by Mark Mills
He had never actually read The Divine Comedy right through. He had skimmed it, filleted a couple of commentaries, done just enough to satisfy an examiner that he was well acquainted with the text. He could have put forward a convincing argument for the timeless appeal of Dante's epic poem, the crowning glory of his life, twelve years in the writing, completed just before his death in 1321. He could also have listed a number of great writers and poets who openly and willingly acknowledged their debt to the work— William Blake, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. He could even have come up with some specifics, lines in The Waste Land that Eliot had lifted straight from The Divine Comedy.
Never having read The Waste Land—or any works by Beckett or Joyce, for that matter—he would have been hard-pressed to say what exactly these modern men of letters had seen to inspire them in a medieval poem about a lost soul's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.
It didn't matter, though. He could recall enough of The Divine Comedy to know that there was some kind of connection with the memorial garden.
Finding himself lost in a dark wood, Dante is approached by the spirit of the poet Virgil, who guides him down through the nine circles of Hell and on into Purgatory. The spirit of Beatrice— the love of Dante's life, long since dead—takes over as guide for the last leg, escorting Dante up through Paradise toward a final meeting with God.
Adam's interest lay in the opening of the story: Virgil leading Dante from the dark wood and through the Gates of Hell. Was it by chance that a dense wood of dark ilex trees bristled menacingly at the head of the memorial garden? Or that the triumphal arch stood so close by? Or that if you read the two curiously unsymmetrical decorative motifs flanking fiore as the letter n, then you had an anagram of inferno, of Hell? Was it possible that Federico Docci had moved, if not Heaven, then earth, and lots of it, to shape a steep slope for a simple amphitheater? Or had he done so in order to re-create the plunging layers of Hell so vividly detailed by Dante in the first part of his poem?
These were some of the questions that had carried Adam up the hill from the garden at a run, and that now had him furiously flipping through the old book.
He found what he was looking for in the fifth Canto of Inferno:
Cosi discesi del cerchio primaio giu nel secondo ...
So I descended from the first circle down to the second...
His eyes roamed over the text: a dark place . . . the cries and curses of the sinners as they're whirled around in a vicious wind that never stops . . . i peccator carnali.
He read on a little to confirm that he hadn't misunderstood. He hadn't.
If the ilex trees stood for the dark wood where Dante lost his way, and the triumphal arch represented the Gates of Hell, then Federico Docci had chosen to place the statue of his dead wife in the circle of Hell that housed the carnal sinners, the adulterers.
He was still trying to take this on board when Maria entered the library from the drawing room.
"Maria."
"Sir." Why had she taken to calling him "sir"? "Signora Docci wishes to see you."
"Thank you."
He didn't move.
"Is everything all right, sir?"
"Yes."
His mind was still reeling from the discovery, yes, but his sweat- soaked shirt was also glued to the back of the leather chair, and he worried what sound it would make if he got to his feet in her presence.
He was right to have waited till she left. It was a ripping sound, a bit like Velcro.
Signora Docci wasn't in her bed, which threw him at first. She had only ever been in her bed. But now it was empty, neatly made, the white cotton counterpane smoothed flat as ice.
"Out here," came her voice from the loggia.
She was seated in a rattan chair, and she was wearing a navy blue skirt and a white cotton blouse. Her feet were bare and resting on a footstool. Her hair, which she had always worn loose, was drawn back in a ponytail; and in the sunlight flooding the loggia, her face had lost some of its pallor. She looked like a passenger lounging on the deck of an ocean liner—the first-class deck.
"I thought we'd have tea al fresco today," she said matter-of- factly. Unable to keep up the pretense, a slow smile broke across her face. "You should see your expression."
"I'm surprised."
"It's hardly the raising of Lazarus. Anyway, it's your fault." "My fault?"
"Well, not directly. It's the shame of talking to you every day from my bed. It's not dignified."
"You don't have to feel dignified on my account."
"Oh, I don't—it's entirely on my own account." She turned her face into the sun. "It is a long time since I felt the sun on my face." She gestured toward the tea service laid out on the low table. "Do you mind?"
Adam poured the tea, as he always did. She was very particular— milk first, then the tea, then half a spoon of sugar.
"You were running," she said.
"Running?"
"Well, trying to. I saw you from there." She pointed toward the low wall of the loggia.
Instinct told him to keep the discovery to himself. If indeed that's what it was. Maybe he had imposed Dante on the garden, or the garden on Dante. He needed to be sure. And that would take time.
"I thought I was on to something. I was wrong."
She wasn't going to let him get away with it that easily. "What?"
"Zephyr," he replied, still formulating his response.
"Zephyr?"
"The west wind."
"Yes, I know."
"Well, in the myth he's Flora's husband; in life Federico was her husband. I suddenly thought, I don't know, that maybe the statue of Zephyr had been modeled on Federico. I wanted to see if there was a resemblance with the portrait in the study."
"Interesting."
"Except there's no likeness." He shrugged.
If she sensed his evasion, she didn't say anything. What she did say surprised him.
