Her response surprised him with its warmth, and emboldened him. “There is only one way I know to experience a familiar film anew,” he said. “You must watch it with someone you can initiate to its charms.”
She smiled so knowingly that Nick found himself enchanted. “It is the same for the opera, I think,” she said.
He forced himself to look around the room. This wasn’t really happening, he thought. It was a product of the day’s fatigue and gratitude for a friendly face in a strange city. He didn’t even know her name.
“This is a nice place,” he managed.
“It is all right,” she said. Her smile disappeared and he could feel her pulling back, too. She took a gulp of wine. “I am sorry to interrupt your meal.”
Nick wondered if he had offended her. But better that than lead her on, he thought as they stood and she gave his outstretched hand a single shake. “It was lovely of you to come out and keep me company, especially when you are so… stanco?”
The left side of her mouth perked up almost imperceptibly. For a moment, as her long fingers sparked against his palm, his breath caught in his throat. He sensed that she felt it, too, and as she drew her hand away, she offered him a full, warm smile. Maybe if things didn’t work out tomorrow, he could come back… Stop it, he told himself. He hadn’t traveled six thousand miles to chase random skirts.
“Enjoy festival week, signore,” she said. And with that, she returned to the kitchen and did not show her beautiful face again.
The pang he felt brought forth another line from Proteus, that legendary gentleman of Verona: Even as one heat another heat expels, or as one nail by strength drives out another, so the remembrance of my former love is by a newer object quite forgotten.
A sad commentary, he thought, when he hadn’t even met his Juliet in person yet. But if nothing real had happened here tonight, he must again be mourning a mirage.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Salvatore often went to bed before Lia returned from her evening shifts, but tonight, with the excitement of the festival just ahead, he couldn’t sleep. He sat with a glass of warm milk and thought back on all he’d accomplished with the club. Even with luck, he knew he could expect to be the head rooster for only a few more years. After that, he hoped Serafina might take the helm and help keep Giulietta alive for the world.
In his darkest moments, he’d begged God to lift him onto the spiritual plain occupied by his sweet Viola. But the club and Lia had been his salvation on earth, and Salvatore came to accept that the eternal reunion with his wife would not come on his schedule.
He was twirling his pajama belt absently, waiting for sleep to catch up with him, when the front door lock turned and Lia wearily entered the apartment. “He thinks I stink,” she said, shaking her head in bemused resignation as she plopped her pocketbook onto the kitchen counter.
“Who would say such a thing about my princess?” Salvatore asked. The question gave Lia a start.
“Why are you lurking in the dark, father?”
“It’s more like sitting,” he replied mildly. “I was trying to trick myself into feeling sleepy.”
Lia clicked on a lamp and joined her father at the table. “I’m sorry to snap at you,” she said, taking his hands. “Are you feeling all right?”
“Perfectly fine. I’m just excited about the festival. It’s like Christmas for an old man.” That was saying a lot for a man who’d followed the Veneto’s December 13 tradition of presents from Santa Lucia and slipped in a visit by Babbo Natale on Christmas Eve for good measure when his daughter was growing up.
“I have no doubt it will be the most successful festival yet,” Lia said. “I’m proud of you.”
“Thank you. You’re officially a good daughter again,” he added with a wink. “Now tell me about this rude man.”
Lia chuckled. “It’s nothing, less than nothing. Our young waitress had a handsome customer of my same advanced age and suggested I have a glass of wine with him. I thought it might be nice. It’s been so long since I’ve even talked with a man…”
She gave him an apologetic look, but he waved her off. “I understand all too well what you are saying, Lia. No offense taken. So what happened?”
“He was quite attractive, and he was easy to talk to,” she began. “He’s an American on holiday so I didn’t put too much stock in it. I thought if the drink went well, maybe he would take me to the opera next week on kind of a practice date.”
“Getting back on the bicycle.”
