Belladonna Read online

  When the daylight has nearly faded, we meet Leandro on the terrace, and talk into the night.

  It is an endless botheration trying to keep up with all of them. Especially watching Belladonna effortlessly gallop her horse, Artemis. If she can ride that creature, she can ride anything. She proves it when an ostrich arrives one day, a joke gift from Leandro. Dino throws a rope around its neck, Belladonna hops on, and off they scramble. She bounces along and hangs on for dear life as they zigzag through the tomatoes and green peppers. Caterina tries not to wail in distress as the rest of us are nearly collapsing with laughter. Bryony names the revolting creature Fluffy, and when Pasquale and Guido build an enclosure for him downwind of the horses, he becomes the talk of the village. We try to tame him so the local kids can ride him, but Fluffy has fallen hard for Belladonna, and a one-woman ostrich he remains.

  Oh ho, the magic touch!

  We go up every afternoon to hear a different story from Leandro, fanning ourselves as we sit in the shade of the grape arbor on his terrace, the valley below us shimmering gold and brown. I’ve got to be very careful of the sun here"I don’t tan anymore; I blotch.

  Like Scheherazade, Leandro enchants us and instructs us. He talks around the topic del giorno, and this way we are far more likely to remember what he says.

  “I no longer wish to impose my will, to tell people what to do,” Leandro said to us one sweltering afternoon just before dusk. “I have done that for too many years, and paid the price for it. Now I am content to watch others instead. They must figure out the answers for themselves.”

  He makes us think. Belladonna is observing and absorbing his manner and wisdom, his vast store of knowledge, his charming facade, which belies a core of steel. His pain. And, of course, his ruthlessness. He occasionally shares with us snippets from his catalog of professional dirty tricks. Personally, I live for those moments. Of course I’m not going to tell them to you now. What manner of fool must you think me!

  Besides, I expect you’ll figure out which are his soon enough.

  “Tell me about your childhood,” Leandro says to Belladonna one day. “It will help me to understand you.”

  I am curious myself. Not once has she mentioned her family.

  “I grew up in small-town America, just outside St. Louis,” she says after a long silence, staring out over the sunflowers dropping in the heat. “Webster Groves, Missouri. A million miles from here. My mother’s full-time occupation was getting drunk and doting on my father. He was a banker, all puffed up with the power it gave him in our little world. William and Maria, the infamous party-mad Nickersons. I was an only child, which is why I’m sometimes so jealous of you and Matteo,” she adds, turning to me.

  “Jealous of us?” I am stupefied.

  “Jealous of your twinness,” she says. “Jealous that you grew up with family around you.”

  “Yes, well look where it got us.”

  She ignores that. “My mother stayed busy with her bridge parties and the country club and serving my father’s every whim. I was starved for attention, so when they shipped me off to boarding school I kept getting into trouble, hoping somebody would notice me.” She ventures a rueful grin. “Fighting for the underdog. I got expelled from one school because I cut Sally Simpson’s pigtails off and then flushed her head in the toilet. She was bullying the little kids and I couldn’t stand it.”

  “I’m sure she deserved it,” I say.

  “She did, but my parents were furious. They were terrible snobs, and manners were all they cared about. Appearances, one-upping everyone at the club with the biggest car, the driest martinis, the new decorator with the horrible overstuffed sofas. All I really wanted to do was please them, of course, like any child wants to please its parents. I wanted to please everybody. I just didn’t know how.

  “And then, my mother’s drinking got out of control,” she goes on, her face and her voice both far away. “Her gambling, too. As soon as my father went to work she pulled out the racing form and snuck out of the house"she walked to her bookie so no one in town would see her driving and wonder where she was going. I suppose that’s how she stayed so slim. She hid all her bottles underneath the rosebushes in the garden. I’ll say this"she had great style. For a lush.”

  She sighs and is silent again for a long time.

  “Where are they now?” I finally venture to ask.

  “In Holy Spirit Cemetery. Side by side forever,” she says. “They crashed the car when I was fifteen, driving home drunk from the club. At least they died together.”

  “What happened to you afterward?”

  “I went to live with my uncle Paul and aunt Blair and cousin June in Minneapolis. Well, for the summers. It was easier to stay at boarding school and milk all the sympathy I could get as an orphan. I gave up my tantrums and became excruciatingly polite. My teachers loved me, but I was hiding behind my impeccable manners because it kept me close to something that had been important to my parents. And then, when I graduated from high school early, I went to stay with June. She was living in London, pretending to study art.”

  “Husband hunting, you mean.”

  “Exactly. For the first time in my life I could breathe. I was just starting to figure out what I could do, when"I mean, that’s where …” Her face shifts and becomes hard and, in the shadows, cruel. “That’s where my manners took me. To a place where I could be tricked.”

  Leandro sighs. “I am very sorry,” he says.

  “Where is June now?” I ask.

  “I have no idea.” Belladonna’s voice is full of bitterness. “When we were in London she was busy looking out for herself. I don’t know how she knew him, but she introduced me to Hogarth, and that was the beginning of it.”

