by Glenn Dixon
After she moved, we e-mailed and texted for a while, permitting ourselves all the artificial communications of the twenty-first century, but it was never the same. And in time, I didn’t hear from her anymore—though I never stopped thinking about her. She was gone two years, then three, then four, and then I stopped counting. I settled into a life alone. No one else appeared to take her place and, frankly, I didn’t give a damn. I was tired of being a complete idiot. I was done with love.
* * *
“Okay, where were we?”
The class hadn’t quieted yet. The bell had rung but the students were still arranging their books and papers. I heard the heat duct kick in. At the front of the class, in the first row, Sadia pursed her lips and glared at her text but avoided eye contact. Several desks behind her, Andy snuck a glance at Allison. Devin, nearer the back, was surreptitiously stealing a last glance at his cell phone, so I stared him down until he pushed it into the black hole of his backpack.
“All right, everybody. Act 2, scene 2, line 55, do you have it?” Their heads tucked down to the text. “Juliet is talking to herself, and she’s clearly a little put out that Romeo was eavesdropping on her. Listen: What man art thou that thus bescreen’d in night so stumblest on my counsel?”
Andy smiled and thrust up his hand, though I hadn’t asked a question.
“Yes? Andy?”
“She’s saying, ‘What are you doing here? Why are you sneaking around in the dark?’ ” Andy leaned back and folded his arms across his chest, quite pleased with himself.
“That’s what she’s saying, all right.”
Andy beamed.
“Then Romeo says, With love’s light wings did I o’er-perch these walls; for stony limits cannot hold love out.”
“Nice,” said Andy. He’d lifted his pen, about to copy that down.
“It’s drivel, Andy. It’s utter rubbish,” I said.
Andy gaped at me as if I’d just defied gravity. “But it’s Shakespeare.”
“No, it’s Romeo. And he’s put himself and Juliet in a dangerous position by being there. Tybalt would kill him in a second. That’s what Juliet is saying.”
“So she’s warning him.”
“Yes.”
“And Romeo is being kind of a jackass,” said Devin.
“Devin,” I cautioned, “don’t push it.”
Sadia put up her hand. “Isn’t it supposed to be the girls who are the romantics and the boys who are the—”
“Jackasses?” Devin finished.
“Shakespeare doesn’t stick to clichés,” I said. “That’s what’s great about him but, Devin, seeing as you are perfect for Romeo today, you can read his lines.”
“Oh, Mr. Dixon. C’mon.”
“Sadia, you read Juliet.”
Sadia coughed theatrically. For some ungodly reason, when she recited lines, she did so in a mock Scottish accent.
Dost thou love me? I know thou wilt say ‘Ay,’
And I will take thy word: yet if thou swear’st,
Thou mayst prove false.
Devin looked up at me for the signal to read.
“Lady,” he began, “by yonder blessed moon I swear that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops—”
“She cuts him off here,” I interrupted. “Sadia, go ahead.”
Sadia ahem-ed again.
O, swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon,
That monthly changes in her circled orb,
Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
She’d drawled out moon like an extra from Bonnydoon. “Isn’t the moon Rosaline?”
“Could be,” I said. “Or maybe here, it’s just the moon. Do you understand it, though? Romeo tries to swear by the moon and she says no, the moon is always changing. Your love for me must be more consistent than that.”
Sadia grinned. Devin didn’t look happy. “What shall I swear by?” he went on, in a non-Scottish accent.
“Do not swear at all,” said our Braveheart Juliet. I held up my hand to stop her.
“That’s good,” I said. “Most directors have Romeo climbing up a tree or vines or something to get up to the balcony at this point.”
Devin grimaced at me. “There is no balcony.”
“I said it’s not in the stage directions. They are both madly in love with each other, so most directors figure that you need to get them kissing here.”
“Oh, Mr. Dixon.” Sadia’s cheeks blushed red.
“Now read on a bit, where Juliet delivers some real poetry, something from the heart.”
Sadia read:
My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite.
“Can you hear the difference between her lines and Romeo’s?”
Sadia sighed. “Romeo’s just making up flowery stuff. Juliet’s lines are . . . I don’t know . . . more real.”
Andy copied the lines into his notebook. Allison watched him do it. She was, it seemed to me, looking at him a little differently now.
* * *
The afternoons were sweltering in Verona. By two o’clock, the sun baked the streets and the shadows were short tiny circles around us. Anna and I walked to a little place where we could grab a slice of pizza, and we ate as we walked, heading toward the new office on the Vicolo Santa Cecilia.
A hot blue sky rolled above us as we cut through the University of Verona and over the Ponte Nuovo—the New Bridge—which has been there since 1334. Anna talked about her university days. She’d studied economics and marketing. She obviously had a head for it.
“When I finished the university,” she said, “I traveled, like you. I went with Gloria—she’s at the club sometimes, probably you have seen her?”
I wasn’t sure who that was.
“All the time I was traveling,” she went on, “I was thinking about my home in Verona.”
“And?”
“You think Shakespeare’s play is not true, but there is more to the story. Many people here believe it truly happened.”
