Juliet's Answer

by Glenn Dixon

  “Sometimes I answer these letters by saying love cannot be defined. It can only be felt,” Soa said. “In this way, I don’t give a direct answer.”

  “It’s like a loophole,” I said.

  “Loophole?”

  “Never mind. That’s good. Is it okay if I use that?”

  Soa tipped her head. “As you like.”

  The lane past Juliet’s house opened onto the Piazza delle Erbe, the old vegetable market. Between the fountains and statues, there are still stalls, but now they’re mostly filled with tourist souvenirs. Only a couple of the stalls carry golden jars of honey or sheaves of fennel. In the middle of the square is a fountain whose pedestal looks like a giant wheel of cheese. Mounted on top of it is the statue of a woman. The torso is actually from the Roman era, with long, draping folds carved into the marble; the head is medieval; and the arms hold a scroll upon which is written the motto of the city—THE DEFENDER OF JUSTICE AND THE LOVER OF HONOR.

  Across the square, Veronica skipped toward us, a broad and toothy grin on her face. Veronica was the youngest of Juliet’s secretaries—by far. She was still a teenager—still in school, in fact—and she lived on the very outskirts of Verona in one of the far-off suburbs. She’d caught the bus to meet us.

  “Ciao,” she said, bouncing into step with us.

  Across from where we were walking, midway up on the opposite side of the square, a narrow lane jutted north between two buildings, and an archway, like the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, ran between the two, a couple of stories off the ground. Inexplicably, a massive curved shape hung beneath the archway from a chain. “Veronica,” I said, “what is that thing?”

  “A dinosaur bone,” she said. “That’s what we tell the tourists.”

  Soa flashed her a warning look.

  “Okay, but what is it really?”

  “The rib bone of a whale. They found it when they built this square, maybe five hundred years ago, maybe longer.”

  “But why is it hanging there?”

  “Because we are all mad.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We have a saying here: ‘Venesiani gran sion, Padoani tuti doton, Vicentini maia gati, Veronesi tuti mati.’ It’s in dialect,” said Veronica. “It means Venetians are grand sirs, high class,” she said, performing a little flourish with her hand, “and people from Padua are all doctors. People from Vicenza eat cats,” continued Veronica.

  “Eat cats?” I said.

  “And people from Verona are all mad.” Veronica laughed.

  “That explains a few things,” said Soa.

  “It’s funny,” I said, “in English, we often talk about love being madness.”

  Soa studied me.

  “We’re always saying things like, ‘I’m crazy about her,’ or, ‘She drives me out of my mind.’ Even Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, calls love ‘a madness most discreet.’ ”

  “It is kind of crazy,” Soa said.

  “It is the same in Italian,” said Veronica. “Sono pazza di te.”

  Soa pursed her lips together and nodded sagely. They both turned to me.

  “Why are you not learning Italian?” Veronica asked. “You are here.”

  “I don’t know.” I was too embarrassed to say that I’d opened my grammar book exactly once since I’d arrived. It intimidated me. Prego! the cover announced, An Invitation to Italian. Inside the book, my friend’s name, Desiree, had been written in looping blue letters on the flyleaf. Desiree had gone on to do her master’s degree in interpreting and translation, and I knew she was hoping I’d pick up some of the language while I was here. Boy, was she going to be disappointed.

  I had flipped through the first few pages and learned bits of the opening chapter on introducing yourself—but beyond that, it seemed impossible for me to learn this most mellifluous of languages from the pages of a book.

  “I guess,” I said, “understanding has always come slowly for me.”

  * * *

  I walked with Soa and Veronica up the Corso Porta Borsari, the wide cobblestone street that runs perpendicularly off from the square. A few blocks up, Soa ducked around a corner into the lane called Vicolo Santa Cecilia.

  Soa sprang ahead of us and rattled at the front door with her key. She stepped through and held the front door for us. Inside, we tramped up the marble stairs and crossed over to the glassed-in entrance of the new office. Soa had that key too.

  We’d left a pile of letters in the middle of the table the last time we were here, and we each took our seats as if we were sitting down to a card game. Papers rustled as we opened envelopes. Soa drew out a large sheet of paper and her face twisted into disgust. The paper had an imprint of lipstick on it where someone had kissed it. Soa held it up between her forefinger and thumb like something rank. “Listen to this one,” she said. “ ‘When the stars cross the moon, I will see you soon.’ ”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “Terrible,” she agreed. “Stars don’t cross in front of the moon. Who writes these things?” She bent to pen her response and shook her head. “Sometimes, I just want to slap these people.”

  “And,” Veronica said, “how about this one? ‘Dear Juliet,’ ” she read. “ ‘I’m Ellie from Kentucky. I have a lover. I really love him. I know he is not perfect. But his imperfections are just perfect for me.’ ”

  “That’s nice,” I said.

  “No, no . . . listen,” said Veronica. “ ‘The problem is I am not a good girlfriend. I like drinking and I have lots of problems. I drink without control. I mess up with other boys. I want to fix it and be a good girl. But it’s not that easy. I have already broken his heart many times. I’m on vacation, traveling in Europe for twenty-six days. After I come back home, I wish I could be a nice, good person. Thanks for reading.’ ” Veronica looked up. “What do you think?”

