The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  “No one has ever been able to make them out,” he told me. “She made the design so complicated that no one even in her time could read them. And, of course, over the centuries the roses have so overgrown their original beds that there’s no way to make out the initials now.”

  “What a shame,” I said, “that all traces of their love affair are gone.”

  Bruno formed his lips into that little dismissive pout—a gesture I would come to know all too well over that year—and drew me to him. We were almost within sight of the house, and it both thrilled me that he was willing to take the chance we would be seen (his wife couldn’t mean that much to him in that case) and scared me.

  “All any lovers have is this,” he said, pressing his lips to mine. “It’s only poets who try to pretend otherwise, who think they can trap warm flesh in words.”

  “But what about the poems Ginevra de Laura wrote to her lover? Isn’t that a kind of immortality that we know about their love through her poems?”

  “Alas, none of her poems have survived. The story is that she burned them when Barbagianni died and his son’s guardians forced her into the Convent of Santa Catalina.” Bruno pointed toward the house, to a small iron balcony covered with climbing roses. “That was her room,” he told me. “Some say she built a pyre out of broken furniture and firewood right on top of her bed and burned all her poems and all the roses her lover had sent her over the years so that everyone for miles around could smell the scent of burning roses.”

  “Wow,” I said, imagining it—the dead rose petals catching fire, their scent rising on the air. “What happened to her after that?”

  “Oh, she went along to the convent. Another legend says that she went dressed in nothing but a linen shift, into which she sewed her poems.”

  “Couldn’t she have gone somewhere else?”

  Bruno shrugs. “Where? What choice did she have other than to become another man’s mistress? And although it was said she wrote some beautiful poems, it was no easier to make a living as a poet then than it is now. She spent the rest of her life kneeling on cold marble floors with only the remembrance of her past passion to keep her warm.”

  “Repenting, do you think?”

  “Oh, I hope not,” he had said, laughing and kissing me again.

  I pause in my search for clothes and look up, alerted by some shift in the air. Through the windows, which I’d left open, a breeze carries the sound of voices from the garden, a man’s laugh that sounds almost like Bruno’s. It could be Bruno. For the first time, that fact finally gets through to me. For years after I came back from Italy I would imagine I saw him or heard his voice on the street. I had to school myself to ignore those mirages, but now it’s possible—well, more than possible…inevitable—that I will see him again. I’d shut out the thought over the last few weeks by telling myself that he probably left Florence in the summer and, like most Italians, fled to the seaside or the northern lakes. But Claudia hadn’t said he was gone. In fact, she’d said that they both wanted to talk to me about Robin.

  And so, if I ever choose an outfit and leave this room, I’m likely to run into him.

  I look down at the pile of clothes I have been sifting through like a homeless woman picking through Salvation Army castoffs and suddenly feel defeated. My God, do I own anything that’s not black or white? Is this my summer wardrobe? Black linen dresses and black cotton capris, white button-down shirts (three-quarter sleeve instead of winter’s long sleeve), and white T-shirts. Is this what I’ve worn through nineteen New York summers except when I go to Woodstock, where I live in cut-off denims and my aunt’s old peasant blouses? All of this seems too dreary and heavy to wear in the lambent Italian air, which, coming through the open windows now, seems to bathe my skin. Even this towel is feeling too heavy.

  I’ve gotten to the bottom of the suitcase when I remember Chihiro’s going-away present. Something with an actual color, she’d said, to brighten my usual schoolgirl uniforms, which is exactly what my drab clothes look like to me.

  I unfold the thick tissue paper—itself a beautiful shade of vibrant orange that I recognize as the packaging of the Tibetan store Do Kham in Nolita—and lift up a delicate dress of pink gauze embroidered with gold thread; it flutters in the breeze like a rare butterfly. I slip it over my head before it can fly away—and before I can heed the little voice inside telling me I should probably wear a bra. I do put on panties and the gold Tibetan sandals I find nestled in the tissue paper along with a prayer from the Dalai Lama.

