by Glenn Dixon
“I’m with Radio Four,” he said. “We’ll be recording a program for Juliet’s birthday.”
“Really?” I thought of the Korean Broadcasting Service, so long ago. Manuela said, “I will be taking Mr. Jenkins on the tour of the city this afternoon.”
He nodded graciously. “And I am very much looking forward to it.”
“But,” said Manuela, “I thought you should first meet each other. Glenn,” she said, “is an expert on Romeo and Juliet.”
“Well, I’m not really an expert.”
“Then, I should like to interview you at some point,” he said.
“For the BBC?”
“If that is quite all right with you.”
“Yes, yes, I’m sorry. Of course. It’s just a lot to take in.”
“We must be going. We have many things to see,” she said. “And you? What is your program for the day?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Any suggestions?”
“You have seen San Zeno?”
“What’s San Zeno?”
Manuela smiled. “It is the cathedral, on the other side of the river. Some say Romeo and Juliet were married there in the crypt. Perhaps you should visit it.”
* * *
The Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore is as old a cathedral as you are likely to find in Europe. The crypt holds the mummified remains of Saint Zeno, the patron saint of Verona who lived here almost seventeen centuries ago. The cathedral itself is more than a thousand years old, constructed of cream-colored stones. A massive stained-glass window called the Wheel of Fortune is set in the bricks above the front doors.
A wedding ceremony had just concluded when Desiree and I arrived, and the guests were pouring out onto the steps. It could have been a wedding anywhere—uncles in stiff suits, bridesmaids in taffeta, kids skipping and oblivious to the occasion. The bride and groom emerged into a hail of confetti and the popping of flashbulbs. Did they realize they were being married in what might have been the same place as Romeo and Juliet? Did they know how that story ended? Desiree and I had been holding hands on the way to the cathedral, but she dropped my hand like a rock when she saw the bride and groom. It wasn’t even a Tuesday.
The two of us skirted the crowds and entered the cathedral through a side entrance. Inside, bouquets of white roses and delicate purple gladiolas were being packed into boxes. An old man swept up the petals and debris, growling to himself at the mess. He disappeared down a stairwell with his broom and dustpan and an eerie silence hung over the great empty cathedral.
“Do you want your camera?” I asked Desiree. I carried it in my daypack. The damn thing was heavy.
“Maybe later,” she said.
We headed up the side of the nave, with the long wooden pews to the right of us. Stout marble pillars striped horizontally in chalk-white and puce rose almost up to the ceiling, and there, between the old timber braces, were the stars. Six-sided stars, exactly the same as the ones at Juliet’s house, hundreds of them lining the roof in alternating colors of mustard yellow and silver. The stars were older than Shakespeare, older even than Dante.
“That’s where the idea comes from,” I said, craning my neck up at them. “The whole star-crossed-lovers thing.”
Desiree was circumspect, oddly silent. After a while, she said, “Do you really think they were married here?”
“Supposedly the wedding took place in the crypt. You know, to keep it hidden.”
We shuffled up the aisle, our footsteps echoing, toward the front of the cathedral and the apse. Over the stone altarpiece hung a renaissance masterpiece by Andrea Mantegna, a triptych of images with Mary on a throne in the center panel holding up the Christ child. The ancient paint had taken on a black sheen that was almost lustrous. To the side of the apse, in a round niche, a statue of Saint Zeno grinned down at us. A set of steps beside him led down to a subterranean room. “That’s got to be it,” I said.
The color had drained from Desiree’s face.
“Look,” I said, “I’ll just pop down for a moment. You can stay up here.”
“No,” she said, “I’m going if you’re going.”
I edged down the stairs and Desiree clamped on to my arm, a step behind me. The crypt was actually well lit. Most of the room was taken up with a sort of golden cage, and behind the latticework, the saint’s wooden sarcophagus sat in a spotlight. It looked like a gilded aquarium.
A full-size cast of the saint reclined behind a window in the sarcophagus. It looked like a mannequin coated in silver and dressed in red velvet robes. A bishop’s miter sat like a crown on the sterling head, except that the point of it stuck out horizontally, like a folded linen napkin that had fallen from the table. I assume the cast encased his bones. I’d read that on the feast day of San Zeno, the townspeople hauled the cast up and paraded it through the city. I hadn’t told Desiree that. She was spooked enough as it was.
“So that’s him?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s him.”
She pressed in closer. I could feel her breath on my neck.
“This is so creepy,” she said.
The place was nothing like the movie scenes. I remembered teaching the wedding scene, the danger that was inherent in it for everybody: Romeo and Juliet kiss, of course, but Friar Lawrence stands back from it all. These violent delights, he says, have violent ends. And in their triumph die, like fire.
Desiree sighed. “I don’t ever want to get married again,” she said.
“Well, not here for sure.”
“Not anywhere.”
“Okay, well, that’s exercising your internal locus of control.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“No, I’m just—”
“I’ll wait for you upstairs, okay?”
“Sure. Here, take your camera.”
