It’s a grey February morning. Dawn passed a while ago, but the sun can’t cut through the low, heavy clouds. The light is timid, unable to warm the skin. A thin, damp mist rises from the small, cold stream, wrapping around a stone sculpture of a peasant woman — once white, now grey and grimy with years of neglect beneath the pine branches. The mist rising from the icy water curls around her: an amphora in her hand, a long dress twisted around her ankles, her hair gathered in a playful braid. The pine stands tall at the entrance of the Venetian villa, its roots reaching toward the green wrought-iron gate — a gate that creaks, left ajar for years, stuck on the threshold ever since the villa’s owners left. The gravel path is buried under dry leaves and damp ones, gathered into piles the wind keeps scattering.
On this grey morning, a red squirrel darts through the villa’s woods, hopping between beech, maple, and oak trees, hunting for a pomegranate seed forgotten since November, or a nut buried under the second pine to the right of the entrance — the one closest to the stone lion roaring at the young peasant woman.
The mist climbs toward the pine’s highest branches, up to the roof of the old villa. Many of the tiles are broken, and the chimney is black with soot. From above, the villa looks immense — three floors, one wing for guests, another for a small greenhouse. Once, the greenhouse held pink azaleas, ficus plants with leaves as big as fans, and orchids of every color. At Christmas, the pots were dressed with small colorful ribbons, and warm string lights ran all around the glass walls. But the orchids were the greenhouse’s true pride, the envy of the whole neighborhood.
Now, the shelves are littered with dry leaves, ceramic pots where the soil has gone moldy, and cracked plastic ones — some lying on the floor as if hurled in anger. A hole high in the upper right corner lets insects in; when they find nothing to gnaw on, they follow another hole in the lower left corner, and it leads them straight into the house.
That’s how cockroaches, bees, and spiders end up in one of the villa’s five sitting rooms — the one on the first floor, once used for family dinners or the weekly book club meetings. Moths have started eating away at the furniture, and spiders are spinning webs around the terracotta vases, in the corners behind the armchairs, in the gaps between the books. The books themselves are fading — their once-white pages stained a yellowish damp, as if someone had smeared them with mustard. The spines are fraying, the titles growing harder to read: I promessi sposi, a physiology textbook, The Metamorphosis. The sun that manages to slip through the tall, grimy windows slaps against the books like a blow, and the light filtering through the stained glass reaches all the way to the corridor leading to the villa’s entrance.
A long flight of pink marble stairs winds up to the floor above — a gleaming serpent with a handrail of fine wood. Once, that handrail and those stairs were polished three times a week: Monday, Wednesday, Friday. They used to be so shiny they looked like a pool of clear water. Now a torn red carpet runs down the stairs, laid there by someone who thought it might protect the beautiful marble underneath. The carpet is damp and starting to smell. Another rug — round, Persian, imported from an oasis deep in the Moroccan desert — once welcomed guests at the entrance. It’s gone now, rolled up in some storage closet belonging to one of the Palladini heirs.
The butler used to open the tall oak door, framed by marble columns, with a slight bow. He made sure the guests noticed the luxurious rug before taking their coats. At sunset, the sun’s rays would leap from one marble surface to another, casting a play of color that left everyone breathless — even the butler, who had worked in that Venetian villa for twenty-five years.
“Please, come in,” the tall, bald man who loved that house as if it were his own used to say, his baritone voice filling the air — warm in winter, thanks to the crackling fireplace, and cool in summer.
Inside, the massive door opened onto the marble staircase. Outside, it opened onto an Italian garden of geometric hedges, with a fountain at its center — a tall fountain shaped like an angel, a curly-haired cherub, a serious frog crouched at his feet, poised to leap. Now real frogs live in that fountain, splashing in the puddles left by the rain.
The mist rises through the February morning, and the air turns grey. The sun disappears behind clouds heavy with an incoming storm, and the green iron gate slams shut, startling the young peasant woman, pulling her from her thoughts.
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