Читать книгу Juliet - Anne Fortier - Страница 13

What’s in a name? That which we call a roseBy any other word would smell as sweet

The view from the old Medici fortress, the Fortezza, was spectacular. Not only could I see the terracotta roofs of Siena broiling in the afternoon sun, but at least twenty miles of rolling hills were heaving around me like an ocean in shades of green and distant blues. Again and again I looked up from my reading, taking in the sweeping landscape in the hope that it would force all stale air from my lungs and fill my soul with summer. And yet every time I looked down and resumed Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, I plunged right back into the dark events of 1340.

I had spent the morning at Malèna’s espresso bar in Piazza Postierla, leafing through the official early versions of Romeo and Juliet written by Masuccio Salernitano and Luigi da Porto in 1476 and 1530 respectively. It was interesting to see how the plot had developed, and how da Porto had put a literary spin to a story, which, Salernitano claimed, was based on real events.

In Salernitano’s version, Romeo and Juliet—or rather, Mariotto and Giannozza—lived in Siena, but their parents were not at war. They did get married in secret, after bribing a friar, but the drama only really began when Mariotto killed a prominent citizen and had to go into exile. Meanwhile, Giannozza’s parents, unaware that their daughter was already married, demanded that she marry someone else. In desperation, Giannozza had the friar cook up a powerful sleeping potion, and the effect was so great that her imbecilic parents believed she was dead and went ahead and buried her right away. Fortunately, the good old friar was able to deliver her from the sepulchre, whereupon Giannozza travelled secretly by boat to Alexandria, where Mariotto was living the good life. However, the messenger who was supposed to inform Mariotto of the sleeping-potion scheme had been captured by pirates, and upon receiving the news of Giannozza’s death, Mariotto came blasting back into Siena to die by her side. Here, he was captured by soldiers, and beheaded. Chop. And Giannozza had spent the rest of her life weeping in a convent.

As far as I could see, the key elements in this original version were: the secret marriage, Romeo’s banishment, the harebrained scheme of the sleeping potion, the messenger gone astray, and Romeo’s deliberate suicide-mission based on his erroneous belief in Juliet’s death.

The big difference, of course, was that the whole thing supposedly happened in Siena, and if Malèna had been around, I would have asked her if this was common knowledge. I highly suspected it was not.

Interestingly enough, when da Porto took over the story half a century later, he too, was eager to anchor the story in reality, going so far as to call Romeo and Giulietta by their real first names. He lost his nerve over the location, however, and moved the whole thing to Verona, changing all family names—very possibly to avoid retribution from the powerful clans involved in the scandal.

But never mind the logistics; in my interpretation—aided by several cups of cappuccino—da Porto wrote a far more entertaining story. He was the one who introduced the masked ball and the balcony scene, and his was the genius that first devised the double suicide. The only thing that did not immediately make sense to me was that he had Juliet die by holding her breath. But perhaps da Porto had felt that his audience would not appreciate a bloody scene…scruples that Shakespeare, fortunately, did not have.

After da Porto, someone called Bandello had felt compelled to write a third version and add a lot of melodramatic dialogue without—as far as I could see—altering the essentials of the plot. But from then on the Italians were done with the story, and it travelled first to France, then England, to eventually end up on Shakespeare’s desk, ready for immortalization.

The biggest difference, as far as I could see, between all these poetic versions and Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, was that in reality there had been three families involved, not just two. The Tolomeis and the Salimbenis had been the feuding households—the Capulets and the Montagues, so to speak—while Romeo, in fact, had been a Marescotti and thus an outsider. In that respect, Salernitano’s very early rendition of the story was the one that came closest to the truth; it was set in Siena, and there had been no mention of a family feud.

Later, walking back from the Fortezza with Maestro Ambrogio’s journal clutched to my chest, I looked at all the happy people around me and once again felt the presence of an invisible wall between me and them. There they were, walking, jogging, and eating ice cream, not pausing to question the past, nor burdened, as I was, with a feeling that they did not fully belong in this world.

That same morning, I had stood in front of the bathroom mirror trying on the necklace with the silver crucifix that had been in my mother’s box, and decided I would start wearing it. After all, it was something she had owned, and by leaving it in the box she had clearly intended it for me. Perhaps, I thought, it would somehow protect me against the curse that had marked her for an early death.

Was I insane? Maybe. But then, there are many different kinds of insanity. Aunt Rose had always taken for granted that the whole world was in a state of constantly fluctuating madness, and that a neurosis was not an illness, but a fact of life, like pimples. Some have more, some have less, but only truly abnormal people have none at all. This commonsense philosophy had consoled me many times before, as it did now.

When I returned to the hotel, Direttore Rossini came towards me like the messenger from Marathon, dying to tell me the news. ‘Miss Tolomei! Where have you been? You must go! Right away! Contessa Salimbeni is waiting for you in Palazzo Pubblico! Go, go’—he shooed me the way you would a dog hanging around for scraps—‘you must not leave her waiting!’

‘Wait!’ I pointed at two objects that sat conspicuously in the middle of the floor. ‘Those are my suitcases!’

‘Yes-yes-yes, they were delivered a moment ago.’

