The Sonnet Lover (25 page)

I finish getting dressed and then pack the thermos and some of the pastry and figs wrapped in a napkin into my book bag along with my laptop. It’s only a few steps across the hall to the upstairs library. When I open the door I’m greeted by an aroma even stronger than the Italian coffee. Maple syrup, I think, sniffing the air, with a touch of nutmeg and…yes, Daisy was right…there’s a hint of lemon from when the pages were dried in the
limonaia.
Even with the scent of lemon, though, the dim, dusty room I step into feels miles away from the sunlit gardens.

The three-storied library at La Civetta takes up the entire northeast corner of the building. In this, the third floor, the room is austerely plain, the walls whitewashed, as though in respect for the religious nature of the collection. The windows overlook the dusty olive trees in front of the villa and the funereal cypress trees that line the
viale.
It’s here that Lucy Graham stored the books she saved (or looted, depending on your point of view) from the flooded Convent of Santa Catalina, stacked on metal shelves, in no particular order. Little has changed since I first saw them twenty years ago except that someone has dusted them recently. As I remove one of the volumes from a shelf, I have the dreadful feeling that they’ve been waiting here for me, an impossible task set for me, like the mountains of grain Psyche was supposed to sort into piles of wheat, barley, and millet.

I look at a long row of nuns’ chronicles—mostly dry histories of the founding of the convent—and account books that record the number of sheep bought and born and sold and slaughtered each year, the amount of wool produced, and the money earned through the weaving of tapestries. I take down one chronicle, by a Suor Benedetta Fortino in the beginning of the seventeenth century. It describes the founding of the order of Santa Catalina in the hills above Florence in the fifteenth century and then the removal of the order in 1581 to the Valdarno, giving as a reason for the move the desire of the sisters to expand the wool production and tapestry works of the convent. I flip through the whole of the handwritten chronicle, skimming for mention of Ginevra de Laura or of any nun who wrote poetry, but it seems as if the nuns of Santa Catalina were too busy raising sheep, spinning wool, and weaving tapestries to do much writing.

I move on to a shelf of prayer books, taking down each one and flipping through to see whether all they contain are prayers. I know that sometimes more than one work may be bound into the same book, but if this were the case with Ginevra de Laura’s poems, then why were the one that Robin gave me and the one I found last night on loose manu-script sheets? They hadn’t been torn from a bound book. Still, I know I should go through each one of these missals carefully and I have just made up my mind to carry a stack of them to the library table set beneath the windows when I hear a knock on the door.

“Come in,” I call.

The door opens and Zoe Demarchis appears, her pink hair jarringly bright in the plain whitewashed room. “Um, Professor Asher? President Abrams sent me up to see if you needed any help with the books. Like, if you needed me to move anything or…I don’t know…help you sort through them.”

“Don’t you have a class?” I ask, torn between my relief at being offered help and compunction at subjecting poor little Zoe to such a tedious task.

“Just Early Christian Art,” she answers, making a face, “and I took that last fall. I mean, like, how many crucifixions and bleeding saints can a girl take? Besides, I helped out last year dusting and reshelving the books, so President Abrams thought I’d be the right person to do it.” She moves to a shelf and runs a finger along the spines of a row of account books. “They could use another good dusting. To tell you the truth, I’m allergic to dust…”

“You’re right,” I say, looking at the actually fairly dust-free books in my hand. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you go down to the kitchen and get a dust cloth and come back up here and give them all a good going over. I’ve got some things I want to check out in the lower floor of the library in the meantime.”

“Yeah, okay,” she says, “anything to get out of another lecture on Christian symbolism. I’ll have them nice and clean for you. Do you want me to organize them in any particular order?”

“Well, you could pull out any folios with loose pages and leave them stacked on the table over there.”

“Sure,” she says, “that’ll be easy. Robin and I put all that stuff on the bottom shelves last fall.”

“Robin? Do you mean Robin Weiss? He worked with you reshelving these books last fall?”

