Juliet (47 page)

“Hail Mary!” exclaimed Janice. “We’re back in business! You go first. Age before beauty.”

The pain and frustration of walking through the dark tunnel was nothing compared to the claustrophobia I felt crawling up the narrow shaft and the torment of scraping along on my raw knees and elbows. For every time I managed to pull myself up half a foot, painfully, by my toes and fingertips, I kept sliding back down several inches.

“Come on!” urged Janice, right behind me. “Let’s get moving!”

“Then why didn’t you go first?” I snapped back. “You’re the fancy-ass rock climber.”

“Here—” She placed a hand underneath my high-heeled sandal. “Push away on this.”

Slowly and agonizingly, we made our way up the shaft, and although it widened considerably at the very top, allowing Janice to crawl up beside me, it was still a revolting place to be.

“Eek!” she said, looking around at the junk that people had tossed in there through the grate. “This is disgusting. Is that … a cheeseburger?”

“Does it have cheese in it?”

“Hey, look!” She picked something up. “It’s a cell phone! Hang on—no, sorry. Out of battery.”

“If you are finished rifling through the garbage, can we move on?”

We elbowed our way through a mess too nasty for words before finally coming up to the vertical, artsy sewer cover separating us from the earth’s surface. “Where are we?” Janice pressed her nose against the bronze filigree, and we both looked out at the legs and feet walking by. “It’s some kind of piazza. But huge.”

“Holy cow!” I exclaimed, realizing that I had seen the place before, many times, but from very different angles. “I know exactly where we are. It’s the Campo.” I knocked on the sewer cover. “Ow! It’s pretty solid.”

“Hello?
Hello?
” Janice stretched to see better. “Can anyone hear me? Is anyone there?”

A few seconds later, an incredulous teenager with a snow cone and green lips came into view, stooping down to see us. “Ciao?” she said, smiling uncertainly, as if suspecting she was the victim of a prank. “I am Antonella.”

“Hi, Antonella,” I said, trying to make eye contact with her. “Do you speak English? We’re kind of trapped down here. Do you think you could … find someone who can help us out?”

Twenty deeply embarrassing minutes later, Antonella returned with a pair of naked feet in sandals.

“Maestro Lippi?” I was so astounded to see my friend, the painter, that my voice almost escaped me. “Hello? Do you remember me? I slept on your couch.”

“Of course I remember you!” he beamed. “How are you doing?”

“Uh—” I said, “do you think it would be possible to … remove this thing?” I wiggled my fingers through the sewer cover. “We’re kind of stuck down here. And—this is my sister, by the way.”

Maestro Lippi knelt down to see us better. “Did you two go somewhere you shouldn’t go?”

I smiled as timidly as I could. “I’m afraid we did.”

The Maestro frowned. “Did you find her grave? Did you steal her eyes? Did I not tell you to leave them where they are?”

“We didn’t do anything!” I glanced at Janice to make sure she, too, looked sufficiently innocent. “We got trapped, that’s all. Do you think we can somehow”—once again, I knocked on the sewer cover, and once again, it felt pretty rigid—“unscrew this thing?”

“Of course!” he said, without hesitation. “It is very easy.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure!” He got back on his feet. “I made it!”

DINNER THAT NIGHT
was pasta primavera from a can, spruced up with a twig of rosemary from Maestro Lippi’s windowsill and accompanied by a box of Band-Aids for our bruises. There was barely room for the three of us at the table in his workshop, seeing that we were sharing the
space with artwork and potted plants in different stages of demise, but even so, he and Janice were having a grand old time.

“You are very quiet,” observed the artist at one point, recovering from laughter and pouring more wine.

“Juliet had a little run-in with Romeo,” explained Janice, on my behalf. “He swore by the moon. Big mistake.”

“Ah!” said Maestro Lippi. “He came here last night. He was not happy. Now I understand why.”

“He came here last night?” I echoed.

“Yes,” nodded the Maestro. “He said you don’t look like the painting. You are much more beautiful. And much more—what was it he said?—oh, yes …
lethal.”
The Maestro grinned and raised his glass to me in playful communion.

“Did he happen to mention,” I said, failing to take the edge off my voice, “why he has been playing schizo games with me instead of telling me that he was Romeo all along? I thought he was someone else.”

Maestro Lippi looked surprised. “But didn’t you recognize him?”

“No!” I clutched my head in frustration. “I didn’t recognize him. And he sure as hell didn’t recognize me either!”

“What exactly can you tell us about this guy?” Janice asked the Maestro. “How many people are aware he is Romeo?”

“All I know,” said Maestro Lippi, shrugging, “is that he does not want to be called Romeo. Only his family calls him that. It is a big secret. I don’t know why. He wants to be called Alessandro Santini—”

I gasped. “You knew his name all along! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought you knew!” the Maestro shot back. “You are Juliet! Maybe you need glasses!”

“Excuse me,” said Janice, rubbing a scratch on her arm, “but how did
you
know he was Romeo?”

Maestro Lippi looked stunned. “I … I—”

She reached out to help herself to another Band-Aid. “Please don’t say you recognized him from a previous life.”

“No,” said the Maestro, frowning, “I recognized him from the fresco. In Palazzo Pubblico. And then I saw the Marescotti eagle on his arm”—he took me by the wrist and pointed at the underside of my forearm—“right here. Did you never notice that?”

For a few seconds I was back in the basement of Palazzo Salimbeni, trying to ignore Alessandro’s tattoos while we discussed the fact that I was being followed. Even then I had been aware that his were not—unlike Janice’s muffin-top tramp stamps—mere souvenirs from boozy spring breaks in Amsterdam, but it had not occurred to me that they held important clues to his identity. In fact, I had been too busy looking for diplomas and ancestors on his office wall to realize that here was a man who did not display his virtues in a silver frame, but carried them around on his body in whatever form they took.