  Now all I have to do is find a way to slip into the garden without running into Cyril Graham and company.

  I grab a comb and run it through my wet hair on my way to the door, scattering water drops in my wake. When I stop at the full-length Venetian mirror by the door, I look back and notice that the water drops have turned the mosaic rose petals a brighter red. I turn to the mirror and look at myself. Chihiro chose well. The pink suits me. It’s brought out the pink in my skin (or maybe that’s just the effects of the hot bath), and the gold threads in the fabric catch the gold in my hair, which is quickly drying and beginning to curl in the hot, moist air. I begin to tie it up into a knot but then decide to let it hang loose. I am not, I remind myself, going to the rose garden to meet Bruno. I am going there to look for the poems Robin found.

  On the day I first kissed Bruno, he had taken me into the garden to show me an inscription on the marble rim of the fountain at its center. He had wanted me to read the lines there as a warning against thinking that writing poetry was a way of making something that lasted. Ginevra de Laura, he told me, had spent her whole life writing poetry, but out of all those poems only two lines, carved into crumbling marble and hidden beneath tangled vines, had survived. What if before she left for the convent Ginevra decided not to burn the poems but to hide them? What better repository for those love poems than that same fountain, hidden at the center of a garden designed in the shape of her lover’s initials?

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  I MANAGE TO MAKE IT TO THE STAIRS AND DOWN TO THE FIRST FLOOR OF THE rotunda without running into anyone, but as I’m passing the sala grande I hear voices approaching and the door opening. Fortunately, I learned years ago that when I wanted to avoid running into anyone in the rotunda, there is a convenient hiding place just at the foot of the stairs: a niche covered with a medieval tapestry. This one depicts a peasant snaring a bird for a lady on horseback. I step into this recess now and look out through a narrow gap between the tapestry and the wall. The doors to the sala grande open, and out step Cyril Graham and Leo Balthasar.

  Although I feel suddenly like Polonius hiding in Queen Gertrude’s bedroom, I’m glad I have this chance to see Cyril Graham for the first time while remaining unobserved myself. I know exactly what he would expect—demand—as tribute from a guest who had been long absent. You haven’t changed a bit. He was famously vain about his “figure,” as he called it, and lectured us on the advantages of a Mediterranean diet long before it became fashionable.

  And he is thin. I can say that for him. His mandarin-collar jacket (no doubt made by the special tailor in Hong Kong he had always bragged about) hangs off his thin, sloping shoulders, and his linen slacks swish around his bony ankles as he escorts Balthasar to the ingresso. He passes so close to me that I can see the liver spots on his bald head and smell his cologne.

  “Good, it’s settled, then,” Cyril says, clapping his hand onto Balthasar’s shoulder in a gesture that’s supposed to be hearty but ends up, as Cyril’s hand drifts trembling down Balthasar’s arm, looking as if he’s trying to hold on to the younger man for support. “You can start filming in the limonaia once you pay the roofers. After all, you don’t want all that expensive film equipment water damaged.”

  “I’ll pay the roofer’s bill, Graham, and any other little home improvement project you can cook up, as long as you keep to your end of the bargain.”

  “A gentleman always honors his word.” Cyril draws himself up, try
ing to square his thin shoulders, but succeeds only in swaying from side to side.

  “But you thought the boy had the papers,” Balthasar says, putting out a hand to steady Cyril. I can see an expression of pity mixed with irritation on Leo Balthasar’s face.

  “I’m sure he found something.”

  “Well, if he did, their whereabouts have died with him, I’m afraid. Are you sure you’ve looked everywhere?”

  “You can’t imagine the amount of papers stuffed away in this old place.” Cyril lifts his hands, palms up, and looks toward the ceiling of the rotunda as if he expected a rain of paper to flutter down from the glassed-over oculus. “Are you sure he didn’t tell the Brunelli boy before he died? That would be a disaster.”