  “One cannot foretell the future, whether in relationships, with children, our livelihood, our friends, our homes,” Leandro says eventually. “One can only imagine it. There will always be catastrophes and calamities. One must not yield. One must go on. You, my sweet Belladonna, you must fight, and create your own world, your own rules, despite everything that has happened to you. Wherever the path leads you, you must not give in.”

  “What you really mean is that I should find June,” she says. “If only to satisfy my curiosity.”

  “What makes the world go round is tension,” Leandro says. “Tension between men and women, man and wife, parent and child, lover and beloved. Between the master and slave.”

  Belladonna shudders.

  “Control is at the heart of all human relationships.” Leandro twists his ring around and I see a gleam of color. “Control and the resistance to it. Seeking or refusing to let someone or something dominate us. Now, my dear child, your own will is always within your control. Nothing can stop you unless you let it.”

  “Nothing can stop me,” says Belladonna. And we all believe her.

  “This story is most likely apocryphal,” Leandro says to us the next day, “as stories about notorious women often are. Ninon de Lenclos was a fascinating courtesan in France; she established a salon, was the lover of kings and dukes and princes, friend to Molière and Racine and countless others. It was said that when she was of a certain age, a young man fell in love with her. Despite the decades between them, he saw only a delectable and charming woman. Unbeknownst to him, she was, in fact, his mother; he had been born of a liaison with a duke more than twenty years before, and educated far from Paris, as young nobles of that era often were. When she divulged the unhappy truth and rebuffed his declaration of undying passion, he threw himself on his sword. In front of her.”

  That is a bit melodramatic, even for me.

  “One must learn how to fail. That is what the son of Ninon never understood,” Leandro says.

  “I know how to fail,” Belladonna says fiercely. “And I won’t, ever again.”

  “Well, then, how you create your world is by the way you think. Obviously, you cannot alter the physical circumstances of what happened to you, but you can change the way you think about it.
For your purposes now, it is not so much what happened, or happens, but how you allow yourself to react to it.

  “You, my Belladonna, must train your thinking with concentration and discipline. Think of revenge, not forgiveness. But you must realize that you will be forever captive to the revenge if you let yourself remain obsessed by it.”

  “I don’t want to be free,” she says, “and captivity I understand. The only thing that will make me free is finding my son, and the man who stole him from me. And all the other members of the Club. I want them to wake up in darkness. I want to smell their terror, to read it in their eyes. I want to hear them beg.”

  “Very well,” he says. “I see we are making progress.”

  “I am,” she insists. “Every day I feel myself changing.”

  “Change is not a burden once one learns how to embrace its opportunities. And the result is rarely what one presupposes.”

  We sit in the deepening darkness and watch the stars come out. A whiff of basil floats past us as the leaves rustle in the slightest of breezes.

  When we arrange ourselves on the terrace the next day, Leandro waves a letter at us. “It is from Laura Garnett,” he says. “She is arriving soon. By herself. The children are with Andrew’s family. She says she is looking forward to seeing all of you.”

  “I’ll bet,” I say.

  “Do not be unkind,” Leandro says, chastising me. “Poor Laura was mortified by her folly with your Mr. Nutley. She writes often, and I can divine from her letters that she is still unhappy. I would have liked to have seen her children once more.” He sighs.

  “What do you mean, ‘once more’?” I ask, a fluttering flag of panic waving in my gut as Belladonna and I exchange glances. He looks the same as ever, but I worry about his health. He is seventy-one this year, and the effort of hiding so much of his grief and rage from us cannot ease his worries. Sometimes I wonder if he is willing himself to stay alive until he knows Belladonna is ready to leave.

  “Only that sometimes my bones ache, and Laura’s children do me good,” he says. “It would be nice for Bryony to have playmates her age.”

  “She has plenty of playmates her age,” I retort. “Carla’s children, Caterina’s children, Bruno’s children, all the children here. And she has Sam.”

  Sam is her boy doll, which she insists on dressing in girl doll clothes. He’s got no hair and a glazed dumb look in his glass eyes, and Bryony forbids him to wear underwear under his lacy frocks. She also insists on discussing this with every person she meets. Poor Sam must be a transvestite. Gender problems seem to run in this motley group, don’t they?

  “Not English children,” Leandro says.

  “You’re right,” I say. “And I am trying to feel nothing but pity for Laura. Really.”

  “She laughs and acts the fool to protect herself from hurt,” he says. “Surely you understand that.”

  “How can I not?”

  “Ah, well,” Leandro says, sighing. “One can never understand relationships or the strange bond between lovers. But I have watched Laura, who was lovely and curious, become a docile puppy.”

  What a thrilling visit we have to look forward to. Besides, Laura never struck me as particularly docile.

  “Dependency is not love,” Leandro says, leaning back, his eyes closed. “That is a mistake I have made.”

  “I won’t make that mistake,” Belladonna says fervently. “Never will I let myself be dependent on any man. Never.”

  Leandro opens his eyes and smiles at her gently. “Ask Laura to sing for you,” he says, stifling a yawn. “That would please her very much. She possesses a voice that could melt a glacier.”

  “If it pleases you,” she says softly, “and only you, I will.”

  He is teaching her well.

  3

  The Cascade of

  the Contessa

  “If only he were more discreet.”

  Discretion is not a word you’ll see often in this saga.

  Leandro is, however, discussing Laura’s husband, the reason she is not here with us after all. Some family emergency, the cable read. One of Andrew’s mistresses threw a fit or something equally charming, I expect. Frankly, I’m glad she’s not here. Who needs her? Not us. Not me.

  Certainly not Belladonna.

  We are walking in the gardens, past the neatly sprawling plots of rosemary and lavender. The wind is heady with their scent, and fat bumblebees, drunk on nectar, fill the air with a low buzzing.

  “Why doesn’t she leave him?” Belladonna asks Leandro.

  “Leaving is never simple. Perhaps it is a situation that, though unpleasant, is habitual.” Leandro gives the most imperceptible sigh. “But I fear that as long as she remains with Andrew, she will not know what it is to be loved by a man.”

  “Nor do I. Nor will I ever.”

  “My dearest Belladonna,” Leandro says, stopping to kiss her hand. After all our time here, it is the only gesture she can bear without automatically flinching. “I will not let you believe it so. There is a Greek word, metanoia, which one could say denotes a change of mind. Stopping in one’s tracks. One’s mind turns around, and one no longer thinks as one once did. The ancients saw this as a gift, as opening oneself up to the possibility of grace.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “It is possible to rant and rage and fume and then turn one’s mind around.”

  “That may have worked for you,” Belladonna says savagely, “but I plan to rant and rage, and my mind will not be turned around. I will never let go. You can’t make me.”

  “No, my darling, that has not worked for me. Nor can I make you do anything. Or even wish it so. Quite the contrary. If one thinks about it, throughout history men full of rage have been lionized as heroes, as warriors and prophets. But a woman full of rage, she can only be a demon or a witch. Like the Bacchae: When they were mad, they would tear men’s flesh to shreds.”

  “So you could say that the world actually needs more enraged women,” I offer.

  “That, I understand,” Belladonna says.

  “Yes, but what I have learned all too well is that if life is to be bearable, then you must regard it as something quite insignificant,” Leandro tells her. “I have not let go"I will not ever. I am old, and I hide my thoughts better, that is all. Still they exist. One can acknowledge them and continue to live without being tyrannized by them. That’s what the death of love has taught me.”

  She looks at him, her eyes soft.

  “Forgiveness is a gift,” he says. “It is the only thing that can free us from the weight of hatred.”

  “But you have chosen not to be freed from it. And you aren’t listening to me,” she protests. “I don’t want to be freed from it, either.”

  “Then you accept that as long as we fail to forgive, we’re holding the hand of our offender. That will always be the hand pulling us backward.”

  “I don’t care. Let it pull me; I must do it. I just don’t know where to start.”

  “Start at the beginning.”

  “The beginning. Who got me there, in other words.” Her eyes narrow. “You mean June, my cousin. You’ve meant her all along.”

  “I mean whatever it is you think is the beginning. There are no rules. Trust yourself, and you will know what to do. All I will say is that you can become anything, but only if you know what you want. Which, of course, most people don’t. If you think you can’t fail, you won’t. If you think you’re going to lose, you will. If you avoid the truth, you pay for your lies. A lie will always do the most harm to the person who tells it.”

  “I don’t have to tell lies to find the truth.”

  “Perhaps not, but you must accept the possibility that your plans may not end as you might wish them to. You must focus, and stay true. There will always be some little spark of doubt, a tiny little snake creeping deep down inside the dark places. You must turn your head away from it.”

  “This I know,” Belladonna murmurs.

  “The surf
ace is that only: a facade. This is why your plotting must be meticulous. Only with much digging does one find the treasure"or lack thereof"underneath. Which is why jealousy and envy are so often futile. They are a mere response to the facade.”

  Yes, but it’s so much fun to make snap judgments about awful, stupid people! Not all the wisdom in the world will keep me from rushing in where Belladonna is too cautious to tread.

  “No wise man is always entirely wise; and no evil man is always entirely evil,” Leandro continues in a matter-of-fact tone. “Even a monster will have some moments when he forgets the horror of his own soul. That is his weapon, his appeal to your weakness. You must not falter in the face of it.”

  Belladonna’s face is pale, but her mouth is firm. “I will not falter,” she says. “I will not succumb to the weakness. I will not turn my head away from them. Too often, I wake in the middle of the night and I feel him; I can feel his eyes staring at me even though it’s dark and I can never see him. He’s still watching me and he won’t let me go. I will find him. All the rest of them. And I will make them suffer.”

  “Per amore o per forza. Then you shall start at the beginning. You will find June Nickerson, whoever and whatever she is, and you will do whatever it is you feel you have to do, and then we shall see. Prepare yourself carefully. Remember, it may take longer than you think.”

  We will practice and refine our methods with the hapless cousin, I think Leandro is too circumspect to say. Then we shall see. We shall see very far indeed.