The Sonnet Lover (24 page)

I look around for a chair to stand on so I can examine the pictures more closely, but all the furniture in this room is too fragile and expensive looking, so I go into my old room—the convent room—and drag back its serviceable desk chair and place it under the painting of the forest. Even when the painting is at eye level it’s still hard to make out the details, so I climb down from the chair and get my flashlight (
Always pack a flashlight,
my mother’s voice had reminded me while I was packing back in New York;
you never know when your hotel might catch fire
) out of my suitcase and, back on the chair, shine the heavy metal Maglite into the branches of the painted grove.

Immediately a hundred amber eyes stare back at me from behind the tangled branches. The trees are full of sharp-taloned owls hunting for prey. Beneath them the youth looks vulnerable and lost. When I shine my flashlight on him the light catches the glint of fear in his eyes and the gleam of tears on his dewy cheek. An innocent—and yet there’s something in his stance and his richly adorned clothes, his cloak tossed jauntily over his milk white shoulder, the sparkle of jewels on his fingers, those gaudy peacock feathers in his hat, that makes him appear arrogant and callous. Looking back at the previous scene I can’t tell whether he’s been rejected by his lover or he’s rejected her, but it’s clear that having been exiled from the garden of love, he’s chosen to reject all bonds of civilization for the lawless wilderness. How lawless becomes apparent in the next scene, in which the youth watches from behind a tree as an armored knight appears on horseback chasing a naked woman.

Of course, I realize, it’s the story of Nastagio degli Onesti from Boccaccio’s
Decameron,
a common enough theme for Renaissance wedding
cassoni
and nuptial suites despite—or maybe because of—its grisly content. Dragging my chair to the fourth painting, which is between the garden windows and directly across from the bed, I should be prepared for the gruesome scene. No wonder Lucy Graham partially concealed it behind the curtains.

The story, as I remember it, tells of a young nobleman, Nastagio degli Onesti, who, rejected by his beloved, runs off to lead a wild and ir-responsible life in the woods outside Ravenna. While wandering there alone, he sees a knight on horseback pursuing a naked woman. Then, to his horror, he watches what happens when the knight catches her.

I push back the curtains and shine my flashlight on the scene. The knight, having leapt from his steed onto the back of the screaming naked girl, lifts his sword and slits her in two from the nape of her neck to the small of her back. The hunting dogs snap and growl over her scattered entrails. Horrified, Nastagio watches from behind a tree, while the yellow-eyed owls descend from their perches to snatch their share of the offal.

Oh, yeah, this must have been a pretty sight for the blushing bride to contemplate from her nuptial bed while waiting for her new husband to ascend from his drunken revelries downstairs to the bridal suite.

I’ve read that the story is not directed solely at a female audience or meant to cow young women into obedience. It’s the future bridegroom, Nastagio, who learns how the knight, rejected by his lover, killed himself, causing, in turn, his beloved to kill herself and condemning the both of them to reenact this grisly cycle of butchery and resurrection each day just at nightfall. Learning this, Nastagio invites his family and the family of his beloved to a banquet at which the horrified dinner guests witness the gory scene—reenacted here on the west wall of the chamber. When Nastagio explains the knight’s story, his beloved agrees to bed with him immediately, but Nastagio, a changed man, says he wants an honorable marriage.

