The Garden of Monsters

Lorenza Pieri, Liesl Schillinger

• Publisher: Europa Editions
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781609455989
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Italienische Literatur

In Southern Tuscany, two families are at war while a young woman discovers her path in the acclaimed Italian author's English-language debut. The Biagini are local ranchers, while the wealthy Sanfilippi belong to Rome's upper middle-class. When Sauro, an ambitious rancher, and Filippo, a hedonistic politician, become friends and business partners, the stories of their families become irrevocably intertwined. As the town experiences an influx of new money, political allegiances, family loyalties, moral codes, and sexual identities all begin to shift. Sauro and Filippo and their families are the prototypes of the new Italy, ostensibly emancipated from traditional mores, but at the same time, insecure and blinkered. Fifteen-year-old Annamaria, fragile and anxious, feels overshadowed by the beautiful and confident Lisa. Luckily, a parallel world is taking shape nearby: the Tarot Garden, the monumental sculpture garden created by the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle. It is in this magical place, through her conversations with the artist, that Annamaria will slowly find a sense of identity and belonging.

THE GARDEN
OF MONSTERS

0. THE FOOL
Energy. Origin. Liberating Force.

Nobody thought any more about what this region had been like only a few decades before. A putrid swamp, an inhospitable locale infested with malaria, where you could be felled by mosquitoes, or wracked by sweats from atrocious fevers and bad water. All that was left of that world were heartbreaking folk songs about lost loved ones, voyages of no return, and birds whose feathers fell out simply from flying overhead. The hills and the ancient trees were the same; and as always, the nearness of the sea converted the light into a substance that made everything glisten.

Once death had been vanquished, beauty remained.

The area and its surroundings had been transformed into places that were pleasing in every season. There was the autumn sun on the leaves of the oaks, the horseback rides along the beach before lunch, the fine wine, the countryside with its olive trees and orderly vineyards, their ever-changing colors as nuanced as renaissance frescoes. There were beaches of gray sand, darkened by the water, which was nevertheless clear and clean; there was the village with the tower, the crows, the medieval wall, and the little square; the sublime food, the placid animals, the farmhouses that were ugly, but still could be bought cheaply. There was the proximity of Rome, and something in the air, at the end of the eighties, that promised a change for the better. Money had arrived, the lifeblood and the poison of everything that would come after. But before it had created a trap too large to be seen by those who found themselves caught within it, the money that arrived was a good sign, as cheerful and shameless as the decade in which it circulated so freely.

Yet the region would remain a place that everybody swore at. That everybody cursed, with epithets like fucking Maremma, stinking Maremma. Maremma.

In those years, great changes were brought about by the arrival of newcomers, and by what went on between the local people and the tourists; between the noble families that owned the estates and the families who had obtained the “land they labored on” from the agricultural reforms of the postwar era. State-owned farmhouses were bought and renovated one after the other by rich families, who used the land to provide themselves with lawns, patio furniture, dog runs. Stables were transformed into dining rooms, watering troughs into swimming pools, feed lots covered to make room for benches and dancing after parties.

Changes of ownership and inexorable waves of colonization; the arrival not only of people, but of personalities. Then, at a certain point, someone who was completely different arrived, someone from far away, strange, a foreigner, running away from her life, her obsessions, her illness. An artist. A genius. The joker in the deck, the wild card that can represent every other card without identifying with any one of them.

By a series of accidents, a hillside in this area was ideally suited to the artist’s intentions, a place where she could create a world of her own. A magical and colorful garden, an unusual and extraordinary refuge. She stayed there a long time, but not forever. For the time it took to build twenty-two gigantic sculptures that embodied the Major Arcana of the tarot deck; to transform that hillside, and the lives of several people, for all time; to assert a presence on the natural environment with generosity and imagination. To leave a gift to the world. An enigmatic gift that would inhabit an eternal present. A gift that gave life to a story which could only be told there, in that time, and in that space. Where the encounter had taken place; where the magic was transacted.

