‘Siena, actually,’ I said, my mouth full. ‘I was born there. But I’ve never been back since.’
‘How wonderful!’ she exclaimed. ‘But how strange! Why not?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Tell me. You must tell me all about it.’ When she saw me hesitating, she held out her hand. ‘I am sorry. I am very nosy. I am Eva Maria Salimbeni.’
‘Julie – Giulietta Tolomei.’
She nearly fell off her chair. ‘Tolomei? Your name is Tolomei? No, I don’t believe it! It is impossible! Wait…what seat are you in? Yes, on the flight. Let me see.’ She took one look at my boarding pass, then plucked it right out of my hand. ‘One moment! Stay here!’
I watched her as she strode up to the counter, wondering whether this was an ordinary day in Eva Maria Salimbeni’s life. I assumed she was trying to change the seating so we could sit together during the flight, and judging by her smile when she returned, she was successful. ‘Et voilà!’ She handed me a new boarding pass, and as soon as I looked at it, I had to suppress a giggle of delight. Of course, for us to continue our conversation, I would have to be upgraded to first class.
Once we were airborne, it did not take Eva Maria long to extract my story. The only elements I left out were my double identity and my mother’s possible treasure.
‘So,’ she finally said, head to one side, ‘you are going to Siena to…see the Palio?’
‘The what?’
My question made her gasp. ‘The Palio! The horse race. Siena is famous for the Palio horse race. Did your aunt’s housekeeper – his clever Alberto – never tell you about it?’
‘Umberto,’ I corrected her. ‘Yes, I guess he did. But I didn’t realize it’s still taking place. Whenever he talked about it, it sounded like a mediaeval thing, with knights in shining armour and all that.’
‘The history of the Palio,’ nodded Eva Maria, ‘reaches into the very’ – she had to search for the right English word – ‘obscurity of the Middle Ages. Nowadays the race takes place in the Campo in front of City Hall, and the riders are professional jockeys. But in the earliest times, it is believed that the riders were noblemen on their battle horses, and that they would ride all the way from the countryside and into the city to end up in front of Siena Cathedral.’
‘Sounds dramatic,’ I said, still puzzled by her effusive kindness. But maybe she just saw it as her duty to educate strangers about Siena.
‘Oh!’ Eva Maria rolled her eyes. ‘It is the greatest drama of our lives. For months and months, the people of Siena can talk of nothing but horses and rivals and deals with this and that jockey.’ She shook her head lovingly. ‘It’s what we call a dolce pazzia… a sweet madness. Once you feel it, you will never want to leave.’
‘Umberto always says that you can’t explain Siena,’ I said, suddenly wishing he was with me, listening to this fascinating woman. ‘You have to be there and hear the drums to understand.’
Eva Maria smiled graciously, like a queen receiving a compliment. ‘He is right. You have to feel it’ – she reached out and touched a hand to my chest – ‘in here.’ Coming from anyone else, the gesture would have seemed wildly inappropriate, but Eva Maria was the kind of person who could pull it off.
While the flight attendant poured us both another glass of champagne, my new friend told me more about Siena, ‘so you don’t get yourself into trouble,’ she winked. ‘Tourists always get themselves into trouble. They don’t realize that Siena is not just Siena, but seventeen different neighbourhoods – or, contrade – within the city that all have their own territory, their own magistrates, and their own coat of arms.’ Eva Maria touched her glass to mine, conspiratorially. ‘If you are in doubt, you can always look up at the corners of the houses. The little porcelain signs will tell you what contrada you are in. Now, your own family, the Tolomeis, belong in the contrada of the Owl and your allies are the Eagle and the Porcupine and…I forget the others. To the people of Siena, these contrade, these neighbourhoods, are what life is all about; they are your friends, your community, your allies, and also your rivals. Every day of the year.’
‘So, my contrada is the Owl,’ I said, amused because Umberto had occasionally called me a scowly owl when I was being moody. ‘What is your own contrada?’
For the first time since we had begun our long conversation, Eva Maria looked away, distressed by my question. ‘I do not have one,’ she said, dismissively. ‘My family was banished from Siena many hundred years ago.’
Long before we landed in Florence, Eva Maria began insisting on giving me a ride to Siena. It was right on the way to her home in Val d’Orcia, she explained, and really no trouble at all. I told her that I didn’t mind taking the bus, but she was clearly not someone who believed in public transport. ‘Dio santo!’ she exclaimed, when I kept declining her kind offer. ‘Why do you want to wait for a bus that never shows up, when you can come with me and have a very comfortable ride in my godson’s new car?’ Seeing that she almost had me, she smiled charmingly and leaned in for the clincher. ‘Giulietta, I will be so disappointed if we cannot continue our lovely conversation a bit longer.’
And so we walked through customs arm in arm; while the officer barely looked at my passport, he did look twice at Eva Maria’s cleavage. Later, when I was filling out a sheaf of coloured forms to report my luggage missing, Eva Maria stood next to me, tapping the floor with her Gucci pump until the baggage clerk had sworn an oath that he would personally recover my two suitcases from wherever they had gone in the world and, regardless of the hour, drive directly to Siena to deliver them at Hotel Chiusarelli, the address of which Eva Maria all but wrote out in lipstick and tucked into his pocket.
‘You see, Giulietta,’ she explained as we walked out of the airport together, bringing with us nothing but her minuscule carry-on, ‘it is fifty per cent what they see, and fifty per cent what they think they see. Ah!’ She waved excitedly at a black sedan idling in the emergency lane. ‘There he is! Nice car, no?’ She elbowed me with a wink. ‘It is the new model.’
‘Oh, really?’ I said politely. Cars had never been a passion of mine, primarily because they usually came with a guy attached. Undoubtedly, Janice could have told me the exact name and model of the vehicle in question, and that it was on her to-do list to make love to the owner of one while parked at a scenic spot along the Amalfi Coast. Needless to say, her to-do list was radically different from mine.
Not too offended by my lack of enthusiasm, Eva Maria pulled me even closer to whisper into my ear. ‘Don’t say anything, I want this to be a surprise! Oh, look…isn’t he handsome?’ She giggled delightedly and steered us both towards the man getting out of the car. ‘Ciao, Sandro!’
The man came around the car to greet us. ‘Ciao, Madrina!’ He kissed his godmother on both cheeks and did not seem to mind her running an admiring claw through his dark hair. ‘Bentornata.’
Eva Maria was right. Not only was her godson sinfully easy on the eyes, he was also dressed to kill, and although I was hardly an authority on female behaviour, I suspected he never lacked willing victims.
‘Alessandro, I want you to meet someone.’ Eva Maria had a hard time curbing her excitement. ‘This is my new friend. We met on the plane. Her name is Giulietta Tolomei. Can you believe it?’
Alessandro turned to look at me with eyes the colour of dried rosemary, eyes that would have made Janice rhumba through the house in her underwear, crooning into a hairbrush microphone.
‘Ciao!’ I said, wondering if he was going to kiss me, too.
But he wasn’t. Alessandro looked at my braids, my baggy shorts, and my flip-flops, before he finally wrung out a smile and said something in Italian that I didn’t understand.
‘I’m