The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  WHEN I STEP OUT INTO THE POMERINO I THINK, FOR AN INSTANT, THAT I have stepped back in time to the winter of my junior year, to the night it snowed. The statue at the center of the walled garden—a half-nude goddess with a leaping deer at her side and bow strapped across her bared breast—is blindingly white, as if dusted by snow. But when I come close enough to lay my hand on the cool marble, I see it is only an effect of the moonlight—and perhaps of the two glasses of absinthe I’ve just drunk. Leave it to Cyril to imbibe not just any after-dinner drink, but one redolent of history and mystique. “The Green Muse,” it was called by the artists and writers who favored it in nineteenth-century Paris. Granter of visions and corruptor of virtues. All myth, I’ve heard. Most of the reported effects came from the adulterants used in cheaper brands, which the lower classes—all those laundresses and prostitutes in Toulouse-Latrec’s paintings—drank all the more to match the alcohol content of the more expensive brands. And, I’ve read, the chemical similarity between Artemisia absinthium and cannabis has been greatly exaggerated.

  Still, the last time I found myself so fascinated with the texture of stone was the last time I smoked pot. I realize that I’ve been standing here in front of this statue for…well, I’m not really sure how long. I feel as if she’s cast a spell on me, willing me into the same stony rigidity as her. Of course, I suddenly realize, she’s Artemis, the namesake of the herb I’ve just drunk. I nearly laugh at the coincidence (the way I recall laughing at such epiphanies when stoned) but remember that Cyril is probably still watching me from the library. Just as he must have watched the whole scene with Mara and Orlando and realized that she was trying to interfere with the plan to blackmail Claudia into dropping the suit. Claudia was right—La Civetta really is built for spying. The walled pomerino feels suddenly like one of those glass snow domes and the child shaking it is Cyril.

  I turn to the right, hearing a creak that could be my bones coming rustily to life, but is actually the sound of paper rustling in my shawl. I walk through the same gate that Orlando, Mara, Leo, Ned, and Zoe all passed through before, out onto the lemon walk. Under the moonlight the glossy leaves of the lemon trees shine like polished jade and the lemons like globes of yellow quartz. It is as if I’ve wandered into a world carved out of precious stone—a pietre dure landscape. For a second I think the two figures pasted up against the wall farther down the walk are part of the stone inlay. Cupid and Psyche embracing, perhaps, only this Psyche has Zoe Demarchis’s raspberry-colored hair and her Cupid is the gangly Ned Silverman. They are so engrossed in each other that they don’t notice me, even though the moonlight lights up the path between us. As soon as I move, though, they’re bound to hear the crunch of the gravel, and I find myself loath to disturb them, so I step off the path into the soft grass.

  To my left is the yew path that leads down to the teatrino. I’d planned to go into the rose garden that way, but I hear voices coming from there and glimpse shadowy shapes on the grassy stage. Some of the shapes, I know, are the statues of Shakespearian heroines, while others must be students performing impromptu theatrics, but I find it hard to tell them apart. The absinthe has affected my perception in a way that makes solid objects appear to shimmer with an otherworldly life and live things freeze into stone. When I turn right, stepping over the chain, to take the staircase down into the sunken rose garden, the marble steps seem to undulate like an escalator. I reach out to hold the railing, but the piece of decorative carving I touch turns scaly and skitters away under my hand. The lizards, I remember with a shudder. I concentrate on placing each foot carefully on each step, feeling for the wide cracks and loose paving stones and praying that I don’t step on a lizard.

  On the landing I find the broken statue. She’s mostly in shadow, but as I step over her, a splash of moonlight falls on her vacant eye, making it glitter reproachfully. Another streak of moonlight seems to bring a broken hand to life. I feel something graze my ankle, and in leaping away I nearly fall headlong down the next flight of stairs. I manage to catch myself just in time. I creep down the rest of the stairs, clinging to the railing no matter what brushes against my hand, until I reach the tomb of the veiled woman.

