The Savage Garden

by Mark Mills

  Adam searched out old friends from the neighborhood. They drank beer together in the garden of the Stag and Hounds, trading stories and trying their best to ignore the inescapable truth—that the ties that once bound them were loosening by the year and might soon be gone altogether.

  His mother was delighted to have him home and keen to show it, which usually meant she was unhappy. Whenever she smothered him with affection, he had the uneasy sensation she was using him as a rod with which to beat his father: You see what you're missing out on? His father was more withdrawn than ever, and not best pleased. He had wanted Adam to give the summer over to work experience—a placement with an acquaintance of his at the Baltic Exchange. It was a wise thing to develop a working knowledge of the Baltic Exchange before a career in marine insurance at Lloyd's. It was a wise thing to do, because that's exactly what he himself had done. In the end, though, he conceded defeat.

  The arrangements had gone without a hitch: a letter to Signora Docci, her reply (typed and in impeccable English) saying that she had secured a room for him at a pensione in the local town. Aside from rustling up a bit of funding for Adam from within the History of Art Department, Professor Leonard had not needed to involve himself. He did, however, suggest that Adam meet up with him in town before leaving for the Continent.

  The proposed venue was a grand stone building close by Cannon Street station in the city. Adam had never heard of the Worshipful Company of Skinners, although he wasn't unduly surprised to discover that the professor was associated with a medieval guild whose history reached back seven centuries. They passed through paneled chambers en route to the roof terrace, where they took lunch beneath an even layer of cloud like a moth-eaten blanket, the sun slanting through at intervals and picking out patches of the city.

  They ate beef off the bone and drank claret.

  The professor had come armed with a bundle of books and articles for Adam's mental edification.

  "Read these right through," he said, handing over copies of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Fasti. "The rest are for reference purposes. You'll find the family has an impressive library, which I'm sure you'll be given access to." The professor was reluctant to say any more about the garden—"You don't want me coloring your judgment"—although he was happy to share some other background with Adam.

  Signora Docci lived alone at Villa Docci, her husband having died some years before. Her eldest son, Emilio, was also dead, killed toward the end of the war by the Germans who had occupied the villa. There was another son, Maurizio, soon to take over the estate, as well as a dissolute daughter, Caterina, who now lived in Rome.

  The rest of lunch was spent talking about the professor's imminent trip to France. He was off to view the Paleolithic cave paintings at Lascaux—his third visit since their chance discovery by a group of local boys back in 1940. He recalled his frustration at having to wait five years for the war to end before making his first pilgrimage. Thirteen years on, he felt it was now possible to trace the influence of that primitive imagery on the work of contemporary artists. In fact, it was to be the subject of an article, and possibly even a book.

  "Europe's greatest living painters drawing inspiration from its oldest known painters, seventeen thousand years on. If that isn't art history, I don't know what is."

  "No."

  "You don't have to humor me, you know."

  "Of course I do," said Adam. "You're buying lunch."

  Later, when they parted company out on the street, the professor said, "Francesca . . . Signora Docci.. . she's old now, and frail by all accounts. But don't underestimate her."

  "What do you mean?"

  Professor Leonard hesitated, glancing off down the street. "I'm not sure I rightly know, but it's sound advice."

  As Adam sat slumped and slightly inebriated in the deserted car on the train journey back to Purley, he was left with the uneasy sensation that the professor's parting warning had been the true purpose of their meeting.

  A week later, Adam was gone. He changed trains in Paris, aware that this was as far south as he had ever traveled in his life. On Professor Leonard's advice, he slipped some francs to the guard and was allotted a spare sleeping compartment to himself.

  He didn't sleep. He tossed in the darkness, France rattling by beneath him, and he thought (far more than he would have liked) of Gloria and of the look on her face when she had said to him, "I don't know why. I think maybe it's because you're a touch boring."

  He might have been less stung if they hadn't just made love. Twice.

  "Boring?"

  "No, not boring, that's unfair. Bland."