  “I don’t think he told Orlando anything. They weren’t exactly on speaking terms at the end. But I think he might have told Dr. Asher something. She certainly changed her mind about my offer quickly after Robin died.”

  Cyril says something I can’t make out, and I hear the front door open and close. I wait to see whether Cyril is coming back, but after a moment I conclude that he must have gone outside with Balthasar. I slip out from the niche and into the sala grande, which has, I remember, doors leading out into the garden.

  The sala grande looks so exactly as it did twenty years ago that I feel as if I really have stepped back in time. It’s not just the Louis Seize furniture—artfully arranged in conversational groupings—or the early medieval paintings on the walls that are the same. I could swear that even the knicknacks—or tshatshkes, as my mother would call the porcelain shepherdesses, ivory netsukes, and majolica lemons—and silver-framed photographs are arranged on the ormolu tabletops and chinoiserie cabinets exactly as they had been on my last day at La Civetta. I pick up a framed photograph of a minor British royal with a not-so-minor British writer and notice that the wood of the table is a darker color in the spot where the picture was positioned. I move a faience bulldog and a millefiori paperweight and see that they, too, have been sitting on darkened shadows of themselves while the wood around them has bleached in the Tuscan sun.

  The sound of someone coming down the stairs in the rotunda startles me out of my communion with the inanimate objects. Whoever it is, I don’t want to be kept from my errand in the garden. The fountain there might be the one place Cyril Graham and Leo Balthasar would not have thought of looking for Ginevra’s poems. I unlatch the glass doors and slip outside, feeling, as the sultry air wraps around me, more insubstantial than those sepia-toned images in the sala.

  A short flight of mossy steps takes me down to the lemon walk, which is lined with lemon trees, each in its own terra-cotta pot from the Tuscan village of Impruneta, where the high iron content of the clay makes their pottery resistant to frost. The flowers have fallen from the trees, and small green lemons are ripening in the sun. On the terrace above the walk is a walled fruit garden—the pomerino—and across from the pomerino is the limonaia, where the lemon trees spend the winter, and above the limonaia, on the second floor, is the apartment where Bruno lived the year I was here. It was a large and elegant apartment with terra-cotta floors and views of the garden and the Valdarno, but I somehow doubt that it would be enough for Claudia.

  I see that the old wooden gate that used to be at the top of the staircase leading down into the rose garden has crumbled away. Instead there’s a sign strung on a chain between two marble pillars warning Pericoloso! I’m surprised that this part of the gardens has not been renovated, but then, from the conversation I just overheard between Cyril and Leo Balthasar, I gather Cyril hasn’t had enough money to even keep up the buildings. Something will have to be done about this staircase, though, when Hudson takes over. You can’t expect students to heed a little wooden hand-painted sign. I certainly don’t. With a quick backward glance at the villa, I step over the chain and start down the stairs.

  They are dangerous, I quickly realize. There are whole steps missing and some that rock when you step on them. Small green lizards, which have colonized the ruined steps, dart under my feet, nearly causing me to trip several times. At the first landing, where the steps turn sharply right to descend into the rose garden, a statue of some ill-fated goddess or nymph has toppled over into a heap of broken limbs. Her face is half covered with vines, one eye staring up toward the top of the stairs as if waiting for someone to come down and save her.

  “No one’s coming, honey,” I say stepping over her. At the bottom of the steps is the tomb of the veiled woman. I realize that this is also the back entrance of the teatrino and would have been an easier way to get into the rose garden. Next time, I think, reading the Shakespearian inscription carved into the stone, the one added by Cyril’s father, Sir Lionel. “My father was quite the romantic,” Cyril would tell us. “He liked to imagine the Bard himself wandering through these shaded walks or his lovers meeting under cover of night in the teatrino.”

  The notion had struck my imagination then and it still has power now. This could be the forest of Arden from As You Like It or the enchanted woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The gardens of La Civetta seem to exist outside time and place, just as Shakespeare’s characters transcend their age and circumstances. As if to confirm my thoughts, I hear, from the teatrino, a voice reciting lines I recognize from Romeo and Juliet.

