being woken by Jacopo in the middle of the night. I couldn’t have been more than four at the time. Come on, Gaetano, he said. We’re going for a walk. He made it sound like an adventure. As soon as we were out of sight of the house, though, he began to call me names. I was a shrimp and a weevil. I was a darkie. I was the bastard son of a servant, and Jacopo’s parents – his stupid, soft-hearted parents – had taken me in and given me their name. When we reached the Maniace fortress, where the sea wall was at its highest, he hoisted me on to the parapet, then gripped my ankles and lowered me over the edge. I was upside-down, the black waves lurching below. You’re heavier than I thought, he said. I’m not sure I can hold on any longer. The clouds hung between my feet like chunks of dented metal. Oh, no, he said. I think I’m going to drop you. The urine ran up my body and into my hair. Jacopo just laughed. Saves me pissing on you, I suppose, he said.
Two years later, our father died suddenly. An accident in the shipyard, we were told. By then, Jacopo’s voice had broken, and he had fuzz on his upper lip; he was already a man – to me, at least. You killed my father, he would tell me when I was on my own with him. He would throw a blanket over my head and hit me, and his fists were hard as horses’ hooves. Once, he buried me up to my neck in sand and left me there all day. When he dug me out, my face was burnt. Darkie, he said. I was so numb I couldn’t stand. He watched me cry out as the feeling crept back into my body. You killed him, he said. It was you. Our mother didn’t notice. She was too busy grieving.
One December evening, not long after my fifteenth birthday, Jacopo came and sat beside my bed, his head lowered, his hands dangling between his thighs. It was during the annual festival that marked the decapitation of our patron saint, Lucia. Ill at the time, I hadn’t joined the procession that moved in silence through the city to the sepulchre beyond the gates. If I stared at Jacopo that night, it was because I had never seen him look vulnerable before. All he could talk about was the girl who had walked next to the statue of the murdered saint, and how her yellow hair had gleamed, and how her lips had parted, as if in expectation of a kiss. Her name was Ornella Camilleri, and her father was a barber-surgeon from Valletta. What skin she had! Like moonlight. No, moonlight wasn’t rare enough. His hands clenched. In any case, he hoped he had caught her eye. Being Jacopo, he was accustomed to getting what he wanted. Imagine his astonishment, then – imagine his outrage – when Ornella failed to reciprocate his feelings. He began to rail against her stuck-up ways. Who did she think she was?
That year, I would often row across the shallow bay to the Embarcadero, then climb the hill to the ancient limestone quarries where I would sit at the cool mouth of a cave and lose myself in Vesalius or Baltasar Gracián or whoever I happened to be reading at the time. One afternoon, as I walked back down to the harbour, I sensed something behind me. I whirled round. A man in rags. Bloodshot eyes, fist raised. There was a burst of light in my brain, and then a smell of burning.
A woman’s face was slowly tipped out of the dark bowl of the sky. She seemed placid, capable; I didn’t know her. Above her, and far smaller, far more pale, was another face, that of a girl. She was staring down, her hair the colour of the pears that grew in our courtyard at home, and I felt I was one of the strangers who had gathered, and a stab of envy went through me because I wanted to be the object of her gaze. Then the whole scene shifted or revolved. When I realized I was the person on the ground, I was filled with relief and gratitude, and all I could think of was to close my eyes and drift away.