Juliet

I barely knew what to do. Normally I was not someone who ran around hugging people—I left that to Janice—but even I didn’t mind it from this endearing old man.

‘I’m sorry to barge in,’ I started, then stopped, not sure what to say next.

‘No-no-no-no-no!’ Peppo brushed it all aside. ‘I am so happy you are here! Come, let me show you the museum! This is the museum for the contrada of the Owl.’ He barely knew where to start and hopped around on his cane, looking for something impressive to show me. But when he saw my expression, he stopped himself. ‘No! You don’t want to see the museum! You want to talk! Yes, we must talk!’ He threw up his arms and nearly knocked over a sculpture with the crutch. ‘I must hear everything. My wife—we must go see my wife. She will be so happy. She is at the house—Salvatore! Oh, where is he?’

Five minutes later I came zooming out of Piazzetta del Castellare on a red-and-black scooter. Peppo Tolomei had helped me into the saddle with the gallantry of a magician helping a lovely young assistant into a box he intends to saw in half, and as soon as I had a secure grip on his braces, we zoomed out through the covered alleyway, braking for no one.

Peppo had insisted on closing up the museum right away and taking me home with him, so that I could meet his wife, Pia, and whoever else happened to be around. I had gladly accepted the invitation, assuming that the home to which he was referring was just around the corner. Only now, as we flew up the Corso past Palazzo Tolomei, did I realize my mistake.

‘Is it far?’ I yelled, hanging on as best I could.

‘No-no-no!’ replied Peppo, narrowly missing a nun pushing an old man in a wheelchair. ‘Don’t worry, we will call everyone and have a big family reunion!’ Excited at the prospect, he began describing all the family members I would soon be meeting, though I could barely hear him in the wind. He was too distracted to notice that, as we passed Palazzo Salimbeni, we went right through a handful of security guards, forcing them all to jump aside.

‘Whoa!’ I exclaimed, wondering if Peppo was aware that we might be having our big family reunion in the slammer. But the guards made no move to stop us, merely watched us go past the way dogs on a tight leash watch a fluffy squirrel strut across the road. Unfortunately, one of them was Eva Maria’s godson, Alessandro, and I was almost certain he recognized me, for he did a double take at the sight of my dangling legs, perhaps wondering what had happened to my flip-flops.

‘Peppo!’ I yelled, pulling at my cousin’s braces, ‘I really don’t want to be arrested, okay?’

‘Don’t worry!’ Peppo turned a corner and accelerated as he spoke. ‘I go too fast for police!’ Moments later we shot through an ancient city gate like a poodle through a hoop, and flew right into the masterpiece of a full-blown Tuscan summer.

As I sat there, looking at the landscape over his shoulder, I wanted so much to be filled with a sense of familiarity, of finally returning home. But everything around me was new; the warm wafts of weeds and spices, the lazily rolling fields—even Peppo’s cologne had a foreign component that was absurdly attractive.

How much do we really remember from the first three years of our lives? Sometimes I could conjure a memory of hugging a pair of bare legs that were definitely not Aunt Rose’s, and Janice and I were both sure we remembered a large glass bowl filled with wine corks, but apart from that, it was hard to tell which fragments belonged where. When we occasionally managed to uncover memories of ourselves as toddlers, we always ended up confused. ‘I’m sure the wobbly chess table was in Tuscany,’ Janice would always insist. ‘Where else could it have been? Aunt Rose has never had one.’

‘Then how,’ I would inevitably counter, ‘do you explain that it was Umberto who slapped you when you pushed it over?’

But Janice couldn’t explain it. In the end, she would merely mumble, ‘Well, maybe it was someone else. When you’re two years old, all men look the same.’ Then she’d snort, ‘Hell, they still do.’

As a teenager I used to fantasize about returning to Siena and suddenly remembering everything about my childhood; now that I was finally here, hurtling down narrow roads without recognizing anything, I began to wonder if living away from this place for most of my life had somehow withered away an essential part of my soul.

