The Savage Garden. Mark Mills

her before, before this –’ Her fingertips moved to her forehead. ‘She was so beautiful. Now she hides herself away in a back room and works with her hands. La poverina.’

      Her words riled him, especially the last two, replete with pity: the poor thing.

      ‘I disagree,’ said Adam. ‘I can’t see her hiding herself.’

      ‘No?’ Her tone was flat, sceptical.

      ‘I know I’ve only met her once, but it’s what struck me most – that she’s not ashamed, not embarrassed. The way she wears her hair, the way she carries herself. She’s not hiding.’

      ‘You think she doesn’t look in the mirror every morning and wish it was different?’

      ‘Maybe. I don’t know. But she’s more beautiful because of it, because of the way she is with it.’

      ‘You really believe that?’

      ‘I do. Yes.’

      At first he took her look for one of weary sufferance, and he suddenly felt very young, he suddenly felt like a person in the presence of someone who has spent considerably more time on the planet. But there was something else in her eyes, something he couldn’t quite place. He only realized what it was when a slow and slightly wicked smile spread across her face.

      ‘You’re playing with me.’

      ‘It’s nice to see you defending her. And you’re right – she is more beautiful because of it.’

      ‘How did it happen?’

      ‘It was near Portofino, at night. Her mother was driving. She was also lucky. She only broke two ribs.’

      Signora Docci had not elaborated. In fact, she had termin ated the conversation then and there on some doubtful pretext, banishing him back downstairs to his books.

      Maybe that’s what the problem was, mused Adam, strolling back past the grotto: the routine, the rigmarole, long periods of study broken by conversations with a bed-bound septuagenarian. Toss the pitiless heat into the pot, and it was little wonder he was losing his grip.

      He climbed the steps sunk into the slope behind the grotto, resolving as he did so to break the pattern, to introduce some variety into his life, maybe eat out one night, cycle off somewhere for half a day, or even hitch a lift into Florence – anything to add some variety, jolt him out of his folly.

      He stopped at the base of the amphitheatre and stared up at Flora on her pedestal near the top. He would never be able to see her as he had that first time. Antonella’s words had irrevocably coloured his judgement. When he looked on the goddess twisting one way then the other he no longer saw the classic pose borrowed from Giambologna, he saw a woman contorted with some other emotion, he saw the provocative thrust of her right hip.

      Why put her there, near the top but not at the top? In fact, why put her there at all, in a nine-tiered amph i theatre? And why nine instead of seven tiers? Or five for that matter? What was so special about nine? The nine lives of a cat? A stitch in time…? The nine planets of the solar system? No, they hadn’t known about Pluto back then. Shakespeare, maybe – Macbeth – the witches repeating their spells nine times. Not possible. Shakespeare couldn’t have been more than a boy when the garden was laid out. Close, though. And the occult connection was interesting. How had the witches put it?

       Thrice to thine, and thrice to mine,And thrice again to make up nine.

      The trinity to the power of three – a powerful number - thrice sacred, like the Holiest of Holies, composed of the three trinities. And something else, some other dark association with the number nine. But what?

      He pulled himself up short, the resolution fresh in his mind yet already ignored. He lit a cigarette, dropped the match in the trough at the foot of the amphitheatre and made off up the pathway.

      He was a few yards shy of the yew hedge barring his exit from the garden when the answer came to him.

      The nine circles of Hell in Dante’s Inferno.

      It was several moments before he turned and hurried back down the path to the amphitheatre.

      It wasn’t that the statue of Flora was placed on the second tier from the top – he couldn’t remember just which category of human sin or depravity had been enshrined by Dante in the second circle of his Inferno - it was the inscription on the triumphal arch standing proud on the crest above that settled it:

      It took him ten minutes to locate a copy of the book in the library, just time enough to recover his breath. He dropped into a leather chair and examined the tome: La Divina Commedia by Dante Alighieri, an Italian edition dating from the late nineteenth century.

      His dictionary was back at the pensione, but with any luck he wouldn’t need it, not immediately. Even his rudimentary Italian should be up to establishing which class of sinner inhabited the second circle of Dante’s Hell, his Inferno.

      He had never actually read The Divine Comedy right through. He had skimmed it, filleted a couple of com mentaries, done just enough to satisfy an examiner that he was well acquainted with the text. He could have put forward a convincing argument for the timeless appeal of Dante’s epic poem, the crowning glory of his life, twelve years in the writing, completed just before his death in 1321. He could also have listed a number of great writers and poets who openly and willingly acknowledged their debt to the work – William Blake, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. He could even have come up with some specifics, lines in The Waste Land that Eliot had lifted straight from The Divine Comedy.

      Never having read The Waste Land – or any works by Beckett and Joyce, for that matter – he would have been hard pressed to say what exactly these modern men of letters had seen to inspire them in a medieval poem about a lost soul’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise.