The Garden of the Villa Mollini Read online

  On the morning of the housing lottery, Lou couldn’t face cooking barracouta, so we had bread and jam for breakfast. Will turned on the Home Service to calm his wife’s beating heart. I left as early as I could to walk to my park and it was a beautiful morning, still and shiny and the smell of the park in summer was as fantastic to me as the smell of the Majestic cinema was to Lou. A consignment of bedding geraniums had arrived, and I started to dig over the bed where they’d go in. I tried not to think about 879, or about Lou waiting with thousands of other women to hear the numbers called out. There were fifty-one flats in William Petrie Buildings and at least twenty times that number of applicants. Mr. Dowdswell came by to look at the geraniums. ‘Good work, Douglas,’ he said approvingly, and then tapped my bending back and said in his confidential stammer: ‘No more bla . . . no more yer bloody barley next year, thank Ga . . . thank God!’ ‘Hooray, Sir.’ I answered.

  When I got home, Lou was resting and Will was mushing up the barracouta we hadn’t eaten for breakfast. ‘Don’t disturb your mother,’ said Will.

  ‘We didn’t get one, did we?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said Will.

  I went to wash my hands at the sink. Outside, the stuckin conifers were going brown.

  ‘869 was lucky,’ said Will, ‘and 849 and 859, but not 879. Shame we had the 7.’

  I stared at Will and then beyond him to the bedroom where Lou was lying in the aftermath of her malaria. Willou. 8 and 9. Without me, they would have got lucky. I was the 7 alright. I’d made them lose.

  That August Knacky Mick died and I applied for a job at the hospital where I’d visited him and where I’ve been now all my life. I told Willou this was my new start, and they were proud of me. But my last day at the park was one of the saddest things I can remember. They’d harvested the barley. I sat in the sunshine, staring at all the litter left among the stubble and thinking about my country.

  The Garden of the Villa Mollini

  BEFORE THE ARRIVAL of Antonio Mollini in 1877, the villa had been called, simply, the Villa Bianca, the White House. It came to be known as the Villa Mollini, not through the vanity of Antonio Mollini himself, but through the pride of the people of the village. They wanted to be able to say – to travellers who passed that way, to relations who journeyed there from Arezzo or Rapolano or Assisi – ‘We have in our midst the great Mollini, the world’s most renowned opera singer. He knows us and even remembers the names of our children.’

  In fact, Antonio Mollini was seldom there. He was forty-one when he bought the villa and his voice had entered what the critics later termed its ‘decade of magnificence’. His life was passed in the musical capitals of Europe – Milan, Paris, Vienna. He came to the Villa Mollini only to rest, to visit his wife and to plan his garden.

  He wanted, in the design of this garden, to express a simple and optimistic philosophy. He believed that his life was a journey of discovery, revelation and surprise and that it led forward perpetually, never back. In it, there was not merely one goal, one destination, but many, each one leading forwards from the next. All were different. Repetition seldom, if ever, occurred. He would not allow it to occur. And even at life’s close, he thought there would be new landscapes and new visions of hope. The garden he was going to create would thus be infinitely varied, intricate and above all beautiful.

  It was fortunate, then, that the terrain on which he would realise the garden wasn’t flat, but sloped gently upwards away from the house to a cypress grove, and then descended, equally gently, towards a river. On the other side of the river, there were clover fields and, beyond these, a forest. The far edge of the forest was the boundary of Mollini’s land.

  His head gardener, Paulo Pappavincente, was the illegitimate son of a priest. Pappavincente’s mother had died at his birth and he’d been brought up by aged and devout grandparents unable to conceal their shame at his existence. Though Mollini explained his philosophy carefully to Pappavincente, using simple terms, baby language almost, the gardener was unable to see life as his master saw it. To him, it led, repetitively and inevitably, to dark and deep abysses of guilt. But he didn’t want to bore Mollini or anger him with chatter about his own sufferings; he wanted to design the most beautiful garden in Tuscany, so that one day he could say to his own legitimate grandchildren, ‘I made it. I made the garden of the Villa Mollini.’ He did suggest, however, that a well be sunk at a certain place, not far from the house, where Mollini had thought a statue of the goddess Diana would draw the eye forward. ‘I think a well also beckons, Sir,’ he said. To his surprise and also to his relief, Mollini agreed. That night, as he knelt to say his prayers, Pappavincente began to feel that good fortune was stealing into his life.

