The Sonnet Lover (17 page)

“This is too much,” I say to Claudia, who’s smoothing the embroidered coverlet on the four-poster bed.

Claudia sits down on the edge of the bed. “President Abrams told me, specifically, to make sure you had a good room and one in the main villa,” she says, tilting her head and smiling slyly at me. “I got the impression that he wanted you close to him—he’s just down the hall. Such a handsome man, your president,
bellissimo
…You are perhaps…” She allows her voice to trail off suggestively and I feel the force of her charm urging me to confirm her suspicions. Leave it to Claudia to pick up on whatever stray bit of gossip is in the air. She’d been equally quick to learn of my involvement with Bruno twenty years ago.

“Colleagues,” I say, returning her smile. “I imagine he wanted me to be near Lucy Graham’s archives. I’m sure he had no idea you’d give me such an elaborate room. Surely there are more important guests staying here this summer who are more worthy of it. Some of Cyril’s prospective film investors, for instance.”

“Yes, but I wanted you to have it.” She looks up at me and for the first time today I can see the last twenty years in her face. The colors in this room are meant to flatter a young woman—a blushing bride. Clau-dia’s skin looks a little sallow and her eyes look tired. I can think of nothing to say but what I’m really thinking. “But why?” I ask. “Why are you being so kind to me?”

“I’ve always felt you were the one who suffered the most in the…situation. That you were the victim caught between Bruno’s and my estrangement that year. And given how difficult your situation was, I thought you acted quite well. If you hadn’t gone back to America, I don’t think Bruno would have come back to me.”

“But you were married,” I say. “What else could I have done?”

Claudia smiles and rises from the bed. She reaches out her hand and touches my cheek. Her hand is warm, but still her touch makes me shiver. “
Cara
Rosa, you could have done anything you pleased with him. But you didn’t. And for that I am thankful. So”—she hands me two silver keys, one large, one small, tied together with a blue ribbon—“enjoy your suite. There’s a private bath through that door, and Lucy’s archives are housed right across the hall. There’s a computer there—although I see you’ve brought your own—and a scanner. And, of course, you’ve got your funny little convent room for when you want to be serious.”

“That’s how I always thought of it,” I admit as I walk Claudia to the door, glad for a change of subject. “It’s funny it was attached to Lucy Graham’s bedroom. What could she have used it for?” I ask. “Praying?”

Claudia laughs. “Really, Rose, you Americans are so adorable. It was her maid’s room, of course.”

CHAPTER
TEN

T
HE BEST THING ABOUT THE SUITE TURNS OUT TO BE THE BATH
. T
HE YEAR
I stayed here I used a hall bathroom that featured a hip bath and a rubber hose that dispensed a thin trickle of rust-colored water, while all that time this enormous antique marble tub lay empty behind locked doors! I fill the tub with hot water and pour in a capful of
aqua di rosa,
a potion made by the Farmaceutica Santa Maria Novella. The scent of roses rises with the steam as I sink into the hot water, and I say a little prayer of thanks to the Dominican friars who have been making this magical elixir since the thirteenth century. This same fragrance might have scented the baths of the Renaissance women who first lived in the villa. Ginevra de Laura, Barbagianni’s mistress, might have soaked in this very tub, inhaling this same “perfumed tincture of roses.” Watching the steam rise to the high-domed ceiling, I feel suddenly dizzy, as if the perfumed cloud held the ghosts of all the roses that ever bloomed in the gardens below, a heady potpourri gathered over the centuries.

It’s only the jet lag,
I tell myself, closing my eyes and sinking deeper into the perfumed water, jet lag and the disorientation of my former lover’s wife thanking me for handing her back her husband.
You could have done anything you pleased with him.
She’d made it sound as if I had been the one in control back then, and yet, I’d never felt more out of control in my entire life. From the first day of class, when the handsome dark-eyed professor (I hadn’t yet realized he was still in graduate school) had looked up from his roster after calling my name and recited, “The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem / for that sweet odour which doth in it live.”

Later, when I knew Shakespeare’s sonnet number 54 better, it would strike me as ironic that Bruno wooed me with a poem that praised the beloved for his truthfulness when our love affair was founded on a lie.

