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 wondered how she could know such a story when I myself had never heard mention of it. She said the old folks never spoke of it, but had put the tale 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?”