The Garden of the Villa Mollini

by Rose Tremain

  On the morning of his departure, Pappavincente came to see Mollini. He told him that wire for the aviary had arrived and asked him whether he should employ builders to start work on it. ‘Of course,’ said Mollini, ‘of course.’

  As the summer was coming, Mollini had decided to rent a house rather than an apartment in Paris. It wasn’t far from the Bois de Boulogne. It had a pretty courtyard with a fountain.

  In this house, a long way from Verena, he felt his sadness begin to ebb and his energy return. He gave a party on a warm June evening. A string quartet played Mozart. Sitting by his fountain, he saw bats circling over the city and remembered Rosa. He shuddered. He took the white wrist of his young co-star, Clara Buig, and held it to his lips. I will amuse myself, he decided, by making love to Clara.

  La Buig was twenty-two. She was French. Paris thought her enchanting. Her career was at its beginning. She wasn’t known outside her country yet, but to be singing Tatiana to Mollini’s Lensky would soon ensure her international status.

  When Mollini’s party was over, La Buig stayed behind. Mollini undressed her tenderly, as he would have undressed a child. She was slim and pale. ‘Do you like gardens, Clara?’ he asked.

  Mollini was now forty-eight. Clara Buig was young enough to be his daughter. When he touched her, her eyes watched him gravely.

  The next morning, he woke alone. He sent a servant with a note inviting Clara to lunch. But Mademoiselle Buig was not at home, she was working with her voice coach. Mollini went early to the Opéra. When La Buig arrived, she was wearing a pale lemon-coloured dress. She moved very gracefully, Mollini noted, like a dancer.

  After the rehearsal, he invited her to supper. They would dine in the Bois after going for a stroll under the chestnut trees. But she refused. She was very tired, she said. To sing well, she needed a lot of rest.

  Mollini went back to his house and sat by his fountain. He loved Paris. No other city satisfied the eye so agreeably. I shall stay here till autumn, he decided. It’s so hot in Tuscany in the summer and here, it’s cool. But he knew that if he stayed till autumn, Verena would arrive, with her trunks full of dresses and jewellery and her fan collection and her maids and her boxes of sweets. The thought of this arrival dismayed him. Hastily, he sat down and wrote to his wife. He informed her that there was a typhoid epidemic in Paris. ‘I implore you, do not come near the city,’ he wrote. ‘For my sake, my love.’

  And every time he saw Clara Buig, her sweet neck, her shy smile, her expressive hands, it was as if he was seeing a corner of his garden that he’d never noticed, never expected to be there, but which, given his care and his talents, would one day be the most beautiful place of all. As the days passed, he became more and more convinced that Clara Buig could not be absent from his future.

  He waited. He had to wait patiently. His invitations to supper were, night after night, refused. ‘Why?’ he asked eventually. ‘Why, Clara?’

  She took his hand, noticing as she did so that several of his nails were bitten. ‘The night of your party, I was so excited,’ she said, ‘so flattered. I just let myself go. I couldn’t help it.’

  ‘And was that wrong, my adorable Clara?’

  ‘Oh yes. But I won’t let it happen again.’

  So, only on stage did she look at him adoringly. Outside the Opéra, she refused ever to be alone with him.

  Verena wrote to him almost every day. Her fortieth birthday was approaching. She was depressed. She begged Mollini to let her know the moment the typhoid epidemic was over so that she could come to Paris and be with him. She told him that the loss of their child had only deepened her love for him.

  What she didn’t say in her letters, because at first she didn’t notice it, was that since the second week of April no rain had fallen and that the level of the lake was going down fast as the villagers pumped out more and more water for their potato crop, for their vines, for their thirsty animals.

  Pappavincente was worried about all the new shrubs he’d planted in the child’s garden. Water containers were driven through the new paths in the forest. He and the other gardeners spent two hours every evening going round with watering cans.

  One evening, Pappavincente took a walk up the valley. He saw that the river was dangerously low and he remembered with dread the terrible drought of 1856, when all the villages along the valley began desperately trying to sink new wells and when his grandmother had wondered aloud whether Pappavincente’s existence wasn’t to blame for all the anxiety and suffering.

  As he walked back towards the lake, he saw La Dusa standing by it, holding a parasol. He bowed to her. She was dressed in grey satin with a high lace collar and, with her feet tucked into red shoes, Pappavincente thought she looked like a fat pigeon. Her once beautiful eyes were now just two dark pleats in the flesh of her face.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Signora,’ said Pappavincente, ‘about the baby . . .’

  ‘Yes,’ said La Dusa and waddled away up the path to the forest, carrying her weight, as she carried her sorrow, awkwardly.

  The forest was cool. A hundred times, Verena had rehearsed in her mind the day when she would push the ornate baby carriage under the magnificent fans of oak and beech and watch the dappling of sunlight on her son, Giuseppe. Now, she was there alone. And it was her birthday. She stopped and folded her parasol and examined her hands for signs of age. Mollini’s wedding ring was wedged so tightly onto her finger, she was unable, these days, to take it off. ‘Look at these fat hands!’ she said aloud and recalled with a strange kind of fascination the beautifully drawn thin hand pointing downwards to the hospital morgue.

  She’d intended to visit the child’s garden. Mollini had refused to discuss with her his decision to carry on with the project and the thought of this garden being designed and planted for someone who would never see it filled her with sadness. She found, as she neared it and caught sight of the half-completed aviary that she really didn’t want to go there, and anyway she was out of breath.

  She returned to the house. On the first terrace she noticed that the drains were stinking again. The smell was disgusting, but she lingered near it for a moment. It reminded her of happier times.

  On the opening night of Eugene Onegin, La Dusa arrived, uninvited, in Paris.

  Mollini’s house was filled with servants preparing for a party. Lanterns had been lit all round the courtyard and tables set up near the fountain.

  Mollini wasn’t there. La Dusa dressed herself in a white gown and put feathers in her hair. She didn’t go to the Opéra, but sat in the cool garden sipping champagne and questioning the servants about the typhoid epidemic. ‘What typhoid epidemic?’ they inquired politely.

  When Mollini returned, Clara Buig was with him, holding on to his arm. La Dusa looked at them. Mollini had grown a beard, put on weight. He looked like an English king. When he saw his wife, he bowed – just as Pappavincente had bowed to her beside the lake – and led Clara Buig forward and introduced her formally. La Dusa didn’t get up. She ignored Clara’s outstretched hand, but reached up and pulled Mollini towards her, so that he stumbled and fell into her lap. She bit his ear. ‘If you lie to me again, Antonio, I shall kill you,’ she said.

  Two weeks later, they returned together to the Villa Mollini. On the journey, Mollini feigned illness, a return of the pain in his bowel. And it was true, he was suffering. He was now madly, dementedly, obsessively in love with Clara Buig. He couldn’t look at his wife, let alone touch her. All he could remember was the one beautiful night when Clara had let him love her, a night he had so carefully planned to repeat by giving a party in her honour.

  He couldn’t close his eyes without dreaming of Clara. Thoughts of her never left his mind. By the time he arrived at the Villa, he felt so troubled he had to sit down and write to her straight away and in the letter he found that he was telling her that he loved her more than he’d ever loved anyone, that his love for La Dusa had been pale in comparison. Pale? As he wrote this word, he couldn’t help remembering certa
in nights, certain delectable – afternoons he’d spent with Verena, but of course these had been long ago and she’d been beautiful then. And things pass, he said to himself. We move. The horizon changes. We turn a corner and a new sight greets us. This is how it has to be.

  And to reassure himself, he went out into the garden. He was shocked at what he saw. The earth was parched. The smell near the house was terrible. Everywhere, as he strolled from path to path, from terrace to terrace, there were gaps in the borders and beds where plants had withered. The fountains had been turned off. The water in the fountain pools was bright green and foul-smelling. Mollini stood still and stared up at the sky. It was a deep, relentless blue. The sun on his face was fierce and all he could hear and feel was the buzzing and shimmering of the heat.

  At that moment, he remembered the nine bullock carcasses. His stomach turned. Sorrow for his little dead child compounded his sickness. He sat down on a stone seat and put his head in his hands. The salt sweat from his brow stung his eyes.

