The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (10 page)

The palazzo had been built in the early twenties by Borghini’s father, Count Ottorino. In siting it, he had selected one of the highest points in Rome, the top of the Quirinal, with a prospect of the sprawling city as far as St. Peter’s.

The palace had been conceived at a time when the principal impulse of architecture deferred to the monumental. All construction was intended as a not-too-subtle reminder of the grandeur of the state.

With its four stories, twenty thousand square feet of Carrara marble, salons, sitting rooms, galleries, boudoirs, kitchens designed to provide vast banquets, Palazzo Borghini, in scale and design, had succeeded eminently. At the time of its completion, journalists had been sent there from newspapers and periodicals to photograph and write about its many wonders. Its endless winding corridors had known leaders of state, poets, and artists. D’Annunzio, a U.S. president, and even Il Duce had all been guests there.

For the Count, Palazzo Borghini was rife with ghosts. He’d been born there and come of age, romping with little friends, steering tricycles and hoops down its labyrinthine corridors, flying kites out on its vast, rolling parklike grounds.

His mother had died there and she and his father were buried in a small private cemetery on the grounds. The specters of aunts and uncles, grandparents, and vanished cousins wandered the hallways. On certain nights when his head swam from too much wine, he swore he could hear laughter, the wheezing of his grandfather Raffaello’s accordion torturing some long-forgotten Neapolitan street song, and his aunt Lucia’s frail, warbling accompaniments. Sometimes she would venture a little Puccini, something short from
Gianni Schicchi
or
Turandot,
her favorites. He could hear the rough, slightly drunken voices of the men arguing politics in the billiard room after dinner, or out on the bocci court under the olive trees on the back lawn, their laughter drifting in through the open terrace doors on one of those stifling Roman afternoons.

At such times, he imagined he could smell the odor of dark bitter coffee laced with anisette. He associated the smell of anisette with his mother, who loved fennel, grew it in profusion in her gardens, and flavored many of her most savory dishes with it.

The aroma of fine old Havana cigars, Borghini associated with his father—the big humidor of Monte Christos on the Colonella’s desk, always full and perfectly moist. He could still feel the shock of pride he experienced the first time his father had offered him one.

Today, with the Borghini dynasty mostly dead or scattered in disarray on foreign soil (one of the last survivors was said to drive a taxi in a large American city), and the count himself unmarried, in his fifties, hobbled by chronic debt, the palazzo had been allowed to run quietly to seed.

Save for the sullen youth who lived there with him, there were no other occupants. Serving as a kind of man Friday, the boy functioned as everything from bodyguard and chauffeur to cook and personal valet.

Bruno Falco—Beppe, as the colonel affectionately called him—was short and bulky in stature. While clumsy, he was also immensely powerful. He had a soft, round face, seemingly boneless and of ambiguous gender. It wore a blank and unchanging expression that many found unsettling. A waif of the streets, informally adopted by Borghini, the boy had the sort of rash fearlessness ideal in a bodyguard. In matters regarding his master, his loyalty was slavish. But along with the loyalty, there was a residue of resentment, unspoken but nonetheless real, born from the tough independence of Roman street life. Yes, he resented taking orders from anyone—even the colonel.

Dusk coming on fast, the interior of the cupola had grown thick with shadows.

“It’s all right, Mother. I’m fine now. I know what must be done and I will do it,” Borghini whispered at the encroaching dark.

Laying down an old quill pen, Borghini rose from his desk. Just behind the chair where he’d sat was a narrow area of wall framed between two strips of ornate molding. One had to look closely to discover inset between those strips the faint outline of a door.

The colonel drew a chain of keys out of his pocket and fished about in search of one in particular. It was a small gold key he inserted into the tiny opening that served as the lock of the door. Snapping his wrist sharply, the click of tumblers could be heard as the door swung open.

Peering into the darkness beyond the threshold, Borghini appeared to waver for a moment, then entered and closed the door behind him.

He stood there for some time, his back pressed hard against the door. The voices of children at play drifted up from somewhere in the street below.