  In the silver moonlight I can just make out the lines: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” I remember that Robin thought Shakespeare’s promise to his beloved to immortalize him through art was “an infinite deal of nothing.” I’d put Robin’s bitterness down to some trifling love spat, as though I didn’t know how thoroughly one could have one’s heart broken at nineteen.

  I look up at the statue of the woman reclining on the tomb. She’s wrapped head to toe in diaphanous drapery—a winding sheet or shroud, perhaps. Even her face is covered in the material, her features faintly visible beneath the tightly stretched veil. I walk around the tomb in a slow circle, noticing how the figure seems to be straining against her wraps like a mummy struggling to free herself of her winding sheet. I realize that even though the night is warm, I’ve wound the black shawl around me just as tightly in an unconscious imitation of the tautness of the statue’s drapery. Although I know that the lines of the poem were added later to the tomb, it feels as if they were written for her. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” She seems, though dead, to be struggling against the bonds of death as if her lover’s promise will indeed bring her back to life. Resurrection by the pen! I’d laugh at the thought if it didn’t suddenly chill me to the bone. I’ve turned Shake-speare’s eighteenth sonnet into a Hollywood B zombie movie. I stop in my tracks, dizzy from walking in circles, and hear the question Robin asked me that day in class.

  If you lost someone you loved, would reading something about him—or by him—lessen the loss one iota? Wouldn’t you trade all the poems and all the plays in all the world for just five minutes with him again?

  Wouldn’t I?

  I grasp my shawl closer to me and hear the crackle of paper. Isn’t that what I’m doing right now? Carrying Ginevra de Laura’s poems to Bruno as an offering for…what? As compensation for what I’m about to tell him about Orlando? As if some old poems could make up for the loss of his son?

  I shake my head, trying to shake free of the morbid turn my thoughts have taken. It’s Cyril’s fault. Cyril the poisoner. He’s poured his evil thoughts into my ear while pouring bitter wormwood into my cup. The motion does nothing but make my ears ring—a tinny, jangling sound that’s maddening and growing louder by the minute. Just when I think the absinthe has produced auditory delusions along with the visual ones I’ve been suffering, two figures appear on the other side of the statue accompanied by the sound of bells and laughter.

  I really am hallucinating, I think, staring at the diaphanous belltrimmed wings fluttering around them and their crowns of tangled branches—or else the gardens of La Civetta really do possess fairies and sprites. One of the fairies pirouettes in front of the statue and recites:

  “You spotted snakes with double tongue,

  Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen,

  Newts and blind-worms…

  Shit, how did the rest go?”

  Her companion answers, “Newt and blind-worms do no wrong, / Come not near our fairy queen.”

  “Yeah,” she spins again, wobbling a little, and curtseys in front of the statue.

  “Come on, let’s find our Puck,” the boy says. “Zoe said he went into the garden.”

  The two drama students evaporate into the shadows without seeing me, taking the path back to the teatrino. Hopefully that means Orlando’s in that direction and not in the rose garden, which I head into now.

  I hadn’t noticed when I was here yesterday how close together the rosebushes had grown, so close that they brush against my arms, thorny branches catching at my shawl. I pull it tighter to me, the paper crackling in the lining, and think immediately of the yellow eyes in the painted woods, of the talons waiting to strike. When I peer into the thi
ck bushes, which are speckled with white flecks of moonlight, I can see long hooked thorns gleaming in the silvery light. It’s as if the rosebushes had mated with owls and sprouted talons. A breeze moves through the garden, stirring the foliage. The whole garden seems to be breathing, coming to life, a green monster with eyes the color of absinthe and claws wrought of silver. The Green Muse, indeed—not the muse as a winsome girl in floating drapery, but an angry winged harpy riding its prey to ground and then devouring it.

  I come to a place where two paths cross and realize I have no idea which way to go. The paths in the rose garden are laid out like a labyrinth. Even in the daylight they’re difficult to navigate. I could be wandering in here for hours. Why in the world had I told Bruno that I’d be able to find the fountain? And why had he picked such a difficult spot to meet? If it was to ensure privacy, he picked the wrong night. Several times I hear laughter and whispering—more students, I imagine, frolicking through the garden as if it were their private enchanted wood.

