Much love & God bless, Auntie
It took me a while to recover from the letter. Reading it, I could almost hear Aunt Rose dictating it, just as wonderfully scatterbrained in death as she had been when she was still alive. By the time I was finished with Umberto’s handkerchief, he did not want it back. Instead, he told me to take it with me to Italy, so that I would remember him when I found my big treasure.
‘Come on!’ I blew my nose one final time. ‘We both know there’s no treasure!’
He picked up the key. ‘Are you not curious? Your aunt was convinced that your mother had found something of tremendous value.’
‘Then why didn’t she tell me earlier? Why wait until she’s…’ I threw up my arms. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
Umberto squinted. ‘She wanted to. But you were never around.’
I rubbed my face, mostly to avoid his accusatory stare. ‘Even if she was right, you know I can’t go back to Italy. They’d lock me up so fast. You know they told me…’
Actually, they – the Italian police – had told me significantly more than I had ever passed on to Umberto. But he knew the gist of it. He knew that I had once been arrested in Rome during an antiwar demonstration, and spent a very unrecommendable night in a local prison before being tossed out of the country at daybreak and told never to come back. He also knew that it hadn’t been my fault. I had been eighteen, and all I had wanted was to go to Italy and see the place where I was born.
Pining in front of my college’s bulletin boards with their gaudy ads for study trips and expensive language courses in Florence, I had come across a small poster denouncing the war in Iraq and all the countries that took part in it. One of those countries, I was excited to discover, was Italy. At the bottom of the page was a list of dates and destinations; anyone interested in the cause was welcome to join in. One week in Rome, travel included, would cost me no more than four hundred dollars, which was precisely what I had left in my bank account. Little did I know that the low fare was made possible by the fact that we were almost guaranteed to not stay the whole week, and that the tab for our return flights and last night’s lodgings would – if all went according to plan – be picked up by the Italian authorities, that is, the Italian taxpayers.
And so, understanding very little about the purpose of the trip, I circled back to the poster several times before finally signing up. That night, however, tossing around in my bed, I realized I had done the wrong thing and that I would have to undo it as soon as possible. But when I told Janice the next morning, she just rolled her eyes and said, ‘Here lies Jules, who didn’t have much of a life, but who almost went to Italy once.’
Obviously, I had to go.
When the first rocks started flying in front of the Italian Parliament – thrown by two of my fellow travellers, Sam and Greg – I would have loved nothing more than to be back in my dorm room, pillow over my head. But I was trapped in the crowd like everyone else, and once the Roman police had had enough of our rocks and Molotov cocktails, we were all baptized by tear gas.
It was the first time in my life I found myself thinking, I could die now. Falling down on the asphalt and seeing the world – legs, arms, vomit – through a haze of pain and disbelief, I completely forgot who I was and where I was going with my life. Perhaps like the martyrs of old, I discovered another place; somewhere that was neither life nor death. But then the pain came back, and the panic, too, and after a moment it stopped feeling like a religious experience.
Months later, I kept wondering if I had fully recovered from the events in Rome. When I forced myself to think about it, I got this nagging feeling that I was still forgetting something crucial about who I was – something that had been spilled on the Italian asphalt, and never come back.
‘True.’ Umberto opened the passport and scrutinized my photo. ‘They told Julie Jacobs she can’t return to Italy. But what about Giulietta Tolomei?’
I did a double take. Here was Umberto, who still scolded me for dressing like a flower child, urging me to break the law. ‘Are you suggesting…?’
‘Why do you think I had this made? It was your aunt’s last wish that you go to Italy. Don’t break my heart, principessa.’
Seeing the sincerity in his eyes, I struggled once more against the tears. ‘But what about you?’ I said gruffly. ‘Why don’t you come with me? We could find the treasure together. And if we don’t, to hell with it! We’ll become pirates. We’ll scour the seas…’
Umberto reached out and touched my cheek very gently, as if he knew that, once I was gone, I would never come back. And should we ever meet again, it would not be like this, sitting together in a child’s hideaway, our backs turned against the world outside. ‘There are some things,’ he said softly, ‘that a princess has to do alone. Do you remember what I told you…one day you will find your kingdom?’
‘That was just a story. Life isn’t like that.’
‘Everything we say is a story. But nothing we say is just a story.’
I threw my arms around him, not yet ready to let go. ‘What about you? You’re not staying here, are you?’
Umberto squinted up at the dripping woodwork. ‘I think Janice is right. It’s time for old Birdie to retire. I should steal the silver and go to Vegas. It will last me about a week, I think, with my luck. So make sure to call me when you find your treasure.’
I leaned my head against his shoulder. ‘You’ll be the first to know.’
Draw thy tool; here comes two of the house of Montagues
As far back as I could remember, Aunt Rose had done everything in her power to prevent Janice and me from going to Italy. ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ she used to say, ‘that it is not a place for nice girls?’ Later on, realizing that her strategy had to change, she would shake her head whenever anyone would broach the subject, and clasp her heart as if the very thought of the place put her at death’s door. ‘Trust me,’ she would wheeze, ‘Italy is nothing but a big disappointment, and Italian men are pigs!’
I had always resented her inexplicable prejudice against the country where I was born, but after my experience in Rome I ended up more or less agreeing with her: Italy was a disappointment, and the Italians – at least the uniformed variety – made pigs look pretty good.
Similarly, whenever we asked her about our parents, Aunt Rose would cut us off by reciting the same old story. ‘How many times do I have to tell you,’ she would grunt, frustrated at being interrupted in the middle of reading the newspaper, wearing the little cotton gloves that kept the ink off her hands, ‘that your parents died in a car accident in Tuscany when you were three years old?’ Fortunately for Janice and me – or so the story continued – Aunt Rose and poor Uncle Jim, bless his soul, had been able to adopt us immediately after the tragedy, and it was our good luck that they had never been able to have children of their own. We ought to be grateful that we had not ended up in an Italian orphanage eating spaghetti every day. Look at us! Here we were, living on an estate in Virginia, spoiled rotten; the very least we could do in return was to stop plaguing Aunt Rose with questions she didn’t know how to answer. And could someone please fix her another mint julep, seeing that her joints were aching something fierce from our incessant nagging.
As I sat on the plane