The Garden of Monsters

by Lorenza Pieri

  While she interrogated herself, she felt a pain in her right temple, which she decided to treat with another swig of wine. It was clear that everyone was looking at her, that they felt sorry for her family, for this ruined feast, for the daughter with makeup running down her face, for the lace dress she was wearing for the husband who had left, who was clearly a violent grouch who victimized all three of them. Oh, if they’d only known how nice he could be. What did they know about her family, they should mind their own business. She smiled, raised her chin as if she were challenging everyone in the room, but in reality, the battle was taking place all in her head, with accusations, excuses, and justifications.

  She turned to Annamaria: “My precious, what dessert have you decided on?”

  She’d never called her “my precious” before.

  While her mother was engaged in her solitary war against her sense of guilt and the patrons of the restaurant, the two siblings had smiled at each other.

  “What’s come over you, kid?”

  “Nothing, my precious, everything’s fine. You’re just being an asshole, as usual.”

  “It was a joke, I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “It wasn’t a very funny joke, in front of Babbo and Mamma.”

  “Not so funny, you have a point. But again, I repeat, there would be nothing wrong with it . . .”

  “Knock it off, you’re a moron.”

  “I’m joking, kiddo, I wanted to see if you were relapsing.”

  Saverio gave her a kiss on the forehead, and she felt unmoored all over again: she was surrounded by incomprehensible people who continually had to be forgiven. That must have been why she had become incomprehensible to herself, too.

  “I don’t know, either the tiramisù or the panna cotta,” she said in a whisper; desserts always went so well with despair.

  They waited for midnight, the three of them. Then Saverio went up to the lovely waitress, who was about to finish her shift, and asked her what there was to do around here, if there was anywhere you could go dancing. She said yes, there was a discotheque, and she’d be going there later with her boyfriend.

  “That’s a pity,” he said, “I would have liked to take you.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and smiled at him.

  “Tell me the name again?”

  “It’s called White Cat.”

  “Not the name of the disco, your name.”

  “Oh,” she giggled. “My name is Katia, but if you want, you can call me Kat.”

  “Like ‘cat’ in English?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And my name is Saverio, but you can call me ‘Very,’ like ‘very much,’ in English.”

  They laughed. Saverio regretted the existence of that boyfriend. Before he left, he managed to steal a quick kiss and feel her breasts.

  “All night I was imagining what it would be like to sample that dessert. And I wasn’t wrong. You taste delicious. Happy New Year,” he said to her.

  “Happy New Year to you, too,” she responded, smiling at him before disappearing through the back doors.

  Saverio returned to the table, where Miriam was signing the bill, and cast an eye at Annamaria, who understood at one glance what had happened. It was incredible to her how easy it was for her brother to attract women. “Who knows what they see in that mass of muscles,” she thought. “It must be the blue eyes and the black hair; one day I’ll buy myself some contact lenses, and then we’ll see.”

  It was freezing outside. They heard booming sounds; in another valley they could see the luminous bursts of fireworks.

  “Let’s go to bed, tomorrow we have to leave early.”

  “What a shitty New Year’s Eve,” said Saverio. “Let’s hope the rest of the year won’t be this cruddy. To bed at 1 A.M., like children. I’ve got to hop around a little at the disco, I’m going to go do that.”

  “Suit yourself, I’ll wake you tomorrow at seven.”

  “Let’s hope that tomorrow I’m still awake at seven. Good night, and Happy New Year, ladies. Give my regards to Babbo. I promise that this year I’ll be better, in so far as that’s possible,” he said, heading away from the hotel.

  Miriam responded, “May you succeed.” She and Annamaria continued on their own. On the snowy path they saw two dogs running off, spooked by the booming of the fireworks. They soon vanished; only a sliver of moonlight remained, illuminating the snow. Mother and daughter walked in silence, listening to the crunching under their boots. Their rhythmic steps seemed to say to Annamaria, An-swer, an-swer, an-swer.

  Another year was beginning, and she didn’t know how to answer. She didn’t even know what the question was.

  Meanwhile, with every step Miriam felt the chafing of the red synthetic underwear she’d bought for the occasion—the lace thong rode up between her buttocks, she couldn’t wait to take it off. She had hoped Sauro would do that, had hoped at least that it might set off the propitiatory lovemaking that they’d always done on New Year’s Eve, crude, quick, and drunken. Instead she found him already asleep in the room and very sweaty: it probably was true that he’d come down with a fever again. She thought it was better that way—indeed, she truly was tired and would have liked to sleep so long that she’d wake up and find out that it was already summer, with the apricots ripe on the tree in front of the house, and Annamaria gathering them. She took off her underwear and massaged her breasts a little, once they were freed from the elastic cage that had confined them. She put on her flannel nightgown and lay down next to Sauro without even taking off her makeup. She had drunk too much. She tried to fall asleep in the company of the apricot tree, even imagining she heard the hum of bees, but it was just buzzing in her ears from all the booze.