His eyes now adjusted to the dark, he groped for the electric switch. Flicking it, the lights came on, not at once, but slowly, as in a theater when the curtain goes up. The light didn’t come from overhead but, rather, from behind the walls. It cast a pale phantomish glow like that of pictures viewed on an X-ray screen.

It was a long, narrow room that the colonel now occupied. The walls on either side were made of long glass panels divided into separate compartments, each roughly three or four hundred square feet in area. Each a kind of large glass tank, it was what museums call a diorama, used for display.

A rail of teak ran the full length of the wall on each side, preventing observers from coming any closer than two or three feet to the glass, though few observers other than the colonel had ever been to this room. The low hum of an electrical generator, barely audible, flowed outward from somewhere behind the glass.

He’d been sitting there for several hours watching her. They didn’t speak. They didn’t have to. At such moments, their communication with each other was complete. He was content merely to watch her work. He could sit there like that and watch for hours.

Outside, the sky was lowering, streaked with a threatening green-gray pewter. Periodically, thunder rumbled down off the craggy peaks above and seemed to bounce and roll up to the very wells of the chalet on Lake Maggiore. It was warm and the windows were open. He could smell the lake, and the air stirring the curtains carried with it a promise of rain.

His father was gone—off on one of his business trips. He wouldn’t be back for several days. That’s the way the boy liked it—just him and his mother, alone in the chalet, peaceful, watching her work. The brush moved back and forth, so he could hear its faint scratching over the canvas. Then came the lines of color, gorgeous color—trailing out magically behind her brush, like the feathery letters streaming out from the exhaust of a skywriter.

He’d watched this particular painting take shape over the past several months. His mother worked from an open book of art reproductions and from sketches of the original she had copied at the museum. It was a Botticelli Madonna and Child. An angel stood before the two, bearing a bowl of grapes. Next to them was a window that opened on a prospect of ruins high on a hillside. An old chapel sloped sideways near its crest. Terraced meadows led up to it. At each level of meadows, farmers hoed and scythed, and horses ploughed. Cows and sheep grazed. A mythical representation of Tuscan fecundity underscored the principal image of the child at its mother’s breast. The painting, entitled the
Chigi Madonna,
appeared to be finished except for the eyes, which his mother had done over and over again, painting them out, unable to reproduce them to her satisfaction. Where the sensuously protuberant eyes of the original were supposed to be, only a gray emptiness filled the vacant sockets.

Colonel Borghini stood, back pressed hard against the door, eyes half-closed, as though trying to recall something. Voices rolled down the long corridor and faded beneath his feet somewhere on the floor below. The sole occupant of that dark cavernous space in the upper reaches of the house, he gave the impression of frightened, vulnerable smallness.

In the first diorama to his right, two life-sized female figures appeared to be hurrying across a wooded landscape. Both young and fair, the one in front brandished a saber, its blade glistening with blood. The one following close behind bore a woven basket on her head. Clearly visible inside the basket was a severed head. A small white card, framed on a pilaster to the right of the diorama, carried several typed lines in a small, formal print.

JUDITH RETURNS FROM THE ENEMY CAMP AT BETHULIA

Botticelli, ca. 1470, Uffizi, Florence

Anyone having even a passing familiarity with the famous painting would have been astonished at the faithfulness to detail. Only the scale had been altered to make the characters life-size. But beyond that, everything was meticulously rendered—the gowns the two women wore, the design, the color, the manner in which they were draped on the figures—all copied to perfection.

The diorama itself was lit so as to replicate perfectly the washed-out yellows and bluish greens of the original. The skin tones of Judith’s face and throat, as well as the serving maid’s, had the flushed, vibrant look of people who’d been running hard for some time. One could almost see the arteries pulsating beneath the skin. No less was the effect of the blood at the edge of Judith’s saber blade. It looked newly shed—sticky and wet.

The next diorama featured Botticelli’s
Mars and Venus.
The lovers lay on a bed of grass and cushions. Both exhausted from recent lovemaking, Mars slept while the goddess of love, satisfied and tranquil, studied him enigmatically. All about them, cupids disported themselves.

