O, Juliet (17 page)

The feeling was heady.

I heard Romeo lowering below me, rung by rung. I reached down with my toe and found the step. Brought one foot to meet the other and that way descended to the garden floor.

He took my hand then, guiding me around the newly cleared path—it had all been part of his plan!—past the olives to the wall that separated the garden from the street.

“Wait here,” he whispered, disappearing back into shadow.

A moment later he returned, the ladder under his arm. He placed it against the wall, careful to make no sound at all, then swiftly climbed to the top and called me to join him.

Suddenly I felt bold. I gripped a rung above my head and ascended. Moments later, there I was at the top.

“Remember what you did on the balcony?” he said in low tones. “It is the very same here. One leg first. Swivel. Then the other. I will be waiting to guide your feet.” Then he was gone over the wall.

I took a breath of the night air. It filled me with courage, and barely thinking, I made my move. Another ladder and the promised help were there, and in moments we were both on the ground.

I turned to Romeo. Triumph lit his face. He set the lamp down, dousing it, and stood and kissed me full and heartily.

Was I dreaming? Was this real?
Here I was outside my garden wall just past midnight garbed in male clothing pressed hard against my lover.

Romeo pulled from the embrace, donned a full cloak that had been lying near the ladder on the ground, then placed an arm about my shoulder.

“We are two friends carousing,” he said as he walked us into the street. “Don’t leave my side.”

“Never,” I said as we headed for the corner
.

Dante was right,
I thought.
Love is insane.

H
ow shocking it was to see that the streets were so alive amid the curfew in the dead of night. Massive lanterns on the corners where fine houses and palazzi stood threw wide collars of light around them diminishing into shadows, where could be seen small groups of figures loitering, others squatting in doorways. As we strode past, keeping our heads together, I could see that the lion’s share were gambling—dice. Frowned upon by the church and moral authorities, the game was beloved by all men, played with reckless abandon causing some to lose fortunes or, if violence ensued, even their lives. Few of these Florentines looked up from their candlelit pleasures at two young men passing.

Then it struck me. Romeo and I were meant to be seen as two male lovers.

“Are we disguised as
Florenzers
?” I whispered. This was the German word that described such men. So many were known to reside in Florence that the city’s name now connoted the condition.

“You may speak normally, ‘Giuliano,’ ” said Romeo with a sly grin. “No one is listening. And yes, we will be seen as a pair of sodomites out for a night’s stroll.”

A loud cry echoing from a darkened alley as we passed it stopped me cold.

“Romeo!” I said, clutching his arm. “Someone is being hurt. We must—”

“No one is being hurt, my love. Look closer.” He guided me a yard into the alley, and now I could make out the shape of a man pressing a woman against the stone wall. Her skirts were hitched high, her legs wrapped around his hips.

Carefully protected as I had been my whole life, I rarely had occasion to lay eyes on a prostitute, no less one vigorously engaged in her profession. But the posture of the woman and her patron was not so far removed from Romeo’s and mine at his villa wall, and I thanked the darkness for hiding my hot red cheeks.

Coming toward us now was a small but raucous
brigata
—young men all centered around one of their own, leaning in and teasing him with leering, drunken epithets.

“How many times were you able?” one rejoined.

“Four,” the lucky lover replied, sounding very proud.

“Right,” another man cried, poking the braggart in the chest, “and I’ve got four balls!”

“And your
cazzo
’s four inches long, fully erect,” a fourth man insisted.

As we passed them arm in arm, their eyes fell on us briefly. I thought I saw in the gaze of several of them a certain hunger for two pretty young men, but we moved on without incident.

Now as we headed toward the cathedral piazza, I heard Romeo whisper urgently, “Separate, Giuliano,” and he pushed me aside. We continued walking, but ambling several feet apart from each other. A moment later I saw the reason for it.

A roving patrol of
polizia
, large and tough, carrying lanterns and armed with nightsticks, was hustling all the loiterers, gamblers, and whores from every alleyway and loggia. They would not look kindly on a pair of Florenzers, I thought.

