“What is your uncle’s name?” asked the Comandante, realizing that he had forgotten to ask that most obvious question.
“Benincasa,” replied the boy. “He makes colors. I like the blue, but it is expensive.” He glanced up at the Comandante. “My father always wore nice colors, you know. Yellow mostly, with a black cape that looked like wings when he was riding fast. When you are rich you can do that.”
“I suppose,” said the Comandante.
Romanino stopped at a gate of tall iron bars and looked glumly into the courtyard. “This is it. That is Monna Lappa, my aunt. Or … she is not really my aunt, but she wanted me to call her that anyway.”
Comandante Marescotti was surprised at the size of the place; he had imagined something far more humble. Inside the courtyard, three children were helping their mother spread out laundry, while a tiny girl crawled around on her hands and knees, picking up grains laid out for the geese.
“Romanino!” The woman jumped to her feet when she saw the boy through the gate, and as soon as the bar had been lifted off the hook and the door opened, she pulled him inside and embraced him with tears and kisses. “We thought you were dead, you silly boy!”
In the commotion, nobody took any notice of the baby girl, and the Comandante—who had been just about to back away from the happy family reunion—was the only person with the presence of mind to see her crawling towards the open gate and to bend over and pick her up with awkward hands.
It was an uncommonly pretty little girl, thought Comandante Marescotti, and much more charming than one would expect from someone that size. In fact, despite his lack of experience with such tiny personnel, he found himself almost unwilling to hand the baby back to Monna Lappa, and he simply stood there, looking at the little face, feeling something stirring inside his chest, like a small spring flower forcing its way up through the frozen soil.
The fascination was equal on both sides; soon, the baby began slapping and pulling at the Comandante’s features with all signs of delight.
“Caterina!” cried her mother, quickly liberating the distinguished visitor by snatching away the girl. “I beg your pardon, Messere!”
“No need, no need,” said the Comandante. “God has kept his hand over you and yours, Monna Lappa. Your house is blessed, I think.”
The woman looked at him for a long time. Then she bent her head. “Thank you, Messere.”
The Comandante turned to go, but hesitated. Turning again, he looked at Romanino. The boy was standing straight, like a young tree braced against the wind, and yet his eyes had lost their courage.
“Monna Lappa,” said Comandante Marescotti, “I want—I would like—I wonder if you might consider giving up this boy. To me.”
The woman’s expression was mostly one of disbelief.
“You see,” the Comandante quickly added, “I believe he is my grandson.”
The words came as a surprise to everyone, including the Comandante. While Monna Lappa looked almost frightened at the confession, Romanino was positively cock-a-hoop, and the boy’s glee nearly made the Comandante burst out laughing despite himself.
“You are Comandante Marescotti?” exclaimed the woman, her cheeks flushed with excitement. “Then it was true! Oh, the poor girl! I never—” Too shocked to know how to behave, Monna Lappa grabbed Romanino by the shoulder and pushed him towards the Comandante. “Go! Go, you silly boy! And … don’t forget to thank the Lord!”
She did not have to say it twice, and before the Comandante even had a visual confirmation of the advance, Romanino’s arms were already wrapped around his midsection, a snotty nose burrowing into the embroidered velvet.
“Come now,” he said, patting the dirty head, “we need to find you a pair of shoes. And other things. So, stop crying.”
“I know,” sniffled the boy, wiping away his tears, “knights don’t cry.”
“They certainly do,” said the Comandante, taking the boy’s hand, “but only when they are clean and dressed, and wearing shoes. Do you think you can wait that long?”
“I’ll do my best.”
When they walked away down the street together, hand in hand, Comandante Marescotti found himself struggling against an onslaught of shame. How was it possible that he, a man sick with grief, who had lost everything save his own heartbeat, could find so much comfort in the presence of a small, sticky fist tucked firmly inside his own?
IT WAS MANY YEARS later when, one day, a traveling monk came to Palazzo Marescotti and asked to speak with the head of the family. The monk explained that he had come from a monastery in Viterbo, and that he had been instructed by his abbot to return a great treasure to its proper owner.
Romanino, who was now a grown man of thirty years, invited the monk inside and sent his daughters upstairs to see if their great-grandfather, the old Comandante, had the strength to meet with the guest. While they waited for the Comandante to come down, Romanino made sure the monk had food and drink, and his curiosity was so great that he asked the stranger about the nature of the treasure.
“I know little about its origins,” replied the monk between mouthfuls, “but I do know that I cannot take it back with me.”
“Why not?” inquired Romanino.
“Because it has a great, destructive power,” said the monk, helping himself to more bread. “Everyone who opens the box falls ill.”
Romanino sat back on his chair. “I thought you said it was a treasure? Now you tell me it is evil!”
“Pardon me, Messere,” the monk corrected him, “but I never said it was evil. I just said that it has great powers. For protection, but also for destruction. And therefore, it must be returned to the hands that can control those powers. It must be returned to its proper owner. That is all I know.”
“And that owner is Comandante Marescotti?”
The monk nodded again, but this time with less conviction. “We believe so.”
“Because if it is not,” Romanino pointed out, “you have brought a demon into my house, you realize.”
