Juliet. Anne Fortier

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      Later, when I was posing as a candelabrum in Juliet’s bedroom, I made Janice wake up next to Romeo and say right off the bat, ‘Hie hence, begone, away!’ which didn’t set a very good tone for the rest of their tender scene. Needless to say, Janice was so furious that afterwards she chased me all the way through the school, swearing that she was going to shave off my eyebrows. It had been fun at first, but when, in the end, she locked herself in the school bathroom and cried for an hour, even I stopped laughing.

      Long after midnight, when I sat in the living room talking with Aunt Rose, afraid of going to bed and submitting myself to sleep and Janice’s razor, Umberto came in with a glass of vin santo for us both. He did not say anything, just handed us the glasses, and Aunt Rose did not utter a word about me being too young to drink.

      ‘You like that play?’ she said instead. ‘You seem to know it by heart.’

      ‘I don’t really like it a whole lot,’ I confessed, shrugging and sipping my drink at the same time. ‘It’s just…there, stuck in my head.’

      Aunt Rose nodded slowly, savouring the vin santo. ‘Your mother was the same way. She knew it by heart. It was…an obsession.’

      I held my breath, not wanting to break her train of thought. I waited for another glimpse of my mother, but it never came. Aunt Rose just looked up, frowning, to clear her throat and take another sip of wine. And that was it. That was one of the only things she ever told me about my mother without being prompted, and I never passed it on to Janice. Our mutual obsession with Shakespeare’s play was a little secret I shared with my mother and no one else, just like I never told anyone about my growing fear that, because my mother had died at twenty-five, I would, too.

      

      As soon as Peppo dropped me off in front of Hotel Chiusarelli, I went straight to the nearest internet café and Googled Luciano Salimbeni. But it took me several verbal acrobatics to come up with a search combination that yielded anything remotely useful. Only after at least an hour and many, many frustrations with the Italian language, I was fairly confident of the following conclusions:

      One: Luciano Salimbeni was dead.

      Two: Luciano Salimbeni had been a bad guy, possibly even a mass murderer.

      Three: Luciano and Eva Maria Salimbeni were somehow related.

      Four: There had been something fishy about the car accident that had killed my mother, and Luciano Salimbeni had been wanted for questioning.

      I printed out all the pages so that I could reread them later, in the company of my dictionary. The search had yielded little more than Peppo Tolomei had just told me this afternoon, but at least now I knew my elderly cousin had not merely invented the story; there really had been a dangerous Luciano Salimbeni at large in Siena some twenty or so years ago.

      But the good news was that he was dead. In other words, he definitely could not be the tracksuit charmer who might or might not have stalked me the day before, after I left the bank in Palazzo Tolomei with my mother’s box.

      As an afterthought, I Googled Juliet’s Eyes. Not surprisingly, none of the search results had anything to do with legendary treasures. Almost all were semischolarly discussions about the significance of eyes in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and I dutifully read through a couple of passages from the play, trying to spot a secret message. One of them went:

       Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye Than twenty of their swords.

      Well, I thought to myself, if this evil Luciano Salimbeni had really killed my mother over a treasure called Juliet’s Eyes, then Romeo’s statement was true; whatever the nature of those mysterious eyes, they were potentially more dangerous than weapons, simple as that. In contrast, the second passage was a bit more complex than your average pickup line:

       Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, Having some business, do entreat her eyes To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head?

      I mulled over the lines all the way down Via del Paradiso. Romeo was clearly trying to compliment Juliet by saying that her eyes were like sparkling stars, but he had a funny way of phrasing it. It was, in my opinion, not particularly appealing to woo a girl by imagining what she would look like with her eyes gouged out.

      But really, this poetry was a welcome diversion from the other facts I had learned that day. Both my parents had died in a horrendous way, separately, and possibly even at the hands of a murderer. Even though I had left the cemetery hours ago, I was still struggling to take in this terrible discovery. On top of my shock and sorrow I also felt the little fleabites of fear, just as I had the day before, when I thought I was being followed after leaving the bank. But had Peppo been right in warning me? Could I possibly be in danger now, so many years later? If so, I could presumably pull myself back out of danger by going home to Virginia. But then, what if there really was a treasure? What if, somewhere in my mother’s box, there was a clue to finding Juliet’s Eyes, whatever they were?

      Lost in speculation, I strolled into a secluded cloister garden off Piazza San Domenico. By now day was turning to dusk, and I stood for a moment in the portico of a loggia, drinking in the last rays of sunshine while the evening shadows slowly lengthened. I did not feel like going back to the hotel just yet, where Maestro Ambrogio’s journal was waiting to sweep me through another sleepless night in the year 1340.

      As I stood there, absorbed in the twilight, my thoughts circling around my parents, I saw him for the first time—

      The Maestro.

      He was walking through the shadows of the opposite loggia, carrying an easel and several other items that kept slipping from his grip, forcing him to stop and redistribute the weight. At first I simply stared at him. It was impossible not to. He was unlike any other Italian I had ever met, with his long, grey hair, sagging cardigan, and open sandals; in fact, he looked most of all like a time traveller from Woodstock, shuffling around in a world taken over by runway models.

      He did not see me at first, and when I caught up with him and handed him a paintbrush he had dropped, he jumped with fear.

      ‘Scusi,’ I said, ‘but I think this is yours.’

      He looked at the brush without recognition, and when he finally took it, he held it awkwardly, as if its purpose completely escaped him. Then he looked at me, still perplexed, and said, ‘Do I know you?’

      Before I could answer, a smile spread over his face, and he exclaimed, ‘Of course I do! I remember you. You are—oh! Remind me…who are you?’

      ‘Giulietta. Tolomei? But I don’t think—’

      ‘Si-si-si! Of course! Where have you been?’

      ‘I…just arrived.’

      He grimaced at his own stupidity. ‘Of course you did! Never mind me. You just arrived. And here you are. Giulietta Tolomei. More beautiful than ever.’ He smiled and shook his head. ‘I never understood this thing, time.’

      ‘Well,’ I said, somewhat confused, ‘will you be okay?’

      ‘Me? Oh! Yes, thank you. But…you must come and see me. I want to show you something. Do you know my workshop? It is in Via Santa Caterina. The blue door. You don’t have to knock, just come in.’

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