  That same night, Giulia was at home with the flu. Filippo wanted her to go with him to the party of a filmmaker friend of his, an event full of people from the movie industry. She thought it would have been useful for her to be there, for the newspaper, for contacts, but she was seriously ill. She had a fever of 101º, a splitting headache and chills; even with all the good will she had promised to devote to her rising professional career, she couldn’t manage it. She knew that much of the time Filippo didn’t believe her when she made up excuses not to go out with him, often there was reason not to believe them, but her face, the crumpled tissues in her hands and her red nose convinced him much more than her words. He’d even asked her if he shouldn’t stay home, too. She knew that this was only for show, that he would have killed her if she had ruined New Year’s Eve. He’d been stranded by his friend Sauro, who had left for the mountains, leaving him behind in Rome. Giulia sat in front of the television wrapped in a comforter so as not to feel too lonely. The end-of-the-year speech by President Cossiga gave her even more chills. She watched Heaven Can Wait for the thousandth time, fast-forwarding it from time to time, then turned to a program in which a young actress she’d often run into at Porto Ercole kept her hanging on until it was nearly midnight. She decided to go to sleep and give up on waiting for the new year.

  The telephone woke her up. Sauro’s voice was on the other end of the line. She asked him what he wanted at this hour—if he was looking for Filippo to wish him Happy New Year, he wasn’t there.

  He responded, “No, I’m in a hotel room, and I have a fever. I was thinking of you, and I just wanted to talk to you. But I really didn’t expect I’d find you.”

  “I’m also homesick.”

  “That must be a sign. Were you thinking of me, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think about you all the time, you know. I miss you a lot. It seems absurd to me that I don’t see you anymore.”

  Giulia couldn’t make her voice leave her throat. Hot tears were beginning to rise. She felt like she was burning up, she was sweating.

  “Giulia, are you still there?”

  She said yes, barely perceptibly.


  “Maybe I was wrong to call you, I’m sorry if I disturbed you, when you have a fever you do stupid things. Happy New Year, Giulia. To you, to everyone. Take care of yourself for me. I know it never meant anything to you, it was obvious that you were just interested in sex, but I loved you.”

  Sauro hung up without waiting for a response. Giulia had to raise herself up to breathe. Sitting in bed in the dark with her mounting fever, she heard fireworks outside; she loved Sauro, and she’d always known it, her body had instantly understood that he loved her, too; there could be no other explanation, her body had understood it before her mind had, her mind filled with paranoia, useless information, prejudices, rationalizations, analyses, and counter-analyses, criticisms, moral judgments, accusations of insensitivity and ignorance, guilt that was inflicted, endured, expiated. She lay down again, her body shaken by chills, put a hand between her legs and made love to him, remembering every time he had kissed her, remembering his neck, his scent, his tongue, the hands which, so many times, maddened by jealousy, she had imagined running over other bodies. In delirium she raved: “For you I lost myself, I was prepared to lose everything, I’ve already lost everything, you are my most exposed nerve, most buried, most exposed, most hidden. And you, you still love me? You loved me? That past tense killed me, it was wrong, more than wrong, it was monstrous. I think of you all the time. You’re my blood that flows the opposite direction, my pleasure, my most intense trembling, my most immense pain. Don’t look at me now, I’m ugly and sick, my hair is dirty and I’m sweaty and I would disgust you. I want to die, I want to die gripping your shoulders, don’t look at me. I’m burning up.”

  Many times, she saw Sauro coming near her to kiss her, then going away without doing it. In the morning, when her fever had gone down, she woke with confused thoughts, her nightgown sticking to her body. Filippo told her that around one o’clock he had tried to call her, and because the line was always busy, he’d started to worry and had come home. He had found her wracked by chills, she was burning hot and was speaking nonsense; the only thing he could make out was “I want to die,” and then he had given her a fever-reducer, standing at the ready to call an ambulance if he heard her talk that way again. In twenty years together she had never done this. Giulia was terrified, afraid she might have said Sauro’s name, that she might have said compromising things. Poor Filippo, poor me, she thought; she remembered nothing of her husband’s return to the house, nothing of what really happened, she didn’t know if she’d ever received that phone call. She remembered only the things that she had repeated to herself in her mind. And it was still true that she wanted to die.

  19. THE SUN

  Heat. New life. Success.

  The fields had turned yellow with rapeseed very early, then made way for the green of the wheat and the red of the poppies. The landscapes striped with colors that looked made for postcards of Tuscany only lasted a short while. Long was the season of gold and brown, of fields for reaping, of crop stubble and freshly ploughed furrows.

