UMBERTO FOUND ME in the garden, crouched under the arbor he had once built for us when Aunt Rose was in bed with pneumonia. Sitting down next to me on the wet bench, he did not comment on my childish disappearing act, just handed me an immaculately ironed handkerchief and observed me as I blew my nose.
“It’s not the money,” I said, defensively. “Did you see her smirk? Did you hear what she said? She doesn’t care about Aunt Rose. She never did. It’s not fair!”
“Who told you life was fair?” Umberto looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Not me.”
“I know! I just don’t understand-but it’s my own fault. I always thought she was serious about treating us equally. I borrowed money-” I clutched my face to avoid his stare. “Don’t say it!”
“Are you finished?”
I shook my head. “You have no idea how finished I am.”
“Good.” He opened his jacket and took out a dry but slightly bent manila envelope. “Because she wanted you to have this. It’s a big secret. Gallagher doesn’t know. Janice doesn’t know. It’s for you only.”
I was immediately suspicious. It was very unlike Aunt Rose to give me something behind Janice’s back, but then, it was also very unlike her to write me out of her will. Clearly, I had not known my mother’s aunt as well as I thought I did, nor had I fully known myself until now. To think that I could sit here-today of all days-and cry over money. Although she had been in her late fifties when she adopted us, Aunt Rose had been like a mother to us, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for wanting anything more from her.
When I finally opened it, the envelope turned out to contain three things: a letter, a passport, and a key.
“This is my passport!” I exclaimed. “How did she-?” I looked at the picture page again. It was my photo all right, and my date of birth, but the name was not mine. “Giulietta? Giulietta Tolomei?”
“That is your real name. Your aunt changed it when she brought you here from Italy. She changed Janice’s name, too.”
I was stunned. “But why?… How long have you known?”
He looked down. “Why don’t you read the letter?”
I unfolded the two sheets of paper. “You wrote this?”
“She dictated it to me.” Umberto smiled sadly. “She wanted to make sure you could read it.”
The letter read as follows:
My dearest Julie,
I have asked Umberto to give you this letter after my funeral, so I suppose that means I am dead. Anyway, I know you are still angry that I never took you girls to Italy, but believe me when I say that it was for your own good. How could I ever forgive myself if something happened to you? But now you are older. And there is something there, in Siena, that your mother left for you. You alone. I don’t know why, but that is Diane for you, bless her soul. She found something, and supposedly it is still there. By the sound of it, it was much more valuable than anything I have ever owned. And that is why I decided to do it this way, and give the house to Janice. I was hoping we could avoid all this and forget about Italy, but now I am beginning to think that it would be wrong of me if I never told you.
Here is what you must do. Take this key and go to the bank in Palazzo Tolomei. In Siena. I think it is for a safety-deposit box. Your mother had it in her purse when she died. She had a financial advisor there, a man called Francesco Maconi. Find him and tell him that you are Diane Tolomei’s daughter. Oh, and that is another thing. I changed your names. Your real name is Giulietta Tolomei. But this is America. I thought Julie Jacobs made more sense, but no one can spell that either. What is the world coming to? No, I have had a good life. Thanks to you. Oh, and another thing: Umberto is going to get you a passport with your real name. I have no idea how you do these things, but never mind, we will leave that to him.
I am not going to say goodbye. We will see each other again in Heaven, God willing. But I wanted to make sure you get what is rightly yours. Just be careful over there. Look what happened to your mother. Italy can be a very strange place. Your great-grandmother was born there, of course, but I’ll tell you, you couldn’t have dragged her back therefor all the money in the world. Anyway, don’t tell anyone what I have told you. And try to smile more. You have such a beautiful smile, when you use it.
Much love amp; 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 knew 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 travelers, 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.