I get down from my chair and approach the final scene, on the left side of the bed, which is covered by a tapestry. The tapestry itself depicts a familiar trope of courtly love: a young man in richly embroidered doublet and hose offering a rose to a blushing maiden. She reaches for the rose shyly, her gracefully long fingers resting on the air like a dove perched on a branch. I expect that the painting under it will be the traditional last scene in the series—the marriage of Nastagio degli Onesti. It should be another garden scene, ordered and calm. Instead, when I hold back the tapestry and shine my flashlight on the wall, I surprise two naked figures in a lewd and compromising posture. Nastagio degli Onesti, his pose cruelly echoing the pose of the knight disemboweling his beloved, mounts his fiancée from behind as the horrified banquet guests look on. In this version of the story, Nastagio takes his fiancée at her word and avails himself of her offer of a night of unmarried lust. He has learned not obedience from the knight’s tale but bloodlust. Moving closer to the picture I see that the guests have the same yellow eyes as the owls in the forest scene and that only some of them are horrified. Others are laughing and pointing at the ground beneath the copulating couple, where the hunting dogs have come to lap at the blood that pools beneath the violated virgin. Bile rises to my throat. It’s by far one of the nastiest pieces of pornography I’ve ever seen. I drop the tapestry over it, struck by the contrast between the sweet scene on the tapestry and the ugliness it hides. Instead of masking the scene beneath, though, I feel now as if the corruption from the painting is seeping up, polluting the innocence of the two young lovers. The proffered rose now seems obscenely red, its stem fleshy and thick, its thorns threatening to the maiden’s white hand that reaches for it. I’m forced to agree with Daisy Wallace’s verdict that whoever installed a new bride in this room—in the fifteenth century or the twentieth—was a sadist.

I no longer feel so comfortable in the room. I double-check the locks on the door leading to the hall and the one into the convent room. I leave the windows open for air but close and lock the slatted wooden shutters. Even then I feel on edge as I sit down at the dressing table. I take the rolled-up parchment out of my shawl first and flatten it so I can put it in a file folder in my book bag, but as I’m smoothing it out I realize that there’s a thin sheet of tissue paper clinging to the back of it. When I peel it away from the parchment, I realize it’s the same kind of airmail stationery as the note Robin included with the last poem. And it’s in Robin’s handwriting. A note from the dead, then.

“This house is stained with the blood of innocence,” it reads, “that will never bloom again.”

I read the single line over several times. Whatever Robin meant by the comment, someone else has chosen to send it to me, but is it a threat or a warning? It’s an infuriatingly oblique line of prose and I suddenly wish I had Chihiro here to analyze it. I’m too tired now, though, to puzzle through its meaning. It will have to wait until the morning.

I crawl into bed, placing the heavy Maglite on my night table, and try to put the images from the paintings from my mind, but they follow me into my sleep. In my dream I wander through a dark wood. Although I can’t see anyone, I know I’m not alone. I hear the rustle of mice through the dry underbrush and glimpse yellow eyes in the branches. Then the yellow lights swell and become the dancers from the
Midsummer Night’s Dream
pageant—only instead of fairies they’ve become sinuous demons twining themselves through the tree branches—and the rustle becomes the thunder of horse hooves bearing down on me. I start to run in the sickening slow motion of nightmares, but I can already feel the hot breath of the horse on my neck and I know that it’s only a matter of seconds before I feel the steel of the knight’s blade cleave my back in two.

As I feel myself falling under the horse’s hooves, I startle awake, flinching away from the weight of a hand at the back of my neck. Before I can untangle the skeins of the dream from reality, I’ve reared up against the headboard and grabbed the heavy metal Maglite from my night table to strike at the intruder.

“Rose, it’s me, Mark,” I hear before I can bring my arm down. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Mark? Jesus, how did you get in?”

“I finagled an extra copy of the key from Claudia Brunelli. I thought…well, I thought you might be expecting me.” Even though he’s whispering, his voice has regained the formality he uses in faculty meetings. He’s clearly hurt that I hadn’t been expecting this surprise midnight visit.

“I thought you might…Claudia said you were on this floor…” I stammer, feeling like I’ve been caught out in an indiscretion. “I must have been in a very deep sleep,” I explain, “and then I was confused when I woke up. Being in a strange place and all.”

My eyes have adjusted to the darkness enough to see his shoulders relax. He moves toward me and takes the flashlight out of my hand and lays it down on the night table. “Jesus, that thing’s heavy. I’m lucky you didn’t hit me with it. Look how tense your shoulders are.” He starts to massage my shoulders and I try not to flinch at the feel of his hands on the back of my neck. I still can’t quite banish the images from my dream. Even when we make love I can feel the yellow eyes of the owls watching us, and when Mark tries to turn me over—into the position I know he favors—I let him know that’s not something I want to do tonight. I can’t quite make myself turn my back to him.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

M
ARK IS GONE BY THE TIME
I
WAKE UP THE NEXT MORNING
. F
OR A FEW
moments, lying in the strips of pale gray light from the slatted shutters, I wonder whether his visit wasn’t a dream—an extension of my night journey through the woods—but then I notice a Post-it note anchored beneath the flashlight on the night table.

