The Sonnet Lover (27 page)

Nor have I ever been able to fathom the subject matter usually chosen for these monstrosities. The rape of the Sabine women, for instance, was a popular choice because it celebrated the reconciliatory power of marriage between enemies. Kneeling down to examine the painted panel on the front of this
cassone,
I find another popular Renaissance choice: Boccaccio’s story of Griselda. Although it’s not as gruesome as the story of Nastagio degli Onesti, I’ve always thought it was a particularly depressing story to use in celebrating a marriage.

A wealthy marquis named Gualtieri shuns marriage in favor of hawking and hunting. It strikes me how often the stories of this period start with a reluctant bridegroom. Even Shakespeare’s sonnets start with poems beseeching a wealthy young man to do his duty and procreate. In Gualtieri’s case, it’s his vassals who urge their master to marry lest he die without an heir.

Like a petulant teenager forced to attend a family gathering and so making sure that everyone suffers in his company, Gualtieri makes a deliberately perverse choice of bride. He picks a poor peasant girl, beautiful but penniless, named Griselda. He invites all his friends and relatives, and all the nobility from the surrounding countryside, and brings them to the rustic hut where Griselda lives with her father. Then, in front of all the assembled company, he orders her stripped naked so that he may clothe her in new expensive clothing.

It’s this moment that painters loved to depict: the naked Griselda in the midst of the richly attired company. Here it takes up the entire left-hand side of the
cassone.
Klapisch-Zuber has called the dressing of the bride a rite of passage, a rite of integration. The husband’s gifts of jewels and dresses mark her as a part of his family. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to celebrate this moment on the very trunk that carried the bride’s robes. Gazing at Griselda’s lovely bare form against a backdrop of lush velvet and fur robes, I can’t help but feel, though, that the painter meant us to feel a little frisson of prurient excitement at her nakedness. She stands like an Oriental slave at market, so much flesh for sale. How, I wonder, did the bride whose trousseau this chest carried look upon her? Did the image remind her that she would soon stand naked before a man who was probably little more than a stranger to her? The depiction of Griselda strikes me as half brutal and half tantalizing, but unlike the wall paintings of Nastagio’s story, the scenes on the
cassone
seem to follow the conventional course of the story. On the front of the
cassone
Griselda undergoes the tests of obedience that Gualtieri designs for her. When she gives birth to a girl, he tells her his vassals are unhappy with such lowborn offspring and in order to satisfy them he must have the child put to death. Griselda submits to his judgment, just as she accepts, in the next two scenes, the same treatment of her son and her husband’s decision to have their marriage annulled. When I move around to the right side of the
cassone,
I find Griselda naked again, this time going home to her father’s hut, her head bowed in obedience to her husband’s will.

I stand up to look at the lid and find the finale. On the far left Griselda is shown sweeping Gualtieri’s sumptuous villa—which, I realize, looks an awful lot like La Civetta—while wearing rags. She’s been ordered to act as servant in her own former home while her husband brings a new bride to take her place. The next scene shows the bridal procession—a young, childlike bride riding a white horse followed by servants, gaily attired in brightly colored tunics and tights, carrying her
cassone.
Bending down to look closely at the
cassone,
I find a sly hall of mirrors trick. It is painted with the story of Griselda—miniature versions of the same paintings on the real
cassone.
If Griselda herself, as she bows humbly before her “replacement,” would only raise her downcast eyes, she could read her own happy future on it. But she doesn’t. In this ultimate sign of obedience and trust she seems to deliberately look away from her own future—as if her fate were as much a part of her husband’s possessions as the clothes that he provides and takes away as it pleases him.

Griselda is, of course, rewarded in the end for her long ordeal. The child bride turns out to be Griselda’s own daughter restored to her (the little son, as well, follows in the procession). She is reinstated in her former place. In the last scene she is shown dressed in finery, seated at a banquet table at her husband’s side. All she’s lost is her children’s childhood, but then, I remind myself, it was common for Florentines to send their infants out to wet nurses for extended periods of time. Missing your child’s infancy might not seem such an unusual deprivation to the audience for which this
cassone
was intended. In fact, Griselda’s acceptance of being parted from her babies might be another part of the lesson taught here.

