Juliet

‘Pretty, is it not?’ Eva Maria continued, nodding at the fresco. ‘A city at peace with itself?’

‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘although I have to say people don’t look particularly happy. Look.’ I pointed at a young woman who appeared to be trapped in a cluster of dancing girls. ‘This one seems—I don’t know. Lost in thought.’

‘Perhaps she saw the wedding procession passing by?’ suggested Eva Maria, nodding at a train of people following what looked like a bride on a horse. ‘And perhaps it made her think of a lost love?’

‘She is looking at the drum,’ I said, pointing again, ‘or, the tambourine. And the other dancers look…evil. Look at the way they have her trapped in the dance. And one of them is staring at her stomach.’ I cast a glance at Eva Maria, but it was hard to interpret her expression. ‘Or maybe I’m just imagining things.’

‘No,’ she said, quietly, ‘Maestro Ambrogio clearly wants us to notice her. He made this group of dancing women bigger than anybody else in the picture. And if you take another look, she is the only one with a tiara in her hair.’

I squinted and saw that she was right. ‘So, who was she? Do we know?’

Eva Maria shrugged. ‘Officially, we don’t know. But between you and me’—she leaned towards me and lowered her voice—‘I think she is your ancestor. Her name was Giulietta Tolomei.’

I was so shocked to hear her speak the name—my name—and articulate the exact same thought I had put to Umberto over the telephone that it took me a moment to come up with the only natural question: ‘How on earth do you know?…That she is my ancestor, I mean?’

Eva Maria almost laughed. ‘Isn’t it obvious? Why else would your mother name you after her? In fact, she told me so herself—your bloodline comes straight from Giulietta and Giannozza Tolomei.’

Although I was thrilled to hear this, spoken with such certainty, it was almost more information than I could handle at once. ‘I didn’t realize you knew my mother,’ I said, wondering why she had not told me this before.

‘She came to visit once. With your father. It was before they were married.’ Eva Maria paused. ‘She was very young. Younger than you. It was a party with a hundred guests, but we spent the whole evening talking about Maestro Ambrogio. They were the ones who told me everything I am telling you now. They were very knowledgeable, very interested in our families. It was sad the way things went.’

We stood for a moment in silence. Eva Maria was looking at me with a wry smile, as if she knew there was a question that was burning a hole in my tongue, but which I could not bring myself to ask, namely: What was her relationship – if any – with the evil Luciano Salimbeni, and how much did she know about my parents’ deaths?

‘Your father believed,’ Eva Maria went on, not leaving me room for further inquiry, ‘that Maestro Ambrogio was hiding a story in this picture. A tragedy that happened in his own time, and which could not be discussed openly. Look’ – she pointed at the fresco – ‘do you see that little birdcage in the window up there? What if I told you that the building is Palazzo Salimbeni, and that the man you see inside is Salimbeni himself, enthroned like a king, while people crouch at his feet to borrow money?’

Sensing that the story somehow gave her pain, I smiled at Eva Maria, determined not to let the past come between us. ‘You don’t sound very proud of him.’

She grimaced. ‘Oh, he was a great man. But Maestro Ambrogio didn’t like him. Don’t you see? Look…there was a marriage…a sad girl dancing…and now, a bird in a cage. What do you make of that?’ When I did not reply right away, Eva Maria looked out the window. ‘I was twenty-two, you know. When I married him. Salimbeni. He was sixty-four. Do you think that is old?’ She looked straight at me, trying to read my thoughts.

‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘As you know, my mother—’

‘Well, I did,’ Eva Maria cut me off. ‘I thought he was very old and that he would die soon. But he was rich. I have a beautiful house. You must come and visit me.’

I was so baffled by her straightforward confession, and subsequent invitation, that I just said, ‘I’d love to.’

‘Good!’ She put a possessive hand on my shoulder. ‘And now you must find the hero in the fresco!’

I nearly laughed. Eva Maria Salimbeni was a true virtuoso in the art of changing subjects.

‘Come now,’ she said, like a teacher to a class full of lazy kids, ‘where is the hero? There is always a hero. Look at the fresco.’

I looked up dutifully. ‘That could be anyone.’

