Kitabı oku: «The Savage Garden», sayfa 2

3

Has the Englishman arrived yet?

No, Signora.

When?

Tomorrow.

Tomorrow?

That’s what he said in his letter. The twelfth.

I wish to see him as soon as he gets here.

You’ve already said, Signora. You won’t forget?

Why would I forget? Move a little to the side, please.

Gently. Don’t push.

I’m sorry. Turn over, please.

You don’t have to do this, Maria.

I know.

I’m happy to hire someone else.

You really expect me to cook and clean for someone else?

You’re a good woman.

Thank you, Signora.

Just as your father was a good man.

He had the highest respect for you too, Signora.

There’s really no need to be quite so formal, not when you’re giving me a bed-bath.

He had the highest respect for you too.

You know, Maria, I believe you’re in danger of developing a sense of humour in your old age.

Turn over, please.

4

They left Florence through the Porta Romana, heading south to Galluzzo, where they wound their way up into the hills past a sprawling Carthusian monastery.

The climbing road was flanked by olive groves, neat rows of trees laid out in terraces, their foliage flashing silver in the sunlight. Vineyards and stands of umbrella pines studded the hillside. Every so often, an avenue of dark cypresses indicated a track leading to some isolated farmhouse, which invariably was also guarded by a small cohort of the tall, tapering conifers. Apart from the tarmac road along which they were travelling, there was little to suggest the passing centuries had wrought any meaningful change on the tapestried landscape.

Adam lounged in his seat, taking in the view, the cooling breeze from the open window washing over him, ruffling his hair. The taxi driver was still talking nineteen to the dozen despite Adam’s earlier confession that most of the words were lost on him. Every now and then Adam would catch the man’s eye in the rear-view mirror and grunt and nod his assent – an arrangement that seemed to work to the complete satisfaction of both parties.

When the road levelled out he turned and peered through the rear window, searching for a glimpse of Florence. The city was lost to view behind the tumble of hills rolling in from the south. Somehow it seemed appropriate; she was hiding herself, even now.

All morning he had walked her streets, the stone chasms hacked into her, grid-like. Her buildings were no more welcoming – the palaces of rusticated stone, modelled on fortresses (or so it seemed); the churches with their unadorned exteriors, many sheathed in black-and-white marble; the museums housed in all manner of forbidding structures. And yet, behind those austere façades lay any number of riches.

Adam had chosen carefully, almost mathematically, limited as he was by the short time at his disposal. There had been disappointments, acclaimed works which had left him feeling strangely indifferent. But as the taxi worked its way higher into the hills, he consoled himself with the knowledge that it had been a first foray, a swift reconnaissance. There would be plenty of opportunities to return.

San Casciano sat huddled on a high hill, dominating the surrounding countryside. Its commanding position had largely determined the course of its history, apparently, although the entry in Adam’s guidebook made no mention of the last siege the town had been forced to endure. Even as the taxi approached, it was evident that the ancient walls girdling the town had not been constructed to withstand an assault by the kind of weaponry available to the Allies and the Germans.

These weren’t the first scars of war Adam had witnessed. Even Florence, declared an ‘open city’ by both sides out of respect for her architectural significance, had suffered. As the Allies swept up from the south, the Germans had dug in, blowing all but one of the city’s historic bridges. They may have spared the Ponte Vecchio, but this consideration came at a price. The buildings flanking the river in the vicinity of the bridge were mined, medieval towers and Renaissance palaces reduced to rubble, the field cleared for the forthcoming battle. As it was, the Allied troops had simply crossed the Arno elsewhere on makeshift Bailey bridges and swiftly liberated the town.

Years on, the wound inflicted right in the heart of the old city remained raw and open. If efforts had been made to restore those lost streets to their former glory, it was not evident. Modern structures with smooth faces and clean sharp lines stood out along the river’s southern frontage, like teenagers in a queue of pensioners. The very best you could say was that the space had been filled.

In San Casciano that work was still going on. The town was pockmarked with the ruins of bomb-damaged buildings left to lie where they’d fallen. Impressively, Nature had reclaimed what she could in these plots. Young trees sprouted defiantly; shrubs had somehow detected enough moisture in piles of old stones to put down roots and prosper; weeds and ferns sprang from crevices in crumbling walls. The bland new concrete edifices that studded the historic centre were further evidence of the severe pounding the town had taken.

