I
knew
every
step of
the stairs
between Sulle
Scale and Positano,
long flights that dropped
through canyons and descended
into tunnels bored in the limestone,
past orchards and the ruins of derelict
paper mills, past waterfalls and green pools.
I walked those stairs when I slept, in my dreams.
The
trail
my father
and I walked
most often led
past a painted red
gate, barring the way
to a crooked staircase.
I thought those steps led to
a private villa and paid the gate
no mind until the day I paused on the
way down with a load of marble and leaned
on it to rest and it swung open to my touch.
My
father,
he lagged
thirty or so
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?”
“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
