I reached out to touch the chair upon which a shirt was draped. I rubbed the material between my fingers and opened myself to what I found.
Emotions flowed into me; sometimes they were accompanied by images. I moved around the room, running my hands over every surface, feeling the man who owned these things, understanding him in a way that had been denied me.
It did not stop there. Emboldened by my new awareness and knowledge, I left the workshop and ascended to the piano nobile. As I passed the objects in the corridor, I touched them. I didn’t care anymore who saw me. The servants who did ignored me, believing me lost in reflection or suffering ennui. I extracted and, before I could stop myself, distilled a little of something back into them. Tapestries, chairs, mirrors, paintings, nothing was spared. Sensations warred inside me. Feelings such as I’d never known – jealousy, craven lust, deception – it was all there, carved deep into the fabric of the casa itself. But there was also love, hate, loathing and lies – dreadful, terrible lies.
I moved along faster now, my breathing heavy. I had to stop. This was too much, too great for me to bear. Outside Giaconda’s door, I hesitated. Just one tiny extraction, one little insight into the woman who hovered over my life like an avenging angel. I slowly reached out and then touched the door handle.
I staggered and fell into the chair against the wall.
‘Who is there?’ called Giaconda. ‘Hafeza?’
I was panting now. The shock of my discovery almost undid me. I whirled to my feet and ran down the passage. I reached my door and wrenched it open and ran inside, straight into Hafeza, almost knocking her off her feet. I threw my arms out to steady her, not realising that I was still extracting. It was only when I saw the horror spreading across Hafeza’s face, saw the way her eyes were locked onto mine, that I knew what I was doing. But by then it was too late. I could not stop.
Standing in the middle of my room, I held Hafeza in the thrall of my gaze, my touch, and after all these months of anger and distrust, I came to know her.
Taken from her family just as she was reaching womanhood, she had been locked in the hold of a ship, chained to other children, other women. Beaten, starved, thirsty and tired, she’d been too afraid to speak. She worried about her mother, her sisters, her father, the young man who had just begun to court her. I felt the passage of time – it did not lessen her loss; that only intensified.
Next she was on a platform, a skinny, frail girl with black skin, stripped for all to see. Others were beside her, trying to hide their nakedness, protect what little of their dignity remained. Below them, men jostled and fought to get closer; their hands flew up, their gaping mouths shrieked. It was all babble to Hafeza. She did not understand. She didn’t know what they wanted, that they were bartering for her.
Then she was here, in Casa Maleovelli. A fat old woman with red hands washed her. She cried then, not from the cloth that, ignoring her wounds, roughly broke the scabs away and made her bleed, but because she knew she would never get her former life back. The big woman scrubbed her hair and then cut it coarsely, with a knife. She tugged and pulled, oblivious to Hafeza’s protests.
Hafeza pleaded. I heard words even though I did not understand exactly what they meant. My heart seized. Hafeza could talk! She was not born mute as I had believed. I held her tighter, searching, probing, what had happened to her? I could not let her go.
Another woman came towards Hafeza followed by a beautiful little girl. The girl had long dark hair, green eyes and olive skin. She looked like the woman leading her into the room, her mother. Only I saw calculation in this young one’s eyes that made that of her mother’s seem harmless. Hafeza saw it too and cringed. Even so, she was unprepared when the child handed her mother a long, shiny knife.
The pain of having her tongue cut out gradually faded along with Hafeza’s hope. She came to understand these people whom she now worked for and what they required of her. They didn’t need to remove her tongue – she would have