Ivano didn’t give up. For hours he kept knocking, and for hours Guglielmo kept repeating that no one was home. Then, on Giuseppe’s order, the butler stopped opening the door.
The trees were casting long shadows and a pale moon was trembling in the sky when a disconsolate Ivano headed back downhill. He felt empty, as if his entrails had been extracted and tossed into the sea. “A gutted fish,” he whispered, “that’s what I am right now.”
All along, Caterina remained confined to her room, where her father visited her every three hours, asking for the name of her seducer. With her famous stubbornness, Caterina refused to answer. The only words she uttered during those visits were that she loved Ivano and wanted to be his wife. The more Caterina repeated those words, the more enraged Giuseppe became. At some point, out of a furor he could no longer contain, he set Caterina’s bedroom upside down. He opened her closets, yanked all the clothes from the hangers, and threw them up in the air. Then he directed his rage to the drawers, pulling them one by one from two chests and overturning them, so that their contents joined the dresses and skirts that lay in disorderly, limp heaps on the floor. It was when he overturned the last drawer that a number of sheets flew out. He froze as he stared at the floating pages with surprise. When he picked one up, his face became livid. “You slut,” he grunted. Then he gathered all the drawings in his arms and rushed to the reading room, where he lit the fireplace with a handful of small branches and three large logs. When the fire caught, with one precise motion, he dropped all the drawings of Ivano and his mandolin into the flames.
While the drawings were turning to ashes, knowing she would not see them ever again, in the bedroom Caterina gave vent to her pain with one of her theatrical acts. Stone-faced, she threw the disorderly mass of clothes and garments out the window, into the east garden. They floated in the air like autumn leaves. The oleander branches caught some of them, others clung to the bougainvillea vines. A few reached the ground. When Guglielmo opened the door in the morning, he stared at the colorful patches hanging from the trees and thought he was hallucinating. Then he realized they were clothes. Across the garden, beyond the gate, three city workers were grooming the belvedere. The east garden was not visible to them, but the clothes that were stuck to the higher branches were. All three workers were pointing, and one of them shouted, “Have you decided to put up your Christmas decorations in March?” His colleagues laughed loudly. Displaying no emotion, Guglielmo turned around and reentered the palazzina. He went straight to Viola’s room, where he excused himself for the early-morning intrusion and asked for her help in restoring the garden’s stately beauty.
“What are you talking about?” Viola asked.
“Follow me,” Gugliemo replied.
When Viola stepped outside and saw the spectacle before her, she burst into laughter. She knew at once the clothes on the branches were Caterina’s doing. “She’s back,” she chuckled then turned to Guglielmo. “Get a ladder. We need to take those garments down before we become the laughing stock of Corso Solferino. And you,” she shouted at the city workers, who were still laughing and pointing, “mind your own business or I’ll come out and smack you with my brooms. Then we shall see who likes to laugh!”
A half hour later, Viola and Guglielmo had all the clothes gathered in a pile. Viola shook the dust off each item, folded everything, and placed the clothes in front of Caterina’s locked door. When Giuseppe returned to Caterina’s room, he stared at the pile of folded garment, shook his head, and walked in.
The routine of questions and no answers lasted four days. When from lack of nourishment and liquids Caterina became too weak to speak and fainted, Giuseppe understood that his daughter would rather die than reveal her secret. He summoned Matilda and told her he would do what was the custom amongst upper-class families to cure the souls of unrepentant sinning daughters.
“I’ll send Caterina to a convent,” he grinned, “where she’ll spend the rest of her days meditating over her actions and asking God for forgiveness.”
“Now, Giuseppe. You’re being excessive,” Matilda said, coming out of her silence. “True, she did something she shouldn’t have done, but she’s