The Whirling Girl (29 page)

THEY PARKED BELOW PERUGIA'S city walls. A moving staircase carried them up through a former tyrant's dungeons and underground realms. When they emerged, the day had turned brilliant again, breezy.

Nikki strode ahead, her red sleeves fluttering, leading Clare off the main street and down many sets of pink marble steps. A circular tower topped with a roof like a Pierrot hat reared above a wall; the monastery tower, Nikki paused to say before she darted ahead again like one of those birds in a folk tale, leading Clare on to some predetermined end, through the gates, across a cloistered courtyard, out into a sunny area where the air smelled dizzyingly of herbs. This was certainly the place that Gianni had spoken of. The air was pungent with loss.

“Giardino dello Spiritio.”

Nikki picked up a pamphlet and was reading aloud from it in Italian. It explained the metaphorical concept of the garden, how it had indeed been laid out to an elaborate philosophical plan, how every plant had cosmic significance, how at the very centre of the area where they now stood was the Cosmic Tree. A meandering philosophically significant pathway led from here towards a further cloister sheltering the hortus sanctus, the garden of native blooms and healing plants.

Nikki folded the pamphlet into her satchel and grasped Clare's arm to lead her onto that path. But Clare could not follow.

“Go on ahead. I'll join you in a minute. I need …”

Nikki frowned, tugged at her long braid, as if this might hurry Clare along. Clare seized the first excuse that came to her. “I need to find something about this in English. I'll go back to the entrance to see if they have one.”

“Nonsense!” Nikki said. “
Ridicolo! Che sciocchezze!
The
Signora
wishes a brochure, when she has me as her humble guide and translator?” She fished out the pamphlet again, struck a pose. “
Ecco Signori
, esteemed ladies and gentlemen, in this direction we come to the Grove of Meditation, then pass the Tree of Good and Evil, into the Sacred Wood.”

“Please,” Clare said. “Don't wait. I'll just dash out and see if I can get some literature to take back with me.”

Nikki looked around. A young man was plunging a fork into the grass, on the slope leading to the Cosmic Tree. She hailed him. Clare protested. Nikki waved that aside and explained to the young man, who was coming over, that her friend needed a book about the garden, but in English.

“Ah!” He turned to Clare, with an enchanting smile. “If you will wait just one minute.”

Clare tried to stop him, but he'd already dropped the fork; he was sprinting towards an official-looking building by the cloister wall. This was ridiculous; more so, in this place of healing and healthy air, that she could hardly breathe. “Go,” she finally told Nikki, not caring anymore if she was rude or not, “Please just go!” Finally, with the mock bow of an offended courtier, Nikki spun away along the main path and on into the Grove of Meditation, the harlequin pattern of her pants merging with the dappled shade.

It was very hot. The young man returned. “One minute more,” he said, “and my friend will come. Until then, it is better you wait in the shade of our
Albero Cosmico
.” He walked her to the Cosmic Tree.

The bells in the monastery tower began to ring. A scattering of hard oval leaves drifted down. The young man seemed determined to keep her company. More cosmically aligned minutes ticked by. He gestured to a circular plaque laid into the nearby grass, painted with heraldic figures. “Do you like this? It is my
opera
.”

His
opera
. In other words, he meant it was his “work.”

“Are you a painter?”

“A little.”

“Do you do other work like this? Do you sell it?”

He laughed. “I do it for joy!”

He picked up the fork again. Probably the whole episode of helpfulness had run its course in a charming, inconclusive, Italian sort of way. How he went at his work in the garden though, the filigree of tattoos on his brown arms rippling as he plunged the fork into the dirt again and again. She couldn't help musing how in Italian
opera
was the word for a job of creative work. One of those simplistic thoughts that strangers had, who knew nothing of this country, never would …

“
Allora! Finalmente!
” The fork hit the ground. The young man bounded across the lawn. He grasped an approaching figure by the shoulder. Clare closed her eyes.

She did not deserve this.

Gianni crossing the lawn towards her.

Clare standing beneath the Cosmic Tree.

“BUT THIS IS IN Italian.”

“Sadly, yes.”

He slipped the book into his jacket pocket, where it spoiled the line of his fine wool suit.

He took a deep breath.

