I hadn’t been entirely honest with the Grand Duke. In fact, I hadn’t been honest at all. Though it was true that Siracusa was idyllic, my childhood and adolescence had been anything but, and in the end, only a few weeks before my twentieth birthday, I had made my escape. With every mile I travelled, my heart seemed to diminish, as if it were not blood or muscle but a ball of scarlet wool unravelling. I had been driven from the place I loved, the people I most cared for. I kept thinking I heard footsteps behind me. Voices. My neck ached from looking over my shoulder. I was frightened, but I was also furious. Furious because my life was about to change for ever. Furious because no one had defended me. Furious most of all because I was innocent.
My brother, Jacopo, had taken against me from the very beginning. Seven years older than me, he was tall, fair-haired, and athletic – less like a brother than a reverse image. With my olive complexion and my dark-brown curls, I was always told I resembled my father’s father, who had been a cloth merchant in the south of Spain – like most surnames that begin with Z, Zummo was probably Arabic in origin – but Jacopo had inherited my mother’s looks. Her parents, both light-skinned, had been born in the Piedmont.
One of my earliest memories was 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.
‘No, don’t go to sleep,’ the woman said.
Only after they had dropped me at 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 f*cking 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.
*