Juliet

‘I understand your disappointment,’ said Mr Gallagher.

‘Disappointment?’ I felt like grabbing him by the collar, but stuck my hands in my pockets instead, as deep as they could go. ‘Don’t think I’m just accepting this. I want to see the will.’ Looking him straight in the eye I saw him squirming under my gaze. ‘There’s something going on here behind my back.’

‘You were always a sore loser,’ Janice broke in, savouring my fury with a catty smile, ‘that’s what’s going on.’

‘Here.’ Mr Gallagher clicked open his briefcase with shaky hands and handed me a document. ‘This is your copy of the will. I’m afraid there’s not much room for dispute.’

Umberto found me in the garden, crouched under the arbour he had once built for us when Aunt Rose was in bed with pneumonia. Sitting down next to me on the wet bench, he did not comment on my childish disappearing act, just handed me an immaculately ironed handkerchief and observed me as I blew my nose.

‘It’s not the money,’ I said, defensively. ‘Did you see her smirk? Did you hear what she said? She doesn’t care about Aunt Rose. She never did. It’s not fair!’

‘Who told you life was fair?’ Umberto looked at me with raised eyebrows. ‘Not me.’

‘I know! I just don’t understand – but it’s my own fault. I always thought she was serious about treating us equally. I borrowed money.’ I clutched my face to avoid his stare. ‘Don’t say it!’

‘Are you finished?’

I shook my head. ‘You have no idea how finished I am.’

‘Good.’ He opened his jacket and took out a dry but slightly bent manila envelope. ‘Because she wanted you to have this. It’s a big secret. Gallagher doesn’t know. Janice doesn’t know. It’s for you only.’

I was immediately suspicious. It was very unlike Aunt Rose to give me something behind Janice’s back, but then, it was also very unlike her to write me out of her will. Clearly, I had not known my mother’s aunt as well as I thought, nor had I fully known myself until now. To think that I could sit here, today of all days, and cry over money. Although she had been in her late fifties when she adopted us, Aunt Rose had been like a mother to us, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for wanting anything more from her.

When I finally opened it, the envelope turned out to contain three things: a letter, a passport, and a key.

‘This is my passport!’ I exclaimed. ‘How did she…?’ I looked at the picture page again. It was my photo all right, and my date of birth, but the name was not mine. ‘Giulietta? Giulietta Tolomei?’

‘That is your real name. Your aunt changed it when she brought you here from Italy. She changed Janice’s name, too.’ I was stunned. ‘But why?…How long have you known?’ He looked down. ‘Why don’t you read the letter?’ I unfolded the two sheets of paper. ‘You wrote this?’ ‘She dictated it to me.’ Umberto smiled sadly. ‘She wanted to make sure you could read it.’ The letter read as follows:

My dearest Julie,

I have asked Umberto to give you this letter after my funeral, so I suppose that means I am dead. Anyway, I know you are still angry that I never took you girls to Italy, but believe me when I say that it was for your own good. How could I ever forgive myself if something happened to you? But now you are older. And there is something there, in Siena, that your mother left for you. You alone. I don’t know why, but that was Diane for you, bless her soul. She found something, and supposedly it is still there. By the sound of it, it was much more valuable than anything I have ever owned. And that is why I decided to do it this way, and give the house to Janice. I was hoping we could avoid all this and forget about Italy, but now I am beginning to think that it would be wrong of me if I never told you.

Here is what you must do. Take this key and go to the bank in Palazzo Tolomei. In Siena. I think it is for a safety deposit box. Your mother had it in her purse when she died. She had a financial advisor there, a man called Francesco Maconi. Find him and tell him that you are Diane Tolomei’s daughter. Oh, and that is another thing. I changed your names. Your real name is Giulietta Tolomei. But this is America. I thought Julie Jacobs made more sense, but no one can spell that either. What is the world coming to? No, I have had a good life. Thanks to you. Oh, and another thing: Umberto is going to get you a passport with your real name. I have no idea how you do these things, but never mind, we will leave that to him.

