by Anne Fortier
I more felt than saw Janice rolling her eyes, ready to give up on the whole thing. But there was something incredibly sincere about Friar Lorenzo that resonated inside me in a way my sister would never be able to understand.
“I know,” I said, meeting the monk’s eyes. “But my most important duty is to end the curse. You know that. And I can’t do it without your help.”
After hearing Umberto’s translation of my answer, Friar Lorenzo frowned slightly and reached out to touch my neck.
“He asks where the crucifix is,” says Umberto. “The crucifix will protect you from the demons.”
“I … don’t know where it is,” I stammered, thinking back to Alessandro removing it from my neck—mostly to tease—and putting it on the bedstand right where I had put his bullet. After that I had forgotten all about it.
Friar Lorenzo was clearly not happy with my answer, nor was he pleased to discover that I was no longer wearing the eagle ring.
“He says it would be very dangerous for you to approach the grave like this,” said Umberto, wiping a drop of sweat from his forehead, “and he wants you to reconsider.”
I swallowed a few times, trying to calm my galloping heart. Then I said, before I could convince myself otherwise, “Tell him that there is nothing for me to consider. I have no choice. We must find that grave tonight.” I nodded at the men behind us. “Those are the real demons. Only the Virgin Mary can protect us from them. But I know their punishment will find them.”
Now at last, Friar Lorenzo nodded. But instead of speaking, he closed his eyes and started humming a little tune, head rocking back and forth as if he was trying to remember the lyrics to a song. Glancing at Janice I saw her making a face at Umberto, but just as she opened her mouth to comment on my progress—or lack thereof—the monk stopped humming, opened his eyes, and recited what sounded like a short poem.
“‘Black plague guards the Virgin’s door,’” translated Umberto, “that is what the book says.”
“What book?” Janice wanted to know.
“‘Look at them now,’” Umberto went on, ignoring her, “‘the godless men and women, prostrate before her door, which remains forever closed.’ Friar Lorenzo says this cave must be the old antechamber to the crypt. The question is—” Umberto broke off when the monk suddenly started walking towards the nearest wall, muttering to himself.
Not quite sure what we were supposed to do, we dutifully followed Friar Lorenzo as he walked slowly around the cave with a hand to the wall. Now that we knew what we were walking on, I felt a little shiver for every step I took, and the wafts of cigarette smoke were almost welcome, for they drowned out the other smell in the cave, which I now knew was the smell of death.
Only when we had come full circle and were back where we started—all the while trying to ignore the rude gibes from Cocco’s men, who were watching us with contemptuous amusement—did Friar Lorenzo finally stop and speak to us again.
“The Siena Cathedral is oriented east-west,” Umberto explained, “with the entrance facing west. That is normal for cathedrals. And so you’d think it would be the same with the crypt. However, the book says—”
“What book?” Janice asked again.
“For crap’s sake,” I snapped. “Some book that monks read in Viterbo, okay?”
“The book says,” Umberto continued, looking daggers at us both, “that ‘the Virgin’s black part is the mirror image of her white part,’ which could mean that the crypt—being the black part, that is, the one below-ground—is in fact oriented west-east, with the entrance in the east, in which case the door leading to it from this room would be facing west. Don’t you agree?”
Janice and I exchanged glances; she looked precisely as dazed as I felt. “We have no idea,” I said to Umberto, “how he got to that conclusion, but at this point, we’ll believe anything.”
When Cocco heard the news, he flicked away his cigarette butt and pushed up his sleeve to set the compass on his wristwatch. And as soon as he was confident which way was west, he began yelling instructions to the men.
Minutes later, they were all busy breaking up the floor in the westernmost part of the cave, ripping out dismembered skeletons with their bare hands and tossing them aside as if they were nothing but the branches off a dead tree. It was an odd sight, the men crawling around in their tuxedos and shiny shoes, headlamps on, not the least bit worried about breathing in the dust from the disintegrating bones.
