by Anne Fortier
“And do you really,” he asked, walking again, “want to live your life according to Shakespeare?”
I looked down at the dagger. It was awkward to walk around with it like this, but it was too big to fit in my handbag, and I did not want to ask Alessandro to carry it for me again. “Not necessarily.”
He glanced at the dagger, too, and I knew that we were thinking the same thing. If Shakespeare was right, this was the weapon with which Giulietta Tolomei had killed herself. “Then why don’t you rewrite it?” he proposed. “And change your destiny.”
I glared at him. “You mean, rewrite Romeo and Juliet?”
He did not meet my eyes, but kept looking straight ahead. “And be my friend.”
I studied his profile in the darkness. We had spent the whole night talking, but I still knew almost nothing about him. “On one condition,” I said. “That you tell me more about Romeo.” But I regretted the words as soon as I had said them, seeing the frustration on his face.
“Romeo, Romeo,” he gibed, “always Romeo. Is that why you came to Siena? To find the cute guy with the dancing feet and the nice hands? Well, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. He’s nothing like the Romeo you think you know. He won’t make love in rhyming couplets. Take it from me: He’s a real bastard. If I were you”—he looked at me at last—“I’d share my balcony with Paris this time around.”
“I have no intention,” I said, tartly, “of sharing my balcony with anyone. All I want is to get the cencio back, and the way I see it, Romeo is the only one with a motive for taking it. If you don’t think he did it, then say so, and I’ll drop the subject.”
“Okay,” said Alessandro. “I don’t think he did it. But that doesn’t mean he is clean. You heard your cousin: Romeo has evil hands. Everyone would like to think he is dead.”
“What makes you so sure he is not?”
He squinted. “I can feel it.”
“A nose for scumbags?”
He didn’t reply right away. When he finally spoke, it was to himself as much as to me. “A nose for rivals.”
DIRETTOR ROSSINI KISSED the feet of an imaginary crucifix when he saw me walking through the front door of his hotel that night. “Miss Tolomei! Grazie a Dio! You are safe! Your cousin called from the hospital many times—” Only now did he notice Alessandro behind me, and nodded a brief greeting. “He said that you were in bad company. Where have you been?”
I cringed. “As you can see, I’m in the best of hands.”
“The second best,” Alessandro corrected me, taking an absurd amount of pleasure in the situation. “For now.”
“And he also,” Direttor Rossini continued, “told me to tell you to put the dagger in a safe place.”
I looked down at the dagger in my hand.
“Give it to me,” said Alessandro. “I’ll take care of it for you.”
“Yes,” urged Direttor Rossini. “Give it to Captain Santini. I don’t want any more break-ins.”
And so I gave Romeo’s dagger to Alessandro, and saw it disappearing once more into his inner pocket. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, “at nine o’clock. Don’t open your door to anyone else.”
“Not even my balcony door?”
“Especially not your balcony door.”
CRAWLING INTO BED that night, I curled up with the document from my mother’s box called Giulietta and Giannozza Family Tree. I had looked at it before, but had not found it very illuminating. Now, after Eva Maria had more or less confirmed that I was descended from Giulietta Tolomei, it suddenly made much more sense that my mother should have cared about tracing our bloodline.
My room was still a mess, but I did not feel like addressing my baggage just yet. At least the broken glass was gone, and a new pane had been installed while I was out; if someone else wanted to get into my room tonight, he would have to wake me first.
Unrolling the lengthy document on top of the bed, I spent a long time trying to orient myself in its forest of names. It was no ordinary family tree, for it traced our roots exclusively through the female line, and it was only concerned with logging the direct connection between the Giulietta Tolomei of 1340 and me.
I eventually found myself and Janice at the very bottom of the document, right below the names of our parents:
After my initial guffaw at the fact that Janice’s given name really was Giannozza—she had always hated being Janice, and had maintained, to the point of tears, that it was not her name—I went all the way to the top of the document to find the exact same names right there:
And so forth. The list in between was so long that I could have used it as a rope ladder from my balcony. It was impressive that someone—or rather, dozens of people over the centuries—had so diligently kept track of our bloodline, starting all the way back in 1340, with Giulietta and her sister, Giannozza.