  I can’t say I blame them. I remember my days and nights here at La Civetta like a gilded dream, a stage set designed especially for my ro-mance with Bruno. I think that up until the end I’d believed that we were characters in a story. I didn’t necessarily expect a happy ending, but I thought that whatever the conclusion to our drama, it would be a beautiful work of art—something I’d treasure like the watercolors I brought home and put on my walls or the brightly covered pieces of pottery that now sit on my shelves. Souvenirs. I didn’t realize I’d spend the rest of my life missing what I’d lost here.

  Which is what I’ve done, I realize now as I walk in aimless circles on these paths carved out of another woman’s longing for her lost beloved. I’ve never allowed myself to love anyone else. What I’d valued most of all in Mark was the distance he let me keep from him. It’s Bruno I’ve loved all along. I only hope that I can find him in this maze and that he hasn’t given up waiting for me.

  I walk faster—practically running now—my heart hammering against my hands where I’m clutching the poems to my body. My dowry. Not all the poems and all the plays in all the world, but just these three poems. My breath grows ragged, choking on the heavy air, which is perfumed with roses and marijuana and something else—a richer and more complex aroma. Cuban tobacco.

  I pull up short on the path because I can hear voices around the next bend. There’s no place to go but into the thorny rosebushes, and I’m not about to ruin my new dress to hide. Why should I? I’ve done nothing wrong. I hold my ground, but the voices, which I recognize now as Leo Balthasar’s and Orlando’s, don’t come closer.

  “You made a deal,” Balthasar is saying. “You can’t back out of it now.”

  “But Mrs. Silverman knows what happened and is going to tell—”

  “Don’t worry about Mrs. Silverman. I’ve got that situation under control.”

  Orlando says something I can’t make out, and Leo replies, “Just stick to your end of the bargain and find those poems—”

  “You’ll get the poems,” Orlando says. “Robin showed them to me. They’re somewhere in the villa. If Robin could find them, I can. I just need a little more time.”

  “Alas, I’m afraid that the amount of time you have depends on Mrs. Silverman…”

  I miss the rest of what Balthasar says because they’ve started walking away from me. I consider following them to hear more, but I’m so disgusted by their machinations that I turn around and head in the opposite direction. I don’t want to hear what bribe they’ll come up with to buy Mara’s silence. I can’t imagine it will have to be much. Then I’ll be alone claiming that Orlando pushed Robin. I won’t be able, though, to say I saw it myself.

  I walk more slowly now, no longer in a rush to reach Bruno. It is too late, I realize, whether he’s waiting for me at the fountain or not. When I tell him what I know about his son and what I intend to do with the information, I’ll effectively put an end to any possibility of a future together. The only good thing I could hope for from the encounter is that I might finally admit that it’s over and get on with my life.

  I’ve all but given up on ever even finding the fountain when the dark path suddenly opens into a wide bowl filled with light, an open glade into which the moonlight has poured itself as though into a cup, the dry fountain at its center brimming over with silver light. I’ll never know whether Bruno would forgive me for betraying his son, though, because the glade is empty. I stand still for a few moments, willing myself to breathe in the silence and accept that whatever future I might have imagined for me and Bruno is as empty as this silver fountain. I’ve just begun to accept that truth when a voice breaks the silence.

  “I thought you’d decided not to come.”

  The words so mirror my own thoughts that for a moment I think they’re another illusion brought on by absinthe and garden magic. Even when I turn and see Bruno standing in the shadows at the edge of the glade, I still think he’s a vision I’ve conjured. Then he steps forward out of the shadows into the moonlight and his face—creased with time and worry—is all too real. I can read in every line of it what he’s been through in the last twenty years. What had Claudia said in the church? That he’d spent the last twenty years punishing himself for our affair.

  “I got lost,” I say, and it seems the most truthful thing I’ve said in a while.

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked you to meet me here. It was sentimental of me.”

