In the fifth part are a funnel-like corridor of cages of galvanized steel, each filled with white, red, and green pebbles; beds of hart’s tongue fern sprinkled with luminous little wells of water; and a small forest of tree trunks bleached by salty seawater spray.
In the sixth part is a square tube of opaque glass that runs toward the pond, supported by carved rocks; short slabs of dull copper growing upright in beds of fiddlehead fern, royal fern, and sweet fern; and a path made of stone split along its natural cleavage planes.
The seventh part has the cistern, now an ornamental pond studded with conical heaps of crushed white glass rising a foot and a half above the surface of the water; long, narrow beds fanning out from the water like sunrays; and stands of bamboo in purply black patches of mussel shells.
I talked to them about the Garden as Experience, about the kind of garden you can move through as if it represents a whole lifetime, like a set of memories; of the hardness of stone shattering against water and against the transparency of glass; about new elements versus old elements that deserve to be preserved and reshaped; about the three-way axis point in the fourth part, which is simply a reinterpretation of an old-fashioned garden, with the plant elements confronting the mineral elements and ultimately mixing and interpenetrating; about the marine elements as the memory of these plains where we live, a reference to their fossilized past; about the light and shadow that we simply have to accept; about the nuanced, indeterminate areas; about the unresolved elements; about the warped reflections and the ferns’ symmetrical chaos; and I concluded by calling it a Garden as Dream.
Rossi turns his palms up to the sky and shakes his head slowly, smiling slightly. Now he’s going to tell me it’s all nonsense, I think, surprised to find myself anxious about a client’s opinion, which I never have been before.
But “It’s marvelous,” says he, “it’s evocative and …” He looks for some other adjective, shakes his head, “marvelous.”
From the sound of it, Witold must have been worried too: I hear him sigh with relief. Everyone smiles and relaxes.
Then, still looking at the garden, Rossi says, “And what do you think, darling?”
Elisabetta is standing off to one side; out of the corner of my eye, I had seen her stroking the tiger flowers, shaking the ferns as if she wanted to wake them up, closely inspecting the shells embedded in the concrete, playing with the mirror shards that shifted one of her eyes away from her face.
“Yes, it’s marvelous,” she says.
I look down. I picture myself in my kitchen, Elisabetta across the table from me, and me asking her, “What did you really think of the garden, back then?” Ten or fifteen years have gone by, and we’re living together. “It was marvelous,” she says.
Rossi asked me back to his study for a cup of coffee. Before going up in the elevator, he calls over one of the twins and whispers something in his ear. Once we get to the study, he has me sit on the red sofa.
He says, “I understand, and … thank you.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. I smile, just barely. I hope he’ll explain quickly.
“Alfredo is watching us from up there,” he says, pointing heavenward.
I nod. The secretary comes in with the coffee.
“Congratulations, Mr. Fratta,” she says, more cordial than ever before. “It’s really splendid. We were all speechless.”
I smile and thank her. She leaves.
“It’s the story of Alfredo’s life — I understood that right away. The three archways are the three choices he made: scholar, benefactor, and head of the family … and the labyrinth is the world, where a fragile human being gets tossed against the hard, sharp rocks … and the mysterious ways of the Lord … the pull of the basic essence of things … the bleached wood is splendid … and that final image of bliss, the clouds upside down in the pond … his spirit really hovers through the whole garden … I didn’t dare to hope for something so good … and I can’t wait to show it to some friends, the friends who will understand …”
I try to stay perfectly still; anyway, he doesn’t need any confirmation from me. The twins come in, and one of them takes away the tray of coffee cups; the other is carrying a rectangular package wrapped in paper, which he sets on the floor, leaning up against the wheelchair.
“But the garden will also be good for my wife, so we’re thankful to you for that too. She’s so fragile and unstable. She needs peace and quiet.”
A pause.
“She needs to spend some time alone, thinking about her life. But how can I help her with that, in the condition I’m in?”
He no longer has the plaid blanket across his legs; he smooths the rumples in his sweatpants.
“She has a very sad family history, you know. They wrung her dry, wiped her out, erased her. She has no ambitions, no dreams, as if the future didn’t exist.”
A pause.
“I don’t know what she wants, and I’m afraid she doesn’t want anything. Isn’t that terrible? Isn’t it terrible to want nothing? Or to want only small, simple things?”
Obviously I wasn’t supposed to respond that there was nothing terrible about it — that you just had to get used to it. I stayed quiet.
Rossi picked up the package.
“This is a gift; I’m deeply indebted to you,” he said, offering it to me.
“You shouldn’t have—”
“Yes, I should.”
He had tears in his eyes. “Please,” he said, “take it.”
I got up and took the package; I could feel a frame inside — it was a picture.
Afterward, I drove Witold home; he was excited and proud, humming the aria from some opera, and every so often he turned to me and said, “So everything’s good, right?”
“Everything’s good.”
In the rearview mirror I kept my eye on the black Ka that was following me.
When I got home I brought the package right inside, shut my front door, and unwrapped the picture in the front hall. I heard the tires crackling across the courtyard gravel. It was the painting of the country house covered with climbing plants and immersed in dense, bright green foliage. Someone rang the bell. I set the painting on the floor against the wall and went toward the door. I asked who it was. No one answered. I didn’t open it. They rang again.
“Who is it?”
No answer. I let her in.
She came in without looking at me. She was still wearing her shorts, top, and flip-flops. She looked at the painting. She turned around. She came close and embraced me. She squeezed me tight, hiding her face in the crook of my neck, pressing her breasts against me.
I took her hair in my fist and pulled it gently, forcing her head back. I kissed her. I felt her tongue slide around mine. I wished that I had a new life, with a kiss like that every evening. It seemed like a simple wish that could easily come true.
That Thursday night, Elisabetta went home again, but on Friday she was back, and for the first time she stayed the whole night, and Saturday, and until Sunday morning. She told Alberto she was going to visit her aunts up at the lake. She wanted to hide the Ka under a tarp in case someone came around here looking for her; I told her it was useless because anybody who might be following her regularly would already know she was here, but I pulled out an old camouflage tarp anyway, one that I covered the R4 with whenever I spent a few days away from home, in case any savvy vintage-car collector commissioned someone to steal it.
We didn’t leave the house for thirty-six hours; we didn’t even open the shutters, and when we weren’t in bed we left the rooms dimly lit, and when moving from kitchen to living room, we crossed the few shafts of light that slanted through the shutters; in the whirling dust her hips and back were tiger-striped by the sun.