The Savage Garden (12 page)

    He stopped at the base of the amphitheater and stared up at Flora on her pedestal near the top. He would never be able to see her as he had that first time. Antonella's words had irrevocably colored his judgment. When he looked on the goddess twisting one way, then the other, he no longer saw the classic pose borrowed from Giambologna, he saw a woman contorted with some other emotion, he saw the provocative thrust of her right hip.

    Why put her there, near the top but not at the top? In fact, why put her there at all, in a nine-tiered amphitheater? And why nine instead of seven tiers? Or five for that matter? What was so special about nine? The nine lives of a cat? A stitch in time . . . ? The nine planets of the solar system? No, they hadn't known about Pluto back then. Shakespeare, maybe—Macbeth—the witches repeating their spells nine times. Not possible. Shakespeare couldn't have been more than a boy when the garden was laid out. Close, though.

    And the occult connection was interesting. How had the witches put it?

    Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,

    And thrice again, to make up nine.

    The trinity to the power of three—a powerful number—thrice sacred, like the Holiest of Holies, composed of the three trinities. And something else, some other dark association with the number nine. But what?

    He pulled himself up short, the resolution fresh in his mind yet already ignored. He lit a cigarette, dropped the match in the trough at the foot of the amphitheater and made off up the pathway.

    He was a few yards shy of the yew hedge barring his exit from the garden when the answer came to him.

    The nine circles of Hell in Dante's
Inferno.

    It was several moments before he turned and hurried back down the path to the amphitheater.

    It wasn't that the statue of Flora was placed on the second tier from the top—he couldn't remember just which category of human sin or depravity had been enshrined by Dante in the second circle of his
Inferno
—it was the inscription on the triumphal arch standing proud on the crest above that settled it:

    It took him ten minutes to locate a copy of the book in the library, just time enough to recover his breath. He dropped into a leather chair and examined the tome:
La Divina Commedia
by Dante Alighieri, an Italian edition dating from the late nineteenth century.

    His dictionary was back at the
pensione,
but with any luck he wouldn't need it, not immediately. Even his rudimentary Italian should be up to establishing which class of sinner inhabited the second circle of Dante's Hell, his
Inferno.

    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.