a beat. ‘When you are finished with that, I want you to come with me to a very nice concert. Here.’ She dug into her handbag and took out an admission ticket, ‘it is a wonderful programme. I chose it myself. You will like it. Seven o’clock. Afterwards we will have dinner, and I will tell you more about our ancestors.’
As I walked to the concert hall later that day, I could feel something nagging me. It was a beautiful evening, and the town was buzzing with happy people, but I was still unable to share in the fun. Striding down the street with eyes for nothing but the pavement ahead, I was gradually able to identify the cause of my grumpiness.
I was being manipulated.
Ever since my arrival in Siena, people had been on tiptoes to tell me what to do and what to think. Eva Maria most of all. She seemed to find it only natural that her own bizarre wishes and plans should dictate my movements, dress code included, and now she was trying to control my line of thought as well. Suppose I did not want to discuss the events of 1340 with her? Well, too bad, because I didn’t have a choice. And yet, in some strange way I still liked her. Why was that? Was it because she was the very antithesis of Aunt Rose, who had always been so afraid of doing something wrong that she never did anything right either? Or did I like Eva Maria because I was not supposed to? That would have been Umberto’s take on it; the surest way of making me hang with the Salimbenis would be to tell me to stay the hell away from them. I guess it was a Juliet thing.
Well, maybe it was time for Juliet to put on her rational hat. According to Presidente Maconi, the Salimbenis would always be the Salimbenis, and according to my cousin Peppo that meant woe unto any Tolomei standing in their way. This had not only held true for the stormy Middle Ages; even now, in present-day Siena, the ghost of maybe-murderer Luciano Salimbeni had not yet left the stage.
On the other hand, maybe it was this kind of prejudice that had kept the old family feud alive for generations. What if the elusive Luciano Salimbeni had never laid a hand on my parents, but had been a suspect solely because of his name? No wonder he had made himself scarce. In a place where you are found guilty by association, your executioner is not likely to sit patiently through a trial.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the more the scales tipped in Eva Maria’s favour; after all, she was the one who seemed most determined to prove that despite our ancestral rivalry, we could still be friends. And if that was really so, I did not want to be the party pooper.
The evening concert was hosted by the Chigiana Musical Academy in Palazzo Chigi-Saracini, right across the street from my friend Luigi’s hair salon. I entered the building through a covered gateway to emerge in an enclosed courtyard with a loggia and an old well in the middle. Knights in shining armour, I thought to myself, would have pulled water from that well for their battle horses, and beneath my high-heeled sandals the stone tiles in the floor were worn smooth from centuries of horses’ hooves and cartwheels. The place was neither too big nor too imposing, and it had a quiet dignity of its own that made me wonder whether the things going on outside the walls of this timeless quadrangle were truly that important.
As I stood there, marvelling at the mosaic ceiling underneath the loggia, an usher handed me a brochure and pointed out the door going up to the concert hall. I glanced at the brochure as I climbed the stairs, expecting it to list the musical programme. But instead, it was a brief history of the building written in several different languages. The English version began:
Palazzo Chigi-Saracini, one of the most beautiful palazzos in Siena, originally belonged to the Marescotti family. The core of the building is very old, but during the Middle Ages the Marescotti family began to incorporate the neighbouring buildings, and, like many other powerful families in Siena, they began the erection of a great tower. It was from this tower that the victory at Montaperti in 1260 was announced, by the sound of a drum, or tambourine.
I stopped in the middle of the staircase to reread the passage. If this was true, and if I had not completely mixed up the names in Maestro Ambrogio’s journal, then the building in which I was currently standing had originally been Palazzo Marescotti, that is, Romeo’s home in 1340.
Only when people started squeezing past me in irritation did I shake off my surprise and move on. So what if it had been Romeo’s home? He and I were separated by nearly seven hundred years, and besides, back then, he had had a Juliet of his own. Despite my new clothes and hair, I was still nothing but a gangly offshoot of the perfect creature that once was.
Janice would have laughed at me if she had known my romantic thoughts. ‘Here we go again,’ she would have jeered, ‘Jules dreaming about a man she can’t have.’ And she was right. But sometimes, those are the best ones.
My strange obsession with historical figures had been kicked off at the age of nine with President Jefferson. While everyone else, including Janice, had posters of pop tarts with exposed midriffs plastered all over their walls, my room was a shrine to my favourite Founding Father. I had gone to great lengths to learn how to write out Thomas in calligraphy, and had even embroidered a cushion with a giant T, which I hugged every night as I fell asleep. Unfortunately, Janice had found my secret notebook and passed it around in class, making everyone howl with laughter at my fanciful drawings of myself standing in front of Monticello wearing a veil and a wedding gown, hand in hand with a very muscular President Jefferson.
After that, everyone had called me Jeff, even the teachers, who had no idea why they did it, and who amazingly never saw me wincing when they spoke to me during lessons. In the end I stopped putting up my hand entirely, and just sat there, hiding behind my hair in the back row, hoping no one would notice me.
In high school – thanks to Umberto – I had started looking towards the ancient world instead, and my fancy had jumped from Leonidas the Spartan to Scipio the Roman and even to Emperor Augustus for a while, until I discovered his dark side. By the time I entered college I had finally strayed so far back in time that my hero was an unnamed caveman living on the Russian steppes, killing woolly mammoths and playing haunting tunes on his bone flute under the full moon, all by himself.
The only one to point out that all my boyfriends had one thing in common was, of course, Janice. ‘Too bad,’ she had said one night, when we were trying to fall asleep in a tent in the garden and she had managed to extract all my secrets one by one, in exchange for caramels that were originally mine, ‘that they are all deader than doornails.’
‘They are not!’ I had protested, already regretting telling her my secrets. ‘Famous people live forever!’
To this, Janice had merely snorted, ‘Maybe, but who wants to kiss a mummy?’
Despite my sister’s best efforts, however, it was no flight of fancy but simple habit for me to now feel a little frisson at the discovery that I was stalking the ghost of Romeo in his own house; the only requirement for us to continue this beautiful relationship was that he stayed just the way he was: dead.
Eva Maria was holding court in the concert hall, surrounded by men in dark suits and women in glittering dresses. It was a tall room decorated in the colours of milk and honey and finished off with touches of gold. About two hundred chairs were set up for the audience, and judging by the number of people already gathered there, it would be no problem filling them. At the far end, members of an orchestra were fine-tuning their instruments, and a large woman in a red dress looked as if she was threatening to sing. As with most spaces in Siena there was nothing modern here to disturb the eye, save the odd rebellious teenager wearing sneakers underneath his pleated trousers.
As soon as she saw me, Eva Maria summoned me to her entourage with a regal wave. As I approached the group, I could hear her introducing me with superlatives I did not deserve, and within minutes I was best friends with some of the leading figures of Sienese culture, one of whom was the President of the Monte dei Paschi Bank in Palazzo Salimbeni.
‘Monte dei Paschi,’ explained Eva Maria, ‘is the greatest protector of the arts in Siena. None of what you see around you would have been possible without the financial support of the Foundation.’
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