“I am so glad you are Romeo,” I whispered, my forehead against his, “but even if you were not, I would still-”
“You would still what?”
I looked down in embarrassment. “I would still be happy.”
He chuckled, knowing full well that I had been about to say something far more revealing. “Come…” He pulled me down in the grass beside him. “You make me forget my promise. You are very good at that!”
I looked at him as he sat there, so determined to collect his thoughts. “What promise?”
“To tell you about my family,” he replied, helplessly. “I want you to know everything-”
“Oh, but I don’t want to know everything,” I cut him off, straddling his lap. “Not right now.”
“Wait!” He tried in vain to stop my misbehaving hands. “First, I have to tell you about…”
“Shh!” I put my fingers over his mouth. “First, you want to kiss me again.”
“… Charlemagne-”
“… can wait.” I removed my fingers and touched my lips to his in a lingering kiss that left no room for contradictions. “Wouldn’t you say?”
He looked at me with the expression of a lone defender facing a barbarian invasion. “But I want you to know what you’re getting yourself into.”
“Oh, don’t you worry,” I whispered, “I think I know what I’m getting myself into-”
After struggling for three noble seconds, his resolve finally caved in, and he pulled me as close as Italian fashion permitted. “Are you sure?” The next thing I knew I was lying on my back in a bed of wild thyme, giggling with surprise. “Well, Giulietta…” Alessandro looked at me sternly, “I hope you’re not expecting a rhyming couplet.”
I laughed. “It’s too bad Shakespeare never wrote any stage directions.”
“Why?” He kissed me softly on the neck. “Do you really think old William was a better lover than me?”
In the end, it was not my modesty that put an end to the fun, but the unwelcome specter of Sienese chivalry.
“Did you know,” Alessandro growled, pinning my arms to the ground in an attempt at saving his remaining shirt buttons, “that it took Columbus six years to discover the mainland of America?” As he hovered above me, constraint incarnate, the bullet dangled between us like a pendulum.
“What took him so long?” I asked, savoring the sight of his valiant struggle against the backdrop of blue sky.
“He was an Italian gentleman,” replied Alessandro, speaking to himself as much as to me, “not a conquistador.”
“Oh, he was after the gold,” I said, trying to kiss his clenched jaw, “just like them.”
“Maybe at first. But then”-he reached down to pull my skirt back where it belonged-“he discovered how much he loved to explore the coastline and get to know this strange, new culture.”
“Six years is a long time,” I protested, not yet ready to get up and on with reality. “Far too long.”
“No.” He smiled at my invitation. “Six hundred years is a long time. So I think you can be patient for half an hour while I tell you my story.”
THE PROSECCO WAS warm by the time we finally got around to it, but it was still the best glass of wine I had ever had. It tasted like honey and wild herbs, of love and giddy plans, and as I sat there, leaning against Alessandro, who was leaning against a boulder, I could almost believe that my life would be long and full of joy, and that I had finally found a blessing to put my ghosts to rest.
“I know you are still upset because I didn’t tell you who I was,” he said, stroking my hair. “Maybe you think I was afraid you would fall in love with the name and not the man. But the truth is the exact opposite. I was afraid-I am still afraid-that when you hear my story, the story of Romeo Marescotti, you will wish you had never met me.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but he did not let me. “Those things your cousin Peppo said about me… they are all true. I am sure the psychologists could explain it all with some graphs, but in my family, we don’t listen to psychologists. We don’t listen to anybody. We-the Marescottis-have our own theories, and we are so sure they are right that-as you say-they become dragons beneath our tower, letting no one in and no one out.” He paused to fill up my glass. “Here, the rest is for you. I am driving.”
“Driving?” I laughed. “That doesn’t sound like the Romeo Marescotti that Peppo told me about! I thought you were supposed to be reckless. This is a huge disappointment.”
“Don’t worry…” He pulled me closer. “I will make up for it in other ways.”
While I sipped my Prosecco, he told me about his mother, who became pregnant at seventeen and wouldn’t say who the father was. Naturally, her own father-old man Marescotti, Alessandro’s grandfather-had been furious. He threw her out of the house, and she went to live with her mother’s old school friend, Eva Maria Salimbeni. When Alessandro was born, Eva Maria became his godmother, and she was the one who insisted that the boy should be baptized with the traditional family name, Romeo Alessandro Marescotti, even though she knew it would make old man Marescotti foam at the mouth to have a bastard carry his name.
Finally, in 1977, Alessandro’s grandmother persuaded his grandfather to allow their daughter and grandson to come back to Siena for the first time after Alessandro was born, and the boy was baptized in the Aquila fountain just before the Palio. But that year, the contrada lost both Palios in terrible ways, and old man Marescotti was looking for someone to blame. When he heard that his daughter had taken her little boy to see the Aquila stable before the race-and had let him touch the horse-he became convinced that this was the reason right there: The little bastard had brought bad luck to the whole contrada.
He had yelled to his daughter to take her boy, go back to Rome, and not come home again before she had found a husband. So, she did. She went back to Rome and found a husband, a very good man who was a Carabinieri officer. This man let Alessandro use his last name, Santini, and brought him up like his own sons, with discipline and love. That was how Romeo Marescotti became Alessandro Santini.
But still, every summer, Alessandro had to spend a month at his grandparents’ farm in Siena, to get to know his cousins and get away from the big city. This was not his grandfather’s idea, or his mother’s; but it was his grandmother who insisted on it. The only thing she could not persuade old man Marescotti to do was to let Alessandro come to the Palio. Everyone would go-cousins, uncles, aunts-but Alessandro had to stay at home, because his grandfather was afraid he would bring bad luck to the Aquila horse. Or so he said. So, Alessandro had stayed behind on the farm all alone, and had made his own Palio riding the old workhorse around. Later, he learned how to fix scooters and motorcycles, and his Palio had been just as dangerous as the real thing.
In the end, he didn’t want to go back to Siena at all, for whenever he went, his grandfather would nag him with comments about his mother, who-for good reason-never came to visit. And so Alessandro finished school and joined the Carabinieri like his father and brothers, and did everything to forget that he was Romeo Marescotti. From then on, he only called himself Alessandro Santini, and he traveled as far away as he could from Siena, signing up every time there was a peacekeeping mission in another country. This was how he ended up in Iraq, perfecting his English in yelling arguments with American defense contractors and narrowly avoiding being blown to bits when insurgents ran a truck full of explosives into the Carabinieri headquarters in Nassiriyah.
When he finally visited Siena, he did not tell anyone that he was there, not even his grandmother. But on the night before the Palio, he went to the contrada stable. He didn’t plan it; he just couldn’t stay away. His uncle was there, guarding the horse, and when Alessandro told him who he was, his uncle was so excited that he let him touch the yellow-and-black Aquila giubbetto-the jacket that the jockey would wear during the race-for good luck.