by Mark Mills
Unless he was mistaken, Federico Docci had cast his wife in the image of Flora, goddess of flowers. This was not so surprising, but the conceit still brought a smile to his lips.
If there was any doubt as to the identity of the statue, on the crest above, a triumphal arch stood out proud against a screen of dark ilex trees. On the heavy lintel borne up by fluted columns, and set between two decorative lozenges, was incised the word:
The Italian for flower; Flora in Latin. There was something telling, tender, about Federico's decision to employ the Italian form of his wife's Christian name—an indication, perhaps, of a pet name or some other private intimacy lost to history.
Two steep stone runnels bordered the amphitheater, descending to a long trough sunk into the ground. Leaves and other debris had collected in the base of the trough, and a dead bird lay on this rotting mattress, pale bones showing through decaying plumage. A weather-fretted stone bench was set before the trough, facing the amphitheater. It bore an inscription in Latin, eroded by the elements, but just possible to make out:
anima fit sedendo et quiescendo prudentior
The Soul in Repose Grows Wiser. Or something like that. An appropriate message for a spot intended for contemplation.
The presence of an overflow outlet just below the rim of the trough steered his gaze down the slope to a high mound bristling with laurel and fringed with cypresses. From here two paths branched off into the dark woods flanking the overgrown pasture that ran to the foot of the valley, and at the far end of which some kind of stone building lurked in the trees.
A flight of shallow steps led down to the mound. Adam skirted the artificial hillock, wondering just what it represented. It didn't represent anything, he discovered; it existed to house a deep, stygian grotto.
The irregular entrance, designed to look like the mouth of some mountain cave, was encrusted with cut rock and stalactites. The angle of the sun was such that he couldn't make out what lay inside.
He hesitated for a moment, shook off a mild foreboding, then stepped into the yawning darkness.
Did you see him before he left?
Briefly. I told him you were resting.
I wanted to see him.
Wake me up next time.
Of course, Signora.
Did he say anything?
About what?
The garden, of course.
No.
Nothing? He was very silent.
Silent?
Distracted.
He's handsome, don't you think? Tall and dark and slightly dangerous.
He's too pallid.
It's not his fault, Maria, he's English.
And he's too thin.
A bit, I agree.
He needs fattening up.
That will come with time. He hasn't grown into his body yet.
I think he's strange.
Really?
When he left, I saw him walking back and forth between the cypresses at the top of the driveway. Big long steps.
Interesting.
Worrying. It must be the heat.
No, it means he's worked it out. Signora?
The cypresses taper toward the top of the driveway.
Taper?
The two rows narrow as you approach the villa—to increase the sense of perspective.
I didn't know.
That's because I don't tell anyone.
Why not?
To see if they notice. Only two people have ever noticed. Three now.
And the other two?
Both dead.
Let's hope for the Englishman's sake there's no connection.
You know, Maria, you really can be quite amusing when you want to be.
ADAM WAS AWAKENED BY A DULL BUT PERSISTENT PRESSURE in his right buttock. His fingers searched out the offending object but couldn't make sense of it. He opened his eyes and peered at an unopened bottle of mineral water. Overhead, the blades of the ceiling fan struggled to generate a downdraft. He was flat on his back on the bed, fully clothed still, and the wall lights were ablaze, unbearably bright.
He swung his legs off the bed and made unsteadily for the switch beside the door. The beat in his temples informed him that he'd drunk too much the night before. And then he remembered why.
He searched the tangle of memories for irredeemable behavior.
Nothing. No. He was in the clear.
He pushed open the shutters, allowing the soft dawn light to wash into the room.
Unscrewing the cap of the mineral water bottle, he downed half the tepid contents without drawing breath. He hadn't registered it before, but there was a tinted print on the wall above the bed—a garish depiction of Christ in some rocky landscape, two fingers raised in benediction. Presumably the artist had gone for a beatific expression, but the Son of God was glancing down with what appeared to be the weary look of someone who has seen it all before—as if nothing that unfolded on the mattress below could ever surprise him. He might even have been a judge scoring a lackluster performance: two-out-of-five for effort.