Almost sick to my stomach, I turned to Janice, who seemed completely mesmerized by the excavation. When she saw me looking at her, she shuddered slightly and said, “‘Lady, come from that nest of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep. A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents.’”
I put an arm around her, trying to shield us both from the horrendous sight. “And I who thought you’d never learn those damn lines.”
“It wasn’t the lines,” she said. “It was the role. I was never Juliet.” She wrapped my arm more tightly around her. “I could never die for love.”
I tried to read her face in the wavering light. “How do you know?”
She didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter. For just then, one of the men yelled out from the hole they were making, and we both stepped forward to see what had happened.
“They found the top of something,” said Umberto, pointing. “It looks like Friar Lorenzo was right.”
We both stretched to see what he was pointing at, but in the sporadic light of the headlamps it was nearly impossible to make out anything other than the men themselves, bustling around in the hole like frenzied beetles.
Only later, when they all climbed out to get their power tools, did I dare point my flashlight into the crater to see what they had found. “Look!” I grabbed Janice by the arm. “It’s a sealed-up door!”
In reality, it was no more than the pointy top of a white structure in the cave wall—barely three feet high—but there was no question it had once been a door frame, or at least the upper part of one, and it even had a five-petal rose carved at the very top. The door opening, however, had been sealed off with a jumble of brown brick and fragments of marble décor; whoever had overseen the work—presumably sometime in the dreadful year 1348—had clearly been in too much of a hurry to care about the building materials or the pattern.
When the men returned with their tools and started drilling into the brick, Janice and I took cover behind Umberto and Friar Lorenzo. Soon, the cave was vibrating with the mayhem of demolition, and chunks of tufa began falling like hail from the ceiling, covering us all—once more—in rubble.
No less than four layers of brick separated the mass grave from what lay beyond, and as soon as the men with the drills saw that they were through the final one, they stepped back and started kicking at the remainder to bring it down. It didn’t take them long to make a big, jagged hole, and before the dust had even settled, Cocco pushed them all aside in order to be the first man to point his torch through the opening.
In the silence following the bedlam, we very clearly heard him whistling in wonder, and the sound created an eerie, hollow echo.
“La cripta!” whispered Friar Lorenzo, crossing himself.
“Here we go,” muttered Janice. “I hope you brought garlic.”
IT TOOK COCCO’S MEN about half an hour to prepare our descent into the crypt. Digging further into the interlaced bones, and drilling out the brick in the wall as they went, they were clearly trying to bring us down to floor level. In the end, however, they got tired of the dusty job and began tossing bones and rubble through the hole, trying to create a heap that could serve as a ramp on the other side. In the beginning, the bricks came down with loud thuds on what sounded like a stone floor, but as the pile started growing, the noise became more faint.
When Cocco finally sent us through the opening, Janice and I descended into the crypt hand in hand with Friar Lorenzo, carefully making our way down the sloping pile of brick and bones, feeling not unlike airraid surv
ivors clambering down a shattered staircase, wondering if this was the end—or the beginning—of the world.
The air was much cooler in the crypt than it had been in the cave behind us, and definitely cleaner. Looking around in the light of a dozen swaying searchlights, I half expected to see a long, narrow room with rows of grim sarcophagi and sinister Latin inscriptions on the walls, but much to my surprise it was a beautiful, even majestic space with a vaulted ceiling and tall, supporting pillars. Here and there stood a number of stone tables that might originally have been altars, but which were now stripped of all sacred objects. Apart from that, there was not much left in the crypt but shadows and silence.
“Oh, my God!” whispered Janice, pointing my torchlight at the walls around us, “Look at those frescoes! We’re the first people to see them since—”
“The Plague,” I said. “And this is probably bad for them … all this air and light.”
She giggled, but it sounded more like a sob. “That should be the very least of our concerns right now, if you don’t mind.”
