The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  Filippo knew he was in a strongly advantageous position. All he had to do in this game was to hide the fact that he had a knife up his sleeve. He had just needed to make Miriam understand how risky it was to brandish the blade that way.

  He returned to her in ten minutes. Ten minutes in which Miriam had lit another cigarette and was standing and smoking it by the window.

  “I’ve neutralized the papers, for the moment. Shit, Miriam, you don’t know how much it cost me to make that call. And I hope that my phone here in the country isn’t tapped, otherwise we’re all in deep shit.”

  “Thank you, Filippo, I can’t thank you enough. And I have an idea. Remember that fifty percent of the shares of the Seaside Cowboy are in my name, and I can do anything I want with them. If you can get the complaint against my son erased, if you do it cleanly, as if it had never happened, I’ll give them to you. All of them. And Sauro doesn’t even need to know.”

  “Miriam, no. I can’t. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I know very well what I’m saying. I know that you’re taking a risk. And I’m prepared to pay you for it.”

  Filippo looked into her eyes. They were reddened, it made the blue stand out even more. Miriam had the melancholy expression of all women who’ve been married for many years. He thought he should tell Lisa to never get married.

  “Miriam, really. I want to help you, but you’re suggesting something improper and dishonest. And I’m not saying this on my own behalf. I know that, as a politician, my reputation is already compromised, by definition. To the public we’re all corrupt thieves, right? Regardless of our actions. But that’s something I can’t do, I consider Sauro one of my best friends. I can’t make a decision like that without consulting him. First off, the restaurant is his. It was his idea.”

  “At the same time, that’s not true, because, in fact, the restaurant is ours. And our son is his, too. And I can’t bear the fact that a father wouldn’t do something for the good of his child. I can put up with everything Sauro does, and you know very well how many things I close an eye to, not one eye but both eyes. I’m blind to him. But not when it comes to the children . . . I can accept that he isn’t a good husband, but not that he isn’t a good father.”

  She started crying again.

  “Sauro is a good father,” Filippo soothed her.

  “I don’t know how you can say that. He’s a father who kicked his son out of the house.”

  “Pardon me, but actually this situation makes me think that he is a good father; he insists, fairly, that Saverio should pay for his mistakes. You, on the other hand, seem to me to be a loving mother, certainly, but maybe over-protective. Not only do you want your son to pay no price for his mistakes, but you’re asking me to help you erase them.”

  Sanfilippi lowered his eyelids partway, feeling a satisfaction whose source he could not identify. If he’d been self-aware, he would have known that it came from self-congratulation for his ability to direct the game, his way of controlling every situation by placing himself in a position of unassailable reason.

  “Filì, Saverio wouldn’t have made those mistakes if his father had lent him a hand, if he had guided him, if he had made him work with us, if he hadn’t criticized every one of his choices, only to kick him out of the house telling him he was a disgrace, an asshole, making him feel worthless. Saverio is only twenty years old, he’s gotten into trouble because he listened to the wrong people, that moron, his friend at the gym. We are respectable people . . .” Her voice grew fainter, as if these words didn’t really want to come out. “Nothing . . . nothing would have happened if Sauro had loved Saverio more . . . nothing would have happened.”

  Filippo embraced her. She let her head fall on his shoulder, as if she might fall asleep in that position. He held her there, putting up with the smell of the kitchen in her hair, putting up with the pity that she provoked in him, which made him want to push her away. He broke away after a few seconds that seemed interminable to him.