‘The heroine is inside the city,’ she said, pointing, ‘looking very sad. So, the hero must be…? Look! On the left you have life within the city walls. Then you have Porta Romana, the city gate to the south, which cuts the fresco in half. And on the right-hand side…’

‘Okay, I see him now,’ I said, being a good sport. ‘It’s the guy on the horse, leaving town.’

Eva Maria smiled, not at me, but at the fresco. ‘He is handsome, is he not?’

‘Drop dead. What’s with the elf hat?’

‘He is a hunter. Look at him. He has a hunting bird and is just about to release it, but something holds him back. That other man, the darker man walking on foot, carrying the painter’s box, is trying to tell him something, and our young hero is leaning back in the saddle to hear it.’

‘Perhaps the walking man wants him to stay in town?’ I suggested.

‘Perhaps. But what might happen to him if he does? Look at what Maestro Ambrogio has put above his head. The gallows. Not a pleasant alternative, is it?’ Eva Maria smiled. ‘Who do you think he is?’

I did not answer right away. If the Maestro Ambrogio who had painted this fresco was, in fact, the same Maestro Ambrogio whose journal I was in the process of reading, and if the unhappily dancing woman with the tiara was indeed my ancestor, Giulietta Tolomei, then the man on the horse could only be Romeo Marescotti. But I was not comfortable with Eva Maria knowing the extent of my recent discoveries, nor the source of my knowledge. She was, after all, a Salimbeni. So, I merely shrugged and said, ‘I have no idea.’

‘Suppose I told you,’ said Eva Maria, ‘that it is Romeo from Romeo and Juliet?…And that your ancestor, Giulietta, is Shakespeare’s Juliet?’

I managed to laugh. ‘Wasn’t that set in Verona? And didn’t Shakespeare invent them? In Shakespeare in Love—’

‘Shakespeare in Love!’ Eva Maria looked at me as if she had rarely heard anything so revolting. ‘Giulietta’ – she put a hand on my cheek – ‘trust me when I say that it happened right here in Siena. Long, long before Shakespeare. And here they are, up there, on this wall. Romeo going into exile and Juliet preparing for marriage to a man she cannot love.’ She smiled at my expression and finally let go of me. ‘Don’t worry. When you visit me, we will have more talk of these sad things. What are you doing tonight?’

I took a step back, hoping to conceal my shock at her intimacy with my family history. ‘Cleaning my balcony.’

Eva Maria didn’t miss a beat. ‘When you are finished with that, I want you to come with me to a very nice concert. Here.’ She dug into her handbag and took out an admission ticket, ‘it is a wonderful programme. I chose it myself. You will like it. Seven o’clock. Afterwards we will have dinner, and I will tell you more about our ancestors.’

As I walked to the concert hall later that day, I could feel something nagging me. It was a beautiful evening, and the town was buzzing with happy people, but I was still unable to share in the fun. Striding down the street with eyes for nothing but the pavement ahead, I was gradually able to identify the cause of my grumpiness.

I was being manipulated.

Ever since my arrival in Siena, people had been on tiptoes to tell me what to do and what to think. Eva Maria most of all. She seemed to find it only natural that her own bizarre wishes and plans should dictate my movements, dress code included, and now she was trying to control my line of thought as well. Suppose I did not want to discuss the events of 1340 with her? Well, too bad, because I didn’t have a choice. And yet, in some strange way I still liked her. Why was that? Was it because she was the very antithesis of Aunt Rose, who had always been so afraid of doing something wrong that she never did anything right either? Or did I like Eva Maria because I was not supposed to? That would have been Umberto’s take on it; the surest way of making me hang with the Salimbenis would be to tell me to stay the hell away from them. I guess it was a Juliet thing.

Well, maybe it was time for Juliet to put on her rational hat. According to Presidente Maconi, the Salimbenis would always be the Salimbenis, and according to my cousin Peppo that meant woe unto any Tolomei standing in their way. This had not only held true for the stormy Middle Ages; even now, in present-day Siena, the ghost of maybe-murderer Luciano Salimbeni had not yet left the stage.

On the other hand, maybe it was this kind of prejudice that had kept the old family feud alive for generations. What if the elusive Luciano Salimbeni had never laid a hand on my parents, but had been a suspect solely because of his name? No wonder he had made himself scarce. In a place where you are found guilty by association, your executioner is not likely to sit patiently through a trial.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more the scales tipped in Eva Maria’s favour; after all, she was the one who seemed most determined to prove that despite our ancestral rivalry, we could still be friends. And if that was really so, I did not want to be the party pooper.

