The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  I read the single line over several times. Whatever Robin meant by the comment, someone else has chosen to send it to me, but is it a threat or a warning? It’s an infuriatingly oblique line of prose and I suddenly wish I had Chihiro here to analyze it. I’m too tired now, though, to puzzle through its meaning. It will have to wait until the morning.

  I crawl into bed, placing the heavy Maglite on my night table, and try to put the images from the paintings from my mind, but they follow me into my sleep. In my dream I wander through a dark wood. Although I can’t see anyone, I know I’m not alone. I hear the rustle of mice through the dry underbrush and glimpse yellow eyes in the branches. Then the yellow lights swell and become the dancers from the Midsummer Night’s Dream pageant—only instead of fairies they’ve become sinuous demons twining themselves through the tree branches—and the rustle becomes the thunder of horse hooves bearing down on me. I start to run in the sickening slow motion of nightmares, but I can already feel the hot breath of the horse on my neck and I know that it’s only a matter of seconds before I feel the steel of the knight’s blade cleave my back in two.

  As I feel myself falling under the horse’s hooves, I startle awake, flinching away from the weight of a hand at the back of my neck. Before I can untangle the skeins of the dream from reality, I’ve reared up against the headboard and grabbed the heavy metal Maglite from my night table to strike at the intruder.

  “Rose, it’s me, Mark,” I hear before I can bring my arm down. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “Mark? Jesus, how did you get in?”

  “I finagled an extra copy of the key from Claudia Brunelli. I thought…well, I thought you might be expecting me.” Even though he’s whispering, his voice has regained the formality he uses in faculty meetings. He’s clearly hurt that I hadn’t been expecting this surprise midnight visit.

  “I thought you might…Claudia said you were on this floor…” I stammer, feeling like I’ve been caught out in an indiscretion. “I must have been in a very deep sleep,” I explain, “and then I was confused when I woke up. Being in a strange place and all.”

  My eyes have adjusted to the darkness enough to see his shoulders relax. He moves toward me and takes the flashlight out of my hand and lays it down on the night table. “Jesus, that thing’s heavy. I’m lucky you didn’t hit me with it. Look how tense your shoulders are.” He starts to massage my shoulders and I try not to flinch at the feel of his hands on the back of my neck. I still can’t quite banish the images from my dream. Even when we make love I can feel the yellow eyes of the owls watching us, and when Mark tries to turn me over—into the position I know he favors—I let him know that’s not something I want to do tonight. I can’t quite make myself turn my back to him.

  CHAPTER

  FIFTEEN

  MARK IS GONE BY THE TIME I WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING. FOR A FEW moments, lying in the strips of pale gray light from the slatted shutters, I wonder whether his visit wasn’t a dream—an extension of my night journey through the woods—but then I notice a Post-it note anchored beneath the flashlight on the night table.

  “I’ll tell the kitchen to leave a breakfast tray outside your door so you don’t have to come down to breakfast. I know how anxious you are to get to work on the archives.”

  He’s signed the note “Mark.” No “love,” in case anyone should see it. Although we’ve agreed that such discretion is as much for my benefit as his, I can’t help feeling disappointed at his caution. Maybe it’s the love poem I read last night that’s made me want to hear my lover declare boldly, as my supposed sixteenth-century poet did, “I long for thee more than the wind can know, / More desperately than roses for the sun.” I repeat the lines to myself as I open the shutters and step out onto the balcony, closing my eyes and turning my face up to feel the morning sun on my skin and breathing in the scent of lemons and roses on the air. Opening my eyes, I watch the sun crest the ancient hill town of Fiesole, setting the red-slate roofs on fire, and then wash down into the shallow bowl that holds Florence, the light turning the city into a sparkling mirage of tower and dome, the arched bridges that span the Arno springing into life as gracefully as deer leaping a stream. “The air trembling with clarity,” as the poet Guido Calvacanti put it.

