“‘Black plague guards the Virgin’s door,’” translated Umberto, “that is what the book says.”
“What book?” Janice wanted to know.
“‘Look at them now,’” Umberto went on, ignoring her, “‘the godless men and women, prostrate before her door, which remains forever closed.’ Friar Lorenzo says this cave must be the old antechamber to the crypt. The question is-” Umberto broke off when the monk suddenly started walking towards the nearest wall, muttering to himself.
Not quite sure what we were supposed to do, we dutifully followed Friar Lorenzo as he walked slowly around the cave with a hand to the wall. Now that we knew what we were walking on, I felt a little shiver for every step I took, and the wafts of cigarette smoke were almost welcome, for they drowned out the other smell in the cave, which I now knew was the smell of death.
Only when we had come full circle and were back where we started-all the while trying to ignore the rude gibes from Cocco’s men, who were watching us with contemptuous amusement-did Friar Lorenzo finally stop and speak to us again.
“The Siena Cathedral is oriented east-west,” Umberto explained, “with the entrance facing west. That is normal for cathedrals. And so you’d think it would be the same with the crypt. However, the book says-”
“What book?” Janice asked again.
“For crap’s sake,” I snapped. “Some book that monks read in Viterbo, okay?”
“The book says,” Umberto continued, looking daggers at us both, “that ‘the Virgin’s black part is the mirror image of her white part,’ which could mean that the crypt-being the black part, that is, the one below-ground-is in fact oriented west-east, with the entrance in the east, in which case the door leading to it from this room would be facing west. Don’t you agree?”
Janice and I exchanged glances; she looked precisely as dazed as I felt. “We have no idea,” I said to Umberto, “how he got to that conclusion, but at this point, we’ll believe anything.”
When Cocco heard the news, he flicked away his cigarette butt and pushed up his sleeve to set the compass on his wristwatch. And as soon as he was confident which way was west, he began yelling instructions to the men.
Minutes later, they were all busy breaking up the floor in the westernmost part of the cave, ripping out dismembered skeletons with their bare hands and tossing them aside as if they were nothing but the branches off a dead tree. It was an odd sight, the men crawling around in their tuxedos and shiny shoes, headlamps on, not the least bit worried about breathing in the dust from the disintegrating bones.
Almost sick to my stomach, I turned to Janice, who seemed completely mesmerized by the excavation. When she saw me looking at her, she shuddered slightly and said, “‘Lady, come from that nest of death, contagion, and unnatural sleep. A greater power than we can contradict hath thwarted our intents.’”
I put an arm around her, trying to shield us both from the horrendous sight. “And I who thought you’d never learn those damn lines.”
“It wasn’t the lines,” she said. “It was the role. I was never Juliet.” She wrapped my arm more tightly around her. “I could never die for love.”
I tried to read her face in the wavering light. “How do you know?”
She didn’t answer, but it didn’t matter. For just then, one of the men yelled out from the hole they were making, and we both stepped forward to see what had happened.
“They found the top of something,” said Umberto, pointing. “It looks like Friar Lorenzo was right.”
We both stretched to see what he was pointing at, but in the sporadic light of the headlamps it was nearly impossible to make out anything other than the men themselves, bustling around in the hole like frenzied beetles.
Only later, when they all climbed out to get their power tools, did I dare point my flashlight into the crater to see what they had found. “Look!” I grabbed Janice by the arm. “It’s a sealed-up door!”
In reality, it was no more than the pointy top of a white structure in the cave wall-barely three feet high-but there was no question it had once been a door frame, or at least the upper part of one, and it even had a five-petal rose carved at the very top. The door opening, however, had been sealed off with a jumble of brown brick and fragments of marble décor; whoever had overseen the work-presumably sometime in the dreadful year 1348-had clearly been in too much of a hurry to care about the building materials or the pattern.
When the men returned with their tools and started drilling into the brick, Janice and I took cover behind Umberto and Friar Lorenzo. Soon, the cave was vibrating with the mayhem of demolition, and chunks of tufa began falling like hail from the ceiling, covering us all-once more-in rubble.
No less than four layers of brick separated the mass grave from what lay beyond, and as soon as the men with the drills saw that they were through the final one, they stepped back and started kicking at the remainder to bring it down. It didn’t take them long to make a big, jagged hole, and before the dust had even settled, Cocco pushed them all aside in order to be the first man to point his torch through the opening.
In the silence following the bedlam, we very clearly heard him whistling in wonder, and the sound created an eerie, hollow echo.
“La cripta!” whispered Friar Lorenzo, crossing himself.
“Here we go,” muttered Janice. “I hope you brought garlic.”
IT TOOK COCCO’S MEN about half an hour to prepare our descent into the crypt. Digging further into the interlaced bones, and drilling out the brick in the wall as they went, they were clearly trying to bring us down to floor level. In the end, however, they got tired of the dusty job and began tossing bones and rubble through the hole, trying to create a heap that could serve as a ramp on the other side. In the beginning, the bricks came down with loud thuds on what sounded like a stone floor, but as the pile started growing, the noise became more faint.
When Cocco finally sent us through the opening, Janice and I descended into the crypt hand in hand with Friar Lorenzo, carefully making our way down the sloping pile of brick and bones, feeling not unlike airraid survivors clambering down a shattered staircase, wondering if this was the end-or the beginning-of the world.
The air was much cooler in the crypt than it had been in the cave behind us, and definitely cleaner. Looking around in the light of a dozen swaying searchlights, I half expected to see a long, narrow room with rows of grim sarcophagi and sinister Latin inscriptions on the walls, but much to my surprise it was a beautiful, even majestic space with a vaulted ceiling and tall, supporting pillars. Here and there stood a number of stone tables that might originally have been altars, but which were now stripped of all sacred objects. Apart from that, there was not much left in the crypt but shadows and silence.
“Oh, my God!” whispered Janice, pointing my torchlight at the walls around us, “Look at those frescoes! We’re the first people to see them since-”
“The Plague,” I said. “And this is probably bad for them… all this air and light.”
She giggled, but it sounded more like a sob. “That should be the very least of our concerns right now, if you don’t mind.”
Walking along the wall, looking at the frescoes, we passed by a doorway that was covered by a cast-iron gate with golden filigree. Pointing the flashlight through the bars we could see a small side chapel with graves that made me think of the village cemetery with the Tolomei sepulchre, which I had visited with cousin Peppo a lifetime ago.
Janice and I were not the only ones interested in the side chapels. All around us, Cocco’s men were systematically checking each and every door, obviously looking for Romeo and Giulietta’s grave.