Juliet (23 page)

Sure enough, when I followed Direttor Rossini downstairs to his office,
I found my mother’s box sitting very snugly in the hotel safe amongst accounting books and silver candelabra. “Bless you!” I said, meaning it, “this box is very special.”

“I know.” He nodded gravely. “My grandmother had one just like it. They don’t make them anymore. It is an old Sienese tradition. We call it the box of secrets, because they have hidden rooms. You can hide things from your parents. Or from your children. Or from anybody.”

“You mean … it has a secret compartment?”

“Yes!” Direttor Rossini took the box and began inspecting it. “I will show you. You have to be a Sienese to know how to find them; it is very sneaky. They are never in the same place. My grandmother’s was on the side, right here … but this is different. This is tricky. Let me see … not here … not here—” He inspected the box from all angles, enjoying the challenge. “She had a lock of hair, nothing else. I found it one day when she was sleeping. I never asked—
aha!”

Somehow, Direttor Rossini had managed to locate and trigger the release mechanism to the secret compartment. He smiled in triumph as a quarter of the bottom fell out on the table, followed by a small, rectangular piece of card stock. Turning the box over, we both examined the secret compartment, but it had contained nothing except the card.

“Do you understand this?” I showed Direttor Rossini the letters and numbers that were typed on the card with an old-fashioned typewriter. “It looks like some kind of code.”

“This,” he said, taking it from me, “is an old—how do you say it?—index card. We used these before we had computers. It was before your time. Ah, the world has changed! I remember when—”

“Do you have any idea where it came from?”

“This? Maybe a library? I don’t know. I am not an expert. But”—he glanced at me to gauge whether I was worthy of this level of clearance—“I know someone who is.”

IT TOOK ME A
while to find the tiny secondhand bookstore that Direttor Rossini had described, and once I did, it was—of course—closed for lunch. I tried to look through the windows to see if there was anyone inside, but saw nothing but books and more books.

Walking around the corner to Piazza del Duomo, I sat down to pass
the time on the front steps of the Siena Cathedral. Despite the tourists milling in and out of the church doors, there was something tranquil about the whole place, something very grounded and eternal that made me feel that had I not been on a mission, I could have sat there forever, just like the building itself, and watched with a mix of nostalgia and compassion the perennial rebirth of mankind.

The most striking feature of the cathedral was the bell tower. It was not as tall as the Mangia Tower, Direttor Rossini’s virile lily in the Campo, but what made it the more remarkable of the two was the fact that it was zebra-striped. Slim, alternating layers of white and black stone continued all the way to the very top, like a biscuit staircase to Heaven, and I could not help but wonder about the symbolism of the pattern. Perhaps there was none. Perhaps the purpose had simply been to make it striking. Or perhaps it was a reflection of the Siena coat of arms, the Balzana—part black, part white, like a stemless wineglass half filled with the most stygian red wine—which I found equally perplexing.

Direttor Rossini had told me some story about Roman twins escaping their evil uncle on a black and a white horse, but I was not convinced this was the underlying narrative of the colors of the Balzana. It had to be something about contrasts. Something about the perilous art of uniting extremes and forcing compromises, or perhaps about acknowledging that life is a delicate balance of great forces, and that good would lose its potency if there was no evil left to fight in the world.

But I was no philosopher, and the sun was beginning to let me know that it was the hour when only mad dogs and Englishmen exposed themselves to its rays. Walking back around the corner I saw that the bookstore was still closed, and I sighed and looked at my watch, wondering where I should seek refuge until it suited Direttor Rossini’s mother’s childhood friend to return from lunch.

THE AIR IN THE SIENA CATHEDRAL
was full of gold and shadows. Around me on all sides, massive black-and-white pillars held up a vast heaven sprinkled with little stars, and the mosaic floor was a giant jigsaw puzzle of symbols and legends that I somehow knew—as one knows the sounds of a foreign language—but did not understand.