Harry, thought Adam. Why Harry? Why now? And why hadn't he, Adam, said no?
The only consolation was that when Signora Fanelli had come to his room just before dinner with the news that 'Arry was on the telephone, he had assumed the worst, that their mother or father had suffered some terrible fate. As it turned out, the news was only marginally less calamitous. Harry was coming to visit.
Reason had quickly stemmed the trickle of loneliness that welcomed the idea.
"Why, Harry?" Adam had demanded.
"Because you're my baby brother."
"You mean you couldn't make my farewell dinner in Purley, but Italy's not a problem?"
"I don't do farewell dinners in Purley, not when I'm in Sheffield."
"What were you doing in Sheffield?"
"None of your business. Anyway, what's the fuss—I phoned, didn't I?"
"No, as it happens."
"Well, I meant to."
Of course, Harry couldn't say when he'd be arriving or leaving—"For God's sake, Adam, what am I, a fucking train timetable?"—only that he had things to do in Italy and that he'd fit Adam in along the way.
Fortunately, this time he'd be on his own, unlike his last impromptu visit. Harry had shown up in Cambridge earlier in the year with a fellow sculptor from Corsham in tow, a garrulous Scotsman with child-bearing hips and a face like a bag of wrenches. Finn Duggan had taken an instant and very vocal dislike to the university and all associated with it. Leaping to his feet in the Baron of Beef on the first evening, he had challenged all the "snotty wee shites" present to drink him under the table. A mousey astrophysicist from Trinity Hall had duly obliged, plunging Finn Duggan into a deep and dangerous gloom for the remainder of the weekend. Violence had only narrowly been avoided following Harry's mischievous speculation that the loser's beers had been spiked with some chemical cooked up in one of the university labs.
No Finn Duggan this time, thankfully, but Harry required maintenance, supervision even. And Adam had enough on his mind already.
For a brief while it had all seemed so clear: switching the subject of his thesis from the memorial garden to Villa Docci itself. But that was before he'd stepped through the breach in the yew hedge.
Even now he couldn't say just why the place had affected him so much. All he could point to was a vague sensation of having been momentarily transported somewhere else, a parallel world, unquestionably beautiful but also disquieting.
No doubt the unassuming entrance was intended to produce the effect of stumbling upon a lost Arcadia, but there was something illicit in the act of pushing your way through a hedge that smacked of trespass, each subsequent step in some way forbidden. This sense of intruding was reinforced by the personal nature of what lay beyond the hedge: the touching tribute of a grieving husband to his deceased wife. The other Renaissance gardens Adam had studied in preparation for his trip were far grander stages on which the most high-blown ideas of the age were p
layed out—Man and Nature in uneasy coexistence; Man imposing himself on Nature, molding her to his own ends, yet constantly fighting her hold over him, struggling to rise above his baser instincts to the role ordained for him by God.
Not that God or any other Christian imagery figured in the elaborate cycles set out by wealthy Romans and Florentines in the grounds of their country estates. The language of the garden was purely pagan, its world a mythical earthly paradise populated with marble gods and demigods and other outlandish creatures from Greek and Roman legend, where water gushed from Mount Parnassus, pouring along channels, tumbling over waterfalls, spraying from fountains and trickling down the rough-hewn walls of woodland grottoes.
The memorial garden at Villa Docci sat firmly within this tradition, and although it couldn't match its eminent counterparts at Villa di Castello, Villa Gamberaia and Villa Campi for sheer size and grandiosity, it stood out for its human dimension, its purity of purpose, the haunting message of love and loss enshrined in its buildings, inscriptions and groupings of statues buried away in the woods.
The hour or so Adam had spent strolling the circuit had intrigued him, unsettled him, whereas the villa itself had simply awed him with its serene perfection. The choice was no longer clear to him. Which of the two should he spend his time on?