  He prayed the nausea would pass. It seemed like the nausea of death, when the appetite for the world drains, leaving the mind filled with loathing.

  To soothe himself, he thought of his music. ‘Mollini’s voice is not simply a voice,’ a Paris critic had declared, ‘it is an instrument. I have never before heard such an astonishing sound come out of a man.’ And the sickness did, after a while, begin to pass. So Mollini stood up. Instead of returning to the house – to Verena’s tears and entreaties which only repelled him and were utterly in vain – he walked on down to the lake. It was no longer blue, but brownish and full of silt. He skirted it and went up into the forest. Here, it was cool. In the shade of the big trees, nettles and sweet briars were green.

  He followed one of the winding paths. He began to feel better. If only, he thought, I could stroll here with Clara, with her little hand tucked into my arm.

  As he neared the child’s garden, he feared that all the new bushes and hedges planted in the spring would have died, but the moment he left the forest and came out again into the sunlight, he saw that everything here was living and healthy, that already roses were climbing up the trellises and that purple and white clematis were growing strongly up the sides of the aviary.

  Mollini smiled. It was a smile of gratitude and a smile of hope renewed. As he looked at the faithful work of Pappavincente and the other gardeners, he knew why he had made them go on with the child’s garden: he would give it to Clara.

  In August, Mollini told Pappavincente that water to the village would have to be rationed. The ration was so meagre and insufficient that the young men led nightly raiding parties to the lake, carrying buckets and churns, but the water itself was becoming soupy and brackish and the villagers and their animals developed intestinal illnesses.

  Then, the widow Verri died. Mollini attended the funeral. He sensed, for the first time, that his presence among the villagers no longer filled them with pride. As he held out his hand for them to shake, they let their fingers touch his, but wouldn’t hold his hand in a firm grip. To cheer them up and win back their reverence, he invited them to come and see the child’s garden and to drink wine with him on the site of the summer house he was planning to build there.

  So they came one morning and stood about awkwardly. The garden was beautiful, lush and healthy. They touched the flowers. The scent of them was extraordinary. They’d forgotten how superb the world could seem. They drank the dry white wine, bottle after bottle, and staggered home in mid-afternoon to dream muddled dreams. Before they left, Mollini had embraced the men and kissed the women on the lips. ‘I made them happy,’ he told Verena.

  Verena didn’t move out of her room these days. She sat up in her bed and fed her sorrow with sweet wine and chocolate. Her feet began to swell and the doctor was called. Verena burst into tears. ‘I know what would cure me,’ she sobbed, ‘if Antonio would only take me in his arms . . .’ The doctor went away, disgusted.

  ‘My wife is suffering,’ Mollini wrote to Clara, ‘and I cannot help but feel sorry for her. But her suffering is nothing to my own: I’m in love with a woman I cannot marry.’

  In September, Mollini left for Vienna. He was to take on his most demanding and difficult role, in Verdi’s Otello. He had signed the contract on one condition, that the part of Desdemona be given to Clara Buig. And in Vienna at last Clara became Mollini’s mistress. She had been so moved, she said, by his letters, she knew she could no longer resist.

  He was in heaven. La Buig wasn’t a sensual woman like La Dusa. There were moments, even, when her grave face beneath his reminded Mollini of Rosa’s face, long, long ago. ‘You give our love nobility and dignity,’ he told Clara, ‘you turn the past into the future.’

  He was determined, now, that there would be a future with Clara. He wrote to Pappavincente with new designs for the summer house. It would no longer be a summer house: it would have a sumptuous bedroom and bathroom and fires in all the rooms. It would be Clara’s residence.

  As rumours of the love affair of Antonio Mollini and the 23-year-old Clara Buig spread in whispers round the tea-rooms and the musical salons of Vienna, it began at last to rain in Tuscany. It rained for seventeen days and nights. The villagers came out of their hovels and stuck their tongues out and let the sweet rain trickle down their throats. Verena got out of bed, threw a shawl round her shoulders and walked out in the downpour to the lake side. The water had risen by several feet. Verena walked into the water, wearing her pink satin slippers. The slippers stuck in the mud, so she waded on without them, feeling her petticoats and her skirt become heavy.