Every now and then those two names—Giulietta and Giannozza—popped up side by side on the family tree, but always with a different last name; they were never called Tolomei. What was particularly interesting was that, as far as I could see, Eva Maria had not been entirely right in saying that Giulietta Tolomei was my ancestor. For according to this document, we were all—Mom, Janice, and me—descended from Giulietta’s sister, Giannozza, and her husband, Mariotto da Gambacorta. As for Giulietta, there was no record of her having married anyone, and certainly not of her having children.
Full of foreboding, I eventually put the document aside and dove back into the other texts. The knowledge that it was, in fact, Giannozza Tolomei who was my real ancestor made me much more appreciative of Giulietta’s fragmented letters to her and occasional comments on Giannozza’s quiet country life far away from Siena.
“You are lucky, my dearest,” she had written at one point, “that your house is so large and your husband so hard of walking—” and later on she had mused, “Oh, to be you, sneaking outside and lying in the wild thyme for a stolen hour of peace—”
I eventually nodded off and slept soundly for a couple of hours, until a loud noise woke me up while it was still dark.
SOMEWHAT BLURRY ON the sounds of the waking world, it took me a moment to recognize the bedlam as a motorcycle revving its engine in the street beneath my balcony.
For a while I just lay there, annoyed at the inconsiderate nature of Siena youth in general, and it took me longer than it should have to realize that this was no ordinary gang rally, but a single biker trying to catch someone’s attention. And that someone, I began to fear, was me.
Peeking out through the cracks in the shutters, I could not see much of the street below, but as I stood there, stretching this way and that, I started hearing noise all around me in the building. The other hotel guests, it seemed, were also getting out of bed and banging open the shutters to see what on earth was going on.
Emboldened by the collective uproar, I opened my French doors to peek out, and now I finally saw him; it was indeed my motorcycle stalker, making textbook figure-eights beneath a streetlamp. There was no doubt in my mind that it was the same guy who had followed me twice before—once to save me from Bruno Carrera, and once to look at me through the glass door of Malèna’s espresso bar—for he was still black on black, visor closed, and I had never seen another bike just like his.
At one point he turned his head and spotted me in the balcony door. As the engine noise suddenly waned to a purr, it was nearly drowned out by angry shouts from the other windows and balconies of Hotel Chiusarelli, but he could not care less; reaching into his pocket, he took out a round object, pulled back his arm, and pitched whatever it was at my balcony with perfect aim.
It landed before my feet with an odd, squishy sound, and even bounced a bit before it finally rolled to a halt. With no other attempt at communication, my leather-clad friend jerked the Ducati into a frenzied acceleration that very nearly made it rear up and throw him off. Seconds later he disappeared around a corner and was gone, and had it not been for the other hotel guests—some grumbling, some laughing—the nigh
t would once again have been quiet.
I stood for a moment, staring at the missile, before I finally dared pick it up and bring it back into my room, closing the balcony door tightly behind me. Turning on the lights, I found that it was a tennis ball wrapped in heavy bond paper and secured with rubber bands. The paper, it turned out, was a message drafted by a strong, confident hand in the dark red ink of love letters and suicide notes. This was what it said:
Giulietta ∼
Forgive me that I am carefulle, I have very good reason. Soon you will understand. I must talk with you and explain to you every thing. Meet me in the top of the Torre del Mangia tomorrow morning on 9, and do not tell it to any body.
∼ Romeo
[ V.I ]
Why I descend into this bed of death
Is partly to behold my lady’s face
But chiefly to take thence from her dead finger
A precious ring
…
Siena, A.D. 1340
ON THE NIGHT OF THE FATAL PALIO, the body of young Tebaldo Tolomei was laid out in the church of San Cristoforo, across the piazza from Palazzo Tolomei. In a gesture of friendship, Messer Salimbeni had stopped by to drape the cencio over the dead hero and to promise the grieving father that the murderer would soon be found. After that, he had excused himself and left the Tolomei family to their grief, pausing only briefly on his way out to bow to the Lord and appreciate Giulietta’s slender form kneeling rather invitingly in prayer before the bier of her cousin.