Pia and Peppo Tolomei lived on a farm in a small valley, surrounded by vineyards and olive groves. Gentle hills rose around their property on all sides, and the comfort of peaceful seclusion more than made up for the lack of extended views. The house was by no means grand; its yellow walls had weeds growing in the cracks, the green shutters needed much more than just a paint job, and the terracotta roof looked as if the next storm—or maybe just someone sneezing inside—would make all the tiles come rattling down. And yet the many trailing vines and strategically placed flowerpots were able to mask the decay and make the place utterly irresistible.

After parking the scooter and grabbing a crutch leaning against the wall, Peppo took me directly into the garden. Back here, in the shade of the house, his wife Pia sat on a stool amongst her grandchildren and great-grandchildren like an ageless harvest goddess surrounded by nymphs, teaching them how to make braids out of fresh garlic. It took several attempts before Peppo was able to make her understand who I was and why he had brought me there, but once Pia finally dared to trust her ears, she stuck her feet into her slippers, got up with the aid of her entourage, and enfolded me in a tearful embrace. ‘Giulietta!’ she exclaimed, pressing me to her chest and kissing me on the forehead all at once. ‘Che meraviglia! It is a miracle!’

Her joy in seeing me was so genuine that I almost felt ashamed of myself. I had not gone to the Owl Museum this morning in search of my long-lost godparents, nor had it occurred to me before this moment that I even had godparents, and that they would be this happy to see me alive and well. Yet here they were, and their kindness made me realize that, until now, I had never felt truly welcome anywhere, not even in my own home. At least not when Janice was around.

Within an hour the house and garden filled with people and food. It was as if everybody had been waiting just around the corner, local delicacy in hand, desperate for an excuse to celebrate. Some were family, some friends and neighbours, and they all claimed to have known my parents and to have wondered what ever happened to their twin daughters. No one said anything explicit, but I sensed that, back then, Aunt Rose had swooped in and claimed Janice and me against the wishes of the Tolomei family—thanks to Uncle Jim she still had connections in the State Department—and that we had vanished without a trace, much to the frustration of Pia and Peppo, who were, after all, our godparents.

‘But that is all in the past,’ Peppo kept saying, patting me on the back, ‘for now you are here, and we can finally talk.’ But it was hard to know where to begin; there were so many years that must be accounted for, and so many questions that needed answers, including the reason for my sister’s mysterious absence.

‘She was too busy to come along,’ I said, looking away. ‘But I’m sure she’ll come and visit you soon.’

It did not help that only a handful of the guests spoke English, and that every answer to every inquiry had to first be understood and interpreted by a third party. Still, everyone was so friendly and warm that even I, after a while, began to relax and enjoy myself. It didn’t really matter that we couldn’t understand each other, what mattered were those little smiles and nods that said so much more than words.

At one point, Pia came out on the terrace with a photo album and sat down to show me pictures from my parents’ wedding. As soon as she opened the album, other women clustered around us, eager to follow along and help turn the pages.

‘There!’ Pia pointed at a large picture. ‘Your mother is wearing the dress I wore at my wedding. Oh, aren’t they a handsome couple? And here, this is your cousin Francesco…’

‘Wait!’ I tried to prevent her from turning the page, but in vain. She probably didn’t realize that I had never seen a picture of my father before, and that the only grown-up photo of my mother I had ever known was her high-school graduation portrait on Aunt Rose’s piano.

Pia’s album came as a surprise to me. Not so much because my mother was visibly pregnant underneath the wedding gown, but because my father looked as if he was a hundred years old. Obviously, he was not, but standing next to my mother—an attractive college dropout with dimples in her smile—he looked like old man Abraham in my illustrated children’s Bible.

Even so, they appeared to be happy together, and although there were no shots of them kissing, most of the photos showed my mother clinging to her husband’s elbow and looking at him with great admiration. And so after a while I shrugged off my astonishment and decided to accept the possibility that here, in this bright and blissful place, concepts like time and age had very little bearing on people’s lives.

The women around me confirmed my theory; none of them seemed to find the union in any way extraordinary. As far as I could understand, their chirping commentary—all in Italian—was primarily about my mother’s dress, her veil, and the complex genealogical relationship of every single wedding guest to my father and to themselves.