“Yes, and I felt we made a nice first impression on each other. When I told him I was tired, he thought I said I stank. His Italian is nonexistent. He was embarrassed and otherwise charming, so I dismissed it as a cute mistake. But then after we’d talked for a while and everything seemed to be going so well, he went cold on me. Maybe I was too forward, hinting about the opera and all, but I couldn’t help thinking that maybe he decided he wasn’t attracted to me. To each his own, but it wasn’t quite the confidence-building experience I was looking for.” She finally stopped to draw a breath. “Oh, you don’t need to hear that your daughter secretly wants men to lust after her…”
Salvatore laughed. “We’re adults, Lia. Friends. I’m happy to have you confide in me. In fact, I’m honored. I remember when you were a teenager, you wouldn’t even confirm the existence of the boys who were always so impatient to speak with you when I answered the phone.”
“I’ll never be in demand like that again.”
“Don’t be so sure. Love has a way of sneaking up on you.”
Lia sniffed under an arm. “If it sneaks up at the end of a shift, it might turn right around and tip-toe back into the night,” she said before heading off to wash away the day’s hard work and disappointment.
Chapter Thirty
Although it was nearly midnight, Nick was too giddy to head back to his hotel, so he wandered the old city until he came to Casa di Giulietta, which soon would be the frenzied focal point of a citywide celebration. A few couples snuggled in the shadows, but otherwise the small square beneath Juliet’s balcony was as peaceful as her nearby “tomb.”
He’d read about the bronze statue of the young lover standing watch below the balcony (actually, she stood a bit off to the left, the better to keep tabs on the visitors who lined up to enter her domicile). Even the house docents encouraged fans to rub Juliet’s right breast for luck; as a result, the breast and right arm remained shiny after more than three decades while oxidization covered the rest of her in a brown patina.
Nick couldn’t bring himself to molest the poor girl—hadn’t she been through enough?—but he did drop to one knee on the concrete pedestal and give the top of her right hand a respectful kiss. As he took her fingers in his, he flashed back to the electric handshake with the chef at Ristorante Roma. The memory gave him goose bumps.
“Dearest Juliet,” he said, peering up at her kindly face in the darkness, “please don’t play me for a fool. I have journeyed far, with pure and open heart, hoping for a chance at real, lasting love. Pray give me the wisdom I will need to recognize it and not rush past in pursuit of false passion.”
Juliet’s gaze remained fixed on the entryway and, from the corner of her eye, the balcony. Nick stood beside her and peered up at it as well, a yellowed stone box like a lidless sarcophagus, decorated on front and sides with two tiers of intricately carved arches, and held up by twin triangular supports baring teeth like saw blades. Such a cold repository for her timeless passion.
He took Juliet’s cool right hand in his left and whispered, “She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that? Her eye discourses; I will answer it… I am too bold, ’tis not to me she speaks: Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes to twinkle in their spheres till they return.”
He noticed a teenage couple waiting to commune with the embodiment of young love. Their manner was respectful, but he heard the girl giggle as she whispered to her boyfriend. Nick realized how ridiculous he m
ust seem to them, someone clearly old enough to know better than to buy this romantic myth. Someday they would learn that the yearning for true connection only grew with age, and that finding it was worth almost any risk. As he stepped off the pedestal, he welcomed them to take his place with a grand sweep of his arms. They nodded their greetings and he strode off into the night.
Chapter Thirty-one
Nick waited for Salvatore Cattaneo, the old man who apparently managed Club di Giulietta, outside the Via Galilei office just before noon Friday. They’d arranged the introductory meeting via e-mail a few days before he’d boarded the plane for Europe.
Watching a slightly stooped but lively looking gentleman strolling his way, Nick placed a silent wager with himself that this was his man. Alone in a foreign city awaiting a street-side rendezvous with someone he’d never met, he couldn’t help feeling like a character in a spy novel.
“Are you a friend of Giulietta?” the old man called out, as if he’d read Nick’s mind and decided to try out a secret contact phrase.