This was the dilemma he'd been struggling with over dinner at the pensione when a bottle of red wine had landed on his table with a thud.
It was attached by a lean brown arm to a man whom Adam had noticed drinking alone at the bar. He was dark, rangy, handsome in a disheveled kind of way. He pushed his lank hair out of his eyes.
"Can I?" he asked in Italian, not waiting for a reply and dumping himself in the chair opposite. He glanced at the open file beside Adam's plate. "It's not good," he said.
"What?"
"Reading and eating at the same time. The stomach needs blood for digestion. When you read, the brain steals the blood."
"Really?"
"It's what my father used to say, but he was an idiot, so who knows? I'm Fausto."
Adam shook the strong hand offered him. "Adam."
"Can I?" Fausto helped himself from Adam's pack, tearing off the filter before lighting the cigarette. "You're English?"
"Yes."
"I like the English," declared Fausto, sitting back in his chair and plucking a stray shard of tobacco from his tongue. "London Liverpool Manchester A-stings."
"A-stings?"
"The Battle of A-stings."
"Oh, Hastings."
"A-stings. Exactly," said Fausto, not altogether happy about being corrected, although it didn't stop him from filling Adam's glass from the bottle of red wine he'd arrived with.
Adam took a sip.
"What do you think?"
Adam knew the word for "drinkable" in Italian. So presumably "undrinkable" was "non potabile."
"Excellent," he replied.
Fausto smiled. "That's why I like you English. You're so fucking polite."
Fausto, it turned out, had done his homework. He knew from Signora Fanelli the purpose of Adam's visit, and even its intended duration. Not that that was saying much—everyone did, tourists being something of a rarity in San Casciano. Apparently, the last foreign visitors of any note had been a bunch of New Zealanders— the ones who'd liberated the town from the Germans back in 1944. Fausto described in elaborate detail, much of it lost on Adam, the fierce siege that had laid waste to his birthplace—a sad inevitability given San Casciano's pivotal role in the main German line of defense south of Florence.
Despite this, Fausto seemed to harbor a grudging respect for the German military machine, which had so successfully slowed the Allied advance northward, mining bridges and roads, its troops fighting a relentless rearguard action against overwhelming odds, taking severe casualties but never losing their discipline or their fighting spirit, forever melting away, withholding their fire until you were right on them, and always ceasing fire at the first sign of the Red Cross.
Fausto was speaking from firsthand experience. He'd been a member of a partisan group who'd assisted the Allies in their push on Florence, fighting alongside the British when they entered the city, men from "London Liverpool Manchester."
And Hastings?
No, that was something else, Fausto explained—an interest in historic battles.
He was lying. He knew more about the Battle of Hastings than was healthy for any man to know. They were well into the third bottle of wine before Harold even got the arrow in the eye.
Fausto was enacting this event with a slender breadstick when Signora Fanelli appeared at the table.
"Fausto, leave him alone, look at him, he's half dead."
Fausto peered at Adam.
"Leave the poor boy alone. Go home. It's late," Signora Fanelli insisted, before returning to the bar.
"A beautiful woman," mused Fausto, helping himself to yet another of Adam's cigarettes.
"What happened to her husband?"
"The war. It was a bad thing."
"What?"
Fausto's dark eyes narrowed, as if judging Adam worthy of a response.
"We were fighting for our country. Our country. Against the Germans, yes, but also against each other—Communists, Socialists, Monarchists, Fascists. For the future. There was . . . confusion. Things happened. War permits it. It demands it." He drew on the cigarette and exhaled. "Giovanni Gentile. Do you know the name?"
"No."
"He was a philosopher. A thinker. Of the right. A Fascist. He had a house in Florence. They went to his door carrying books like students, carrying books to fool him. And then they shot him." He took a sip of wine. "When they start killing the men of ideas, you can be sure the Devil is laughing."
"Did you know them?" asked Adam.
"Who?"
"The ones who did it?"
"You ask a lot of questions."
"It's the first chance I've had."