After the wedding photos came a few pages dedicated to our baptism, but my parents were barely in them. The pictures showed Pia holding a baby that could have been either Janice or me—it was impossible to tell which one, and Pia could not remember—and Peppo proudly holding the other. There appeared to have been two different ceremonies; one inside a church, and one outside in the sunshine, by the baptismal font of the contrada of the Owl.

‘That was a good day,’ said Pia, smiling sadly. ‘You and your sister became little civettini, little owls. It was too bad…’ She did not finish the sentence, but closed the album very tenderly. ‘It is such a long time ago. Sometimes I wonder if time really heals.’ She was interrupted by a sudden commotion inside the house, and by a voice impatiently calling her name. ‘Come!’ Pia got up, suddenly anxious. ‘That must be our Nonna!’

Old Granny Tolomei, whom everyone referred to as Nonna, lived with one of her granddaughters in the centre of Siena, but had been summoned to the farm this afternoon in order to meet me—an arrangement that clearly did not fit her personal schedule. She was standing in the hallway, irritably arranging her black lace with one hand while leaning heavily on her granddaughter with the other. Had I been as uncharitable as Janice, I would have instantly proclaimed her the picture-perfect fairy-tale witch. All that was missing was the crow on her shoulder.

Pia rushed forward to greet the old lady, who grudgingly allowed herself to be kissed on both cheeks and escorted into a particularly favoured chair in the living room. Some minutes were spent making Nonna comfortable; cushions fetched, placed, and moved around, and special lemonade brought in from the kitchen, immediately sent back, and brought in anew, this time with a slice of lemon perched on the rim.

‘Nonna is our aunt,’ Peppo whispered in my ear, ‘and your father’s youngest sister. Come, I will introduce you.’ He pulled me along to stand to attention in front of the old lady and eagerly explained the situation to her in Italian, clearly expecting to see some sign of joy on her face.

But Nonna refused to smile. No matter how much Peppo urged her, even begged her, to rejoice with the rest of us, she could not be persuaded to take any kind of pleasure in my presence. He even had me step forward so that she could see me more clearly, but what she saw only gave her further reason to scowl, and before Peppo managed to pull me out of range, she leaned forward and snarled something I did not understand, but which made everyone gasp with embarrassment.

Pia and Peppo practically evacuated me from the living room, apologizing all the way. ‘I am so sorry!’ Peppo kept saying, over and over, too mortified even to look me in the eye. ‘I don’t know what is wrong with her! I think she is going crazy!’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, too stunned to feel anything, ‘I don’t blame her for not believing it. It’s all so new, even for me.’

‘Let us go for a little walk,’ said Peppo, still flustered, ‘and come back later. It is time I show you their graves.’

The village cemetery was a welcoming, sleepy oasis, and very different from any other graveyard I had ever seen. The whole place was a maze of white, freestanding walls with no roof, and the walls themselves were a mosaic of graves from top to bottom. Names, dates, and photos identified the individuals dwelling behind the marble slabs, and brass sconces held—on behalf of the temporarily incapacitated host—flowers brought by visitors.

‘Here.’ Peppo had a hand on my shoulder for support, but that did not prevent him from gallantly opening a squeaky iron gate and letting us both into a small shrine off the main path. ‘This is part of the old Tolomei…hmm…sepulchre. Most of it is underground, and we don’t go down there any more. Up here is better.’

‘It is beautiful.’ I stepped into the small room and looked around at the many marble plates and the bouquet of fresh flowers standing on the altar. A candle was burning steadily in a red glass bowl that seemed vaguely familiar to me, indicating that the Tolomei sepulchre was a place carefully maintained by the family. I suddenly felt a stab of guilt that I was here alone, without Janice, but I quickly shook it off. If she had been here, she would most likely have ruined the moment with a sarky comment.

‘This is your father,’ pointed Peppo, ‘and your mother right next to him.’ He paused, lost in memory. ‘She was so young. I thought she would be alive long after I was gone.’

I looked at the two marble plates that were all that was left of Professor Patrizio Scipione Tolomei and his wife, Diane Lloyd Tolomei, and felt my heart flutter. For as long as I could remember, my parents had been little more than distant shadows in a daydream, and I had never imagined I would one day find myself as close to them—at least physically—as this. Even when fantasizing about travelling to Italy, for some reason it had never occurred to me that my first duty upon arrival must be to find their graves, and I felt a warm wave of gratitude towards Peppo for helping me do the right thing.

