The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  “You’ve found something,” he says. “I can tell by the look in your eyes.” He draws a chair next to mine and leans close to see the record book on the table in front of me. His arm presses against mine and I can feel the heat of his body through the thin cloth of his shirt—as if he ran all the way here from La Civetta. He looks exhausted enough to have run here from a greater distance than that. His face is lined with worry and the shadows under his eyes are deeper than they were yesterday.

  “Has something happened?” I ask.

  “Orlando has disappeared,” he says, “since last night. I went to look for him after we found Mrs. Silverman and I couldn’t find him. I’ve been looking for him all night—so have the police.”

  “Why do the police want him?”

  “You saw that argument he had with Mrs. Silverman earlier in the evening. Well, so did half the guests at the villa. So of course they wanted to speak with him. I’m afraid…”

  He pauses to mop the sweat from his brow. I put my hand over his. “What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m afraid that when Orlando heard about Mara’s death, he ran away—because he thought the police would suspect him—just as he did in New York.” Bruno shakes his head. “He’s never been able to stand anyone being angry with him. Once, when he was five, he broke his grandmother’s favorite mixing bowl. He hid for the rest of the day. It was midnight before I found him, hiding in one of the big lemon tree pots in the gardener’s shed. He told me he couldn’t bear to see Nonna angry at him.” A heartbreaking look of fondness passes over Bruno’s face, replacing for a fleeting instant his anxiety.

  “It makes it look very bad that he’s run away,” I say.

  “Yes, yes, I know, but it’s ridiculous. Orlando wouldn’t have hurt that woman—even if she was so horrible to him. And you know why she attacked him like that?” he asks me, but before I can answer—before I can say it’s because of what happened in New York—he answers his own question. “Because she thought he was corrupting her precious son.”

  “She thought Orlando was gay…um…I heard…” Bruno sees me struggling and puts me out of my misery.

  “Yes, I know my son’s gay,” he tells me, patting my hand, as if I were the one who needed comfort. “I’ve known, I think, since he figured it out himself, about three years ago. At first…Well, like most parents I suppose I thought it might be a stage that would pass, but then when he was with that boy Robin last year, I saw…I saw what my son looked like when he was really in love. How could I wish him not to follow his heart?” He looks at me and then he looks away. “I know too well what comes of denying one’s heart.”

  “And so that’s what Mara was angry with Orlando about?” I recall standing with Mara at the film party in New York. Her telling me that she didn’t want Ned to go to the Hudson acting program because there were too many gays. Then the jealous fit she threw on the balcony—I had assumed the target of her jealousy was Zoe, but I realize now that Gene had his arm around both young people: Zoe and Robin. What if she were actually jealous of Robin? Had I misread the scene on the balcony just as I had misread the one in the park?

  “But it seemed to me that Mrs. Silverman was angry with Leo Balthasar and her husband as well as with Orlando,” Bruno says. “I’m sure her husband had far more cause to want her dead than my son, especially if she were interfering with his movie deal. I heard Balthasar say to Mara that she had to be quiet until they had the papers. He must have meant Ginevra de Laura’s poems—”

  “Bruno, do you really think Gene Silverman would kill his own wife? Or that Leo Balthasar would kill Mara because of some poems?”

  “I know—whoever cared that much for poetry, eh?” He attempts a smile, but his face is so ravaged by fatigue that it’s only a weak flicker that fades from his face in an instant. “But I think there may be something with the poems—a letter—that might be very valuable. It’s something my mother told me about when she described the limonaia poem. That’s why I wanted to know if there was a letter with the poem when Robin gave it to you.”