The patrol had stopped to harass a clutch of dice players in the doorway of the cathedral. Angry shouts and the crack of nightsticks on flesh and bone were alarming. Romeo deftly steered me out of sight onto a side street. He shielded my body with his own.

“Why have you done this?” I whispered. “I am mystified that you’ve chosen to put me in danger.”

“It was necessary. You’ll see.” He peered around the corner, then pulled back quickly, flattening us both against the wall.

A moment later the patrol, with bludgeons raised threateningly, was herding the grumbling gamblers before them, past us on the street.

When all was clear, we emerged, crossing the piazza to the cathedral doors, which were now deserted.

Once again I marveled at the sight, both familiar and foreign. Countless times I had come to worship or make confession under the dome of the most celebrated church in the world, yet I had seen it only by the light of the sun, and never in moonlight. And certainly I had never crossed its threshold in the sacrilegious garb of a man. Joan of Arc had been burned at the stake for such a blasphemy, I thought with a shudder.

But Romeo was holding one of the great doors ajar. The church was always open with no fear of vandalism or violation. Everyone knew that the consequences of such a sin would be paid for more dearly in the next life than in this one.

“Come quickly,” said Romeo.

I followed him in. Devoid of worshippers, students of Dante, penitents, and priests, the Duomo by candlelight was terrifying in its size and echoing emptiness. The massive dome above us was a great, looming starless sky.

He walked boldly up the center of the cross-shaped nave, I a few steps behind him. But at the main altar there was no need for instruction. We both fell to our knees and crossed ourselves. I heard Romeo quickly and quietly murmuring a novena.

“Good Saint Anne, mother of her who is our life, our sweetness, and our hope, pray to her for us and obtain our request.”

I wondered for what request he might be praying, but a moment later he was on his feet, making for the altar containing votive candles. Putting a coin in the box, he took two tapers and lit them, then returned to my side and, grabbing my other hand, pushed me through a door I had never noticed before.

“Where are we going?” I said, realizing too late that my voice was magnified many times over in what appeared to be a narrow, low-ceilinged passage.

“Just follow, Giuliano,” he said as softly as he was able, yet his voice was easily heard. “Step up now. We will be climbing.”

“Climbing?”

“Yes. Stairs. Many stairs.”

My heart—that necessary organ that pounded as frantically in fear or exertion as in love—now began a wild thumping.

Indeed, we were climbing.

Except for the light of two candles, we ascended in the airless pitch-black, both spiral stairs of stone and others steep and straight. The shadowy lines of Romeo’s cloak swaying rhythmically before me held me spellbound, making the careful placing of my feet on the steps even more difficult. But for Romeo’s presence, the upward passage was altogether terrifying.

We emerged suddenly onto a narrow railed ledge that had us looking down from a great height onto the Duomo floor, a vast expanse of marble, now bathed in a patchwork of candlelight. Above us Brunelleschi’s egg-shaped cupola hovered in fantastic emptiness, its lower edge spaced evenly with circular windows.

I turned to Romeo. “You’ve been here before?”

“Several times.” He peered up into the darkness. “They say one day the whole of the dome will be painted by the great masters. Even now, plain and whitewashed, it is breathtaking.”

I was yet bewildered by Romeo’s actions this night, and his motives. He confused me, this wild and gentle man. He appeared unabashed, wholly confident. I could not fathom the questions to be asked.
Have we arrived at our destination? Why have we come here?

“Are you ready?” he finally said.

“Ready? Is there more?”

“Oh yes. We climb more stairs.” His eyes glittered by the light of the candles we held between us.

“You look like a naughty boy who’s made off with Cook’s warm pie,” I said.

He grabbed my hand, abruptly turned, and pulled me around the whole ledge’s perimeter and in through another door. Suddenly we were climbing again, within what must have been an inner wall of the dome itself! These stairs were long stretches straight and steep, with occasional turns and several moonlit windows as we rose to the ever-narrowing egg’s end.