  Most people looking at this city think of the masterpieces of art contained within its churches and museums. Michelangelo’s David, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Brunelleschi’s great dome. But even though I’m not immune to those attractions, I look at Florence and think of the poets of the late thirteenth century: Guido Calvacanti, Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, and the young Dante. It was they who made the sonnet into a visionary and moment-centered love poem. It was here that Dante first set eyes on his Beatrice. It’s the city more than any other where love poetry was born. No wonder I awoke this morning hungrier for love poems than for Post-it notes.

  I go back into my room and open the door to find a tray waiting outside in the hall. It might not be a love poem, but the thermoses of steamed milk and coffee, the basket of fresh-baked cornetti, and the blue and yellow majolica bowl of fresh figs come pretty close. Besides, I remind myself as I drink my coffee and get dressed, the love poem I read last night spoke of blood and violation and it came with a warning—or a threat, depending on how you read Robin’s cryptic note. The poem might be a fake as well. My plan for this morning is to look at the inventories to see when all the curious and morbid decorations—the paintings, the cassone, and the pietre dure floor—were installed. I suspect that the paintings and cassone will turn out to have been purchased years before Ginevra’s lifetime, and if the floors were installed after her residence at the villa, then it will prove that the reference to rose petals on the floor is a modern one derived from the legends that have grown up around the curious decorations.

  I’m curious, too, to see whether I can trace the references in the poem back to the inventories themselves. Whoever faked the poems might have done his research there, and he might have left some trace of himself in the archives. The most likely author of the poems is Robin—since the note attached to the poem is in Robin’s handwriting even if the poem is not—but it’s possible that Orlando wrote them, or even Bruno. He is the one with the most talent and the most access to the archives, which is what Gene was drunkenly implying last night—that Bruno could have stolen the poems to sell them on the black market or used them to get his son an in with a Hollywood producer. What if Robin, though, somehow found out and managed to get the poems away from Bruno? Would Bruno send Orlando to New York to get them back? The Bruno I knew would have too much integrity to do something like that, but then, I knew Bruno before he was a father. He looked so proud last night watching Orlando perform. What did I know of that kind of love or what it might drive one to?

  I shake my head, trying to unwind the scenario I’ve woven. It’s the secretive atmosphere of this place—a wasp’s nest of gossip and suspicion. Certainly the last person whose suspicions I should be listening to is Gene Silverman.

  I finish my coffee and try to put away my doubts. As I dress, though, I have an unwelcome thought. Gene was close enough to Robin and Orlando on the balcony to hear what they were saying. What if Gene’s suspicions of Bruno came from something Robin said to Orlando? Or what if Orlando accused Robin of stealing his father’s poems? I promise myself to keep my mind open while searching through the archives and then see what I can find out from Gene—or from Mara, who was also there on the balcony and is far more likely to tell me what she heard.

  I finish getting dressed and then pack the thermos and some of the pastry and figs wrapped in a napkin into my book bag along with my laptop. It’s only a few steps across the hall to the upstairs library. When I open the door I’m greeted by an aroma even stronger than the Italian coffee. Maple syrup, I think, sniffing the air, with a touch of nutmeg and…yes, Daisy was right…there’s a hint of lemon from when the pages were dried in the limonaia. Even with the scent of lemon, though, the dim, dusty room I step into fe
els miles away from the sunlit gardens.

  The three-storied library at La Civetta takes up the entire northeast corner of the building. In this, the third floor, the room is austerely plain, the walls whitewashed, as though in respect for the religious nature of the collection. The windows overlook the dusty olive trees in front of the villa and the funereal cypress trees that line the viale. It’s here that Lucy Graham stored the books she saved (or looted, depending on your point of view) from the flooded Convent of Santa Catalina, stacked on metal shelves, in no particular order. Little has changed since I first saw them twenty years ago except that someone has dusted them recently. As I remove one of the volumes from a shelf, I have the dreadful feeling that they’ve been waiting here for me, an impossible task set for me, like the mountains of grain Psyche was supposed to sort into piles of wheat, barley, and millet.

