When no one responded with a single word, she eventually lost her spirit. Weak with grief, she lay on her bed with a sheet over her head, unable to think of anything but Romeo’s molested body and her own inability to prevent his grisly death. Only now did fearful servants come to the door to offer food and drink, but Giulietta refused it all, even water, in the hope of expediting her own demise and following her lover to Paradise before he got too far ahead.
Her only duty left in life, she felt, was to pen a secret letter to her sister Giannozza. It was meant as a goodbye note, but in the end it became just one letter out of many, written by the light of a candle stump and hidden under a loose floorboard with all the others. To think, she wrote, that she had once been so intrigued by this world and everyone in it; now she understood that Friar Lorenzo had been right all along. “The mortal world is a world of dust,” he used to say. “Everywhere you step it crumbles away right beneath your foot, and if you do not walk carefully, you will fall over the edge and into limbo.” This limbo was where she must surely be right now, thought Giulietta-the abyss from which no prayers could be heard.
GIANNOZZA, SHE KNEW, was no stranger to this sort of misery. For all his novel ideas that his daughters should be able to read and write, their father had been an old-fashioned man when it came to marriage. Daughters, to him, were emissaries that could be sent out to build alliances with important people in foreign places, and so when his wife’s cousin-a nobleman with a large estate north of Rome-had expressed an interest in closer ties with the Tolomeis, he had informed Giulietta that she would have to go. She was, after all, four minutes older than her sister, Giannozza, and it is the duty of the eldest to go first.
Hearing this news, the sisters had spent many days in tears at the prospect of being torn apart and settled at such a distance from each other. But their father was unbending, and their mother even more so-after all, the groom was her cousin and no stranger-and in the end the girls had approached their parents with a humble proposal.
“Father,” Giannozza had said, as she was the only one bold enough to speak her mind, “Giulietta is honored that you have such plans for her, but she begs you to consider whether it might not be better to send me instead. The truth is, her heart was always bent on the convent, and she fears she would not make a very happy bride to anyone other than Christ. I, on the other hand, have no objection to an earthly marriage; in fact, I believe I should rather like to run a house on my own. And so we were wondering”-now, for the first time, Giannozza had eyed their mother as well, hoping for her aquiescence-“whether you would consider dispatching us both together-me as a bride, and Giulietta as a novice at a nearby convent. That way, we can see each other whenever we wish, and you will not have to worry about our well-being.”
Seeing that Giulietta was so against the idea of marriage, their father finally agreed to let Giannozza take her place. But when it came to the other half of the plan, he remained dismissive. “If Giulietta will not marry now,” he had said, seated behind his large desk, arms crossed, as his women stood before him in supplication, “she will marry later, when she grows out of this… nonsense.” He had shaken his head, angry at this interference in his affairs. “I should never have taught you girls to read! I suspect you have been reading the Bible behind my back-that is enough to fill a girl’s head with folly!”
“But Father-”
Only now had their mother stepped forward, eyes ablaze. “Shame on you,” she had hissed at her daughters, “for putting your father in this situation! We are not poor, and yet you ask him to behave as if we were! You both have dowries large enough to tempt a prince! But we have been selective. Many have come calling for you, Giulietta, but your father has turned them all away, because he knew we could do better. And now you want him to rejoice in seeing you as a nun?… As if we did not have the means and connections for you to marry? Shame on you for putting your own selfish desires before the dignity of your family!”
And so Giannozza had been married to a man she had never seen before, and had spent her wedding night with a groom thrice her age, who had the eyes of her mother but the hands of a stranger. When she said goodbye to her family the next morning-to leave her home forever with her new husband-she had clung to them all one by one, without a word, her lips pressed tightly together to prevent herself from cursing her parents.
The words came later, in endless letters from her new home, addressed not to Giulietta directly, but to their friend, Friar Lorenzo, that he might deliver her missives in stealth, when he had Giulietta in confession in the chapel. These were letters that could never be forgotten, letters that must haunt the reader forever, and Giulietta would often allude to them in her own writing, such as when she agreed with her sister that “there are, indeed, as you say, men in this world who thrive on evil, men who live only to see others suffer.” But she would always encourage Giannozza to look at the positive side of things-her husband was old and sickly, and would surely die while she was still young, and even though she was not allowed out of doors, at least the view from her castle was magnificent-and would even go as far as to point out that “contrary to what you say, my dearest, there is some pleasure to be found in the company of men. They are not all rotten through and through.”
In her farewell letter to Giannozza, however, composed in her prison cell the day after Tebaldo’s funeral, Giulietta could no longer speak so bravely in favor of the future. “You were right,” she wrote simply, “and I was wrong. When life hurts more than death, it is not worth living.”
AND SO SHE HAD decided to die, and to refuse all nourishment until her body gave in, setting her soul free to reunite with Romeo. But on the third day of her hunger strike-her lips parched and her head throbbing-a new thought began to haunt her, namely, the question of where exactly in Paradise she would have to go in order to find him. It was obviously a vast place-it had to be-and there was no saying whether the two of them would be sent to the same region. In fact, she rather feared they would not.
While she might not be perfectly blameless in the eyes of God, she was still an innocent maid; Romeo, on the other hand, had undoubtedly left behind a long trail of mischief. Furthermore, there had been no funerary rites and no prayers said over his body, and so it was even doubtful whether he would go to Paradise at all. Perhaps he was doomed to wander around as a ghost, wounded and bloody, until-if ever-some kind Samaritan took pity on him and finally put his body to rest.
Giulietta sat up in bed with a gasp. If she died now, who was to make sure Romeo was properly buried? Leave it to the Tolomeis to discover the body next time there was a family funeral-in all likelihood her own-and they would most certainly give it anything but peace. No, she thought, reaching out for the water at last, her weak fingers barely able to grasp the cup, she would have to stay alive until she had spoken with Friar Lorenzo and explained the situation to him.
Where on earth was the monk? In her misery, Giulietta had not wanted to speak to anyone, not even her old friend, and it had been a relief that he had never come to see her. But now-her heart set on a plan she could not possibly execute on her own-she was furious with him for not being at her side. Only later, after wolfing down every scrap of food she could find in the room, did it occur to her that her uncle Tolomei might have prohibited the monk’s visits altogether, in an attempt at preventing him from spreading reports of her misery.