The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  I’ve felt terrible these last months. I struggled not to be consumed by a sense of guilt. I tried to work as hard as I could. I signed up for an aerobics class, I cried almost every night. I tapped all the reserves of my goodwill. I tried to tell myself that I’d always done everything I did with full awareness in my mind of the difference between right and wrong. But maybe in that confused moment, in which the principle that dominated was pleasure, I got confused. On the good side, everyone’s first priority is “well-being.” Pleasure and enjoying yourself are the imperatives of this era. It seems like they’ve found the formula, they’ve made it work. Always keeping in mind that life could end in one hour, tomorrow, in a week, has been enough to make us stop thinking about the future, about the consequences of our choices, to avoid weighing lost opportunities, because we don’t want to lose out on anything; so we do everything, and load each occasion onto the next without letting anything go to waste. It’s as though suddenly we all have a hunger for life and for lightness that nobody had before. Maybe we want to make up for the sacrifices of the previous generation, maybe we’re bored of politics, maybe we’re more afraid of dying than the others had been, and certain that when we do die, we’ll leave almost no trace, we surrender ourselves to the nearest, most ephemeral pleasure. We consume, we are consumed. Everything is going so well that we’re sure either that we can pay for it, or that it’s not that expensive. Maybe someone will pay for it who comes after us, but that doesn’t seem very important to us. We’re unable to look ahead to the future, we’re really in no condition to worry about our children. We’re superficial, and we lack any higher goals beyond the infantile satisfaction of our material desires. But it’s useless to talk about what will happen to this generic ‘us’ (into which I can doubtless insert all the adults I know, my so-called friends), in the end, society does nothing more than provide us with an incredibly stupid alibi. In these months, I lost the will to live. My nights were plagued with nightmares, of Annamaria drowning, Sauro drowning, me drowning in the water in front of the Seaside Cowboy, and Filippo at a table, eating, not seeing, not hearing the shouting, not intervening. A dream so didactic that it made me think once again how useless my therapist is. Nobody in the family noticed how I was feeling. Nobody asked me if anything was wrong. Not that I expected my children to worry about me. But Filippo. My god how invisible I am to him. I think that, in the end, that’s the sole certainty that remains to me. I don’t exist for him. Sauro is right, he’s less interested in me than in his horse. I hadn’t admitted this, and I think that everything comes from this, my effort to make everything go smoothly, the equilibrium of unhappiness that we had covered over with feigned joy, now has turned on me. The loveless banality of everyday life that you have when you’ve been together for twenty years seemed to me to be compensated for by our household and all of our comfortable shared routines. Knowing certain people, appreciating sophistication, carving out an area of freedom while always keeping the children’s needs in mind, ensuring that they lacked for nothing; that they would dress well and eat better, travel, get jobs that were essentially guaranteed, with a purpose—democracy, the environment, the correct information. It’s so easy to look happy when you’ve got well-being. Still, it’s enough to scratch this shiny surface for just one second to see the truth of what we are. People who are petty, egotistical, incapable of any pure, generous gesture, of any impulse that would demand a true sacrifice. I’ve watched Filippo over these months, while he wasn’t watching me. I was transparent, and he was unrecognizable; who knows for how long I hadn’t dignified him with real attention either. But now that I’ve opened my eyes it weighs on me so much. I needed his love, his support, I needed to tell him everything and to know that he was by my side, unconditionally; to know that my mistakes would be treated with the same leniency that I showed his. But I knew that nothing like that would have happened, that I’m just a useful person to run our household with, the children, the business, friends. And that, apart from my role as a support, as wife and mother, I’m nothing to him, nothing but a nuisance, who cries, and grows older. We’re strangers to the people we live with. I don’t know if I will have the patience to keep going, to keep putting up a good front amid this lovelessness. Over the years, I thought we were heading toward some kind of paradise, only now do I see that, instead, we were headed straight down opposite roads, our backs to each other. It’s impossible to turn back now.

  I think I will ask for a divorce and move to another city. I think about all the people I have around me, and I have only one certainty: we are all monsters. Except for Annamaria, but she will also come to nothing, surrounded by so much human and emotional misery. We are all monsters.

  * * *

  Annamaria had started going secretly to the Garden at least one afternoon a week. She had recognized that talking with Giovanna was much more useful to her than the silence of the library, so she asked her when she could come by without causing trouble, because she’d understood that she might be in the way when the others were working, and above all she did not want to disturb the artist.

