Page 15 of In the Garden of Monsters

Ignazio fetched an Elastoplast from the kit, pulled off its paper and applied it to the wound with great care. In the few seconds before he backed away, I was overcome with a great urge to reach up for him, to bring him to me, to seal his lips against mine. I cleared my throat and turned my head away. His lips curled upward in a satisfied smile. Then he left, ascending the steps toward thetempietto. I shuddered, tamping down any remaining vestige of desire. I was not one to play with fire.

After his departure, Gala fussed over me, arranging my limbs again and fixing my clothing. “You stupid girl. I would have had him kiss it better,” she said.

I couldn’t respond, sure my cheeks were the same shade as my dress.

Just then, Dalí, who had wandered off while I was being tended to, gave a shout from the other end of the hippodrome. He stood near a statue of a siren, waving something in the air. “Pomegranates,” he exclaimed as he rushed back to us, raving about finding the fruit-loaded trees. He had two ruby-round orbs in his hands, which he placed, one in front of me and the other to my left, upon one of Proserpina’s stone legs.

“Tomorrow we will remove the dress,” he said as he stepped back to look at me.

“Of course.” I shrugged, just as Orpheus jumped up and curled himself into a ball in my lap, tucking his face into my belly. I expected Dalí to shoo the beast away, but he only said“bueno”and then returned to his easel.

A subtle shift in the air drew my attention. Ignazio was there, standing slightly apart from the rest, that damned smile at the edges of his lips. I had been wrong to assume he had departed. Crimson heat rose to my cheeks with the thought of his eyes upon my naked body. I looked away, wishing I hadn’t agreed with Dalí so easily. Perhaps I could have bought at least another day of clothing.

“I’ll return soon with the midday meal,” Ignazio told the group. This time I watched him make his way back to the truck. I was glad for his departure and relaxed the moment he vanished down the trail. Gala, Jack, and Paolo also left us, eager to explore more of the garden, while Dalí began to paint me—a preliminary sketch in oils. He planned to create many images of me, and I knew it wasn’t feasible to develop entire paintings in the garden. It was the perfect time to ask him about his techniques.

“You are sketching me in oil—will you paint it in oil, too, or will you use a different medium?”

Dalí paused and regarded me. “Why do you wish to know this?”

“I am a painter as well. I didn’t just model for theaccademia.I graduated in the spring.”

He snorted. “Women are not suited for art. You are a muse, you are a goddess, but you are not an artist. You will never be an artist.”

“That’s a terribly backward view,” I ventured boldly. “There are many female artists.”

Dalí laughed, loud and long. The sound was eerie against the silence of the hippodrome.“C’est un spectacle,”he said in French. “Nothing more. A brief shine before history obliterates all memory of them.”

“I am not a spectacle,” I told him.

“Neither are you a real painter. Now hush, Proserpina. I’m paying you to model, not comment on art.”

I pressed my lips together, willing myself to be quiet, to not say the words I wished to say. And I closed my eyes, so I would not cry. I thought of Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Cassatt, Dorothea Tanning, Helen Lundeberg, Frida Kahlo—women I admired for their talent and verve, women whom Dalí had just declared to be nothing more than inconsequential. I pictured Meret Oppenheim’sObjectin my mind. Her fur-lined tea set had captured the world’s imagination a decade back, in a way that even Dalí’s melting clocks could not.

I fumed as he painted. My whole reason for coming to this damned place was dashed with just a line out of Dalí’s mouth. I wanted to retort, to spit back all the things that the art world and tabloids said about him—that he was a sellout who cared more about commercial success than art, that he was a Nazi sympathizer and lover of dictators like Hitler and Franco. That he was a shallow self-promoter, a consummate narcissist, a political opportunist who had compromised his art for fame.

I wanted to scream all these things at him, but I remembered the number on the piece of paper that I had shown Lillian, a monetary sum I could not conceivably make in any other way, and I kept my mouth shut. But I decided then that the opinions of this man would not sway me. Besides, I reasoned, he was right about one thing. I hadn’t paid him to teach me. He was the one who had hired me for an outrageous fee and I had gratefully accepted it.

I counted down from one hundred to calm myself. Maybe Lillian had been right in her worries about my visiting Bomarzo.

After a time, I did fall into a dream state, thinking of what the Sacro Bosco might have been like when Vicino Orsini first created it. In my mind, the tangled mess of weeds before me was instead filled with grassy paths between beds of flowers and herbs. I pictured the women in their beautiful dresses, the men in their jackets and ruffled shirts, and musicians playing in the rotunda that overlooked the hippodrome. I could hear their happy murmurings, the women’s laughter, the grand stories of the men. It was almost like a memory, a good one, one that had made me content.

At some point, Jack roused me from my fugue. “Ready for lunch?”

I sat up and looked around. Dalí had already set aside his paints and was making his way up a crumbling moss-covered stairway behind Proserpina’s bench. I made to stand but my leg had gone to sleep. Shaking it, I winced with the sensation, and Jack extended his arm to help me up.

“Those steps would be much faster, but clearly, we have to take the long way,” he said, pointing to the staircase on Proserpina’s right, which led deeper into theboschettobut was blocked by a massive tree that had fallen long ago.

“That would have been a great shortcut,” I agreed as we headed up the stairs. “This leads around the edge of the garden, rather than through it.” At the top stretched a vast field, half of which was sowed with wheat, the other half with corn. On the far edge of the field, I could make out the silhouettes of a man and a donkey. “I always associate cornfields with America,” I said with wonder. The truth was that I wasn’t sure I had ever seen a cornfield in person, but I couldn’t tell Jack that. My “memories” of the United States were built upon images I had seen in newspapers and films.

Jack laughed. “It’s wacky to see something so familiar here, isn’t it? But don’t worry, we don’t have to find our way through the cornfield.”

We walked along the edge of the field until we saw a monstrous vase rising out of the weeds of the garden, towering over us by four or five feet. “How strange,” I said, marveling at the size. I pressed my hand against it.

The whisper came to me again, faint this time.Julia, don’t... Julia, Julia, don’t...I snatched my hand away.

Jack didn’t seem to notice. “Gala saw Ignazio before he left for lunch and asked him about the vase. He said it represents Bacchus’s entry into hell, with his goblet in hand.”

“I think someone is buried here,” I said, certain it was true. There were ashes within or under the vase. I could sense it. And this time, I somehow knew that the voice had been talking to me. It was a warning, but a warning I didn’t understand.

---