Walking along the wall, looking at the frescoes, we passed by a doorway that was covered by a cast-iron gate with golden filigree. Pointing the flashlight through the bars we could see a small side chapel with graves that made me think of the village cemetery with the Tolomei sepulchre, which I had visited with cousin Peppo a lifetime ago.
Janice and I were not the only ones interested in the side chapels. All around us, Cocco’s men were systematically checking each and every door, obviously looking for Romeo and Giulietta’s grave.
“What if it isn’t here?” whispered Janice, glancing nervously at Cocco, who was becoming more and more frustrated as the search continued without result. “Or what if they’re buried here all right, but the statue is somewhere else? … Jules?”
But I was only listening to her with half an ear. After stepping on several chunks of what looked like crumbled plaster, I had pointed my flashlight upwards and discovered that the whole place was far more dilapidated than I had first assumed. Here and there, parts of the vaulted ceiling had come down, and a couple of the supporting pillars were leaning, ominously, under the burden of the modern world.
“Oh, boy,” I said, suddenly realizing that Cocco and his men were no longer our only enemies, “this whole place is just waiting to collapse.”
Looking over my shoulder at the jagged opening leading to the antechamber with the mass grave, I knew that, even if we were able to sneak back there unseen, we would never get up through the hole in the ceiling, where the men had helped us down. Using all my strength, I might be able to lift up Janice, but then what about me? And what about Friar Lorenzo? In theory, Umberto could lift all three of us one by one, but then what about him? Would we just leave him there?
My speculations were interrupted when Cocco summoned us both with a sharp whistle and ordered Umberto to ask us if we had any more clues as to where the damned statue could be.
“Oh, it’s here!” Janice blurted out. “The question is where they hid it.”
When she saw that Cocco wasn’t following, she tried to laugh. “Did you really think,” she went on, her voice beginning to shake, “they would put something so valuable in a place where everyone would see it?”
“What did Friar Lorenzo say?” I asked Umberto, mostly to get everyone’s attention off Janice, who looked as if she might burst into tears at any moment. “He must have some idea.”
We all looked at the monk, who was wandering about on his own, gazing at the golden stars on the ceiling.
“‘And he put a dragon there to guard their eyes,’” recited Umberto. “That’s all. But there’s no dragon here. Not a single statue anywhere.”
“What’s odd,” I said, looking from one side of the crypt to the other, “is that over there on the left we have five side chapels at regular intervals, but over here we only have four. Look. The middle one is missing. There’s just wall.”
Before Umberto had even finished translating what I said, Cocco marched us all over to the place where the fifth doorway should have been, in order to take a closer look.
“Not just wall,” observed Janice, pointing at a colorful fresco, “but a landscape with a big, red, flying … snake.”
“Looks like a dragon to me,” I said, taking a step back. “You know what I think? I think the grave is behind this wall. See …” I pointed at a long crack in the fresco betraying the shape of a door frame beneath the plaster. “This was obviously a side chapel, just like the others, but I bet Salimbeni got tired of posting guards here twenty-four seven. And so he simply walled it up. It makes sense.”
Cocco did not need any more proof that this was, indeed, the location of the grave, and within minutes the power tools were going again, the roar of metal against stone reverberating through the crypt as the men drilled into the dragon fresco to get access to the presumed hidden niche. This time it was not just dust and rubble that fell on us as we stood there, watching the destruction with our fingers in our ears, but big chunks of the vaulted ceiling, including several golden stars that fell around us with fateful clangs, as if the very cogwheels of the universe were coming off.
…
WHEN THE DRILLS FINALLY stopped, the opening in the wall was just large enough for a person to walk through, and it did indeed reveal a hidden niche. One by one, the men disappeared through the improvised doorway, and in the end neither Janice nor I could resist the temptation to follow, even though nobody told us to.
