The Sonnet Lover (15 page)

“Right. So he could have gone to Italy—and what better reason to travel than to visit some beautiful Italian poetess living in a villa who’s been writing him these sexy love poems. The Dark Lady is a great role. I’ve got top talent interested in playing her.”

“Really?” I ask. “Have you actually ever read the Dark Lady sonnets?”

Leo Balthasar smiles at me as if I’d just asked him if he did his own laundry. “Honey, I’ve read the
treatment.
”

“Um…well, did you notice that they’re not exactly flattering? In the nicest poem to her, he calls her hair black wires and her breasts dun. He accuses her of promiscuity and betrayal.”

“Yes, yes,” Leo says, excited. “It’s just what we want. It was obviously a tempestuous relationship. She must have done something to enrage the Bard. What do you know about this Ginevra de Laura woman?”

“Not much,” I admit. “She lived in the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century, was rumored to be the mistress of Lorenzo Barbagianni, who brought her to live at La Civetta, and some diarists of the period said she wrote sonnets, but none have survived—”

“But they could have been hidden at the villa, right? I was there last summer and the place is a rat’s nest of paper—stuff crammed in every nook and cranny. An enterprising boy like Robin could have found them somewhere—”

“Did Robin ever show you these poems?” I ask.

“Well, not the originals,” Leo admits. “He said he found the poems at the villa and hand-copied the one he used in the film because he couldn’t remove it and if he took it down to the office to Xerox he’d attract attention. But he said he still had access to the poems and that if I needed the originals he could get them for me.”

“You didn’t encourage him to
steal
from the villa?” I ask, summoning all the outraged zeal of the scholar. A scholar who has in her carry-on luggage a possibly rare Renaissance manuscript page.

“Of course not!” Balthasar says, shaking his head reprovingly as if I had suggested that the Academy Awards could be bought. “But,” he adds, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “I think
someone
thought he had taken something from the villa.”

“Orlando Brunelli?” I ask and then, remembering something, add, “You met with Orlando the day of the film show, didn’t you?”

Balthasar looks taken aback briefly but then smiles and taps his finger to his shiny skull. “Ah, I knew there was a reason I hired you. I’m never wrong about people. You don’t miss a beat! Yes, I did meet with the boy at a cafe…uh, were you there? I don’t remember seeing you until that night, and I never forget a beautiful woman.”

“I wasn’t there,” I say, trying not to feel too pleased at Balthasar’s flattery. “But I know the owner, and one of the waiters told me the next day—”

“Oh, yes, yes.” Balthasar bobs his head up and down. “Orlando asked me to meet with him about Robin’s script. He wanted a writing credit because he said he had helped Robin with the research. I told him that made him a research consultant, not a writer.”

“Did he say anything about the poems?”

“What he said was…now let me make sure I’ve got this right”—Leo screws up his face in concentration—“he said that Robin had taken all the papers; yes, that’s it.
Tutti i papiri.
My Italian’s not so great, but I got that. I thought he meant that Robin had taken the only copy of the script. When he crashed the party, yelling at Robin for stealing something, I thought that’s what he meant, but he couldn’t have thought Robin had the whole script on his person; he must have thought Robin had the poems on him.”

I nod, thinking that Orlando had been right. He just didn’t know that Robin had already handed the one poem he had over to me.

“So, he could have been trying to get the poem from Robin on the balcony. He might have pushed him while trying to get the poem.”

Balthasar widens his eyes at me. “Really? Do you think so?”

“Well, you would know better than I would,” I say, exasperated. “I wasn’t on the balcony.”

Balthasar shakes his head. “I was busy with that girl—the one with the pink hair. She was between us and she was hysterical. I was afraid
she
was going to jump! And Mark had his hands full with Orlando Brunelli, who was demanding that Robin give him back something he’d stolen from him. If Robin did have one of those poems on him when he jumped, it would have been bloodstained pulp by the time they scraped him off the sidewalk.”

I wince at the image and Balthasar shrugs apologetically. “Sorry. I know you were close to the boy.”

