my house did it occur to me that the girl with the pear-blond hair must have been Ornella.
That night, Jacopo looked in on me.
‘A tramp?’ he said when I told him what had happened. ‘I would have flattened him.’
‘Always the hero,’ I murmured.
He thrust his face so close to mine that I could smell the grappa on his breath. Since his rejection by the Camilleri girl, as he called her, he had started spending time on the waterfront in Graziella, arm-wrestling fishermen and pinching the fat on the hips of the innkeeper’s daughter.
‘Look at you,’ he said, grabbing a handful of my dark-brown curls and twisting. ‘You wormed your way into this family. You fucking worm –’
‘Language, Jacopo.’
Our mother had appeared in the doorway.
Jacopo draped a heavy, careless arm around her shoulders. ‘You’re quite right, mother. Worm was a bit strong.’
A few days later, I called at the Camilleri residence, a tall grey-white house at the southern tip of Ortigia, not far from the fortress. As chance would have it, it was Ornella herself who answered the door.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Much better, thanks.’
‘You have a bruise.’ She put her fingers to the equivalent place on her own forehead, a gesture so intimate that she might have touched me after all.
In the parlour she stood by the shutters, which were half-closed against the heat. If she gave the impression of aloofness, it had to do with the angle at which she carried her head, I decided, and with the tilt of her top lip. In other words, it was something she had no say over, and might not even have been aware of. I wanted to thank her, I said, for saving me.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ she said. ‘It was all Laura’s doing. My governess. I’m hopeless in emergencies, not practical at all.’ She turned from the window, her eyes grey as the sea on an October morning. ‘Something strange. You were lying on the footpath, dazed and bleeding, but when you noticed me, you smiled …’
Yes, it had been strange. That rush of gratitude, the feeling of well-being. The sudden, irresistible desire for oblivion. As if all my living had been done now that I had seen her face.
‘Maybe I was happy to be rescued,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t that kind of smile.’
A brief silence followed, during which we both appeared to be thinking. Not long afterwards, I said I had to leave.
As I reached the end of the hall, another thought occurred to me, and I swung round. Ornella must have been stepping forwards, ready to shut the door behind me, because she was suddenly so close that I could see the gold spokes in her cool grey eyes. If she ran into my brother, I said, it might be best not to tell him I had visited her house. In fact, it might be best not to mention me at all.
She looked startled.
‘You don’t know him,’ I went on. ‘If he finds out we’ve spoken –’
‘I know him a little. He frightens me.’
‘He frightens me too – and I have to live with him.’
‘I won’t mention you,’ she said. ‘I promise.’
‘You’ve never seen me. You’ve never even heard of me.’ I had become giddy, perhaps because I had inadvertently found a way of making her my ally. ‘You don’t know I exist.’
Out on the street again, I walked without noticing where I was going. Before long, I found myself above the Porto Grande. The sea was smooth that day, and paler than the sky – more like light than water. I rested my forearms on the warm stone of the wall. Since Jacopo had all the perceived advantages – a classically proportioned face, a warrior’s physique – he had no grounds for jealousy or hatred, yet I had spent most of my life trying to avoid the blows he aimed at me. As I looked south towards Egg Rock and the low green headland of Plemmirio, I realized that if he learned of my encounter with Ornella he would have all the grounds he needed. We had been alone together. I had seen the gold in her grey eyes. That would be enough, more than enough.
*
I came back from Mass one day to find that a consignment of wax had been delivered to my room. I cut the cord that held the wrapping in place, and there it was, a brownish-yellow block, about the size of a child’s torso. Running