Illustration by Wenting Li
Ten years ago, love was on a station platform in Florence, Italy, while I waited for a train to take me to Verona, the home of Romeo and Juliet.
I have never forgotten that day.
The platform was full of people scurrying in all directions and sizzling like red hot ants under the roof of a Victorian glass house. People were eating, slugging back Coca Cola in conspicuous red cans, reading newspapers, browsing souvenir shops, calming children, running to and from departure platforms and arguing, lots of arguing.
I perched on the base of a cement pillar, thinking Italy was starving for seats in public places.
A man came into focus hiding behind a pillar on Platform 1. He wore a rakish black hat on curly black hair, a black shirttail hung loosely over black jeans. His brown eyes darted back and forth as he peeked around the post, leaning slightly toward the train tracks, his eyes fixed in the direction of an incoming train. A woman in a pencil-thin ebony skirt and stiletto heels clicked down the length of the platform. Her brows were plucked to perfection but quirked on her furrowed forehead as she called, “Alberto?” In my mind, I tacked on “wherefore art thou?” Alberto pranced from behind the pillar, like a horse at a Palio di Siena horse race. Laughing, he grabbed her, passionately kissed her mouth, having experienced how much she wanted him.
I climbed on the train and one hour later arrived at the front entrance of the Verona station. Roads radiated from the station like the spokes of a giant wheel. The street to the courtyard of the Capulet home was directly in front of me with a prominent sign and arrow. At its end was an arched passage thick with ivy so green it looked good enough to eat.
On the inner walls of the tunnel that leads to the courtyard, folded pieces of paper were jammed into cracks. Women and pinkly dressed girls crowded the passage looking for an empty chink to poke their love notes into while their men stood with downcast eyes in embarrassed self-consciousness, like chastised chimpanzees in a zoo ducking behind the obligatory tree stripped of its leaves. The tunnel was a mosaic of paper tessera tiles declaring dreams, telling stories of love, pronouncing prophecies and speaking to hope.
I did not add a note, wanting to reject the flimsy evidence of lasting love designed to make-believe true love can last forever and conquers all.
I don’t believe wishes or superstitions determine my life, although I have lit votive candles in front of altars and shrines, prayed and howled at the moon, pulled apart turkey wishbones and thrown spilled salt over my left shoulder.
In Paris, at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, lipstick kisses and notes of devotion are left on the stone edifice of Oscar Wilde’s gravestone. Branches of a tree outside the Virgin Mary’s last home in Turkey are knotted with torn strips of white cloth, the raggedy edges looking like my nighttime ringlet routine when I was 13. In Umbria, Italy, there is a barbed-wire fence dedicated to Saint Francis of Assisi, often called a saint of peace, every point covered with chewing gum. Clearly, we are a superstitious and ritualistic species that believes in magic, true love and fairy tales.
Eventually, I entered the courtyard of the Capulet home. In front of me, a lush green balcony looked like a scene from the stage of an Elizabethan drama. A brass life-sized statue of Juliet stood in the garden under the balcony, her left breast faded to a shopworn patina from the rubbing and cupping by millions of hands.
“Is that it?” I said to the man standing next to me, pointing to a balcony draped with mixed greens hanging like leafy curtains.
“No,” he said and stabbed his finger toward a diminutive, second-storey stone balcony without a stitch of green to cover its carved arches and columns, and only supported by two stone buttresses at each end.
Four giggling girls, one with flaming pink hair, lean with their elbows on the balcony and look down at the courtyard from their stage, waving in amazement and capturing the crowd’s attention. They spoke in Italian, but I knew what they said: “Look. I’m in the very place where it happened.”
The girls usurped my moment. I sighed and willed them to leave the balcony, wanting to take a picture without them contaminating the magic. Since the balcony was high off the ground, I wondered how Romeo even got up there. Then I remembered. It was a fantasy designed to seduce me – a faux shrine. It was the figment of a playwright’s imagination. It never happened.
I am drawn to theatre, fairy tales and mythology. Adam had his Eve, Snow White, Belle and Cinderella had their princes. Ken and Barbie have spent decades working on the forever-after, one-and-only nature of romantic love. In Verona, I closed my eyes, made a modest wish for love prefaced by “if it’s to be.” Then I walked into the gift shop to buy a postcard with an uninhabited balcony to send my granddaughters and imprint the fantasy into their script and dreams.
Wendy Weseen lives in Kamloops, B.C.
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