/ Fiction /
The sound of angry voices rose up from the road below on Monday morning, Juliana's farmhouse under siege. She had been sleeping fitfully and only intermittently these past few nights, stiff with tension and pain, and had just dozed off after several waking hours when something roused her—a knock, maybe, or a particularly strident voice, purposefully raised.
Young and impervious, the others seemed indifferent to the threat. She found Conall in the kitchen eating pane alla griglia with his heavy-duty headphones on, and an Iain Pears art mystery paperback being kept open next to his plate by a rock pick hammer. Hetty had ventured out onto the back terrazza, in her fandango purple yoga pants, and lay in her favorite supplicant position, arms spread, forehead touching the travertine tile, in a long balasana, the “way relaxing” child's pose she espoused.
Juliana tried to disregard the volley of voices (Italian, male) as she made coffee in the cafetière, but she was pretty sure it was a hostile knock that had awakened her, and that she'd find more graffiti painted with blood-red goo across the soft fawn door. The writing two mornings ago said just Vattene! And in all caps, INDESIDERATA. Essentially "Get out—you're not wanted."
No obscene words, not yet. But all this "subtle" stuff which had been escalating all during the week was taking a toll on her already compromised health, her debilitating arthritis. She knew that stress caused flare-ups in her body, that the chemicals released heightened inflammation and pain.
She’d come to Tuscany when the arthritis had gotten too bad to go on with the archaeology she’d been doing in Rome for thirteen years, having been assured that balneotherapy would help it. She’d since taken the waters of hot springs and baths named for the Medici, for a satiric poet, for blackbirds.
But she hadn't depended only on the waters for a cure, hadn't dared count on that. She’d tried a whole array of things—whatever promised relief. Meditation, acupuncture, evening primrose, turmeric, stinging nettle, thunder god vine. And just before buying the farmhouse on the outskirts of Montecatini, contemporary shamanism. She’d flown all night and day to stay with cousins in Tucson, back in the Southwest USA where she’d grown up, and went off into the desert for three days with the youngest cousin’s partner, a Peruvian healer. But the baths really did help most, she’d learned. She found immense relief in the waters. As she did in music, as well, especially in the vocal balm of her longstanding baritone lover, Renzo.
But now . . . she knew that all her oddities (thunder god vine!) would count against her, that her health and well-being were at risk with Agnolo Mazzei putting it about (with sly contempt, then with increasing anger when the archaeologists wouldn’t back down) that Juliana Abbott was a witch. The self-appointed nobiluomo or capofamiglia was highly influential here, and had set everyone against her and her colleagues as soon as they’d inadvertently abscised his illusions of grandeur.
* * *
It had started quietly enough. Just before Lent began, Juliana had given coffee to Elena Mazzei, who'd come asking for help. Her friend from the grand villa just downhill from her stone farmhouse, on the private road. The villa—with its nine bedrooms, three terraces, private chapel, and art-rich library—had been in the Mazzei family for centuries, and on the ornate gate which Juliana passed on her way anywhere was the Medici crest with its mysterious six balls, as Agnolo Mazzei and his clan prided themselves on being descended from the illustrious dynasty.
They'd sat and talked for a long time, she and Elena, pleasantly as ever. She'd set out coffee in the big cafetière, and some of the sfogliatelle she had baked the afternoon before. (She wouldn’t be observing Lent.)
“We need your help,” Elena said, her penetrating eyes pressing, and presented the facts, to which Juliana listened with interest.
“You may remember that there’s been a story in the news about a possible model for Leonardo’s Mona Lisa recently unearthed in a Florence convent.”
“Results inconclusive, I think? With no chance of comparing DNA?”
“That’s so. But a persistent Mazzei family tradition (mentioned in several letters in our archive, which our sons went through again when this story caught fire in the news) has it that one of Agnolo’s ancestors from the late 15th century—her name Agnese—was in fact the model of the painting, or at least an earlier sketch.