She snatched it out of my hands and fled up the steps. I waited a moment, then thudded up the stairs behind her. At the top, I found her at a side door that led to the cloisters. The door was open and I could see the green gardens outside. She was staring at something on the wall.
“Desiree?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Everyone always wants me to be such and such a way, but I can’t. I can only be me.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m okay with that.”
I was still holding the lens cap of her camera and passed it to her. “Wait,” she said. “Let me get a photo of this thing.”
“What thing?”
“Look,” she said. Up between two pillars on a sort of shelf sat an odd bronze sculpture. On a lectern in front of it was a description: LAMPADA VOTIVA, it read. And underneath that: IL MIRACOLO DELL’AMORE. Even I could understand that—the miracle of love.
“What’s that supposed to be?” I asked.
The base was a banana-boat shape and above it, dangling on a wire, was a circle with pointed spangly things sticking out of it.
“It’s a votive lamp, for burning holy oil,” she said.
“And that?” I asked, pointing to the thing on top. “Is that supposed to be a star?”
“It’s the sun. It says on the plaque that the shape of the lamp represents the moon with the sun rising above it. Apparently, it’s a Franciscan symbol.”
“Friar Lawrence was a Franciscan,” I said.
“It’s a metaphor, right?” Desiree asked.
“It is,” I said. “Juliet is the sun and Rosaline is the moon.” It was as if Shakespeare himself had been in this cathedral—admiring the stars on the roof and this strange little votive lamp, the sun blotting out the moon, the old love gone pale in comparison to the real love that had eclipsed it.
“You think it’s trying to tell us something?”
“You just smarten it up, mister,” she said, then laughed. She snapped off a final photo and handed me the camera. I clipped on the lens cap and nestled it inside my daypack. She pulled me out the door, down a set of steps, out into the brilliant sunshine.
* * *
“You w
ere going to tell me something,” I said. “Yesterday. You stopped, but you were going to tell me something.”
“Oh,” she said.
We were walking back along the streets of Verona—on the other side of the river—where the bakers and mechanics live, where hardware stores and stationery shops line the streets.
“When I left Italy,” she began, “I traveled all over the world.”
“Okay.”
“I surfed all over the world.”
“Surf. Like in the ocean, surf?”
“Yeah,” she said. “And the truth is, it’s all I really want to do—just surf.”
“That’s it? That’s what you wanted to tell me?”
She was struggling to explain something to me. I could see that.
“Out on the ocean,” she said, “at dawn, with the sun just coming up, that’s when I’m most myself.”
“I love the water,” I said. “I practically lived in the water when I was a kid.”
“Really?” She brightened.
“I didn’t know you were a surfer. I didn’t see that coming.”
“I surfed with Rafael,” she said, “here in Italy. After that, I traveled all over: Sri Lanka, Fiji, Hawaii, Australia.”
“What? By yourself?”
“Yes.”
“That’s brave.”
“There’s a fine line between bravery and stupidity. I was competing then. I was pretty hard-core.”
“Wow.”
“So, all last year, you remember I was in Mexico, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. I was training for another competition . . . and I got hurt.”
“Ah shit, Desiree. Are you okay?”
“No, actually, not really. I was hurt quite badly. And that’s when I finally came back to Canada,” she said. “That was rock bottom, for me. Everything I tried . . .” She shrugged. “It felt like my life was over.” She fixed me with a stare. “That’s when I came to your place to pick up that book I lent you. That’s where it comes full circle.”
“I had no idea.”
“And on your back deck,” she said, “when you said you were going to Verona, I couldn’t stop thinking about Italy again. I thought about it every day.”
“And now, here you are.”
“Yes. Here I am.”
We were coming up to the Castelvecchio Bridge. The bricks were a rusty red, three arches spanning the lazy river. I felt for her hand and took it in mine, and we walked on in silence for a while. “It is kind of like fate,” she said. “You have to admit that.”
“What is?”
“That I got hurt. That I had to come back to Canada, right when all that stuff happened to you, with Claire. Everything fell into place for us to be here . . . together.”
“I admit nothing.”
“Come on,” she said. “I’m serious.”
The bridge opened up before us and we walked onto it. I was thinking about what she was saying. “Most of the research on love,” I said, “talks about hormones and chemicals and biology.”
“That’s not very romantic.”
“No, it’s not. But it’s true: We’re hardwired for these biological drives. Certain patterns are set, and then they’re very hard to break.”
“Not romantic at all.”
“Wait, I’m not finished. I think that—especially when we’re young—we are slaves to these drives. It’s biological destiny. That’s a sort of fate, if you like.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“But then you get older and you’re not such—”
“Not such an idiot?” She squeezed my hand.
“You know what I mean. You don’t have to do what your hormones are telling you to do. You can choose. You can defy the stars.”
“I didn’t choose to get hurt.” She stopped and frowned at me. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“No,” I said.
“Not a very happy ending,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said, “maybe because that’s not the ending.”