The monk looked sheepish. “Messere,” he said, urgingly, “please believe that I had no intention of harming you or your family. I am only doing what I have been instructed to do. This box”—he reached into his satchel and took out a small and very simple wooden box which he put gently down on the table—“was given to us by the priests of San Lorenzo, our cathedral, and I believe that maybe—but I am not sure—it contains a relic of a saint that was recently sent to Viterbo by its noble patron in Siena.”
“I have heard of no such saint!” exclaimed Romanino, eyeing the box with apprehension. “Who was the noble patron?”
The monk folded his hands in respect. “The pious and modest Monna Mina of the Salimbeni, Messere.”
“Huh.” Romanino fell silent for a while. He had heard of the lady, certainly—who had not heard of the young bride’s madness and the alleged curse on the basement wall?—but what kind of saint would befriend the Salimbenis? “Then may I ask why you are not returning this so-called treasure to her?”
“Oh!” The monk was horrified at the idea. “No! The treasure doesn’t like the Salimbenis! One of my poor brethren, a Salimbeni by birth, died in his sleep after touching the box—”
“God damn you, monk!” barked Romanino, and stood up. “Take your cursed box and leave my house at once!”
“But then, he was a hundred and two years old!” the monk hastened to add. “And other people who touched it have had miraculous recoveries from long-term ailments!”
Just then, Comandante Marescotti entered the dining hall with great dignity, his proud bearing suported by a cane. Instead of shooing the monk out the door with a broom—as he was just about to do—Romanino calmed himself and made sure his grandfather was seated comfortably at the table end, before he explained the circumstances of the unexpected visit.
“Viterbo?” The Comandante frowned. “How would they know my name?”
The monk stood awkwardly, not knowing whether he should stay up or sit
down, and whether he or Romanino was expected to answer the question. “Here …” he said instead, placing the box in front of the old man, “this, I was told, must be returned to its proper owner.”
“Grandfather, be careful!” exclaimed Romanino as the Comandante reached out to open the box. “We do not know what demons it contains!”
“No, my son,” replied the Comandante, “but we intend to find out.”
There was a moment’s dreadful silence while the Comandante slowly lifted the lid and peeked into the box. Seeing that his grandfather did not immediately fall to the floor in convulsions, Romanino stepped closer and looked, too.
In the box lay a ring.
“I wouldn’t …” began the monk, but Comandante Marescotti had already taken out the ring and was staring at it in disbelief.
“Who,” he said, his hand shaking, “did you say gave you this?”
“My abbot,” replied the monk, backing up in fear. “He told me that the men who found it had spoken the name Marescotti before they died of a ghastly fever, three days after receiving the saint’s coffin.”
Romanino looked at his grandfather, anxious that he should put down the ring. But the Comandante was in another world, touching the ring’s eagle signet without any fear and mumbling to himself an old family motto, “Faithful through the centuries,” engraved on the inside of the band in tiny letters. “Come, my son,” he finally said, reaching out for Romanino. “This was your father’s ring. Now it is yours.”
Romanino didn’t know what to do. On the one hand, he wanted to obey his grandfather; on the other, he was afraid of the ring, and he was not so sure that he was its rightful owner, even if it had belonged to his father. When Comandante Marescotti saw him hesitating, the old man was filled with anger, explosive anger, and he began to yell that Romanino was a coward, and to demand that he take the ring. But just as Romanino stepped forward, the Comandante fell back in his chair in a seizure, dropping the ring on the floor.
When he saw that the old man had fallen prey to the ring’s evil, the monk screamed in horror and fled from the room, leaving Romanino to throw himself at his grandfather and beseech his soul to remain in the body for the last sacrament. “Monk!” he bellowed, cradling the Comandante’s head, “come back here and do your job, you rat, or I swear I’ll bring the devil to Viterbo and we’ll eat you all alive!”
Hearing the threat, the monk came back into the kitchen, and he found in his satchel the small vial of consecrated oil that his abbot had given him for the journey. So, the Comandante received the extreme unction, and he lay very peacefully for a moment, looking at Romanino. His last words before he died were, “Shine on high, my son.”
Understandably, Romanino did not know what to think about that damned ring. It was obviously evil and had killed his grandfather, but at the same time, it had belonged to his father, Romeo. In the end Romanino decided to keep it, but to put the box in a place where no one but he could find it. And so he went down into the basement and into the Bottini, to put the box away in a dark corner where nobody ever came. He never told his children about it for fear that their curiosity would make them unleash its demons once again, but he wrote down the whole story, sealed the paper, and kept it with the rest of the family records.
It is doubtful whether Romanino ever discovered the truth about the ring in his lifetime and, for many generations, the box remained hidden in the Bottini underneath the house, untouched and unclaimed. But even so, there was a feeling among the Marescottis that an old evil was somehow imbedded in the house, and the family eventually decided to sell the building in 1506. Needless to say, the box with the ring stayed where it was.
NOW, MANY HUNDRED years later, another grandfather, old man Marescotti, was walking through his vineyard one summer day when he suddenly looked down and saw a little girl standing at his feet. He asked her, in Italian, who she was, and she replied, also in Italian, that her name was Giulietta, and that she was almost three years old. He was very surprised, because usually little children were afraid of him, but this one kept talking to him as if they were old friends, and when they started walking, she put her hand in his.
