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.
His motive, of course, was to catch a glimpse of Giulietta and, if possible, offer her his assistance. With what, exactly, he was not sure, but he knew that he could not be calm until she knew she still had friends left in this world. But no matter how long he waited—climbing around on ladders pretending to find fault with his own work—the young woman never came downstairs. Nor did anyone mention her name. It was almost as if she had ceased to exist.
One evening, when Maestro Ambrogio was stretched at the very top of a tall ladder, inspecting the same coat of arms for the third time and wondering if perhaps he ought to rethink his strategy, he accidentally came to overhear a conversation between Salimbeni and his son, Nino, taking place in the neighboring room. Clearly under the impression that they were alone, the two men had withdrawn into this remote part of the house to discuss an issue that required some discretion; little did they know that, through the gap between a side door and frame, standing very still on his ladder, Maestro Ambrogio could hear every word.
“I want you,” said Salimbeni to his son, “to take Monna Giulietta to Rocca di Tentennano and see to it that she is properly … installed.”
“So soon?” exclaimed the young man. “Do you not think people will talk?”
“People are already talking,” observed Salimbeni, apparently used to having such frank exchanges with his son, “and I do not want everything to come to a boil. Tebaldo … Romeo … all that. It would be good for you to leave town for a while. Until people forget. Too much has happened lately. The mob is stirring. It worries me.”
Nino made a sound that could only be an attempt at laughter. “Perhaps you should go instead of me. A change of air—”
“Quiet!” There was a limit to Salimbeni’s camaraderie. “You will go, and you will bring her with you. Out with her, disobedient baggage! It sickens me to have her in my house. And once you are there, I want you to stay—”
“Stay there?” Nino could think of nothing more odious than a sojourn in the country. “For how long?”
“Until she is pregnant.”
There was an understandable silence, during which Maestro Ambrogio had to cling to the ladder with both hands so as to not lose his balance as he coped with the shocking demand.
“Oh no—” Nino backed away from his father, finding the whole thing absurd. “Not me. Someone else. Anyone.”
His face flushed with rage, Salimbeni walked right up to his son and took him by the collar. “I do not have to tell you what is going on. Our honor is at stake. I would happily do away with her, but she is a Tolomei. So, I will do the second best, and plant her in the country where no one is looking, busy with her children and out of my way.” He finally let go of his son. “People
will say I have been merciful.”
“Children?” Nino liked the plan less and less. “For how many years do you want me to sleep with my mother?”
“She is sixteen!” retorted Salimbeni, “and you will do as I say. Before this winter is over, I want everyone in Siena to know that she is pregnant with my child. Preferably a boy.”
“I shall endeavor to give satisfaction,” said Nino, sarcastically.
Seeing that his son was being flippant, Salimbeni held up a warning finger. “But God help you if you let her out of your sight. No one else may touch her but you. I do not want to show off a bastard.”
Nino sighed. “Very well. I will play Paris and take your wife, old man. Oh, wait. She is not actually your wife, is she?”
The slap on the face did not come as a surprise to Nino; he was asking for it. “That’s right,” he said, backing away, “hit me every time I tell the truth, and reward me whenever I do wrong. Just tell me what you want—kill a rival, kill a friend, kill a maidenhead—and I’ll do it. But don’t ask me to respect you afterwards.”
AS MAESTRO AMBROGIO walked back to his workshop later that night, he could not stop thinking of the conversation he had overheard. How could there be such perversity at large in the world, let alone in his own city? And why did no one move to stop it? He suddenly felt old and obsolete, and began to wish he had never gone to Palazzo Salimbeni in the first place and never overheard those wicked plans.
When he arrived at his workshop, he found the blue door unlocked. Hesitating on the threshold, he wondered briefly whether he had forgotten to lock it when he left, but when he could not hear Dante barking, he began to fear a break-in. “Hello?” He pushed open the door and stepped inside fearfully, confused by the burning lamps. “Who is here?”
Almost immediately, someone pulled him away from the door and closed it firmly behind him. When he turned to face his adversary, however, he saw that it was no malevolent stranger, but Romeo Marescotti. And right next to him stood Friar Lorenzo with Dante in his arms, holding the dog’s mouth closed.
“Heaven be praised!” exclaimed Maestro Ambrogio, looking at the youngsters and marveling at their full beards. “Back from foreign lands at last?”
“Not so foreign,” said Romeo, limping slightly as he walked over to the table to sit down. “We’ve been in a monastery not far from here.”
“Both of you?” asked the painter, dumbfounded.
“Lorenzo,” said Romeo, grimacing as he stretched out his leg, “saved my life. They left me for dead—the Salimbenis, in the cemetery—but he found me and brought me back to life. These past months—I should have been dead, but for him.”
“God,” said Friar Lorenzo, putting down the dog at last, “wanted you to live. And he wanted me to help you.”
“God,” said Romeo, retrieving a bit of his former mischief, “wants a lot from us, doesn’t he?”
“You could not,” said Maestro Ambrogio, looking around for wine and cups, “have returned at a better time. For I have just heard—”
“We have heard it, too,” Romeo cut him off, “but I don’t care. I am not leaving her with him. Lorenzo wanted me to wait until I had recovered fully, but I am not sure I ever will. We have men and horses. Giulietta’s sister, Monna Giannozza, wants her out of Salimbeni’s clutches as much as we do.” The young man leaned back on his chair, slightly out of breath from talking. “Now, you’re the master of frescoes, so you know all the houses. I need you to paint me a map of Palazzo Salimbeni—”
“Pardon me,” said Maestro Ambrogio, shaking his head in bewilderment, “but what exactly is it that you have heard?”