I am not going to say goodbye. We will see each other again in heaven, God willing. But I wanted to make sure you get what is rightly yours. Just be careful over there. Look what happened to your mother. Italy can be a very strange place. Your great-grandmother was born there, of course, but I’ll tell you, you couldn’t have dragged her back there for all the money in the world. Anyway, don’t tell anyone what I have told you. And try to smile more. You have such a beautiful smile, when you use it.

Much love & God bless, Auntie

It took me a while to recover from the letter. Reading it, I could almost hear Aunt Rose dictating it, just as wonderfully scatterbrained in death as she had been when she was still alive. By the time I was finished with Umberto’s handkerchief, he did not want it back. Instead, he told me to take it with me to Italy, so that I would remember him when I found my big treasure.

‘Come on!’ I blew my nose one final time. ‘We both know there’s no treasure!’

He picked up the key. ‘Are you not curious? Your aunt was convinced that your mother had found something of tremendous value.’

‘Then why didn’t she tell me earlier? Why wait until she’s…’ I threw up my arms. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

Umberto squinted. ‘She wanted to. But you were never around.’

I rubbed my face, mostly to avoid his accusatory stare. ‘Even if she was right, you know I can’t go back to Italy. They’d lock me up so fast. You know they told me…’

Actually, they – the Italian police – had told me significantly more than I had ever passed on to Umberto. But he knew the gist of it. He knew that I had once been arrested in Rome during an antiwar demonstration, and spent a very unrecommendable night in a local prison before being tossed out of the country at daybreak and told never to come back. He also knew that it hadn’t been my fault. I had been eighteen, and all I had wanted was to go to Italy and see the place where I was born.

Pining in front of my college’s bulletin boards with their gaudy ads for study trips and expensive language courses in Florence, I had come across a small poster denouncing the war in Iraq and all the countries that took part in it. One of those countries, I was excited to discover, was Italy. At the bottom of the page was a list of dates and destinations; anyone interested in the cause was welcome to join in. One week in Rome, travel included, would cost me no more than four hundred dollars, which was precisely what I had left in my bank account. Little did I know that the low fare was made possible by the fact that we were almost guaranteed to not stay the whole week, and that the tab for our return flights and last night’s lodgings would – if all went according to plan – be picked up by the Italian authorities, that is, the Italian taxpayers.

And so, understanding very little about the purpose of the trip, I circled back to the poster several times before finally signing up. That night, however, tossing around in my bed, I realized I had done the wrong thing and that I would have to undo it as soon as possible. But when I told Janice the next morning, she just rolled her eyes and said, ‘Here lies Jules, who didn’t have much of a life, but who almost went to Italy once.’

Obviously, I had to go.

When the first rocks started flying in front of the Italian Parliament – thrown by two of my fellow travellers, Sam and Greg – I would have loved nothing more than to be back in my dorm room, pillow over my head. But I was trapped in the crowd like everyone else, and once the Roman police had had enough of our rocks and Molotov cocktails, we were all baptized by tear gas.

It was the first time in my life I found myself thinking, I could die now. Falling down on the asphalt and seeing the world – legs, arms, vomit – through a haze of pain and disbelief, I completely forgot who I was and where I was going with my life. Perhaps like the martyrs of old, I discovered another place; somewhere that was neither life nor death. But then the pain came back, and the panic, too, and after a moment it stopped feeling like a religious experience.

Months later, I kept wondering if I had fully recovered from the events in Rome. When I forced myself to think about it, I got this nagging feeling that I was still forgetting something crucial about who I was – something that had been spilled on the Italian asphalt, and never come back.

‘True.’ Umberto opened the passport and scrutinized my photo. ‘They told Julie Jacobs she can’t return to Italy. But what about Giulietta Tolomei?’

I did a double take. Here was Umberto, who still scolded me for dressing like a flower child, urging me to break the law. ‘Are you suggesting…?’

‘Why do you think I had this made? It was your aunt’s last wish that you go to Italy. Don’t break my heart, principessa.’