1. THE MAGICIAN
Shrewdness. Beginning. Choice.

Sauro had quickly understood the potential of his land. He was a man who knew how to harvest signals from the wind and turn them into profit. The first test of his intuition had become a kind of turning point for his own life, and not only for his. The demand for summer houses had grown in recent years, and he’d thought that, with a little bit of work, he might be able to rent out the second farmhouse, the stone one, which up to now had been used as a tool shed. It was in a quiet, rather isolated spot, but it wasn’t far from the sea and the village, and it had a view that wasn’t bad. His own house was nearby, with an olive grove, and horses to rent out for riding, an activity that was taking off pretty well. At that time, he was the only one offering that in the area. Farm stays—later there would be dozens of them—were only just beginning to come into fashion. The notion that the countryside was a place where you might happily spend an enjoyable vacation was already fairly popular, and the idea that you could exchange work in the fields for hospitality was in circulation. But that was something that never came to pass, at least not in these parts. The farmhouse had no electric light or heating, but Sauro had cleaned it well and installed a generator. It had floors of worn terracotta; a few tiles were missing, but the color was pretty, and most important, they were the same ones as when the house was built, in the 19th century. As soon as he saw them, he realized they would go over better than the geometrically-shaped majolica tiles his wife had wanted for the renovation. He was surprised, but had stored up the information. He understood that using the adjectives “antique” and “original” in place of “old” and “broken” would work in his favor. Similarly, inside the enormous fireplace that dominated the central wall of the living room, he installed a bench made of two old railway ties, which made everything reek of tar whenever you built a fire. It was suffused with carcinogenic oil, but those were years when people were more or less indifferent to the toxicity of things, as long they looked “natural,” felt like “old-time” solutions. In the kitchen he’d avoided replacing the cracked granite sink, which had only cold running water, and had left the dark-green, flaking wooden window frames, with their paper-thin glass, exactly as they were, even though he recognized the great advantage of the anodized aluminum window frames in his own house. On the wall, he’d hung horseshoes and big rusty keys that no longer opened any door, though his wife had wanted to put up framed prints of Impressionist paintings that she’d bought in Grosseto. He’d told her that his clients went crazy for old iron. She’d let him do it his way, as always.

The garden out back, which had been overgrown with briars and weeds for years, was put in order; and he hung a hammock between the two surviving trees, an oak and an ailing plum. And finally, in a stroke of genius, he invented a story for the stone house. He dredged up a tale he’d been told when he was little by his father, Settimio, who had been drunk at the time, in a time and place when habitual excessive drinking wasn’t considered a problem, it was something normal—even grounds for boasting about your stamina when you joined the others to work the land. Settimio took bottles out of the family wine cellar and hid them in that farmhouse, turning it into a kind of warehouse. To keep Sauro away from it, he’d told him that it was the place where, at the end of the 19th century, the police had captured and killed the bandit Tiburzi, who’d been taken by surprise in this peasant dwelling, along with his accomplice Fioravanti. He’d added that Tiburzi’s ghost appeared on certain autumn nights, sometimes accompanied by rifle shots. Sauro remembered that, as a child, whenever he heard hunters shooting before dawn, he’d always thought it was Tiburzi, come back from the dead. Even after he found out that the house where they’d captured the outlaw was somewhere else, he didn’t stop hearing phantom shots. Tiburzi was a true legend, hailed as a kind of local Robin Hood. He’d been a fugitive for twenty-four years, with a huge price on his head. It was never clear whether he was a good guy or a bad guy; probably a little of both. Stories about him painted him as a kind of a vigilante, who avenged the wrongs done to the peasantry by the landowners; rather like a mobster who demands protection money. But he’d always retained a heroic aura. Sauro made the most of that. A photo of the bandit hung in every local restaurant, always the same one, taken at the time of his death: tied to a post, a shotgun between his lifeless hands, his sightless eyes half closed.

The first person who came to visit the house was an extremely elegant brunette, who had a Northern accent but said she lived in Rome, and that she’d been coming to the area for years, though Sauro had never seen her. Sauro thought the farmhouse wasn’t up to her standards, but he revised his opinion as he watched the movement of the woman’s eyebrows in front of the enormous fireplace. More information emerged: he learned that she was a university professor, and that she was looking for a place to spend the summer with her companion, as she called him, and her son, but also wanted a guest room for friends. Space wasn’t lacking, but everything else was.

