The Savage Garden Read Free Page B

through the French night, for example. He tried to stem the flow of his thoughts, or at least divert their course. When he failed, he turned on the light and worked on his Italian grammar.
        Dawn rose, bringing with it the barely discernible mass of a steep Alpine valley. A few hours later, they were free of the mountains.
        All he saw of Milan was the Fascist splendor of the Stazione Centrale as he hurried between platforms to make his connecting train. He was aware of the heat and the smell of unfamiliar tobacco, but not much else. He briefly glimpsed Shelley's "waveless plain of Lombardy" before nodding off.
        A deep and dreamless sleep carried him all the way to Florence, where he was woken brusquely by the guard, who talked at him in a language quite unlike the Italian he'd learned at school and recently brushed up on. Ejected onto the platform, he felt this certainly wasn't the kind of reception he'd been led to believe he might receive in Italy.
        He found a
pensione
on Piazza Santa Maria Novella, a short walk from the station. The owner informed him that he was in luck; a room had just fallen free. It was easy to see why. Adam made a speculative survey of the dismal little box in the roof and told himself it was only for one night.
        He stripped off his shirt and lay on the sagging mattress, smoking a cigarette, unaccustomed to the humidity pressing down on the city. Was this normal? If so, why had no one thought to mention it? Or the mosquitoes, for that matter. They speckled the ceiling, waiting for night to fall and the feast to begin.
        He squeezed himself into the shower room at the end of the corridor and allowed the trickle of water to cool him off. It was a temporary measure. His fresh shirt was lacquered to his chest by the time he'd descended four flights of stairs to the lobby.
        The storm broke as he stepped from the building, the sharp crack of thunder echoing around the piazza, the deluge following moments later as the amethyst clouds deposited their load. He stood beneath the awning, watching the raindrops dancing on the road. Water sheeted down from overflowing gutters; drains were lost to sight beneath spreading pools of water. And still the rain came, constant, unvarying in its strength. When it ceased, it ceased suddenly and completely.
        A church bell struck half past the hour, and immediately people began to appear from the shelter of doorways around the piazza— almost as if the two events were connected, the bell alerting the inhabitants of the quarter to the passing of danger, as it had always done. The sun burst from behind the departing slab of cloud. It hit hard, flashing off the steaming flagstones.
        Scuttling figures skipped over puddles, hurrying to make up for lost time. Adam joined their ranks, map in hand, heading south out of the piazza. In Via dei Fossi, rainwater still streamed from jutting eaves high overhead, driving pedestrians off the sidewalks into the road, forcing them to do battle with squadrons of scooters and cars. The narrow street filled with the sounds of horns and curses, the cacophony played out with leaps and bounds and wild gesticulations, the distant rumble of the departing storm like a low kettledrum roll underscoring the deranged opera.
        A twinge of anxiety stiffened his stride, though not at the chaos unfolding around him. He knew the city intimately, but only from books. What if he was disappointed? What if Florence's "unique cultural and artistic heritage," which he'd detailed in his essays with such hollow authority, left him cold? As if on cue, he found himself on a bridge spanning the River Arno—no lively, sparkling torrent, but a strip of brown and turbid water, a river fit for a factory district.
        Five minutes later he reached his destination, and his apprehension melted away. The Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine was deserted when he entered it, and