  "Bland?"

  "No."

  "What, then?"

  "I don't know. I can't put my finger on it. I can't think of a word."

  Great. He was a category unto himself—a unique category, indefinable by words but falling somewhere between "boring" and "bland."

  He had lost his temper, hurling a pillow across the room and swearing at her. He could still recall every moment of the long walk back to his own college, creeping down the staircase from her rooms, stepping through the pale dawn of Trinity Great Court, the bittersweet taste of self-pity rendering him immune to the daggered look from the porter on duty in the lodge.

  Pathetic, really, when looked at from a distance, from the darkened sleeping compartment of a train hurtling through the French night, for example. He tried to stem the flow of his thoughts, or at least divert their course. When he failed, he turned on the light and worked on his Italian grammar.

  Dawn rose, bringing with it the barely discernible mass of a steep Alpine valley. A few hours later, they were free of the mountains.

  All he saw of Milan was the Fascist splendor of the Stazione Centrale as he hurried between platforms to make his connecting train. He was aware of the heat and the smell of unfamiliar tobacco, but not much else. He briefly glimpsed Shelley's "waveless plain of Lombardy" before nodding off.

  A deep and dreamless sleep carried him all the way to Florence, where he was woken brusquely by the guard, who talked at him in a language quite unlike the Italian he'd learned at school and recently brushed up on. Ejected onto the platform, he felt this certainly wasn't the kind of reception he'd been led to believe he might receive in Italy.

  He found a pensione on Piazza Santa Maria Novella, a short walk from the station. The owner informed him that he was in luck; a room had just fallen free. It was easy to see why. Adam made a speculative survey of the dismal little box in the roof and told himself it was only for one night.

  He stripped off his shirt and lay on the sagging mattress, smoking a cigarette, unaccustomed to the humidity pressing down on the city. Was this normal? If so, why had no one thought to mention it? Or the mosquitoes, for that matter. They speckled the ceiling, waiting for night to fall and the feast to begin.

  He squeezed himself into the shower room at the end of the corridor and allowed the trickle of water to cool him off. It was a temporary measure. His fresh shirt was lacquered to his chest by the time he'd descended four flights of stairs to the lobby.

  The storm broke as he stepped from the building, the sharp crack of thunder echoing around the piazza, the deluge following moments later as the amethyst clouds deposited their load. He stood beneath the awning, watching the raindrops dancing on the road. Water sheeted down from overflowing gutters; drains were lost to sight beneath spreading pools of water. And still the rain came, constant, unvarying in its strength. When it ceased, it ceased suddenly and completely.

  A church bell struck half past the hour, and immediately people began to appear from the shelter of doorways around the piazza— almost as if the two events were connected, the bell alerting the inhabitants of the quarter to the passing of danger, as it had always done. The sun burst from behind the departing slab of cloud. It hit hard, flashing off the steaming flagstones.

  Scuttling figures skipped over puddles, hurrying to make up for lost time. Adam joined their ranks, map in hand, heading south out
of the piazza. In Via dei Fossi, rainwater still streamed from jutting eaves high overhead, driving pedestrians off the sidewalks into the road, forcing them to do battle with squadrons of scooters and cars. The narrow street filled with the sounds of horns and curses, the cacophony played out with leaps and bounds and wild gesticulations, the distant rumble of the departing storm like a low kettledrum roll underscoring the deranged opera.

  A twinge of anxiety stiffened his stride, though not at the chaos unfolding around him. He knew the city intimately, but only from books. What if he was disappointed? What if Florence's "unique cultural and artistic heritage," which he'd detailed in his essays with such hollow authority, left him cold? As if on cue, he found himself on a bridge spanning the River Arno—no lively, sparkling torrent, but a strip of brown and turbid water, a river fit for a factory district.

