The Savage Garden

by Mark Mills

  He headed straight there, the prospect of trudging the streets of the city center on a bellyful of raw meat and red wine not a particularly appealing one. Better to flee the heat and make for the higher ground, the tree-clad slopes. Besides, the Romanesque church of San Miniato al Monte was perched just above the piazzale, and it was one of the few places Professor Leonard had insisted he visit.

  It didn't disappoint. It was a small building, beautifully proportioned and elaborately decorated, with an unusual elevated choir.

  The interior was gloomy and pleasantly cool. He hovered close to a tour group of Americans, hitching a free ride. At a certain point, he allowed them to wander ahead. Something had caught his eye: a large zodiac set in the stone floor, like a giant clock face, the astrological signs of the twelve constellations made of inlaid white- marble.

  He patrolled the circumference, wondering just what on earth it was doing here, this pagan symbolism in a Christian church. Did anyone know the answer? Had the guide passed over it because there was no explanation? The guide did mention the zodiac before leading her party from the church but offered no real illumination. Its presence there was open to speculation, she said. Adam found this strangely comforting. If its exact significance had gone missing over the centuries, then why shouldn't the same hold true for the memorial garden? Maybe he really was on to something. Maybe the book in his hand really did hold the key to some lost interpretation.

  He had found nothing new in Dante's words to suggest this was the case by the time Antonella showed up at the wheel of an extremely small car. She called it her "blue frog" and she said she loved it. This didn't square with the way she treated the little Fiat 600, hurling it around the corners, wrenching it up through the gears until it was screaming in protest.

  Crammed into the passenger seat, hurtling down a precipitous cobbled street, Adam found himself wishing he had opted to thumb a lift back to San Casciano. The city ceased abruptly, cobbles giving way to dirt and dust, stone walls to high, banked hedgerows. It was a narrow country lane. Very narrow. Must be one way. Had to be, given the speed they were traveling at.

  It wasn't. But it was nice to know the brakes worked.

  He asked Antonella to drop him off on the outskirts of San Casciano. It wasn't that he feared for the lives of the residents— although the thought had crossed his mind—he was more concerned that Antonella might sense something of what had gone on the night before if allowed to come face to face with Signora Fanelli. He was only delaying the inevitable. When Antonella suggested coming by the pensione in the morning and transporting his bags to Villa Docci, he could hardly refuse the offer.

  He found Signora Fanelli on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor of the trattoria. It was a position he recognized. She got to her feet, wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, which didn't help.

  It was lust, he realized, pure and simple, unassailable. He was no different from Paolo and Francesca in the second circle of Dante's Hell, blown about for all of time by fierce winds, doomed by their— how had Dante put it?—dubbiosi disiri. Their dubious desires.

  "Is everything okay?"

  "Yes," he replied absently, thinking that he'd already reached the fifth circle of Hell in Dorothy L. Sayers' translation and he'd yet to come across a sin he hadn't been guilty of at one time or another.

  "The money for Harry?"

  "Yes. No problem."

  How much further would he have to descend into Dante's ordered underworld before he could finally declare himself innocent of the transgression on show?

  "How did you get back?"

  He told her.

  "She's a beautiful girl, isn't she?"

  "Is she?"

  "You don't think so?"

  "No. Yes. I suppose."

  "She's wild, that one. Well, not anymore. But she used to be."

  "Wild?"

  "Like her mother. But it's different now. They say she's changed."

  "Changed?"

  "That's what they say."

  He headed for the bar in Piazza Cavour before dinner, as he did every evening, aware that this was the last time he would watch the ragged boys playing football, scampering to and fro between the goalposts chalked onto the walls, stopping to splash their faces with water from the old stone trough whenever one of them scored. The piazza started to fill—slow but steady trickles of humanity from the side streets—and the young footballers grudgingly relinquished their pitch to their elders.

  You could go a whole day in San Casciano barely seeing a soul, but come early evening, the entire town (or so it seemed) took to the streets, making for Piazza Cavour. Couples, families, black- shawled widows bent with the weight of years: They all gathered, sauntering around.

