Juliet's Answer

by Glenn Dixon

  Devin looked up at the clock. The bell was going to ring, my last school bell ever. “It’s time, Mr. Dixon.” He tugged his backpack up onto his lap.

  “Yes,” I said. “We’re finished.”

  The students didn’t hop up from their desks as I expected them to. Instead, they were whispering to each other. One or two glanced at me with mischievous smiles. Then all at once, they stood—the entire class—surrounding me. I still had my Romeo and Juliet text in my hands.

  “Whoa,” I said. “What gives?”

  “Group hug!” someone called out. And they sandwiched me. Thirty of them. I didn’t know what to say.

  The bell rang, and my students bounded out the door. They were so young. Just beginning. They had no real sense of endings. They jumbled out the door, chattering and pushing, as if tomorrow morning they’d be in class again, as if they would always be this age, caught in perpetual youth, the whole world ahead of them.

  On her way out, Sadia stopped and turned back. “Thank you, Mr. Dixon,” she said. And then she too was gone.

  Act Three

  Any man that can write

  Verona rained. It thundered and poured. I arrived on a dark and miserable evening and took a taxi to the pensione I’d booked online. The place wasn’t far from the train station; in fact, it was in an apartment block tucked just behind the Franciscan monastery that housed Juliet’s tomb.

  A creaky old lift took me up to the third floor, and the owner, Emiliano, met me at the door. He didn’t say much. He handed me a couple of toothy keys on an iron ring as big as a bracelet—one for the street entrance and another for his apartment. The front hall was lined with posters from classical music performances. A violin case sat on the floor beside the umbrella stand.

  “You may choose one of the bedrooms at the back,” Emiliano said, stepping aside to let me in. He’d divided the back rooms from the rest of the apartment with a sliding accordion door. “And please excuse me,” he went on. “I am now practicing.”

  The door to his music room had a pane of wavy opaque glass. I watched him shuffle in, his distorted figure hunching down over a harp. The wood bracing of the harp curved over his head and he tinkled out a short baroque passage, a series of notes that chimed up and down a minor scale.

  I chose the bedroom at the very back and heaved my bags in. I knew I should just climb into bed, but I was still wide awake, my circadian rhythms well out of sorts from the long flight. I sat by the bedroom window, which overlooked a tiny lane and a crumbling stone wall. Just behind the wall was Juliet’s vault.

  Okay, I thought. I’ve escaped. Now what? Here I was, back in Verona, a long way from my troubles, but I wasn’t exactly feeling liberated. I was lost and alone on the far side of the world, and maybe I’d made a big mistake. I’d come thinking that I should write another letter to Juliet. Something a little more insistent. “Dear Juliet, what the fuck just happened to my life?” I pondered a few more choice phrases, but I knew that anger never helped anything.

  Out front, Emiliano played on. The sound of the harp was soothing, a gentle plink of notes under the pattering of rain outside my window. I went to the washroom, toothbrush in hand, just as Emiliano finished his playing. We crossed paths in the hallway.

  “Buona sera,” he said. “You cannot sleep?”

  “Buona sera,” I said. “No, sorry. I heard you playing and, well . . . it sounded beautiful.”

  “Eh,” he said, shrugging in resignation. “Si può sempre migliorare.”

  “What’s does that mean?”

  “It means, ‘One can always improve.’ ”

  Yes, I thought, but how?

  I did eventually fall asleep, and in the morning, the rain had let up enough for me to walk to the old office on the Via Galileo Galilei. Raindrops plopped on my umbrella, but the worst of the storm was over. I stepped over puddles in the cobblestones and walked out across the dark bridge, down past the railroad tracks. At the entrance to number 3, I closed my umbrella and shook it out. Giovanna stood behind the reception counter with a sheaf of papers in her hand. “You have returned!” she said with a genuine smile.

  “Yes, I—”

  “You have come at a good time,” she said, sidling out from behind the counter. “There have been some changes. You will have the same room, but . . .” Her heels clicked down the familiar hallway and I followed her. The office was considerably improved, furnished now with a shining hardwood desk and a proper office chair, padded in a plush blue fabric. The rough shelving along the wall was gone, replaced by an aluminum cabinet with sliding doors.

