The Girl With the Botticelli Eyes (15 page)

The man at the center of all of this chaos, the man she’d come there to hear, Count Ludovico Borghini, was a member of one of the most ancient and venerated families of Italy. He was an admitted fascist and despised. His family was said to have been closely associated with Mussolini during the war, and had collaborated with the Germans during the occupation. The colonel himself argued for a curb on many of the rights of the people, a curb on the waves of Third World immigrants currently flooding the country, a curb on the press, and an expansion of powers for the police and the military.

Borghini’s views were deemed to be so extreme that even members of his own family had publicly disavowed them. At the time Isobel came to know him, he was already an outcast. That, doubtless, was part of the attraction for her. So was she, and by her own choice.

She watched him on the podium where he stood, a prematurely gray, impeccably tailored presence. Small. Smaller than she. Having read so much about him and knowing his views when she first saw him, she came close to laughing. It was simply so incongruous.

A great deal of what he said she scarcely understood. He spoke about politics, the church, Italian history, particularly that of the fifteenth century. When he spoke of Savonarola, his eyes appeared to glow. Afterward, she went up to the podium, where a few others milled about, asking him questions. All the while he spoke, he kept glancing at her, until she became keenly aware of his interest, his eyes holding hers, so that after a while some subtle thread of understanding had bonded them. After the others had drifted off, she finally approached him.

For a man with such hateful thoughts (much of his thinking was hateful to her—elitism, exclusivism, right is might), she was nonetheless drawn to his longing for an Italy long gone, for a less cynical, less mercenary Italy, for people who placed the love of ideas above the love of things. After all, she had come from one of the powerful merchant families herself and was diametrically opposed to the glib, fashionable new socialism that many people of her age and class had embraced.

Later, he gave her his card. “If you get to Rome someday, call.” She sensed that he liked her.

A motor scooter shot past the taxi and cut out in front of them. The driver blared his horn and jammed on the brakes. There was the squeal of metal grinding and almost instantly the smell of burning rubber. She was hurled forward, hard up against the back of the front seat, shaken but unhurt. The driver’s head was out the side window, spewing obscenities after the driver speeding rapidly into the gaudy twilight up ahead.

They sat pulled over to the side, where the driver scribbled something into his book. When she looked out, she was startled to find that they had stopped almost directly across from the Palazzo Borghini. She asked the driver to pull over for a moment.

The place was not as she recalled it. For one thing, it now seemed closer to the street—almost exactly where the Via del Quirinale crosses the Via della Quattro Fontane.

That first night when she’d gone there, she recalled a far more gracious expanse of open space around the palace. She was surprised now to discover that it was wedged somewhat clumsily between two official-looking buildings, dwarfed by one and overshadowing the other.

Her first impression, years before, was that it was a larger, more imposing structure. That might have been due to the fact that she was younger and more impressionable, more inclined to amplify and romanticize things.

Looking out the taxi window, the place looked a bit tatty—unkempt, unattended to. The gardens, at one time a source of pride to the Borghinis (and Contessa Borghini’s particular joy), had been allowed to ran to seed.

In fact, the whole place, still impressive as architecture, had the down-at-the-heels look of derelict property. If not for the single light glowing faintly in a corner window, she would have guessed the place was unoccupied. There was a dark, inhospitable look about it, a rueful air heightened by the spear-point wrought-iron gates that stood shut and unwelcoming against the approaching night.

Just beyond the gate and standing off to the side of the large circular drive, she glimpsed a vintage Hispano Suiza. Battered and looking every bit its age, the car, once the pride of the late Count Ottorino, was a sure sign that Borghini himself was in residence, no doubt the lone occupant of the corner downstairs room where the single light burned against the vast façade of the building.

“Signorina?”

The note of impatience in the driver’s voice roused her from her musings. The man was hot, still infuriated by the motor scooter driver who’d nearly wrecked them, and, no doubt, anxious to get home to his family and supper.

“Yes. I’m sorry. Drive on,” she said.