I find myself unable to speak for a moment, my throat suddenly parched in the canned air of the airplane cabin. I look away from Leo Balthasar, out toward the vacant blue of twilight that is fast fading as we cross the Atlantic. I feel a wave of warmth steal over me and realize that it comes from Leo Balthasar’s hand, which he has laid over mine on the armrest. I’m surprised more by the jolt of the physical contact than by the unexpected intimacy of the gesture. “I liked him, too,” Balthasar says, squeezing my hand. “That’s why I’m so damned set on doing this film. He’d have wanted his words immortalized on screen. You do whatever you need to, to make that script viable—I don’t care if we’ve got to put Shakespeare in a time machine to get him to Italy—and keep an eye out for those sonnets. And I’ll keep an eye on Orlando Brunelli. I’ll tell you one thing. If it turns out he really pushed Robin off that balcony, I’ll make damn sure he doesn’t get a writing credit!”

Balthasar releases my hand after giving it another bone-bruising squeeze and goes back to his own seat. I feel suddenly overcome by fatigue, the effect of the stress of these last few weeks. I put the screenplay away in my book bag, cinching shut the brass toggles and tucking the bag under my other carry-on. I tilt my seat back and slip a pillow between my cheek and the cabin wall. When I close my eyes, though, the scene Leo Balthasar described rises up in my mind: Robin perched on the edge of the balcony and Orlando rushing toward him…accusing him of stealing from him…Mark trying to hold Orlando back…Robin’s body falling, his body hurtling through space…The sensation jerks me awake. I must have fallen asleep, because outside my window the sun is cresting the curved horizon, limning a jagged line of mountains. I keep my eyes on the mountains as the cabin fills with the sounds of passengers yawning and the aroma of coffee and fresh-baked croissants. The mountains seem to spring out of the sea, massive and cragged and still peaked with snow in the heights. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could ever have traveled over them on foot or by horse. Fynes Moryson, an English traveler, described travelers creeping over the Alps on their hands and feet with nails in their gloves and shoes, while their guides warned them not to look down into the deep abyss.

A good idea, I think, looking away from the beautiful, but bleak, scenery and toward the awakening cabin. Still, I can’t quite dispel the notion that while my journey doesn’t require crawling hand and foot over the mountains, it’s likely to have its own perils and that the more I try to find the truth behind Robin’s fall, the closer I bring myself to the edge of a precipice.

CHAPTER
NINE

I
AM FOILED IN MY IGNOBLE PLAN TO DITCH
M
ARA AT THE AIRPORT BY
G
ENE
Silverman’s determination to catch up to Leo Balthasar. First he cuts the line at immigration, infuriating a French couple behind us who reel off a list of anti-American epithets at Gene’s uncomprehending back. Mara smiles at the woman and tries to ask her where she purchased her Longchamps bag, but when the woman stares at her icily, Mara sidles closer to me and whispers, “The French, they’re such snobs.”

Although Mara, by all rights, should present her passport with her husband, she sticks to my side so that we end up approaching immigration together—forming an unlikely family unit in the eyes of the Italian government. Then, since Gene is too deep in movie talk with Balthasar to bother with Mara’s luggage, I end up helping her collect five pieces of matching Louis Vuitton bags—including one that we are forced to return to the infuriated Frenchwoman.

By the time we reach the taxi queue, Gene has hopped into a cab with Balthasar and a German hedge fund manager who they’ve learned is also bound for La Civetta.

“Have you thought of investing in film?” I hear Balthasar say in perfect German. I wonder how many languages he knows how to say that phrase in.

“You girls probably want to plot out your shopping anyway,” Gene tosses over his shoulder to us as he gets into the minivan. And then, turning to Leo Balthasar, “I should probably ask you guys for my retainer fee in cameos and small leather goods.” He laughs at his own joke as the car drives off, leaving Mara and me to a tiny Fiat that visibly sinks to the pavement under the weight of Mara’s luggage.

“Will we pass any good shops on the way to the villa?” Mara asks.

“No. La Civetta is in the hills north of the city. We’re just skirting the northern edge of town right now. All the stores are south—along the Arno and the Via della Vigna Nuova, and, of course, the Ponte Vecchio has dozens of jewelry shops.” I peer out the window in the direction of the river, but all I can see, past the brown and gold suitcases crammed into the backseat with us, are flashes of ochre walls and the metal shutters that cover the doors and windows of closed
tabaccherie
and cafes. It’s early Sunday morning. The Florentines are still in bed or in church. Whatever life’s occurring is going on behind thick stone walls and shuttered windows. A wave of sadness passes over me—a feeling of being shut out that I try to dismiss as jet lag or the melancholy that Boswell described upon viewing “the celebrated Forum…now all in ruins.” My sadness, though, is not for ancient history, but for my own past, the life I might have had here.

