Page 31 of In the Garden of Monsters

A servant deposited a salad of red before me, a plate full of radicchio, amaranth, currants, and strawberries.

“What did Ignazio say the name of this room is?” Jack asked.

“The Fields of Mourning,” Gala said as she lifted the ruby-colored, spinachlike greens to her lips.

“The place where love has died! Where Dido resides!” Dalí exclaimed, his voice ringing through the small structure. My heart clenched.

“Maestro Dalí is correct,” Ignazio chimed in from the doorway, the flames lighting up his features. “The Fields of Mourning is where unrequited lovers are doomed to eternity. If you’ve read theAeneid, you might recall that Queen Dido entered the Fields after she killed herself because her love for Aeneas was unrequited. It is a mournful locale, full of longing, desperation, loneliness, bleeding hearts.” He looked at me as though he thought it was something I knew. And he was right—I knew the story of Dido, and while I had all too much familiarity with longing and desperation, there was something else in his look, an expectation that I knew more than just what the legends suggested.

“Why are the lovers doomed there for eternity?” Jack asked, unnerved.

“It is as the gods have willed it.” Now it was Ignazio who looked mournful. “And no god may undo what another god has done.”

“He quips Ovid again,” Dalí chuckled, waving a fork toward Ignazio and, as if on cue, Ignazio faded back into the darkness. I wasn’t sure what was more bizarre—Ignazio looking so stricken or Dalí seemingly having committed theMetamorphosesto memory.

I concentrated on my plate, thinking about the dead queen lost to the Fields of Mourning, and said little for the rest of that course, letting Jack hijack the conversation to explain American sports to Dalí. Instead, I focused on the wild array of red dishes that continued to appear on the table: tomato-and-red-pepper tarts, steak tartare, beet pasta with goat cheese and pistachios, little dishes of roasted red potatoes, blood orange pies, red cakes, and tiny bowls of grapes and cherries.

“We’re moving toward the Underworld,” Dalí announced as the servants escorted us from the dinner table to our next location.

As I moved to walk through the door into the slightly larger main room, I felt two tiny paws upon my leg. Orpheus again. He rubbed against me, purring loudly.

“That beast won’t leave you alone,” Gala growled.

“I feel like he’s trying to tell me something,” I admitted.

“It really is as though he’s trying to stop you from going,” Paolo said.

Somehow, I knew Paolo was right, but I couldn’t avoid going along with the rest of the group. I moved around the cat and made my way to the door. But Orpheus raced out in front of me and stood in the threshold, his little cat voice lifting in the most mournful way.

“How strange,” Jack said. He’d already crossed through the door and was watching the cat from the other side. “Perhaps he believes you truly are Proserpina?”

“I can’t stay here forever, Orpheus,” I said, leaning down to scoop him up. He continued to cry in my ear as we exited the Casa Pendente, and we weren’t more than a few paces down the torch-lit footpath when he grew stiff in my arms. He dug his claws into my cloak and the hairs on his back began to bristle beneath my fingers.

“What is wrong with you?” Gala griped when I suddenly halted, causing her to run into me. She swiped at my shoulder with the back of her hand, a nudge to keep me moving.

I didn’t bother answering as I pulled Orpheus from my shoulder and set him on the ground. He stood in front of me, hissing at something in the darkness.

“What is wrong withhim?” Jack asked.

“Maybe there is a wild beast of some sort out there,” Gala said, her voice lower, with a touch of nervousness that I hadn’t heard before.

“Do not worry, Signora Dalí,” Paolo said. “There are only boars and bears around here, and they wouldn’t come so close with our voices and all the torches.”

Jack walked a few paces in the direction of Orpheus’s ire, past the torchlight. “There’s a statue here, a big one, of a woman with a planter of flowers on her head,” he called back. “Look, theorcois just up there.” He pointed in the direction away from the woman, then looked back up at the reclining statue. “This is the statue Julia and I were looking at when we felt the earthquake the other day.”

“Ceres,” I said, an unexplained warmth spreading through me and the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. I hadn’t realized the monstrous goddess was so close. Was that what Orpheus was trying to warn me about?

“The mother!” Dalí’s voice was loud in the dark silence.

I looked toward the statue, suddenly dizzy.

“No,” I said.

“But she is. Ceres is Proserpina’s mother. It is for her the earth weeps every winter as she seeks divine retribution for Pluto stealing her daughter.”

“Ceres isn’t her mother,” I said, the memories slipping away like sand through my fingers but leaving a conviction behind.

“But she is,” Gala broke in, parroting her husband. “Don’t you know the myth of Demeter and Persephone—Ceres and Proserpina? It’s the story of a mother protecting her daughter.”

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