We continued along the bridge, the swallowtail crenellations rising above us on both sides. “I guess,” I said, “you could say that you did choose to come to Verona. I chose to come too.”
“I guess,” she said.
“Hey,” I said, “we should go up onto the battlements. There’s a good view of the Old City up there.”
We clambered up a set of crumbling steps in the wall, up to an alcove overlooking the river. A breeze swept at Desiree’s hair. Her face was as beautiful as the Venus in Botticelli’s famous painting. We sat on the stones looking across the river at the spires and towers of old Verona. When I opened my daypack, thinking she might want her camera, she saw my notebook.
“Have you finished your letter yet?” she asked.
“Uh, no. Not really.”
“Can I read it?”
“No,” I said.
“Come on. Let me read it.”
“Um . . .”
“Come on.”
“Well . . .” I brought out the notebook and opened it up to the right page. “I only have the first paragraph.” I handed it over and watched as her eyes trailed down the lines:
I despair of love, Juliet. I have been hurt many times and I am worn out and cynical. I am afraid of growing old alone.
Desiree already knew the whole story. I’d told it to her on my back deck. But even that seemed like a long time ago. When she finished reading, she stared at the paper. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It’s pathetic,” I said. “What I don’t understand is why I had to go through all of that, you know, before I could come to my senses.”
“I know,” she said. “Why do you have to hit rock bottom before you can come up again?” She slipped the notebook back to me. “Are you going to finish the letter?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you should post it, just as it is.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Because it’s about Claire.”
“Is it really, though?”
“I don’t . . . I mean, what? What do you mean?”
She considered me gravely. “Glenn, I don’t want to grow old alone either.”
“You said you didn’t want to get married again.”
“I don’t. That’s not the same thing. That’s not what I’m saying.”
“Okay, fair point.”
We watched the world for a while. The late afternoon light was soft, silken almost.
“So,” I said, “do you think you’re going to be able to surf again?”
“Maybe,” she said. “I’m healing, slowly.”
I couldn’t tell if she meant from the surfing or more than that.
“I think you will,” I said. “I think you can do anything you set your mind to.”
She turned to me. Her smile was incandescent. She leaned over then and kissed me. It was a warm kiss, delicate and very, very sweet. It was a kiss I will never forget.
“Hey,” I said when she pulled away. “Does that kiss count?”
“Yes,” she said. “That one counts.”
* * *
That evening, under the towering medieval city walls, Desiree and I dined at the Pizzeria Leon d’Oro. The waiters bustled in and out from the kitchen in the old manor house behind us. The evening was warm. Desiree sat across from me, the soft lamplight gentle on her face. Above us, the stars had come out over the ancient walls. I could see the belt of Orion, tipping up to the east.
We’d walked all day. I’d dragged along my daypack and it sat at my feet. Between us, on the table, was a bottle of Valpolicella Classico Allegrini. We’d ordered our pizzas—a capricciosa pizza for me, a margherita for her.
“This really is a fantastic place,” I said.
Desiree’s eyes twinkled. “I love it,” she answered.
I took a sip of the ruby-red wine.
The waiter arrived with our pizzas. The mozzarella was light
and the artichokes smelled rich and earthy. Desiree lifted a piece from her plate and folded it over on itself. She brought it to her mouth, seemed to think of something, and put it down again.
“Thanks,” she said.
“For what?”
“I like myself better when I’m with you, that’s all.”
“Me too,” I said. “I love being with you.”
She stared down at her plate. “I need to ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“I need to ask you: What happens next?”
“Well, I thought we were going to travel around Italy a bit.”
“Yeah, no . . . not that. We will. I have some friends I want to see. I mean, after that.”
She held my gaze. She looked beautiful and I thought that, yes, I wanted to spend a whole lot more time with her.
Her fingers fumbled up to her locket. “I need to go back to the ocean,” she said, “just like I needed to come to Italy. Do you know what I mean?” She paused. “I was kind of hoping you’d come with me.”
“Go with you to a tropical paradise?” I smiled. “Yeah, I think I could manage that.”
She laughed. “Oh,” she said, “I do like you so.”
After dinner, we walked back to Emiliano’s under a sky full of stars. We walked hand in hand, and that night—I guess I don’t have to tell you—we moved our things into just one of the bedrooms. This time we really did meet at the Gates of Paradise, and in the morning I woke with her beside me, feeling happy, perfectly in accord with the universe.
* * *
On the morning of Juliet’s 730th birthday, Desiree needed some extra time to get ready for the big day, so I tramped up the streets to the Piazza delle Erbe by myself. The fruit stalls were already open, and the fountain was splashing with water. A little farther on, I ducked through a passageway that led into the Piazza dei Signori. The piazza is surrounded by some of the oldest and most beautiful buildings in Verona, and in the center of the cobblestone square, rising up on a white marble pedestal, stands a statue of Dante Alighieri himself. The palace of the Scala family takes up one side of the piazza, and I knew that somewhere in the rooms behind that ornate facade, a very real Prince Escalus had told Dante the story of love and loss that had occurred in his city.