  “Listen, Miriam, I want to help you. But this thing has a cost, do you understand? A cost that is very high for me, for the risk I’m running in getting involved, and a real cost to the people who’ll find their jobs at risk, in turn. Don’t think this is a cakewalk for anybody. I’ll have to compensate the people involved, and well. Among them will be the chief of police, who in turn will have to ask the court clerk, or work out a solution with the cops who arrested him. To fake a procedural error, to rewrite the report. In which case, we’ll have to implicate someone else in Saverio’s place, which yes, we can do, but it will be hard. Don’t think that a parliamentarian is omnipotent. Far from it. And judicial affairs are very complicated, they involve a lot of people, at various levels. To make testimony disappear, evidence that’s already been collected . . . the stuff in his car will have been seized, and will already be registered and on the record, sent to the laboratory for analysis, kept in the court clerk’s office. In short, we are getting into a real shitshow.”

  “I’m sorry, Filippo, I’m so sorry. Let’s do this. Let’s make it so you’re not doing this for me, and not even for Sauro, or for Saverio, but for your son. Let’s make it so that, once this has been done and settled, I sign over my shares of the restaurant to Luca. He will become your partner, you will sign over the remaining shares to him, for his future. The restaurant will become yours, Sauro and I will continue to work there, but you will be the bosses. Do you think we can do that?”

  “I can do that for you only if Sauro agrees. And if I can leave him at least ten percent of the shares. The Seaside Cowboy is his baby.”

  “Saverio is his baby, too.”

  “I know. And I get you. I also get that you can’t really talk with him about this, right? You’ve been arguing, I imagine.”

  “How did you guess?”

  “So, Miriam, do something for me. Go home and try to calm him down. Make peace somehow. I will call the chief of police immediately and then I’ll call Sauro, I’ll tell him that you came here, I’ll reason with him. You and I have a plan for the future of our children, that will be enough to make him understand, to make him agree with us. I’m sure that everything will go fine. You’ve just got to trust me.”

  “There’s nobody I could trust more, Filì. Truly.”

  “Five million lira in cash would help, for a start.”

  “I’ll bring it to you tomorrow morning.”

  “No later than seven thirty. I’ll let you know what the chief of police and Sauro and I have talked about. Then we’ll go forward. We’ll deal with the notary calmly.”

  “And you have to trust me, too, I’ve given you my word on the shares.”

  “There’s nobody I could trust more,” he repeated to her, smiling.

  Miriam put on her coat and scarf and left. A damp wind came from the sea. The dim lights from the house, the distant lamppost, filled her with infinite sadness, a sadness that was a prison.

  She thought of Saverio—he must have been feeling that way, too. She quickly got into the car and prayed that the night would be over quickly, that everything would be over quickly, and there would be a new day.

  Annamaria couldn’t sleep all night, trying to understand how something like this could have happened; she had heard her parents fighting furiously, her father saying terrible things about Saverio, she’d realized that Saverio had gotten caught up in some kind of mess, but she couldn’t figure out exactly what; Sauro had sent her to her room and shouted at her not to break his balls, that they’d already had enough trouble. She had found out about the arrest from her grandfather, who had told her about it, sniggering and repeating the joke that he’d been asking for it since he was a tyke, that he’d always known that sooner or later that good-for-nothing was bound for jail.

  In the morning, when the alarm rang at six o’clock her eyes were already open. She got ready and went to the kitchen, where she found Miria
m at the table smoking, her eyes swollen from crying.

  “Mamma, everything will turn out all right, nobody’s dead.”

  “Not quite. Your father says that Saverio is dead to him, can you believe it?”

  “You know Babbo always exaggerates when he talks, but he’s not a bad guy, really. It just takes him longer to digest things. And Saverio isn’t a bad guy, either. They’re both assholes, sort of, but look, you don’t go to prison if you haven’t done anything wrong. At the most they’ll give him a little bit of house arrest, which means you’ll be stuck with him here at home for a few months. That’s not so terrible, is it?”

  “He can’t be under the same roof with Sauro. But why has this happened to us? Why? We’ve always been upstanding people, respectable. We have a reputation in the village.”

  “In my opinion you’re making too much of this. It’s the gym that gave him the pills that’s responsible, not him. He just has to prove it.”