Fausto cracked a smile and he laughed. "I talk too much, it's true."
"What?" called Signora Fanelli from across the room. "I don't see you for months and now I can't get rid of you?"
"I'm going, I'm going," said Fausto, holding up his hands in capitulation. Turning back to Adam, he leaned close. "Things can make sense at the time, but as you get older those consolations no longer help you sleep. It's the only thing I've learned. We all think we know the answer, and we're all wrong. Shit, I'm not sure we even know what the question is."
Adam drew his own consolation from the words: that Fausto was even more drunk than he was.
Fausto drained his glass and rose to his feet. "It's been a pleasure. You be careful up there at Villa Docci."
"Why do you say that?"
"It's a bad place."
"A bad place?"
"It always has been. People have a tendency to die there."
Adam couldn't help smiling at the melodramatic statement.
"You think I'm joking?"
"No . . . I'm sorry. You mean Signora Docci's son?"
"You heard about Emilio?"
"Not much. Only that he was killed by the Germans during the war."
Fausto crushed his cigarette in the ashtray. "So the story goes."
There was no time for Adam to pick him up on this last comment.
"Out!" trumpeted Signora Fanelli, advancing toward them wielding a broom.
Fausto turned to meet his attacker. "Letizia, you are a beautiful woman. If I were a richer man I would try to make you my wife." "Ahhhh," she cooed sweetly. "Well, you're about to become even poorer. Three bottles of wine."
"I'll pay," said Adam.
"He'll pay," said Fausto.
"No he won't," said Signora Fanelli.
Fausto delved into his pocket, pulled out some crumpled notes and dropped them on the table. "Good night, everybody," he said with the slightest of bows. "Fausto is no more."
He left via the terrace, the life somehow draining out of the room along with him.
Signora
Fanelli set about stacking chairs on the tables. "Fausto, Fausto," she sighed wearily. "You mustn't take him too seriously, he's a bit depressed at the moment."
"Why?"
"The Communists did not do well at the election in May . . . only twenty-two percent, the poor things," she added with a distinct note of false sympathy.
Twenty-two percent sounded like a not inconsiderable slice of the electorate.
"You're not a Communist?" Adam asked.
"Communism is for young people with empty stomachs. Look at me."
He had been, quite closely, and he would happily have paid her the compliment she was fishing for if the Italian words hadn't eluded him.
"Fausto isn't so young," he said.
"Fausto was born an idealist. It's not his fault."
He had wanted to sit there, chatting idly, observing the play of her slender hips beneath her dress as she worked the broom around the tables. But she had dispatched him upstairs with a bottle of mineral water and firm instructions to drink the lot before bed.
This he had failed to do.
Instead, he had flopped onto the mattress and set about constructing a gratifying little scenario in his head. His last memory before drifting into drunken slumber had been of Harry barging into the room just as Signora Fanelli was peeling off an emerald green chenille bathrobe.
THE WALK TO VILLA DOCCI FAILED TO CLEAR HIS HEAD; all it did was shunt the pain from the front of his skull to the back of it, where, he knew from hard experience, it would remain lodged for the rest of the day. The heat was building fast under a cloudless sky, and his shirt was clinging to him by the time he arrived.
He had anticipated having to force a decision on himself. In the end, it came naturally, when he was not even halfway through his brisk tramp around the memorial garden.
There was something not quite right about the place, and this was where its appeal lay. There were no great questions clamoring for answers; they were more like restless whispers at the back of his mind.
According to the records, Flora had died in 1548, the year after Villa Docci's completion, so why had her husband waited almost thirty years—till the very end of his own life—to lay out a garden to her memory? Then there were the small anomalies within the garden itself, not exactly discordant elements, but somehow out of keeping with the mood and tone of the whole. Why, for example, the triumphal arch on which Flora's name was carved in its Italian form? It was such a pompous piece of architecture, crowning the crest above her like some advertising. At no other point in the itinerary did the garden look to declare its purpose. Rather, it encrypted it in symbols and metaphors and allegory.