The place was as different from the modern churches of my childhood
as one religion from another, and yet I felt my heart responding to it with mystified recognition, as if I had been there before, looking for the same God, a long, long time ago. And it suddenly occurred to me that here, for the first time, I was standing in a building that resembled my dream castle of whispering ghosts. Perhaps, I thought, gaping up at the star-spangled dome in this silent forest of silver-birch columns, someone had brought me to this very cathedral when I was a baby, and I had somehow stored it in my memory without knowing what it was.

The only other time I had been in a church of this size was when Umberto had taken me to the Basilica of the National Shrine in Washington, playing hooky after a dentist appointment. I could not have been more than six or seven years old, but I vividly remembered him kneeling down next to me in the middle of the enormous floor and asking me, “Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?” I had asked, the little plastic bag with a new pink toothbrush clutched in my hand.

He had cocked his head playfully. “The angels. If you are very quiet, you can hear them giggle.”

“What are they laughing at?” I had wanted to know. “Us?”

“They take flying lessons here. There is no wind, only the breath of God.”

“Is that what makes them fly? The breath of God?”

“There is a trick to flying. The angels told me.” He had smiled at my wide-eyed awe. “You need to forget everything you know as a human being. When you are human, you discover that there is great power in hating the earth. And it can almost make you fly. But it never will.”

I had frowned, not quite understanding him. “So, what’s the trick?”

“Love the sky.”

While I was standing there, lost in the memory of Umberto’s rare, emotional gush, a group of British tourists came up behind me, their guide talking animatedly about the many failed attempts at finding and excavating the old cathedral crypt—allegedly in existence in the Middle Ages, but now apparently lost forever.

I listened for a while, amused by the sensationalist bent of the guide, before leaving the cathedral to the tourists and strolling down Via del Capitano to end up—much to my surprise—back in Piazza Postierla, right across from Malèna’s espresso bar.

The little square had been quite busy the other times I had been there, but today it was pleasantly calm, perhaps because it was siesta time and sizzling hot. A pedestal with a wolf and two suckling babes stood opposite a small water fountain with a fierce-looking metal bird hovering above it. Two children, a boy and a girl, were splashing water on each other and running to and fro, shrieking with laughter, while a row of old men sat in the shade not far away, hats on, jackets off, looking with mild eyes on their own immortality.

“Hello again!” said Malèna when she saw me entering the bar. “Luigi did a good job, no?”

“He’s a genius.” I walked up to her and leaned on the cool countertop, feeling strangely at home. “I’m never going to leave Siena for as long as he is here.”

She laughed out loud, a warm, knowing laughter that made me once again wonder about the secret ingredient in these women’s lives. Whatever it was, I was clearly missing it. It was so much more than just self-confidence; it seemed to be the ability to love oneself, enthusiastically and unsparingly, body and soul, naturally followed by the assumption that every man on the planet is dying to get in on the act.

“Here”—Malèna placed an espresso in front of me and added a biscotto with a little wink—“eat more. It gives you … you know,
character.”

“Fierce-looking creature,” I said, referring to the fountain outside.

“What kind of bird is it?”

“It is our eagle, aquila in Italian. The fountain is our … oh, what is it?” She bit her lip, searching for the word. “Fonte battesimale … our font for baptism? Yes! This is where we bring our babies so they become aquilini, little eagles.”

“This is the Eagle contrada?” I glanced around at the other customers, suddenly all goose-bumpy. “Is it true that the eagle symbol originally came from the Marescotti family?”

“Yes,” she said, nodding, “but we didn’t invent it, of course. The eagle came originally from the Romans, and then Carlomagno took it over, and since the Marescottis were in his army, we had the right to use this imperial symbol. But nobody knows that anymore.”

I stared at her, almost certain she had referred to the Marescottis as if she was, in fact, one of them. But just as I opened my mouth to ask the question, the grinning face of a waiter came between us. “Only the people
who are lucky enough to work here. We know everything about her big bird.”

“Just ignore him,” said Malèna, pretending to hit him over the head with a tray. “He is from Contrada della Torre—the Tower, you know.” She grimaced. “Always being funny.”

Just then, in the middle of the general amusement, something outside caught my eye. It was a black motorcycle and rider, visor closed, pausing briefly to look through the glass door before speeding up with a roar and disappearing.

