by Mark Mills
The more temperate approach at Villa Docci was exemplified by the statue of Flora on the plinth near the top of the amphitheater. The corkscrew pose, with the left leg bent and resting on a perch, was a traditional stance, typical of the mid-to-late sixteenth century—a form that had found its highest expression in the sculptures of Giambologna and Ammannati. In fact, as the file pointed out, the statue of Flora was closely modeled on Giambologna's marble Venus in the Boboli Gardens in Florence, although like many of the imitations spawned by that masterpiece, it lacked the original's grace and vitality.
"I don't know about the others," said Antonella as they circled beneath Flora, "but for me she is alive."
Her look challenged him to contest the assertion. When he didn't, she added, "Touch her leg."
He wished she hadn't said it. He also wished she hadn't reached out and run her hand up the back of the marble calf from the heel to the crook of the knee, because it left him no choice but to follow suit.
He tried to experience something—he wanted to experience something—and he did.
"What do you feel?" asked Antonella.
"I feel," he replied, "like a sweaty Englishman molesting a naked statue in the presence of a complete stranger."
Antonella gave a sudden loud laugh, her hand shooting to her mouth.
"I'm sorry," she said. "Maybe you will see her differently with time."
"Maybe."
"Go on, please."
"Really?"
"I come here every day if I can."
It wasn't surprising, he continued, that the statue of Flora had been modeled on Venus, given the close link between the two goddesses. Both were associated with fertility and the season of spring. Indeed, it was quite possible that the goddess of love and the goddess of flowers appeared alongside each other in two of the most celebrated paintings to come out of the Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli's Primavera and his Birth of Venus.
"Really?"
"It's a new theory, very new."
"Ah," said Antonella skeptically.
"You're right, it's probably nothing." He shrugged, knowing full well that it wasn't, not for her, not if she visited the garden as often as she claimed to.
"Tell me anyway."
There was no need to explain Flora's story; it was in the file, which she had surely read. Her great-grandfather had even included the Latin lines from Ovid's Fasti detailing how the nymph Chloris was pursued by Zephyrus, the west wind, who then violated her, atoning for this act by making her his wife and transforming her into Flora, mistress of all the flowers.
No one disputed that Zephyrus and Chloris figured in
Botticelli's Primavera, but until now scholars had always read the figure standing to the left of them as the Hora—the spirit—of springtime, scattering flowers. Hence the name of the painting.
"But what if she's really Flora?" he asked.
"After her transformation?"
"Exactly."
"I don't know. What if it is her?"
The painting could then be read as an allegory for the nature of love. By pairing Flora—a product of lust, of Zephyrus's passion— with the chaste figure of Venus, then maybe Botticelli was saying that true love is the union of both: passion tempered with chastity.
It was possible to read the same buried message in the Birth of Venus. Zephyrus and Chloris were again present, suggesting that the female figure standing on the shore, holding out the cloak for Venus, might well be Flora.
"And Venus again represents chastity?"
"Exactly. Venus Pudica."
She smiled when he adopted the well-known pose of Venus in her shell, modestly covering her nakedness.
"It's a good theory," she said.
"You think?"
"Yes. Because if it's right, then Flora is a symbol for the erotic, the sexual."
"Yes, I suppose she is."
Antonella turned her gaze on Flora. "Do you see it now?"
He looked up at the statue.
"See the way she stands—her hips are turned away, but they are also . . . open, inviting. Her arm covers her breasts, but only just, like she doesn't care too much. And her face, the eyes, the mouth. She is not una innocente."
He could see what Antonella was driving at. Maybe he was wrong to have attributed the slight slackness of the pose to the inferior hand of a secondary sculptor. Maybe that sculptor hadn't been striving for delicacy and poise, but for something looser, more sensual. No, that was wrong. He had somehow managed to achieve both—a demure quality coupled with an erotic charge.
"So I'm not wrong?"
"Huh?" he said distractedly.
"I'm not alone. You see it too."
"It's possible."
"Possible? It is there or it isn't," came the indignant reply.
"You're not wrong."
"Everyone else thinks I am. My grandmother thinks I imagine it, and this says very much about me."
"What does she think it says about you?"
Even as the words left his mouth he realized it was an impertinent question, far too personal.
"It doesn't matter now," she replied, "because we are right and she is wrong."
He found himself smiling at the ease with which she'd deflected his inquiry, sparing him further embarrassment. His mind, though, was leaping ahead, questions already coalescing. Was it done knowingly? And if so, why? Why would a grieving husband allow his wife to be personified as some prudish yet pouting goddess, some virgin-whore?
The questions stayed with him as they moved on down the slope to the grotto buried in its mound of shaggy laurel. They entered silently, allowing their eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The marble figures stood out pale and ghostly against the dark, encrusted rock of the back wall. In the center, facing left, was Daphne at the moment of her transformation into a laurel tree, her toes turning to roots, bark already girding her thighs, branches and leaves beginning to sprout from the splayed fingers of her left hand, which was raised heavenward in desperation, supplication. To her right was Apollo, the sun god, from whom she was fleeing— youthful, muscular, identifiable by the lyre in his hand and the bow slung across his broad back. Below them, an elderly bearded gentleman reclined along the rim of a great basin of purple and white variegated marble. This was Peneus, the river god, father to Daphne.
