Image by Danielle Winterton
LATE SUMMER IS THE IDEAL TIME to pick up, thumb through, read or re-read the Riviera Stories of Difficult Loves, an Italo Calvino fiction collection. Iced ginger tea or dry rose wine in glass, I like to sit in my modest garden between the herbs and the potted annuals and dream through the stories in this collection that feature garden settings.
The literary garden is a very specific, carefully chosen setting: neither wilderness nor civilization, but some kind of halfway point between the two. These gardens are neither private domestic spaces nor public shared social arenas: a person working in a storied garden is never alone, as people passing by stop to chat and neighbors peer in from upstairs windows. This juxtaposition – the expectation of privacy with the constant possibility of spontaneous social interaction– sets up the perfect conditions for characters to experience a clash between the safe and familiar, the mysterious and the threatening, and this collision heralds the breakdown of treasured illusions and the smashing of precious, tenderly held dreams and sentimentalities in the characters.
Even the story of the Garden of Eden uses cultivated plants as literary bridges between interior and exterior, between the individual and the unknown. And the very first story in Calvino’s collection, entitled “Adam, One Afternoon,” brings the Creation allegory to the forefront of the reader’s consideration before the first page has been turned.
This story, which is filled with the long, bright light of a high summer day, invokes curiosity, playfulness and glad-hearted delight as it narrates the impromptu rendezvous of a free-spirited gardener boy and the young housegirl. As the story opens, we see Maria-nunziata watching Libereso out her kitchen window as he waters the nasturtiums. He wears short shorts and his long hair is tied back with a little boy. “What a nice calm job gardening must be,” she thinks. Intrigued, and no doubt aroused, she taps on the window to get his attention.
As in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” also set in Italy, it is the one on the inside who pursues the one on the outside, the domesticated creature beckons the more feral one; Hawthorne’s Giovanni is lured away from his desk as he watches Beatrice working in her father’s garden.
Maria-nunziata is drawn outdoors because Libereso charms her with the promise of something beautiful: “D’you want to see something nice?” he asks, pointing to a pot of dahlias. Although she initially resists, he insists, and when she comes outside, he takes her by the hand and walks her through the garden.
But she quickly realizes that gardening is anything but nice and calm: outside the walls of the safe space in her home, Maria-nunziata encounters perceived dangers in an environment completely foreign to her. Libereso tries to woo her with gifts: she expects to be given dahlias, but instead he reaches behind the pot, through wet leaves and garden mold, and brings out a toad, which he holds up to her. Squeamish, she skips away her high-heeled shoes.
Libereso’s skin is brown from the sun. Maria-Nunziata’s is rosy white. Her hair falls in masses of black curls, his is long, like a girl’s, and tied into a pony-tail.
But Libereso doesn’t give up. He follows. Why are you frightened? he asks.
“Kill it,” she says.
“All toads are nice,” Libereso informs her. “They eat the worms.”
He pets the toad. She points and shrieks in horror. “No! No! Don’t touch it!”
Libereso is amused by her fear, and tries to lure her with other “presents:” chafers, a lizard, a tiny snake, all of which increase Maria-nunziata’s mounting horror. He pulls a frog off a water lily in the pond, and finds that a female is attached to it; Maria-nunziata feels nervous, unsure “whether she was frightened because they were frogs, or because they were male and female stuck together.”
By now we have learned that Maria-nunziata is devout Catholic, eager to grow up so she can wear red lipstick, go dancing, and don a black lace veil on her head for Benediction. Libereso, conversely, is not religious, is a vegetarian, spends his free time frolicking in the forest, and does drawings for the Anarchist Federation windows in town. Maria-nunziata asks Libereso if he ever picks the flowers. Why would I do that? he asks. To take to the Madonna, she answers. I wouldn’t know about that, he says.
Finally, Libereso takes her to the fountain and shows her the goldfish: “at last, Maria-nunziata liked the goldfish.” Appropriately, the only wildlife she finds agreeable is the one domesticated and living in an enclosed space.
Suffice it to say that here we have aspects of the story of the Fall referenced, but thwarted. Pre-adolescent children gambol through a garden as youths on the cusp of puberty, about to gain knowledge and awareness of their bodies. The male makes offerings to the female, rather than the other way around. Libereso, an Anarchist and presumably an Atheist, knows nothing of Adam, Eve, or Christ, and he is portrayed as healthy, young, strong inquisitive, infused with vitality. His inquiry is innocent and joyful, as though before the Fall.
While I won’t divulge further charming details of the story for the sake of those who haven’t read it, it’s not a spoiler to say that there is no significant punishment for either Maria-Nunziata or the boy. The bliss of perpetual discovery is apparent in Libereso, who runs around the garden searching out new and fascinating wonders. But his “Eve” is less enthusiastic about the joys of nature; she represents the encroachment of civilization onto feral land. Perhaps the two stark opposites are permitted to learn about the sexual secrets of life without punishment because there is no longer any God for us to fear, or maybe there is no Fall within the narrative because man’s alienation from nature, as exemplified by Maria-nunziata’s recurring disgust, has already taken place outside the context of the story.
Danielle Winterton, a features editor for The Ithaca Post and co-founding editor of Essays & Fictions, is a former gardener who spent the last decade slowly becoming more devoted to books and words than flowers and plants. She now exorcises her nostalgia through garden writing.