Juliet. Anne Fortier
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himself to smile. ‘So…you are a friend of Captain Santini?’
I looked behind me. ‘You mean, the man who was just here? No, we’re not friends. Is that his name? Santini?’
Direttore Rossini clearly found me lacking in understanding. ‘His name is Captain Santini. He is the–what do you say–Head of Security at Monte dei Paschi. In Palazzo Salimbeni.’
I must have looked stricken, because Direttore Rossini hastened to comfort me. ‘Don’t worry, we don’t have criminals in Siena. She is a very peaceful city. Once there was a criminal here’–he chuckled to himself as he rang for the bellboy–‘but we took care of him!’
For hours I had looked forward to collapsing on a bed. But now, when I finally could, rather than lying down I found myself pacing up and down the floor of my hotel room, chewing on the possibility that Alessandro Santini would run a search on my name and truffle out my dark past. The very last thing I needed now was for someone in Siena to pull up the old Julie Jacobs file, discover my Roman debacle, and put an untimely end to my treasure hunt.
A bit later, when I called Umberto to tell him I had arrived safely, he must have heard it in my voice, because he instantly knew something had gone wrong.
‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ I said. ‘Just some Armani stiff who discovered I have two names.’
‘But he is an Italian,’ was Umberto’s sensible reply. ‘He doesn’t care if you break some law a little bit, as long as you wear beautiful shoes. Are you wearing beautiful shoes? Are you wearing the shoes I gave you?…Principessa?’
I looked down at my flip-flops. ‘Looks like I’ve had it.’
Crawling into bed that night, I slipped right into a recurring dream that I had not had for several months, but which had been a part of my life since childhood. The dream had me walking through a magnificent castle with mosaic floors and cathedral ceilings held up by massive marble pillars, pushing open one gilded door after another and wondering where everyone was. The only light came from narrow stained-glass windows high, high over my head, and the coloured beams did little to illuminate the dark corners around me.
As I walked through those vast rooms, I felt like a child lost in the woods. It frustrated me that I could sense the presence of others, but they never showed themselves to me. When I stood still, I could hear them whispering and fluttering about like ghosts, but if they were indeed ethereal beings, they were still trapped just like me, looking for a way out.
Only when I read the play in high school had I discovered that what these invisible demons were whispering were fragments from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet–not the way actors would recite the lines on stage, but mumbled with quiet intensity, like a spell. Or a curse.
Within this three hours will fair Juliet wake
It took the bells of the basilica across the piazza to finally stir me from sleep. Two minutes later Direttore Rossini knocked on my door as if he knew I could not possibly have slept through the racket. ‘Excuse me!’ Without waiting for an invitation, he lugged a large suitcase into my room and placed it on the empty baggage stand. ‘This came for you last night.’
‘Wait!’ I let go of the door and gathered the hotel bathrobe around me as tightly as I could. ‘That is not my suitcase.’
‘I know.’ He pulled the large handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead. ‘It is from Contessa Salimbeni. Here, she left a note for you.’
I took the note. ‘What exactly is a contessa?’
‘Normally,’ said Direttore Rossini with some dignity, ‘I do not carry luggage. But since it was Contessa Salimbeni…’
‘She is lending me her clothes?’ I stared at Eva Maria’s brief handwritten note in disbelief. ‘And shoes?’
‘Until your own luggage arrives. It is now in Frittoli.’
In her exquisite handwriting, Eva Maria anticipated that her clothes might not fit me perfectly. But, she concluded, it was better than running around naked.
As I examined the specimens in the suitcase one by one, I was happy Janice could not see me. Our childhood home had not been big enough for two fashionistas and so I, much to Umberto’s chagrin, had embarked upon a career of being everything but. In school, Janice got her compliments from friends whose lives were headlined by designer names, while any admiration I got came from girls who had bummed a ride to the charity store, but who hadn’t had the vision to buy what I bought, nor the courage to put it together. It was not that I disliked fancy clothes, it was just that I wouldn’t give Janice the satisfaction of appearing to care about my looks. For no matter what I did to myself, she could always outdo me.
By the time we left college, I had become a dandelion in the flower bed of society. Cute, but still a weed. When Aunt Rose had put our graduation photos side by side on the grand piano, she had smiled sadly and observed that, of all those many classes I had taken, I seemed to have graduated with the best results as the perfect anti-Janice.
Eva Maria’s designer clothes were, in other words, definitely not my style. But what were my options? Following my telephone conversation with Umberto the night before, I had decided to retire my flip-flops for the time being and pay a little more attention to my bella figura. After all, the last thing I needed now was for Francesco Maconi, my mother’s financial advisor, to think I was someone not to be trusted.
And so I tried on Eva Maria’s outfits one by one, turning this way and that before the wardrobe mirror, until I found the least outrageous one–a foxy little skirt and jacket, fire-engine red with big black polka dots–that made me look as if I had just emerged from a Jaguar with four pieces of perfectly matched luggage and a small dog called Bijou. But most important, it made me look as if I ate hidden heirlooms–and financial advisors–for breakfast.
And by the way, it had matching shoes.
In order to get to Palazzo Tolomei, Direttore Rossini had explained, I must choose to either go up Via del Paradiso or down Via della Sapienza. They were both practically closed to traffic–as were most streets in the centre of Siena–but Sapienza, he advised, could be a bit of a challenge, and all in all, Paradiso was probably the safer route.
As I walked down Via della Sapienza the façades of ancient houses closed in on me from all sides, and I was soon trapped in a labyrinth of centuries past, following the patterns of an earlier way of life. Above me a ribbon of blue sky was crisscrossed by banners, their bold colours strangely vivid against the mediaeval brick, but apart from that–and the odd pair of jeans drying from a window–there was almost nothing that suggested this place belonged to the modern world.
The rest of Italy had developed around it, but Siena didn’t care. Direttore Rossini had told me that, for the Sienese, the golden age had been the late Middle Ages, and as I walked, I could see that he was right; the city clung to its mediaeval self with a stubborn disregard for the attractions of progress. There were touches of the Renaissance here and there, but overall, the hotel director had sniggered, Siena had been too wise to be seduced by the charms of history’s playboys, those so-called masters, who turned houses into wedding cakes.
As a result, the most beautiful thing about Siena was her integrity; even now, in a world that had stopped caring, she was still Saena Vetus Civitas Virginis, or, in my own language, Old Siena, City of the Virgin. And for that reason alone, Direttore Rossini had concluded, all of his fingers spread on the green marble counter, it was the only place on the planet worth living.
‘So, where else have you lived?’ I had asked him, innocently.
‘I was in Rome for two days,’ he had replied with dignity. ‘Who needs to see more? When you