“Uh-huh, but I know what you’re thinking. He didn’t find any of those old poems in here. I was with him the whole time and all we found were lists of sheep and stuff…It was pretty boring. Robin was always saying that the really interesting papers in the villa would be hidden and that we should explore the other rooms.”

“And did you go exploring other rooms?” I ask.

“Uh-uh,” she says, shaking her head adamantly. “Not me. I’m here on scholarship and I didn’t want to get in trouble. But Robin…I think he did later…which is how he found those poems he was going to put in his screenplay. But he never told me where he found them…Well, I’d better go get those dust cloths…” Zoe shifts uneasily from foot to foot and appears to be blushing—although it may just be the reflection of her pink hair in this white room. She certainly seems anxious to be away from me, so I let her go, wondering what she and Robin got up to in here while sorting through these dusty dry tomes. Concocting Renaissance love poems, perhaps, or acting them out? I bend down and glance at the stacks of folios and boxes on the lowest shelves. I’ll have a look at them later, I think, straightening up and kneading a crick in my lower back. I’ll let Zoe pull them out and dust them off before going through them. First I’ll have a look at the record books from La Civetta to find out when those awful paintings in my room were created and see whether there’s any mention of when the rose-petal floors were made.

I cross the room to the spiral staircase that leads down to the two lower levels of the library. When I step onto the first cast-iron tread, the whole staircase trembles. The staircase was installed by Lucy Graham during the Second World War as an emergency route into a secret cellar in case the family needed to flee from the Nazis. Bruno once told me that Lucy had seen nothing ironic about ordering the staircase from Hamburg. When it arrived, the Italian laborers who had been hired to install it couldn’t read the German instructions—or didn’t bother, at any rate—instead assembling it according to some aesthetic principle only they understood. Perhaps they wanted it to vibrate like a plucked violin string.

I navigate the first flight as gingerly as I can, hoping not to draw the attention of anyone on the library’s main floor. I can’t hear voices as I descend, and when I peek out between the shelves that screen the staircase from the rest of the library, the room appears to be empty save for the painted birds that made me so uneasy last night. In the early morning they look harmless enough; even the painted owl on the ceiling looks half asleep, drowsing on his perch instead of keeping an eye out for prey.

I descend to the next, and lowest, level of the library—into darkness. Fortunately I thought to bring my Maglite—an item that is turning out to have more uses than even my overcautious mother would ever have imagined. I use it to find the chain to the bare bulb that hangs from the ceiling. I’m surprised that it actually works. Someone must have been down here recently, although, looking around at the cobwebs and dust-coated bookshelves, it’s hard to imagine why.

The bottom floor of La Civetta’s library is actually part of the villa’s ancient cellar. The walls are bare stone, the floor dirt, the only window an unglazed porthole covered by a metal grate high on the wall. A dungeon, really, like something out of the Museo della Tortura in San Gimignano. Instead of the pleasant smell of old books in the upper stories, this room’s predominant odor is mold and mouse droppings. I should talk to Mark about having these books moved to a drier location. Although they’re only record books, they no doubt contain information that would be valuable to social historians. The French scholar Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, for instance, has used tax documents and family records to illuminate nuptial practices in fourteenth-century Florence, and Frieda Mainbocher has assembled data from hundreds of last wills and testaments in Siena to document the increase in female bequests to the church after the Black Death. And though it seems odd to come looking for marriage rites in this underground tomb, the Florentines were a practical people who orchestrated family unions with complex rituals of contracts and dowries, trousseaus and bride gifts. The people who invented double-entry bookkeeping kept as careful records of their familial alliances as of their banks and businesses.

Shining my flashlight on the metal shelves, I see that the books are covered in dust and mold, but one appears to be slightly less encrusted—the inventory for 1581, the year Lorenzo Barbagianni’s father died and left him the villa and all its contents. If the paintings and the floor in my room were done before Lorenzo brought Ginevra de Laura to the villa, then they would be described in this inventory. I also take down a thick leather-bound ledger that lists the accounts—the
libri dei conti—
for the villa for the years 1581 to Lorenzo’s death in 1593, and transfer the books to the table beneath the lightbulb. It, too, appears a bit less dusty than the other books, but I can’t tell for sure whether that’s because it’s been consulted more recently.