“Ducati Monster S4,” the waiter recited, as if he had memorized the ad from a magazine, “a real street fighter. Liquid-cooled motor. She makes men dream of blood, and they wake up in a sweat and try to catch her. But she has no grab rails. So”—he patted his belly suggestively—“don’t invite a girl on board if you don’t have a six-pack antilock braking system.”

“Basta, basta, Dario!” scolded Malèna. “Tu parli di niente!”

“Do you know that guy?” I asked, trying to sound casual while feeling everything but.

“That guy?” She rolled her eyes, not impressed. “You know what they say … those who make a lot of noise, they are missing something down there.”

“I don’t make a lot of noise!” protested Dario.

“I was not talking about you, stupido! I was talking about the moscerino on the motorcycle.”

“Do you know who he is?” I asked again.

She shrugged. “I like men with cars. Men on motorcycles … they are playboys. You can put a girlfriend on a motorcycle, yes, but what about your children and your bridesmaids, and your mother-in-law?”

“Exactly my point,” said Dario, wiggling his eyebrows. “I am saving up for one.”

By now, several other customers were getting audibly impatient in the queue behind me, and although Malèna seemed quite comfortable ignoring them all for as long as she damn well wanted, I decided to postpone my questions about the Marescottis and their possible present-day descendants to some other time.

As I walked away from the bar, I kept looking around for the motorcycle, but it was nowhere to be seen. Of course, I could not be sure, but my intuition told me this was the same guy who had bullied me the night before,
and, honestly, if he really was a playboy looking for someone to hug his abs, I could think of better ways to start that conversation.

WHEN THE OWNER
of the bookstore finally came back from lunch, I was sitting on her front step, leaning against the door, very close to giving up on the whole thing. But my patience was rewarded, for the woman—a sweet old lady whose spindly frame seemed to be propelled into motion by little more than an enormous curiosity—took one look at the index card and nodded right away.

“Ah, yes,” she said in fluent English, not the least bit surprised, “this is from the university archive. The history collection. I think they still use the old catalogue. Let me see now—yes, see, this stands for
Late Middle Ages
. And this means
local
. And look”—she showed me the codes on the card—“this is the letter of the shelf, K, and this is the number of the drawer, 3-17b. But it doesn’t say what is in it. Anyway, that is what the code means.” Having solved the mystery so quickly, she looked up at me, hoping for another. “How did you get this card?”

“My mother—or rather, my father—I think he was a professor at the university. Professor Tolomei?”

The old woman lit up like a Christmas tree. “I remember him! I was his student! You know, he was the one who organized that whole collection. It was a mess. I spent two summers gluing numbers on drawers. But … I wonder why he took out this card. He was always so upset when people left the index cards lying around.”

THE UNIVERSITY OF SIENA
was scattered all over town, but the history archive was no more than a brisk walk away, out towards the city gate called Porta Tufi. It took me a while to find the right building among the inconspicuous façades lining the road; in the end what gave it away as a place for education was the patchwork of socialist posters on the fence outside.

Hoping very much to blend in with the general student population, I entered through the door that the bookseller had described to me, and headed straight for the basement. Perhaps because it was still siesta—or perhaps because no one was around during the summer—I was able to
get downstairs without meeting a single person; the whole place was blissfully cool and quiet. It was almost too easy.

With nothing but the index card to guide me, I walked through the archive several times, trying in vain to find the appropriate shelves. It was a separate collection, the bookseller had explained, and even back then, people had rarely used it. I had to find the remotest part of the archive, but this instruction was complicated by the fact that every part of the archive seemed remote to me. Furthermore, the shelves I was looking at did not have drawers; they were regular shelves with books, not artifacts. And there was no book labeled K 3-17b.

After walking around for at least twenty minutes, it finally occurred to me to try a door at the far end of the room. It was a sealed metal door, almost like the door to a bank vault, but it opened without a problem, revealing yet another—smaller—room with some sort of climate control that made the air smell very different, like chocolate chip mothballs.