  Miriam kept shaking her head. Annamaria poured milk into her cup and added some coffee from the coffeemaker that had already grown cold. She threw in a couple of biscotti and dug in with her spoon without looking at her mother, to whom, with her mouth full of a last bite of biscotti, she said, “Oh, I’ve got to get going or I’ll miss the bus.” She got no answer.

  She grabbed her jacket, her backpack and started off on her moped for the bus stop, which should have taken her to school, but instead of stopping and locking her moped to the post with a chain as she usually did, she turned left and took the Aurelia in the opposite direction. She found herself in front of the gate to the Garden at 7 A.M.; the building site was closed, and motionless in the frost. Tools all over the place, cement mixers, plastic sheeting, and the sound of dogs barking seemed to have neutralized any magic. She wondered if it was only human presence that gave meaning and beauty to constructed places. Nature is full of significance all on its own. Artificial places, no; art needs someone to observe it. She wondered how long she would have to wait for Giovanna to arrive and to see Niki, and wondered if she would ever again find the magic that seemed to have disappeared behind the gate on this damp morning bereft of poetry. She had gotten so cold on the moped, and there was no place to sit down in the parking lot. She decided to go to the bar around the bend, where she had gone with Saverio the day of the accident. She was sure it would be open: shepherds, farmers, mushroom gatherers, and hunters always got up early even when hunting season was over. She knew she would have to explain her presence there, this bothered her, but she had no alternative.

  She had just gone in when she met Decimo, the man who had baptized Sauro on his first hunt with the blood of the wild boar that had just been gutted. At home they had a photo in which you could see an enormous boar in the background, hanging by its trotters; in front were four hunters on their knees with a shotgun in one hand and dogs’ leashes in the other. Sauro, sixteen, was standing in the middle with his face daubed with blood and with a smile that could not conceal his grimace of disgust. Annamaria was happy that the photo was in black and white so you couldn’t see the real color of the stuff her father had on his face—it might have been mud. “Cavemen,” she thought, as she greeted Decimo, his companion, and the barista, all of them dressed in military green.

  Decimo did not let her get away without a scolding. “Shouldn’t you be in school, young lady? What are you doing in these parts at this hour? I’ll tell your father when I see him.”

  “Go ahead and tell him. I’m here because I have to do research on the Tarot Garden for my design class, and I have an appointment with the artist in a little while.”

  “What a pigsty. What do they have you studying at school? What are you going to do with that? If I were your mamma I’d teach you to cook and clean, and leave art to the artists.”

  Annamaria turned red and responded, “Where did you leave your club, Decimo?”

  He didn’t understand and answered, “My wife isn’t named Clara, her name is Assunta, and she’s where women should be, at home.”

  Annamaria suppressed a laugh and responded, “What home? In a cave, more like.” But then she felt like an imbecile for having answered him at all. She asked for a tea with lemon, and sat down at the table farthest away, unaware that this was something Giulia would do, Giulia, who in her mind now was identified as “the traitor.”

  To keep anyone else from coming up to talk to her, she pulled Dante’s Inferno out of her backpack. It was the one in which he was badmouthing her region. Describing the forest of the suicides, Dante wanted to put across the idea of a place so inhospitable and wild that it was even worse than the Maremma.

  Not foliage green, but of a dusky color,

  Not branches smooth, but gnarled and intertangled,

  Not apple-trees were there, but thorns with poison.

  Such tangled thickets have not, nor so dense,

  Those savage wild-beasts, that in hatred hold

  ’Twixt Cecina and Corneto the tilled places.

  She took her notebook and wrote: “There were no green fronds, they were dark in color, no straight branches but knotted and contorted, no fruit, but sticks with poisonous thorns. Even the wild beasts who take refuge far from cultivated land get stuck in the dense underbrush of the woods in the Maremma.”