Only when the car starts climbing do I realize we’re on the street that leads to the villa. The road is narrow and curving, flanked by high stone walls that give no hint of the palatial villas that lie behind them. A fringe of olive branches, a spill of bougainvillea down an iron gate, or an enameled plaque inscribed with some whimsical name are the only clues that princes and dukes kept their summer homes here and, later, British peers and rich Americans, and now, colleges and universities. We pass the University of Paris’s villa and I recognize the French cou-ple from the airport standing before the gate shouting their names into an intercom box. La Civetta is just around the next curve of the road—which means that we’ll be bumping into our new French friends at the bus stop for the rest of the summer.

Our driver swerves into a shallow half-circle depression, screeching to a halt inches from a pair of closed wrought-iron gates. I can see over the hood of our taxi the black face of an owl with hollow eyes staring at us as if we were intruders—part of the decorative pattern in the old metalwork.

“Is this it?” Mara asks. “You’d think Mr. Balthasar would have left the gates open for us.” She doesn’t mention that her husband was in the same car with him and might have been expected to think of his own wife’s convenience first.

“Cyril Graham is fanatical about security,” I tell her. “The gates are fixed to close automatically after each entrance. I’ll have to get out and ring the bell.”

I climb over a toiletry case and what looks like a hat box (who in the world still travels with a hat box?) and step out of the car. The intercom is the same antiquated metal box I remember from twenty years ago—a metal grate with a brass lever you turn to the right. I shout my name into it as though I were shouting down a well instead of speaking into a piece of late-twentieth-century electronic equipment.

The school took us all once to the Cave of the Sibyl at Cumae, and Bruno told me that there was a tradition that if you shouted your name into the cave and then listened very carefully, you would hear your destiny. I realized later that many of Bruno’s “traditions” were his own fancies, but I didn’t know that then. I threw my name into the dank sulfurous gloom as confidently as any tourist tossing lire into the Trevi fountain and then listened to the echoes dying in the still, flat air, waiting for an answering vibration from beneath the earth—from the gates of hell, as the ancient Cimbrians who once populated that part of Italy believed. Instead I felt Bruno’s touch along the back of my neck and the coolness of his breath in my ear as he suggested how we might spend the rest of the afternoon. It seemed at the time all of the future I needed to know.

Now I don’t bother to listen at the metal grate for any answering call. It’s a one-way intercom (cheaper, Cyril Graham once told me); its only response is the slow opening of the iron gates. Mara beckons from the cab for me to get back in, but I lean in and hand her a twenty-euro note for my half of the fare.

“I’ll walk,” I tell her, closing the door before she can object. For a moment I feel the same childish glee I had back at Cumae when Bruno and I managed to slip away from the scheduled field trip and spend the rest of the afternoon at the Hotel Sibylla, and all because now I can approach the villa at my own pace with only my memories for company.

I step between two marble pillars that are surmounted by marble owls whose taloned claws grip three balls—icons that link the original owners of the villa (the Barbagianni family, whose name means “barn owl”) with the symbol of the Medici family. These owls always frightened me. Their talons are long and sharp, their wings flexed for flight. As I pass underneath them it’s hard not to imagine that they will follow me on silent wings, ready to sink their claws into the back of my neck. Even the sound the gates make as they close resembles the high-pitched screech of an owl.

To my right is the path that leads to the plain gray-stone building that once housed the Convent of Santa Catalina but now serves as a dorm for the students. Everyone just calls it the little villa. The main villa is lemon colored and lies at the end of a long avenue, or
viale,
of tall cypresses. It’s a popular view featured in all the college’s advertising brochures and on the Web site for the study abroad program. Maybe that’s why I find myself curiously numb as I start down the
viale,
as if I am approaching a picture instead of the real thing, a painted façade that seems to slip in and out between its frame of gray-green cypresses like a woman hiding coquettishly behind a curtain.