“I guess everyone can see a bit of themselves in Romeo and Juliet.”
Anna stopped, midway on the bridge. The Adige River flowed beneath us, gurgling down from the Alps. “There are at least two Italian versions,” she said, “more than a hundred years older than your Shakespeare.”
“He’s not really ‘my Shakespeare.’ ”
“Glenn,” she said, “why did you come here?”
“Because I thought it would be . . . interesting.”
She stared me down. “Probably that is not all.”
I took two deep breaths. “Well,” I said. “I have a . . . a situation.” I glanced out over the river. “It’s a long story.”
“We have some time,” she said.
“I think maybe I should write a letter to Juliet.”
“You? You will write to her? About what?”
“There is this woman. She’s my best friend, but I—”
Anna’s phone started beeping. She reached into her purse, holding up a finger to pause me. “Pronto?” she said.
I heard a buzzing voice on the other side, and Anna spoke back. She held her finger up to me again, then said, “Ciao,” into the phone three times before clicking it off.
“Are you hot?” she asked.
“What?”
“You like gelato? I know a really good place.”
“Um, sure.”
“The others are meeting there now. We can go before working?”
“Absolutely.”
The Gelateria Savoia is one of the oldest gelato shops in Verona, maybe one of the oldest in the world. When Anna and I arrived, Soa, Veronica, and another woman I’d not seen before were waiting for us out front. Inside the Gelateria Savoia, a crystal chandelier hung high above the counter. Soa pointed it out to me. “There are two in the world,” she said. “The other one is in the Hermitage, in Saint Petersburg.”
I don’t know if I eve
n looked at it. I was too distracted by the metal pans of gelato behind the counter, rainbows of color, all shiny as silk. They wobbled a bit when our server punched into them with her scooping spoon. “Oh man,” I said.
“Fragola is strawberry,” Soa explained. “Cocco, that’s coconut.”
“What’s this one?” My breath was frosting the glass.
“Mango.”
“I’ll have that.”
Soa ordered for me. And before she scooped up the gelato, the barista squirted something into the bottom of the waffle cone.
“That’s cioccolato fondente,” said Soa.
“We enjoy chocolate,” said Anna, “in the bottom of our cones. It is really nice.”
This was, without doubt, the best ice cream I’d ever tasted. I once heard the comedian John Pinette do a skit on gelato. “It’s not ‘Wow, that’s good,’ ” he said. “It’s ‘Wow, I’m going to sell my house and everything I own just so I can move here and eat this every day until I die.’ ”
It was that good.
After, we strolled to the new office, cones in hand. Soa dribbled a bit of gelato onto her shirt and shook her head at herself. On her T-shirt was a print of an owl.
“Nice graphic,” I said.
Soa dabbed at her shirt with a napkin. “The owl is for my initials. So and Va Sova means ‘owl’ in Czech.”
Anna turned to her. “So, you are an owl?”
“An owl is a messenger,” said Soa, “and I am answering the letters of Juliet. Like a messenger.”
“Owls are messengers in many of the North American First Nations stories,” I said.
“And in Harry Potter,” chimed Veronica.
“In children’s stories,” I said, “owls are wise animals.”
“Allora,” said Anna, “then you have the wrong animal, Soa.”
Soa stabbed her ice-cream cone at Anna. The two had a real Laurel-and-Hardy thing going on.
I thought I’d change the subject. “How long have you been here, Soa?”
“Two months.”
“Two months too long, Mrs. Owl,” Anna said.
Soa ignored her, though I could tell she liked the repartee.
“Get any really good letters lately?” I asked.
“Some are funny,” said Soa. “One letter asked: ‘How many cats does it take to replace a boyfriend?’ ”
“What did you answer?”
“Five—and a hamster.”
“Are you serious? Did you write that?”
“No. But that’s what I wanted to write.”
When we finally arrived at the new office, we sat around the wooden table in the middle of the room. We worked diligently for a while, until Soa gave an audible intake of breath and we all turned to her.
“Look at these,” Soa said. She had two letters in front of her, side by side. She touched first one, then the other.
“Someone wrote twice?” I asked.
“No, no . . . look.” She pushed them toward me.
Both letters were from Minneapolis, written by best friends, Emily and Marissa. They must have made a pact to write their letters to Juliet together. I’m not sure they read each other’s letters, though, because if they had, they’d have been very surprised. Marissa was unmarried. She was lonely. All her friends were married (and obviously that included Emily). Some of them had children already. It was so unfair. What had she done wrong?
Emily, on the other hand, had been married for six years. Her husband had been deployed to Iraq. He’d come back unharmed and, in fact, he hadn’t changed much after his tour of duty. But she had. Her father had died while he was gone. She’d been seven months pregnant when he left, and she’d had to deal with a new baby all by herself. When her husband returned, in a shower of stars and stripes, she found she’d completely lost her libido. He wanted to make love all the time and she just wanted to be left alone. She felt terrible about it. He’d served his country. Was it too much to expect to come back to a loving wife? So she went on playing the part. And now that their daughter was born, she was trapped and uncertain and desperately unhappy.