“That I am, Signore Cattaneo,” he replied with a grin.
“Nick,” Salvatore said, extending a hand. “I know almost nothing about you, and yet I feel somehow I know your heart. I think it is a good one.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” Nick said. “You are an expert on such matters, after all.”
“Matters of the heart—my specialty,” Salvatore said with a chuckle. “Affairs of the heart, not so much these days.” He took Nick by the elbow. Rather than leading him up the stairs into the office, though, the old man headed down the narrow street further into the heart of the old city.
“I thought a constitutional would be nice to get the blood going, and then perhaps a bite of lunch before giving you the grand tour,” Salvatore said.
“Lead on, MacDuff,” Nick said.
“It is ‘Lay on,’” his guide corrected. “Lay on, MacDuff. And damned be him that first cries, ‘Hold, enough!’” Salvatore poked Nick’s arm with a bony elbow. “Besides,” he said, “it is the wrong play!”
For the next hour, Nick struggled to keep up with the deceptively quick old man as he pointed out spots where wonderful things would be happening during the festival. From memory, he rattled off the booth locations of the finest artisans, schedules for the roaming jugglers and magicians, and proudly discussed all of the fine regional artists who soon would be engaged in painting the group mural in Piazza Brá.
“The city has not committed to putting it on permanent display—yet,” Salvatore said. “But I predict they will embrace it once it is completed. Our wise leaders otherwise take what we do on faith. They pay postage for the return letters from the secretaries of Giulietta and never bother us about taking over the old city for festival week. Of course, the fact that our labor of love helps lure nearly two million tourists to Verona every year may have something to do with it.”
He clapped Nick on the back and led him to a café called Osteria dal Duca with pleasantly shaded tables and a good view of the passing throngs.
“Welcome to Romeo’s house,” Salvatore said as they took an outside table. “This may have been where the Montecchi family lived back in the early 1300s—if we look back to the story’s original sources, such as Salernitano’s 1476 story of Mariotto and Gianozza, or Luigi da Porto’s Historia Novellamente Ritrovata di Due Nobili Amanti in 1530. Da Porto was the first to call our young lovers Romeo and Giulietta, and the publication date is also where we get her ‘birthday’ in mid-September. But Shakespeare was the one who renamed the Montecchis the Montagues sixty-five years later, just as he christened the Capellettis the Capulets.”
“We covered some of that in my literature classes, but it’s truly amazing to be at the actual scene,” Nick said. “What about Casa di Giulietta?”
Salvatore shook his head. “It’s a thirteenth-century inn, so the period is right. But the balcony, the Gothic door and the rest of it are pure fantasy. It was used as a setting in a 1930s Hollywood movie, and the local fathers soon realized what a promotional tool they had on their hands.”
He made a twirling gesture with his fork. “I prefer to think of it as Giulietta’s spiritual home. After all, the first modern love letter to her was discovered next to the tomb in 1937, so it did give rise to at least one romantic tradition that’s dear to my heart.”
While they ate pesto pizza drizzled with pungent olive oil, the old man gave Nick a thumbnail history lesson—how the Renaissance painters called Verona the City of Stones, and how it was the only place you could find beautifully preserved walls from the Roman to the Austrian periods still rising together. He discussed the more than eighty-year-old grand opera tradition in the coliseum, and explained with pride how the city had preserved the nearby Carega district to evoke the craftsmen who had plied their trade in the workshops there throughout the fourteenth century.
“Two thousand years of civilization—not so easy to sum up,” Salvatore concluded.
“I get the flavor,” Nick said.
“That is good. Verona is all about flavor.”
After lunch, they stopped by Casa di Giulietta and took a side entrance into the vine-covered building. The main floor held la Tomba di Giulietta, an open, and thankfully empty, stone chamber. Upstairs, there was a bed used in the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet, and a few other period furnishings. But Nick was surprised to see computer terminals set up in one room.