  She lay on her back. She expected to sink straight away, but her large body was buoyant and she found that she was floating. She stared at the grey sky and thought how astonishingly full of colour her life had been. It took her three hours to die. On the brink of death, it seemed to La Dusa that the grey cloud moved away and that the hot sun was shining on her round face. And for a second, she imagined the autumn to come and the wonderful vibrant reds and umbers of the leaves.

  By the time the winter came, Clara’s house was finished. Mollini, however, didn’t bother to have the fires lit.

  ‘Clara will live with me in the Villa Mollini,’ he told Pappavincente, so the shutters were closed and the place locked.

  When Clara Buig at last arrived at the Villa Mollini, however, and was led by a maid to the very room La Dusa had occupied, she refused to sleep there. The house, in fact, gave her the creeps, she said. She couldn’t possibly spend a night in it.

  Mollini wrapped her in her velvet coat and walked with her, arm in arm, through the garden, round the lake and up into the forest. The great trees were silent. Winter had begun to bite early this year.

  The pleasure Mollini took from seeing Clara’s little gloved hand on his arm was acute, too precious and fleeting to mention. They walked on in silence, descending at last down the intricate paths of the child’s garden to Clara’s house. Golden pheasants in the aviary squawked and pecked at the wire as they passed.

  Mollini opened the shutters of the house and got on his knees and lit a fire in one of the grates.

  Clara walked on her own from room to room and then went outside again and walked all round the house. It was nicely set in the child’s garden, surrounded by stone terraces and ornate balustrading and small cypresses. At the back of it, however, about forty yards away, Clara could see an ugly post-and-rails fence and beyond this a boring slope of empty pastureland.

  ‘What is that?’ she asked Mollini.

  Mollini had followed her outside and now looked to where she was pointing.

  ‘Common land,’ said Mollini. ‘The village people use it to graze their cattle.’

  La Buig sniffed. Then she turned her stern child’s face towards Mollini and said: ‘You know what I would like to see there instead of that?’

  ‘No, my love.’

  ‘An English lawn. This whole garden is nothing but steps and piazzas and gazebos and mazes and borders a
nd beds. If I’m going to live here, I really want a lawn.’

  Mollini sent for Pappavincente. One of his sons arrived instead and told him that Pappavincente was ill and couldn’t come.

  Mollini went at once to the village, not to tell the people that he was going to take away the rest of their pasture for Clara’s lawn, but to see the old man and take him some of the strong red wine he knew he liked to drink.

  ‘We believe he’s dying,’ said Signora Pappavincente. She was holding a rag to her nose, and when Mollini went into the room where Pappavincente lay, it seemed to him that the odour of death was indeed very strong.

  ‘Listen, old friend,’ he whispered to Pappavincente, ‘remember all that you’ve achieved here. Dwell on that. Feel proud of it. You’ve made the most beautiful garden in Tuscany, perhaps the most beautiful garden in all Italy. And it’s not finished yet. It lives on. It changes and grows. It will last for ever.’

  Pappavincente’s head rolled on the pillow and he turned his staring, angry eyes on Mollini. ‘I have sinned, Master,’ he said.

  He died that night. Mollini wanted him buried in the garden, but the old man’s family were stubborn and wouldn’t allow it.

  Mollini explained to Clara that the whole village would be in mourning for a while and that it would be impossible, just at the moment, to mention the land he was going to take for her lawn.

  ‘I understand,’ said Clara, ‘but you will tell them in the spring?’

  ‘Yes. In the spring.’

  ‘Because I want to push my baby’s bassinet on the lawn. Like an English duchess. You see?’

  ‘Your baby’s bassinet, Clara?’

  ‘Yes, Antonio. I’m going to have your child.’

  Mollini took Clara’s serious little face in his hands and covered it with kisses. Three weeks later, he married her. Once again, the cream of the opera world was invited to the Villa Mollini. Among the cream was an extraordinarily beautiful English soprano called Marion Shepherd. Marion Shepherd told Mollini that she thought his garden was as unbelievable as his voice and smiled such a dazzling smile that Mollini was forced to reach out and caress her mouth with his finger.