Juliet (35 page)

…

S
EEN FROM THE TOP OF THE
Mangia Tower, the half-moon-shaped Campo looked like a hand of cards with the picture side down. How suitable, I thought, for a city that held so many secrets. Who would have thought that men like the evil Messer Salimbeni could thrive in such a beautiful place—or rather, that he had been allowed to.

There was nothing in Maestro Ambrogio’s journal to suggest that this medieval Salimbeni had had redeeming qualities—such as the generosity of Eva Maria or the charms of Alessandro—and even if he did, it didn’t change the fact that he had brutally murdered everyone Giulietta had ever loved, with the exception of Friar Lorenzo and her sister, Giannozza.

I had spent most of the night in anguish over the brutal events described in the journal, and the dwindling number of pages left told me that a bitter end loomed. There was, I feared, not going to be a happily-ever-after for Romeo and Juliet; it was not merely literary acrobatics but solid facts that had turned their lives into a tragedy. As far as I could tell, Romeo was already dead, stabbed in the stomach with his own dagger—or rather,
my
dagger—and Giulietta was now in the clutches of a loathed enemy. What remained to be seen was whether she, too, would die before the pages ran out.

Perhaps this was why I was not in a merrier mood as I stood at the top of the Mangia Tower that morning, waiting for my motorcycle Romeo to appear. Or perhaps I was apprehensive because I damn well knew I shouldn’t have come. What kind of woman agrees to a blind date at the
top of a tower? And what kind of man spends his nights with a helmet on his head, visor closed, communicating with people via tennis balls?

But here I was.

For if this mysterious man was truly the descendant of medieval Romeo, I simply had to see what he looked like. It was more than six hundred years since our ancestors had been torn apart under very violent circumstances, and between then and now, their disastrous romance had become one of the greatest love stories the world had ever known.

How could I not be excited? Surely, I ought to be all steamed up at the idea that one of my historical figures—undeniably the most important of them all, at least to me—had finally come alive. Ever since Maestro Lippi had first made me aware that there was a contemporary, art-loving, wine-drinking Romeo Marescotti at large in Siena by night, I had secretly dreamt of a meeting. Yet now that I finally had it before me—fleshed out in red ink and signed with a swirl—it occurred to me that what I really felt was nausea … the kind of nausea you feel when you are betraying someone whose good opinion you cannot afford to lose.

That someone, I realized, sitting on the embrasure overlooking a city at once achingly beautiful and irresistibly arrogant, was Alessandro. Yes, he was a Salimbeni, and no, he did not like my Romeo one bit, but his smile—when he allowed it to surface—was so genuine and so contagious that I had already become hooked.

Then again, it was ridiculous. We had known each other for a week, no more, and for most of that time we had been at each other’s throats, eagerly spurred on by my own prejudiced family. Even Romeo and Giulietta—the real ones—could not boast that kind of initial enmity. It was ironic that the story of our ancestors should come full circle like this, leaving us looking like Shakespearean wannabes, while at the same time seriously reshuffling our little love triangle.

No sooner had I deigned to acknowledge my infatuation with Alessandro, however, than I started feeling sorry for the Romeo I was about to meet. According to my cousin Peppo, he had fled to foreign lands to escape the viciousness that had driven him and his mother out of town, and whatever his ultimate purpose in returning to Siena, he was very possibly risking it all by offering to meet me in the Mangia Tower today. For that alone, I owed him thanks.

And even if he was not Alessandro’s equal, the least I could do was to
give him a chance to wow me, if that was what he wanted to do, and not stubbornly close my heart to him the way Juliet had closed her heart to Paris after meeting Romeo. Or … perhaps I was jumping to conclusions. Perhaps all he wanted was to talk with me. If that were the case, it would—quite frankly—be a relief.

When I finally heard steps on the stairs, I got up from my perch on the stony embrasure and brushed off my dress with stiff hands, steeling myself for the quasi-legendary encounter about to happen. It took a while, though, before my hero made it to the very top of the spiral stairs, and as I stood there, poised to like him, I could not help but notice that—judging from his heavy breathing and the way he dragged his feet the last little bit—between the two of us, I was in far better shape.

