stumbled on a flight of brick steps as I was making my way down with the Don’s wine and a strap slipped and the crate on my back struck the cliff wall and a bottle was smashed. I brought it to the Saracen on the quay. He said either I drank it or I should have, for that bottle was worth all I made in a month. He told me I could consider myself paid and paid well. He laughed and his white teeth flashed in his black face.
I was sober when he laughed at me but soon enough had a head full of wine. Not Don Carlotta’s smooth and peppery red mountain wine but the cheapest Chianti in the Taverna, which I drank with a passel of unemployed friends.
Lithodora found me after it was dark and she stood over me, her dark hair framing her cool, white, beautiful, disgusted, loving face. She said she had the silver I was owed. She had told her friend Ahmed that he had insulted an honest man, that my family traded in hard labor, not lies, and he was lucky I had not —
“Did you call him friend?” I said. “A monkey of the desert who knows nothing of Christ the lord?”
The way that she looked at me then made me ashamed. The way she put the money in front of me made me more ashamed. “I see you have more use for this than you have for me,” she said before she went.
I almost got up to go after her. Almost. One of my friends asked, “Have you heard the Saracen gave your cousin a slave bracelet, a loop of silver bells, to wear around her ankle? I suppose in the Arab lands, such gifts are made to every new whore in the harem.”
I came to my feet so quickly my chair fell over. I grabbed his throat in both hands and said, “You lie. Her father would never allow her to accept such a gift from a godless blackamoor.”
But another friend said the Arab trader was godless no more. Lithodora had taught Ahmed to read Latin, using the Bible as his grammar, and he claimed now to have entered into the light of Christ, and he gave the bracelet to her with the full knowledge of her parents, as a way to show thanks for introducing him to the grace of our Father who art.
When my first friend had recovered his breath, he told me Lithodora climbed the stairs every night to meet with him secretly in empty shepherds’ huts or in the caves, or among the ruins of the paper mills, by the roar of the waterfall, as it leapt like liquid silver in the moonlight, and in such places she was his pupil and he a firm and most demanding tutor. He always went ahead and then she would ascend the stairs in the dark wearing the bracelet. When he heard the bells he would light a candle to show her where he waited to begin the lesson.
I was so drunk.
I set out for Lithodora’s house, with no idea what I meant to do when I got there. I came up behind the cottage where she lived with her parents thinking I would throw a few stones to wake her and bring her to her window. But as I stole toward the back of the house I heard a silvery tinkling somewhere above me. She was already on the stairs and climbing into the stars with her white dress swinging from her hips and the bracelet around her ankle so bright in the gloom.
My heart thudded, a cask flung down a staircase: doom doom doom doom. I knew the hills better than anyone and I ran another way, making a steep climb up crude steps of mud to get ahead of her, then rejoining the main path to Sulle Scale. I still had the silver coin the Saracen prince had given her, when she went to him and dishonored me by begging him to pay me the wage I was properly owed.
I put his silver in a tin cup I had and slowed to a walk and went along shaking his Judas coin in my old battered mug. Such a pretty ringing it made in the echoing canyons, on the stairs, in the night, high above Positano and the crash and sigh of the sea, as the tide consummated the desire of water to pound the earth into submission.