All the women of the Tolomei family were gathered in the church of San Cristoforo that night, wailing and praying with Tebaldo’s mother, while the men ran back and forth between church and palazzo, wine on their breath, athirst to execute justice on Romeo Marescotti. Whenever Giulietta heard snippets of their hushed conversations, her throat tightened in fear, and her eyes welled up at the imagined sight of the man she loved, caught by his enemies and punished for a crime she was certain he had not committed.
It spoke in her favor that she was seen to grieve so profoundly over a cousin with whom she had never exchanged a single word; the tears Giulietta cried that night mingled with those of her cousins and aunts like rivers running into one and the same lake; they were so plentiful that no one cared to explore their true source.
“I suppose you are truly sorry,” her aunt had said, looking up briefly from her own grief to see Giulietta crying into the cencio that was draped over Tebaldo. “And you should be! Had it not been for you, that bastard Romeo would never have dared—” Before she could finish the sentence, Monna Antonia had once again collapsed in tears, and Giulietta had discreetly removed herself from the center of attention to sit down in a pew in one of the darker corners of the church.
As she sat there, lonely and miserable, she was sorely tempted to try her luck and escape from San Cristoforo on foot. She had no money, and no one to protect her, but, God willing, she might be able to find her way back to Maestro Ambrogio’s workshop. The city streets, however, were awash with soldiers searching for Romeo, and the entrance to the church was lined with guards. Only an angel—or a ghost—would be able to get past them unnoticed.
Sometime past midnight she looked up from her folded hands to see Friar Lorenzo making the rounds of the mourning party. The sight surprised her; she had heard the Tolomei guards talking about a Franciscan friar who had—allegedly—helped Romeo escape through the Bottini right after the Palio, and she had naturally assumed the man was Friar Lorenzo. Now, seeing him walking around the church so calmly, comforting the mourning women, her chest became heavy with disappointment. Whoever it was that had helped Romeo to escape, it was no one she knew or was ever likely to know.
When he eventually caught sight of her sitting alone in the corner, he joined her right away. Squeezing into the pew, Friar Lorenzo took the liberty of sharing her kneeler, and mumbled, “Forgive me for intruding on your grief.”
Giulietta replied softly, making sure no one overheard them. “You are my grief’s oldest friend.”
“Would it console you to know that the man for whom you are truly crying is on his way to foreign lands where his foes will never find him?”
Giulietta pressed a hand to her mouth to strangle her emotion. “If he is indeed safe, then I am the happiest creature on earth. But I am also”—her voice trembled—“the most pitiful. Oh, Lorenzo, how can we live like this … he there, I here? Would that I had gone with him! Would that I were a falcon on his arm and not a wanton bird in this putrid cage!”
Aware that she had spoken too loudly, and far too frankly, Giulietta looked around nervously to see if anyone had heard her. But fortunately, Monna Antonia was too absorbed in her own misery to notice much around her, and the other women were still flocking around the bier, busying themselves with flower arrangements.
Friar Lorenzo looked at her intently from behind his folded hands. “If you could follow him, would you go?”
“Of course!” Giulietta straightened up in spite of herself. “I would follow him throughout the world!” Realizing that, once again, she was being carried away, she sank lower on the kneeler, and added, in a solemn whisper, “I would follow him through the valley of the shadow of Death.”
“Then compose yourself,” whispered Friar Lorenzo, putting a warning hand on her arm, “for he is here, and—calm yourself! He would not leave Siena without you. Do not turn your head, for he is right—”
Giulietta could not help but twist around to catch a glimpse of the hooded monk crouched on the kneeler behind her, head bent in perfect concealment; if she was not mistaken, he was wearing the very same cowl Friar Lorenzo had made her wear when they once went together to Palazzo Marescotti.
Light-headed with excitement, Giulietta eyed her aunts and cousins with nervous calculation. If anyone discovered that Romeo was here, in this very church on this very night, surely neither he, nor she, nor even Friar Lorenzo would live to see the sun rise. It was too bold, too devilish for a presumed murderer to defile poor Tebaldo’s vigil in order to woo the dead hero’s cousin, and no Tolomei would ever tolerate the insult.