“Her sister lived where you do now, uphill from us, and through some falling-out with her husband—a brute, it seems—Agnese left home abruptly, fearing for her life. She went to stay in the neighboring house until things were resolved. Unfortunately that never happened, and she died here during one of the region’s epidemics and was interred in the sepulcher with her sister and a couple of nieces who died around the same time.”
Elena concluded with a flourish. “The husband never did reclaim her bones. Other events intruded, and the region was swept up in wars over subsequent years. Given all that, she is still here. Not in her proper resting place. Not in the chapel on our property where visitors can come when her story catches the interest of the world.”
“But there isn’t a sepulcher, that I have seen!” Juliana was surprised, though it was true that her impaired mobility had kept her from exploring all the grounds, especially the steepish slope planted with olive trees and oleander which her terrace overlooked.
“It will be in ruins, surely overgrown. That’s it, you see. We need your kind permission first, to excavate this sepulcher—and then your expertise. If your infirmity prevents your physical participation, you can in any case oversee others, no? People you have worked with before?”
Juliana murmured noncommittally, though keenly interested despite the reservations she spelled out for her friend.
“It’s important to have someone simpatica. Someone who knows the right people to go to—as we do not.”
Elena went on painting a picture almost rivaling Leonardo’s.
“Agnolo wants the bones of Agnese identified, and brought back to the cappella where she belongs. Our middle son, Danilo, a writer of some acclaim, has started transcribing the letters and the other documents we have in hand, preparing to make known the story of this woman evidence will show was Leonardo’s famous sitter. The provenance is clear. The world is fascinated still—that has been proven by the interest in that other woman they exhumed. Agnese and Danilo might well both be famous soon.”
Though Juliana stressed her limitations once again—her physical impairment and retirement from archaeology, her unfamiliarity with the time period in question—her friend insisted that she be the one to take this on for them.
When Elena had gone Juliana sat mulling the possibilities. The temptation was strong. She’d realized over the long, rainy winter months how bored she'd gotten with her latest enterprise—and how fed up with rich, eager young foreigners. Instead of being stymied by her disability two years ago, when she’d decided with regret that archaeology was no longer for her, she’d started a successful business helping expats with the complexities of Italian property law, working at home in the room that was office and kitchen—and divine light.
So though she shouldn’t even have considered it, her heart leapt at the chance to get back even temporarily into the pursuits she truly loved. The mysteries of the past, the lure of enigmatic stones and bones. However different this was from the ancient world she’d been familiar with, focused instead on Florence's famous Renaissance times. And unbelievably, on one of its most famous artists. She told herself that this would all be different, a fresh start. And as Renzo pointed out when she consulted him by phone, she would only be supervising the project, advising and coordinating, rather than physically involved. (In fact the sort of thing she hadn’t wanted to get into, two years ago.)
Then after sleeping on it (none too well—that should have been a sign) she made the call to Florence that had started the whole mess. To the forensic genealogist she'd worked with once in Rome. Pino was eager to get started, too, after being tangentially involved in the related Mona Lisa case, and sent Connal and Hetty from the university to assist with the dig.
* * *
Things had gone well at first. Local volunteers had joined the dig. The Mazzeis were delighted, had Juliana to the great house for a dinner party after Easter (as they’d done just once before, when Renzo had agreed to sing a short Rossini concert for them at a prenuptial celebration for their youngest daughter). Excavations down the hill, the remains of a limestone sepulcher, just where Agnolo had known it must be. In it were several sets of bones. Two proved to be the sisters’, marked with simple tombstones and distinctive jewelry which figured in a much-darkened painting hung in the family home. Both were in the same grave, apparently for lack of space, so both were tested for DNA, along with Agnolo and his family. All eager to play a part in the splendid drama, to establish their own provenance. And yes, the DNA and other evidence was conclusive: Agnese, the Mazzei ancestress, had been identified.
