Juliet. Anne Fortier
on his grave every Sunday, but’—he paused to pull a handkerchief from his pocket—‘she was never happy again.’
‘Wait a minute.’ I stared at the dates on my parents’ graves. ‘My father died before my mother? I always thought they died together.’ But even as I spoke, I could see that the dates confirmed the new truth; my father had died more than two years before my mother. ‘What fire?’
‘Someone—no, I shouldn’t say that.’ Peppo frowned at himself. ‘There was a fire, a terrible fire. Your father’s farm burned down. Your mother was lucky; she was in Siena, shopping, with you girls. It was a great, great tragedy. I would have said that God held his hand over her, but then two years later…’
‘The car accident,’ I muttered.
‘Well…’ Peppo dug the toe of his shoe into the ground. ‘I don’t know the truth. Nobody knows the truth. But’—he finally met my eyes—‘I always suspected that the Salimbenis had a hand in it.’
I didn’t know what to say to this. I pictured Eva Maria and her suitcase full of clothes sitting in my hotel room. She had been so kind to me, so eager to make friends.
‘There was a young man,’ Peppo went on, ‘Luciano Salimbeni. He was a troublemaker. There were rumours. I don’t want to…’ Peppo glanced at me nervously. ‘The fire. The fire that killed your father. They say it was not an accident. They say someone wanted to murder him and destroy his research. It was terrible. Such a beautiful house. But you know, I think your mother saved something from the house. Something important. Documents. She was afraid to talk about it, but after the fire, she began to ask strange questions about…things.’
‘What kind of things?’
‘All kinds. I didn’t know the answers. She asked me about the Salimbenis. About secret tunnels underground. She wanted to find a grave. It was something to do with the plague.’
‘The…bubonic plague?’
‘Yes, the big one. In 1348.’ Peppo cleared his throat, not comfortable with the subject. ‘You see, your mother believed that there is an old curse that is still haunting the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis. And she was trying to find out how to stop it. She was obsessed with this idea. I wanted to believe her, but…’ He pulled at his shirt collar as if he suddenly felt hot. ‘She was so determined. She was convinced that we were all cursed. Death. Destruction. Accidents. A plague on both our houses… that is what she used to say.’ He sighed deeply, reliving the pain of the past. ‘She always quoted Shakespeare. She took it very seriously…Romeo and Juliet. She thought that it had happened right here, in Siena. She had a theory…’ Peppo shook his head dismissively. ‘She was obsessed with it. I don’t know. I am not a professor. All I know is that there was a man, Luciano Salimbeni, who wanted to find a treasure.’
I could not help myself, I had to ask: ‘What kind of treasure?’
‘Who knows?’ Peppo threw up his arms. ‘Your father spent all his time researching old legends. He was always talking about lost treasures. But your mother told me about something once—oh, what did she call it?—I think she called it Juliet’s Eyes. I don’t know what she meant, but I think it was very valuable, and I think it was what Luciano Salimbeni was after.’
I was dying to know more, but by now Peppo was looking very distressed, almost ill, and he swayed and grabbed my arm for balance. ‘If I was you,’ he went on, ‘I would be very, very careful. And I would not trust anyone with the name of Salimbeni.’ Seeing my expression, he frowned. ‘You think I am pazzo… crazy? Here we are, standing by the grave of a young woman who died before her time. She was your mother. Who am I to tell you who did this to her, and why?’ His grip tightened. ‘She is dead. Your father is dead. That is all I know. But my old Tolomei heart tells me that you must be careful.’
When we were seniors in high school, Janice and I had both volunteered for the annual play—as it so happened, it was Romeo and Juliet. After the auditions Janice was cast as Juliet, while I was to be a tree in the Capulet orchard. She, of course, spent more time on her nails than on memorizing the dialogue, and whenever we rehearsed the balcony scene, I would be the one to whisper her lines to her, being, after all, conveniently located onstage with branches for arms.
On opening night, however, she was particularly horrible to me. As we sat in makeup, she kept laughing at my brown face and pulling the leaves out of my hair, while she was being dolled up with blond braids and rosy cheeks, and by the time the balcony scene rolled around, I was in no mood to cover for her. In fact, I did quite the opposite. When Romeo said, ‘What shall I swear by?’ I whispered, ‘Three words!’
And Janice immediately said, ‘Three words, dear Romeo, and good night indeed!’ which threw Romeo off completely, and had the scene end in confusion.
Later, when I was posing as a candelabrum in Juliet’s bedroom, I made Janice wake up next to Romeo and say right off the bat, ‘Hie hence, begone, away!’ which didn’t set a very good tone for the rest of their tender scene. Needless to say, Janice was so furious that afterwards she chased me all the way through the school, swearing that she was going to shave off my eyebrows. It had been fun at first, but when, in the end, she locked herself in the school bathroom and cried for an hour, even I stopped laughing.
Long after midnight, when I sat in the living room talking with Aunt Rose, afraid of going to bed and submitting myself to sleep and Janice’s razor, Umberto came in with a glass of vin santo for us both. He did not say anything, just handed us the glasses, and Aunt Rose did not utter a word about me being too young to drink.
‘You like that play?’ she said instead. ‘You seem to know it by heart.’
‘I don’t really like it a whole lot,’ I confessed, shrugging and sipping my drink at the same time. ‘It’s just…there, stuck in my head.’
Aunt Rose nodded slowly, savouring the vin santo. ‘Your mother was the same way. She knew it by heart. It was…an obsession.’
I held my breath, not wanting to break her train of thought. I waited for another glimpse of my mother, but it never came. Aunt Rose just looked up, frowning, to clear her throat and take another sip of wine. And that was it. That was one of the only things she ever told me about my mother without being prompted, and I never passed it on to Janice. Our mutual obsession with Shakespeare’s play was a little secret I shared with my mother and no one else, just like I never told anyone about my growing fear that, because my mother had died at twenty-five, I would, too.
As soon as Peppo dropped me off in front of Hotel Chiusarelli, I went straight to the nearest internet café and Googled Luciano Salimbeni. But it took me several verbal acrobatics to come up with a search combination that yielded anything remotely useful. Only after at least an hour and many, many frustrations with the Italian language, I was fairly confident of the following conclusions:
One: Luciano Salimbeni was dead.
Two: Luciano Salimbeni had been a bad guy, possibly even a mass murderer.
Three: Luciano and Eva Maria Salimbeni were somehow related.
Four: There had been something fishy about the car accident that had killed my mother, and Luciano Salimbeni had been wanted for questioning.
I printed out all the pages so that I could reread them later, in the company of my dictionary. The search had yielded little more than Peppo Tolomei had just told me this afternoon, but at least now I knew my elderly cousin had not merely invented the story; there really had been a dangerous Luciano Salimbeni at large in Siena some twenty or so years ago.
But the good news was that he was dead. In other words, he definitely could not be the tracksuit charmer who might or might not have stalked me the day before, after I left the bank in Palazzo Tolomei with my mother’s box.
As an afterthought, I Googled Juliet’s Eyes. Not surprisingly, none of the search results had anything to do with legendary treasures. Almost all were semischolarly discussions about