Then, finally, my panting stalker appeared, leather suit draped over one arm, helmet dangling from the other, and all of a sudden, everything stopped making sense.

It was Janice.

IT WOULD BE HARD
to pinpoint the exact moment when things had started going south in my relationship with Janice. Our childhood had been full of conflicts, but so are most people’s childhoods, and the overwhelming majority of mankind seems to be able to reach maturity without having completely lost the love of their siblings.

Not so with us. Now, at twenty-five, I could no longer remember when I had last embraced my sister, or had a conversation with her that did not deteriorate into a juvenile spat. Whenever we met, it was as if we were eight-year-olds again, falling back on the most primitive forms of argument. “Because I say so!” and “I had it first!” tend to be expressions most people leave happily behind as vestiges from a barbarian age the way they do blankies and pacifiers; to Janice and me, they were the philosophical cornerstones of our entire relationship.

Aunt Rose had generally taken the approach that it would all straighten itself out in due course, as long as there was an even distribution of love and candy. Whenever we applied to her for arbitration, she would be tired of the case before she even heard it—it was, after all, only one of many piling up around her—and would always give us a standard reply to do with sharing, or being nice to each other. “Come now!” she
would say, reaching for the crystal bowl with chocolate pretzels sitting on a side table, within easy reach of her armchair. “Be good girls! Julie, be fair to Janice now, and let her borrow your”—whatever it was … doll, book, belt, bag, hat, boots—“so we can have some peace around here, for heaven’s sake!”

And so, inevitably, we would walk away from her with a whole new can of worms, Janice snickering at my losses and her own undeserved gains. The reason she wanted my things in the first place was that her own had broken or gotten “tired,” and it was easier for her to take over mine than to make money and go out and buy new ones. And so we would leave the armchair after yet another wealth redistribution that had taken away what was mine and replaced it with nothing but a dry chocolate pretzel from the bowl. For all her litanies about fairness, Aunt Rose was a perpetual generator of nasty unintended consequences; the whole hellish path of my childhood was paved with her good intentions.

By the time I reached high school, I didn’t even bother to go to her for help, but ran straight out into the kitchen to complain to Umberto, who was—in my memory—always in the process of sharpening the knives, opera blaring. Whenever I defaulted to the old, “But it isn’t fair!” he would counter with, “Who told you life is fair?” and, when I finally calmed down, he would ask me, “So, what do you want me to do about it?”

As I grew older and wiser, I learned that the correct answer to his question was, “Nothing. I have to do it myself.” And it was true. I did not run to him because I really wanted him to take Janice to task—although that would have been nice—but because he was not afraid of telling me, in his way, that I was better than her, and that I deserved more from life. But, that said, it was up to me to get it. The only problem was, he never told me how.

All my life, it seemed, I had been running around with my tail between my legs, trying to dig up opportunities that Janice could not somehow steal or spoil, but no matter where I buried my treasures, she was always able to sniff them out and chew them up beyond recognition. If I had saved my new satin ballet shoes for the end-of-season recital, I would open the box only to discover that she had tried them on and left the ribbons in a tangle, and once, when I had spent weeks making a collage of
figure skaters in art class, she had inserted a cutout of Big Bird from
Sesame Street
as soon as I brought it home.

It didn’t matter how far away I ran, or how much rot I rolled in to camouflage my scent, she would always come running, tongue hanging out, to bounce around me with playful mischief and leave a steaming number two right in the middle of my path.

As I stood there in the Mangia Tower, it all hit me at once—my countless reasons for hating Janice. It was as if someone had started a slide show of bad memories in my head, and I felt a surge of fury that I had never felt in the company of anyone else.

“Surprise!” she now said, dropping the leather suit and helmet and opening her arms for applause.

“What the hell,” I finally gasped, my voice shrill with anger, “do you think you are doing here? Was that you, chasing me around on that ridiculous bike? And the letter—” I pulled the handwritten note out of my purse, creased it into a ball and flung it at her. “How stupid do you think I am?”

Janice grinned, enjoying my fury. “Stupid enough to climb up the friggin’ tower! … Oh!” She made a grimace of faux sympathy that she had patented at the age of five. “Is that it? You weally fought I was Womeo?”