  “Get off the sauce, Ellie,” I said.

  “Sauce?” asked Veronica.

  “The booze, the alcohol.”

  Veronica looked pensive.

  “What amazes me,” I pushed on, “is that none of these people seem to see the obvious in their predicaments.”

  “I think,” said Veronica, “that is why they write. They write not just to Juliet . . .”

  “They write to themselves,” finished Soa. “They write to make it clear to themselves.”

  I tapped the pen to my lips. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe.”

  * * *

  I had a key to Claire’s place and she had a key to mine. We’d water the plants and pick up the mail if the other was away. One day I popped over and she didn’t answer the door when I knocked. There was a pause and then, “C’mon in,” she called. Her voice sounded distant, coming from upstairs somewhere. I squeaked open the front door.

  “Where are you?”

  “Up here.”

  I clumped up the stairs.

  She was in the kitchen, crouched on top of the stove in an odd position. I rushed forward. “What the hell . . . what are you doing?”

  She grunted. “I’m trying to put in this new stove cover.” Above the stove, she held up a stove hood with one hand and one knee. In her other hand was a screwdriver.

  “Here,” I said, “let me get this. Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Because I was holding up this.”

  “Okay, look, here . . .” I held the stove hood in place and she turned the first screw into place and tightened it. Gradually, screw by screw, we secured it into place.

  “Can you help me off here?” she asked. She reached out a hand. She was folded up quite extraordinarily. “I’ve been here a while,” she said.

  I helped her down and she stretched her neck once, stood back to survey her work. “It looks good though, don’t you think?”

  “Sure.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how much that thing costs.”

  “Don’t even tell me.”

  Claire had been in her place for a while now, gradually making it her own. She had expensi
ve taste, that’s for sure. She carried a red designer purse around, a Louis Vuitton, I think. She wore smart little black dresses and had her blond hair trimmed in a swank salon. One day, she showed me a door handle she wanted to install at her place. It cost over three hundred dollars. But it’s a door handle, I thought, and not even for the front door. “Won’t you need a whole bunch of them?” I said, “One for each room in your—”

  “But feel it,” she said, placing the cold brass into my hand. I held it in my palm. “Impeccable,” I said. I knew she liked the word, but she yanked the door handle away from me, thinking I was making fun of her.

  “I might have to hire someone to do the renovations,” she said. “This is getting to be too much.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that might be the way to go. But it’ll cost you. It will cost a lot.”

  * * *

  “Ecco!” Veronica said. “Here is a letter about Shakespeare.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It’s in Italian.” She translated it for me. “ ‘Cara Juliet,’ ” she began. “ ‘Why do you wish to kill yourself? Why do you and Romeo stay in Verona? Why do you not run away from there?’ ”

  That exact question had in fact come up in class, and I didn’t really have a good answer for it.

  “In my opinion,” said Veronica, “you cannot know what it is like for another person. Maybe it is a good option for us—to run away—but maybe it is not possible for her.”

  “For a young woman in that time,” I said.

  “Maybe for a young woman in any time,” said Soa.

  We were quiet again after that. In my peripheral vision, I saw Soa stop at one letter. She stared at it, then reached back for the last one she had answered. She placed them side by side.

  “Look at this,” said Soa. “This one is from a father and this one”—Soa held up the one beside it—“is from his daughter. Both from the same address.” Soa pushed them across the table toward me. “You can answer these.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re older. Because you’re a man.”

  “Yes, but . . . why—”

  “Take them,” insisted Soa.

  I sighed and reached for the letters.

  The father wrote that his wife of twenty-three years had left him. “There was a lot of change,” he wrote. “We had good years, but we became different in character. Then she lied to the children, our daughters.” He went on,“I said to my wife, ‘If you no longer love me then by all means leave, but beware the impact on the children.’ And now she has had three relationships in two years. I don’t know what to say to my daughters. I worry so much that they will become cynical, that they will never be able to love.”

  The daughter’s letter was even more difficult. Her name was Rebecca and she was the eldest at sixteen. “They say time is a good healer,” she began. “My parents got divorced two years ago, but my heart is still broken. Is it possible to have a broken heart when the breakup wasn’t mine? Mother has a new partner and seems happy, but my father is so very lonely.”

  I wondered if they’d sat down together to write these letters as a way to try to heal. But I don’t think they’d read each other’s letters. So much sorrow. So many secrets.

  Soa was watching me.

  “What am I supposed to say?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” Veronica started, “you can say that they both have someone who loves them very much. You can tell the father how much his daughter cares about him and you can tell the daughter how much she is loved by her father.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I suppose that’s a start.”

  At the end of the day, Soa walked back to the university, where she shared a flat with another exchange student. Veronica had to catch her bus home, so I walked with her down to her stop. It was on my way anyway.

  “You are leaving soon?” she asked with a sideways glance.

  “Yes, tomorrow.”

  “You have not been here long.”

  “No.” I didn’t know what else to say. We turned left onto the busy Corso Cavour. “Veronica,” I said, as we walked, “I can’t help but ask. How old are you exactly?”