  The same night, Antonio Mollini’s wife, Rosa, stared by candlelight at the half-completed sketches of the box aisles and the fountains, the herbarium and the rose trellises, the steps and terraces leading up to the cypress grove and down to the river, and said aloud, ‘I think he must contrive a lake.’

  Mollini was asleep. He lay on his back, snoring, with his legs apart. From his magnificent lungs came an unmelodious kind of squealing. Rosa pulled aside the curtains of the bed and leaned over him, holding her candle.

  ‘Antonio,’ she whispered, ‘please, Antonio.’

  He opened his eyes. This thin white face of Rosa’s on its pale neck sometimes reminded him of a sad mask on a stick.

  ‘What, Rosa?’

  ‘When the river leaves our land, westwards, where does it arrive, Antonio?’

  ‘In the village.’

  ‘Then I expect we may have to move the village.’

  Mollini stared up. He chose his mistresses for their roundness, for their bright colour. Rosa was his little ghostly possession.

  ‘We cannot move the village, Rosa.’

  Tears sparkled in her eyes.

  ‘Please, Antonio. You must make a lake.’

  Pappavincente was consulted. When he heard of the plan to dam up the river, he descended once more into his habitual pessimism. Politely, he informed his master of the life-sustaining properties of the village water supply. Antonio Mollini felt ashamed. He loved the village people. He’d made a list of all their names and the names of their children so that he wouldn’t forget them, and now, in the night, he’d allowed his wife to suggest something that would impoverish and destroy them. ‘Rosa is mad’, he said to Pappavincente, ‘but forgive her. Since the death of Pietro, her mind often wanders astray.’

  The death of Pietro had occurred in the same year that Mollini’s fame was born. Consumption thus played a role in both events. As Mollini sang Alfredo in Verdi’s La Traviata, his son Pietro was dying of Violetta’s disease. He refused to mourn. He looked at the little coffin. He would have more sons. He would replace Pietro. He would christen all his sons ‘Pietro’, so that if another one died, he, too, could be replaced. Rosa accused him of callousness. ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I will not let death win.’

  Rosa didn’t conceive. She knew that loss, like starvation, can make a woman barren. She would be barren for ever, mourning Pietro. She longed, at that time, for a garden. She thought it would make her feel more kindly towards the world if she could bury seeds in the earth and see leaves emerge, bright green. But Mollini wasn’t yet rich. They lived in Milan in a narrow house on a dark courtyard. The Villa Mollini was six years away.

  In those six years, Pappavincente fathered four sons, one of whom he christened Pietro.

  Mollini fathered none. His fame grew. ‘There is no adequate epithet to describe Mollini’s voice,’ one French critic wrote. ‘To say it is like honey, or like velvet, or like silver is merely to debase it. It is like no other voice we have ever heard.’

  On its gentle hillside, the Villa Mollini, still known as the Villa Bianca and occupied by a professor of medicine, waited for the great man’s arrival.

  In the week following Rosa’s dreadful request for a lake, Mollini left for Milan. On his forty-second birthday, the day he began rehearsals
for La Scala’s new production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, he met for the first time the internationally known soprano, Verena Dusa, and fell in love with her.

  La Dusa was thirty-four. Her elbows were dimpled and her belly and breasts round and firm and fat. She was the mistress of the impresario, Riccardo Levi, from whose bed Mollini quickly wooed her.

  Riccardo Levi demanded a duel and was refused. He threatened to ruin La Dusa’s career, but his threats were ignored. La Dusa moved her dresses and her fan collection from Levi’s apartment to Mollini’s town house. In despair, Riccardo Levi wrote a letter to Rosa, telling Mollini’s wife that she had been betrayed.