Seeing the sincerity in his eyes, I struggled once more against the tears. ‘But what about you?’ I said gruffly. ‘Why don’t you come with me? We could find the treasure together. And if we don’t, to hell with it! We’ll become pirates. We’ll scour the seas…’

Umberto reached out and touched my cheek very gently, as if he knew that, once I was gone, I would never come back. And should we ever meet again, it would not be like this, sitting together in a child’s hideaway, our backs turned against the world outside. ‘There are some things,’ he said softly, ‘that a princess has to do alone. Do you remember what I told you…one day you will find your kingdom?’

‘That was just a story. Life isn’t like that.’

‘Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.’

I threw my arms around him, not yet ready to let go. ‘What about you? You’re not staying here, are you?’

Umberto squinted up at the dripping woodwork. ‘I think Janice is right. It’s time for old Birdie to retire. I should steal the silver and go to Vegas. It will last me about a week, I think, with my luck. So make sure to call me when you find your treasure.’

I leaned my head against his shoulder. ‘You’ll be the first to know.’

I.II

Draw thy tool; here comes two of the house of Montagues

As far back as I could remember, Aunt Rose had done everything in her power to prevent Janice and me from going to Italy. ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ she used to say, ‘that it is not a place for nice girls?’ Later on, realizing that her strategy had to change, she would shake her head whenever anyone would broach the subject, and clasp her heart as if the very thought of the place put her at death’s door. ‘Trust me,’ she would wheeze, ‘Italy is nothing but a big disappointment, and Italian men are pigs!’

I had always resented her inexplicable prejudice against the country where I was born, but after my experience in Rome I ended up more or less agreeing with her: Italy was a disappointment, and the Italians – at least the uniformed variety – made pigs look pretty good.

Similarly, whenever we asked her about our parents, Aunt Rose would cut us off by reciting the same old story. ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ she would grunt, frustrated at being interrupted in the middle of reading the newspaper, wearing the little cotton gloves that kept the ink off her hands, ‘that your parents died in a car accident in Tuscany when you were three years old?’ Fortunately for Janice and me – or so the story continued – Aunt Rose and poor Uncle Jim, bless his soul, had been able to adopt us immediately after the tragedy, and it was our good luck that they had never been able to have children of their own. We ought to be grateful that we had not ended up in an Italian orphanage eating spaghetti every day. Look at us! Here we were, living on an estate in Virginia, spoiled rotten; the very least we could do in return was to stop plaguing Aunt Rose with questions she didn’t know how to answer. And could someone please fix her another mint julep, seeing that her joints were aching something fierce from our incessant nagging.

As I sat on the plane to Europe, staring out into the Atlantic night and reliving conflicts past, it struck me that I missed everything about Aunt Rose, not just the good bits. How happy I would have been to spend another hour with her, even if she were to spend that hour ranting. Now that she was gone, it was hard to believe she could ever have made me slam doors and stomp upstairs, and hard to accept that I had wasted so many precious hours in stubborn silence, locked in my room.

I angrily wiped a tear rolling down my cheek with the flimsy airline napkin and told myself that regrets were a waste of time. Yes, I should have written more letters to her, and yes, I should have called more often and told her I loved her, but that was all too late now; I could not undo the sins of the past.

On top of my grief there was also another sensation gnawing at my spine. Was it foreboding? Not necessarily. Foreboding implies that something bad will happen; my problem was that I didn’t know if anything would happen at all. It was entirely possible that the whole trip would end in disappointment. But I also knew that there was only one person I could rightfully blame for the squeeze I was in, and that person was me.

I had grown up believing I would inherit half of Aunt Rose’s fortune, and therefore had not even tried to make one of my own. While other girls my age had climbed up the slippery career pole with carefully manicured nails, I had only worked in jobs I liked – such as teaching at Shakespeare camps – knowing that sooner or later, my inheritance from Aunt Rose would take care of my growing credit-card debt. As a result, I had little to fall back on now but an elusive heirloom left behind in a faraway land by a mother I could barely remember.

Ever since dropping out of grad school I had lived nowhere in particular, couch-surfing with friends from the antiwar movement, and moving out whenever I got a Shakespeare teaching gig. For some reason, the Bard’s plays were all that had ever stuck in my head, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never get tired of Romeo and Juliet.