  “There was only the note from Robin,” I say. I can see that he’s working hard to construct some alternative scenario for Mara’s death. All I have to do to topple his shaky edifice is to tell him that Orlando pushed Robin from the balcony—that Mara knew it and was trying to make Gene go to the police, and that’s why Orlando killed her—but I find I can’t do it right now while he’s so obviously frightened for his son. What good would it do while Orlando is missing? It might even encourage Bruno to help Orlando stay hidden. When Orlando shows up there will be time enough for Bruno to learn the extent of his son’s crimes. If he wants to spend these last hours in ignorance, trolling through archives and looking for Ginevra de Laura’s poems, so be it. I know I’m staying silent for my own reasons as well—to give myself a few more hours with him—but don’t I deserve at least that after all these years? “But I have found a record of the rape,” I tell him, “and of Pietro’s lawsuit against Barbagianni.”

  “Ah,” Bruno says, looking glad for something to distract him, “did he want Barbagianni to marry her?”

  “Yes, can you imagine being forced to plead in court to get your attacker to marry you?”

  Bruno shrugs. “It was not uncommon. I’d imagine that a wealthy man like Barbagianni would have settled for paying the girl’s dowry instead. Is this her testimony?” he asks, nodding at the book.

  “Here,” I say, sliding the book over so that it’s between us. “You read it. My Italian may not be up to the nuances of her testimony.”

  He gives me a skeptical look. My spoken Italian might be a little rusty, but we both know I don’t have any trouble with the written language. If he suspects that I’m afraid of what my voice will reveal of my feelings about Ginevra’s case, he doesn’t say so.

  “‘On the first of May in the year 1581—’” Bruno begins, translating as he reads.

  “Less than two weeks after Barbagianni commissioned Pietro de Laura to lay the floor in the dining room of La Civetta,” I interject.

  “Yes, he didn’t wait long. On this day he saw his opportunity. She says, ‘I came with my father to the Villa La Civetta to help him in laying a floor in the dining room. On this day he had forgotten one of the knives he needed for cutting the smaller pieces in the design and I volunteered to retrieve the knife from his workshop. Ser Barbagianni insisted that it was not safe or proper for a girl to walk the streets alone and so sent instead a servant to escort my father to his workshop while suggesting to me that I amuse myself by looking at many of the fine paintings in the villa. When he had shown me the paintings in the sala downstairs he told me that upstairs in the camera nuziale were many fine spalliere that told wonderful stories. He knew I was especially fond of stories.’”

  “Betrayed by her love of literature,” I say.

  “Yes,” Bruno says, summoning a small smile. “Another Francesca. ‘And so I accompanied Ser Barbagianni upstairs to the camera nuziale, never suspecting what he had planned for me there. At first he seemed only interested in showing me the paintings. They told the story of a young man who, rejected by his first love, refused all marriage and was forced to witness a scene of savage butchery to learn the price we pay for shunning honorable love. Ser Barbagianni spoke so movingly of the lessons conveyed in the paintings that I never would have suspected that he was planning his own savagery. When he showed me the scene of the banquet where Nastagio degli Onesti’s fiancée offers him her unwed body, he asked me what I thought his answer would be. “What any honorable man would answer,” I told him. “He will refuse her offer and wait until they are married to consummate their union.” “Ah, you have read your Boccaccio,” he said, praising me. “But see here, this story has a different ending.” Then he lifted a cloth from the wall—a tapestry showing decorous lovers engaged in polite and proper courtship—’”

  “That sounds like the tapestry that’s in the room now,” I interrupt. “But in the inventory it’s described as hanging
in the rotunda. Barbagianni must have had the new painting done and moved the tapestry to cover it sometime in the first few months after he inherited the villa.”

  “He probably thought it was a good joke to cover such an obscene picture with a depiction of courtly lovers—and it sounds as if he relished the surprise of revealing it to Ginevra. Certainly she found it shocking: ‘Imagine my horror when I saw that beneath this tranquil scene lay a picture of such unspeakable shame that I cannot here describe it, only to say that looking at it seemed to inflame Ser Barbagianni’s desire and that he looked to the picture as a justification of what he wanted to do. “That woman should not have offered what she was not willing to give freely,” he said, and then he took hold of me from behind and forced me down onto the bed—which I only noticed then had been strewn with fresh rose petals as people are wont to do for a marriage bed. Such a cruel touch, indeed! As if what he planned to do to me was a marriage! Then he pressed himself so heavily against me that my face was pushed into the bedclothes so I could barely breathe, let alone scream. Although I struggled, he lifted my skirts and pushed himself inside of me, causing me great pain and making me bleed. When he was done, I wept so hard and made such a commotion that he threatened to lock me up if I didn’t leave off with my lamenting, and when I still didn’t stop he picked me up and carried me to a painted chest at the foot of the bed and dropped me into it, closing and sealing the lid so that I was trapped, alone in the dark empty chest.’”