But a second, incendiary truth had come to light as well. Juliana had to break it to the family (gathered in the loggia one August morning; Agnolo’s voice colder than she could ever have imagined it, and the sons darkening, amassing, like swift thunderclouds devouring a hill) that there was no connection between them and the Medicis. Neither of the sisters had been related, and nor was the family at large.
And—worse news still. The lab in Florence had determined that the Mazzeis were in fact descendents of the despised Pazzi family. Pazzi conspirators had tried to kill Lorenzo the Magnificent one Easter Day, and had succeeded in stabbing to death his younger brother, Giuliano de’ Medici. As the account she read had it, the conspirators were hanged, and their remaining relatives banished. They lost their lands and property, and every last trace of the family name—erased from streets and buildings, public registers, inborn identity. “Anyone named Pazzi had to take a new name; anyone married to a Pazzi was barred from public office.”
Lies and suppressions would have been crucial for any Pazzi’s continuance, back then. Agnese and her siblings would have had to be spirited off somehow.
So ironically, though Agnese might well have been the model for the Mona Lisa, as Danilo Mazzei was busily affirming in his book, that would no longer be the glorious revelation they’d intended. The more notable truth would ruin the family. (The oldest son a politician, the youngest an important banker in the shoes of his Medici "forebears.") They couldn’t possibly let this ignominy sink them. The DNA results must instead vanish without trace.
As Juliana, shaking, left the loggia where she’d confided the repugnant news to them, she felt the hatred palpable on every side. They’d already begun planning to make life miserable for anybody in the know. This foreign female first of all . . . suspect since she’d moved in out of the blue and renovated the stone house. Further, a shameless witch. (She’d mentioned her experience with shamanism to Elena, and spelled out those unusual cures she sought.) She was too proud, too unapologetically independent. She wasn’t the least feminine. She had peculiar friends, immoderate acquaintances, no connections they acknowledged.
All at once, then, she was persona non grata. The DNA research for which she was responsible threatened not only the nobiluomo, his family and his good name, but even worse—the way things were, the long established history of the area that was all but set in stone. The findings from the DNA would change the proud story the patriarch and his family had told for centuries—about their origins, identity, distinguished share in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.
She’d always known that mastery was what Agnolo held most dear—and his sons after him. They patronized anyone lesser, with condescending forbearance. Women especially, of course.
In fact, according to the DNA findings, Agnolo's wife, Elena, was the noblest of the lot—coming from indigenous stock, the Villanovians, and from them the great Etruscans. Juliana had expected Elena to be cheered by that gift of Fate, and was surprised and devastated when her friend turned against her as completely as everyone else.
Vengeance was swift. In addition to the snubbing and the angry words and graffiti, the outdoor stone bathtub with power jets which Juliana’d had installed at great expense when she’d moved in had been blackened at midnight with sepia ink—the night which ended with the knock on her front door just after it got light.
And that would be only the beginning.
* * *
Juliana was torn—from outside and within. She’d always been a devotee of truth, science, what evidence was entrusted to her by time, the earth, the ancient goddesses of wisdom. She’d find it painful, a betrayal, to dismiss the revelations of the bones. Pino was raring to publish his findings, come what may. The story was sensational; he saw himself the up-and-coming darling of buzzworthy genetics. Conall and Hetty were fully behind him, seeing no reason not to make the DNA results public.
But she was shaken badly by the desertion of Elena, who she’d always thought proof against the stone-hard male community. Another friend, dear high-spirited Albertina, also took the side of the Mazzei family, saying brusquely “Remember that my husband is a cousin to the sons.” Juliana found the threats to her welfare—even her safety—daunting. The esteemed old mineral baths had proven to be what her body needed, along with the house full of tranquility and light. She couldn’t imagine losing the blessings they offered.