  Five minutes later he reached his destination, and his apprehension melted away. The Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine was deserted when he entered it, and it remained so for the next quarter of an hour. Michelangelo and Raphael had both come here to study, to copy, to learn from the young man who had changed the face of European painting: Tom-maso Guidi, nicknamed Masaccio by his friends, the scruffy boy- wonder, dead at twenty-seven but who had left his defining mark on these walls long before. Others had contributed to the same cycle of frescoes—Masolino, Fra Lippo Lippi, names to be reckoned with—but their work was flat, lifeless, when set alongside that of Masaccio.

  His figures demanded to be heard, to be believed in; some even threatened to step out of the walls and shake the doubters into credence. Real men, not ciphers. And real women. His depiction of Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden required no context in order to be appreciated. More than five hundred years on, it still struck home: the fallen couple, with their bare, rough- hewn limbs, granite hard from toil, cast out like country laborers by some unforgiving landlord. Adam's face was buried in his hands, a broken man. Eve covered her nakedness in shame, but her face was raised, crying out to the heavens. All the anger, frustration and incomprehension in the world seemed contained within that gaping, shapeless hole Masaccio had given her for a mouth.

  The more Adam stared at the image, the more he saw, and the less he understood. A definition of true art? He was still cringing at his own pomposity when a couple entered the chapel.

  They were French. His thick dark hair was oiled back into two symmetrical wings that protruded a short distance from the forehead. She was extremely slender, quite unlike Masaccio's Eve, or maybe as Eve would have looked some years after her banishment from the bounty of Eden—pinched and emaciated.

  "Good afternoon," said the Frenchman in accented English, looking up from his guidebook.

  It rankled that he was so readily identifiable, not just as a fellow tourist but an Englishman.

  "American?" asked the Frenchman.

  "English."

  The word came out wrong—barked, indignant—a parody of Anglo-Saxon self-importance. The couple exchanged the faintest of amused glances, which only annoyed him more.

  He looked at the man's perfectly coiffed hair and wondered just how distressing that flash downpour must have been for him. Or maybe the oil helped; maybe it assisted runoff.

  He realized he was staring only when the Frenchman shifted nervously and said, "Yes . . . ?"

  Adam gestured to the frescoes. "Las pinturas son muy hermosas," he said in his best Spanish.

  As he left the chapel, abandoning the couple to Masaccio's genius, he wondered whether his antagonism toward them owed itself to their interruption of his experience, or whether the work itself had somehow unleashed it in him.

  Has the Englishman arrived yet?

  No, Signora.

  When?

  Tomorrow.

  Tomorrow?

  That's what he said in his letter. The twelfth. I wish to see him as soon as he gets here. You've already said, Signora. You won't forget?

  Why would I forget? Move a little to the side, please.

  Gently. Don't push.

  I'm sorry. Turn over, please.

  You don't have to do this, Maria.

  I know.

  I'm happy to hire someone else.

  You really expect me to cook and clean for someone else?

  You're a good woman.

  Thank you, Signora. Just as your father was a good man. He had the highest respect for you too, Signora. There's really no need to be quite so formal, not when you're giving me a bed-bath.

  He had the highest respect for you too.

  You know, Maria, I believe you're in danger of developing a sense of humor in your old age. Turn over, please.

  THEY LEFT FLORENCE THROUGH THE PORTA ROMANA, heading south to Galluzzo, where they wound their way up into the hills past a sprawling Carthusian monastery.

  The climbing road was flanked by olive groves, neat rows of trees laid out in terraces, their foliage flashing silver in the sunlight. Vineyards and stands of umbrella pines studded the hillside. Every so often, an avenue of dark cypresses indicated a track leading to some isolated farmhouse, which invariably was also guarded by a small cohort of the tall, tapering conifers. Apart from the tarmac road along which they were traveling, there was little to suggest the passing centuries had wrought any meaningful change on the tapestried landscape.

  Adam lounged in his seat, taking in the view, the cooling breeze from the open window washing over him, ruffling his hair. The taxi driver was still talking nineteen to the dozen despite Adam's earlier confession that most of the words were lost on him. Every now and then Adam would catch the man's eye in the rearview mirror and grunt and nod his assent—an arrangement that seemed to work to the complete satisfaction of both parties.

