by Mark Mills
He hefted his suitcase onto the worm-eaten chest at the end of the bed and began to unpack. She must have had the boy young— seventeen, eighteen—though you'd have said even younger judging by her looks. For some reason he'd pictured an elderly woman, small in stature and of no mean girth. Instead, he was being housed by a stringier version of Gina Lollobrigida in Trapeze.
It was a pleasing thought.
Another image from the same film barged its way into his head unbidden—Burt Lancaster's overmuscled physique squeezed into a leotard—and the moment passed.
The road to Villa Docci proved to be a dusty white track following the crest of a high spur to the north of town. It rose and fell past ocher-washed farmhouses, hay meadows giving way to olive groves and vineyards tucked behind high hedgerows ablaze with honeysuckle, mallow and blood-red poppies. His mother would have been thrilled, stopping every so often to call his attention to some plant or flower. That was her way. But all Adam was aware of was the mocking chant of the cicadas pulsing in time to the pitiless heat.
He was about to turn back, convinced that he'd made a mistake, when he saw two weathered stone gateposts up ahead. Beyond them an avenue of ancient cypresses climbed sharply toward a large villa, the trunks of the trees powdered white with dust thrown up from the driveway. There was no sign beside the gateposts, but a quick glance at the handdrawn map Signora Docci had sent him confirmed that he had at last arrived.
Nearing the top of the driveway, he stopped, uncertain, sensing something. He turned, glancing back down the gradient, the plunging perspective of the flanking cypresses.
Something not right. But what? He couldn't say. And he was too hot to ponder it further.
The cypresses gave way to a gravel turning area in front of the villa. There were some farm buildings away to his left, down the slope, beyond a stand of holm oaks, but his attention was focused on the main structure.
How had Professor Leonard described the architecture of the villa? Pedestrian?
Admittedly, his own knowledge on the subject was drawn almost exclusively from a battered copy of Edith Wharton's book on Italian villas, but there seemed to be nothing whatsoever run- of-the-mill about the building in front of him. Though not as large or obviously grand as some, its symmetry and proportions lent it an air of discreet nobility, majesty even.
Set around three sides of a flagstone courtyard, it climbed three floors to a shallow, tiled roof with projecting eaves. Arcaded loggias occupied the middle and upper stories of the front facade, while the wings consisted of blind arcades with pedimented and consoled windows. There was not much more to it than that, but every detail of it worked.
The building felt no need to proclaim its pedigree; rather, it exuded it like a well-cut suit. You were left in little doubt that the hand of some master lay behind its conception—long-dead, unrecognized, forgotten. For if one of the more illustrious architects of the period had been responsible for bringing it into being, that fact would have been preserved in the historical record. As it was, he had found almost no references to Villa Docci during his preliminary research.
He skirted the wellhead in the middle of the courtyard and mounted the front steps. There was a stone escutcheon set in the wall above the entrance door, a rampant boar the centerpiece of the Docci coat of arms. He tugged on the iron bellpull.
She must have been observing him from inside, waiting for him to make his approach, for the door swung open almost immediately. She was short and stout, and she was wearing a white blouse tucked into a black skirt. Her dark eyes reached for his and held them, viselike.
"Good morning," he said in Italian.
"Good afternoon."
"I'm Adam Strickland."
"You're late."
"Yes. I'm sorry."
She stepped aside, allowing him to enter, appraising him with a purposeful eye as if he were a horse she was thinking of betting on (and leaving him with the distinct impression that she wouldn't be reaching for her purse anytime soon).
"Signora Docci wishes to see you."
At either end of the long entrance hall was a stone stairway leading to the upper floors. When she made for the one on the left, Adam fell in beside her.
"May I have a glass of water, please?"
"Water? Yes, of course." She changed tack, heading for a corridor beside the staircase. "Wait here," she said.
He didn't mind. It allowed him to cast an eye around the interior. Any suspicions that the quiet elegance of the villa's exterior owed itself to little more than chance vanished immediately. You sensed the same poised hand at work in the proportions of the vast drawing room that occupied the central section of the ground floor, and giving onto a balustraded terrace out back. The flanking rooms were connected by a run of doorways, perfectly aligned, which generated a telescopic sense of perspective and permitted an uninterrupted view from one end of the villa to the other.
Adam retreated at the sound of approaching footsteps, not wishing to be caught snooping by the maid, or the housekeeper, or whatever she was.
Signora Docci lay propped up on a bank of pillows in a four-poster bed of dark wood, reading. She inclined her head toward the door as they entered, peering over the top of her spectacles.
"Adam," she said, smiling broadly.
"Hello."
"Grazie, Maria."
Maria acknowledged the dismissal with a nod, pulling the door closed behind her as she left.
Signora Docci gestured for Adam to approach the bed. "Please, it's not contagious, just old age." She laid her book aside and smiled again. "Well, maybe it is contagious."
Her hair hung loose, tumbling like a silver wave around her shoulders. It seemed too long, too thick, for a woman of her advanced years. A tracery of fine lines lay like a veil across her face, but the flesh was firm, shored up by the prominent bones beneath. Her eyes were dark and wide-spaced.