The evening concert was hosted by the Chigiana Musical Academy in Palazzo Chigi-Saracini, right across the street from my friend Luigi’s hair salon. I entered the building through a covered gateway to emerge in an enclosed courtyard with a loggia and an old well in the middle. Knights in shining armour, I thought to myself, would have pulled water from that well for their battle horses, and beneath my high-heeled sandals the stone tiles in the floor were worn smooth from centuries of horses’ hooves and cartwheels. The place was neither too big nor too imposing, and it had a quiet dignity of its own that made me wonder whether the things going on outside the walls of this timeless quadrangle were truly that important.

As I stood there, marvelling at the mosaic ceiling underneath the loggia, an usher handed me a brochure and pointed out the door going up to the concert hall. I glanced at the brochure as I climbed the stairs, expecting it to list the musical programme. But instead, it was a brief history of the building written in several different languages. The English version began:

Palazzo Chigi-Saracini, one of the most beautiful palazzos in Siena, originally belonged to the Marescotti family. The core of the building is very old, but during the Middle Ages the Marescotti family began to incorporate the neighbouring buildings, and, like many other powerful families in Siena, they began the erection of a great tower. It was from this tower that the victory at Montaperti in 1260 was announced, by the sound of a drum, or tambourine.

I stopped in the middle of the staircase to reread the passage. If this was true, and if I had not completely mixed up the names in Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, then the building in which I was currently standing had originally been Palazzo Marescotti, that is, Romeo’s home in 1340.

Only when people started squeezing past me in irritation did I shake off my surprise and move on. So what if it had been Romeo’s home? He and I were separated by nearly seven hundred years, and besides, back then, he had had a Juliet of his own. Despite my new clothes and hair, I was still nothing but a gangly offshoot of the perfect creature that once was.

Janice would have laughed at me if she had known my romantic thoughts. ‘Here we go again,’ she would have jeered, ‘Jules dreaming about a man she can’t have.’ And she was right. But sometimes, those are the best ones.

My strange obsession with historical figures had been kicked off at the age of nine with President Jefferson. While everyone else, including Janice, had posters of pop tarts with exposed midriffs plastered all over their walls, my room was a shrine to my favourite Founding Father. I had gone to great lengths to learn how to write out Thomas in calligraphy, and had even embroidered a cushion with a giant T, which I hugged every night as I fell asleep. Unfortunately, Janice had found my secret notebook and passed it around in class, making everyone howl with laughter at my fanciful drawings of myself standing in front of Monticello wearing a veil and a wedding gown, hand in hand with a very muscular President Jefferson.

After that, everyone had called me Jeff, even the teachers, who had no idea why they did it, and who amazingly never saw me wincing when they spoke to me during lessons. In the end I stopped putting up my hand entirely, and just sat there, hiding behind my hair in the back row, hoping no one would notice me.

In high school – thanks to Umberto – I had started looking towards the ancient world instead, and my fancy had jumped from Leonidas the Spartan to Scipio the Roman and even to Emperor Augustus for a while, until I discovered his dark side. By the time I entered college I had finally strayed so far back in time that my hero was an unnamed caveman living on the Russian steppes, killing woolly mammoths and playing haunting tunes on his bone flute under the full moon, all by himself.

The only one to point out that all my boyfriends had one thing in common was, of course, Janice. ‘Too bad,’ she had said one night, when we were trying to fall asleep in a tent in the garden and she had managed to extract all my secrets one by one, in exchange for caramels that were originally mine, ‘that they are all deader than doornails.’

‘They are not!’ I had protested, already regretting telling her my secrets. ‘Famous people live forever!’

To this, Janice had merely snorted, ‘Maybe, but who wants to kiss a mummy?’

Despite my sister’s best efforts, however, it was no flight of fancy but simple habit for me to now feel a little frisson at the discovery that I was stalking the ghost of Romeo in his own house; the only requirement for us to continue this beautiful relationship was that he stayed just the way he was: dead.

Eva Maria was holding court in the concert hall, surrounded by men in dark suits and women in glittering dresses. It was a tall room decorated in the colours of milk and honey and finished off with touches of gold. About two hundred chairs were set up for the audience, and judging by the number of people already gathered there, it would be no problem filling them. At the far end, members of an orchestra were fine-tuning their instruments, and a large woman in a red dress looked as if she was threatening to sing. As with most spaces in Siena there was nothing modern here to disturb the eye, save the odd rebellious teenager wearing sneakers underneath his pleated trousers.

