“But who would accompany me?” I asked her.

“You can walk there on your own,” Kanella replied. “Your father has given his consent.”

I stood before her, my mouth agape at the thought of the front doors of my father’s house opening and my body, alone, slipping through.

Kanella looked at me, her face an empty plate.

I understood so little about Kanella then. It had not occurred to me that she understood everything about me. Kanella was not an old woman. With her olive-oil-smooth cheeks, she was not an ugly woman. She cooked everyday dishes that were beautiful on our tongues, especially my father’s. I knew these things about her, but I did not know what they, taken together, would mean for me.

As my father told me it would be, I began the journey from his house to His house. So near to each other, via the street of villas, that four bites of an apple would bring me from one set of doors to the other, but what I saw, smelled, and heard during those solitary crossings would free me from the feathers and from a life of waiting for more of them to fall.

At midmorning, the aromas, which hung like damp laundry over the street of villas, were the same as those coming from Kanella’s kitchen. Onions and olive oil. The whole island by noon was a pan of sweet onions melting. The midday meals of all Cerigotes began with those two ingredients. When I told this to Old Iota, she said that the onions and oil made Cerigo seem real to her. She often looked at me wide-eyed whenever I would tell her about my island of birth. She looked at me with envy too. Old Iota thought it was brave that I had boarded a ship and sailed away from my family and the rocky soil where their bodies would one day lie. She knew the reason why I had to leave Cerigo. She insisted that I was brave nonetheless. She had never traveled afar. She did not know how easy it could be to leave, how cowards always depart.

The street of villas also gathered all the aromas that followed the onions and the oil. The thyme and laurel of Kanella’s kitchen, the tomatoes of Villa Lazaretti, the wine of Villa Venieri. Lamb, fish, or cuts of beef would then follow. No one in those villas of nobles, minor and otherwise, went hungry.

“We trace our bloodlines to the Republic of Venice” was what my father reminded my brothers whenever he heard them “corrupting” their speech with Romaic, the language of the countryside, of the interior lands, and of those who smelled onions and oil and knew that there would be nothing else to add to their pans. “We speak the language of our forefathers,” my father commanded, and my brothers followed.

Kanella understood Venetian, but mostly she spoke Romaic. I did not know that they were two separate languages as I learned them both during my first years of life. When they untwined themselves, they became the language of the rich and the language of the poor. I grew up with both because I grew up with Kanella as my caretaker. According to my brothers, the house was full of servants when our mother was alive. These servants were let go, one by one, until Kanella became the only. Except for the cook, his sons, and me, my father rid the Villa Cassimati of all the bodies that reminded him of his young wife and of her once bustling household. Death caused most men to grieve. Death caused my father to feel anger at the one who had departed and the one who had stayed. When my brothers were feeling very cruel, they would tell me that a fever ended our mother’s life but that my birth had weakened her first.