‘Well, I’d like to go to my room and—’

‘No!’ Direttore Rossini flung open the front door. ‘You must go right away!’

‘I don’t even know where I’m going!’

‘Santa Caterina!’ Though I knew he was secretly delighted with yet another opportunity to educate me about Siena, Direttore Rossini rolled his eyes and let go of the door. ‘Come, I will draw directions!’

Entering the Campo was like stepping into a gigantic seashell. All around the edge were restaurants and cafés, and right where the pearl would have been, at the bottom of the sloping piazza, sat Palazzo Pubblico, the building that had served as Siena’s city hall since the Middle Ages.

I paused for a moment, taking in the hum of many voices under the dome of a blue sky, the pigeons flapping around, and the white marble fountain with the turquoise water—until a wave of tourists came up behind me and swept me along with them, rushing forward in excited wonder at the magnificence of the giant square.

While drawing his directions, Direttore Rossini had assured me that the Campo was considered the most beautiful piazza in all of Italy, and not only by the Sienese themselves. In fact, he could hardly recount the numerous occasions on which hotel guests from all corners of the world, even from Florence, had come to him and extolled its graces. He, of course, had protested and pointed out the many splendours of other places—surely, they were out there somewhere—but people had been unwilling to listen. They had stubbornly maintained that Siena was the loveliest, most unspoiled city on the globe, and in the face of such conviction, what could Direttore Rossini do but allow that, indeed, it might be so?

I stuffed the directions into my handbag and began walking down towards Palazzo Pubblico. The building was hard to miss with the tall bell tower, Torre del Mangia, the construction of which Direttore Rossini had described in such detail that it had taken me several minutes to realize that it had not, in fact, been erected before his very eyes, but at some time in the late Middle Ages. A lily, he had called it, a proud monument to female purity with its white stone flower held aloft by a tall red stem. And curiously, it had been built with no foundation. The Mangia Tower, he claimed, had stood for over six centuries, held up by the grace of God and faith alone.

I blocked the sun with my hand and looked at the tower as it stretched against the infinite blue. In no other place had I ever seen female purity celebrated by a 335-foot phallic object. But maybe that was me.

There was a quite literal sense of gravity about Palazzo Pubblico and its tower, as if the Campo itself was caving in under its weight. Direttore Rossini had told me that if I was in doubt, I was to imagine that I had a ball and put it on the ground. No matter where I stood on the Campo, the ball would roll right down to Palazzo Pubblico. There was something about the image that appealed to me. Maybe it was the thought of a ball bouncing over the ancient brick pavement. Or maybe it was simply the way he had pronounced the words, with whispering drama, like a magician talking to four-year-olds.

Palazzo Pubblico had, like all seats of government, grown with age. From its origins as little more than a meeting room for nine administrators, it was now a formidable structure, and I entered the inner courtyard with a feeling of being watched. Not so much by people, I suppose, as by the lingering shadows of generations past, generations devoted to the life of this city, this small plot of land as cities go, this universe unto itself.

Eva Maria Salimbeni was waiting for me in the Hall of Peace. She sat on a bench in the middle of the room, looking up into the air, as if she was having a silent conversation with God. But as soon as I walked through the door, she came to, and a smile of delight spread over her face.

‘So, you came after all!’ she exclaimed, rising from the bench to kiss me on both cheeks. ‘I was beginning to worry.’

‘Sorry to keep you waiting. I didn’t even realize…’

Her smile dismissed everything I could possibly say. ‘You are here now. That is all that matters. Look’—she made a sweeping gesture at the giant frescoes covering the walls of the room—‘have you ever seen anything so magnificent? Our great Maestro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, made them in the late 1330s. He probably finished this one, over the doors, in 1340. It is called Good Government.’

I turned to look at the fresco in question. It covered the entire length of the wall, and to make it would have required a complex machinery of ladders and scaffolding, perhaps even platforms suspended from the ceiling. The left half depicted a peaceful city scene with ordinary citizens going about their business; the right half was a wide view of the countryside beyond the city wall. Then something occurred to me, and I said, baffled, ‘You mean…Maestro Ambrogio?’

‘Oh, yes,’ nodded Eva Maria, not the least bit surprised that I was familiar with the name. ‘One of the greatest masters. He painted these scenes to celebrate the end of a long feud between our two families, the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis. Finally, in 1339, there was peace.’

‘Really?’ I thought of Giulietta and Friar Lorenzo escaping from the Salimbeni bandits on the high road outside Siena. ‘I get the impression that in 1340 our ancestors were still very much at war. Certainly out in the countryside.’

Eva Maria smiled cryptically; either she was delighted that I had bothered to read up on family lore, or she was miffed that I dared to contradict her. If the latter, she was graceful enough to acknowledge my point, and said, ‘You are right. The peace had unintended consequences. It happens whenever the bureaucrats try to help us.’ She threw up her arms. ‘If people want to fight, you can’t stop them. If you prevent them inside the city, they will fight in the country, and out there, they will get away with it. At least inside Siena, the riots were always stopped before things got completely out of hand. Why?’

She looked at me to see if I could guess, but of course, I couldn’t.