‘Thank you,’ I said quietly, squeezing his hand, which was still resting on my shoulder.

‘It was a great tragedy the way they died,’ he said, shaking his head, ‘and that all Patrizio’s work was lost in the fire. He had a beautiful farm in Malamarenda—all gone. After the funeral your mother bought a little house near Montepulciano and lived there alone with the twins—with you and your sister—but she was never the same. She came to put flowers on his grave every Sunday, but’—he paused to pull a handkerchief from his pocket—‘she was never happy again.’

‘Wait a minute.’ I stared at the dates on my parents’ graves. ‘My father died before my mother? I always thought they died together.’ But even as I spoke, I could see that the dates confirmed the new truth; my father had died more than two years before my mother. ‘What fire?’

‘Someone—no, I shouldn’t say that.’ Peppo frowned at himself. ‘There was a fire, a terrible fire. Your father’s farm burned down. Your mother was lucky; she was in Siena, shopping, with you girls. It was a great, great tragedy. I would have said that God held his hand over her, but then two years later…’

‘The car accident,’ I muttered.

‘Well…’ Peppo dug the toe of his shoe into the ground. ‘I don’t know the truth. Nobody knows the truth. But’—he finally met my eyes—‘I always suspected that the Salimbenis had a hand in it.’

I didn’t know what to say to this. I pictured Eva Maria and her suitcase full of clothes sitting in my hotel room. She had been so kind to me, so eager to make friends.

‘There was a young man,’ Peppo went on, ‘Luciano Salimbeni. He was a troublemaker. There were rumours. I don’t want to…’ Peppo glanced at me nervously. ‘The fire. The fire that killed your father. They say it was not an accident. They say someone wanted to murder him and destroy his research. It was terrible. Such a beautiful house. But you know, I think your mother saved something from the house. Something important. Documents. She was afraid to talk about it, but after the fire, she began to ask strange questions about…things.’

‘What kind of things?’

‘All kinds. I didn’t know the answers. She asked me about the Salimbenis. About secret tunnels underground. She wanted to find a grave. It was something to do with the plague.’

‘The…bubonic plague?’

‘Yes, the big one. In 1348.’ Peppo cleared his throat, not comfortable with the subject. ‘You see, your mother believed that there is an old curse that is still haunting the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis. And she was trying to find out how to stop it. She was obsessed with this idea. I wanted to believe her, but…’ He pulled at his shirt collar as if he suddenly felt hot. ‘She was so determined. She was convinced that we were all cursed. Death. Destruction. Accidents. A plague on both our houses… that is what she used to say.’ He sighed deeply, reliving the pain of the past. ‘She always quoted Shakespeare. She took it very seriously…Romeo and Juliet. She thought that it had happened right here, in Siena. She had a theory…’ Peppo shook his head dismissively. ‘She was obsessed with it. I don’t know. I am not a professor. All I know is that there was a man, Luciano Salimbeni, who wanted to find a treasure.’

I could not help myself, I had to ask: ‘What kind of treasure?’

‘Who knows?’ Peppo threw up his arms. ‘Your father spent all his time researching old legends. He was always talking about lost treasures. But your mother told me about something once—oh, what did she call it?—I think she called it Juliet’s Eyes. I don’t know what she meant, but I think it was very valuable, and I think it was what Luciano Salimbeni was after.’

I was dying to know more, but by now Peppo was looking very distressed, almost ill, and he swayed and grabbed my arm for balance. ‘If I was you,’ he went on, ‘I would be very, very careful. And I would not trust anyone with the name of Salimbeni.’ Seeing my expression, he frowned. ‘You think I am pazzo… crazy? Here we are, standing by the grave of a young woman who died before her time. She was your mother. Who am I to tell you who did this to her, and why?’ His grip tightened. ‘She is dead. Your father is dead. That is all I know. But my old Tolomei heart tells me that you must be careful.’

