“A concealed weapon!” he exclaimed, pulling it free and admiring its flawless blade. “You already know how to please me.”
“You gutter pig!” Giulietta tried to take it from him and nearly cut herself. “It is mine!”
“Indeed?” He looked at her distorted face, his amusement growing. “Then go get it!” One quick throw later, the knife sat quivering in a wooden beam far out of reach, and when Giulietta tried to kick him in frustration, he pushed her right back down and pinned her against the cencio, easily evading her attempts at scratching him and spitting in his face. “Now, then,” he said, taunting her with false tenderness, “what other surprises do you have for me tonight, my dearest?”
“A curse!” she sneered, struggling to get her arms free. “A curse on everything you hold dear! You killed my parents, and you killed Romeo. You will burn in Hell all right, and I will shit on your grave!”
As she lay there helplessly, her weapon lost, looking up into the triumphant face of the man who ought, by now, to have been prostrate in a pool of blood, dismembered if not dead, Giulietta should have been despairing. And for a few ghastly moments, she was.
But then something happened. At first it was little more than a sudden warmth, penetrating her whole body from the bed below. It was a curious, prickling heat, as if she were lying on a skillet over a slow fire, and when the sensation deepened, it made her burst out laughing. For she suddenly understood that what she felt was a moment of religious ecstasy, and that the Virgin Mary was working a divine wonder through the cencio on which she was lying.
To Salimbeni, Giulietta’s maniacal laughter was far more unsettling than any insult or weapon she could possibly have hurled at him, and he slapped her across the face once, twice, even thrice, without accomplishing anything but to boost her mad amusement. Desperate to shut her up, he started tearing at the silk covering her bosom, but in his agitation was unable to solve the mystery of her apparel. Cursing the Tolomei tailors for the strength of their thread, he turned instead to her skirts, rifling through their intricate layers in search of a less fortified access point.
Giulietta did not even struggle. She just lay there, still chuckling, while Salimbeni made himself ridiculous. For she knew, with a certainty that could only come from Heaven itself, that he could not harm her tonight. No matter how determined he was to put her in her place, the Virgin Mary was by her side, sword drawn, to bar his invasion and protect the holy cencio from an act of barbarous sacrilege.
Chuckling again, she looked at her assailant with eyes full of jubilation. “Did you not hear me?” she asked, simply. “You are cursed. Can you not feel it?”
THE PEOPLE OF SIENA knew very well that gossip is either a plague or an avenger, depending on whether you yourself are the victim. It is cunning, tenacious, and fatal; once you have been marked, it will stop at nothing to bring you down. If it cannot corner you in its present form, it will alter slightly and leap on you from aloft or below; it does not matter how far you run, or how long you crouch in silence: It will find you.
Maestro Ambrogio first heard the rumor at the butcher’s. Later that day, he heard it whispered at the baker’s. And by the time he returned home with his groceries, he knew enough to feel a need to act.
Putting aside his basket of food-all thoughts of dinner gone-he went straight into the back room of his workshop to retrieve the portrait of Giulietta Tolomei and put it back on the easel. For he had never completely finished it. Now he finally knew what she must hold in her piously folded hands; not a rosary, not a crucifix, but a five-petal rose, the rosa mistica. An ancient symbol for the Virgin Mary, this flower was thought to express the mystery of her virginity as well as her own immaculate conception, and in Maestro Ambrogio’s mind there existed no more appropriate emblem of Heaven’s patronage of innocence.
The troublesome task for the painter was always to represent this intriguing plant in a way that steered men’s thoughts towards religious doctrine, rather than distracting them with the alluring, organic symmetry of its petals. It was a challenge the Maestro embraced wholeheartedly, and as he began mixing his colors to produce the perfect shades of red, he did his best to purge his mind of anything but botany.
But he could not. The rumors he had heard around town were too marvelous-too welcome-for him not to enjoy them a little further. For it was said that on the very eve of Salimbeni’s wedding to Giulietta Tolomei, Nemesis had paid a timely visit to the bridal chamber and had stopped, most mercifully, an act of unspeakable cruelty.
Some called it magic, others called it human nature or simple logic; whatever the cause, however, they all agreed on the effect: The groom had been unable to consummate the marriage.
The proofs of this remarkable situation, Maestro Ambrogio had been given to understand, were abundant. One had to do with Salimbeni’s movements, and it went like this: A mature man marries a lovely young girl and crowns their nuptials by joining her in the marriage bed. After three days he leaves the house and seeks a lady of the night, yet is unable to benefit from her services. When that lady kindly offers him an assortment of potions and powders, he cries out furiously that he has already tried them all, and that they are nothing but humbug. What could be concluded but that he had spent his nuptial night incapacitated, and that not even a consultation with a specialist had produced a cure?
Another proof of this presumed state of affairs came from a far more trustworthy quarter, for it had originated in Salimbeni’s own household. For as long as anyone cared to remember, it had been a tradition in that family to scrutinize the bedsheet after every wedding night to ensure that the bride had been a virgin. If there was no blood on the sheet, the girl would be returned to her parents in disgrace, and the Salimbenis would add yet another name to their long list of enemies.
On the morning after Salimbeni’s own wedding, however, no such sheet was displayed, nor was Romeo’s cencio waved around in triumph. The only one who knew of its fate was the servant who was ordered to deliver it in a box to Messer Tolomei that same afternoon, apologizing for its unjustified removal from Tebaldo’s corpse. And when finally, several days after the wedding, a piece of bloodstained linen was handed over to the chambermaid, who gave it to the housekeeper, who promptly gave it to the oldest grandmother of the house… then that old grandmother instantly dismissed it as a falsification.
The purity of a bride was so great a question of honor that it sometimes necessitated great deception, and so, all over town, grandmother was pitted against grandmother in developing and detecting the most convincing concoctions that could quickly be dabbed onto a nuptial sheet for lack of the real thing. Blood itself was not enough; it had to be mixed with other substances, and every grandmother of every family had her own secret recipe as well as a method of detection. Like the alchemists of old, these women spoke not in mundane, but in magical terms; to them the eternal challenge was to forge the perfect combination of pleasure and pain, of male and female.
Such a woman, trained and seasoned in all but witchcraft, could never be fooled by Salimbeni’s wedding sheet, which was clearly the work of a man who had never taken a second look at his bride or his bed after their initial skirmish. Even so, nobody dared to bring up the issue with the master himself, for it was already widely known that the problem lay not with his lady, but with him.
COMPLETING THE PORTRAIT of Giulietta Tolomei was not enough. Filled with restless energy, Maestro Ambrogio went to Palazzo Salimbeni a week after the wedding to inform its inhabitants that their frescoes needed inspection and possibly maintenance. No one dared to contradict the famous Maestro, nor did anyone feel a need to consult Salimbeni on the matter, and so, for the next many days, Maestro Ambrogio was free to come and go in the house as he pleased.