I’d like, even now, to pretend that the lie was Bruno’s, that I didn’t know he was married. But he’d mentioned “his wife”—dropping the words like a boy drops stones off a bridge just to watch the ripples they make—the first time he kissed me.

The sonnet class was taught at the little villa near the Via Bolognese. Most of the students would rush out the minute class ended, in a hurry to get to the main villa, where lunch was served. I was a lingerer, though, the student who stayed behind with questions. In truth, I lingered because the sound of Bruno’s voice entranced me each class and I found it hard to tear myself away. I spent my evenings, when I should have been studying, thinking up questions to ask after class so that I could walk back to the main villa with Professor Brunelli, discussing Petrarch and Shakespeare as we walked through the olive grove that lay between the main villa and the road. Instead of eating lunch at the villa, Bruno (as he soon told me to call him) liked to bring bread and cheese and a little flask of red wine and picnic under the shade of the olive trees. He invited me to join him, and I started collecting the small, sweet plums that grew in the walled fruit garden—the
pomerino—
so I’d have something to share in exchange for the bread and cheese and wine he gave me. I brought, too, the little journal I wrote my poems in and, after a few weeks, admitted to him that I wanted to be a poet. He didn’t laugh or ask, as my mother always did when I confessed my ambitions, how I planned to make a living doing
that.
(
What are you going to do? Open a poetry store?
) Instead he looked at me for a long time, his dark brown eyes reflecting the silvery green of the olive trees, and asked, “Why?”

“To make something that lasts,” I answered.

“Let me show you something,” he said, getting up and brushing the dust from his pants, “about the lasting powers of poetry.”

He led me into the gardens, onto the lower terrace with its famous view of Florence, down the lemon walk and through a gate that the students were told not to enter, and down a flight of crumbling steps into a sunken rose garden so overgrown, it appeared to be an underwater pool of pink and red and coral sea anemones.

“Most people think the rose garden is a later addition,” he told me, “an English affectation. But in fact it dates from the late sixteenth century. Ginevra de Laura, Barbagianni’s mistress, designed it herself based on an Elizabethan knot garden. There’s a story that she had visited England and had a lover there and that as she walked through this garden she composed love poems in his memory. The paths are supposedly shaped in her lover’s initials.”

I had an idea then of why he’d brought me here. He wanted me to understand the immortal power of poetry. “Do you come here to write?” I asked.

He smiled and tapped his finger under his eye. “Ah, you’ve found me out. How did you know I wrote poetry?”

“Well, when you teach Petrarch and Shakespeare you speak with such passion—”

“And that
passion,
” he said, his voice lingering over the word, “you think that’s where poetry comes from?”

I blushed as pink as one of the damask roses arching over the path and nodded. “Yes…yes, I do.” I tore the rose off the vine and buried my face in it to hide my embarrassment. I wasn’t used to discussing passion with my professors—or with anyone, for that matter.

We had come to a ruined fountain at the center of the knot. Bruno sat down on the edge of the fountain. “Then in order to write poetry one has to experience that passion—even if it causes pain and sorrow?” he asked.

When I looked up from the rose I saw that he was staring at me with a hunger in his eyes that unnerved me. I realized that these weren’t academic questions—these were life-and-death questions for him, and he seemed to think that I had the answers. The scent of so many roses baking in the hot sun was so strong that I suddenly felt dizzy. I must have swayed slightly, because he put his hand on my arm to steady me and then, when I continued to sway, he pulled me down beside him and kissed me. The rose I held in my hand, already past its bloom, was crushed between us, and its scent seemed to swell around us, a cloud that would shield us from the rest of the world but that also made it hard to breathe. When he pulled away from me, the very air felt heavy with perfume—I could see it—a thick gold haze that trembled all around us.

“You’re not going to faint,
cara,
” he said, laughing. “You do know I have a wife, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I lied, instantly and without thinking, afraid he wouldn’t kiss me again if he thought the first kiss was a mistake.

“We’re separated, of course,” he went on, picking up a rose petal and rubbing it between his thumb and forefinger as if it were a piece of cloth he was considering having a suit made from. Watching his fingers stroke the soft pink flesh made my stomach ache. “We met at the University at Rome and she goes back as often as she can. She finds Florence—and especially La Civetta—too provincial. I’m afraid she’s not cut out to be a professor’s wife.”

“Do you have children?” I managed to ask. When he told me no, I asked, trying to make my voice sound casual, whether he was planning on getting a divorce. He shrugged and pursed his lips in that way Italian men have of dismissing a question as silly. Instead of feeling dis-missed, though, I was looking at his lips and remembering how they felt pressed against mine.

“It’s not so easy for Catholics,” he told me. “If it bothers you, perhaps we’d better stop right now.”

I shrugged, too, trying to imitate his gesture down to the little purse of the lips, although I was finding it hard not to smile.
We’d better stop right now.
His words implied we’d already started something, that our first kiss was not an anomaly, but the first in a
series.

“No,” I said, telling my second lie, “if it doesn’t bother you and she knows—”

“Our understanding is that we are both free to lead our own lives,” he said, lifting his hand and caressing my cheek.

And so I began my affair with Bruno with my eyes open. He hadn’t lied to me. I was the one who lied—who told him I was content with being the mistress of a married man when I knew already that day in the rose garden that I was falling in love with him. I thought it would be okay if the only person I was hurting was myself. I hadn’t counted on him falling in love with me.

The bathwater has gone cold by the time I get out, dripping to the floor in oily splotches. I look down and see a splash of red and think for a moment that I must have gotten my period—that the air travel and the hot bath have brought it on early—but when I kneel to wipe up the stain I see it’s embedded in the marble floor: a red rose petal made out of dark red marble, the same as the ones on the stairs.
Is this where the pattern starts?
I wonder.

I follow the inlaid rose petals out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where they end at the edge of the thick Aubusson carpet. I lift a corner of the rug and see that the pattern continues underneath. I can’t help but wonder whether the pattern extends over the whole floor and whether it consists of only random petals or takes some other shape. I also can’t help wondering why anybody would cover up such a beautiful mosaic of
pietre dure,
even with an expensive French rug. Expensive
and
heavy. It takes all my strength to peel it back and then, kneeling on the cold marble floor, to roll it to the edge of the room, beneath the win-dows. When I’m done, I sit back on the rolled-up carpet, wearing nothing but a towel and a sheen of sweat from my exertions, and survey the floor.

The cascade of petals is thickest around the bed, a deep red circle that surrounds the massive wooden posts like a crimson moat. From there the petals trail off in two directions—the bathroom and then the front door, and to the wide windows overlooking the gardens. I get up and walk around the bed, feeling with my bare feet where the marble has buckled and, in some places, cracked with age. Perhaps this is why the floor’s been covered with a rug—to protect the mosaic from further deterioration. It looks old, centuries old.

The visual arts are not my specialty. When I was here at La Civetta, the professors and students divided themselves into two camps: the word people and the stone people. I was in the word camp, but I secretly loved the art and archeology classes we all had to take and I especially loved
pietre dure
—mosaics crafted out of carved semiprecious stones that became popular under the patronage of the Medici in the late sixteenth century. I try to think of a mosaic that looks like this floor, but the pieces that I’ve seen at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure or at the Uffizi of this quality are usually small tabletops. The only time I’ve seen an entire floor made out of such intricately carved stone is in the Capella dei Medici in San Lorenzo—and that took hundreds of years to complete. Also, there’s something about this design that feels profoundly
personal,
obsessive almost, beyond mere ornament. The pattern seems to be telling a story—but of what event?

I circle the bed once more and notice that the rose petals are thickest on the side of the bed farthest from the window. There’s only a light scattering on the floor between the windows and the bed, as if they had blown there from the open windows. I notice, then, that the rolled-up carpet is covering some kind of border. I push it away and find two mosaic faces on either side of the windows, their cheeks swelling and their lips pursed as if they were blowing out air. Thin, nearly transparent lines (carved from delicate chalcedony) stream out from their lips, rose petals fluttering in their wake. These faces do look familiar to me. They look very much like the figures of the winds in Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus.
So, I figure, the rose petals are supposed to be blown in from the garden, through the window, and then onto the bed. That makes at least some sense. I open the window and step out onto the little wrought-iron balcony. Below me, beyond the lemon walk and to the right of the
teatrino,
at the foot of a long flight of marble steps that are even more derelict and overgrown than they were twenty years ago, I can just make out the old rose garden where Bruno and I first kissed. If I lean over the railing, I might even see the fountain—