  “The stains at the bottom of the cassone,” I say. “I thought it was water damage—”

  “But actually they are from Ginevra’s blood,” Bruno says, shaking his head. “What a brute! ‘I was there so long, screaming and trying to claw my way out, that I thought it would be my coffin, but finally one of the servants came and let me out. The servant offered me water with which to wash myself, but instead I ran from the room. I could feel the blood running down my legs and see the trail of blood I left behind me, but I only wanted to get as far away as I could from Ser Barbagianni and the scene of my disgrace. In my confusion I thought of the drops of blood I shed as the rose petals he had strewn upon the bed and I thought that this would be the only marriage bed I ever lay upon now that I was no longer a maid.’”

  Bruno stops reading, but he doesn’t lift his head from the book. Neither do I. I know he’s thinking of that first time we made love in his apartment above the limonaia. Of course, it was nothing like what happened between Barbagianni and Ginevra—I had been more than willing—but when I’d gotten up from his bed, a splash of blood had hit the tiled floor and Bruno had been unable to conceal his surprise. He hadn’t known it was my first time. “Poverina,” he had said, “now you’ll have to remember me forever,” and I had wept because I’d realized that if I’d have to remember him it meant we weren’t always going to be together.

  Now I feel something wet fall against my hand. I look up, half expecting to see the red splash of Ginevra’s blood, summoned by her words, staining my hand, but it’s only Bruno’s tears. I put my arm around his back, which trembles with the effort of holding back a sob, and lay my head against his shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” I say, not sure whose loss of love and faith I’m consoling him for—mine, or Ginevra’s, or his—and although I’m afraid it’s untrue, I tell him that there’s still time to make everything all right.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  IT WASN’T UNTIL YOU WERE GONE THAT I UNDERSTOOD HOW MUCH I HAD LOST through my stupidity,” Bruno says when he has wiped his face with his handkerchief.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I tell him, “ especially not today.

  You don’t have to explain. We were both…foolish. You never promised me more than the present.”

  He shakes his head. “Only an idiot thinks he can put such limits on love”—he makes chopping motions with his hand on the table as if he were dicing carrots—“this is how much love there will be and this is how long it will last and then—poof! It will vanish, leaving only sweet memories and no scars.”

  “It’s not your fault I fell in love with you,” I say.

  He turns to me, his face washed by his tears into an openness that makes him look both younger and older than when he arrived here thirty minutes ago. “It wasn’t you I was speaking about,” he says, and then shrugs, trying to retreat back into his worldly persona, only the gesture turns into more of a shiver. “You seem not to have suffered any grievous injury from my folly. I don’t presume that you’ve thought of me all these years—”

  “I’ve done little but,” I say, grabbing his hand and pressing it hard. I want to hold on to the naked look I’d seen in his eyes a moment ago; I know I may never have an opportunity to say these things to him again. “I thought the worst part would be at the beginning, that as time passed I would get over you, and for a while I thought I had. I threw myself into graduate school and writing my dissertation and then teaching and more writing. I dated, of course, but you know how graduate school is—there’s not a lot of time for that sort of thing and everyone knows they’ll be heading in different directions afterward and I knew I’d do better if I was entirely focused on my work—”

  “I’ve read your articles on the sonnet, by the way. They’re excellent.”