  “I can’t stay too long today,” I said. “I arrived just last night. I’m—”

  “Of course,” she said, tipping her head. “Stay as long as you like.”

  I plunked myself down on the chair. “Is Anna coming in?”

  Giovanna stood up a little straighter. “Anna will be working on some new ideas now.” She paused as if unsure of something. “I will be at the front desk. Yes?”

  The Gustav Klimt poster was still up on the wall. A battered cardboard box, bigger even than last year’s, took up a good portion of the desktop. Outside, a dog barked and I reached for the first letter of the day. It seemed very strange to be back.

  The letters were the same as ever—pleas, mostly from young women. Where is my Romeo? How will I find him? And my answers were rote. Be patient. Your time will come.

  I worked for an hour or so, until I came to this one:

  “Dear Juliet, I have come to spend the summer in Tuscany. I was in a relationship with a man named Jake who has played a significant part in my life for four years.”

  Four years. Exactly the time at which a lot of relationships fall apart.

  “When we began,” the letter went on, “we were madly, passionately, vibratingly in love. We spent all our free time together making beautiful memories. Then his father became ill. The sicker the father got, the more my love pushed me away. Then the man who wanted to spend forever with me cheated.”

  Bang. There it is.

  “He continued on this destructive path for more than a year, treating me terribly and cheating behind my back. Destiny stepped in and I found out in an impossible, inconceivable way. I finally broke it off and spent a year wanting to hurt him until I grew sick of feeling anger all the time.

  “We eventually got back together. Of course we did, but as wonderful as he now seemed to be, I could not let go of the past. I still held all of the hurt in my heart, and I realized there was so much more in this world for me. I realized I needed to find myself, and not myself in relation to him. So I broke things off and I have never felt such a wave of relief.”

  A dull ache gnawed at the back of my jaw. This letter struck a little too close to the bone.

  This woman had felt relief, but where was mine? I’d escaped, all right, but there was no satisfaction in it and no cure. How long would that take? When would I ever feel happy again? It was all so unfair. I was miserable and lonely and the only difference now was that I was miserable and lonely many thousands of miles from home.

  That night I went out to a restaurant that Giovanna had suggested. I found the Osteria al Duca up past the Piazza della Erbe. When I peeked in the window, the long benches were populated by locals. The room was rustic, with open beams across the roof and plank floorboards. A little plaque inside the door said that the building dated back to medieval times and probably at one point had been the stables of the rulers of the city.

  I sat by myself at the end of a long trestle table. The tables were supposed to ensure that you wouldn’t be eating by yourself. Eating is not a solitary affair in Italy. There’s none of this business of wolfing down a meal in front of the television. Meals are a time for camaraderie, for family, a time to savor the company and the dishes. So I knew I was being a little out of line, sitting at the far end of the table, drawing my laptop out of my daypack and setting it up. I didn’t care.

  Giovanna had written down a couple of local dishes
I should try. When the menu came, I settled on bigole al torchio con ragù d’asino Ragù, I knew, meant a meat sauce served over pasta. The cathedral bells gonged six times—six o’clock then, very early for dinner by European standards.

  Near the stairs leading up to the second floor, a woman sat at a tiny desk, squabbling into a phone. She didn’t stop talking. She didn’t seem to even take a breath. Her voice ripped through the room like a chain saw. She glared at me a few times, some poor sod in her restaurant, heartsick and alone, tapping at his computer. I put up my hand and she spat something more into the phone, put it down, and came over to me. “Allora?” she said, her hands on her hips.

  I pointed at the ragù on the menu and she stomped off into the kitchen. About fifteen minutes later, she clattered my plate down in front of me.