“It’s not glasses she needs,” observed Janice, enjoying my cross-eyed introspection, “it’s a new brain.”

“Not to change the subject,” I said, picking up my handbag, “but would you mind translating something for us?” I handed Maestro Lippi the Italian text from our mother’s box, which I had been carrying around for days, hoping to stumble upon a willing translator. I had originally toyed with the idea of asking Alessandro, but something had held me back. “We think it might be important.”

The Maestro took the text and perused the headline and first few paragraphs. “This,” he said, a little surprised, “is a story. It is called
La Maledizione sul Muro … The Curse on the Wall
. It is quite long. Are you sure you want to hear it?”

   [   VI.II   ]

…

T
HE
C
URSE ON THE
W
ALL

Siena
,
A.D
. 1370

T
HERE IS A STORY THAT NOT MANY
people have heard, because it was hushed up by the famous families involved. It starts with Santa Caterina, who had been known for her special powers since she was a little girl. People would come to her from all over Siena with their pains and aches, and would be healed by her touch. Now, as a grown woman, she spent most of her time taking care of the sick at the hospital by the Siena Cathedral, the Santa Maria della Scala, where she had her own room with a bed.

One day Santa Caterina was called to Palazzo Salimbeni, and when she arrived, she saw that everyone in the house was sick with worry. Four nights ago, they told her, there was a great wedding held here, and the bride was a woman of the Tolomeis, the lovely Mina. It had been a magnificent feast, for the groom was a son of Salimbeni, and the two families were there together, eating and singing, celebrating a long peace.

But when the groom went to his wedding chamber in the midnight hour, his bride was not there. He asked the servants, but no one had seen her, and he was filled with fear. What had happened to his Mina? Did she run away? Or was she abducted by enemies? But who would dare do such a thing to the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis? It was impossible. So, the groom ran everywhere, looking for his bride, upstairs, downstairs,
asking the servants, asking the guards, but everyone told him that Mina could not have left the house unseen. And his heart as well said no! He was a kind young man, a handsome man. She would never run away from him. But now, this young Salimbeni must tell his father, and her father, and when they heard what was wrong, the whole house began searching for Mina.

For hours they searched—in the bedrooms, the kitchen, even in the servants’ quarters—until the lark started singing, and they finally gave up. But now that a new day had begun, the oldest grandmother of the wedding party, Monna Cecilia, came downstairs to find them sitting there, all in tears and talking of war against these, war against those. And old Monna Cecilia listened to them, and then she said to them, “Sad gentlemen, come with me, and I will find your Mina. For there is one place in the house you have not looked, and I feel in my heart that she is there.”

Monna Cecilia took them down, down, deep underneath the earth and into the ancient dungeons of Palazzo Salimbeni. And she showed them that the doors had been opened with the household keys that were given to the bride in the wedding ceremony, and she told them what they already knew: that these were caverns where no one had come for many years, for fear of the darkness. The old men in the wedding party were terrified, for they could not believe that the new bride had been given keys to all these secret doors, and they got more and more angry as they went, and more and more afraid. For they knew that there was much darkness down there, and that many things had happened in the past, before the Plague, that were best forgotten. So there they were, all the great men, walking after old Monna Cecilia with their torches, not believing their eyes.

At last they came to a room that was used in the old days for punishment, and now Monna Cecilia stopped, and all the men stopped too, and they heard the sound of someone crying. Without hesitation, the young groom rushed forward with his torch, and when the light reached the far corner of the cell, he saw his bride there, sitting on the floor in her fine blue nightgown. She was shivering with cold, and so afraid that she screamed when she saw the men, for she did not recognize anyone, even her own father.

Of course, they picked her up and brought her upstairs into the light, and they wrapped her in wool and gave her water to drink and nice things
to eat, but Mina kept shaking and pushed them all away. Her father tried to talk to her, but she turned her head away and would not look at him. At last the poor man took her by the shoulders and asked his daughter, “Do you not remember that you are my little Mina?” But Mina pushed him away with a sneer and said, in a voice that was not hers, a voice as dark as death, “No,” she said, “I am not your Mina. My name is Lorenzo.”

You can imagine the horror of both families when they realized that Mina had lost her mind. The women started praying to the Virgin Mary, and the men started accusing each other of being bad fathers, and brothers, and of finding poor Mina so late. The only one who was calm was old Monna Cecilia, who sat down with Mina and stroked her hair and tried to make her speak again.

But Mina rocked back and forth and would not look at anyone until Monna Cecilia finally said, “Lorenzo, Lorenzo, my dear, I am Monna Cecilia. I know what they did to you!”

Now at last, Monna Mina looked at the old woman and started crying again. And Monna Cecilia embraced her and let her cry, for hours, until they fell asleep together on the wedding bed. For three days Monna Mina slept, and she had dreams, terrible dreams, and she woke up the whole house with her screams, until at last the families decided to call for Santa Caterina.

After she had heard the whole story, Santa Caterina understood that Monna Mina had become possessed by a spirit. But she was not afraid. She sat by the young woman’s bed all night and prayed without a pause, and by morning, Monna Mina woke up and remembered who she was.

There was much joy in the house, and everybody praised Santa Caterina, even though she scolded them and said that the praise was due only to Christ. But even in this hour of great joy, Monna Mina was still troubled, and when they asked her what was troubling her, she told them that she had a message for them, from Lorenzo. And that she could not rest until she had delivered it. You can imagine how everyone must have been terrified to hear her speak of this Lorenzo again, this spirit who had possessed her, but they said to her, “Very well, we are ready to hear the message.” But Monna Mina could not remember the message, and she started crying again, and everyone was horrified. Maybe, they worried to each other in hushed voices, she would lose her mind once more.