So what was she to do? The sharp outcry on every side (and literally on her doorstep) made her increasingly unwell. She felt pulled into pieces by the two equally adamant factions, reactions, needs. She’d loathed the politics that had beleaguered her in Rome as her career advanced, and couldn’t bear finding herself caught up in them again when she’d thought she’d successfully escaped.
Only Renzo had been sympathetic—but she didn't know when he’d be back in Tuscany again. He’d been there briefly in the middle of the week, between engagements, and listened without comment while she thought out loud. She knew his family was deeply conservative, though his time in the cultural centers of Bologna and Milan with international associates and friends had given him an open mind and disregard for narrow patriarchal traditions. During the time she’d known him he’d become a well-known baritone, sought after in the opera houses of Bologna and Parma, then Milan, Verona, and Rome. He came to visit her as often as he could, less all the time as his career blossomed.
That had been fine when everything was on an even keel. But he had seemed distracted lately too, a bit withdrawn. He'd mentioned a mezzo soprano several times. From Serbia, she thought. She got the impression that they might be romantically involved—only fair, of course, since Juliana had been against the whole idea of marriage. She was surprised how bad that made her feel. She’d loved him in her own way but had jealously guarded her independence—even more since her illness had threatened it. But just this week she’d realized that his loss would be terrible, if it came.
But what was it that she needed the most? She sat wrapped in a comfy burnt-orange comforter, legs tucked up under her stiffly, and quizzed herself while one of Boccherini’s cello concertos played into the soft twilight. This old farmhouse of stone that was all light and grace had been meant to be clear-headed, like her life from here on out. Devoid of clutter, infighting, the convolutions she had known elsewhere—confined relationships included. She hadn't married or had children, but along the way collected interesting friends, people she gathered up against the lonely days of winter rain and fed, fed from, the way her mother had graduate students back in New Hampshire ages ago.
Her sureness was deserting her now, though, along with her friends. Despite her successes over the years, the archaeology in the American Southwest and Rome, the places she had made her own—the adobe in Abiquiu, the funky apartment near the Castel Sant’Angelo, this house in the Tuscan hills whose walls she’d washed the color of first light—she was surrounded by the enemy, by the long, troubled history of her adopted home. Was she to flee? Give up? Leave the Mazzeis to their noble blood, and Renzo to his Serbian mezzo? Go back to New Mexico or New Hampshire or some random place she had never been, and start again? Hope for the best? Lie low?
* * *
Connal and Hetty had gone back to the university, and Albertina wasn’t answering her calls. In town two days ago, having to shop, Juliana had stopped to catch her breath halfway back to her car, and looking back saw the group of men at the café steadily watching her. The tension palpable.
Elena Mazzei had come up to her door the day before, despite her husband’s explicit orders, but refused to come in. She stood with her arms crossed, wanting for the sake of their old friendship to warn the archaeologist, and plead with her.
“You must not publish your findings. They’re baying like wild boar hounds for your blood.” For their own blood, as well—they wanted the pure, blue stuff back.
Renzo had turned up unexpectedly later, either ready to break it off or out of concern for her state of mind—she hadn’t dared ask yet. They’d talked with rather formal watchfulness all the next day, the only time they had before he was to sing again in Genoa, and as they walked among the olive trees down to the emptied sepulcher late in the afternoon, she fretted over her options again.
As dusk came on, he stood beside her small piano (spruce from Italy’s eastern Alps) and sang Macbeth’s aria, “Pietà, rispetto, amore”—sad and heavy as the ancient hills, full of regret and terrible longing.
Juliana sat by the window wrapped in cotton folds and listened to Verdi’s music. She loved that aria, loved Renzo’s voice—like salted caramel, like sage, like gilded capitals in books of hours illustrated in some sacred dim-lit space by gentle monks. Reverent and powerful.
They’d had discussions in the past of the strange absence of a baritone part in old masses, none of the standard four soloists a baritone.
“They need that baritone reverence,” she’d argued.