"There's a bedroom in the north wing, big, with its own bathroom. It's yours if you want it."
He wasn't sure if he'd heard right.
"It's an invitation."
"To stay?"
"Not forever," she said with a small smile. "Think on it. You don't have to decide now. And I won't be offended if you say no."
"Thank you."
"It will save you money."
"It's not my money, it's the faculty's."
"That doesn't mean you can't spend it on something else. Crispin doesn't need to know. And if he did, he'd hardly ask for it back. Am I wrong?" "No."
"So?"
It wasn't the money. Something else altogether accounted for his hesitation.
"My brother's coming to stay."
"You never mentioned you had a brother."
"I try not to think about it too much."
Signora Docci smiled. "When is he arriving?"
"That's not the kind of question you ask Harry."
"And what does Harry do?"
"He's a sculptor."
"A sculptor?" She sounded intrigued.
"Of sorts. He's very modern—lots of welded steel dragged off scrap heaps."
"Is he presentable?"
"That's not a word I've ever associated with him."
Signora Docci laughed. "Well, there's another room for Harry if he wants it. You decide. It doesn't matter to me either way."
But it did, he could see that; he could see an elderly woman about to be displaced from her home and extending an invitation of hospitality, possibly her last. What settled it for him, though, was the chance it offered to see more of Antonella. If their paths hadn't crossed in the past few days, it was only because he was always long gone, back at the pensione in San Casciano by the time she showed up to visit her grandmother in the evening.
SIGNORA FANELLI WAS A LITTLE PUT OUT TO HEAR THAT Adam would be leaving, less so when he offered to cover the cost of the room for a full week.
"When will you go?"
"Not tomorrow, but the d
ay after that day." He made a mental note to look up the Italian for "the day after tomorrow."
Signora Fanelli was busying herself in the trattoria, polishing glasses in readiness for the evening trade. The front of her dress was cut lower than usual, and a gold cross dangled alluringly at her cleavage. He hadn't registered it before, but there was something of Flora in her high collarbones.
"The Signora really invited you to stay?"
"Yes."
"Strange."
"Why?"
"She's very private."
"She doesn't seem very private." "She wasn't. Before. She was very . . . vivacious."
"What happened?"
She looked up with her large dark eyes. "The murder, of course."
"You mean Emilio?"
"A bad thing." She crossed herself with the barest of movements, drawing his eyes once more to her low neckline.
The family had never really recovered from the death of Emilio, she went on, although Signora Docci's husband, Benedetto, had taken it worse than she had. He faded from view. He was rarely seen out and about, not even at harvest time when the grapes and the olives were picked and pressed. Then suddenly he was dead, of a heart attack. In her opinion, those Germans might just as well have shot him too, because he was dying from the moment they killed his eldest boy.
"What happened to them—the Germans?"
"Killed, both of them, in the battle of Florence."
"Justice."
"You think so? Two lives for one? Ten, maybe . . . fifty ... a hundred of their lives. To kill him like that, a man who had welcomed them into his own home."
The memory still angered her. It was a physical thing, shocking to an English eye.
She swept a stray strand of hair out of her face. "They changed this place. It's not the same. Everyone knows what happened here, and we still feel it. What they did in a moment, we live with forever."
Later, when he had showered, he read through the letter he'd written to Gloria, relieved that he hadn't got around to posting it. He thought he'd struck just the right note of magnanimity, forgiving her for the brutal termination of their relationship, but there was something pompous and self-pitying tucked away in his words. What did she care what he thought? She had wanted company to see her through to the summer break. He shouldn't be forgiving her; he should be admonishing himself for failing to read the signs earlier.
His mind turned to Signora Fanelli, to the flash of fire in her eyes and the dark passion in her voice when she had spoken about Emilio's murder. He also dwelt on her parting words to him downstairs.
"I'm sorry you're leaving, but I understand."
It was a simple enough statement, but her gaze had faltered, as if with embarrassment, as if she had revealed too much of herself. Had there been something provocative in that bashful glance? It wasn't impossible. Their relationship had hovered somewhere between easy familiarity and flirtation since their very first exchange, when she had corrected his Italian with a wry little smile. Over the past days they had joked, he had flattered her, and she had found any number of pretexts on which to playfully chide him. It wasn't exactly a remarkable relationship, but there was no denying a certain alchemy.
When he headed downstairs for dinner, there was nothing in Signora Fanelli's manner to suggest that any of these thoughts had ever occurred to her. She was too busy to show him to his table as she usually did. Instead, she pointed to the terrace and barked, "Outside." And when she finally got around to taking his order, there was none of the usual banter while he prevaricated (far more than was ever necessary). She insisted that he start with the cacciucco, whatever that was, then hurried off.
Cacciucco proved to be steamed mussels in a spicy red sauce. It was excellent, certainly too good to do anything other than eat, not that the messy operation allowed for a book on the table, let alone three. The moment the debris was cleared away, he opened The Divine Comedy. Many of the words didn't even appear in his dictionary, and it soon became depressingly clear that he could spend the rest of his time in Italy toiling through the text and still not reach the end. He persevered, though, the thrill of the breakthrough fresh in his mind.