I occasionally taught adults, but much preferred kids – maybe because I was fairly sure they liked me. My first clue was that they would always refer to the grown-ups as if I weren’t one of them. It made me happy that they accepted me as one of their own, although I knew it was not actually a compliment. It simply meant that they suspected I had never really grown up either, and that, even at twenty-five, I still came across as an awkward tween struggling to articulate – or, more often, conceal – the poetry raging in my soul.

It didn’t help my career path that I was at a complete loss to imagine my future. When people asked me what I would like to do with my life, I had no idea what to say, and when I tried to visualize myself five years down the road, all I saw was a big, black pothole. In gloomy moments I interpreted this impending darkness as a sign that I would die young, and concluded that the reason I could not envision my future was that I had none. My mother had died young, and so had my grandmother, Aunt Rose’s younger sister. For some reason, fate was on our case, and whenever I found myself contemplating a long-term commitment, whether it was work or housing, I always bowed out at the last minute, haunted by the idea that I would not be around to see it to completion.

Every time I came home for Christmas or a summer holiday, Aunt Rose would discreetly beg me to stay with her rather than continuing my aimless existence. ‘You know, Julie,’ she would say, while picking dead leaves off a houseplant or decorating the Christmas tree one angel at a time, ‘you could always come back here for a while, and think about what you would like to do with yourself.’

But even if I was tempted, I knew I couldn’t do that. Janice was out there on her own, making money by matchmaking and renting a two-bedroom apartment with a view over a fake lake; for me to move back home would be to acknowledge that she had won.

Now, of course, everything had changed. Moving back in with Aunt Rose was no longer an option. The world as I knew it belonged to Janice, and I was left with nothing more than the contents of a manila envelope. As I sat there on the plane, rereading Aunt Rose’s letter over a plastic cup of sour wine, it suddenly occurred to me how thoroughly alone I was now, with her gone and only Umberto left in the world.

Growing up, I had never been good at making friends. In contrast, Janice would have had a hard time squeezing her closest and dearest into a double-decker bus. Whenever she went out with her giggling throng at night, Aunt Rose would circle around me nervously for a while, pretending to look for the magnifying glass or her dedicated crossword pencil. Eventually, she would sit down next to me on the sofa, seemingly interested in the book I was reading. But I knew she wasn’t.

‘You know, Julie,’ she would say, picking specks of lint from my pyjama bottoms, ‘I can easily entertain myself. If you want to go out with your friends…’

The suggestion would hang in the air for a while, until I had concocted a suitable reply. The truth was that I did not stay at home because I felt sorry for Aunt Rose, but because I had no interest in going out. Whenever I let people drag me along to some bar I always ended up surrounded by meatheads and geeks, who all seemed to think we were acting out a fairy tale in which I would have to choose one of them before the night was over.

The memory of Aunt Rose sitting next to me and in her own sweet way telling me to get a life sent another pang through my heart. Staring glumly through the greasy little aeroplane window into the void outside, I found myself wondering if perhaps this whole trip was meant as some kind of punishment for how I had treated her. Perhaps God was going to make the plane crash, just to show me. Or perhaps he would allow me to actually get to Siena, and then let me discover that someone else had already snagged the family treasure.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I began to suspect that the real reason Aunt Rose had never broached the issue while she was still alive was that it was all rubbish. Perhaps she had simply lost it in the end, in which case the alleged treasure might well turn out to be nothing but wishful thinking. And even if, against all odds, there really had been something of value still kicking around in Siena after we left some twenty-plus years ago, what were the chances it was still there? Considering the population density of Europe, and the ingenuity of mankind in general, I would be very surprised if there was any cheese left in the centre of the maze once – and if – I ever got there.

The only thought that was to cheer me through the long sleepless flight was that every miniature drink handed out by the smiling flight attendants took me further away from Janice. There she was, dancing around in a house that was all hers, laughing at my misfortune. She had no idea I was going to Italy, no idea that poor old Aunt Rose had sent me on a golden goose chase, and at least I could be glad about that. For if my trip failed to result in the recovery of something meaningful, I would rather she was not around to crow.

