the lavender skin beneath her eyes. I was seeing her in minute detail, as if through a magnifying glass. I ran my finger slowly from her perineum to her clitoris. I was hardly touching her at all, but the liquid inside her rose to meet my fingertip, her cunt a cup full to the brim. I could delay no longer. Her cries, though uttered next to my ear, sounded as faint and distant as birds flying high up in the air, birds not visible to the naked eye. Afterwards, we lay side by side, and stared up into a sky that seemed limitless.
‘That wasn’t the first time, was it?’ I said.
‘Yes. Well, no –’
I looked at her.
‘I was attacked once,’ she said. ‘When I was fourteen.’
There was a shifty-looking man who came through Torremagna every few months with a mule-drawn cart and a grindstone. He would always blow the same three haunting notes on his flute to let people know that he had arrived.
‘A knife-sharpener,’ I said.
Faustina nodded. ‘He didn’t used to stop at our house. Ginevra didn’t trust him.’
One day she was south of the village, in the hollow where the mill house was, when she heard him coming. He lifted his flute to his lips as he approached and played a set of notes she didn’t recognize. She asked him why the tune had changed. He would show her why, he said, and seized her by the wrist. He would cut her throat if she didn’t let him show her. He was grinning. His teeth were brown, but his shoulder-length hair was oddly clean and shiny. He pinned her to the back of his cart, her head jammed against the grindstone, and stuck his thing in her. Before he could finish, though, he cried out and dropped to the ground. Vespi stood behind him, wielding an axe-handle.
‘I didn’t know he was capable of something like that,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’
‘He was so upset. I think he suffered more than I did.’
Darker now, almost black, the sky appeared to have a surface to it, like water. It was deep too, and for a few giddy moments I felt I was falling upwards, and that the stars would bounce off me as I passed, no heavier than hail-stones, and that I could fall like that for ever.
‘He would have been a good father to you,’ I said.
‘You think so? I never thought of it like that.’ She leaned on one elbow and looked down at me with a sudden earnestness. ‘If I asked you to take me away from here, would you do it?’
‘From Florence?’
‘Yes.’
‘But my work is here,’ I said, ‘and I’m being paid so well.’
‘What if I said I was in danger?’
‘What kind of danger?’
She lay back. ‘It’s all right. It was just an idea.’
‘No, really. Tell me.’
‘I shouldn’t have brought it up. We hardly know each other –’
The flatness in her voice told me I had missed a chance to prove something to her, and just then, as I looked at her, I would have promised her anything – anything at all.
‘Where would we go?’
I was desperately trying to regain the ground I had occupied only seconds earlier. It was like the moment in her story where she ran up the track with a head full of frantic, fractured prayers. But there was no way back. There never is. I realized that what she had called ‘an idea’ meant something incalculable to her. It had cost her an effort to put the question, and she had done so against her better judgement. My lukewarm response had disappointed her all the more because she had, at some deep level, predicted it. It was too late now to talk of Genoa or Paris.
‘I love you,’ I said.
‘Do you?’ She looked startled, and no wonder: I had surprised myself. I suddenly felt younger than she was, even though I was almost twice her age.
‘It’s true,’ I said stubbornly. ‘One day you’ll realize.’
A clock tolled the hour. The air was motionless. The sky seemed lower than before, and heavier.
She rose to her feet and looked around. ‘I should be going.’
Walking home, I went over some of what she had told me in the weeks since I had met her. Mimmo’s friendship, Vespi’s courtship – both had foundered, come to nothing. These weren’t stories she had dredged up at random. No, they illustrated something fundamental, something she believed – or feared – might be true. How had