Juliet

by Anne Fortier

  Pia’s album came as a surprise to me. Not so much because my mother was visibly pregnant underneath the wedding gown, but because my father looked as if he was a hundred years old. Obviously, he was not, but standing next to my mother—a college dropout vixen with dimples in her smile—he looked like old man Abraham in my illustrated children’s Bible.

  Even so, they appeared to be happy together, and although there were no shots of them kissing, most of the photos showed my mother clinging to her husband’s elbow and looking at him with great admiration. And so after a while I shrugged off my astonishment and decided to accept the possibility that here, in this bright and blissful place, concepts like time and age had very little bearing on people’s lives.

  The women around me confirmed my theory; none of them seemed to find the union in any way extraordinary. As far as I could understand, their chirping commentary—all in Italian—was primarily about my mother’s dress, her veil, and the complex genealogical relationship of every single wedding guest to my father and to themselves.

  After the wedding photos came a few pages dedicated to our baptism, but my parents were barely in them. The pictures showed Pia holding a baby that could have been either Janice or me—it was impossible to tell which one, and Pia could not remember—and Peppo proudly holding the other. There appeared to have been two different ceremonies—one inside a church, and one outside in the sunshine, by the baptismal font of the contrada of the Owl.

  “That was a good day,” said Pia, smiling sadly. “You and your sister became little civettini, little owls. It was too bad—” She did not finish the sentence, but closed the album very tenderly. “It is such a long time ago. Sometimes I wonder if time really heals—” She was interrupted by a sudden commotion inside the house, and by a voice impatiently calling her name. “Come!” Pia got up, suddenly anxious. “That must be our Nonna!”

  Old Granny Tolomei, whom everyone referred to as Nonna, lived with one of her granddaughters in downtown Siena, but had been summoned to the farm this afternoon in order to meet me—an arrangement that clearly did not fit her personal schedule. She was standing in the hallway, irritably arranging her black lace with one hand while leaning heavily on her granddaughter with the other. Had I been as uncharitable as Janice, I would have instantly proclaimed her the picture-perfect fairy-tale witch. All that was missing was the crow on her shoulder.

  Pia rushed forward to greet the old lady, who grudgingly allowed herself to be kissed on both cheeks and escorted into a particularly favored chair in the living room. Some minutes were spent making Nonna comfortable; cushions fetched, placed, and moved around, and special lemonade brought in from the kitchen, immediately sent back, and brought in anew, this time with a slice of lemon perched on the rim.

  “Nonna is our aunt,” Peppo whispered in my ear, “and your father’s youngest sister. Come, I will introduce you.” He pulled me along to stand at attention in front of the old lady and eagerly explained the situation to her in Italian, clearly expecting to see some sign of joy on her face.

  But Nonna refused to smile. No matter how much Peppo urged her—even begged her—to rejoice with the rest of us, she could not be persuaded to take any kind of pleasure in my presence. He even had me step forward so that she could see me more clearly, but what she saw only gave her further reason to scowl, and before Peppo managed to pull me out of range, she leaned forward and snarled something I did not understand, but which made everyone gasp with embarrassment.

  Pia and Peppo practically evacuated me from the living room, apologizing all the way. “I am so sorry!” Peppo kept saying, over and over, too mortified to even look me in the eye. “I don’t know what is wrong with her! I think she is going crazy!”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, too stunned to feel anything, “I don’t blame her for not believing it. It’s all so new, even for me.”

  “Let us go for a little walk,” said Peppo, still flustered, “and come back later. It is time I show you their graves.”

  THE VILLAGE CEMETERY was a welcoming, sleepy oasis, and very different from any other graveyard I had ever seen. The whole place was a maze of white, freestanding walls with no roof, and the walls themselves were a mosaic of graves from top to bottom. Names, dates, and photos identified the individuals dwelling behind the marble slabs, and brass sconces held—on behalf of the temporarily incapacitated host—flowers brought by visitors.

