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,