“Okay,” I said, trying to cut through her laughter, “so, you had your joke. I hope it was worth the flight. Now excuse me, I’d love to stay, but I’d rather go stick my head in a bidet.”

I tried to walk around her to get to the stairs, but she immediately backed up, blocking the door. “Oh, no you don’t!” she hissed, her expression shifting from fair to stormy. “Not until you give me my share!”

I started. “Excuse me?”

“No, not this time,” she said, her lower lip trembling as she tried on the role of the wounded party for a change. “I’m broke. Bankrupt.”

“So, call the millionaire help line!” I retorted, falling right back into our sister act. “I thought you recently inherited a fortune from someone? Someone we both know?”

“Oh, ha!” Janice wrung out a smile. “Yeah, that was priceless. Good old Aunt Rose and all her gazillions.”

“I have no idea,” I said, shaking my head, “what you are whining about. Last time I saw you, you had just won the lottery. If it’s more
money you want, I’m the last person you should be talking to.” I made another push for the door, and this time, I was determined to get through. “Get-out-of-my-way,” I said. And amazingly, she did.

“Why look at you!” she jeered as I walked past her. If I hadn’t known better, I might have seen jealousy in her eyes. “The little runaway princess. How much of my inheritance have you blown on clothes? Huh?”

When I just kept walking without even pausing to reply, I could hear her scrambling to pick up her gear and follow me. All the way down the spiral staircase she was hot on my trail, yelling after me first in anger, then in frustration, and finally in something as unusual as desperation. “Wait!” she cried, using the crash helmet as a buffer against the brick wall. “We have to talk! Stop! Jules! Seriously!”

But I had no intention of stopping. If Janice really had something important to tell me, why had she not done so right away? Why the shenanigans with the motorcycle and the red ink? And why had she wasted our five minutes in the tower with her usual antics? If, as she had hinted in her little rant, she had already managed to squander Aunt Rose’s fortune, then I could certainly understand her frustration. But the way I saw it, that was, for dead sure, her own problem.

As soon as I reached the bottom of the tower I walked away from Palazzo Pubblico and crossed the Campo with firm strides, leaving Janice to her own mess. The Ducati Monster was parked right in front of the building, like a limo pulled up for the Oscars, and as far as I could see, at least three police officers were waiting impatiently—muscular arms akimbo, sunglasses on—for the return of its owner.

MALÈNA’S ESPRESSO BAR
was the only place I could think of going where Janice wouldn’t immediately find me. If I went back to the hotel, I figured, she would show up within minutes to resume her figure eights beneath my balcony.

And so I practically ran all the way up to Piazza Postierla, turning every ten steps to make sure she wasn’t following, my throat still tight with anger. When I finally came shooting through the door of the bar, slamming it shut behind me, Malèna greeted me with a burst of laughter. “Dio
mio! What are you doing here? You look like you are already drinking too much coffee.”

Seeing that I didn’t even have air to reply, she spun around to pour a tall glass of water from the tap. While I was drinking, she leaned on the counter with a look of barefaced curiosity. “Someone … giving you some trouble?” she suggested, her expression hinting that if that were the case, she had a few cousins—apart from Luigi the hairdresser—who would be more than happy to help me out.

“Well—” I said. But where to start? Looking around I was relieved to see that we were almost alone in the bar, and that the other customers were absorbed in conversations of their own. It occurred to me that here was the opportunity I had been hoping for ever since Malèna’s mention of the Marescotti family the day before.

“Did I hear you correctly—” I began, taking the plunge before I could change my mind. “Did you say your name was
Marescotti?”

The question had Malèna break into an ebullient smile. “Certamente! I was born a Marescotti. Now I am married, but”—she pressed a hand to her heart—“I will always be a Marescotti in here. Did you see the palazzo?”

I nodded with polite vigor, thinking of the rather painful concert I had attended with Eva Maria and Alessandro two days earlier. “It’s beautiful. I was wondering—someone told me—” Grinding to a halt, I could feel embarrassment rising in my cheeks as I realized that, no matter how I phrased my follow-up question, I would be making an ass of myself.