  “Almost seventeen.” She jutted out her dimpled chin.

  “And you’re answering letters?”

  “Why not? I like it.”

  “Fair enough. But how did you become a Secretary di Giulietta?”

  We came to her stop at the Piazzetta Santi Apostoli and stood in the shade of a towering marble statue, of a politician maybe, who stared impassively out over the square with a pigeon fluttering on his head. “One time, I went with a school group and they showed us what they do at the Club di Giulietta. They told us that they always need help, so then I returned later, by myself, to answer the letters. I am helping since then.”

  “Well, good for you. They need help.”

  “And you? You will come back?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I’d like to.”

  “Anna said you wrote a letter.”

  “Word travels fast.”

  Veronica waited for me to say more.

  “It’s complicated,” I said. “It’s kind of complicated.”

  * * *

  The next morning, Saturday, I went into the club, and the only person there was Giovanna. She was sitting behind the reception desk. She looked harried.

  “Ah,” she said, when I came in through the door. “You are leaving today, are you not?”

  “Yes, I have a train this afternoon, to Milano.” I stopped just behind the circular table at the front. Someone had painted the top with a mural of a big red heart. I hadn’t noticed before, probably because it was usually covered in letters.

  Giovanna rose, patting down her dress. “I want to thank you for answering the letters here.”

  “I didn’t really do that much.”

  She held up a hand like a stop sign. “Every letter helps,” she said. “It is too much for us alone.”

  “I just wanted to say goodbye before I left.”

  Giovanna smiled. “Would you like a ride to the train station?”

  “I’ve left my bags at the hotel. I have to go get them first.”

  “That is not a problem. We can stop there.”

  Giovanna swept around the desk. She already had keys in her hand. I stood still.

  “Are you coming?” she said.

  “Yes, yes . . . of course.”

  We headed to her car. I tucked myself into the front seat and we puttered off down the road to my hotel.

  “You are staying where?”

  “Still at the same hotel, not far from the train station.”

  “Yes, yes, I remember.” She eyed the rearview mirror again. “It would have been good for you to stay in a flat. Many people here have started these B and Bs. The economy now is not so good. People are trying to make extra money.”

  “That’s doesn’t sound mad to me,” I said.

  She turned to me. “Mad?”

  “Oh, you know, the saying that the Veronese are all mad.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I . . . ah . . . it was because of the whale bone hanging in the Piazza delle Erbe.”

  “There is another story about the whale bone,” she said.

  “That it’s a dinosaur bone?”

  “No. The story tells that the bone will finally fall when an honest person walks underneath it. It must be a person who has never told a lie.”

  I’d walked under that archway a dozen times.

  “And it’s been up there for, what, five hundred years?”

  “Sì.”

  We drove over the bridge. The Roman arena came into view. Giovanna tipped her head forward, eyes glancing up at the sky. Over the arena, a line of black clouds was unfurling in the distance.

  “The sky,” she said, “is preparing something for tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be gone,” I said, but she didn’t seem to be listening. She turned left, and we passed through one of the old medieval gates,
the one with the placard bolted up onto the stones THERE IS NO WORLD WITHOUT VERONA’S WALLS.

  “It was nice to see your father the other day,” I blurted.

  “Yes, he asked who you were.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That you were Canadian. That you were trying to help.”

  Trying.

  She waited outside the hotel while I grabbed my bags; then she took me to the train station. She pulled up in front of the doors there.

  “Well,” I said, “it was nice to meet you. Thanks for letting me answer the letters.”

  She nodded once, then pierced me with a hard look. “I hope,” she said, “you have found what you were looking for.”

  “I . . . um . . . yes, thanks.”

  “Then,” she said, “I will say goodbye.”

  I hopped out of the car and yanked my bags from the backseat. Giovanna was already staring ahead. “Goodbye, then,” I said. “Ciao.”

  She pulled away and I heaved my bag into the dark of the train station. I still had an hour to kill, so I sat on a wooden bench, watching a screen that showed the trains arriving and departing, the plastic letters and times cascading over and gradually shuffling up to the top of the list; Firenze, Venezia, Genova, and finally Milano.

  From Milano, hours later, my plane lifted up over the Alps, snow still lacing the highest peaks, dark valleys and shimmering lakes appearing between the mountaintops. Far below us a river wound like a ribbon of silver and on one green slope, a tiny perfect village sat like a toy model.

  And then we were in the clouds. The pilot said we would be flying over Paris and then out over the English Channel, but I couldn’t see a thing. Eventually, the sky purpled and darkened. A single star winked on above the banks of clouds, and I settled back in my seat for the long journey home.

  Act Two

  I am fortune’s fool

  I have a black metal mailbox outside my front door. I usually open it to bank statements and flyers from questionable pizza establishments, but I came home one evening with a satchel full of papers to be graded and saw that there was a letter waiting for me. I knew what it was immediately, having stuffed several hundred letters myself into exactly the same kind of envelope. In the bottom corner was the familiar graphic of Juliet, hair tossed in the wind, hand outstretched imploringly, a look of utter desolation on her face.