  Signora Fanelli had painted a picture of a fractured community, yet here they all were, congregating, carrying on as normal. He wondered what their stories were, and whether thirteen years was really time enough to forgive and forget.

  He worked during dinner, although at a certain point it ceased to be work, Dante's wild imagination and spectacular imagery carrying him effortlessly along. On reaching the seventh circle of Hell, he was pleased to finally encounter a sin he hadn't committed: murder. Strangely, Dante rated this as a less grievous offense than both hypocrisy and flattery, which he had placed in the eighth circle. Here, a group of souls was walking endlessly around in a circle, a devil slicing them open from top to toe each time they passed him, only for the wounds to reheal. These were the Sowers of Discord and Schism, the prophet Muhammad chief among them. True to form, Dante had devised a punishment appropriate to the sin, splitting each of them apart for all eternity, as they had sought to divide others during their lifetimes.

  But amongst all the unfortunates being eviscerated by devils, boiling in rivers of blood and choking on human excrement, there was still no sign of any of the characters from the garden. Frustrated, he started to skip ahead, skimming the pages for their names: Flora, Zephyr, Daphne, Apollo, Hyacinth, Echo, Narcissus. This is what he was doing when a figure appeared at his shoulder. "Hi."

  Adam turned and looked up at Fausto. He appeared more presentable than before. His chin was still blackened with stubble but he'd run a comb through his long lank hair, and he was wearing a clean shirt, buttoned up to the neck—small concessions to smartness that didn't quite mask a congenital disregard for externals.

  "Can I?" he asked, dropping into the chair opposite.

  Adam pointedly checked the number of cigarettes in his packet. "Sure."

  Fausto smiled. "Don't worry, I brought my own this time."

  "How are you?"

  "Good. Tired. Working too hard."

  "I don't even know what you do."

  "The minimum," grinned Fausto. "I have a small place on the hillside there. There's always something to do. Right now I'm building a shed for a pig."

  "You have a pig?"

  "Not yet. But it'll be the happiest pig alive when I do." He glanced at Adam's book. "Dante, eh? Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate.,,,

  It was a well-known line from the poem, the inscription on the Gates of Hell: Abandon all hope, ye who enter.

  "You know it?"

  "Do I know it? Do you know Shakespeare? Do you know Milton? Dante is a son of Tuscany." Fausto laid his hand on the book. "This is the reason the Tuscan language is the language of Italy, did you know that?"

  "Yes."

  When writing The Divine Comedy, Dante had shunned Latin in favor of his Tuscan vernacular, a clear break from tradition, and one that had enshrined the dialect as the national language.

  "A great man—like Machiavelli, another Tuscan."

  "I know."

  "But I bet you don't know that Machiavelli wrote The Prince just down the road from here."

  "Really?"

  "Sant'Andrea in Percussina, not even three kilometers away. He was forced to leave Florence, like Dante. Two great works written in exile. Coincidence? I don't think so."

  Fausto wasn'
t lying; he knew a lot about The Divine Comedy, right down to the names of the popes Dante had consigned to his Hell. In fact, Fausto seemed to know a lot about pretty much everything, which wasn't altogether surprising—he had been a student at the University in Florence when war broke out.

  A member of the Partito Socialista at the time, he said he was involved in the struggle against the Fascists' creeping grip on the university. Then when the armistice was signed and the Italians suddenly found themselves under occupation by the Germans, their former allies, he became caught up in the fight for national liberation. At first, he helped distribute underground newspapers with punchy titles like Avanti! and Avanguardia. Then he picked up a gun and began to fight, heading for the hills and joining a partisan group. Many had, men of all kinds, all classes. Signora Docci's younger son, Maurizio, had done the same thing. A radical, a member of the Comitato Interpartiti di Firenze at the time, he had abandoned politics for the gun.

  "I never fought with him, but he was known as a good leader, a good fighter." Fausto paused. "You see, in the end words don't count for much. You have to hurt your enemy. The Americans understood that—you English too. You have to kick him hard enough till he leaves you alone."