  “Grazie,” I said meekly. She fluttered her hand and went back to her little desk. The dish looked like a nice spaghetti Bolognese. It tasted like spaghetti Bolognese too. I sprinkled real parmigiano-reggiano over it and tucked in. Only after trying it did I google “ragù d’asino.” Asino, I learned, is the Italian word for donkey, coming from the Latin for “ass.” Donkey meat, it turns out, is a local delicacy in Verona. I tried not to consider the maxim “You are what you eat,” and I tried to avoid the proposition that the universe was trying to tell me something.

  Okay, okay. Enough with the self-pity. I had to get it together. I’d told my students that Romeo and Juliet ended quite hopefully. It took a catastrophe for them to realize it, but the Capulets and Montagues had at last realized the futility of their centuries-old hatred. I’d suffered my own smaller catastrophe, but what epiphanies was I supposed to be drawing from all this? Love is a load of donkey balls, is that it? That kind of attitude didn’t really get me anywhere. That didn’t end the emptiness I was feeling, the hollowness in my gut, the tightness in my jaw. The best I could come up with was that I should just pretend to be happy. There’s science behind that, but also a couple of thousand years of Buddhist philosophy. Just pretend to be happy and soon enough you actually will be happy.

  I’d read before about brain plasticity. I knew that it was possible to rewire your brain by consciously changing your thought patterns. It’s not easy, but it can be done. The initial research came from stroke victims who had managed to physically rebuild or rewire the damaged parts of their brains, sometimes beyond what conventional medicine had thought possible. Unlike any other organ in the body, the brain can reconstruct itself. It’s a literal example of mind over matter.

  So I could choose to be happy. I could choose to let things go and move on. It wouldn’t be simple and it wouldn’t be instantaneous, but choosing to do so would be the first step. The trick, I supposed, would be keeping up the ruse.

  * * *

  The next morning, I walked onto the bridge that led out of the Old City. I stopped for a while to watch the river heaving in dark slabs beneath me. Black clouds unfurled to the north over the Alps, and though the weather was trying to clear, it was still cold and gray. This wasn’t anything like last summer.

  I turned up my collar and scurried on, past the cemetery and down onto the Via Galilei. A gloom of warehouses and ugly apartment blocks lined the street, and every few feet spindly trees were optimistically planted alongside the crumbling concrete curb. There wasn’t any real sidewalk, just a pathway beaten in the wet grass beneath the trees. I plodded along, listening to the sound of my own breath. Not a single car came by, not another soul.

  I arrived at the meager parking lot and headed straight for the front door. When I tipped it open, there, standing at the front, was Anna. She had her boots on and was buttoning up her coat. She glanced at me, but nothing registered. Then, “Glenn!” she cried. “Ben tornado!” and she burst into one of her radiant smiles.

  She lurched forward, kissing me on both cheeks. I bumbled through this kissing thing, turning my left cheek first when it should have been my right, but she just laughed. It was great to see her.

  “I am on my way out. I’m going to meet Manuela,” she said. “We are talking about the tour now. I have some papers for her. You remember the tour?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “And you still have your coat on,” she said. “You must come. It is decided.”

  Giovanna stood at the counter behind Anna. She’d only briefly looked up when I’d opened the door, but then she’d gone back to reading a paper that lay on the counter ledge.

  “Is it okay?” I asked.

  Giovanna nodded and returned to her reading, waving one hand at us to flap us away.

  Back out on Via Galilei I had to trot along to keep up with Anna. The sky was spitting and she hoisted her umbrella. One spoke of it kept poking me in the shoulder. “We are late,” she said. “Manuela will be waiting. She is very timely. How can you say this?”

  “Punctual?”

  “Yes. So much is happening,” Anna said. “Here.” She held her umbrella higher and I ducked under it. “We are planning for Juliet’s birthday. You will be here on September 16?”

  “Yes. I think so,” I said.

  “Good. You must attend. It will be nice.” Anna cast me another of her smiles.

  “I’m glad you have come back,” she said.

  And for the first time since arriving, I was glad to be back too. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Tell me, tell me, what has happened?” she said. “With your letter? With your love life?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s kind of a funny story.”

  Anna stopped and studied my face.

  “Okay, maybe not so funny,” I said.