As they pulled out, she glanced back in time to catch the notched outline of the palazzo against the pale, starless sky of early evening. Turning a corner into the Via Francesco Crispi, the last thing she saw was the tiny orange light flickering in the vast encroaching darkness.

Isobel had misread the significance of the single light flickering that night in a corner window of the Palazzo Borghini. Quite naturally, she’d concluded that the colonel was in residence—somewhere behind the massive masonry of the building.

In point of fact, Borghini was not there. He was, instead, some six or seven miles away, gathering with a handful of young braves at an hosteria in the Parioli district not far from the Quattrocento galleries.

It was a Friday night, the end of the workweek for Borghini. There were no activities scheduled for the next day, and so the colonel felt a certain sense of release. Tonight, he was surrounded by a handful of young louts around whom he felt most comfortable. With their shaved heads and black shirts, they were of that ilk known to the freedom-loving Italians as “Nazi skins.” What these twenty-year-olds found so irresistible in a middle-aged colonel was due in large part, no doubt, to the fact that he spent freely, and then, too, with the colonel there was always the promise of excitement.

Here was Luccabrava; Buonofaccio; Vicenti Picarello, known among his fellows as “the Whip”; Baddamente of the gentle nature and fists of steel; Canova; Corsi; Tenuto, who bore the sobriquet “the Spokesman,” so called for his eloquence in articulating the political and moral platform of the group. Finally, there was young Beppe, the baby of the group, perhaps the rawest and most untamed, the one to inspire most caution.

They’d gathered there at roughly 8:00 P.M. and proceeded to eat and drink with a certain seriousness. The staff in the kitchen and the waiters had all been put on the alert. The colonel was known to insist upon perfection. That was all right, of course. But more disturbingly, the group as a whole had a reputation for unpredictability.

By nine or half past nine that evening, the maestro’s tongue had grown looser. Encouraged by his
banda,
he’d launched into a number of pet diatribes—the fading glory of Italy; Italy as a Third World nation; why Italy must forsake industrialization. Industrialization had fouled everything about them. Italy must return to an agrarian economy; Italy must go back to monarchy. Republicanism had failed Italy; the professional bureaucrats who governed the nation were inept and corrupt; the streets of Rome were an open sewer, swarming with rude Third World blacks and other undesirable ethnic types, all plundering the national treasury. Such people produced nothing but dirt and social problems. Any gesture of generosity they viewed as weakness and an invitation to demand more. He likened these
immigranti
to a running sore.

Mesmerized by his own eloquence, Borghini pounded the table. The youths grew raucous. The innkeeper, who knew Borghini, began to show signs of nervousness. But he also knew the man well enough not to interfere. Borghini’s “louts” could be quite nasty when the honor of the maestro was challenged. So instead, he brought out plate after plate and bottle after bottle—his oldest and finest Brunellos and Barolos.

Offended by the noise, other diners asked to have their tables changed or paid their bills and left. But by then, Borghini and his small clique of admirers were too drunk to notice.

Sipping his after-dinner grappa, his tongue loosened and he grew more relaxed. He leaned back, tie loosened, collar opened, and began to speak of his mother. Bach sentence would begin: “My mother used to say …” or “My mother was a great one for …” He would turn next to his father. “My father, of course, was one of the original founders of Salo—I might say
the
original founder.

After his mother and father, in order of importance came Savonarola, the mad monk who had burned books and paintings in fifteenth-century Florence because they fostered a worldliness that led to atheism and immorality.

Savonarola would usually coincide with the appearance of his third grappa. By the fifth, the colonel would be maudlin. For those who’d sat through these intimate little suppers with him before, they knew this to be the signal for him to lapse into meandering reminiscences, by which time tears would glisten in his bleary eyes.

It was nearly midnight when they lurched out of the little hosteria, leaving in their wake a litter of broken glass and spilled food. The area about the table where they’d dined looked as though a herd of cattle had pastured there.