When we were seniors in high school, Janice and I had both volunteered for the annual play—as it so happened, it was Romeo and Juliet. After the auditions Janice was cast as Juliet, while I was to be a tree in the Capulet orchard. She, of course, spent more time on her nails than on memorizing the dialogue, and whenever we rehearsed the balcony scene, I would be the one to whisper her lines to her, being, after all, conveniently located onstage with branches for arms.

On opening night, however, she was particularly horrible to me. As we sat in makeup, she kept laughing at my brown face and pulling the leaves out of my hair, while she was being dolled up with blond braids and rosy cheeks, and by the time the balcony scene rolled around, I was in no mood to cover for her. In fact, I did quite the opposite. When Romeo said, ‘What shall I swear by?’ I whispered, ‘Three words!’

And Janice immediately said, ‘Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed!’ which threw Romeo off completely, and had the scene end in confusion.

Later, when I was posing as a candelabrum in Juliet’s bedroom, I made Janice wake up next to Romeo and say right off the bat, ‘Hie hence, begone, away!’ which didn’t set a very good tone for the rest of their tender scene. Needless to say, Janice was so furious that afterwards she chased me all the way through the school, swearing that she was going to shave off my eyebrows. It had been fun at first, but when, in the end, she locked herself in the school bathroom and cried for an hour, even I stopped laughing.

Long after midnight, when I sat in the living room talking with Aunt Rose, afraid of going to bed and submitting myself to sleep and Janice’s razor, Umberto came in with a glass of vin santo for us both. He did not say anything, just handed us the glasses, and Aunt Rose did not utter a word about me being too young to drink.

‘You like that play?’ she said instead. ‘You seem to know it by heart.’

‘I don’t really like it a whole lot,’ I confessed, shrugging and sipping my drink at the same time. ‘It’s just…there, stuck in my head.’

Aunt Rose nodded slowly, savouring the vin santo. ‘Your mother was the same way. She knew it by heart. It was…an obsession.’

I held my breath, not wanting to break her train of thought. I waited for another glimpse of my mother, but it never came. Aunt Rose just looked up, frowning, to clear her throat and take another sip of wine. And that was it. That was one of the only things she ever told me about my mother without being prompted, and I never passed it on to Janice. Our mutual obsession with Shakespeare’s play was a little secret I shared with my mother and no one else, just like I never told anyone about my growing fear that, because my mother had died at twenty-five, I would, too.

As soon as Peppo dropped me off in front of Hotel Chiusarelli, I went straight to the nearest internet café and Googled Luciano Salimbeni. But it took me several verbal acrobatics to come up with a search combination that yielded anything remotely useful. Only after at least an hour and many, many frustrations with the Italian language, I was fairly confident of the following conclusions:

One: Luciano Salimbeni was dead.

Two: Luciano Salimbeni had been a bad guy, possibly even a mass murderer.

Three: Luciano and Eva Maria Salimbeni were somehow related.

Four: There had been something fishy about the car accident that had killed my mother, and Luciano Salimbeni had been wanted for questioning.

I printed out all the pages so that I could reread them later, in the company of my dictionary. The search had yielded little more than Peppo Tolomei had just told me this afternoon, but at least now I knew my elderly cousin had not merely invented the story; there really had been a dangerous Luciano Salimbeni at large in Siena some twenty or so years ago.

But the good news was that he was dead. In other words, he definitely could not be the tracksuit charmer who might or might not have stalked me the day before, after I left the bank in Palazzo Tolomei with my mother’s box.

As an afterthought, I Googled Juliet’s Eyes. Not surprisingly, none of the search results had anything to do with legendary treasures. Almost all were semischolarly discussions about the significance of eyes in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and I dutifully read through a couple of passages from the play, trying to spot a secret message. One of them went:

Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords.

Well, I thought to myself, if this evil Luciano Salimbeni had really killed my mother over a treasure called Juliet’s Eyes, then Romeo’s statement was true; whatever the nature of those mysterious eyes, they were potentially more dangerous than weapons, simple as that. In contrast, the second passage was a bit more complex than your average pickup line:

Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

I mulled over the lines all the way down Via del Paradiso. Romeo was clearly trying to compliment Juliet by saying that her eyes were like sparkling stars, but he had a funny way of phrasing it. It was, in my opinion, not particularly appealing to woo a girl by imagining what she would look like with her eyes gouged out.