“That’s where the turistas type little notes to Giulietta,” Salvatore said. “Dear Juliet, Chère Juliette, Liebe Julia, Cara Giulietta. They tend to be silly greetings and declarations of love, requests for advice only rarely. Truth be told, we don’t pay much attention to them. But I’m sure Giulietta does.”
“No doubt,” Nick said.
After making their way through a large tour group, they strolled back to the club offices where Salvatore provided the promised “grand tour”—a quick peek into the nondescript offices and a stop by the espresso machine.
“I’m sorry no one’s about just now,” Salvatore said. “But they’ll all be on hand for dinner tonight.”
“Thank you for your hospitality, signore,” Nick said. “I don’t know how much I’ll be able to eat, though. As the hour approaches, my nerves threaten to get the best of me.”
“Nonsense. Don’t make this into something bigger than it is.” The old man placed a hand on Nick’s left forearm and gave him an almost pleading look. “You are meeting a pen pal, injecting reality into the fantasy. With luck, you will leave here with a friend, someone to correspond with and maybe visit again someday. But please don’t build up your hopes that you will be meeting Giulietta herself for a whirlwind romance.”
As the words pierced him, Nick felt his cheeks flush. “No, of course not,” he heard himself saying. “The odds of finding true love this way…”
“I understand this is not just a lark for you, Nick. But the more realistically you see things, the less likely anyone is to get hurt.”
“I would never try to press the issue,” Nick said. “Please know that. I do think of her as my Juliet, true, but I also realize she is a real person with a life outside the club. I feel such a connection that I want to get to know her on those terms and see what happens. I promise to behave honorably.”
“Va benne,” Salvatore said, clapping Nick on the back. “I knew you would understand.”
Chapter Thirty-two
Salvatore’s protectiveness toward the women of his club was perfectly reasonable, Nick knew, but the words still stung. He’d walked back to the hotel with his head down, too lost in his own embarrassed thoughts to take in the beautiful plazas and the pre-festival bustle.
As he dressed for dinner, Nick thought maybe he should just skip the party and return to Ristorante Roma and apologize to the chef for putting her off last night. But then he realized with a start that they’d never even exchanged names. He’d undoubtedly imagined that connection as well.
He was always losing things almost
as soon as he had them in his grasp. He could see the end of them at the beginning and began to mourn them from the start. That was why his collection had given him solace: He could not see the end of the things those tickets represented, because they would never take place. He longed to find someone real he could take on faith, someone he could live with forever in the moment.
Nick decided to do the right thing and at least put in an appearance at the party being held in his honor. What did the old man know about it, anyway? He’d admitted he was rusty when it came to affairs of the heart. There had been a real spark in those letters, and this was such a romantic quest, if they hit it off in person, who was to say he couldn’t return home arm in arm with his Juliet? Salvatore was probably just jealous he’d captured the heart of a sweet young thing he’d hoped to keep around the club.
And if it turned out the old man was right and a real-life meeting severed the connection, there would still be time to ask that enchanting chef to the opera. Buoyed, Nick adjusted the collar of the San Remo shirt he’d picked for the occasion, a charcoal number that shimmered faintly when it caught the light. He completed the ensemble with grey wool dress pants whose short cuffs brushed the top of stylishly uncomfortable loafers straight from Milan, where the men apparently all had narrow feet and pointy toes.
If he could still joke with himself that was a good sign, he thought as he wiped a sweaty palm on his trousers and grabbed the bottle of limoncello. He resisted the urge to crack it open and take a shot of courage. On to love, he thought, a madness most discreet, a choking gall and a preserving sweet.
Chapter Thirty-three
This was the best thing about preparing a big meal at home, Lia thought as she luxuriated in the warm shower. At the restaurant, freshening up meant mopping your brow with a dirty apron before tackling the next crush of orders. Here she could play hostess as well as chef, perhaps making as good an impression with her person as she seemed to lately with her food.
Finding Juliet Page 9