  If I profane with my unworthiest hand

  This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this,

  My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand

  To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

  I can just make out from where I stand the boy’s white shirt fluttering as he gestures on the grassy stage and the swirl of the girl’s spangled Indian skirt as she answers:

  Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

  Which mannerly devotion shows in this:

  For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch

  And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.

  I don’t wait for the kiss that ends the scene. I move past the teatrino, feeling insubstantial again, like a ghost spying on the living, and enter the knot garden. As I follow the narrow, curving paths I realize that the latter part of Robin’s film was made here—the part in which Zoe runs through the ruined garden after she has been betrayed by Orlando. From the film I recognize the broken statuary strewn across the paths. Arms and legs are scattered in the overgrown rosebushes as if there had been some massacre and these were the bodies of the dead. No heads, I notice. No doubt the garden was plundered for salvageable busts. I imagine Cyril selling them for pocket cash to his antiques dealer in Florence, and that now those marble faces—women’s faces, I gather, from the delicacy and curve of the broken limbs—lie atop coffee tables and bookcases in apartments in Rome, New York, and Paris, like exiled princesses.

  When I get to the fountain at the center of the garden, I remember that this is where Zoe sees Orlando and the other woman reading the Moroccan-bound notebook. When I saw the film in New York, I’d read the scene as a generalized depiction of betrayal. The book stood for the lover’s innermost thoughts about the beloved. The lines of Shake-speare’s poems that the audience hears might be the poems in the book—or they might be meant to suggest the sort of love poetry to be found in the lover’s notebook. It didn’t seem necessary to know for sure in order to feel the sting of betrayal when another woman sits with the beloved and laughs at the contents of the book.

  Now, though, as I tug at the thick underbrush that covers the rim of the fountain, I wonder whether Robin was re-creating his discovery of the lost poems in the film. Perhaps Robin had shown the poems to Orlando and Orlando wanted to use them for his own purposes—to sell them or write his own story about Ginevra de Laura and William Shakespeare…I pause with a vine in my hands, realizing that it’s far more likely that Bruno would write a book like that. In fact, it would be the perfect book for him to write. If Orlando told him about Robin’s discovery, Bruno might have asked him to get the poems for him. Perhaps it was Bruno who sent Orlando to New
York.

  The idea upsets me so much that I tug too fiercely on the tangled vegetation that is still keeping me from the center of the fountain, releasing a thick, thorny vine that snaps back at me, snagging my hair and wrapping itself around my head. I cry out and step back, but that only entangles me further.

  “Stay still,” a man’s voice says from behind me, “and I’ll get you out.”

  I try to turn toward the voice, but the thorns scratch my face. I feel hands moving through my hair, slowly unraveling the vine from each strand. I’m reminded, oddly, of the medieval tapestry in the rotunda that depicts a man releasing a bird from a net into a gilded cage. As I turn around I feel as one of those birds must, freed from one trap only to find itself caught in a larger one. In my case, it’s Bruno’s eyes that have snared me, the fine lines that have grown around them only making them a wider net. I feel myself falling into them, but then I remem-ber that he could have been the one to send Orlando to hound Robin for the poems. Which would mean that he could be the one responsible for Robin’s death.

  “Rose,” he says, making of my one-syllable name a long, drawn-out sigh.

  “Bruno,” I say, trying to make my voice cool, but it’s hard to sound imperious with tangled hair and scratched hands.

  “You’ve torn your dress,” he says.

  I look down and see a small tear-shaped rip in the gathers of the bodice.

  “It’s along the seam,” I say—inanely! Am I really, after all these years, talking to Bruno about clothing repairs? “I can sew it back together easily.”

  “Brava. It’s a lovely dress. The color of your name. And all these years I’ve been afraid you’d become one of those New York women who dress only in black.”