“Think Scarpia . . . Iago . . . Mephistopheles . . . indeed Macbeth. Reverence is seldom in us!”
“It’s there,” she insisted.
She thought of the line from Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient she had underlined, when she had read the book for the third time—for its language, science and poetry combined, the sense of sacred work she’d gotten from her archaeology when things were going well. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows.
Somehow, in Verdi’s baritones, in any case, there was always that element of redemption, of grace, that drew you into the dark heart of things and out again, all the better for it, despite the mortal sacrifices demanded by Germont père in La Traviata, by the Ethiopian king in Aida.
Now, listening to the beautiful, regretful song Renzo sang like a falling angel, she didn’t think that she could bear to let him go, if that was what he was intending, though she’d been the one who’d been resistant the whole while. Had, she was sure, seemed to push him away. Thinking herself self-sufficient, serene in her life here—her courtiers around for conversation and good cheer, always at painstaking arm’s length. Her bones already ached with the imagined loss, worse even than before.
“I can’t do it, Renzo, I don’t think. Go on fighting the whole tribe. I’m no Lady Macbeth . . . I don’t have the ambition or the steel in me.”
“I didn’t want to say . . . to seem to add to the furor . . . but I think you are where you’re meant to be. And if you can, if your conscience—your chosen god—lets you, do what you must to stay on here, as you have been. In triumph, well and happy, rather than their miserable victim somewhere else. Keep the powers that be—i poteri costituiti—happy, and go on with your life. You don’t have a real stake in standing against everyone, do you? Queen of Scotland—or even Tuscany—wouldn’t suit you. Though you’d make a good job of it.”
That was all true. This wasn’t her battle, not anymore. She was well out of it. But what was her battle, then, if bones and sacred DNA were no longer her creed? A kind of terrifying hole was gaping wide.
She thought again about truth, moral high ground, lies. The Mazzeis (the body politic) simply continuing the story about provenance they’d begun back when it was the only way of surviving. And maybe survival was at stake now, again. Saving face—footing—status, where they’d always reigned supreme . . . what would she gain by throwing a wrench into that? What in the world was it to her? Why shouldn’t she capitulate (with honor, grace) to the capo? She shouldn’t ever have let herself get involved.
“And us?” she finally dared ask Renzo, arms cradling her knees.
“There you’ve got me.” He opened his hands palms upward in a baffled and frustrated gesture, the essential Italian E che ne so io? (“what do I know?”) hands. “What do you want for us?”
She unearthed words, as gingerly as any crumbling bones.
“It isn’t fair for me to come to you in my weakness. My body is betraying me, Renzo, and now my moral compass too.”
“It isn’t fair for me to be away from you most of the time, either, my love.”
She uncovered more words, gently, gently, her breath respecting just how frail they were.
“But that is who—or how—we are,” she said slowly. “And maybe that would be the triumph you mention—making ‘us’ work, exactly as each of us needs to be. If you’re still free? And willing to go on as we have been, only with my whole heart and soul behind the importance of that? Married, even, if you like, if not traditionally so.”
“Of course I am, my cara Juliana. I only didn’t and don’t want to force you into any compromise.”
“No compromise. I see that now”—clear as the fine Italian light that would be in the room again the next morning—“and am just sorry it has taken me so long.”
She could base a life on that, going forward. She’d served Minerva faithfully, made learning everything, but felt herself ready to welcome in a different god. Virtus, she thought, smiling amusedly. The Roman god of bravery. Virtue or honor of a different sort. Male supposedly, but in one guise a matron . . . with a male companion said to complement the wanting lady, and assist her during scenes of “intense masculinity.” Just the thing, with Agnolo set to go on reigning downhill!
Salve Virtus.
Putting away her earthen guise, her backwards gaze, she’d let herself be given to the light-graced air, into the keeping of the songs of faith—even her name a kind of invocation now, on Renzo’s lips.
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