Borghini continued his slow, proprietorial walk down the central aisle, acknowledging, one after the other, his own lovingly rendered re-creations of some of the highest points of fifteenth-century Italian painting.

It had taken Borghini decades to assemble and mount his collection. Each diorama represented a monumental labor in itself—some having taken up to three or four years before all of the elements were located and the many intricate steps completed.

Nothing comparable to this existed anywhere else in the world—a shrine devoted exclusively to the works of Botticelli, not Botticelli on wood or canvas, but rendered in human scale, three-dimensionally, more lifelike than the paintings themselves. There were some twelve or thirteen of them.

Intimately familiar with each representation, Borghini didn’t pause long at any of the
tableaux vivants,
but moved directly forward to one of the larger dioramas situated near the end of the hall, where at last he stopped.

The little white card at the right identified the scene within:
MADONNA OF THE EUCHARIST
, ca. 1472, also known as the
CHIGI MADONNA
. For the most part, the major elements of the painting were already there, in place—a clay model of the angel with a wreath in his hair, a blond infant Jesus with pudgy pink thighs and arms, reaching with outstretched fingers for the grapes. However, the place the Madonna herself was to occupy contained only a wire armature representation to suggest the figure and its position when the permanent installation could be made. Faceless and stiff, the wire model was a silent rebuke to the colonel, still unable to find the crucial element he sought in order to complete the scene.

Colonel Borghini was a decisive man. He loathed vacillation, as his father the count had taught him to. In all things, in every aspect of his life, he had the professional soldier’s aptitude for swift, decisive action. But in this particular instance, he felt paralyzed by the task. Mere representation here would not be enough. The work must transcend that. It had to take on a life of its own.

Moreover, Botticelli had been his mother’s god. At the time of her death, she’d been at work on a version of that very painting. Never able to satisfy the ideal of it she held in her head, she’d painted the Chigi over and over again, agonizing over each detail. She’d never completed it to her satisfaction and now her son was determined to execute his own version of the work as an homage to the woman he looked upon as the principal force in his life.

Ragged by the problem of the Chigi, the colonel continued to move about in front of the glass cage, trying to penetrate the mystery of Botticelli’s perspective. When all of his efforts failed, he threw up his hands in disgust and strode to a little door at the rear of the hall that led around to the back of the dioramas. Entering another door, he stooped and entered the diorama itself.

Though the scene within depicted the lush green warmth of springtime, the temperature inside the glass case had been chilled down by means of refrigerants to a frosty seven degrees Celsius.

Puffs of vapor streamed from the colonel’s nose as he took up a position between the angel and the infant Jesus and tried again to situate the Madonna in a way so as to be most faithful to the painter without ruining his perfect perspective.

Standing there in the cool bluish shadows surrounded by gods and goddesses, nymphs, and centaurs, ancient kings in mythological gardens and biblical landscapes, Borghini was in a world half-fantastic—such as he had always wished to inhabit. As a child taken to museums by his nursery maid or his mother, he would imagine himself suddenly disembodied and walking into such paintings, becoming a part of each scene—one of the immortals. This childish dream would often come true while at work in one of his dioramas. He could become one of the players in his own creation.

“Come quickly, Mama. Get dressed.”

“Silly child. The bus doesn’t leave for three hours. There’s plenty of time.”

“Mama, come. We must get there early. The Museum doors open at ten. If we get there before the crowds, the guards may let us in. Like the last time. Remember? Come. Please, Mama. Put down your knitting. Hurry, get dressed …”

The hollow voices receded, fading and slowly dying throughout the untenanted upper floors of the palazzo.

Later, seated in the small chapel just off of the vast gardens, Borghini listened to voices fading, waves of memories sweeping in upon him. The chapel had been the site of family events for years. It was there, the colonel recalled, that parents, aunts and uncles, sisters, cousins, distant relatives, old patriarchal figures, gnarled, stooped, reeking of camphor, had all gathered for such family events as baptisms, weddings, deaths.