  Once she had barged in during a meeting, when Niki was going over stock with her workmen. She had run away without saying hello. But later a funny thing happened that had changed everything. On another afternoon she was behind the Sphinx with Giovanna, who was cleaning. She had brought the Madonna cassette True Blue, and they had put it on the stereo at low volume. Annamaria had started sweeping and imitating a scene from the meeting between Madonna and her relatives from Abruzzo that had been broadcast on RAI Uno a couple of years earlier, when the singer had come to Torino for a concert, a media event that Annamaria had passionately followed. Annamaria, who would have given almost anything to go to that concert, had been captivated by the family from Aquila who were catapulted into the global pop star’s dressing room on the first night, and displayed their ignorance to the entire country, demonstrating that Madonna’s genius was a shocking victory over her genes. They were grandchildren of the same grandparents, but the one in front of the microphone was conquering the world, while the others couldn’t form a sentence. Annamaria recited all the Abruzzo relatives’ lines. She spoke as if she had no teeth. “My name izh Bambina, and I’m Madonna’zh great aunt, I condradulade her sho sho much on the conshert.” Then she did Madonna, posing for the photo with her Italian cousins. “How do you say? Formaggia?” Madonna wanted to ask what to say instead of “cheese” to smile in the snapshot, but they corrected her: “Noooo, formaggio.”

  Once again in an American accent, Annamaria imitated Madonna inviting her little cousin to dance with her on stage, then alternated the responses of the little boy and his mother in different voices.

  “Jaseppi, do you want to dance with me? Dance with me, please, per favori?

  “Dunno how ta dance.”

  “Please, come on, dance con me?”

  “Nooo, dunno dance.”

  “It’s not true, he knows how to dance, he knows how to dance, when he’s alone he puts on the Madonna cassette at top volume and he dances like a demon around the room.”

  “No, Mamma, dunno dancin’.’”

  Annamaria imitated Madonna who went along with it, saying “Okey-dokey,” then followed it up with the interview with the family, alternating the voices of the journalist and some of the Abruzzo relatives.

  “Amelia, how did you feel when you were face to face with Madonna?”

  “I hugged huh so hahd. I thawt I was dreamin’. She was supah nice.

  “And you Annalisa, which Madonna song do you like best?”

  “Umm. Dunno. They’re all good.”

  “And your favorite, Giuseppe?”

  “Umm. Same ones as my sister.”

  Giovanna was doubled over laughing. “Please, do the whole scene again from the top, it’s stupendous.”

  “‘I thawt I was dreamin’.’ That’s how I feel when I’m with Niki . . .” Annamaria said, not realiz
ing that, while this was going on, Niki had walked in, had watched the performance of the whole scene and was highly amused.

  “Could you do it again for me, too?” she asked.

  Annamaria felt her face blazing; Niki insisted. At that point, Annamaria couldn’t say no, and redid the sketch. Niki laughed so much that they all laughed together, then she said to Giovanna, taking her aside, “I beg you, ask this girl to come more often, she’s good for my cure.”

  When the time came to leave, Giovanna took her cousin to the gate, and next to the moped, parked under a mimosa tree, explained: “I haven’t ever told you that Niki is taking a laughing cure for her arthritis. It’s an absurd thing, a kind of Indian therapy. She says that laughter produces a natural painkiller that works really well. So she makes the people around her laugh. Just like that, for no reason. She turns on a kind of cushion with batteries, which makes terrible artificial laughter, it sounds satanic. I’m incapable of fake laughing. And what’s more, when she asks me, it just makes me think about how awful it is that the other cures don’t work, which makes me feel even worse, and the worse I feel, the harder it is for me to laugh. For me it’s torture. I beg you, come often, and tell her jokes, do your imitations, the things you know how to do, and they really do make people laugh, it would be such a relief for me and also for her . . .”

  “Oh my god, but I don’t know how to make people laugh on command.”

  “Yes you do, I’m sure you know how.”

  “I tell three dirty jokes, I do the imitation of Madonna’s cousins, and my repertory is complete.” Annamaria paused. “Of course, if the competition is just recorded laughter from a battery-operated pillow . . .”

  “You see?”

  They hugged. While she breathed in the fresh air on her moped, Annamaria dedicated a thought of gratitude to Madonna Ciccone and to her relatives, who had a house similar to the one she was returning to, with doilies on the couches, and who gave her so many things to laugh about, including herself.

  15. THE DEVIL

  Passion. Money. Temptation.

  It was spring again. The Seaside Cowboy had reopened on weekends. For the inaugural meal of the season, Sauro and Filippo had organized a giant table for the regulars. Only Giulia was missing, though only Sauro truly missed her: he thought of her much more often than he would have liked. The big table reflected the implicit hierarchy of the power structure. Where you were seated depended on the level of conversation you could maintain between the two heads of table, Sanfilippi and Sauro. To the right of Sanfilippi, Gianmaria Molteni; to his left, the CEO of the national television network, and from there on down were politicians, journalists, lawyers, photographers, screenwriters, filmmakers, until you got to the women, who generally all were to be found at Sauro’s end of the table.