‘Because,’ she went on, wagging a didactic finger in front of my nose, ‘in Siena we have always had a militia. And in order to keep the Salimbenis and the Tolomeis in check, the citizens of Siena had to be able to mobilize and have all their companies out in the city streets within minutes.’ She nodded firmly, agreeing with herself. ‘I believe this is why the contrada tradition is so strong here even today; the devotion of the old neighbourhood militia was essentially what made the Sienese republic possible. If you want to keep the bad elements in check, make sure the good men are armed.’

I smiled at her conclusion, doing my best to look as if I had no vested interest. Now was not the time to tell Eva Maria that I did not believe in weapons, and that, in my experience, the so-called good men were no better than the bad ones.

‘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?’

‘Then’ – he paused for effect, and it struck me that the green in his eyes was not like foliage at all, but cold and crystallized, like the slice of malachite I had presented as a special treasure in fourth grade, before the teacher had explained that it was a mineral mined to extract copper, with evident harm to the environment – ‘they must have had a very good reason.’

‘Enough!’ Eva Maria raised her glass. ‘No more banishment. No more fighting. Now we are all friends.’

For about ten minutes we managed to have a civil conversation. After that, Eva Maria excused herself to go to the restroom, and Alessandro and I were left to each other’s devices. Glancing at him, I caught him running his eyes over me, and for the briefest of moments I was able to convince myself that it was all just a cat-and-mouse game to see whether I was sufficiently feisty to become his playmate for the week. Well, I thought to myself, whatever the cat was plotting, it was in for a nasty surprise.

I reached out for a slice of sausage. ‘Do you believe in redemption?’

‘I don’t care,’ said Alessandro, pushing the platter towards me, ‘what you did in Rome. Or anywhere else. But I do care about Siena. So tell me, why are you here?’

‘Is this an interrogation?’ I spoke with my mouth full. ‘Should I call my lawyer?’

He leaned towards me, his voice low. ‘I could have you in jail like this—’ He snapped his fingers right in front of my nose. ‘Is that really what you want?’

‘You know,’ I said, shovelling more food onto my plate and hoping very much he did not notice my hands shaking, ‘power games have never worked on me. They may have worked wonders for your ancestors, but if you recall, my ancestors were never really that impressed.’

‘Okay.’ He leaned back in his chair, changing tactics. ‘How about this: I’m going to leave you alone on one condition. That you stay away from Eva Maria.’

‘Why don’t you tell that to her?’

‘She is a very special woman, and I don’t want her to suffer.’

I put down my fork. ‘But I do? Is that what you think of me?’

‘You really want to know?’ Alessandro gave me the once-over as if I were an overpriced artifact put up for sale. ‘All right. I think you are beautiful, intelligent…a great actor…’ Seeing my confusion, he frowned and went on, more sternly, ‘I think someone paid you a lot of money to come here and pretend to be Giulietta Tolomei…’

‘What?’

‘…and I think that part of your job is to get close to Eva Maria. But guess what? I’m not going to let that happen.’

I barely knew where to start. Fortunately, his accusations were so surreal that I was too flabbergasted to feel truly wounded. ‘Why,’ I finally said, ‘do you not believe I am Giulietta Tolomei? Is it because I don’t have baby-blue eyes?’

‘You want to know why? I’ll tell you why.’ He leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Giulietta Tolomei is dead.’

‘Then how,’ I retorted, leaning forward too, ‘do you explain that I am sitting right here?’

He looked at me for the longest time, searching for something in my face that somehow wasn’t there. In the end he looked away, his lips tight, and I knew that for some reason I had not convinced him, and probably never would.

‘You know what?’ I pushed back my chair and got up. ‘I’m going to take your advice and remove myself from Eva Maria’s company. Tell her thank you for the concert and the food, and tell her that she can have her clothes back whenever she wants them. I am done with them.’

I didn’t wait for his response, but stalked off the deck and away from the restaurant without looking back. As soon as I had turned the first corner and was out of sight, I could feel tears of anger rising, and despite my shoes I started running. The last thing I wanted was for Alessandro to catch up with me and apologize for his rudeness, should he be so human as to try.

Going home that night, I stuck to the shadows and the streets less travelled. As I walked through the darkness, hoping rather than knowing I was going the right way, I was so preoccupied with my discussion with Alessandro – and, more specifically, with all the brilliant things I could have said, but didn’t – that it took me a while to realize I was being followed.

In the beginning it was little more than an eerie feeling of being watched. But soon I began to notice the faint sounds of someone sneaking along behind me. Whenever I forged ahead I could discern a shuffle of clothes and soft soles, but if I slowed down the shuffle disappeared, and I heard nothing but an ominous silence that was almost worse.

Turning abruptly down a random street, I was able to pick up movement and the shape of a man out of the corner of my eye. Unless I was very much mistaken, it was the same thug who had followed me a few days earlier, when I had left the bank in Palazzo Tolomei carrying my mother’s box. My brain had obviously filed our previous encounter under danger, and now that it recognized his shape and gait, it set off a deafening alarm that forced all rational thoughts from my head and made me pull off my shoes and, for the second time that night, start running.