Back at the house, he found that a beautiful young woman was having coffee with his wife. And there was another little girl there, too, stuffing herself with biscotti. His wife explained to him that the young woman was Diane Tolomei, the widow of old Professor Tolomei, and that she had come to ask some questions about the Marescotti family.
Grandfather Marescotti treated Diane Tolomei very well and answered all her questions. She asked him if it was true that his line was descended directly from Romeo Marescotti, through the boy Romanino, and he said yes. She also asked him if he was aware that Romeo Marescotti was the Romeo from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and he said yes, he was aware of that, too. Then she asked if he knew that her line came straight from Juliet, and he said yes, he suspected as much, seeing that she was a Tolomei, and that she had called one of her daughters Giulietta. But when she asked him if he could guess the reason for her visit, he said no, not at all.
Now Diane Tolomei asked him if his family still had in their possession Romeo’s ring. Grandfather Marescotti said that he had no idea what she meant by that. She also asked him if he had ever seen a small wooden box that supposedly contained an evil treasure, or if he had ever heard his parents or grandparents mention such a box. He said no, he had never heard anything about it from anyone. She seemed a little disappointed, and when he asked her what this was all about, she said that maybe it was better this way, maybe she should not bring these old things back to life.
You can imagine what Grandfather Marescotti said to that. He told Diane that she had already asked too many questions, and he had answered every one of them, so now it was time she answered some of his. What kind of ring was she talking about, and why did she think he would know anything about it?
What Diane Tolomei told him first was the story of Romanino and the monk from Viterbo. She explained that her husband had been researching these issues all his life, and that he was the one who had found the Marescotti family records in the city archive and discovered Romanino’s notes about the box. It was a good thing, she said, that Romanino had been too wise to wear the ring, for he was not its rightful owner, and it was possible that it would have done him much harm.
Before she could continue with her explanations, the old man’s grandson, Alessandro—or, as they called him, Romeo—came to the table to steal a biscotto. When Diane realized that he was Romeo, she got very excited, and said, “It is a great honor to meet you, young man. Now, here is someone very special that I want you to meet.” And she pulled one of the little girls into her lap, and said, as if she was presenting a wonder of the world, “This is Giulietta.”
Romeo stuck the biscotto in his pocket. “I don’t think so,” he said. “She’s wearing a diaper.”
“No!” protested Diane Tolomei, pulling down the girl’s dress. “Those are fancy pants. She is a big girl. Aren’t you, Jules?”
Now, Romeo started backing up, hoping he could sneak away, but his grandfather stopped him and told him to take the two little girls and play with them while the adults had coffee. So, he did.
Meanwhile, Diane Tolomei told Grandfather Marescotti and his wife about Romeo’s ring; she explained that it had been his signet ring, and that he had given it to Giulietta Tolomei in a secret marriage ritual performed by their friend, Friar Lorenzo. Therefore, she claimed, the ring’s rightful heir was Giulietta, her daughter, and she went on to explain that it must be recovered for the curse on the Tolomeis to finally end.
Grandfather Marescotti was fascinated by Diane Tolomei’s story, mostly because she was obviously not an Italian, and yet she was so very passionate about the events of the past. It amazed him that this modern woman from America seemed to believe there was a curse on her family—an ancient curse from the Middle Ages, no less—and that she even thought her husband had died as a result of this. It made sense, he suppos
ed, that she should be eager to somehow try and stop it, so that her little girls could grow up without it hanging over their heads. For some reason, she seemed to think that her daughters were particularly exposed to the curse, maybe because both their parents had been Tolomeis.
Obviously, Grandfather Marescotti was sorry that he could not help this poor young widow, but Diane interrupted him as soon as he started to apologize. “From what you have told me, Signore,” she said, “I believe the box with the ring is still there, hidden in the Bottini underneath Palazzo Marescotti, untouched since Romanino put it there more than six hundred years ago.”
Grandfather Marescotti could not help laughing and slapping his knees. “That is too fantastic!” he said. “I cannot imagine it would still be there. And if it is, the reason must be that it is hidden so well that no one can find it. Including me.”
To persuade him to go looking for the ring, Diane told him that if he were able to find it and give it to her, she would give him something in return that the Marescotti family must be equally keen to recover, and which had been in Tolomei possession for far too long. She asked him if he had any idea what sort of treasure she was talking about, but he did not.
Now, Diane Tolomei took a photo out of her purse and put it on the table in front of him. And Grandfather Marescotti crossed himself when he saw that not only was it an old cencio spread out on a table, but it was a cencio he had heard described many times by his own grandfather; a cencio which he had never imagined he would ever see, or touch, because it could no longer possibly exist.
“How long,” he said, his voice shaking, “has your family kept this hidden from us?”
“For as long,” replied Diane Tolomei, “as your family has kept the ring hidden from us, Signore. And now, I think, you will agree that it is time we return these treasures to their proper owners, and put an end to the evil that has left us both in this sad state.”