  Fausto couldn't have been much more than Adam's age at the time, and Adam found himself reaching for equivalents in his own life. The best he could come up with was an unremarkable stint of National Service, and adding his name to a petition censuring Anthony Eden for his handling of the Suez crisis.

  The liberation of Italy didn't bring happier times, Fausto went on. The socialist and communist factions, united under the banner of a common cause, fragmented once more. The Americans were damned if they were going to allow the country to go to that dog Stalin, and promptly set about showering the Christian Democrat party with dollars in a bid to buy the soul of the country. Years on, they still were.

  "Really?"

  "Millions of dollars every year. But a rich, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant country can't impose its values on a poor, Latin, Catholic one.

  We're poor. We earn a quarter of what you do in England—one sixth of what the Americans do."

  "The country's getting richer, I heard."

  Fausto exhaled, fixing Adam with a stare. "True. And if it continues, maybe the Americans will win in the end."

  "Ah, the Americans, the Americans," sighed Signora Fanelli, approaching their table. "What have they done now, Fausto?"

  "You want to know what the Americans have done?"

  "Not really."

  She flashed a wicked smile and replaced their empty carafe of wine with a full one. "On the house—a leaving present."

  "What a woman," said Fausto with a strange mix of indignation and desire, watching her walk away. He topped up their glasses. "You're leaving?"

  "Not Italy. I'm going to stay at Villa Docci."

  Fausto nodded a couple of times. "I thought I told you to be careful."

  "You said it was a bad place."

  "And it is."

  Fausto's evidence was pretty compelling. When he was done presenting it, it occurred to Adam that if you mined the history of any family you might unearth a grim catalogue of intrigues, deceits and unusual deaths; but somehow you couldn't help thinking that the Doccis had suffered more than their fair share of misadventure over the centuries.

  As their fortunes had fluctuated, the estate had fallen in and out of the family's possession. Somehow it had always returned, though. Something—a marriage of convenience, a betrayal or a bribe—always ensured that the family and the property were never separated for too long.

  The times they were together, it was rarely a happy union.

  People died in fires, fell from their horses, smothered their loved ones or had their throats slit in the night. Presumably, many had led quite happy and uneventful lives at Villa Docci, but Fausto's point was this: the house attracted ill luck to itself, like a flame draws moths, and he selected his stories to bear out his argument.

  "And Emilio?" asked Adam.

  "What about him?"

  "You think what happened is all part of the same thing?"

  "Who knows what really happened?" Fausto shrugged.

  "I do. Signora Docci told me."

  "What did she say?"

  Adam spelled out the bare bones of the story as recounted to him. When he was finished, Fausto sat in silence for a moment.

  "Well, most of it's correct."

  "And the rest?"

  Fausto lit a cigarette. "Emilio was a Fascist, a party member, did you know that?"

  "No."

  "It's because of him the Germans were so respectful when they took over the villa. It's also the reason he was so angry when he saw the damage they were doing that night. It wasn't part of the agreement, the understanding. He lost his temper, I can see that. But I still can't see him pulling out his gun."

  "But he did. There were witnesses. Maurizio and the gardener . . ." He couldn't remember the name.

  "Ah, Gaetano," sighed Fausto. "Who knows what Gaetano saw, or what he heard? He didn't seem too sure himself at the time. That came later."

  "I don't understand."

  Fausto leaned close across the table. "He changed his story."

  "Why?"

  Fausto shrugged. "I never asked him." "Why not?"

  "You know the story of Pandora?" "Yes."

  "Well, sometimes it's best to ignore the whispers inside the box."

  ANTONELLA APPEARED PUNCTUALLY AT THE PENSIONE AT ten o'clock the following morning. The encounter between her and Signora Fanelli passed off quite painlessly, the two women exchanging easy pleasantries. The suitcases were loaded into the Fiat and Antonella sped off to Villa Docci. Adam followed on the bicycle. He was dispatched with a kiss on both cheeks from Signora Fanelli. Iacopo offered a limp and clammy hand by way of farewell, but only when prompted by his mother.