“I will presume to say that you do not need a book at all, if you will allow me to point out that this design, laid out by my friend the director, Dr. Menghini, will lead us initially, with good fortune, to the Garden of Eden, where all things can begin again.”

She stopped him. “Listen —”

“Oh, no. Please. I am the one who needs — !”

They stood facing one another. An iridescent flash sailed by, a dragonfly. All sound dropped away, not a bird, not a workman's voice. An opera in reverse?

“How did this happen?” she finally said. “How did you turn up? Gianni, why are you here?”

“I came to talk with my friend, Director Menghini,” he said, “regarding the symbolism of the haven he has created.”

“The symbolism.”

“Since a week ago, I have been in need of reassuring structure for my thoughts. Yes, this I must allow myself to say.”

He spread his hands as if to balance this against a safer observation.

“I have long wanted, in my own garden, to make a design not just rational and practical — for one must understand that symbolism is not logic, nor is it, as the critic de Campeaux tells us, geometry.” She pictured his words clambering up some elaborate trellis, while his thoughts, like hers, were much closer to the ground. “But rather,” he forged on, “an experience of the totality which gives birth to the drama of the self.”

“Are there resin fungi in this theory, too?”

“If you like, I can put them in.” His smile flared, wobbled. Now words deserted them both. A trio of elderly German women crowded by, clucking at the obstruction in the centre of the path. Gianni cleared his throat. His Adam's apple bobbled above his pristine collar. Clare scuffled a pebble. A British family stepped carefully around them as if they were signposts spelling danger. A small child ran smack into Clare.

“I have an idea,” Gianni said. He took her arm. “Down there is the shop of the alchemist.”

He guided her off the path and down rocky steps to a sheltered hollow at the base of the tower, where they were out of sight. A tiny window looked into a mock-up of an alchemist's shop: a stuffed owl perched beside a skull, evil liquid bubbling over artificial coals, coloured bottles on a dusty table, dry weeds overhead.

“It is for children,” he said. “But today, by a special prescription, they are almost all in school.”

“I WILL HAVE TO go and find my friend,” Clare finally said, when words became a reasonable proposition once again.

“The one with the long braid?”

“How did you know?”

He said he had seen Clare talking with this woman at the dinner of the snails.

“Were you lurking in the background at the
festa
?”

“I did not think of it as lurking. I was meditating deeply on life, like the Baron in the Trees.”

“Who?”

He shook his head. Could it be that she did not know this novel by Calvino? Well then, they would have a lovely time, on some winter's night, when he read it to her.

On some winter's night.

As they moved back to the path to the Garden of Healing, he told her how the monastery had stood in wild countryside when it was first constructed; how it had been a refuge during episodes of plague; how its records had been burned by Napoleon; how it had been a passion of his friend Menghini to restore the garden to what it would have been in the time before Columbus, to recreate what a monastery garden would have stood for, a corner of earthly paradise.

They went through an archway into a walled inner cloister. Nikki was sitting cross-legged on a path between the raised beds of plants, sketching with furious concentration, one page, over to the next. As they came up behind her, Clare caught a glimpse of sketch after sketch of long-stemmed flowers with up-thrust bursting petals, all with faces — no, not faces, just hers. Nikki snapped the book shut when she heard their footsteps on the gravel.

Gianni said quietly to Clare that he would like to propose that together they all go to a fine place he knew for lunch. “If you will promise, afterwards, not to escape this time. If you will not give me the hand-off when I drive you home.”

She watched the petals of a large blue poppy waver on the shifting air. “The hand-off?” she said, laughing. “Maybe not.”

Then, over-loud, she called, “Nikki — I'd like you to meet Gianni DiGiustini.”

Nikki said “Hi.” Avoiding Clare's eye. “Yes, I remember seeing you at the snail
festa
.”

“Gianni has invited us to lunch,” Clare said.

“Oh, Gianni has invited us to lunch?” The same intonation as Clare's. She coiled her braid into a loop on top of her head, and pushed her pencil through to hold it. “Beautiful thought. But you know what? I shouldn't be here at all. While I was waiting for Clare, I remembered that I'd already promised to collect our field director's parents on the train from Florence. And, in fact, now I am late. Oh, dear.”