  I smile, pleased at the compliment, but I go on, determined to tell him everything today—before it’s too late. “I felt at times when I was working—reading, researching, writing—that I had no body, as if I was floating outside of my body and had become only mind. And then six or seven years ago, when I began teaching at Hudson, I started having dreams about you. Not just once in a while, but every night, and they felt…well, not like dreams, but like you were actually visiting me. When I woke up it felt as if you’d really just been there—” I stop, unable to convey the immediacy of those dreams.

  “I know what you mean,” he says. “I’ve dreamt of you as well.”

  “And then for days after I’d dreamt of you I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about you. I realized then that all those years I had thought I was getting over you, all I had done was delay grieving for what I had lost. My subconscious was catching up with the reality of what had happened years before, and the dreams were my way of working you out of my system.”

  “Like a splinter?” he suggests, a faint smile curving his lips.

  “Well, not entirely unlike a splinter. I thought…well, that I was simply a slow learner.”

  “Anything but,” he says. “And after dreaming those dreams these last seven years, did it finally work? Did you work me out of your system, as you say?”

  “I thought so,” I say, resolved to be honest. “The dreams became less frequent. I…I started seeing someone a few years ago…” I hesitate. Despite my resolve to be honest, I don’t know whether I should tell him about Mark. It turns out I don’t have to.

  “President Abrams?” he asks, lifting one eyebrow.

  I nod. “How did you know?”

  “I didn’t think he could despise me so much for the lawsuit alone.”

  “You’re wrong there. I think he cares more about the lawsuit than—” I’d been about to say “than me,” but I stop myself. Again, Bruno knows what I’d been about to say.

  “Well, then he’s an even bigger idiot than I was twenty years ago.” He takes my hand in both of his and leans closer to me. “I’d like to think I’ve gotten a little smarter in the interim.”

  His lips have just touched mine when a noise from the door alerts us to the fact that we’re not alone. The young receptionist who greeted me earlier is standing in the doorway, looking flustered.

  “Scusi, Professore, but there are some men—police—here to see you downstairs. I asked them to wait—”

  I see Bruno turn very pale. “They might have good news about Orlando,” I say. “Perhaps they’ve found him.”

  Bruno nods and tries to smile, but when he gets up I notice that his hand is trembling. “I’ll go with you,” I say, starting to
get up.

  “No.” He puts out a hand to keep me in my seat and then, turning to the receptionist, says, “Could you go down and tell the policemen that I will be right down, please?” When she’s left, he sits back down and takes both my hands in his. “If they’ve found Orlando and taken him in for questioning I may be stuck all day at the police headquarters. You should stay here to see if you can find any clue to where Ginevra would have hidden the poems and then go back to the villa. I’ll meet you back there tonight…if you would come to my apartment…?” He leaves the question open and I answer by pressing my mouth onto his. As I watch him leave I can only hope that by tonight he still wants me.

  After another two hours of scouring the record books of Ser Cosimo Guasconi, I can find no conclusive ending to the de Laura/Barbagianni lawsuit. In the first court appearance, Barbagianni’s lawyer went about systematically destroying Ginevra’s reputation. Witnesses were called forth who claimed that she was a woman of low character and that she had bedded several of her father’s clients for money. Barbagianni claimed that she had been the one to suggest going to the second-floor bedroom and had lured him into bed. Obviously, her intent was to trick Barbagianni into an ignoble marriage. As for the evidence of the blood, the servant recanted her testimony, and the nun who had found Ginevra bleeding at the door of Santa Catalina took an oath of silence and, when the convent was relocated to an obscure town in the Valdarno, became a hermit. And then Ginevra and her father disappeared. Ser Guasconi noted on June 1 of 1581 that the de Lauras failed to appear at a hearing and that attempts to locate them at their residence proved unsuccessful. At the same time, Barbagianni informed the podestà that he was engaged to be married—to a young woman of the noble Cecchi family—and argued that the case ought to be dropped. But the podestà decreed that the case should merely be suspended until such time as Ginevra and her father reappeared before the court “in the event that Pietro de Laura had been compelled to leave the city to follow his craft abroad.”