  Rosa examined the letter. She held it near to her face because her eyesight was getting bad and Riccardo Levi had small, mean handwriting. As she read the word ‘betrayed’, she felt a pain shoot down from her knees to the soles of her feet, as if in seconds she’d become an old crone, unable to walk. She put the letter down and stood up, clinging first to the writing table, then to the wall. She went to the window. A team of surveyors had arrived. Pappavincente was describing to them an imaginary circle, the site of his well. Rosa tapped on the window, to summon Pappavincente to help her, but her tap was too feeble and he couldn’t hear her. Her maid came in a while later and found her lying on the floor. She was unable to speak. Her maid called for help. Rosa was put to bed and a doctor sent for. With the arrival of the doctor, word spread to Pappavincente and the other gardeners that the Signora was ill. Retribution, thought Pappavincente.

  The doctor examined Rosa. She was in shock, he told the servants. Something must have frightened her – something she’d seen from the window, perhaps? The servants shrugged their shoulders. Rosa’s maid stroked her mistress’s cold white forehead. Keep her warm, said the doctor and went away. Coverlets were piled on the bed, one on top of another, so that the shape of Rosa’s body disappeared completely beneath them and only her small head stuck out like a tiny sprout on a desirée potato.

  She lay without speaking for a week. Her maid propped her up and spooned vermicelli broth into her narrow mouth. Outside her window, she could hear men talking and tried to turn her head to listen. ‘Drains,’ her maid explained gently, ‘they’re here to re-route the drains and lay conduits to the fountains.’

  The doctor returned. His own wife quite often irritated him by succumbing to illnesses he was unable to cure except by cradling her in his arms like a baby. He looked at Rosa’s blank face. He refused to cradle her in his arms. There were dark hairs on her top lip and creases in her eyelids. ‘Where is Signor Mollini?’ he snapped. ‘He must be sent for.’

  So the servants sent for the priest. He, too, came and stared at Rosa and placed a palm leaf cross on her coverlet mountain and then sat down, in the silence of her room, and wrote in exquisite calligraphy to Antonio Mollini, informing him that his wife appeared to be dying.

  When the letter arrived in Milan, on an early morning of grey mist, Mollini’s voice – that same voice that had caused thousands of Society women to weep with wonder behind their opera glasses – was whispering playful obscenities in La Dusa’s ear. She squirmed and giggled and pouted and the pout of her wide lips was so delicious and irresistible that Mollini was unable to stop himself from kissing them again and murmuring through his nose, ‘I love you, Verena. I love you beyond everything.’

  His servant knocked at his door. He rolled over and covered La Dusa’s breasts with the sheet. The servant excused himself and came forward to the bed and offered Mollini the priest’s letter on a silver salver. It was written on fine parchment, like a communion wafer. Mollini snatched it up and told the servant not to disturb him again that morning. The servant bowed and retreated. Mollini glanced at the letter, tossed it onto the marble bedside cabinet and turned back to La Dusa who lay with her arms above her head, waiting for his embrace.

  The letter was forgotten. He remembered it at last towards six o’clock that evening, as he was preparing to leave for the opera house. He opened it as he was gargling with blackcurrant cordial. When he read the word ‘dying’, he choked on the gargle and spat it all over the bathroom floor. He wiped his mouth, read the letter again and sat down on a stool. For the first time in several months, he remembered Pietro, and at once he saw, clearly and beautifully, where fate had led and where indeed it was leading. It was leading to La Dusa. Rosa was dying because she was unable to bear him more sons. It was fitting. Rosa was dried up, barren, old before her time. But here, right here in his bed, was Verena Dusa with her succulent round hips that would accommodate his future children. All he had to do was to marry her. It was gloriously simple. It was like stepping from a dark, shaded laurel walk onto a sunny terrace and finding at your feet pots of scented jasmine.

  That same evening, Rosa spoke for the first time in seven days. She asked her maid to help her into the garden. When she crept out from under the coverlets, she seemed to have shrunk. Her long white nightgown was tangled round her feet. She looked like a chrysalis.

  She was wrapped up in a cloak. Her hair was brushed and pinned up. She went hesitantly down the stairs, clinging to her maid’s arm.

  Pappavincente was standing in the garden in the twilight, looking at the well shafts. The water table was low. The construction workers had sunk the shafts almost fifty feet. He looked up and saw Rosa totter out with her maid. ‘Forgive her’, Mollini had said. Pappavincente left the well and started to walk towards her. Her maid sat her down on a little stone seat. She stared about her in bewilderment. Deep trenches had been dug in the terraces. Mounds of red earth and lengths of lead piping lay all around.