  Annamaria had been exempted forever from working as a waitress. “That’s not your kind of work,” her father had said to her one day. “It’s a waste of your time.”

  “Why is it a waste now when it wasn’t a year ago?”

  “Because you’re better now than you were a year ago.”

  “In what sense?”

  “You’re older and there’s not so much need.”

  The grandfather had interrupted. “The children of bosses have a seat at the table, and since your father has made himself a boss, sit down and let yourself be served, Annamarì.”

  In a clumsy attempt to learn something about his daughter, Sauro had also asked her during that conversation, “Is there a boy you like?”

  She blushed. “No, I’m not interested in anyone. Besides, I’m sure that if I liked someone he wouldn’t like me.” Intending to reassure a jealous father, she achieved the opposite effect.

  “What are you saying, Annamarì?”

  “I’m ugly, Babbo, you can see that, too. You recognize beautiful women, I know. But it’s not a problem, you know? I can make people laugh, I’ll have a lot of friends.”

  “What does that have to do with anything. You’re pretty, and you’re still growing, at your age it doesn’t mean anything. You’ll see the woman you’ll become.”

  “Babbo, at my age, it’s very easy to see the woman I’ll become. And I will become an ugly woman.” She hadn’t expected a response, and she went to her room; it was incongruous for her father to respond that way. He was a man with a very rudimentary understanding of emotional intelligence, and she was in a phase of life in which the heart’s rules for what worked and what didn’t changed continually. But she knew that in general everything her family said sounded wrong, simplistic, and consoling, if not humiliating. She wasn’t her daddy’s princess anymore; really, she never had been. She was the daughter he was ashamed of being ashamed of.

  At lunch by the sea Sauro was less cheerful than usual. He remained silent while he waited for the meal, paying hardly any attention to the diners who were sitting beside him, who in any case weren’t making any effort to involve him in the conversation. They were talking about Gorbachev’s book, Gorbachev’s mystique, the mark on Gorbachev’s forehead as a portent of great global change, the pathetic quality of Raisa Gorbachev’s wardrobe. Sauro tried instead to hear what was being said on the other side, having overheard Gianmaria Molteni, who was pontificating about diversity. With his rolling “r”s and a broad smile he was saying, “Not everyone experiences the present in the same way. Here, you not only run into two types of people, two classes, two cultures, two geographies—the country and the city—but above all, two different modes of existence. Here, they live in the past, while we in Rome already live in the future. It’s an enormous opportunity for us, to see history up close, but it’s an even greater opportunity for them, to stand beside us in the present and, through us, to see the future. They can see what awaits and what to aim for. It’s strange that there hasn’t been a showdown, or a war, but in a certain sense, they’re all already our prisoners.”

  The others nodded. “If it’s a war of words, I know they don’t have a prayer, Gianmaria. You’re a heavyweight. Nobody would dare get into the ring with you. In your presence we’re all featherweights,” said Sanfilippi.

  Gianmaria responded, “Look who’s talking, you’re the alchemist who holds the philosopher’s stone in your hand. With that, you have the power to transform any human relationship into the gold of classism, without anyone being the wiser.”

  They laughed together. From the other end of the table, Sauro called the waitress to bring the second course and poured wine for the lady on his right, Chiara, Giulia’s best friend, a screenwriter of modest success, whom Sauro always introduced as a set designer. He turned the cigar in his mouth. He bit it. He felt ill at ease. “What the fuck,” he thought. “All of these weaklings and fatsos in glasses, and not one of them would want to get into the ring with me.” He clenched a fist to flex one of his biceps in his jacket. He told himself that with this fist, the King had once knocked a horse to the ground, punching it on the forehead.

  He turned his wrist to look at his stainless steel Patek Philippe. It was almost two o’clock, the sun still made you squint; the yellow paper placemat on the table, greasy with oil and torn at the corners, was scattered with crumbs of unsalted bread. Sauro remembered how Giulia would tear little strips from the placemats during every meal, rolling them into little coils. By the end of the meal she would have made dozens, and her place at the table was always recognizable. As he waited for his salt-crusted sea bream, Sauro felt a strange impatience, a sense of discomfort that he rarely felt and couldn’t define. He got up abruptly to go join Miriam in the kitchen, where he found her giving orders in an aggressive manner. She turned toward him, sighing. “Teaching people to work is harder than working,” she told him. The sous-chef turned toward her brusquely with an arch expression that looked like a go-to-hell, but since he said nothing there were no consequences, except for the certainty that afterwards he would do nothing but trash talk Miriam with all the other
s. She could already hear it: “If it weren’t for Sauro, who’s always nice and generous, it would be such a pain to work here.” Sauro gave Miriam a hug, took her chef’s hat off her head, and tenderly led her out of the kitchens. He needed to hear from someone who was on his side, he needed a benevolent assessment of himself, and knew he could only find it in his wife.