We landed in Frankfurt in something resembling sunshine, and I shuffled off the plane in my flip-flops, puffy-eyed and with a chunk of apple strudel still stuck in my throat. My connecting flight to Florence was more than two hours away, and as soon as I arrived at the gate, I stretched out across three chairs and closed my eyes, head on my macramé handbag, too tired to care if anyone ran away with the rest.

Somewhere between asleep and awake I felt a hand stroking my arm.

‘Ahi, ahi,’ said a voice that was a blend of coffee and smoke, ‘mi scusi!’

I opened my eyes to see the woman sitting next to me frantically brushing crumbs off my sleeve. While I had been napping, the gate had filled up around me, and people were glancing at me the way you glance at a homeless person – with a mix of disdain and sympathy.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said, sitting up, ‘I’m a mess anyway.’

‘Here!’ She offered me half her croissant, perhaps as some kind of compensation. ‘You must be hungry.’

I looked at her, surprised at her kindness. ‘Thanks.’

Calling the woman elegant would be a gross understatement. Everything about her was perfectly matched; not just the colour of her lipstick and nail polish, but also the golden beetles adorning her shoes, her handbag, and on the perky little hat on her immaculately dyed hair. I strongly suspected – and her teasing smile more than confirmed – that this woman had every reason to be content with herself. Probably worth a fortune, or at least married to one, she looked as if she did not have a care in the world save to mask her seasoned soul with a carefully preserved body.

‘You are going to Florence?’ she inquired, in a strong, utterly charming accent. ‘To see all the so-called artworks?’

‘Siena, actually,’ I said, my mouth full. ‘I was born there. But I’ve never been back since.’

‘How wonderful!’ she exclaimed. ‘But how strange! Why not?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘Tell me. You must tell me all about it.’ When she saw me hesitating, she held out her hand. ‘I am sorry. I am very nosy. I am Eva Maria Salimbeni.’

‘Julie – Giulietta Tolomei.’

She nearly fell off her chair. ‘Tolomei? Your name is Tolomei? No, I don’t believe it! It is impossible! Wait…what seat are you in? Yes, on the flight. Let me see.’ She took one look at my boarding pass, then plucked it right out of my hand. ‘One moment! Stay here!’

I watched her as she strode up to the counter, wondering whether this was an ordinary day in Eva Maria Salimbeni’s life. I assumed she was trying to change the seating so we could sit together during the flight, and judging by her smile when she returned, she was successful. ‘Et voilà!’ She handed me a new boarding pass, and as soon as I looked at it, I had to suppress a giggle of delight. Of course, for us to continue our conversation, I would have to be upgraded to first class.

Once we were airborne, it did not take Eva Maria long to extract my story. The only elements I left out were my double identity and my mother’s possible treasure.

‘So,’ she finally said, head to one side, ‘you are going to Siena to…see the Palio?’

‘The what?’

My question made her gasp. ‘The Palio! The horse race. Siena is famous for the Palio horse race. Did your aunt’s housekeeper – his clever Alberto – never tell you about it?’

‘Umberto,’ I corrected her. ‘Yes, I guess he did. But I didn’t realize it’s still taking place. Whenever he talked about it, it sounded like a mediaeval thing, with knights in shining armour and all that.’

‘The history of the Palio,’ nodded Eva Maria, ‘reaches into the very’ – she had to search for the right English word – ‘obscurity of the Middle Ages. Nowadays the race takes place in the Campo in front of City Hall, and the riders are professional jockeys. But in the earliest times, it is believed that the riders were noblemen on their battle horses, and that they would ride all the way from the countryside and into the city to end up in front of Siena Cathedral.’

‘Sounds dramatic,’ I said, still puzzled by her effusive kindness. But maybe she just saw it as her duty to educate strangers about Siena.

‘Oh!’ Eva Maria rolled her eyes. ‘It is the greatest drama of our lives. For months and months, the people of Siena can talk of nothing but horses and rivals and deals with this and that jockey.’ She shook her head lovingly. ‘It’s what we call a dolce pazzia… a sweet madness. Once you feel it, you will never want to leave.’