Romeo and Friar Lorenzo glanced at each other.
“I understood,” said the monk, defensively, “that Giulietta was married to Salimbeni some weeks ago. Is this not true?”
“And that is really,” asked the painter, “all you have heard?”
Once again, the young men looked at each other.
“What is it, Maestro?” Romeo frowned in anticipation. “Don’t tell me she is already carrying his child?”
“Heavens, no!” laughed the painter, suddenly giddy. “Quite the opposite.”
Romeo looked at him with narrow eyes. “I am aware that she has known him for three weeks now”—he swallowed with difficulty, as if the words were making him sick—“but I am hoping she has not yet grown too fond of his embraces.”
“My dearest friends,” said Maestro Ambrogio, locating a bottle at last, “brace yourselves for a most unusual story.”
[ V.IV ]
Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urg’d.
Give me my sin again
…
IT WAS DAWN BY THE TIME Janice and I finally fell asleep in my hotel room, both of us collapsing on a bed of documents, our heads spinning with family lore. We had spent all night going back and forth between now and 1340, and by the time our eyes finally fell shut, Janice knew almost as much about the Tolomeis, the Salimbenis, the Marescottis, and their Shakespearean alter egos as I did. I had shown her every scrap of paper in our mother’s box, including the mangy volume of Romeo and Juliet and the notebook full of sketches. Amazingly, she had not disputed my taking the silver crucifix and wearing it around my neck; she was more interested in our family tree and in tracing her own ancestry back to Giulietta’s sister, Giannozza.
“Look,” she had pointed out, scrolling down the long document, “there are Giuliettas and Giannozzas all over the place!”
“Originally, they were twins,” I had explained, pointing out a passage in one of Giulietta’s last letters to her sister, “see? She writes, ‘You have often said that you are four minutes younger, but four centuries older, than me. I now understand what you mean.’”
“Creepers!” Janice had stuck her nose in the family tree once more. “Maybe these are all twins! Maybe it’s a gene that runs in our family.”
But apart from the fact that our medieval namesakes had been twins, too, it was hard for us to find many other similarities between their lives and ours. They had lived in an age where women were the silent victims of men’s mistakes; we, it would seem, were free to make our own and to shout about it as loudly as we pleased.
Only when we had read on—together—in Maestro Ambrogio’s journal had the two very different worlds finally fused in a language we could both understand, namely that of money. Salimbeni had given Giulietta a bridal crown with four supersized gemstones—two sapphires and two emeralds—and those were supposedly the stones that would later end up in the statue by her grave. But we had fallen asleep before we got that far.
After only the barest bones of sleep, I was woken up by the telephone.
“Miss Tolomei,” chirped Direttor Rossini, enjoying the role of early bird, “are you upright?”
“I am now.” I grimaced to see the face of my wristwatch. It was nine o’clock. “What’s wrong?”
“Captain Santini is here to see you. What should I tell him?”
“Uh—” I looked around at the mess. Janice was still snoring soundly beside me. “I’ll be down in five minutes.”
My hair still dripping from a drive-thru shower, I ran downstairs as fast as I could to find Alessandro sitting on a bench in the front garden, playing absentmindedly with a flower from the magnolia tree. The sight of him filled me with warm expectation, but as soon as he looked up to meet my eyes, I was reminded of the photos of him breaking into my hotel room, and the happy tickle immediately turned into stings of doubt.
“Top of the morning,” I said, not quite meaning it. “Any news about Bruno?”
“I came by yesterday,” he replied, looking at me pensively, “but you weren’t here.”
“I wasn’t?” I did my best to sound surprised. In my frenzy of meeting motorcycle Romeo in the Mangia Tower the day before, I had completely forgotten my appointment with Alessandro. “That’s strange. Oh, well—so what did Bruno say?”
“Not much.” Alessandro tossed aside the flower and stood up. “He
’s dead.”
I gasped. “That was sudden! What happened?”
As we strolled through town together, Alessandro explained that Bruno Carrera—the man who had broken into my cousin Peppo’s museum—had been found dead in his cell the morning after his arrest. It was hard to say whether it was suicide or whether someone on the inside had been paid to silence him, but, Alessandro pointed out, it requires quite a bit of expertise—if not downright magic—to hang yourself from your frayed old shoelaces without breaking them in the fall.
“So, you’re saying he was murdered?” Despite his character, behavior, and gun, I felt sorry for the guy. “I guess someone didn’t want him to talk.”
Alessandro looked at me as if he suspected I knew more than I let on. “That is what it looks like.”
FONTEBRANDA WAS AN old public fountain—thanks to plumbing it was no longer used—which sat at the bottom of a sloping maze of city streets in a large open area. It was a detached, loggialike building in ancient, reddish brick, and leading down to it were broad stairs grown over with weeds.
Sitting down on the edge next to Alessandro, I looked around at the crystal-green water in the large stone basin and the kaleidoscope of light reflected onto the walls and vaulted ceiling above.
“You know,” I said, having a hard time accepting all this beauty, “your ancestor was a real piece of shit!”
He laughed in surprise, an unhappy laughter. “I hope you are not judging me by my ancestors. And I hope you are not judging yourself by yours either.”
How about, I thought to myself as I leaned down to run my fingers through the water, judging you by a photo on my sister’s cell phone? But instead, I said, “That dagger—you can keep it. I don’t think Romeo would ever want it back.” I looked up at him, needing very much to hold someone responsible for Messer Salimbeni’s crimes. “Peppo was right, it has the spirit of the devil in it. But so do some people.”