  She studied my face a moment longer. I think she knew I didn’t want to talk about it. Not yet, at least.

  “Okay,” she said, “maybe we must hurry.”

  At the end of the bridge, we turned up a wide street, almost a square. Guardrails cordoned off an archeological dig in the subterranean gloom below the street level. I could make out contours of an old Roman road and the Ponte dei Leoni archway—the Gate of Lions. It once stood over the road that led to Bologna. There are no lions now, and it’s just a blank wall that leads nowhere, the gate itself having been bricked in more than a thousand years ago.

  We hurried by. Up ahead, I saw the familiar dovetail crenellations at the top of Romeo’s house. “Are we meeting Manuela here?” I called after Anna, who had stepped ahead of me again. She didn’t answer, but at the far end of the street, a woman turned. She wore a pea-green raincoat, sensibly enough, and she carried a yellow purse as big as a pillow. She moved forward and Anna passed her a file folder, which she dropped into her big purse. I’d reasoned that we’d be starting at Romeo’s house, so I’d stopped there, just under the plaque that read THIS IS NOT ROMEO, HE’S SOME OTHER WHERE. But Anna turned and waved at me to join them at the end of the road.

  “Glenn,” Anna said when I caught up, “this is Manuela. Manuela, may I present Glenn. He is an expert on Shakespeare.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I’d say expert.”

  “Piacere,” said Manuela, dipping her head slightly.

  “He has seen the first book of Romeo and Juliet,” said Anna, “in, where did you say?”

  “In the British Library.”

  Manuela studied me. She had a kindly face. She was older and very much shorter than Anna. “We are thinking of beginning the tour here,” she said. She spoke with a classic Italian accent—an upturned a on the end of almost every English word. “It is-a the important-a history,” she said, touching her hand to the wrought iron fence that rose up beside us.

  “You’re not starting at Romeo’s house?” I asked.

  “No,” said Manuela. “We will start with the true history. If you look here . . .” She tapped at the elaborate ironwork again. It enclosed a courtyard and the Santa Maria Antica church. “Do you see?” Manuela asked.

  I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Here,” she said. “This is the insignia of the Scala family.” Wrought into the
fencing were what looked like tiny iron ladders.

  “Ladders?” I said.

  “Stairs,” she said. “Scala means ‘stairs.’ And behind this . . .” In the courtyard were four or five massive tombs, like Gothic gazebos, intricately carved from white Carrara marble. One tomb towered ostentatiously above the rest, a stone sepulcher as elegant as a cathedral spire, with a life-size equestrian statue on top. “That one,” said Manuela, “is the tomb of Cangrande della Scala.”

  “Della Scala?”

  “In Shakespeare, the name is Escalus.”

  “Like, Prince Escalus?”

  Manuela smiled. “Of course.”

  “Are you saying Prince Escalus was a real person?”

  “Yes. That is his grave. Right there.”

  “What?”

  “He was the ruler of Verona in 1302, the year in which Romeo and Juliet’s romance occurred. Prince Scala told the story to Dante.”

  “Wait,” I said, shaking my head. “Like Dante Dante?”

  “Yes. Dante Alighieri wrote much of his Divina Commedia here in Verona. You did not know?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Manuela tsk-ed at me. “Dante wrote the names in his Purgatorio, Capulet and Montague.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “In 1302, yes. It was the time when the two families were fighting. This is certain.”

  “But . . . that’s amazing. You’re telling me it’s a true story—a daughter from one family and a son from the other, falling in love? Here, in Verona?”

  “Yes.” Manuela flipped her wrist over and checked her watch. “We cannot know for 100 percent, but we believe it is a true story.” She turned back to Anna, who’d been quiet all along, a bemused expression on her face. “Grazie, Anna,” Manuela said, tapping at her big yellow purse and the papers inside. “You must excuse me now,” she said. “I must go to meet my daughter. But Glenn—she turned her gaze on me once more—“you should look in Dante. Purgatorio. Canto 6, lines 106 to 108. There, you will find it.”