The story was straight from Ovid's Metamorphoses: the nymph Daphne, fleeing the unwelcome advances of a love-struck Apollo, begged her father to turn her into a laurel tree, which he duly did. It was an appropriate myth for a garden setting—Art and Nature combining in the figure of Daphne. As the file pointed out, there was a relief panel depicting the same scene in the Grotto of Diana at the Villa d'Este in Tivoli. But here in the memorial garden, the myth had an added resonance, mirroring the story of Flora—a nymph who also underwent a metamorphosis following her pursuit by an amorous god.
This last observation was Antonella's. It wasn't in the file, nor had it occurred to Adam, which was mildly annoying, although this wouldn't prevent him, he suspected, from claiming it as his own for the purposes of his thesis.
Antonella explained how the water poured from the urn held by Peneus, filling the marble basin. A lowered lip at the front then allowed it to overflow into a shallow, circular pool set in the stone floor. This was carved with rippling water, and at its center was a female face in relief, staring heavenward, the gaping mouth acting as a sink hole. The hair of this disembodied visage was bedecked with flowers, identifying it as that of Flora: the goddess of flowers drawing sustenance for her creations from the life-giving spring water.
It was an exquisite arrangement, faultless both in its beauty and in its pertinence to the overarching program of the garden. The only false note was the broken-off horn of the unicorn crouched at Apollo's feet, its head bowed toward the marble basin. This was a common motif in gardens of the period. A unicorn dipping its horn into the water signified the purity of the source feeding the garden; it announced that you could happily scoop u
p a handful and down a draft without fear for your life. At some time since that era, though, the unicorn had lost the greater part of its horn.
Adam fingered the truncated stump. "It's a pity."
"Yes. What is a unicorn without its horn?"
"A white horse?"
Antonella smiled. "A very unhappy white horse."
They headed west from the grotto on a looping circuit, the pathway trailing off into the evergreen woods blanketing the sides of the valley. They sauntered through the shade, chatting idly as they went. Antonella lived across the valley in a farmhouse she rented from her grandmother. The old building was delightfully cool in summer but bitterly cold in winter, and she had a rule that whenever the well water froze she would decamp to her brother's apartment in Florence. She and Edoardo were the children of Signora Docci's only daughter, Caterina, a woman whom Professor Leonard had referred to as "dissolute," something Adam found hard to square with the self-possessed creature stepping out beside him.
Her parents were divorced, she explained. Her mother lived in Rome, her father in Milan, where he was given to business ventures of a distinctly dubious nature, which promised (and invariably failed to deliver) untold wealth. She said this with a note of mild amusement in her voice.
By now they had passed through the first glade, with its triad of freestanding sculptures representing the death of Hyacinth, and were nearing the small temple at the foot of the garden.
"And what do you do?" Adam asked.
"Me? Oh, I design clothes. Can't you tell?" She spread her hands in reference to her simple cotton shift dress.
"I . . . yes—"
Her smile stopped him dead. "My dresses have more color. Although they're not really mine. There is someone else's name on everything I do."
"How come?"
"I work at a fashion house in Florence. There can only be one name."
"Doesn't that bother you?"
"What a serious question."
"I'm a serious chap."
"Oh really?"
"Can't you tell?" he said, spreading his hands. "All my friends are on a beach. Me, I'm here studying."
"Only because you have to, and only for two weeks. From what I hear, you will probably see a beach before the end of the summer."
This meant one thing: that the news from Professor Leonard of Adam's indolence had not stopped with Signora Docci.
"I dispute that."
"What?"
"Whatever you've heard."
"The good things too?" Her eyes sparkled with mischief. "My grandmother likes you, I think."
Maybe it was something to do with the way she bared her teeth when she smiled, but at that moment it struck him that the long diagonal scar on her forehead exactly mirrored the cranial ridge on the orangutan skull in the study.
Antonella turned away—feeling the weight of his lingering look?—and glanced down at the supine figure at their feet.
Narcissus lay sprawled along the rim of the octagonal pool, gazing admiringly at what should have been his reflection. Instead, he appeared to be searching for something he had lost, some trinket he'd mislaid in the debris of twigs and leaves that carpeted the bottom of the pool.
"I'm sorry you cannot see it when the water is here."
"Will it ever come back?"
"Who knows? But it is not the same without the water. The water gives it life. It makes it breathe."
She had removed her leather sandals a while before—they now hung lazily from the fingers of her right hand—and looking at her there in her simple cotton dress, he saw her as the child she once must have been, wandering the garden, gazing wide-eyed on the coterie of petrified gods, goddesses and nymphs playing out their troubled stories on this leafy stage.
When she made for the temple, he followed unquestioningly. It was a small structure—octagonal, like the pool—and crowned by a low cupola just visible behind the pedimented portico. The floor was of polished stone, the walls of white stucco, as was the dome. The building was dedicated to Echo, the unfortunate nymph who fell hard for Narcissus. He, too preoccupied with his own beauty, spurned her attentions, whereupon Echo, heartbroken, faded away until only her voice remained.