  I look at a long row of nuns’ chronicles—mostly dry histories of the founding of the convent—and account books that record the number of sheep bought and born and sold and slaughtered each year, the amount of wool produced, and the money earned through the weaving of tapestries. I take down one chronicle, by a Suor Benedetta Fortino in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It describes the founding of the order of Santa Catalina in the hills above Florence in the fifteenth century and then the removal of the order in 1581 to the Valdarno, giving as a reason for the move the desire of the sisters to expand the wool production and tapestry works of the convent. I flip through the whole of the handwritten chronicle, skimming for mention of Ginevra de Laura or of any nun who wrote poetry, but it seems as if the nuns of Santa Catalina were too busy raising sheep, spinning wool, and weaving tapestries to do much writing.

  I move on to a shelf of prayer books, taking down each one and flipping through to see whether all they contain are prayers. I know that sometimes more than one work may be bound into the same book, but if this were the case with Ginevra de Laura’s poems, then why were the one that Robin gave me and the one I found last night on loose manu-script sheets? They hadn’t been torn from a bound book. Still, I know I should go through each one of these missals carefully and I have just made up my mind to carry a stack of them to the library table set beneath the windows when I hear a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I call.

  The door opens and Zoe Demarchis appears, her pink hair jarringly bright in the plain whitewashed room. “Um, Professor Asher? President Abrams sent me up to see if you needed any help with the books. Like, if you needed me to move anything or…I don’t know…help you sort through them.”

  “Don’t you have a class?” I ask, torn between my relief at being offered help and compunction at subjecting poor little Zoe to such a tedious task.

  “Just Early Christian Art,” she answers, making a face, “and I took that last fall. I mean, like, how many crucifixions and bleeding saints can a girl take? Besides, I helped out last year dusting and reshelving the books, so President Abrams thought I’d be the right person to do it.” She moves to a shelf and runs a finger along the spines of a row of account books. “They could use another good dusting. To tell you the truth, I’m allergic to dust…”

  “You’re right,” I say, looking at the actually fairly dust-free books in my hand. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go down to the kitchen and get a dust cloth and come back up here and give them all a good going over. I’ve got some things I want to check out in the lower floor of the library in the meantime.”

  “Yeah, okay,” she says, “anything to get out of another lecture on Christian symbolism. I’ll have them nice and clean for you. Do you want me to organize them in any particular order?”

  “Well, you could pull out any folios with loose pages and leave them stacked on the table over there.”

  “Sure,” she says, “that’ll be easy. Robin and I put all that stuff on the bottom shelves last fall.”

  “Robin? Do you mean Robin Weiss? He worked with you reshelving these books last fall?”

  “Uh-huh, but I know what you’re thinking. He didn’t find any of those old poems in here. I was with him the whole time and all we found were lists of sheep and stuff…It was pretty boring. Robin was always saying that the really interesting papers in the villa would be hidden and that we should explore the other rooms.”

  “And did you go exploring other rooms?” I ask.

  “Uh-uh,” she says, shaking her head adamantly. “Not me. I’m here on scholarship and I didn’t want to get in trouble. But Robin…I think he did later…which is how he found those poems he was going to put in his screenplay. But he never told me where he found them…Well, I’d better go get those dust cloths…” Zoe shifts uneasily from foot to foot and appears to be blushing—although it may just be the reflection of her pink hair in this white room. She certainly seems anxious to be away from me, so I let her go, wondering what she and Robin got up to in here while sorting through these dusty dry tomes. Concocting Renaissance love poems, perhaps, or acting them out? I bend down and glance at the stacks of folios and boxes on the lowest shelves. I’ll have a look at them later, I think, straightening up and kneading a crick in my lower back. I’ll let Zoe pull them out and dust them off before going through them. First I’ll have a look at the record books from La Civetta to find out when those awful paintings in my room were created and see whether there’s any mention of when the rose-petal floors were made.

