watching the scene.

  “Nothing, let it go. Everyone, go dance, go right now, before I get angry. I’ll clear away this stuff now, and the party will go on.” Saverio broke off, taking Luca by the arm as if to accompany him.