It would be pleasanter to take them upstairs to the main floor, but I’m reluctant to meet anyone and have to explain what I’m looking for. I pour myself a cup of coffee from my thermos to ward off the chill and open the inventory.

After five minutes my respect for social historians such as Klapisch-Zuber and Frieda Mainbocher has trebled. Presented in seminars and conferences, neatly arrayed in charts and tables, their findings have always appeared to me so neat and rational compared to the more amorphous impressions of literary analysis. I’ve often envied the historical ethnologists their color-coded pie charts and PowerPoint presentations, but I no longer envy their working conditions. Whatever notary Lorenzo Barbagianni hired to take an inventory of the possessions he inherited from his father in 1581 was not hired for his handwriting. It’s tiny and cramped and employs abbreviations I can’t, at first, begin to guess at. I take a quick glance at the account book and nearly despair when I see that it’s written in the same hand. It strikes me as unusual that the same notary who did the inventory kept the accounts (usually a
computista
would be hired for the latter chore), but then Renaissance bookkeeping is not my specialty.

I turn back to the inventory and find after a few minutes that at least it’s organized by types of objects. There are lists of statues in the house and in the garden, rugs, mosaics, embroidered cloths, jewelry, paintings, furniture, and tapestries—including two described as hanging in the rotunda, “depicting scenes of courtly love,” woven by the nuns of Santa Catalina. One of these must be the one that still hangs in the rotunda that I hid behind yesterday. The other, I suspect, is the one that now hangs in my bedroom, the
camera nuziale.
I scan ahead to the list of frescoes and find a description of the birds painted on the walls of the library. In fact, the notary took pains to list each bird in the room by species and color, an account so thorough, it’s as if he were afraid one of them would take flight and escape into the garden. There’s a description of the garden fresco in the
sala grande
that itemizes each flower and tree in botanical detail and half a page devoted to a still life in the dining room that reads like a shopping list for last night’s banquet and makes me hungry enough to dig into my bag for some figs. I wonder whether the notary was naturally this meticulous or Barbagianni demanded this thorough an accounting of his new possessions. Whichever, I can probably assume that nothing has been left out.

Which is why, when I get to the description of the frescoes in the
camera nuziale,
the first thing I notice is that only four paintings are listed. It is possible, though, that the two paintings on the north wall, which are separated by the bed, are counted as one. So I carefully read the description of each painting.

Four frescoes in the wedding suite to celebrate the marriage of Asdrubale di Tommaso degli Barbagianni to Caterina di Albertozzo degli Galletti in the month of May in the year of 1511, depicting the story of Nastagio degli Onesti. The first fresco depicts the rejection of Nastagio degli Onesti by his beloved in the garden of her father. Various flowers and fruit trees…

I skip the botanical details and read ahead to the description of the second painting, of Nastagio wandering through the forest (no mention, I notice, is made of the birds in the trees—a surprising lapse for this thorough notary), and the third, of Nastagio watching a “noble knight” pursuing an unclothed maiden through the woods.

It is clear from the description of the third painting, the one in which the knight disembowels his former lover, that the notary must have described the painting while standing right in front of it. In fact, he seems to have taken a morbid interest in each gory detail as though the grisly subject matter had taken possession of him just as it had of Nastagio degli Onesti. He even adds an odd little editorial note to the inventory: “And so the young man learns of the perfidy of women and that he is not the first to be so thoughtlessly scorned by one of them.”

A rather unorthodox reading of the tale, I think, and not what I imagine Lorenzo was paying his notary for. Perhaps the notary was admonished for embellishing his account, because the next painting, of the banquet scene on the west wall, is described in a perfunctory manner. Or maybe the notary just had little interest in the happy finale of the story. “And so,” he writes laconically, “Nastagio declines the lady’s offer of a night of unhallowed lust and agrees to marry the lover who first rejected him.” Obviously he wasn’t aware of the existence of a fifth painting that suggested a different ending for the story.