He had punished the evidence, but everything still pointed to a clear link between the garden and Dante's Inferno. Just like Dante, Federico Docci had constructed his own multilayered Hell, and by placing Flora on the second tier from the top he was sending out a message about his young wife, he was saying that she was an adulterous whore.
It was no longer a question of whether or not Federico Docci had made this damning declaration, but why? Why bother laying out a garden to her memory at all if that's the way he felt about her? It didn't make sense, not unless there was more to the story, more that Federico had buried away in the rest of the cycle.
This called for a close examination of Dante's poem; it demanded a thorough search for any further associations with the garden; it meant ploughing on regardless. Which is precisely what he did—right through the main course of spit-roasted Val d'Arno chicken, a warm and windless night descending on the terrace.
Dante and Virgil had barely breached the Gates of Hell when Signora Fanelli arrived at his table with a complimentary brandy.
"You work too hard."
"Feeling better?" he asked.
She gave a coy and contrite smile. "I'm sorry. It's been a bad night. I'll tell you later."
She never got a chance to. Some late diners and the usual diehards at the bar meant she was still working flat out when he finally headed upstairs to bed.
He was awoken by a swath of light cutting through the darkness. There was a figure silhouetted in the doorway of his room.
It was Signora Fanelli.
He closed his eyes, feigning sleep, his mind struggling to digest this new development. So he hadn't been wrong, after all.
"Adam," she whispered, creeping toward him. Her hand settled gently on his shoulder. "Adam."
He did a poor job of pretending to stir. "Yes ... ?" he croaked weakly.
"It's 'Arry," she said. "On the phone."
Harry went straight in without so much as a "hello," and from that moment on Adam was behind in the story, struggling to make up ground.
It had something to do with being in Milan and meeting a girl at the station and the girl was Swiss and she was lost and it was late and she had an address of a hotel nearby and they went there and it was a cheap place with no porters and Harry had carried her bag upstairs for her while she checked in and when he came down he found that she had checked out. Permanently. With his bag. The one he'd innocently left in her company. The one with all his money in it.
It was not unlike a number of stories Adam had heard from Harry over the years.
"Harry, what time is it?"
"What, late for the fucking opera, are we? Christ, it's late, okay, and I'm stuck in this shitty hotel in Milan with a suitcase full of newspapers belonging to a Swiss girl."
"I doubt she was Swiss."
"You doubt she was Swiss!?"
"I doubt it."
"Well, she didn't have pigtails and a bloody great milch cow on a leash, if that's what you mean!"
"Calm down, Harry."
"You calm down. You're not the one in Milan with the suitcase full of newspapers."
"Do you have your passport?"
"Of course," sighed Harry indignantly.
"Any money?"
"Not enough to buy a ticket out of here or I wouldn't be calling."
"Where are you phoning from? The hotel?"
"Yes."
"Do they speak English?"
"They think they do."
"Okay, listen. This is what I suggest. . . ."
As Adam talked, he watched Signora Fanelli going about her business, closing up for the night. She bolted the shutters to the terrace but left the doors open so that the cool night air could circulate. She was wiping down the counter when he finally replaced the receiver on the cradle.
He was suddenly aware of himself
standing there barefoot in his pajama bottoms and the grubby T-shirt he'd pulled on hurriedly.
"Problems?" she asked.
"Do you have a brother?"
"Yes."
"Is he a disaster?"
She laughed. She laughed some more when he related the story of Harry's plight. She then poured them both a nightcap and apologized for being so short with him earlier in the evening. Lucrezia, one of the cooks, had shown up drunk again. Signora Fanelli sympathized—Lucrezia's husband was a violent brute, he had always been a violent brute, even as a boy—but the drinking was getting out of hand. She didn't know what to do. They talked her quandary to a standstill before making their way upstairs to bed.
Adam's room lay on the corridor leading to her apartment. When they reached his door, he said good night to her. She didn't walk on, though; she didn't even reply, not at first. She stared at the floor, then looked up at him and said, "Iacopo's not here tonight. He's staying with a friend."
He knew what the words meant—her son was away, she was alone—but he didn't know what she meant. And he wasn't going to risk making a fool of himself.
He didn't have to. She took him by the hand and drew him into his room, closing the door behind them.
There was nothing urgent in her actions, not at first. She led him through the darkness to the bed, then eased his shirt up and over his head, discarding it on the floor. She ran her hands over his skin, her fingers tugging at the desultory thicket that almost qualified as chest hair. When she raised her face toward his, he stooped to kiss her. Her tongue was small, pointed, inquisitive. She must have felt him stirring against her belly, because she placed a hand in the small of his back and drew him closer.
They stood like this, kissing, for quite some while. His hands roamed, enjoying what they felt through the cotton dress, her nipples hardening beneath his touch.
Slowly, she dropped to her knees and drew his pajama bottoms down over his thighs. He felt her breath against him, and for a moment she seemed to be contemplating what to do next. Then she closed her lips around him.