  “Here—” Peppo had a hand on my shoulder for support, but that did not prevent him from gallantly opening a squeaky iron gate and letting us both into a small shrine off the main drag. “This is part of the old Tolomei … hmm … sepulchre. Most of it is underground, and we don’t go down there anymore. Up here is better.”

  “It is beautiful.” I stepped into the small room and looked around at the many marble plates and the bouquet of fresh flowers standing on the altar. A candle was burning steadily in a red glass bowl that seemed vaguely familiar to me, indicating that the Tolomei sepulchre was a place carefully maintained by the family. I suddenly felt a stab of guilt that I was here alone, without Janice, but I quickly shook it off. If she had been here, she would most likely have ruined the moment with a snarky comment.

  “This is your father,” pointed Peppo, “and your mother right next to him.” He paused to muse on a distant memory. “She was so young. I thought she would be alive long after I was gone.”

  I looked at the two marble plates that were all that was left of Professor Patrizio Scipione Tolomei and his wife, Diane Lloyd Tolomei, and felt my heart flutter. For as long as I could remember, my parents had been little more than distant shadows in a daydream, and I had never imagined I would one day find myself as close to them—at least physically—as this. Even when fantasizing about traveling to Italy, for some reason it had never occurred to me that my first duty upon arrival must be to find their graves, and I felt a warm wave of gratitude towards Peppo for helping me do the right thing.

  “Thank you,” I said quietly, squeezing his hand, which was still resting on my shoulder.

  “It was a great tragedy the way they died,” he said, shaking his head, “and that all Patrizio’s work was lost in the fire. He had a beautiful farm in Malamerenda—all gone. After the funeral your mother bought a little house near Montepulciano and lived there alone with the twins—with you and your sister—but she was never the same. She came to put flowers on his grave every Sunday, but”—he paused to pull a handkerchief from his pocket—“she was never happy again.”

  “Wait a minute—” I stared at the dates on my parents’ graves. “My father died before my mother? I always thought they died together—” But even as I spoke, I could see that the dates confirmed the new truth; my father had died more than two years before my mother. “What fire?”

  “Someone—no, I shouldn’t say that—” Peppo frowned at himself. “There was a fire, a terrible fire. Your father’s farm burned down. Your mother was lucky; she was in Siena, shopping, with you girls. It was a great, great tragedy. I would have said that God held his hand over her, but then two years later—”

  “The car accident,” I muttered.

  “Well—” Peppo dug the toe of his shoe into the ground. “I don’t know the truth. Nobody knows the truth. But”—he finally met my eyes—“I always suspected that the Salimbenis had a hand in it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. I pictured Eva Maria and her suitcase full of clothes sitting in my hotel room. She had been so kind to me, so eager to make friends.

  “There was a young man,” Peppo went on, “Luciano Salimbeni. He was a troublemaker. There were rumors. I don’t want to—” Peppo glanced at me nervously. “The fire. The fire that killed your father. They say it was not an accident. They say someone wanted to murder him and destroy his research. It was terrible. Such a beautiful house. But you know, I think your mother saved something from the house. Something important. Documents. She was afraid to talk about it, but after the fire, she began to ask strange questions about
… things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “All kinds. I didn’t know the answers. She asked me about the Salimbenis. About secret tunnels underground. She wanted to find a grave. It was something to do with the Plague.”

  “The … bubonic plague?”

  “Yes, the big one. In 1348.” Peppo cleared his throat, not comfortable with the subject. “You see, your mother believed that there is an old curse that is still haunting the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis. And she was trying to find out how to stop it. She was obsessed with this idea. I wanted to believe her, but—” He pulled at his shirt collar as if he suddenly felt hot. “She was so determined. She was convinced that we were all cursed. Death. Destruction. Accidents. ‘A plague on both our houses’ … that is what she used to say.” He sighed deeply, reliving the pain of the past. “She always quoted Shakespeare. She took it very seriously … Romeo and Juliet. She thought that it had happened right here, in Siena. She had a theory—” Peppo shook his head dismissively. “She was obsessed with it. I don’t know. I am not a professor. All I know is that there was a man, Luciano Salimbeni, who wanted to find a treasure—”

  I could not help myself, I had to ask, “What kind of treasure?”