  Arriving at the villa, he was surprised to find Maurizio unloading his suitcases from Antonella's car. There had been a family gathering the evening before to finalize the arrangements for the party, and Maurizio had stayed on overnight in order to make the rounds of the estate workers.

  "They always have complaints, but this year is worse than normal."

  "Because of the drought?"

  "Exactly."

  They carried the cases upstairs together. Adam already knew the bedroom assigned to him, but the dark, musty space he had briefly looked in on was almost unrecognizable now that the tall windows were thrown open, allowing light and air to flood it to its corners. Vases of sweet-smelling flowers were distributed around the room.

  Even Maurizio was impressed. "Maria has been busy. I don't think it has ever looked so good."

  Maurizio headed off on his duties, and Adam joined Signora Docci and Antonella on the terrace for coffee. Antonella had errands to run; she only stayed long enough to invite Adam to Sunday lunch at her farmhouse the following day. It was a chance to meet her brother, Edoardo, and some of their other friends. When she rose to leave, Adam also made his excuses, saying he had to work.

  "But it's the weekend."

  "He's not here for your amusement, Nonna." Antonella turned to Adam. "Don't let her tell you what to do. If you want to work, you work."

  "He has the whole afternoon to work. I won't be here to distract him. I'm going into Florence."

  "Nonna?" "What?"

  "Are you ready for Florence?"

  "The question, my dear, is whether Florence is ready for me."

  She left just before lunch in a navy blue Lancia sedan, dragged from a barn and dusted down. She gave a mock-regal wave from the backseat as the vehicle pulled away. It might have been the wave, or maybe it was the sight of Foscolo at the wheel in a chauffeur's cap, but it was the first time Adam had seen Maria smile. The smile suited her face, although the moment she sensed his eyes on her, it was gone.

  He unpacked his suitcases, then made for a shaded corner of the terrace with The Divine Comedy. He tried to progress, but his eyes kept slidi
ng over the text. In the end, he closed the book, conceding defeat to the source of his distraction.

  The top floor was reached by a lone stone staircase, centrally placed, in keeping with the perfect symmetry of the villa. Wooden double doors barred his passage at the head of the stairs. He wasn't surprised to find them locked. He was surprised, however, when a voice echoed in the stairwell.

  "The Signora has the key."

  He spun, startled. Maria was standing at the foot of the steps. He felt the weight of her flat, inscrutable gaze as he descended toward her.

  "Can I prepare you something for lunch?"

  "A sandwich, thanks."

  "You should eat more. You're too thin."

  "I eat a lot at dinner."

  "I'll remember that," she said.

  There was a levity in this last remark, which gave him the courage to ask, "Maria, why is it locked?"

  "It was the Signore's wish. The Signora chooses to respect it."

  "Don't you think it's a bit"—he searched for the word— "macabre?"

  "Just a bit? It sits over this house like a curse. Not for much longer, though. Signor Maurizio has plans."

  "Plans?"

  "I don't know the details. The usual?" "Excuse me?"

  "Ham and cheese?"

  "Yes, thank you."

  He took the sandwich with him to the memorial garden. He ate it on the stone bench at the base of the amphitheater, looking up at Flora on her plinth. She seemed to be taunting him. So did the inscription carved into the bench—"The Soul in Repose Grows Wiser"—a quotation from Aristotle, he now knew.

  He was anything but "in repose," his thoughts turning once again to his conversation with Fausto the evening before. It had robbed him of sleep; it had hovered over him like a cloud all day.

  If Fausto was to be believed, then Gaetano the gardener had changed his account of what happened the night of Emilio's murder. Why would he do that? More important, how could he get away with it? The truth was he couldn't, not without the collusion of Maurizio. Their stories had to tally. This suggested some kind of compact between the two men, arrived at subsequent to Emilio's death. From here it was a short step to the unthinkable—too short not to take, even if you didn't want to.