I glance over the
cassone
again and notice that there are family crests on either side of the heavy brass lock—the Barbagianni crest with its owl perched on three balls and the Galletti rooster. Clearly this is the
cassone
made for the same marriage celebrated in the
spalliere
on the wall. The
cassone,
though, does not appear to have suffered any subsequent alterations. At least not on the outside. I remember, though, that the insides of the lids are usually painted—often with a nude reclining woman as a charm to guarantee the conception of beautiful children. Perhaps that is where Lorenzo Barbagianni has chosen to add another “valuable lesson to contain the baser instincts of a new bride.” When I grasp the heavy rounded edge of the lid and try to lift it up, though, it doesn’t budge. The chest is locked.

What, I wonder, could be in it that required the chest to be locked? Remembering that this was Lucy Graham’s room, I realize that it might have been a convenient hiding place for liquor—in which case she would have kept a key somewhere. I’m just opening the top drawer of the dressing table when I hear a knock on the door. I’m tempted not to answer it, but then I hear Mara Silverman calling my name, and although Mara is the last person I feel like spending time with, I also realize, after hearing Gene and Mara’s conversation with Leo Balthasar, that I shouldn’t pass up an opportunity to try to find out what she knows about what happened on the balcony in New York. As I go to the door, though, I’m preparing to excuse myself from any errand Mara might have for me by pleading a headache. I realize, though, that my headache is gone. Sometime during my investigation of the
cassone
it vanished.

“I’ve got a cab waiting downstairs,” Mara says when I open the door. “Do you want to get out of here and go shopping?”

I’d have wagered two weeks ago that my first trip into Florence proper would be to visit the Uffizi or the Accademia, not the Hermès store in the Piazza degli Antinori.

“I didn’t pack any of my Hermès scarves, and I have to have one to wear with my new scarf ring,” Mara tells me as she hops out of the taxi (leaving me to pay the fare because she hasn’t converted any of her money into euros yet), “and it would be rude not to show Cyril how much I appreciate his gift.”

As I follow her into the Hermès store I wonder whether Mara’s sudden need to buy expensive French silk scarves really comes from a desire to flatter our host or has more to do with the deal she and Gene made with Balthasar in the library just an hour ago. Perhaps she’s shopping in anticipation of that one percent of revenue Balthasar promised Gene and Mara in exchange for keeping the truth about Robin’s death a secret. Whatever her true motive, there’s no doubt that shopping seems to agree with Mara. As soon as she walks through the heavy glass doors, her shoulders relax and she approaches the saleswoman behind the glass cases of scarves with an ease in her step I haven’t seen…well, since the last time I went shopping with her, at Bergdorf’s in New York. It’s as if the atmosphere of the luxury store—the thick carpeting, the polished wood cabinets, the slither of silk as the saleswomen unfold the richly colored scarves—acts as a narcotic on her. I’ll have to wait until lunch to try to get any information out of Mara; she’s totally absorbed in the shopping process.

“I need something to go with my yellow St. John’s dress and my apricot Chanel suit,” she tells the wide-eyed saleswoman in English. “And I want you to show me different ways to use the scarf ring,” she adds, taking out the silver ring from her purse and laying it down on the counter. “Rose, did you bring yours? This will be fun. They’ll show us tricks for how to wear the scarves.”

I shake my head and greet the saleswoman, a young pretty girl who clearly hasn’t understood half of what Mara has just said, translating into Italian as much as I think will be useful.

“Oh, but you speak English, don’t you?” Mara demands, her shoulders already tensing. Before the saleswoman can answer, an older woman appears from the back of the store and, murmuring something into the younger girl’s ear, quickly takes her place. “
Sì, signora,
I speak English. My name is Simona. Let me show you our newest design. I think it will suit your complexion perfectly.”

Mara relaxes again as Simona flips through folded scarves and extracts one in shades of gold, russet, and umber. With a deft flick of her wrist, the silk billows into the air and settles over the glass counter like a swan landing on a still pond. The pattern is of swirling leaves against a rich yellow ground.

“That’s pretty,” I tell Mara, “and the colors suit you.”

Simona folds the scarf diagonally and drapes it over Mara’s shoulders, nimbly tying a loose knot and then twitching it sideways so that it lies perfectly over Mara’s thin collarbones.
“Bellisima,”
she croons.
“Guardi!”
She points Mara to a full-length mirror on the paneled wall. Mara half turns, her fingers fluttering up to the silk at her throat and then, before she could possibly have really seen how the scarf looks, turns back to the saleswoman. “Good. I’ll take it. What else do you have?”