"I love this place."
Her words resounded off the clean, hard surfaces, the acoustic effect no doubt intentional. Simple painted wooden benches ran around the walls, and there was a lengthy Latin inscription carved into the architrave beneath the dome. According to the file it was a line from Socrates: The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.
He approached the cast-iron grille in the center of the floor. This had puzzled him on his previous visits. There was no reference to it in the file, and all his efforts to dislodge it and discover what lay beneath had failed.
"The water falls into a small well then carries on to the pool outside. The sound in here ... it is not easy to describe." She thought on it for a moment. "Sussurri."
"Whispers."
"Yes. Like whispers."
They covered the rest of the circuit in near silence, stopping briefly in the last of the glades, with its statue of Venus stooped over a dead Adonis—the final element in the itinerary, its message of grief and loss almost overwhelming after the other stories they had witnessed.
Any more would have been too much. The garden transported you just far enough. As soon as you felt the grip of its undertow, it released you.
Even without the sculptural program, the place would have exerted an unsettling pull. There was something mysterious and otherworldly about a wooded vale. Maybe it was the sense of enclosure, of containment, coupled with the presence of water, but it somehow reeked of ancient gatherings and happenings. You sensed that you weren't the first to have been drawn here, that naked savages had also stumbled upon it and thought the place bewitched.
Federico Docci would have been hard-pressed to find a better spot for his memorial garden than one already haunted by flickering figures from some spectral past. And he had cleverly turned the location to his own ends, planting large numbers of evergreen trees to screen off views, to guide the eye, to tease and disorient, whatever the season. He had punched holes in this somber vegetation, shaping glades that smacked of sacred groves, connecting them with curling pathways that widened and narrowed as they went, the loose geometry almost musical—a pleasing rhythm of space and enclosure, of light and shade.
Having laid out this new kingdom, Federico had then dedicated it to Flora, goddess of flowers, and populated it with the characters from ancient mythology over whom she held sway: Hyacinth, Narcissus and Adonis. All had died tragically, and all lived on in the flowers that burst from the earth where their blood had spilled—the same flowers that still enameled the ground in their respective areas of the garden every springtime.
Their stories cast a melancholy pall over the garden. They were tales of desire, unrequited love, jealousy, vanity and untimely death. But they also spoke of hope. For just as the gods had interceded to immortalize the fallen youths, so Federico had ensured that the memory of his wife, snatched from him at a tender age, would live on.
These were the thoughts swirling through Adam's head as he and Antonella wended their way back up the hill to the villa. It was the first time he had fully grasped the beauty of the scheme— its logic, subtlety, and cohesion—and he wondered whether Antonella's company had somehow contributed to this epiphany.
He glanced over at her, walking beside him with her loose springless stride, shoulders back like a dancer. She seemed quite at ease with the silence hanging between them.
She caught his look and a smile stole over her features. "It's like waking up, isn't it?"
"Hmmm?"
"Leaving the garden. It takes time to come back to the real world."
He felt a sudden and foolish urge to tell her how beautiful she was. And why. Because she wore her beauty carelessly, without vanity—the same way she wore the wounds o
n her face.
He checked himself just in time.
She cocked her head at him. "What were you going to say?"
"Something I would have regretted."
"Yes," she said quietly, "it can do that too."
It was Antonella's idea that they stop on the lower terrace and settle themselves down on one of the benches overlooking the olive grove. She asked for a cigarette, which she smoked furtively, glancing up at the villa every so often to check she wasn't being observed.
"My grandmother doesn't approve," she explained.
"I think you're safe. I mean, she's bedridden, right?"
Antonella shrugged. "Maybe. She likes to create dramas." She paused. "That's not fair. She was very ill this winter . . . una bronchite, how do you say?
"Bronchitis."
"The doctor was worried. We all were. She has stayed in her bed since then."
"Have you tried to get her up?"
"Have we tried?" She sounded exasperated.
"You think she's pretending?"
"I think she does not care anymore. She is leaving soon, before the end of the year."
"Where's she going?"
Antonella turned and pointed, smoke curling from the cigarette between her fingers. "There."
On a rise just beyond the farm buildings, a large house rose foursquare, its stuccoed walls washed orange by the sun and streaked with the shadows of the surrounding cypresses. Too grand for a laborer, but maybe not grand enough for the Lady of the Manor.
"Why's she moving?"
"It was her decision. She wants Maurizio—my uncle—to have the villa."
"Maybe she's changed her mind."
"She would say."
"Maybe she's saying it the only way she knows how."
"You don't know my grandmother. She would say."
Strolling back to the villa, they passed close to the small chapel pressed up against the sandstone cliff. She asked him if he'd seen inside. He had tried, he said, but the door was always locked.
The key was conveniently located for all would-be thieves beneath a large stone right beside the front step—a fact on which he remarked. "You never know when someone might need it," said Antonella simply.