He extended his hand. "Pleased to meet you."
They shook, her grip firm and bony.
"Please." She indicated a high-backed chair near the bed. "I'm glad you're finally here. Maria has been fussing around for days, tidying and cleaning."
It was hard to picture: stern, monosyllabic Maria preparing for his arrival.
"She is a good person. She will let you see that when she's ready to."
He was slightly unnerved that she'd read the thought in his face.
"So, how was your trip?"
"Good. Long."
"Did you stop in Paris?"
"No."
"Milan?"
"Just Florence. And only for a night."
"One night in Florence," she mused. "It sounds like the title of a song."
"Not a very good one."
Signora Docci gave a short, sharp laugh. "No," she conceded. Adam took a letter from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to her. "From Professor Leonard."
She laid the letter beside her on the bed. He noted that her hand remained resting on it.
"And how is Crispin?" she asked.
"He's in France at the moment, looking at some cave paintings." "Cave paintings?"
"They're very old—lots of bison and deer."
"A cave is no place for a man his age. It'll be the death of him."
Adam smiled.
"I'm serious," she said.
"I know, it's just . . . your English."
"What?"
"It's very good. Very correct."
"Nannies. Nannies and governesses. My father is to blame. He loved England." She shifted in the bed, removing her spectacles and placing them on the bedside table. "So tell me, how is the Pensione Amorini?"
"Perfect. Thanks for arranging it." "How much is she charging you?" "Twenty-five hundred lire a day." "It's too much."
"It's half what I paid in Florence."
"Then you were had."
"Oh."
"You should pay no more than two thousand lire for half- board."
"The room's large, clean."
"Signora
Fanelli knows the power of her looks, I'm afraid. She always has, even as a young girl. And now that she's a widow, well . . ."
"What?"
"Oh, nothing." She shrugged. "Men are as men are. Why should they change?"
Adam's instinct was to defend his sex against the charge, but the news about Signora Fanelli's marital status was really quite agreeable. He chose silence and a grave nod of the head.
"How long will you be with us?"
"Two weeks."
"Is it enough time?"
"I don't know. I've never studied a garden before."
"You'll find it's a little neglected, I'm afraid. Gaetano left last year. It was his responsibility. The other gardeners do what they can." She pointed to some French windows, which were open, although the louvered shutters remained closed. "There's a view behind those. You can't see the memorial garden from here, but I can point you in the right direction."
Adam pushed open the shutters, squinting against the sunlight flooding past him into the room. He found himself in an arcaded loggia. As his eyes adjusted to the light, he made out the commanding view. Patchwork hills spilled away to the west, their folds cast by the lowering sun into varying grades of shade. There was a timeless, almost mythical quality to the panorama—like a Poussin landscape.
"It's special, isn't it?" said Signora Docci.
"If you like that kind of thing."
This brought a laugh from her. Adam peered down onto the gardens at the rear of the villa, the formal arrangements of gravel walks and clipped hedges.
"There are some umbrella pines at the edge of the lower terrace, on the left. If you walk through those and follow the path down, you'll come to it."
Just beyond the knot of pines the land dropped away sharply into a wooded valley.
"Yes, I see."
He pulled the shutters closed behind him as he reentered the room.
"Why put it down there? In the valley, I mean."
"Water. There's a spring. Or there was. It's dry now, like everything. We need rain, we need lots of rain. The grapes and olives are suffering." She reached for a slender file on the bedside table. "Here. My father put it together. It's not much, but it's everything we know about the garden."
Adam was to come and go at his leisure, she went on. He was more than welcome to work out of the study if he wanted to, and of course the library was at his disposal. In fact, he was to have free run of the villa, everything except the top floor, which, for reasons she didn't explain, was off-limits. Maria would prepare him something for lunch if he wanted it.
"We don't stand on ceremony around here. If you need something, you just have to ask."
"Thank you," he said. "Thank you for everything."
"Non c'e di che," replied Signora Docci with a mock-formal tilt of the head. "Come back and see me when you've walked round the garden."
Adam was leaving the room when she added, "Oh, and if you see a young woman down there, it is probably my granddaughter." A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. "Don't worry, she's quite harmless."
He passed through the drawing room and out onto the flagstone terrace at the back. From here a flight of stone steps, bowed with centuries of wear, led down to a formal parterre—an expanse of gravel laid out with low, clipped box hedges arranged in geometric patterns. Lemon trees in giant terra-cotta pots were dotted around. He had read enough to know that the climbing roses and wisteria trellised to the retaining wall were a later addition in the "English style," which had swept the country the previous century, consigning so many ancient gardens to the rubbish heap of history. Parterres had been ripped up to make way for bowling-green lawns, which soon burned to a crisp under the fierce Italian sun. Borders had been dug to house herbaceous plants suited to far gentler climes, and all manner of vines and creepers had been let loose, scaling walls and scrabbling up trees like unruly children. In many cases, the prevailing winds of fashion had wrought wholesale destruction, but it seemed that here at Villa Docci the original Renaissance terraces had survived almost entirely unscathed.