Since there are perhaps a hundred heavy silk twill scarves beneath the glass counter, Simona might be expected to appear confused, but she removes another scarf—this one in deep burgundy with a pattern of racehorses and jockeys—without batting an eye. Before long the glass counter is littered with a dozen scarves in lush puddles of color. Simona has demonstrated how to wear a scarf as a headband, belt, necktie, choker, halter, or, for someone as slim as Mara, a sarong. Each time Mara selects one, the younger saleswoman folds the silk into a square and lays it in a nest of tissue paper in its own shallow orange and brown box.

When she’s picked out six scarves, she turns to me as if suddenly recalling my presence. “Rose! Aren’t you going to get one? You’ve got the scarf ring, and after all, you’re making all this money working on the movie.”

Simona and her assistant pause in their folding and draping, immaculately plucked eyebrows lifted with sudden interest in my direction. I see myself transformed in their eyes from drab academic to movie person! Yes, I suppose I could afford maybe one of these scarves. I finger the rolled, hand-sewn edge of one of Mara’s discards and say, “Well,…”

Instantly the air is alive again with the flutter of silk, only now the colors are cooler—blues and greens, which, Simona insists, will bring out my eyes. One scarf is printed in a mosaic pattern of flowers and vines against jewel-like lozenges of emerald, sapphire, and peridot.

“This reminds me of the mosaics at Santa Constanza in Rome,” I say.

There’s an appreciative murmur from the saleswomen at my classical learning while the scarf is coiled around my neck and tied in a manner that I already know I will never be able to duplicate on my own. But what does it matter? How many articles of clothing flatter both my eyes and my brain?

Fifteen minutes later I leave the store with my own slim orange envelope secured with a brown ribbon, still trying to convert the euro charges that have just been entered on my MasterCard into dollars. Passing a
cambio,
I pause to read the day’s exchange rate posted in glaring red LED lights. It’s worse than I thought. I try to catch up to Mara to warn her, but she’s already veering into another store on the Via Tornabuoni. “Oh, look,” she says, when I catch up to her at the doorway, “I read about this store in
Lucky
magazine. They’ve got all the newest Italian designers and they serve espresso!”

I follow Mara into the spacious modern store, where the clothes seem to hover in midair like exhibitions in an aerospace museum. A slim man in impossibly narrow black jeans and black T-shirt appears with a tiny demitasse of espresso for each of us, both cups garnished with a lemon peel the size of a nail clipping.

“I think I’ll sit this one out,” I begin, edging toward the espresso bar at the back of the store.

“Oh, look, Rose,” Mara croons, “this blouse is exactly the color of the scarf you just bought.” Mara has managed to untie the ribbon of my Hermès bag before I can object and extract a corner of my new $350 scarf.

“Che meraviglia!”
the man in black exclaims as if an angel had just descended from the track lighting. What a miracle!

“And look,” Mara says, pulling out a softly gathered skirt with a pattern of gondolas floating on a green lagoon, “it would be perfect with this skirt. Isn’t this the new Prada line? It was sold out before we left New York.”

The salesman—Cesare—explains in a hushed whisper that this particular line is done by one of Prada’s designers but for “much, much less.” I steal a glance at the price tags as he plucks out a handful of skirts and blouses and slacks for me and notice that “much, much less” is about a week’s worth of my salary. But then I
am
making the script consultant’s fee, and, as Mara explains as we follow Cesare back to the dressing rooms, pieces like this are really an
investment.
And when I try on the well-tailored slacks in teal sateen and the sleeveless silk blouse in jade trimmed with the slightest whisper of pale green chiffon at the throat, I have to admit that they make my clothes back at the villa seem drab and shapeless. Everything seems to fit a little better, drape a bit nicer, and make my skin glow. The emerald green cocktail dress Cesare brings back to me falls over my hips like water, and the slingback sandals in butter-soft kid hug my instep like a masseuse’s hand. Within an hour I’ve said yes to an entire new wardrobe. By the time Mara and I stumble back onto the Via Tornabuoni—exchanging kisses with Cesare like old friends—my head is spinning. Thankfully, all the shops are closing.