Mark Mills - The Savage Garden

By now they had passed through the first glade, with its triad of freestanding sculptures representing the death of Hyacinth, and were nearing the small temple at the foot of the garden.

"And what do you do?" Adam asked.

"Me? Oh, I design clothes. Can't you tell?" She spread her hands in reference to her simple cotton shift dress.

"I . . . yes—"

Her smile stopped him dead. "My dresses have more color. Although they're not really mine. There is someone else's name on everything I do."

"How come?"

"I work at a fashion house in Florence. There can only be one name."

"Doesn't that bother you?"

"What a serious question."

"I'm a serious chap."

"Oh really?"

"Can't you tell?" he said, spreading his hands. "All my friends are on a beach. Me, I'm here studying."

"Only because you have to, and only for two weeks. From what I hear, you will probably see a beach before the end of the summer."

This meant one thing: that the news from Professor Leonard of Adam's indolence had not stopped with Signora Docci.

"I dispute that."

"What?"

"Whatever you've heard."

"The good things too?" Her eyes sparkled with mischief. "My grandmother likes you, I think."

Maybe it was something to do with the way she bared her teeth when she smiled, but at that moment it struck him that the long diagonal scar on her forehead exactly mirrored the cranial ridge on the orangutan skull in the study.

Antonella turned away—feeling the weight of his lingering look?—and glanced down at the supine figure at their feet.

Narcissus lay sprawled along the rim of the octagonal pool, gazing admiringly at what should have been his reflection. Instead, he appeared to be searching for something he had lost, some trinket he'd mislaid in the debris of twigs and leaves that carpeted the bottom of the pool.

"I'm sorry you cannot see it when the water is here."

"Will it ever come back?"

"Who knows? But it is not the same without the water. The water gives it life. It makes it breathe."

She had removed her leather sandals a while before—they now hung lazily from the fingers of her right hand—and looking at her there in her simple cotton dress, he saw her as the child she once must have been, wandering the garden, gazing wide-eyed on the coterie of petrified gods, goddesses and nymphs playing out their troubled stories on this leafy stage.

When she made for the temple, he followed unquestioningly. It was a small structure—octagonal, like the pool—and crowned by a low cupola just visible behind the pedimented portico. The floor was of polished stone, the walls of white stucco, as was the dome. The building was dedicated to Echo, the unfortunate nymph who fell hard for Narcissus. He, too preoccupied with his own beauty, spurned her attentions, whereupon Echo, heartbroken, faded away until only her voice remained.

"I love this place."

Her words resounded off the clean, hard surfaces, the acoustic effect no doubt intentional. Simple painted wooden benches ran around the walls, and there was a lengthy Latin inscription carved into the architrave beneath the dome. According to the file it was a line from Socrates: The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our separate ways, I to die, and you to live. Which of these two is better only God knows.

He approached the cast-iron grille in the center of the floor. This had puzzled him on his previous visits. There was no reference to it in the file, and all his efforts to dislodge it and discover what lay beneath had failed.

"The water falls into a small well then carries on to the pool outside. The sound in here ... it is not easy to describe." She thought on it for a moment. "Sussurri."

"Whispers."

"Yes. Like whispers."

They covered the rest of the circuit in near silence, stopping briefly in the last of the glades, with its statue of Venus stooped over a dead Adonis—the final element in the itinerary, its message of grief and loss almost overwhelming after the other stories they had witnessed.

Any more would have been too much. The garden transported you just far enough. As soon as you felt the grip of its undertow, it released you.

Even without the sculptural program, the place would have exerted an unsettling pull. There was something mysterious and otherworldly about a wooded vale. Maybe it was the sense of enclosure, of containment, coupled with the presence of water, but it somehow reeked of ancient gatherings and happenings. You sensed that you weren't the first to have been drawn here, that naked savages had also stumbled upon it and thought the place bewitched.

Federico Docci would have been hard-pressed to find a better spot for his memorial garden than one already haunted by flickering figures from some spectral past. And he had cleverly turned the location to his own ends, planting large numbers of evergreen trees to screen off views, to guide the eye, to tease and disorient, whatever the season. He had punched holes in this somber vegetation, shaping glades that smacked of sacred groves, connecting them with curling pathways that widened and narrowed as they went, the loose geometry almost musical—a pleasing rhythm of space and enclosure, of light and shade.

Having laid out this new kingdom, Federico had then dedicated it to Flora, goddess of flowers, and populated it with the characters from ancient mythology over whom she held sway: Hyacinth, Narcissus and Adonis. All had died tragically, and all lived on in the flowers that burst from the earth where their blood had spilled—the same flowers that still enameled the ground in their respective areas of the garden every springtime.

Their stories cast a melancholy pall over the garden. They were tales of desire, unrequited love, jealousy, vanity and untimely death. But they also spoke of hope. For just as the gods had interceded to immortalize the fallen youths, so Federico had ensured that the memory of his wife, snatched from him at a tender age, would live on.

These were the thoughts swirling through Adam's head as he and Antonella wended their way back up the hill to the villa. It was the first time he had fully grasped the beauty of the scheme— its logic, subtlety, and cohesion—and he wondered whether Antonella's company had somehow contributed to this epiphany.

He glanced over at her, walking beside him with her loose springless stride, shoulders back like a dancer. She seemed quite at ease with the silence hanging between them.

She caught his look and a smile stole over her features. "It's like waking up, isn't it?"

"Hmmm?"

"Leaving the garden. It takes time to come back to the real world."

He felt a sudden and foolish urge to tell her how beautiful she was. And why. Because she wore her beauty carelessly, without vanity—the same way she wore the wounds on her face.

He checked himself just in time.

She cocked her head at him. "What were you going to say?"

"Something I would have regretted."

"Yes," she said quietly, "it can do that too."

It was Antonella's idea that they stop on the lower terrace and settle themselves down on one of the benches overlooking the olive grove. She asked for a cigarette, which she smoked furtively, glancing up at the villa every so often to check she wasn't being observed.

"My grandmother doesn't approve," she explained.

"I think you're safe. I mean, she's bedridden, right?"

Antonella shrugged. "Maybe. She likes to create dramas." She paused. "That's not fair. She was very ill this winter . . . una bronchite, how do you say?

"Bronchitis."

"The doctor was worried. We all were. She has stayed in her bed since then."

"Have you tried to get her up?"