  “Who knows?” Peppo threw up his arms. “Your father spent all his time researching old legends. He was always talking about lost treasures. But your mother told me about something once—oh, what did she call it?—I think she called it Juliet’s Eyes. I don’t know what she meant, but I think it was very valuable, and I think it was what Luciano Salimbeni was after.”

  I was dying to know more, but by now Peppo was looking very distressed, almost ill, and he swayed and grabbed my arm for balance. “If I were you,” he went on, “I would be very, very careful. And I would not trust anyone with the name of Salimbeni.” Seeing my expression, he frowned. “You think I am pazzo … crazy? Here we are, standing by the grave of a young woman who died before her time. She was your mother. Who am I to tell you who did this to her, and why?” His grip tightened. “She is dead. Your father is dead. That is all I know. But my old Tolomei heart tells me that you must be careful.”

  …

  WHEN WE WERE SENIORS in high school, Janice and I had both volunteered for the annual play—as it so happened, it was Romeo and Juliet. After the tryouts Janice was cast as Juliet, while my role was to be a tree in the Capulet orchard. She, of course, spent more time on her nails than on memorizing the dialogue, and whenever we rehearsed the balcony scene, I would be the one to whisper the first words of her lines to her, being, after all, conveniently located onstage with branches for arms.

  On opening night, however, she was particularly horrible to me—when we sat in makeup, she kept laughing at my brown face and pulling the leaves out of my hair, while she was being dolled up with blond braids and rosy cheeks—and by the time the balcony scene rolled around, I was in no mood to cover for her. In fact, I did quite the opposite. When Romeo said, “what shall I swear by?” I whispered, “three words!”

  And Janice immediately said, “three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed!” which threw Romeo off completely, and had the scene end in confusion.

  Later, when I was posing as a candelabrum in Juliet’s bedroom, I made Janice wake up next to Romeo and say right off the bat, “hie hence, begone, away!” which did not set a very good tone for the rest of their tender scene. Needless to say, Janice was so furious she chased me through the entire school afterwards, swearing that she was going to shave off my eyebrows. It had been fun at first, but when, in the end, she locked herself in the school bathroom and cried for an hour, even I stopped laughing.

  Long after midnight, when I sat in the living room talking with Aunt Rose, afraid of going to bed and submitting myself to sleep and Janice’s razor, Umberto came in with a glass of vin santo for us both. He did not say anything, just handed us the glasses, and Aunt Rose did not utter a word about my being too young to drink.

  “You like that play?” she said instead. “You seem to know it by heart.”

  “I don’t really like it a whole lot,” I confessed, shrugging and sipping my drink at the same time. “It’s just … there, stuck in my head.”

  Aunt Rose nodded slowly, savoring the vin santo. “Your mother was the same way. She knew it by heart. It was … an obsession.”

  I held my breath, not wanting to break her train of thought. I waited for another glimpse of my mother, but it never came. Aunt Rose just looked up, frowning, to clear her throat and take another sip of wine. And that was it. That was one of the only things she ever told me about my mother without being prompted, and I never passed it on to Janice. Our mutual obsession with Shakespeare’s play was a little secret I shared with my mother and no one else, just like I never told anyone about my growing fear that, because my mother had died at twenty-five, I would, too.

  AS SOON AS PEPPO dropped me off in front of Hotel Chiusarelli, I went straight to the nearest Internet café and Googled Luciano Salimbeni. But it took me several verbal acrobatics to come up with a search combination that yielded anything remotely useful. Only after at least an hour and many, many frustrations with the Italian language, I was fairly confident of the following conclusions:

  One: Luciano Salimbeni was dead.

  Two: Luciano Salimbeni had been a bad guy, possibly even a mass murderer.

  Three: Luciano and Eva Maria Salimbeni were somehow related.

