grin faded so fast that her whole face seemed to shrink.
I joined her on the bench. ‘What is it?’
She shook her head.
‘Tell me.’
His name was Mimmo Righetti, she said, and he lived on the narrow, curving street where she grew up, in a house with a green door. His father worked with wood. His mother was dead. Why did Mimmo think she was a witch? Perhaps he had heard people in the village gossiping, or perhaps it was just a feeling that had come to him, as sudden and unprompted as a shiver. Your mother’s not your mother, he would chant in his fluty voice, and she would pretend that his face was a window and she was looking through it at the view, and Mimmo would shout, Look! You see? You’re definitely a witch! because all the little hairs had lifted on his arms. But he had identified the central mystery of her life: her mother wasn’t her mother. Later, when he was eight or nine, he added a second line: And your father’s never here. It was true: he wasn’t. Her father, Remo Ferralis, was someone she did not know, and hardly ever saw. That was something else she didn’t understand. When Mimmo called her a witch, it was as if he was addressing all the aspects of her life that she could not explain. Whether he intended it or not, he had given her a way of thinking about herself.
She did her best to live up to his expectations. She would gather plants and herbs and tie them in bunches and hang them from the beams to dry. She would spend hours distilling potions, which they would drink, and which would give them stomach ache or hiccups or diarrhoea. She would build fires, make offerings. Cast spells. She would try to transform herself. Your mother’s not your mother and your father’s never here, Mimmo would chant, and she would whirl round the flames, her black hair flying, and Mimmo would sit on his haunches, hugging his knees, and sometimes she really did feel as if her face had changed, as if she had turned into another person – or no, as if she had become someone, finally become someone – and it thrilled her, and scared the daylights out of her, and made her feel different, special, powerful.
One warm September afternoon, as they returned from an expedition to the woods, trees rising on one side of the white dust road, a steep drop on the other, she told Mimmo they were going to attempt something extraordinary.
‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to fly – like birds.’
‘Like birds!’ He tipped his head back and stretched out his arms, and if she hadn’t grabbed him by the collar he would have missed his footing and plunged headlong into the gully, a fate that had befallen more than one drink-addled peasant on his way home from a dance.
‘Careful,’ she said. ‘You haven’t had the potion yet.’
He grinned. ‘Where are we going?’
‘The ghost house.’
‘I knew it!’
They skirted the village and turned on to a dirt track that led past a vineyard and an olive grove and out along a low ridge. Up ahead, she could see the two tall cypresses that marked the entrance to Sabatino Vespi’s property. It was Vespi who had given her the goatskin bag she was carrying. That morning she had packed it with everything they would need: a jar of water from the ancient spring below the village, some dead skin shaved from Mimmo’s heel, five spiders’ legs, the head of a rose that she had dried in the sun and ground to a fine powder, a chopped-up clove of garlic, part of a honeycomb, a grey hair found near the altar – she thought she had seen it fall from the priest’s head during a Mass to celebrate the Assumption of the Virgin – some sprigs of basil and oregano, a blue flower, a few of her own fingernail clippings, some sawdust from Mimmo’s father’s workshop, and, most important of all, a glinting black-green feather, which must have belonged to a raven or a crow.
After passing Vespi’s house, the track dipped down and curved to the right, and the roof of the ghost house appeared below, crouching on a promontory that overlooked the wooded valley to the north and the smooth clay hills beyond. It was said that the woman who owned the place had been born in the same year as Galileo, which would have