  When the road leveled out, he turned and peered through the rear window, searching for a glimpse of Florence. The city was lost to view behind the tumble of hills rolling in from the south. Somehow it seemed appropriate; she was hiding herself, even now.

  All morning he had walked her streets, the stone chasms hacked into her, gridlike. Her buildings were no more welcoming—the palaces of rusticated stone, modeled on fortresses (or so it seemed); the churches with their unadorned exteriors, many sheathed in black and white marble; the museums housed in all manner of forbidding structures. And yet, behind those austere facades lay any number of riches.

  Adam had chosen carefully, almost mathematically, limited as he was by the short time at his disposal. There had been disappointments, acclaimed works which had left him feeling strangely indifferent. But as the taxi worked its way higher into the hills, he consoled himself with the knowledge that it had been a first foray, a swift reconnaissance. There would be plenty of other opportunities to return.

  San Casciano sat huddled on a high hill, dominating the surrounding countryside. Its commanding position had largely determined the course of its history, apparently, although the entry in Adam's guidebook made no mention of the last siege the town had been forced to endure. Even as the taxi approached, it was evident that the ancient walls girdling the town had not been constructed to withstand an assault by the kind of weaponry available to the Allies and the Germans.

  These weren't the first scars of war Adam had witnessed. Even Florence, declared an "open city" by both sides out of respect for her architectural significance, had suffered. As the Allies swept up from the south, the Germans had dug in, blowing all but one of the city's historic bridges. They may have spared the Ponte Vecchio, but this consideration came at a price. The buildings flanking the river in the vicinity of the bridge were mined, medieval towers and Renaissance palaces reduced to rubble, the field cleared for the forthcoming battle. As it was, the Allied troops had simply crossed the Arno elsewhere on makeshift Bailey bridges and swiftly liberated the town.

  Years on, the wound inflicted right in the heart of the old city remained raw and open. If efforts had been made to restore those lost streets to their former glory, it was not evident. Modern str
uctures with smooth faces and clean sharp lines stood out along the river's southern frontage, like teenagers in a queue of pensioners. The very best you could say was that the space had been filled.

  In San Casciano that work was still going on. The town was pockmarked with the ruins of bomb-damaged buildings left to lie where they'd fallen. Impressively, Nature had reclaimed what she could in these plots. Young trees sprouted defiantly; shrubs had somehow detected enough moisture in piles of old stones to put down roots and prosper; weeds and ferns sprang from crevices in crumbling walls. The bland new concrete edifices that studded the historic center were further evidence of the severe pounding the town had taken.

  The Pensione Amorini had been spared. One part of the ancient vine clinging to its scaling stucco facade had been trained over a pergola, which shaded a terrace out front, overflow for the bar and trattoria occupying the ground floor. Signora Fanelli was expecting him—he had phoned ahead from Florence—and she summoned her teenage son from a back room to help with Adam's bags.

  "Uffa," said Iacopo as he tested the weight of both suitcases. He left the heaviest—the one containing the books—for Adam to lug upstairs.

  The room was far more than he had hoped for. Large and light, it had a floor of polished deep-red tiles, a beamed ceiling and two windows giving onto a leafy garden out back. It was furnished with the bare essentials: a wrought-iron bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. As requested, there was also a desk, though no chair, which brought a sharp rebuke from Signora Fanelli.

  Iacopo skulked off in search of one, his parting glance holding Adam to blame for this public humiliation. He returned with the chair and disappeared again while Signora Fanelli was still demonstrating the idiosyncrasies of the bathroom plumbing to Adam.

  Adam declared the room to be "perfetto."

  "Perfetta," she corrected him. "Una cameraperfetta."

  She relieved him of his passport, flashed him a smile and left. Only her perfume remained—a faint scent of roses hanging lightly in the air.