Isabel and I grew up in the village near Tivoli. I brought her oranges I stole from the Cardinal’s trees. She rolled her eyes at my crime but ate the fruit. I’d wanted to be a sculptor since I was a child. When I carved a rose the size of my palm to give to her, a sliver of stone flew into my right eye and carved it out. Well, I still had one eye and the feeling in two hands and heart. She allowed me to kiss her but nothing more. I proposed marriage but she shook her head. I thought I would win her over eventually.
My job was to carve a different face for each spout in the fountain. I chiseled and carved and coughed as the dust flew into my throat. I wanted my grotesques to be the best in Italy, the most horrific and true. I wanted to get a commission to work on churches in Rome, where I could sculpt Isabel’s face as the Madonna’s.
When I saw her holding hands with Niccolo, the chief gardener, and walking down the hedgerows, I doubled over and my Cyclops eye filled with tears. I coughed until I could not breathe. Then I stopped coughing and breathed again, though I wished to die. I considered sneaking up behind him and slitting his throat with my rasp. But Isabel raised her face and smiled at him as if he were the sun and she was a rose.
I carved her Niccolo in the central fountain, with drawn cheeks, blank eyes, and a forked tongue resting on a pouting lower lip. I chiseled her lover’s face in The Hundred Fountains. I perched a vulture above him. I sculpted his likeness in the dog’s face, the gorilla’s face, and the monster’s face in the fountains. I am the artist. He’s only the gardener.
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Photo credit: Martin Gommel / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND