For the next eight years, my father forbade me everything except for the Villa Cassimati and a church in the Fortezza. I could walk there with my eyes closed. Instead, I could walk there only when accompanied by my father or brothers on Sundays, Holy Days, and Pascha.

I would come to despise the house where I was born, even its courtyard with the orange bougainvilleas and the sprawling fig tree whose leaves broke the sunlight into pieces of gold. I resented most of all the birds that flocked to the tree when the figs were ripe. The fruits on the uppermost branches, the ones closest to the sun, were the most plump, but Kanella would not bother with them. “We have enough,” she insisted, waving a hand back and forth in front of her face. “Let the birds have them,” she said.

Kanella was from the countryside, and they all believed that this setting aside was required. Whether it was fruits of the arbors or of the vines, the peasants, as my father and brothers called them, always left some of the harvest as an offering to the birds. In return, the birds gathered and pecked, cawing their hunger and their gratitude. It never took these creatures long to cover the courtyard with their fallen feathers and their sticky pieces of flesh, which upon second glance were the pink insides of the ripened figs, torn apart by beaks and claws. The birds would then lift, a dark shawl picked up by the wind, and disappear.

I would watch them and cry. After the first year had passed and I understood that the birds were free and I was not, I began to collect their feathers. If I had enough, I could sew them onto my clothes and paste them onto my shoes. I was too stupid and dull at eighteen to dream of flying. I only wanted to wear my dress of drab feathers and lie down and die, a bird that had lost the battle for the sweetest fruits.

I did not know then that all women bled.

Do not write that down, Elesa.

On second thought, please do.

Patricio should know the body that God gave to women.

Kanella knew, but she did not tell me. She gave me the cloths. She had them laundered when they were soaked through. She shooed me into my bedroom whenever the back of my dresses showed their blooms. She gathered chamomiles on her daily walks and dried them for tea for when I bowed to the pain. What Kanella never did for me was what I needed most. She did not tell me that my father’s house was not my prison. It was the body that God gave me that was my prison, and within that body there were both the lock and the key. Kanella knew.

On the morning of my twenty-fifth name day, Kanella informed me that from that day forward I could attend a service of the Daily Cycle at the church in the Fortezza. She specified the Third Hour service, which began at nine in the morning, when Pontius Pilate handed down his judgment against Christ. I was taken aback by what she was saying to me. My father and brothers were never at home in the mornings, which Kanella, of course, knew.