stairs behind me.
I stepped through the
gate onto the landing to
see where these stairs led.
I saw no villa or vineyard below,
only the staircase falling away from
me down among the sheerest of sheer cliffs.
“Father,”
I called out
as he came near,
the slap of his feet
echoing off the rocks and
his breath whistling out of him.
“Have you ever taken these stairs?”
When
he saw
me standing
inside the gate
he paled and had my
shoulder in an instant
was hauling me back onto
the main staircase. He said,
“How did you open the red gate?”
“It was
open when
I got here,”
I said. “Don’t
they lead all the
way down to the sea?”
“No.”
“But it
looks as if
they go all the
way to the bottom.”
“They go
farther than
that,” my father
said and he crossed
himself. Then he said
again, “The gate is always
locked.” And he stared at me,
the whites of his eyes showing. I
had never seen him look at me so, had
never thought I would see him afraid of me.
Lithodora
laughed when
I told her and
said my father was
old and superstitious.
She told me that there was
a tale that the stairs beyond
the painted gate led down to hell.
I had walked the mountain a thousand
times more than Lithodora and wanted to
know how she could know such a story when
I myself had never heard any mention of it.
She said
the old folks
never spoke of it,
but had put the story
down in a history of the
region, which I would know
if I had ever read any of the
teacher’s assignments. I told her
I could never concentrate on books when
she was in the same room with me. She laughed.
But when I tried to touch her throat she flinched.
My
fingers
brushed her
breast instead
and she was angry
and she told me that
I needed to wash my hands.
After
my father
died—he was
walking down the
stairs with a load
of tiles when a stray
cat shot out in front of
him and rather than step on
it, he stepped into space and
fell fifty feet to be impaled upon
a tree—I found a more lucrative use
for my donkey legs and yardarm shoulders.
I entered the employ of Don Carlotta who kept
a terraced vineyard in the steeps of Sulle Scale.
I hauled
his wine down
the eight hundred
odd steps to Positano,
where it was sold to a rich
Saracen, a prince it was told,
dark and slender and more fluent
in my language than myself, a clever
young man who knew how to read things:
musical notes, the stars, a map, a sextant.
Once I
stumbled
on a flight
of brick steps
as I was making my
way down with the Don’s
wine and a strap slipped and
the crate on my back struck the
cliff wall and a bottle was smashed.
I brought it to the Saracen on the quay.
He said either I drank it or I should have,
for that bottle was worth all I made in a month.
He told me I could consider myself paid and paid well.
He laughed and his white teeth flashed in his black face.
I was
sober when
he laughed at
me but soon enough
had a head full of wine.
Not Don Carlotta’s smooth and
peppery red mountain wine but the
cheapest Chianti in the Taverna, which
I drank with a passel of unemployed friends.
Lithodora
found me after
it was dark and she
stood over me, her dark
hair framing her cool, white
beautiful, disgusted, loving face.
She said she had the silver I was owed.
She had told her friend Ahmed that he had
insulted an honest man, that my family traded
in hard labor, not lies and he was lucky I had not—
“—did
you call
him friend?”
I said. “A monkey
of the desert who knows
nothing of Christ the lord?”
The way that
she looked at me
then made me ashamed.
The way she put the money in
front of me made me more ashamed.
“I see you have more use for this than
you have for me,” she said before she went.
I almost
got up to go
after her. Almost.
One of my friends asked,
“Have you heard the Saracen
gave your cousin a slave bracelet,
a loop of silver bells, to wear around
her ankle? I suppose in the Arab lands, such
gifts are made to every new whore in the harem.”
I came
to my feet
so quickly my
chair fell over.
I grabbed his throat
in both hands and said,
“You lie. Her father would
never allow her to accept such
a gift from a godless blackamoor.”
But
another
friend said
the Arab trader
was godless no more.
Lithodora had taught Ahmed
to read Latin, using the Bible
as his grammar, and he claimed now
to have entered into the light of Christ,
and he gave the bracelet to her with the full
knowledge of her parents, as a way to show thanks
for introducing him to the grace of our Father who art.
When
my first
friend had
recovered his
breath, he told
me Lithodora climbed
the stairs every night
to meet with him secretly
in empty shepherds’ huts or in
the caves, or among the ruins of
the paper mills, by the roar of the
waterfall, as it leapt like liquid silver
in the moonlight, and in such places she was
his pupil and he a firm and most demanding tutor.
He
always
went ahead
and then she
would ascend the
stairs in the dark
wearing the bracelet.
When he heard the bells he
would light a candle to show her
where he waited to begin the lesson.
I
was
so drunk.
I set
out for
Lithodora’s
house, with no
idea what I meant
to do when I got there.
I came up behind the cottage
where she lived with her parents
thinking I would throw a few stones
to wake her and bring her to her window.
But as I stole toward the back of the house