The Pensione Amorini had been spared. One part of the ancient vine clinging to its scaling stucco façade had been trained over a pergola, which shaded a terrace out front, overflow for the bar and trattoria occupying the ground floor. Signora Fanelli was expecting him – he had phoned ahead from Florence – and she summoned her teenage son from a back room to help with Adam’s bags.

‘Oofa,’ said Iacopo as he tested the weight of both suitcases. He left the heaviest – the one containing the books – for Adam to lug upstairs.

The room was far more than he had hoped for. Large and light, it had a floor of polished deep-red tiles, a beamed ceiling and two windows giving on to a leafy garden out back. It was furnished with the bare essentials: a wrought-iron bed, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe. As requested, there was also a desk, though no chair, which brought a sharp rebuke from Signora Fanelli.

Iacopo skulked off in search of one, his parting glance holding Adam to blame for this public humiliation. He returned with the chair and disappeared again while Signora Fanelli was still demonstrating the idiosyncrasies of the bathroom plumbing to Adam.

Adam declared the room to be ‘perfetto’.

‘Perfetta,’ she corrected him. ‘Una camera perfetta.’

She relieved him of his passport, flashed him a smile and left. Only her perfume remained – a faint scent of roses hanging lightly in the air.

He hefted his suitcase on to 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 over-muscled 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 ochre-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 towards 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 hand-drawn 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 of 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 storeys of the front façade, 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 well-head 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 centrepiece of the Docci coat of arms. He tugged on the iron bell pull.

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, vice-like.

‘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 any time 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, giving on to 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 towards the door as they entered, peering over the top of her spectacles.

‘Adam,’ she said, smiling broadly.

‘Hello.’

‘Thank you, 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?’

‘Two thousand 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 louvred 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 mythi cal 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 on to 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’è 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 on to 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 terracotta 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 centre 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 which 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 which 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, fortress-like quality. And yet somehow this seemed in keeping with both its setting and function. It was not a pleasure palace; it was the centrepiece 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 candour 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 mouldering 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 socio-economic 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 Medicis, originated from the Mugello, a mountainous region just north of the city. Although they had never risen to the Medicis’ 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 Tullia 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 hand-drawn 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 gravelled, 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 amphitheatre, 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.

Unless he was mistaken, Federico Docci had cast his wife in the image of Flora, goddess of flowers. This was not so surprising, but the conceit still brought a smile to his lips.

If there was any doubt as to the identity of the statue, on the crest above, a triumphal arch stood out proud against a screen of dark ilex trees. On the heavy lintel borne up by fluted columns, and set between two decorative lozenges, was incised the word:

The Italian for flower: ‘Flora’ in Latin. There was something telling, tender, about Federico’s decision to employ the Italian form of his wife’s Christian name -an indication, perhaps, of a pet name or some other private intimacy lost to history.

Two steep stone runnels bordered the amphitheatre, descending to a long trough sunk into the ground. Leaves and other debris had collected in the base of the trough, and a dead bird lay on this rotting mattress, pale bones showing through decaying plumage. A weather-fretted stone bench was set before the trough, facing the amphitheatre. It bore an inscription in Latin, eroded by the elements, but just possible to make out:

ASTIMA FIT SEDENDO ETQUIESCEKTDO PRUOENTIOR

The Soul in Repose Grows Wiser. Or something like that. An appropriate message for a spot intended for contemplation.

The presence of an overflow outlet just below the rim of the trough steered his gaze down the slope to a high mound bristling with laurel and fringed with cypresses. From here two paths branched off into the dark woods flanking the overgrown pasture that ran to the foot of the valley, and at the far end of which some kind of stone building lurked in the trees.

A flight of shallow steps led down to the mound. Adam skirted the artificial hillock, wondering just what it represented. It didn’t represent anything, he discovered; it existed to house a deep, stygian grotto.

The irregular entrance, designed to look like the mouth of some mountain cave, was encrusted with cut rock and stalactites. The angle of the sun was such that he couldn’t make out what lay inside.

He hesitated for a moment, shook off a mild foreboding, then stepped into the yawning darkness.