Venezia was home to her, the grand monuments, the palazzos, the piazzetas … but it had all come to an end. Luigi went away on a voyage from which he never returned. She had just enough money to pay for her return passage and that of Lucia. she came back but all doors were locked against her. The woman who had transgressed had to pay her retribution. There was no acceptance. No forgiveness. She could not even claim back what was rightfully hers. She had sacrificed that right and she had no resources with which to fight back and no money to go back to Venezia where she had had the freedom to cross the bridges over those innumerable canals—the canal Grande, the ponte di Rialto, to sit beside the palm in that sheltered enclosure of the Chiesa Delia Salute, sipping wine out of a Venetian glass.

In the end Saradha was left with nothing but the memories which she would never relinquish but which drove her mad, demented, with a child who spat abuse at her. She was now spent, finished, yet with that wild light of a reckless and accomplished period of her life glittering like sharp daggers in those brilliant eyes. She had rebelled against a closed in society. Her present wretchedness she had to accept as a penitent would her karma. There was no forgiveness for her. She had to contend with a society which would ultimately destroy her. Saradha and Lucia carried whatever they possessed knotted up in bundles. They were both garbed in rags and tatters, the remains of their once fashionable modish gowns of silk and grosgrain with strands of Venetian beads round their throats and dangling from their ears. At night they slept in the corners of verandahs of the once grand houses where Saradha herself had been welcome in that almost forgotten, so distant, past.

Mother and daughter would live and die outside the pale of a tightly structured society with its invisible but unyielding facade. Lucia, the child of that misalliance, had a rare and unusual beauty—her skin like a peach ripening in a Mediterranean orchard. Her eyes, long, slanted and green, catlike. Transplanted, vulnerable and unprotected on those strange streets that her mother had fled. The two of them displaced in the city, the daily path they trod, that of survival and endurance. Living on other people’s charity. And Luigi? The man who had left Saradha or whom she had abandoned, dying somewhere, old and alone. All his voyages had perhaps ceased. The astrolabe would point to no new star. The compass in no new direction. Old age and death in some forgotten haven. Gerontion. His youth over, all passion spent. Perhaps he had steered his ship to the Happy Isles.