  ‘Signora,’ said Pappavincente, bowing, ‘for your recovery we are making all these waterworks.’ But she only stared at him in bewilderment too, as if he were a lunatic, as if he were the village idiot. ‘I want,’ she said, looking at the devastation round her, ‘my husband back.’ Up above the chimneys of the house and above the garden several bats were circling. Rosa liked bats. ‘Pipistrelli,’ she’d call, ‘pipi, pipi . . .’

  Unaware that the priest had written to Mollini, Rosa that night had the lamp lit on her writing desk and sat down with her pen. She told Mollini that she had been ill and that she had imagined she was lying in a grave with Pietro. Over her body, the earth had been piled higher and higher in a colossal mound, with only her head sticking out. She could not, she said, endure such imaginings and only his love could save her from them. She would forgive him his sin of the flesh if he would just return to her. She signed the letter Your Wife Until Death, Rosa Mollini. Her writing, unlike the priest’s hand, was cramped and ugly and her spelling not terribly good.

  Rosa’s letter reached Milan four days later. Mollini and La Dusa had triumphed in Tristan und Isolde and had been invited each night to elegant suppers by the likes of the Duke of Milan and the Count of Piedmont and had revelled together in their glory. At one of these suppers Mollini had become tottering drunk on a surfeit of champagne and pleasure and had rested his head on La Dusa’s bosom and proposed marriage to her. The other guests had gasped, remembering the small, elegant wife he used to bring to evenings such as these, but La Dusa had only laughed and stroked his burning cheek and told him she was his till she died.

  When he read Rosa’s letter (he had a hangover when it was brought to him and his head was throbbing) he knew that he wouldn’t, couldn’t go back to her. When he thought about his life with Rosa, he was amazed he’d been able to endure it for so many years. Because it seemed full of shadow. Only at Pietro’s birth had the sun shone on it and after his death it had become colourless and ghostly.

  But Mollini knew also that he couldn’t abandon his plans for the garden to Rosa and Pappavincente, both of whose natures were pessimistic and depressive. So he decided he would take La Dusa back with him to the Villa Mollini. He was a great man, revered in the village. He could do as he liked. He was beyond criticism. And he wouldn’t hide La Dusa away. Oh, no. He would move out of the rooms he’d shared with Rosa and into other ro
oms which he’d share with La Dusa. When they were invited out, both women would accompany him, wife and mistress. Tuscan society would be given the chance to exclaim upon La Dusa’s gorgeous beauty. And Rosa? Rosa was a religious, reserved woman. She would behave piously, with dignity, staying away from him most of the time, reading or sewing in her rooms or going to communion.

  Having obtained La Dusa’s willing agreement to these arrangements, Mollini wrote to tell Rosa that he was returning home, but that he was unable to live without Verena Dusa and that she would therefore be coming with him.

  Five days later, they arrived at the Villa Mollini to be told by the servants that Rosa was dead. She had been found with a burned scrap of paper in her hand, which they thought might have been a letter. She had shot herself with one of Mollini’s duelling pistols.

  Summer was coming. The re-routing of the drains wasn’t entirely successful. As Mollini and his love sat with their fingers entwined on the first of the terraces to be completed, they fancied they could smell something decidedly unsavoury.

  It had been a dry spring and the river was low. Verena Dusa went down and looked at the river and said, as she strolled along with her plump little hand fondling Mollini’s velvet-clad buttocks, ‘You know what I would like here, my darling? A lake.’

  Pappavincente was summoned. ‘I am going to dam up the river,’ Mollini informed him. ‘Water will be taken to the village in metal containers. Every villager will have his rightful share.’

  Pappavincente went down to the village, informed the people what was happening and told them to march shoulder to shoulder up to the Villa and break down the gates and threaten to kill Signor Mollini if he went ahead with his dam. ‘We will!’ said a few voices. ‘We won’t let our river be taken away!’ And some of the men got out their pitchforks and their scythes. But nearly all the women of the village folded their arms and shrugged their shoulders. ‘As long as we have water,’ they said, ‘we’re really perfectly happy. Perhaps it will be less trouble to get water from the containers than from the river. And anyway, we mustn’t forget how lucky we are to have Signor Mollini right here in our valley . . .’