Did Gianni notice how every word vibrated with disappointment?

He said, “Well then, if it makes it more convenient, I will be pleased to run Signora Livingston home.”

Nikki stood up, brushed herself off, then pushed past Clare. “But tell me,” she said to Gianni, “when our field director's parents go to Florence, his mom always heads to the DiGiustini boutique, to pick up what she calls little gifts to take home. Gold jewellery with a horse-harness motif. Is there a connection?”

Yes, Gianni said, that was his stepfather's business. “Tomasso was once a manufacturer of farm machinery, but my mother persuaded him to make harnesses for the more expensive mares.”

Nikki said the field director's parents would be impressed to hear that she'd nearly had the real goods for lunch!

Together they walked back to the Corso Cavour, Nikki chatting brightly to Gianni. At the top of the escalator, she broke away and with her arms extended, red sleeves fluttering, led them down through the underground regions of the ruined castle, past traces of ancient roads, piazzas, arched dungeon walls, and out into a late afternoon thick as gold with all that simmered in the air.

The Baron in the Trees

SO THIS WAS WHAT it was all about, the excruciating sweetness of this business that took up such an inordinate portion of the human brain, sweeter than hard rock candy. None of the sorrow of lovemaking with him, the expectation and the drop. He made her think of the boy in the garden:
it is my opera
. His joy spread marvellous contagion.

“But you are looking at me again,” she said, many hours later.

“You don't like that I look at you? Or I should wear a mask?” He brought the rumpled sheet to the level of his eyes. “A blindfold?” He pulled a pillow case over his head. “I should grope?”

“No, I like it too much.”

The foolery fell away, replaced for a moment with a look so serious it was scary. “I feel the same.”

ON THE DRIVE FROM Perugia, he had been silent for such a long spell that she'd started feeling the same confusion as when they'd started for the wedding. Then he'd stopped the car, fixed her with the first of his scary looks.

“What?” she'd said. “Don't just look at me like that.”

After a long silence, he said, “I will have to tell you. They do not stretch to Timbuktu.”

“Oh …”

“It is not such a geographical catastrophe as that. The few, the very few women in my life I have been involved with since my marriage —”

“Gianni! I never …!”

“No, this is important. Before we begin together, I need to tell you about my marriage and my life.”

“I don't want to hear this.”

But he persisted. He said that he should have informed her, immediately at the start, that he had no business to claim anything of her. Nor to lecture her either, on her very small deficiencies.

“You've got that right at least. Though they are not so small.”

He said that she had the most beautiful and intriguing deficiencies he had ever seen. “But we are talking now of mine.”

She touched his lips to hold them closed. He removed her finger, held it, and studied it as he explained that beyond the fact that he was married, he must tell her that his wife was a woman honourable and beautiful and upstanding, the mother of his two children.

“But she doesn't understand you. It's okay. I get it.”

“You have every right to be cynical,” he said.

The fact was that Eleanora understood him very well; they understood each other, which in no way made the pain less that they did not jibe, “as you might say in your idiom,” in any way other than in the serious commitment to their children's welfare. “Also in our agreement that since I have abandoned involvement in the family consortium, Eleanora will run it absolutely.”

He was still talking to her index finger, which was not at all the well-manicured finger of the wife who ran the consortium. A dismal start, Clare thought, that such a small part of her could not stand up to comparative scrutiny.

He said, “Already my mother has broken this consortium once, by taking away the husband of the wife of my dead father's brother. This was before I was born, after both my father and Federica's father died in a tragic accident on the same day.”

He shook his head. “It is a little complicated.”

His mother was very beautiful, he added. (He was looking at Clare now. Everything she had heard about Italian mothers flashed before her.)

“Gianni, I do not want you to go through this!”

But he had to. He had to explain that though he and Eleanora did not jibe, it was a union he would never dissolve. Never would he submit his children to the shadow of such shame as he, Gianni, had grown up in.

“So my exceptional Clare, for whom I have waited all my life, I beg you to understand that though there have been other women, yes, there has been not one who has filled me with this confusion of delight I feel each time I think of you.”

He broke off, as if the great storm of emotions under that noble brow had finally blown away all his words.

She said, “So now can I have my finger back?”

“You must not joke.”