  Annamaria had finished school with honors, and they had bought her a Vespa. She had asked not to work, at least in July, and they had consented. Miriam was happy that she’d started to go to the village on her Vespa, to the games arcade, to the seaside with the kids she’d known forever, and with some who only came in summer. They weren’t the same kids she’d known when they lived in the village. Some families had stopped coming because they could no longer afford the rents, but the kids she’d gone to middle school with, the sisters from Florence, Sara and Betta, who had a private house, were still there. At the horse yard, Adan’s younger brother had come from Tirana to help as a stable hand for the summer. His name was Duran, and he was eighteen years old. They paid him very little, they gave him food and lodging and a weekly stipend—it was mostly a favor they were doing for Adan, who dreaded Albania, poverty, and unemployment for his little brother. To bring him here was an opportunity, even if after the summer season he would have to find work someplace else. He was a shy, handsome boy, very thin, he had big green eyes that always looked frightened. The grandfather Settimio, never having learned his name, once said, “Call that one over to me, the sad little boy who looks like a gate.” After that, Annamaria couldn’t look at him without thinking of the aptness of her grandfather’s metaphor: Duran had the sadness of an abandoned gate. All the same, they’d connected at once. He had asked Annamaria to lend him books so he could learn Italian, she had given him her middle school grammar book and a textbook to read. He’d also asked her to correct him whenever he made a mistake, and she was glad to. She felt sorry for Duran, she was practically the only person he could speak Italian with. The others completely ignored him: once he’d put on a saddle or cleaned a horse he seemed to become invisible. She’d taken him to the village with her a few times, not without a certain embarrassment. She knew that being accompanied by an Albanian who was almost always dirty and wore weird clothes wasn’t good for her reputation.

  The other kids called him Duran Duran, and he was their favorite object of ridicule. If they wanted to make fun of someone for how they were dressed, they would say: “You’re dressed like Duran Duran.” If someone wanted to tell the others that he didn’t have any lira on him, he’d turn his pockets inside out and say, “Tonight I’m broke, I’m worse than Duran Duran.” At a certain point it was no longer necessary to add other words: when anything didn’t go well, was inadequate or pathetic, you’d just say, “Duran Duran,” and everybody understood.

  Annamaria felt sorry for him, but often at night she slipped out furtively, knowing that otherwise he would have asked her to take him to town on her Vespa, and she preferred to go out secretly rather than tell him no. A few times he’d gone to the sea with the group. He had very pale skin and immediately got sunburned. He had a terrible swimsuit, one of those Speedo types that were hardly worn anymore, and he didn’t know how to swim. Thanks to life in the country, he’d put on a little weight and become more muscular, but his appearance suggested poverty too strongly to be considered attractive. And still, one night, as he was standing at the bar leaning against the counter, his blond forelock washed for once, his suntanned face setting off his green eyes, and in better shape than usual from lifting bales of hay, moving equipment and eating Miriam’s good food, Sara had poked Annamaria with her elbow and said to her: “We’re used to seeing him one way, but take a look and just picture it: in better clothes, Duran Duran wouldn’t be half bad.”

  Anamaria thought about it. If Sara could see it, maybe she could see it, too.

  Duran spent all day in the horse yard and bunked with his brother in a trailer with a thatched roof that was parked behind the hayloft. To camouflage it, they’d grown vines all around the fence, and for a long time it had been almost invisible. There was no running water, and Annamaria knew that Adan and Duran bathed when they could with cold water from the watering can attached to the horse trough. They used the Saddlery’s service bathroom. One day Annamaria had taken pants and T-shirts that her brother no longer wore from his wardrobe and given them to the two Albanians. When Saverio saw Duran in a salmon-colored T-shirt with a surfing shark on it he scowled at him. He immediately thought he’d gone into the house and stolen it from him. He grabbed him by the collar and asked him with an ugly expression: “And where in the hell did you get that? The boy turned red and answered, “Annamaria give to me, I sorry, sorry, I give back to you.” Saverio let him go and said: “No need to give it back, go wash yourself, because you stink.”

  He brought it up with Annamaria, who should have asked his permission before she gave away his clothes. She responded, “I would give them my clothes, but then they’d look like fags. They’re Albanians, they’re poor, all they need is to look gay on top of that, you’re already pretty racist as it is. You don’t even wear those clothes anymore.

  “I’m not racist.”

  “Noooo, of course you’re not,” said Annamaria, who these days almos
t always took a sarcastic tone with her brother, part of their continual game of scoring off each other.

  In the late August holidays, the carnival came to town. They’d set up in the sports field where Annamaria had won the cowboy tournament. It was a miserable carnival, with only three “attractions”: the bumper cars; a carousel with swing chairs called the Chair-O-Plane; and the punching-ball—the puncibòl, or iron fist. Lots of people came to the carnival from the countryside, not just little kids, even if the Chair-O-Plane was primarily for them. The bumper cars, on the other hand, were monopolized by the older boys, who amused themselves by making the game dangerous: they cornered the girls’ cars and rammed them, so the recoil would jolt them out.

  But the main attraction was the fist: with sounds and colored lights, it attested nonstop to the different levels of strength of the boys, who challenged each other and made bets until the carnival closed at night, until the big leather punching bag that received all the blows was covered with blood on the front. There was always a thick crowd gathered around the boys who were doing the punching: the thicker the crowd, the more violent the challenges. Occasionally women participated, too, just as a joke. They took on the challenge, but they weren’t even able to hit the center of the bag. They would giggle at their physical weakness, almost flaunting it, as if it were a feminine accessory to display, when appropriate, like the white purses they carried when they went out at night. Almost all those country girls knew how to wring the neck of a chicken, to hack a lamb into pieces with a cleaver so it would fit in the freezer, yet still, landing a punch wasn’t exactly something they would be proud of.