As soon as she saw me, Eva Maria summoned me to her entourage with a regal wave. As I approached the group, I could hear her introducing me with superlatives I did not deserve, and within minutes I was best friends with some of the leading figures of Sienese culture, one of whom was the President of the Monte dei Paschi Bank in Palazzo Salimbeni.

‘Monte dei Paschi,’ explained Eva Maria, ‘is the greatest protector of the arts in Siena. None of what you see around you would have been possible without the financial support of the Foundation.’

The President looked at me with a slight smile, and so did his wife, who stood right next to him, draped around his elbow. Like Eva Maria, she was a woman whose elegance belied her years, and although I had dressed up for the occasion, her eyes told me I still had a lot to learn. She even seemed to whisper as much to her husband.

‘My wife thinks you don’t believe it,’ said the President teasingly, his accent and dramatic intonation suggesting he was reciting the lyrics of a song. ‘Perhaps you think we are too’ – he had to search for the word – ‘proud of ourselves?’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said, my cheeks heating up under their continuing scrutiny, ‘I just find it…paradoxical that the house of the Marescottis depends on the goodwill of the Salimbenis to survive, that’s all.’

The President acknowledged my logic with a slight nod, as if to confirm that Eva Maria’s superlatives had been appropriate. ‘A paradox, yes.’

‘But the world,’ said a voice behind me, ‘is full of paradoxes.’

‘Alessandro!’ exclaimed the President, suddenly all jollity and game, ‘you must come and meet Signorina Tolomei. She is being very…severe on all of us. Especially on you.’

‘Of course she is.’ Alessandro took my hand and kissed it with facetious chivalry. ‘If she was not, we would never believe she was a Tolomei.’ He looked me straight in the eye before releasing my hand. ‘Would we, Miss Jacobs?’

It was an odd moment. He had clearly not expected to encounter me at the concert, and his reaction did not reflect well on either of us. But I could hardly blame him for grilling me; after all, I had never called him back after he stopped by my hotel three days ago. All this time, his business card had been sitting on my desk like a bad omen from a fortune cookie; only this morning I had finally torn it in half and thrown it in the bin, deciding that if he had really wanted to arrest me, he would have done so already.

‘Sandro,’ said Eva Maria, misinterpreting our intensity, ‘don’t you think Giulietta looks lovely tonight?’

Alessandro managed to smile. ‘Bewitching.’

‘Si-si,’ intervened the President, ‘but who is guarding our money, when you are here?’

‘The ghosts of the Salimbenis,’ replied Alessandro, still looking straight at me. ‘A very formidable power.’

‘Basta!’ Secretly pleased by his words, Eva Maria pretended to frown and tapped him on the shoulder with a rolled-up programme. ‘We will all be ghosts soon enough. Tonight we celebrate life.’

After the concert Eva Maria insisted on going out to dinner, just the three of us. When I began protesting, she played the birthday card and said that on this particular night – ‘as I turn another page in the most excellent and lamentable comedy of life’ – her only wish was to go to her favourite restaurant with two of her favourite people. Strangely, Alessandro did not object at all. In Siena, one clearly did not contradict one’s godmother on her day of days.

Eva Maria’s favourite restaurant was in Via delle Campane, just outside the border of Contrada dell’Aquila, that is, the Eagle neighbourhood. Her favourite table, apparently, was on the elevated deck outside, facing a florist’s shop that was closing down for the night.

‘So,’ she said to me, after ordering a bottle of Prosecco and a plate of antipasto, ‘you don’t like opera!’

‘But I do!’ I protested, sitting awkwardly, my crossed legs barely fitting beneath the table. ‘I love opera. My aunt’s housekeeper used to play it all the time. Especially Aida. It’s just that…Aida is supposed to be an Ethiopian princess, not a triple-wide wonder in her fifties. I’m sorry.’

Eva Maria laughed delightedly. ‘Do what Sandro does. Close your eyes.’

I glanced at Alessandro. He had sat behind me at the concert, and I had felt his eyes on me the whole time. ‘Why? It’s still the same woman singing.’

