“I beg you,” coughed Romeo, struggling to lift his head off the ground and see Giulietta one last time, “let her live! It was only a vow! I never lay with her! Please! I swear it by my soul!”
“How touching,” observed Salimbeni, looking from one to the other, not convinced. “What say you, girl”-he took Giulietta by the chin-“is he telling the truth?”
“Damn you!” she spat, trying to shake off his fist. “We are man and wife, and you had better kill me, for just as I lay with him on our wedding bed, so will I lie with him in our grave!”
Salimbeni’s grip tightened. “Is that so? And will you, too, swear on his soul? Mind you, if you lie, he will go straight to Hell on this very night.”
Giulietta looked down at Romeo, so miserable on the ground before her, and the desperation of it all strangled the words in her throat and made her unable to speak-and lie-any further.
“Ha!” Salimbeni towered over them both triumphantly. “So, here is one flower you did not pick, you dog.” He kicked Romeo once more, indulging in the moans of his victim and the sobs of the woman begging him to stop. “Let us make sure”-reaching into his cotehardie, he pulled out Romeo’s dagger and unsheathed it-“you pick no more.”
With one slow, indulgent motion, Salimbeni sank the eagle dagger into its owner’s abdomen and pulled it back out, leaving the youth in breathless agony, his whole body contorted around the gruesome wound.
“No!” screamed Giulietta and sprang forward, her panic so strong that the men could not hold her. Throwing herself down by Romeo’s side, she wrapped her arms around him, desperate to go where he was going, and not be left behind.
But Salimbeni had had enough of her theatrics, and pulled her back up by the hair. “Quiet!” he barked, slapping her across the face until she obeyed. “This howling will not help anyone. Compose yourself, and remember that you are a Tolomei.” Then, before she understood what he was doing, he pulled the signet ring from her finger and tossed it on the ground, where Romeo lay. “There go your vows with him. Be glad they are so easily undone!”
Through the veil of her bloody hair, Giulietta saw the guards pick up Romeo’s body and fling it down the stairs to the Tolomei sepulchre as if it was no more than a sack of grain thrown into storage. But she did not see them slamming the door after him, nor making sure the handle was securely locked. In her horror she had forgotten how to breathe, and now, at last, a merciful angel closed her eyes and let her fall into the embrace of soothing oblivion.
V.II
Virtue itself turns vice being misapplied,
And vice sometime’s by action dignified
SEEN 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.