Sauro took a Toscano cigar from his jacket, slipped it halfway into his mouth to dampen it, cut it in half with a cigar cutter that he always kept on him, and lit the moistened part with a lighter. It made a flame at the tip that he blew out with one breath. This operation took no longer than ten seconds, but the woman had not remained indifferent as she watched this work of lips and hands.

Right there, in front of the fence beyond which the dense woods began, Sauro started telling the story of Tiburzi. He lied, saying that this was definitely the last place he’d been seen alive.

The woman’s face lit up.

Fiddling with his cigar, he upped the ante: “And of course, you know the story about his grave?”

“No, what is it?”

“When Tiburzi died, the priest didn’t want to bury him in the cemetery because he was a criminal. But the people of the village insisted he was a good man, and ought to be buried in the churchyard. And so, to make everyone happy, they buried him half inside the graveyard and half out. If you go to the village and visit the cemetery, you’ll see that there’s still a half column marking the old entrance. The body of Tiburzi supposedly lies beneath it: the legs inside, the head and shoulders outside. But the ghost comes here; and sometimes you can hear him shooting in the night. But not in the summer, just in hunting season, don’t worry.”

They smiled at one another.

“How beautiful. I love ghost stories,” the brunette said, turning to leave. “I’ll tell my companion about it, and I’ll call you back as soon as possible. Be sure not to give the place to anyone else in the meantime. I think this farmhouse would be perfect for us.”

The story had worked; the tale had cast its magic on four broken windows and an uneven floor. When Settimio found out how much Sauro had asked in rent for the farmhouse, he shook his head, let out a brief profanity that ended in a burst of laughter which seemed to come straight from his cirrhotic liver, and exclaimed, “People are such assholes!”

By nightfall the woman already had brought a check for the deposit. A whole month, with no discount, which Miriam, incredulous, rushed to deposit in the bank the next morning, confessing in a loud voice to her friend at the Credito Coopera­tivo, who was standing by the teller window, “If I had that kind of money, no way in hell would I spend it on a vacation in this pigsty of a shack, with no light, with the wind coming in everywhere. I’d book a nice luxury cruise and get out of here. Who can understand this?” Then she said goodbye, laughing.

Sauro, without truly understanding it, had understood everything.

Sauro, also known as “the King.” A nickname he’d earned playing cards at the bar—one afternoon, thirty years ago, he’d won with a king, three games in a row. “Another king!” the others at the table had shouted. “Unbelievable! What are you doing, shitting them out?”

No merit, no honor, attached to this “King;” no noble lineage; just card luck, and the prideful instinct to instantly take the title as his due. Besides, his friends had ridiculous nicknames, too, which either derived from their physical flaws or had been handed down for generations, like Poorboy, Tightass, Thief, or the more modern Bootlicker and Wuss. He even started calling himself “the King” because he thought the nickname fit him like a glove. When he came knocking at somebody’s door, he would announce himself like this: “I’m Sauro, the King.” At first he was teased, got insults like, “Get lost, go away,” and “Yeah, and I’m the Pope,” but he didn’t give up until the mother of his girlfriend at the time, Adriana, had said to him solicitously, upon opening the door of her house, “I’ll call the Queen for you.”

Everyone thought he and Adriana would get married early: their families had known each other forever, they were a very compatible couple, they even resembled each other physically. They seemed destined to spend their lives together and to reproduce an infinite succession of black-eyed beauties with ultra-long eyelashes.

Adriana had a first cousin her age whom she really liked, Miriam, who was sort of a blonde version of herself, with blue eyes. Miriam worked as a saleswoman in an optician’s boutique in the nearest big city. When Adriana wanted to buy Sauro a pair of sunglasses for his birthday, they went to the boutique and spent an amusing afternoon there. Miriam made him try on dozens of models, and when he finally managed to choose a pair,...