The Sonnet Lover (43 page)

On the front door of the convent is a sign in Italian that says that the convent is open for visitors from one thirty to four. It’s ten after one now, so I walk to an olive tree on a bank above the river and sit beneath it to eat my lunch. The warm trunk feels good against my back and the silvery green light is so peaceful, I soon feel my eyes closing. I think about Ginevra de Laura spending her last years here. It had always sounded like a sentence to me, a harsh exile to cold convent life, but there’s nothing cold here. The sound of the river is hypnotic and I find myself drifting into a light sleep. When I wake up, someone is blocking the sun.

“Did you want to see the tapestry works?” the woman asks in an Australian accent. “We’re only open for visitors for another half hour.”

I look at my watch and see I’ve slept more than two hours. I should feel achy and miserable from sleeping on the ground, but instead I feel oddly refreshed.

“Yes,” I say, “that’s what I came for. Thank you for waking me. I had no idea I was asleep for so long.”

“You must have needed it,” the nun says soothingly. It’s what my mother always said when I slept late or fell asleep during the day. It was the one indulgence she allowed me, refusing to wake me up for school if I overslept. It made me cross when I was a teenager, but I feel grateful now for having my afternoon nap sanctioned.

“Yes, I guess I did,” I say. “It was just what I needed.”

The Australian nun (Sister Kate, she tells me) leads me inside the convent. She shows me the shearing rooms and the great vats where the wool is washed and dyed. “We spin by hand, so the sisters usually spin in their own rooms,” she tells me. “And then the wool is woven into tapestries in here.” She takes me into a long, cavernous room where a dozen nuns sit at looms. Light comes through wide arched windows glazed with old mottled glass, turning the colored wool on the looms into gleaming streams. The colors of the wool threads remind me of the clear colors of the stones at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. Ginevra would have been at home here, weaving patterns out of the radiant colors instead of chipping away at hard stone. Between the arched windows hang tapestries produced by the convent—copies, Sister Kate tells me, of designs originally made in the fourteenth century. It’s a series of scenes involving a pair of lovers. I recognize two of the designs from the Villa La Civetta: the boy snaring a bird and the young man offering a rose to his lover.

“I think the originals of these two are hanging in the Villa La Civetta,” I tell Sister Kate.

“Yes, the convent used to be on the grounds of the villa and the nuns produced many tapestries for the Barbagianni family. After the convent was moved here, the Barbagiannis still sent the tapestries here to be repaired.”

“Really? Are there records of the repairs?”

Sister Kate smiles. “Yes. Most of the books were removed to La Civetta after the flood in 1966, but the reverend mother kept the convent record books. Was there anything you were particularly interested in?”

“There was a woman who came here in the late sixteenth century,” I say. I notice that I avoid calling Ginevra a nun. “Her name was Ginevra de Laura.”

“Of course, the poet. Would you like to see her cell?”

I don’t answer right away. I find that although I’ve traveled all this way to find out what I can about Ginevra, I’m reluctant to look at the confined space where she lived out her final years. Sister Kate, though, doesn’t wait for my answer. “Come,” she says, “it’s on the way to the records room.”

She takes me down a long hallway that is, although narrow, amply lit by high clerestory windows along one side. “No one lives in it anymore because of the frescoes,” she says. “The reverend mother says they should be available for everybody to see and enjoy.” She opens a door at the end of the hall and stands aside to let me enter first. I step into the room expecting a narrow claustrophobic cell, but instead it’s as if I’ve stepped into a garden in the middle of summer.

Every inch of wall space is covered with delicately painted flowers like the millefiori design on a tapestry. At first I think that the flowers are painted onto marble, but when I look more closely I see that the background has only been painted to resemble marble and that each flower, each petal and stem, also has the texture and markings of stone. Ginevra painted the walls of her convent cell to resemble the
pietre dure
she had grown up carving in her father’s workshop.

There’s no bed in the room, only two chairs in the middle of the floor, one of which Sister Kate sits down in, motioning for me to take the other. “I like to come sit here when I need to find peace,” she says as I sit down in the other chair. “It makes me feel as if I’m inside a waterfall.”