“I’ll tell the kitchen to leave a breakfast tray outside your door so you don’t have to come down to breakfast. I know how anxious you are to get to work on the archives.”

He’s signed the note “Mark.” No “love,” in case anyone should see it. Although we’ve agreed that such discretion is as much for my benefit as his, I can’t help feeling disappointed at his caution. Maybe it’s the love poem I read last night that’s made me want to hear my lover declare boldly, as my supposed sixteenth-century poet did, “I long for thee more than the wind can know, / More desperately than roses for the sun.” I repeat the lines to myself as I open the shutters and step out onto the balcony, closing my eyes and turning my face up to feel the morning sun on my skin and breathing in the scent of lemons and roses on the air. Opening my eyes, I watch the sun crest the ancient hill town of Fiesole, setting the red-slate roofs on fire, and then wash down into the shallow bowl that holds Florence, the light turning the city into a sparkling mirage of tower and dome, the arched bridges that span the Arno springing into life as gracefully as deer leaping a stream. “The air trembling with clarity,” as the poet Guido Calvacanti put it.

Most people looking at this city think of the masterpieces of art contained within its churches and museums. Michelangelo’s
David,
Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus,
Brunelleschi’s great dome. But even though I’m not immune to those attractions, I look at Florence and think of the poets of the late thirteenth century: Guido Calvacanti, Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, and the young Dante. It was they who made the sonnet into a visionary and moment-centered love poem. It was here that Dante first set eyes on his Beatrice. It’s the city more than any other where love poetry was born. No wonder I awoke this morning hungrier for love poems than for Post-it notes.

I go back into my room and open the door to find a tray waiting outside in the hall. It might not be a love poem, but the thermoses of steamed milk and coffee, the basket of fresh-baked
cornetti,
and the blue and yellow majolica bowl of fresh figs come pretty close. Besides, I remind myself as I drink my coffee and get dressed, the love poem I read last night spoke of blood and violation and it came with a warning—or a threat, depending on how you read Robin’s cryptic note. The poem might be a fake as well. My plan for this morning is to look at the inventories to see when all the curious and morbid decorations—the paintings, the
cassone,
and the
pietre dure
floor—were installed. I suspect that the paintings and
cassone
will turn out to have been purchased years before Ginevra’s lifetime, and if the floors were installed after her residence at the villa, then it will prove that the reference to rose petals on the floor is a modern one derived from the legends that have grown up around the curious decorations.

I’m curious, too, to see whether I can trace the references in the poem back to the inventories themselves. Whoever faked the poems might have done his research there, and he might have left some trace of himself in the archives. The most likely author of the poems is Robin—since the note attached to the poem is in Robin’s handwriting even if the poem is not—but it’s possible that Orlando wrote them, or even Bruno. He is the one with the most talent and the most access to the archives, which is what Gene was drunkenly implying last night—that Bruno could have stolen the poems to sell them on the black market or used them to get his son an in with a Hollywood producer. What if Robin, though, somehow found out and managed to get the poems away from Bruno? Would Bruno send Orlando to New York to get them back? The Bruno I knew would have too much integrity to do something like that, but then, I knew Bruno before he was a father. He looked so proud last night watching Orlando perform. What did I know of that kind of love or what it might drive one to?

I shake my head, trying to unwind the scenario I’ve woven. It’s the secretive atmosphere of this place—a wasp’s nest of gossip and suspicion. Certainly the last person whose suspicions I should be listening to is Gene Silverman.

I finish my coffee and try to put away my doubts. As I dress, though, I have an unwelcome thought. Gene was close enough to Robin and Orlando on the balcony to hear what they were saying. What if Gene’s suspicions of Bruno came from something Robin said to Orlando? Or what if Orlando accused Robin of stealing his father’s poems? I promise myself to keep my mind open while searching through the archives and then see what I can find out from Gene—or from Mara, who was also there on the balcony and is far more likely to tell me what she heard.