“Four hundred and sixty-three steps,” Romeo whispered breathlessly and pushed open a metal-studded door.

The cool air blasted fresh against my face as we emerged into the world of night as I had never seen it. The sky was vast—a black crystal bowl enclosing a full circle of horizons, and the stars pricks of white fire moving and alive, seeming only inches beyond my fingertips.

From such a height my familiar city was a foreign landscape. The bell tower next door looked immense, and in moonlight the expanse of red roofs was an undulating sea, the Arno in the south a glimmering silver ribbon.

Romeo led me to the cupola’s rail. He took my hands and placed them on it, far apart, as if to steady me. Then he came and stood behind me, draping his arms around my shoulders to enfold me. He leaned down to speak and I felt his warm breath on my neck.

Now he pointed to the western sky. “There is the constellation under which I was born—Taurus, the bull. See the V shape there? It is the bull’s face. I was born in May and the great astronomer Paolo Toscanelli—who my father hired to cast my horoscope—said that I was ‘imbued with earth elements, exemplifying the fecundity of nature.’ As for my future, I would have ‘great successes in life, and many strong children.’ ”

“Strong children?” I said teasingly. “That conjures terrible visions of a broad-faced, wide-hipped wife to bear them.”

Romeo laughed at that. “Toscanelli also predicted—and my father always reminded me—that I would find ‘a lover of great fortitude.’ ” He gazed at me deeply but said nothing. Then suddenly a gust of wind knocked the cap from my head and we both lunged for it. It escaped us, and we watched it flutter down and down till it came to rest on a pale rib at the cupola’s widest curve. My hair had unloosed from its braid.

Romeo pressed himself against my back and hugged me tighter, his arms a protective cocoon as we stood against the buffeting breeze.

“Do you know your stars?” he asked. “The house you were born in?”

“Pisces, the fishes,” I said, “but my horoscope has not been drawn. Don Cosimo had Lucrezia’s done, but in fact, it is generally thought unimportant for girls.”

Romeo turned me to him and his eyes went soft gazing at me. “Have you any idea how beautiful you look in the moonlight?” He traced his fingers along the ridges of my cheeks and chin as he recited:

“That’s good,” I said. “Go on.”

But he shook his head slowly no, his eyes steady on mine, then kissed me, hard and soft at once.There was no more strength in my doughlike legs, but my arms were steely, pulling him to me,
into
me if I’d been able. I was past embarrassment of my sudden, greedy hunger.

His hands were on my breasts, searching beneath the doublet for flesh. Mine found the hardness between his legs. I groaned at the shock of it. I loved the taste of Romeo’s mouth, smoky sweet and warm, and by his soundings knew he found my devouring an equal pleasure.

We sank to our knees and in a single motion he unfurled his cloak and laid us down upon it. The stone beneath us was unforgiving, so he pulled me atop him. In breeches it was easy to straddle him, and while perhaps a shameless posture, it was altogether natural and altogether pleasurable. He laced his fingers through my hair and with it drew me down to kiss him again.

Oh, what a heavenly mattress was this man!

The thought came that the cathedral dome would be lit by our fire like a great torch, for all of Florence to see.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” Romeo demanded suddenly.

“What I’m thinking?” I whispered, pulling back, catching my breath.

“Yes. Right now. You have a certain look when your mind is working.”

I told him my vision of a brightly illuminated Duomo apex.

He moved his hips under me with a wicked smile. It made me gasp.

“An explosion of light?” he said, and moved again.

I laid my hands on his chest and found the two tiny buds of his nipples beneath his thin shirt. I brushed them gently with my fingertips.

“What are
you
thinking?” I said.

“What a strangely beautiful bride you will be.”

I strove to remain calm. It was the first that he’d spoken of marriage. “Why strange?” I asked.

“A bride in men’s clothing.”

“What do you mean, love?”

“We must marry tonight. Here. Now.”

I shook my head no, but found myself speechless at the thought.