  “I thought it was so we’d have privacy, but I think half the residents of La Civetta are wandering through the garden tonight.”

  “Yes,” he says, coming closer, “that’s why I stepped out of the moonlight while I was waiting for you. I saw Mara Silverman wandering through here a few minutes ago.”

  “Mara? She’s still loose?” I laugh because I’ve made her sound like a stray cat. “I saw her run out of the pomerino earlier, but I didn’t think she’d last outside too long. She’s afraid of the dark.”

  “Perhaps I should have spoken to her, but I was afraid of scaring her. She’s not too fond of my son.”

  “You saw that scene in the pomerino earlier?”

  “Yes, from my apartment window. I can’t imagine what she has against Orlando. He’s usually very charming.”

  “It must run in the family,” I say and then instantly regret it when Bruno smiles and steps toward me. What am I doing flirting with him when he’s just given me the perfect opportunity to explain exactly what Mara has against Orlando?

  “I think I know why Mara was so upset with Orlando,” I say, drawing my shawl closer around me.

  “Are you cold, Rose?” Bruno asks, stepping even closer and putting his arm around my shoulders. “You’re shivering.”

  Although I hadn’t thought I was cold, I feel suddenly drawn to his warmth, as though I’d been frozen. His arm tightens around me as he pulls me against his chest, where I rest my cheek. Just for a moment, I think, and then I’ll tell him. When I lift my head, though, his lips are there to meet mine, those full, curving lips I’ve never forgotten that feel like they fit the shape of my mouth. I feel his hand on the nape of my neck as I press my mouth against his, and as I lift my hand up to touch his face, my shawl flutters to the ground, releasing its cargo of old parchment.

  “You’re molting,” he says. I can feel his lips smiling under mine, but he doesn’t let me go. It’s only after another long kiss that I break away and say, “I’d better get those.”

  He’s faster than me. He kneels down on the ground to retrieve the three pages, holding each one up in the moonlight to read. I sit on the rim of the fountain and look up at the sky.

  “Where—”

  “Robin gave me the one about the limonaia, then someone put the one about the rose petals in my napkin ring last night, and I found the clothing one in the cassone in my room. You’ve never seen any of them?”

  He shakes his head. “This one about the limonaia is very like the one my mother described to me. She said that Sir Lionel sen
t it to her.”

  “If he gave it to her, how could Robin have found it?”

  “She didn’t keep it. When she told me about it, of course I wanted to see it, but she said she no longer had it…was there anything with this poem?”

  “A letter—” I begin.

  He stands up abruptly. “Do you still have it?” he asks.

  “Back in my room,” I answer, startled by his urgency. He hadn’t shown as much excitement about the poems. “But it’s just a note, really, from Robin, saying he left the rest of the poems where he found them and that I should come to La Civetta to see them—”

  “Then I am thankful to Robin Weiss,” Bruno says, caressing my face, “for bringing you here.”

  “In the note Robin said he was afraid that having the poems had put him in danger and then…then he died—”

  “I think he was right,” Bruno says. “I don’t think you should keep these. Let me keep them for you.” He’s already rolling them up and slipping them underneath his shirt.

  “Bruno,” I say laying my hand on his chest, as much to steady myself as to comfort him for what I’m about to tell him, but before I can say anything else we’re both startled by a sudden scream coming from the direction of the villa.

  “It could be one of the students,” Bruno says, “playing one of their games.” But then we hear another scream and another. There’s nothing playful about them.

  “Come on,” Bruno says, grabbing my arm, “I know the fastest way back.”

  Bruno navigates the maze without a moment’s hesitation, steering me over broken statuary and holding back thorny branches. When the paths narrow he walks ahead of me, but I keep a hand on his elbow so I won’t lose him. We seem to be getting closer to the screams, which have not let up, only hoarsened. When we reach the bottom of the staircase, Bruno stops abruptly and holds his arm up to keep me from coming any farther. I can see around him to the steps, though, and I can’t understand what he’s keeping me from. They’re empty except for scattered rose petals, which gleam darkly in the moonlight.