  I cross the room to the spiral staircase that leads down to the two lower levels of the library. When I step onto the first cast-iron tread, the whole staircase trembles. The staircase was installed by Lucy Graham during the Second World War as an emergency route into a secret cellar in case the family needed to flee from the Nazis. Bruno once told me that Lucy had seen nothing ironic about ordering the staircase from Hamburg. When it arrived, the Italian laborers who had been hired to install it couldn’t read the German instructions—or didn’t bother, at any rate—instead assembling it according to some aesthetic principle only they understood. Perhaps they wanted it to vibrate like a plucked violin string.

  I navigate the first flight as gingerly as I can, hoping not to draw the attention of anyone on the library’s main floor. I can’t hear voices as I descend, and when I peek out between the shelves that screen the staircase from the rest of the library, the room appears to be empty save for the painted birds that made me so uneasy last night. In the early morning they look harmless enough; even the painted owl on the ceiling looks half asleep, drowsing on his perch instead of keeping an eye out for prey.

  I descend to the next, and lowest, level of the library—into darkness. Fortunately I thought to bring my Maglite—an item that is turning out to have more uses than even my overcautious mother would ever have imagined. I use it to find the chain to the bare bulb that hangs from the ceiling. I’m surprised that it actually works. Someone must have been down here recently, although, looking around at the cobwebs and dust-coated bookshelves, it’s hard to imagine why.

  The bottom floor of La Civetta’s library is actually part of the villa’s ancient cellar. The walls are bare stone, the floor dirt, the only window an unglazed porthole covered by a metal grate high on the wall. A dungeon, really, like something out of the Museo della Tortura in San Gimignano. Instead of the pleasant smell of old books in the upper stories, this room’s predominant odor is mold and mouse droppings. I should talk to Mark about having these books moved to a drier location. Although they’re only record books, they no doubt contain information that would be valuable to social historians. The French scholar Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, for instance, has used tax documents and family records to illuminate nuptial practices in fourteenth-century Florence, and Frieda Mainbocher has assembled data from hundreds of last wills and testaments in Siena to document the increase in female bequests to the church after the Black Death. And though it seems odd to come looking for marriage rites in this underground tomb, the Florentines were a practical people who orchestrated family unions with complex rituals of contra
cts and dowries, trousseaus and bride gifts. The people who invented double-entry bookkeeping kept as careful records of their familial alliances as of their banks and businesses.

  Shining my flashlight on the metal shelves, I see that the books are covered in dust and mold, but one appears to be slightly less encrusted—the inventory for 1581, the year Lorenzo Barbagianni’s father died and left him the villa and all its contents. If the paintings and the floor in my room were done before Lorenzo brought Ginevra de Laura to the villa, then they would be described in this inventory. I also take down a thick leather-bound ledger that lists the accounts—the libri dei conti—for the villa for the years 1581 to Lorenzo’s death in 1593, and transfer the books to the table beneath the lightbulb. It, too, appears a bit less dusty than the other books, but I can’t tell for sure whether that’s because it’s been consulted more recently.

  It would be pleasanter to take them upstairs to the main floor, but I’m reluctant to meet anyone and have to explain what I’m looking for. I pour myself a cup of coffee from my thermos to ward off the chill and open the inventory.

  After five minutes my respect for social historians such as Klapisch-Zuber and Frieda Mainbocher has trebled. Presented in seminars and conferences, neatly arrayed in charts and tables, their findings have always appeared to me so neat and rational compared to the more amorphous impressions of literary analysis. I’ve often envied the historical ethnologists their color-coded pie charts and PowerPoint presentations, but I no longer envy their working conditions. Whatever notary Lorenzo Barbagianni hired to take an inventory of the possessions he inherited from his father in 1581 was not hired for his handwriting. It’s tiny and cramped and employs abbreviations I can’t, at first, begin to guess at. I take a quick glance at the account book and nearly despair when I see that it’s written in the same hand. It strikes me as unusual that the same notary who did the inventory kept the accounts (usually a computista would be hired for the latter chore), but then Renaissance bookkeeping is not my specialty.