The colonel had signed his IOU over to the innkeeper, assuring him that payment would be in the mail the next day. The innkeeper could do little more than nod his head deferentially, a queasy smile frozen on his face. He well knew that payment would be a long time coming, if, indeed, it ever came at all. He also knew it was best to swallow his bile and say nothing, rather than tangle with the colonel and his boyish thugs. To be sure, one dared not go to the police, for the colonel had friends in high places, and if some poor aggrieved innkeeper were so rash as to file a complaint, the next day he might find his license to operate suddenly withdrawn—the reasons given, health violations or some trumped-up, nebulous charge.

Full of wine and grappa, the maestro, having eaten and talked himself out, expressed a desire to walk. The night was cool. A breeze had started up off the river and felt like a kiss rushing past his feverish, pounding temples.

The group surged out onto the street, singing bawdy songs. People out for a stroll, returning from cinemas and late-night dinners, gave them a wide berth. They made a fairly menacing picture—six or seven burly louts, not exactly unkempt, but bordering on it, accompanied by a smallish middle-aged man swaggering along with a cocky stride, all apparently relishing the uneasiness they caused in any passerby.

Somewhere near the old Jewish quarter, hard by the Tiber, the group had started to jog, then ran. Someone had snatched an old newspaper out of a trash can and, with bits of string salvaged from carton wrappings found in the gutter, fashioned a ball from it. Shortly, they were barging down the street, playing soccer—kicking their paper ball and banging off one another, their hoots and jeers rising upward into the gaudy night, the small, slight, older individual in the group far more boisterous than his younger companions. He was determined to show that not only could he keep up with his young bucks; he had the physical stamina to exceed them by far.

In the vicinity of the Via Monte de Cenci, they grew more riotous. People on the street, coming out of Piperno and da Giggetto, looked anxiously for taxis and tried hard not to notice.

Not far from Piperno, one of them kicked the paper ball, exploding it into a blizzard of downward-drifting confetti, dusting their hair and the collars of their jackets. They punched out at the slow, drifting white stuff, flailing the air like shadow boxers and roaring with delight. When the blizzard had slowed to a few stray wisps swirling idly about them; the group suddenly looked up, to find themselves in front of the Jewish temple—the old Sinagoga Ebraica on the Lungotevere dei Cenci.

Angular, massive, and thrusting, the ancient masonry loomed above them, jutting out above their heads into the street. Dark and silent, it appeared to sleep deep within the mystery of centuries past.

Realizing for the first time where he was, the maestro gestured for all of his revelers to be silent. He pressed a finger against his lips as if calling for respect before this venerable house of worship.

At once, the group fell silent. They watched the maestro intently, with glints of mischief in their eyes, anticipating that something special was about to take place.

In the next moment, Borghini, a wicked smirk across his face, tiptoed stealthily up the front steps. The others watched, transfixed, as the small, plucky figure opened his trousers and urinated against the big oaken front door of the ancient building.

Cars swept past, speeding up the Lungotevere, momentarily lighting up the strange scene, then sped on. For the little
banda,
it was different. They roared with delight, cheering on their patron—the maestro, a figure of striking dignity, his trousers open, underpants extruding through the unbuttoned fly, pissing against the front door of an ancient, holy building.

Suddenly, they broke out into cheers and hoots of laughter, rushing the door, baying like cats, all urinating at once.

From there, they proceeded north along the river embankment in the direction of Hadrian’s tomb. They sang marching songs and had begun a game of leapfrog down the streets. A few blocks up from the synagogue, one of the youths stumbled, nearly toppling over. When he went back to see what he’d stumbled on, he discovered it to be a foot sticking out from the doorway of a florist’s shop. On closer inspection, the foot was found to be attached to the leg of a vagrant asleep under a pile of newspapers in the doorway.

“What have we here, lads?” Borghini waded into the group, pushing the others aside. He jabbed the newspapers skittishly, as if fearing he might soil the tip of his shoe with some filth below. A faint groan arose from somewhere beneath the papers. “I believe we’ve stumbled upon another victim of social injustice.”

There was sniggering and some boyish shoving as the group surged in closer around the doorway.