I looked up from the letters. Soa was watching me.
“Wow.”
“What do you think?” she asked.
“They’re both unhappy. It’s as if they want to switch lives.”
Veronica said something in Italian.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
Anna stepped in. “It is a saying: ‘No one knows what part of the shoe pinches—if not the person who is wearing it.’ ”
“That’s good,” I said. “We have a saying: You can’t know someone until you walk a mile in their shoes.”
“It is the same,” said Veronica.
“Even best friends,” I went on, tapping at the letters. “They don’t know what’s in the other’s heart.”
Veronica leaned forward, “But we know,” she said. “When we read the letters. They tell us.”
“It’s true,” said Anna.
We grew quiet. Answering these letters was a solemn duty. We were the keepers of secrets. Giovanna had been right about that. The people who wrote entrusted us—or entrusted Juliet, anyway—with their deepest feelings, feelings they had to hide from the rest of the world, but feelings, all the same, that they needed to share.
* * *
Soa was staying in a tiny apartment near the university and had to meet her flatmate. Veronica had to catch a bus back home from a bus stop on the Corso Cavour, and they’d both left already. My hotel was south of the Old City walls, but I stayed awhile longer to close up with Anna. At the door, as she was clicking the key into the lock, she looked hard at me. “You didn’t finish your story,” she said.
“What story?”
“About your letter. That probably you should write a letter to Juliet.”
“Yeah, I should.”
“Allora, what will it say?”
I shook my head.
“Come on. Tell me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Here it is.” I started from the beginning and told her the whole sad story. It all made sense—up until the point where everything changed.
Claire, you see, had come back.
So smile the heavens
The days dwindled in Verona. I had to go back home in September to teach, and so, on one of my last mornings, before heading into the offices of the Club di Giulietta, I made my way through the cobblestone streets to see another of the city’s landmarks—the place they call Juliet’s Tomb.
South of the medieval walls, a busy street leads to the train station. Halfway down, an unremarkable lane veers between two high walls and opens up again into the grounds of a crumbling Franciscan monastery. At the entrance, surrounded by brambles and vines, a bust of Shakespeare sits in a niche. Beside it, bolted onto the stones, is another bronze plaque. A GRAVE? it reads. OH NO, A LANTERN. FOR HERE LIES JULIET AND HER BEAUTY MAKES THIS VAULT A FEASTING PRESENCE, FULL OF LIGHT.
The monastery of San Francesco al Corso was bombed during World War II though an underground vault just past the medieval cloisters remained untouched. I walked across what was left of the gardens. An old wishing well stood in the middle of a grassy courtyard, and past that, a set of damp stone steps led to a cavern. No one else was around. I clunked down the steps. At the bottom, in an arched recess that looked almost Moorish, a candle flickered. I hunched under another archway and into the crypt itself.
A sarcophagus lay in the middle of the floor. This was, supposedly, Juliet’s grave. Shakespeare’s text portrays a family vault, but in this one, there was only a single stone sarcophagus, open at the top and empty inside. The stone was unadorned, and a deep crack ran down its side. Legend has it that Lord Byron chiseled off a piece of the sarcophagus to give to his daughter. Napoléon’s second wife had several stone fragments made into earrings. Apparently, the very first letters to Juliet appeared here, when the postmaster of Verona had no clue where else to deliver them. A groundskeeper at the monastery was the first to collect t
he letters and answer them, and so, whether or not Juliet was real, this place was at least the spiritual home of Juliet’s letters.
In my bag, I carried a notebook. The pages were dog-eared, filled with quotes and conversations, maps, and recommendations regarding my trip so far. I tore out a blank page and looked across at the old grave.
“Dear Juliet,” I began. “It’s been a long journey . . .”
The words flowed easily. I knew what to say. I’d known Claire for almost twenty years. The time had come to stop with all the questions. The time had come for answers.
Once I’d finished, I gave the paper a crooked fold and tucked it into an old envelope. When I looked up, a group of schoolchildren were staring at me. They’d halted at the entrance, unsure if they should disturb me. I waved at them and stood, packing up my writing gear. I had to get to the office but later, I’d drop my letter in the bright red mailbox at the Casa di Giulietta, and that would be that. I’d be done with Verona.
* * *
This was not my first time in Italy. Just when I’d almost gotten her out of my head, Claire moved back. She’d been gone for six years and then, quite out of the blue, her job out east had vaporized and she’d been offered a new one back in the city in which I lived. It was abrupt and unexpected, and she was frazzled by it all.
When she first reappeared, it felt like only a month or two had passed. It was as if time itself was irrelevant for us. And when, in her new position, she was invited to a conference in Europe, I suggested that she should go see Florence. It wasn’t far from where her conference was being held, and it seemed a shame to go all that way and not see Tuscany.
“Maybe I could meet you there,” I ventured.
“Really?” she said.
I hadn’t exactly thought this through, but I barged on. “It’s just an idea,” I said. “It’s kind of crazy—but maybe . . .” I paused. “Just crazy enough that I should do it.”
