“No Francesco Maconi?”
At this point, the teller found it necessary to take off her glasses entirely, fold them carefully on the counter, and look at me with that supremely kind smile people fix on you just before they stick a syringe in your neck. “No.”
“But I know he used to work here-” I did not get any further before the woman’s colleague from the booth next door leaned in on the conversation, whispering something in Italian. At first, my unfriendly teller dismissed the other with an angry wave, but after a while she began to reconsider.
“Excuse me,” she said eventually, leaning forward to get my attention, “but do you mean Presidente Maconi?”
I felt a jolt of excitement. “Did he work here twenty years ago?”
She looked horrified. “Presidente Maconi was always here!”
“And would it be possible to speak with him?” I smiled sweetly, although she did not deserve it. “He is an old friend of my mother’s, Diane Tolomei. I am Giulietta Tolomei.”
Both women stared at me as if I were a spirit conjured up before their very eyes. Without another word, the teller who had originally dismissed me now fumbled her glasses back on her nose, made a phone call, and had a brief conversation in humble, underdog Italian. When it was over she put down the receiver reverently, and turned towards me with something akin to a smile. “He will see you right after lunch, at three o’clock.”
I HAD MY FIRST MEAL since arriving in Siena at a bustling pizzeria called Cavallino Bianco. While I sat there pretending to read the Italian dictionary I had just bought, I began to realize that it would take more than just a borrowed suit and a few handy phrases to level with the locals. These women around me, I suspected, sneaking peeks at their smiles and exuberant gestures as they bantered with the handsome waiter Giulio, possessed something I had never had, some ability I could not put my finger on, but which must be a crucial element in that elusive state of mind, happiness.
Strolling on, feeling more klutzy and displaced than ever, I had a stand-up espresso in a bar in Piazza Postierla and asked the buxom barista if she could recommend a cheap clothes store in the neighborhood. After all, Eva Maria’s suitcase had-fortunately-not contained any underwear. Completely ignoring her other customers the barista looked me over skeptically and said, “You want everything new, no? New hair, new clothes?”
“Well-”
“Don’t worry, my cousin is the best hairdresser in Siena-maybe in the world. He will make you beautiful. Come!”
After taking me by the arm and insisting that I call her Malèna, the barista walked me down to see her cousin Luigi right away, even though it was clearly coffee rush hour, and customers were yelling after her in exasperation as we went. She just shrugged and laughed, knowing full well that they would all still fawn over her when she came back, maybe even a little bit more than before, now that they had tasted life without her.
Luigi was sweeping up hair from the floor when we entered his salon. He was no older than me, but had the penetrating eye of a Michelangelo. When he fixed that eye on me, however, he was not impressed.
“Ciao, caro,” said Malèna and gave him a drive-thru peck on both cheeks, “this is Giulietta. She needs un makeover totale.”
“Just the ends, actually,” I interjected. “A couple inches.”
It took a major argument in Italian-which I was more than relieved to not understand-before Malèna had persuaded Luigi to take on my sorry case. But once he did, he took the challenge very seriously. As soon as Malèna had left the salon, he sat me down on a barber chair and looked at my reflection in the mirror, turning me this way and that to check all the angles. Then he pulled the elastic bands from my braids and threw them directly into the trash bin with an expression of disgust.
“Bene…” he finally said, fluffing up my hair and looking at me once again in the mirror, a little less critically than before. “Not too bad, no?”
WHEN I WALKED BACK to Palazzo Tolomei two hours later, I had sunk myself further into debt, but it was worth every nonexistent penny. Eva Maria’s red-and-black suit lay neatly folded on the bottom of a shopping bag, matching shoes on top, and I was wearing one of five new outfits that had all been approved by Luigi and his uncle, Paolo, who happened to own a clothes store just around the corner. Uncle Paolo-who did not speak a word of English, but who knew everything there was to know about fashion-had knocked 30 percent off my entire purchase as long as I promised never to wear my ladybug costume again.
I had protested at first, explaining that my luggage was due to arrive any moment, but in the end the temptation had been too great. So what if my suitcases were waiting for me when I returned to the hotel? There was nothing in them I could ever wear in Siena anyway, perhaps with the exception of the shoes Umberto had given me for Christmas, and which I had never even tried on.
As I walked away from the store, I glanced at myself in every shopwindow I passed. Why had I never done this before? Ever since high school I had cut my own hair-just the ends-with a pair of kitchen scissors every two years or so. It took me about five minutes, and, honestly, I thought, who could tell the difference? Well, I could certainly see the difference now. Somehow, Luigi had managed to bring my boring old hair to life, and it was already thriving in its new freedom, flowing in the breeze as I walked and framing my face as if it was a face worth framing.
When I was a child, Aunt Rose had taken me to the village barber whenever it occurred to her. But she had been wise enough never to take Janice and me at the same time. Only once did we end up in the salon chairs side by side, and as we sat there, pulling faces at each other in the big mirrors, the old barber had held up our ponytails and said, “Look! This one has bear-hair and the other has princess-hair.”
Aunt Rose had not replied. She had just sat there, silently, and waited for him to finish. Once he was finished, she had paid him and thanked him in that clipped voice of hers. Then she had hauled us both out the door as if it were we, and not the barber, who had misbehaved. Ever since that day, Janice had never missed an opportunity to compliment me on my beary, beary lovely hair.
The memory nearly made me cry. Here I was, all dolled up, while Aunt Rose was in a place where she could no longer appreciate that I had finally stepped out of my macramé cocoon. It would have made her so happy to see me like this-just once-but I had been too busy making sure Janice never did.
PRESIDENTE MACONI WAS a courtly man in his sixties, dressed in a subdued suit and tie and astoundingly successful in combing the long hairs from one side of his head across the crown to the other. As a result, he carried himself with rigid dignity, but there was genuine warmth in his eyes that instantly annulled the ridiculous.
“Miss Tolomei?” He came across the floor of the bank to shake my hand heartily, as if we were old friends. “This is an unexpected delight.”
As we walked together up the stairs, Presidente Maconi went on to apologize in flawless English for the uneven walls and warped floors. Even the most modern interior design, he explained with a smile, was helpless against a building that was almost eight hundred years old.
After a day of constant language malfunctions it was a relief to finally meet someone fluent in my own tongue. A touch of a British accent suggested that Presidente Maconi had lived in England for a while-perhaps he had gone to school there-which might explain why my mother had chosen him as her financial advisor in the first place.
His office was on the top floor, and from the mullioned windows he had a perfect view of the church of San Cristoforo and several other spectacular buildings in the neighborhood. Stepping forward, however, I nearly stumbled over a plastic bucket sitting in the middle of a large Persian rug, and after ensuring that my health was intact, Presidente Maconi very carefully placed the bucket precisely where it had stood before I kicked it.