  Four: There had been something fishy about the car accident that had killed my mother, and Luciano Salimbeni had been wanted for questioning.

  I printed out all the pages so that I could reread them later, in the company of my dictionary. This search had yielded little more than Peppo Tolomei had just told me this afternoon, but at least now I knew my elderly cousin had not merely invented the story; there really had been a dangerous Luciano Salimbeni at large in Siena some twenty years ago or so.

  But the good news was that he was dead. In other words, he definitely could not be the tracksuit charmer who—maybe, maybe not—had stalked me the day before, after I left the bank in Palazzo Tolomei with my mother’s box.

  As an afterthought, I Googled Juliet’s Eyes. Not surprisingly, none of the search results had anything to do with legendary treasures. Almost all were semischolarly discussions about the significance of eyes in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and I dutifully read through a couple of passages from the play, trying to spot a secret message. One of them read:

  Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye

  Than twenty of their swords.

  Well, I thought to myself, if this evil Luciano Salimbeni had really killed my mother over a treasure called Juliet’s Eyes, then Romeo’s statement was true; whatever the nature of those mysterious eyes, they were potentially more dangerous than weapons, simple as that. In contrast, the second passage was a bit more complex than your average pickup line:

  Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven,

  Having some business, do entreat her eyes

  To twinkle in their spheres till they return.

  What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

  I mulled over the lines all the way down Via del Paradiso. Romeo was clearly trying to compliment Juliet by saying that her eyes were like sparkling stars, but he sure had a funny way of phrasing it. It was, in my opinion, not particularly smooth to woo a girl by envisioning what she would look like with her eyes gouged out.

  But really, this poetry was a welcome diversion from the other facts I had learned that day. Both my parents had died in a terrible way, separately, and possibly even at the hands of a murderer. Even though I had left the cemetery hours ago, I was still struggling to process this horrendous discovery. On top of my shock and sorrow I also felt the little fleabites of fear, just as I had the day before, when I thought I was being followed after leaving the bank. But had Peppo been right in warning me? Could I possibly be in danger now, so many years later? If so, I could presumably pull myself back out of danger by going
home to Virginia. But then, what if there really was a treasure? What if—somewhere in my mother’s box—there was a clue to finding Juliet’s Eyes, whatever they were.

  Lost in speculation, I strolled into a secluded cloister garden off Piazza San Domenico. By now day was turning dusk, and I stood for a moment in the portico of a loggia, drinking in the last rays of sunshine while the evening shadows slowly crawled up my legs. I did not feel like going back to the hotel just yet, where Maestro Ambrogio’s journal was waiting to sweep me through another sleepless night in the year 1340.

  As I stood there, absorbed in the twilight, my thoughts circling around my parents, I saw him for the first time—

  The Maestro.

  He was walking through the shadows of the opposite loggia, carrying an easel and several other items that kept slipping from his grip, forcing him to stop and redistribute the weight. At first I simply stared at him. It was impossible not to. He was unlike any other Italian I had ever met, with his long, gray hair, sagging cardigan, and open sandals; in fact, he looked most of all like a time traveler from Woodstock shuffling around in a world taken over by runway models.

  He did not see me at first, and when I caught up with him and handed him a paintbrush he had dropped, he jumped with fear.

  “Scusi,” I said, “but I think this is yours.”

  He looked at the brush without recognition, and when he finally took it, he held it awkwardly, as if its purpose completely escaped him. Then he looked at me, still perplexed, and said, “Do I know you?”

  Before I could answer, a smile spread over his face, and he exclaimed, “Of course I do! I remember you. You are—oh! Remind me … who are you?”

  “Giulietta. Tolomei? But I don’t think—”

  “Si-si-si! Of course! Where have you been?”

  “I … just arrived.”

  He grimaced at his own stupidity. “Of course you did! Never mind me. You just arrived. And here you are. Giulietta Tolomei. More beautiful than ever.” He smiled and shook his head. “I never understood this thing, time.”