I look up at the walls and see what she means. The flowers seem to be cascading down from the ceiling, floating toward the floor, as though borne on a current of water. In among the whole flowers are hundreds of rose petals, drifting free. It’s hard to define why, but the overall impression is immensely peaceful.

We sit quietly in the room for perhaps a quarter of an hour, and then Sister Kate gets up and, without a word, walks out the door. I follow her to the end of the hallway and then up a flight of stairs. Only when we’ve come to a paneled room filled with mostly empty shelves does she talk again. “The reverend mother moved the library upstairs after the flood in 1966 and had these shelves built. We’re still waiting for the collection to be restored.”

“I think it’s unconscionable that the collection is still at La Civetta,” I say, “but if the villa becomes the property of Hudson College, I’m sure they’ll return the books to you.”

“That would be wonderful. All we have are some old record books—mostly to do with the weaving and repair of tapestries. They were in the weaving room when the river flooded and so escaped the deluge. They’re important, I’m sure, but rather dry reading. I’m afraid there won’t be anything here about Ginevra. The work on the tapestries was anonymous.” She deftly thumbs through a dozen books and retrieves one that she opens for me. It’s a record of repairs to tapestries in the first decades of the seventeenth century. “But I’ve always thought that this nun, the one with the beautiful handwriting, might be Ginevra.”

I look down at the entries and nearly gasp. The handwriting in the record book is identical to the handwriting of the poems I’ve found. “I think you’re right,” I say, surprised to hear that my voice is trembling. I’d like to ask to borrow the record book, but I can’t possibly expect the convent to trust anyone from La Civetta with their books again. As if reading my mind, Sister Kate offers to make a photocopy of the page. “We have a brand new Canon copier in the office,” she says proudly.

I start to laugh at the incongruity of such a modern convenience in this medieval setting, but my eye is caught by an entry at the bottom of the page I’m holding. I lift it closer to make out the faded ink and the antiquated Italian. It’s dated June 5, 1613.

“A new backing of crimson silk sewn for the Barbagianni family,” it reads, “for a tapestry of a courtier handing his lady a rose, to be hung in the
camera nuziale
for Fideo Barbagianni’s new bride. May the sins of the father not be visited upon the son.”

“Oh, yes,” Sister Kate says when she sees what entry I’m reading, “I’ve noticed that one. It’s an odd little editorial comment, isn’t it?”

I nod, unable to speak.

“You know what I think?” Sister Kate asks, a conspiratorial glint lighting up her eyes. “I think Fideo was her son. She was sewing the decorations for her own son’s wedding chamber. I imagine she sewed all her love for him into that tapestry.”

“Yes, I think you may be right,” I say, handing the record book into Sister Kate’s capable hands. I don’t add that I think Ginevra may have sewn something else into that tapestry.

All the way back on the long bus ride into Florence, I think about the tapestry Ginevra repaired for Fideo’s wedding in 1613. She hadn’t seen the boy since she had been banished from the villa when his father died, tossed aside like a piece of outdated furniture. This in itself didn’t surprise me. Even if she had been Barbagianni’s lawful wife instead of his mistress, she would have had to leave. Widows reverted to the property of their father’s households when their husbands died, leaving their children behind in
their
fathers’ households. Ginevra’s father was dead by 1613. The only other option for a widow was the convent.

So even if Fideo
were
her son, her fate would have been the same. And yet I can’t help but think that it changes everything. That it makes her banishment from La Civetta that much crueler and the fact that she repaired the tapestry for his wedding night that much more poignant. Could he have been her son? He was eleven when Barbagianni died in 1593. His mother, whom Barbagianni married shortly after Ginevra disappeared from Florence in 1581, supposedly died during childbirth in February of 1582. According to the version of the story I had heard, Ginevra de Laura became Barbagianni’s mistress soon after. Although it would have been common for a man of Barbagianni’s wealth and position to have a mistress, it was considered unseemly to install one in his deceased wife’s place so soon after her death. But what if Cecelia Cecchi’s baby had died in childbirth? If Ginevra had conceived a child when Barbagianni raped her in May of 1581, then she would have had a child a month before Cecelia Cecchi died in childbirth. Perhaps Pietro de Laura contacted Barbagianni to tell him that his daughter had borne him an illegitimate son—or perhaps Pietro heard somehow that Cecelia Cecchi’s child had died.