‘But the voice comes from the soul!’ argued Eva Maria on his behalf, leaning towards me. ‘All you have to do is listen, and you will see Aida the way she really is.’

‘That is very generous.’ I looked at Alessandro. ‘Are you always that generous?’

He did not reply. He didn’t have to.

‘Magnanimity,’ said Eva Maria, testing the Prosecco and deeming it worthy of consumption, ‘is the greatest of all the virtues. Stay away from stingy people. They are trapped in small souls.’

‘According to my aunt’s housekeeper,’ I said, ‘beauty is the greatest virtue. But he would say that generosity is a kind of beauty.’

‘Truth is beauty,’ said Alessandro, speaking at last, ‘beauty, truth. According to Keats. Life is very easy if you live like that.’

‘You don’t?’

‘I’m not an urn.’

I started laughing, but he never even smiled.

Although she clearly wanted us to become friends, Eva Maria was incapable of letting us continue on our own. ‘Tell us more about your aunt!’ she urged me. ‘Why do you think she never told you who you were?’

I looked from one to the other, sensing that they had been discussing my case, and that they had disagreed. ‘I have no idea. I think she was afraid that…or maybe she…’ I looked down. ‘I don’t know.’

‘In Siena,’ said Alessandro, preoccupied with his water glass, ‘your name makes all the difference.’

‘Names, names, names!’ sighed Eva Maria. ‘What I don’t understand is why this aunt – Rosa? – never took you to Siena before.’

‘Maybe she was afraid,’ I said, more sharply this time, ‘that the person who killed my parents would kill me, too.’

Eva Maria sat back, appalled. ‘What a terrible thought!’

‘Well, happy birthday!’ I took a sip of my Prosecco. ‘And thanks for everything.’ I glared at Alessandro, forcing him to meet my eyes. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t stay long.’

‘No,’ he said, nodding once, ‘I imagine it is too peaceful here for your taste.’

‘I like peace.’

Within the coniferous greens of his eyes, I now got a warning glimpse of his soul. It was a disturbing sight. ‘Obviously.’

Rather than replying, I clenched my teeth and turned my attention to the antipasto. Unfortunately, Eva Maria did not pick up on the finer nuances of my emotions; all she saw was my flushed face. ‘Sandro,’ she said, riding what she thought was a wave of flirtation, ‘why have you not taken Giulietta around town and shown her some nice things? She would love to go.’

‘I’m sure she would.’ Alessandro stabbed an olive with his fork, but didn’t eat it. ‘Unfortunately, we don’t have any statues of little mermaids.’

That was when I knew for sure he had checked my file, and that he must have found out everything there was to know about Julie Jacobs – Julie Jacobs the anti-war demonstrator, who had barely returned from Rome before heading off to Copenhagen to protest against the Danish involvement in Iraq by vandalizing the Little Mermaid. Sadly, what the file would not have told him was that it was all a big mistake, and that Julie Jacobs had only gone to Denmark to show her sister that, yes, she dared.

Tasting the dizzying cocktail of fury and fear in my throat, I reached out blindly for the breadbasket, hoping very much my panic didn’t show.

‘No, but we have other nice statues!’ Eva Maria looked at me, then at him, trying to grasp what was going on. ‘And fountains. You must take her to Fontebranda—’

‘Maybe Miss Jacobs would like to see Via dei Malcontenti,’ proposed Alessandro, cutting her off. ‘That was where we used to take the criminals, so their victims could throw things at them on their way to the gallows.’

I returned his unforgiving stare, feeling no further need for concealment. ‘Was anyone ever pardoned?’

‘Yes. It was called banishment. They were told to leave Siena and never come back. In return, their lives would be spared.’

‘Oh, I see,’ I snapped back, ‘just like your family, the Salimbenis.’ I stole a glance at Eva Maria, who was, for a change, dumbstruck. ‘Am I wrong?’

Alessandro did not answer right away. Judging from the play of the muscles in his jaw, he would have liked very much to respond in kind, but knew that he could not do so in front of his godmother. ‘The Salimbeni family,’ he finally said, his voice strained, ‘was expropriated by the government in 1419 and forced to leave the Republic of Siena.’

‘For good?’

‘Obviously not. But they were banished for a long time.’ The way he looked at me suggested that we were now talking about me again. ‘And they probably deserved it.’

‘What if they…came back anyway?’