This was confirmed when he descended to the lowest level. A circular fountain held center stage, set about with tall screens of tight- clipped yew, dividing the terrace into "rooms." The formal gardens stopped here at a high retaining wall that plunged twenty feet to an olive-clad slope occupying the sunny lap of the hill. There were stone benches set at intervals along the balustrade, embracing the view. At the north end of the terrace was a small chapel pressed tight against a low sandstone cliff, its entrance flanked by two towering cypresses, like dark obelisks. At the other end lay the grove of umbrella pines that Signora Docci had drawn his attention to from the loggia.
He settled himself down in the resin-scented shade of the pines and lit a cigarette. He looked up at the villa standing proud and grave on its knoll, like some captain on his poop deck. All of the upper windows were shuttered, suggesting that the top floor was not only out of bounds but also out of use. He smiled at the thought of a deranged relative, some mad Mrs. Rochester, closeted away up there.
Viewed from this angle, there was an air of austerity about the building, a robust, fortresslike quality. And yet somehow this seemed in keeping with both its setting and function. It was not a pleasure palace; it was the centerpiece of a working estate. The farm buildings, just visible from where he was sitting, were arranged around a yard below the villa. There was no shame in the association, and the villa declared as much with the artless candor of the face it chose to present to the valley. Again, he was left with a palpable sense of the mind behind the design.
In almost no time he had fallen under Villa Docci's spell, and the idea that he might have to devote his time to the study of a small part of its garden, one component stuck way down in the valley, was already a building frustration.
The answer came to him suddenly and clearly. He would change the subject of his thesis. Who could protest? Professor Leonard? On what grounds? Their remit as students was broad to the point of being all-embracing. If Roland Gibbs had settled on a moldering Romanesque church in Suffolk as a subject for his thesis, how did an Italian Renaissance villa-estate compare? He would have to play the Marxist historical card—that angle was increasingly popular within the faculty—not art and architecture for their own sakes, but as manifestations of the socioeconomic undercurrents of the time.
His heart already going out of the matter, he opened the file
Signora Docci had given him and began to read. The language was rich, formal, turn-of-the-century.
Flora Bonfadio was only twenty-five years old when she died in 1548—the year after she and her husband, Federico Docci, some two decades her senior, took possession of the new villa they had built near San Casciano. Not much was known of Flora's history. Some had speculated that she was related to the poet and humanist Jacopo Bonfadio, but there was no hard evidence to this effect. As for the Doccis, they were a family of Florentine bankers who, like the Medici, originated from the Mugello, a mountainous region just north of the city. Although they had never risen to the Medici's level of prominence—who had?—by the sixteenth century they were nonetheless established as successful financiers. They had to have been, for Federico Docci to afford the luxury of carving out a country estate for himself and his young wife.
Villa Docci instantly became a port of call for artists and writers, and was renowned, apparently, for the extravagant parties thrown by its generous host. This was not an unusual development. To create a cultural watering hole in the hills was the goal of many wealthy Florentines, almost a necessary stage in their development—a chance to share some of their ill-gotten gains with the more needy while rubbing shoulders with the greatest talents of the age. High finance and high art coming together as they have always done. A simple trade in an age driven by patronage.
Adam recognized only two names on the list of those reputed to have attended Federico's gatherings at Villa Docci. The first was Bronzino, the well-known court painter. The second was Tull
ia d'Aragona, the not-so-much-well-known-as-notorious courtesan and poetess. Her inclusion lent an appealing whiff of scandal to the list, hinting at dark and dangerous goings-on at Villa Docci. Whether or not this was true, Federico's dream of a rural salon was abruptly shattered after a year with the death of his wife. There were no records as to the cause of Flora's untimely demise. Federico must have been devastated though, because he never remarried, the villa and the estate passing to another branch of the Docci clan on his death.
Amongst all this historical fog, one thing was clear: in 1577, Federico had laid out, according to his own design, a small garden to Flora's memory.
Adam turned the page to be presented with a handdrawn map of the garden. He instinctively closed the file. Better to approach the place blind and untutored the first time, as Professor Leonard had suggested.
The pathway meandered lazily down into the valley, a thread of packed earth, untended and overgrown. The trees on either side grew denser, darker, as he descended, deciduous giving way to evergreen: pine, yew, juniper and bay. He heard birds, but their song was muffled, diffuse, hard to locate. And then the path gave out. Or at least it appeared to. Closer inspection revealed a narrow fissure set at an angle in the tall yew hedge barring his way.
He paused for a moment, then edged through the crack.
Beyond the hedge, the path was graveled, with trees pressing in tightly, their interlocking branches forming a gloomy vault overhead. After a hundred yards or so, the trees fell away abruptly on both sides and he found himself in a clearing near the head of a broad cleft in the hillside. This was evidently the heart of the garden, the central axis along which it unfolded.
To his right, set near the top of a tiered and stone-trimmed amphitheater, stood a pedestal bearing a marble statue of a naked woman. Her exaggerated contrapposto stance thrust her right hip out, twisting her torso to the left, while her head was turned back to the right, peering over her shoulder. Her right arm was folded across her front, modestly covering her breasts; her hair was wreathed with blossoms; and at her feet flowers spilled from an overturned vase, like water from an urn.