Ducking through the hole, we emerged into a small, dimly lit side chapel, nearly bumping into the others, who were all standing still. Stretching to see what they were looking at, I merely caught a glimpse of something shiny, before one of the men finally had the presence of mind to point his torch directly at the massive object that seemed to be hovering in the air before us.
“Holy shit!” said someone with perfect pronunciation, and for once even Janice was dumbstruck.
There it was, the statue of Romeo and Giulietta, far bigger and much more spectacular than I had ever imagined—in fact, its proportions made it almost threatening. It was as if its creator had wanted the beholders to fall to their knees spontaneously, begging for forgiveness. And I almost did.
Even as it stood there, set on top of a large marble sarcophagus and covered in six hundred years of dust, it had a golden glow about it that no span of time could take away. And in the dim light of the chapel the four gemstone eyes—two blue sapphires and two green emeralds—shone with an almost supernatural brilliance.
To someone who did not know its story, the statue spoke not of grief, but of love. Romeo was kneeling on the sarcophagus, picking up Giulietta in his arms, and they were looking at each other with an intensity that found its way into the dark cranny where my heart was hiding, reminding me of my own fresh sorrows. The drawings in Mom’s sketchbook had clearly been nothing more than guesswork; even her most loving portraits of these two figures, Romeo and Giulietta, did not begin to do them justice.
Standing there, choking back my regrets, it was hard for me to accept that I had originally come to Siena to find this statue and these four gemstones. Now they were right here in front of me, but I no longer felt the slightest desire to own them. And even if they had been mine, I would happily have given them away a thousand times to be back in the real world, safe from the likes of Cocco, or even just to see Alessandro one more time.
“Do you think they put them both in the same coffin?” whispered Janice, interrupting my thoughts. “Come—” She elbowed her way through the men, pulling me along, and when we were right next to the sarcophagus, she took my flashlight and pointed it at an inscription that was carved into the stone. “Look! Remember this from the story? Do you think it’s the one?”
We both leaned closer to look, but could not make out the Italian.
“What was it now?” Janice frowned, trying to remember the English translation. “Oh yes! ‘Here sleeps true and faithful Giulietta … By the love and mercy of God
’—” She paused, forgetting the rest.
“‘To be woken by Romeo, her rightful spouse,’” I went on quietly, mesmerized by the golden face of Romeo, looking right down at me, “‘in an hour of perfect grace.’”
If the story Maestro Lippi had translated to us was true—and it was certainly beginning to look that way—then old Maestro Ambrogio had personally overseen the creation of this statue back in 1341. Surely he, being Romeo and Giulietta’s friend, would have been adamant about getting it right; surely this was a faithful representation of what they had really looked like.
But Cocco and his men had not come all the way from Naples to be lost in reverie, and two of them were already climbing around on top of the sarcophagus, trying to figure out what tools were needed to gouge out the eyes of the statue. In the end they decided that a special kind of drill was necessary, and once the tools had been assembled and handed to them, they each turned to a figure—one to Giulietta, one to Romeo—ready to go ahead.
When he saw what they were about to do, Friar Lorenzo—who had been perfectly calm until this very moment—burst forward and tried to stop the men, pleading with them not to ruin the statue. It was not just a matter of desecrating a piece of art; the monk was clearly convinced that stealing its eyes would trigger some unspeakable evil that would undo us all. But Cocco had no further need for Friar Lorenzo’s superstitious riddles; he pushed the monk brusquely aside and ordered the men to proceed.
As if the racket from tearing down the wall had not been bad enough, the noise from the metal drills was absolutely hellish. Backing away from the mayhem, hands flat against our ears, Janice and I were only too aware that we were rapidly approaching the bitter end of our quest.
Ducking through the hole in the wall and returning to the main part of the crypt—a visibly distressed Friar Lorenzo in tow—we saw right away that the whole place was, quite literally, falling apart. Large cracks were traveling along the plaster walls and up the vaulted ceiling, creating cobweb patterns that needed no more than the tiniest vibration to spread further in all directions.