  In the comment that she added to her paraphrase, she wrote something banal copied from the curator’s note, even though what this canto brought to mind was a thought directed at those who did not know the place where she was born and raised. Did the people who came here on vacation ever realize that the Maremma was so horrifying that Dante used it to describe a forest in the Inferno? Who knew if the intelligentsia were aware that, almost seven hundred years after the brilliant Tuscan wrote his Divine Comedy, there were so many men like Decimo in this land, who didn’t even speak proper Italian, and who flayed the wild boars they’d hunted, using their hot blood to baptize new hunters, making their wives who were waiting for them at home cook the meat. Had anything changed? They had beautified the land, but the inhabitants could still make the place evoke the Inferno.

  She was filled with agonizing thoughts, and the stench of the cigars and the suspicious and judgmental looks of the old men drove her out into the open air. Even if Giovanna wasn’t there yet, she would go sit on a rock in front of the Garden and cry over her own damned business. She watched the clouds passing swiftly and continued her string of reflections about herself, about the village she lived in, her father, her mother, her brother, the people who rode their horses. She wouldn’t come to the rescue of anyone but the beasts, and maybe Giovanna and Niki, but who knew if they would rescue her. When Giovanna got out of her beat-up Panda, Annamaria recognized from her face that seeing her there had alarmed her. She hurried to tell her, “Nothing has happened, nothing serious,” but as she was saying that, she could no longer hold back the tears that had made her pinch her nose the whole time she’d been at the bar.

  Giovanna immediately let her in and took her straight to the belly of the Sphinx.

  “What happened? Tell me.”

  “Nothing, and it’s . . . another fight between my father and my brother. I hear that Saverio has screwed up again, I don’t know. And then Babbo got enraged at him, and Mamma got enraged at Babbo, and I’m always in the middle, and I feel like nobody loves me, everyone expects me to be the peacemaker and that’s it, but they don’t know what’s going on with me inside, and none of them cares at all.”

  Giovanna made her sit down and brought her a glass of water. Niki was coming down the mirrored steps.

  “Oh, the laughing girl is crying today. Why?”

  Giovanna hurried to answer her. “It’s nothing, Niki, don’t worry, a family crisis. Nothing serious . . . as a rule, parents get to an age when it would be better not to have them.”

  “Ah, I understood from the first that this girl sees in you a younger and more understanding mother, Giovanna,” Niki said
as she slowly descended the stairs to the bathroom.

  Giovanna took advantage of her absence to say to Annamaria, “See what she’s like? Incredible, she can’t fry an egg, she would give blank checks to the first workman who passed, but she’s got such incredible intuition. She always seems to be in the clouds, but she can see what’s in people’s hearts on the fly. She’s crazy and magical.”

  Annamaria blew her nose, producing a tragic echo in the belly of the Sphinx that made her laugh.

  When Niki came out of the bath, she told the girls that if they had a little time, she would tell them a story that would make them return to their fathers’ houses thinking they were very fortunate daughters.

  She adjusted her robe and asked Giovanna to make her some tea. Then she began.

  “It was the summer of the snakes. I was eleven, but I had grown a lot over the last year. For summer vacation my parents had rented a pretty house in the country, in New England. It was me and my siblings, and other friends and cousins often came to see us. It was hot, and invisible, disturbing creatures lurked in the tall grass. All the same, this was still the open air. I went out early in the mornings and often went on my own up the paths beside the house, I liked to study the effect of the sun on things, to look at the shadows that changed shape and color depending on the hour of day. It was on one of those mornings, when it was getting late and the sun was already high, that I saw two snakes intertwined on a rock beside me. They were two black snakes, poisonous, which they had warned all of us about at the house. I was paralyzed, I could neither move nor breathe. For the first time, I was seeing death up close. The serpents were mating. What was this for them, a dance of death, or of life? Would it be death for me and life for them? I was enthralled. Everything was there. Perhaps my whole life in some way is contained in that moment, when two opposites took meaning in the form of a distillation of fear. There was movement, stasis, growth, sex, life, and death; life that reproduces itself, the dance and the terror.