“Are you moonstruck?” she hissed over her shoulder. “If they discover you, they will kill you!”
“Your voice is sharper than their swords!” complained Romeo. “I beg you, be sweet; these may be the last words you ever speak to me.” Giulietta more felt than saw the sincerity in his eyes, gleaming at her from within the shade of the hood as he went on, “If you meant what you said just now, take this”—he pulled a ring off his finger and held it out for her to take—“here, I give you this ring—”
Giulietta gasped, but took the ring nonetheless. It was a golden signet ring with the Marescotti eagle, but through Romeo’s words, I give you this ring, it had become her wedding band.
“May God bless you both forever after!” whispered Friar Lorenzo, knowing full well that forever after might not extend beyond this night. “And may the holy saints in Heaven be the witnesses of your happy union. Now listen carefully. Tomorrow, the funeral will be held at the Tolomei sepulchre, outside the city walls—”
“Wait!” exclaimed Giulietta. “Surely, I am coming with you now?”
“Shh! It is impossible!” Friar Lorenzo laid another hand on her to calm her. “The guards at the door would stop you. And it is too dangerous inside the city tonight—”
The sound of someone hushing them across the room made the three of them jolt with fear. Glancing nervously at her aunts, Giulietta saw them grimacing at her to be quiet and not upset Monna Antonia any further. And so she ducked her head dutifully and held her tongue until they were no longer looking at her. Then, turning around once more, she looked pleadingly at Romeo.
“Do not marry me and leave me!” she begged. “Tonight is our wedding night!”
“Tomorrow,” he whispered, all but reaching out to touch her cheek, “we will look back on all this and laugh.”
“Tomorrow,” sobbed Giulietta, into the palm of her hand, “may never come!”
“Whatever happens,” Romeo assured her, “we will be together. As man and wife. I swear it to you. In this world … or the next.”
THE TOLOMEI SEPULCHRE was part of a vast cemetery outside Porta Tufi. Ever since antiquity, the people of Siena had buried their dead beyond the city walls, and every noble family had kept up—or usurped—an ancient vault containing a suitable quantity of deceased ancestors. The Tolomei sanctuary sat among them all like a marble castle in this city of death; most of the structure was subterranean, but it had a grandiose entrance above ground, much like the tombs of those august Roman statesmen with whom Messer Tolomei so liked to compare himself.
Scores of family members and close friends had come along to the cemetery on this sad day, to comfort Tolomei and his wife as their firstborn was laid to rest in the granite sarcophagus Tolomei had originally commissioned for himself. It was a sin and a shame to see such a healthy young man surrendered to the netherworld; no words could console the wailing mother or the young girl to whom Tebaldo had been betrothed since the day she was born, twelve years ago. Where was she to find another suitable husband now, so close to womanhood, and so used to thinking of herself as mistress of Palazzo Tolomei?
But Giulietta was too anxious about her own immediate future to wallow long in sympathy for her grieving family. She was also exhausted from lack of rest. The vigil had lasted all night, and now, far into the afternoon of the following day—with all hopes of resurrection proving idle—Monna Antonia looked as if she herself was likely to join her son in his untimely grave. Pale and drawn, she supported herself heavily on the arms of her brothers; only once did she turn towards Giulietta, her ghoulish face contorted in hatred.
“And there she is, the snake at my bosom!” she snarled, wanting everyone to hear her. “Had it not been for her shameless encouragement, Romeo Marescotti would never have dared lift a hand against this house! Look at her conniving face! Look at those traitorous tears! I wager they are not for my Tebaldo, but for his murderer, Romeo!” She spat on the ground twice to rid herself of the taste of the name. “It is time for you to act, brothers! Stand no more like frightened sheep! A foul crime has been committed against the house of Tolomei, and the murderer is prancing around town thinking himself above the law—” She withdrew a shiny stiletto from her shawl and waved it in the air. “If you are men, gut this town and find him, wherever he may be hiding, and let a grieving mother bury this blade in his black heart!”