I imagine a deal being struck between Barbagianni and Pietro de Laura. When Pietro discovered that his daughter was carrying Barbagianni’s child, he wrote to Barbagianni offering to drop the suit against him if he would adopt the child and take Ginevra as his mistress. She’d live in luxury and she would be close to her son. What other options did she have? Even if she had fallen in love with a young poet in England, she couldn’t have married him, especially if she was carrying another man’s child. So she returned to Florence and gave her child to the man who had raped her. Then, eleven years later, when Barbagianni died, she wrote to her English lover and begged him to come see her. She was free, but not for long. She knew she would have to leave La Civetta, leave her only child. Did she think her English lover would come and take her away? Did he come at all?

He must not have, I think, as the bus arrives at the terminal across from the church of Santa Maria Novella. The trip back has flown by, so caught up have I been in trying to piece together these bits of Ginevra’s life, like trying to untangle the thousand threads of a tapestry. Still, when I check my watch I see that it’s after five o’clock and, looking up at the clouds massing over Santa Maria Novella, I see, too, that the day has turned from clear to overcast without my noticing it. Since the next bus isn’t scheduled to leave for twenty minutes—and I’m afraid I might get caught in the rain—I wander into the church, remembering that it had been my favorite when I was here before.

Many people consider its late-Gothic interior the most beautiful in the city. Walking down the central nave, beneath the green-and-white striped vaults, I feel the effect of the church’s well-ordered proportions. I remember learning that the pillars become narrower as they lead up to the choir to emphasize the length of the nave. The effect is a sense of balance and harmony that imparts a feeling of peace. Like listening to classical music or reading a sonnet. Chaotic emotion distilled into a rhythmic pattern that feels as if it’s been going on forever and will continue into eternity.

As I walk back to the bus stop I can feel the tangled skeins of threads rearranging themselves into the pattern of a tapestry. Ginevra would have recognized at once the tapestry that hung in the
camera nuziale
and known it was for Fideo’s marriage. Like Griselda, she was reduced to the place of servant preparing for her own child’s wedding, only here there would be no last-minute reprieve, no welcome back into the home she had been forced out of. I don’t think she would have wanted to return to La Civetta, but I imagine she would have wanted to make the repaired tapestry a wedding gift to her son. What could she have given but the only experience she had of love—the poems she exchanged with her English lover. So she sewed them into the silk lining on the back of the tapestry, where they would lie between the tapes-try and the painting beneath it. A barrier between an ideal of courtly love and its desecration.

The bus lumbers toward the Piazza San Marco, where I have to wait again for the bus that will take me to the villa. I should feel impatient to see whether my guess is right, but I don’t. I feel as if I’m carrying the peace of the Convent of Santa Catalina with me, like a round weathered stone in my pocket that I only have to stroke to feel sure and calm. When we pass the Casino di San Marco I imagine Ginevra’s youth there, working in her father’s workshop, chipping stones into patterns of flowers and fruit for wealthy clients. I think of her commissioning the floor for the
camera nuziale
that would always remind her—and Barbagianni—of his violation of her and the blood she shed. Although she was constrained in the choices she could make, she was able to turn her pain into things of beauty: blood drops transformed into rose petals, her lost love affair into sonnets, the walls of her convent cell into a screen of roses, an old tapestry into a reliquary for her poems.

I only wish that I could make the torn threads of my own life into something half as lovely, but as the bus climbs the hill to the villa and my thoughts turn from Ginevra’s story to my own, I can’t imagine that anything good will come of what I’ve done. If Daisy has told my story to the police—and I don’t see her procrastinating—Orlando and Claudia will already have been taken into custody and Bruno will know it’s my doing. That I’ve proved that Robin didn’t kill himself, as I set out to do, gives me curiously little satisfaction. Instead, the burden of my actions feels as heavy and oppressive as the rain clouds I glimpse over the villa’s gate as I get off the bus.