Juliet (51 page)

“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.

Unfortunately, during the Palio on the following day, the jockey from Pantera—the rival contrada—got hold of that very giubbetto, and was able to slow down the Aquila jockey and horse so much that they lost the race.

At this point in the story, I could not help but twist around and look at Alessandro. “Don’t tell me you thought it was your fault.”

He shrugged. “What could I think? I had brought bad luck to our giubbetto, and we lost. Even my uncle said so. And we haven’t won a Palio since.”

“Honestly—!” I began.

“Shh!” He put his hand over my mouth lightly. “Just listen. After that, I was gone for a long period, and I only came back to Siena a few years ago. Just in time. My grandfather was very tired. I remember he was sitting on a bench, looking out over the vineyard, and he didn’t hear me until I put my hand on his shoulder. Then he turned his head and took one look at my face, and started crying, he was so happy. That was a good day. We had a big dinner, and my uncle said they would never let me leave
again. At first, I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay. I had never lived in Siena before, and I had many bad memories. Also, I knew that people would gossip about me if they knew who I was. People don’t forget the past, you know. So, I started by just taking a leave. But then something happened. Aquila ran in the July Palio, and for us, it was the worst race of all times. In the whole history of the Palio, I don’t think any contrada has ever lost in such a bad way before. We were leading the whole race, but then in the very last curve, Pantera passes us and wins instead.” He sighed, reliving the moment. “There is no worse way to lose a Palio. It was a shock to us. And then later, we had to defend our honor in the August Palio, and our fantino—our jockey—was punished. We were all punished. We had no right to run the next year, and the year after that: We were sanctioned. Call it politics if you like, but in my family, we felt it was more than that.

“My grandfather was so upset, he had a heart attack when he realized that it could be two years before Aquila would run in the Palio again. He was eighty-seven. Three days later, he died.” Alessandro paused and looked away. “I sat with him those three days. He was so angry with himself for wasting all this time; now he wanted to look at my face as much as possible. At first, I thought he was upset with me for bringing bad luck again, but then he told me that it was not my fault. It was his fault for not understanding earlier.”

I had to ask. “Understanding what exactly?”

“My mother. He understood that what had happened to her
had
to happen. My uncle has five girls, no boys. I am the only grandchild who carries the family name. Because my mother was not married when I was born, and I was baptized with her name. You see?”

I sat up straight. “What kind of sick, chauvinist—”

“Giulietta, please!” He pulled me back to lean against his shoulder again. “You will never understand this if you don’t listen. What my grandfather realized was that there was an old evil that had woken up after many generations, and it had chosen me, because of my name.”

I felt the little hairs on my arms stand up. “Chosen you … for what?”

“This …” said Alessandro, filling my glass again, “is when we get to Charlemagne.”

   [   VII.II   ]

…

T
HE
P
LAGUE AND THE
R
ING

Siena
,
A.D
. 1340–1370

T
HE MARESCOTTIS ARE ONE
of the oldest noble families in Siena. It is believed that the name was derived from Marius Scotus, a Scottish general in Charlemagne’s army. Most of the Marescottis settled in Bologna, but the family spread its wings far and wide, and the Siena branch was particularly renowned for courage and leadership in times of crisis.

But, as we know, nothing great is great forever, and the fame of the Marescottis is no exception. Hardly anyone remembers their glorious past in Siena nowadays, but then history was always more concerned with those who live to destroy than with those devoted to protection and preservation.

Romeo was born when the family was still illustrious. His father, Comandante Marescotti, was much admired for his moderation and decorum, and his deposits on that account were so plentiful that not even his son—whose greed and sloth were always outstanding—could squander his savings.

However, even the Comandante’s virtues were taxed to the bone when, early in the year 1340, Romeo encountered the woman Rosalina. She was the wife of a butcher, but everyone knew they were not happy together.
In Shakespeare’s version, Rosalina is a young beauty who torments Romeo with her vow of chastity; the truth is quite the opposite. Rosalina was ten years older than he, and she became his mistress. For months, Romeo tried to persuade her to run away with him, but she was too wise to trust him.

Just after Christmas of 1340—not long after Romeo and Giulietta died here at Rocca di Tentennano—Rosalina gave birth to a son, and everyone could see the butcher was not the father. It was a great scandal, and Rosalina was afraid her husband would learn the truth and kill the baby. So, she took the newborn to Comandante Marescotti and asked if he would raise the boy in his own house.