Old Iota then shared with me that, after the passing of each of her sons, she had curled her body around the trees on her husband’s farm. The older the olive tree, the more gnarled its trunk, the longer it had survived in such poor soil, the more she wanted to encircle her body, emptied and slight, around it.

We will see Malta before the end of our voyage, Elesa. Once we cross the Irish Sea, we will dock in Liverpool for several days. Then the ship will embark on the long southern crossing for Malta, where we will dock again.

On the voyage out—Patricio, you will not remember that journey because you were only two years old at the time—I learned that we passengers were not the cargo of worth on a Dublin-bound ship. The barrels of red wine and dried currants were. I do not know what goods from Dublin or Liverpool will be making this return journey with us. Rifles, parasols, and saddle soaps, I would think.

After Malta, depending on the prevailing winds, Santa Maura Island will be only a few days away.

Elesa, I know you have no memory of Santa Maura, but you will recognize it the moment you see it on the horizon. Your mother was born there, so you already know it in your blood and bones, its outline clearer to you than any map. When Patricio makes this voyage one day, it will be the same for him when he continues southward. “Cerigo,” he will say. “Mother” is what he will mean.

We are still weeks away. You will have time to prepare, Elesa. We both will have plenty of time.

First thing I will do is find Old Iota. She will weep when she sees that Patricio is not with me. She will think that he has gone to God, as his elder brother had. I will show her the calotype of him to assure her that he is alive. She will not understand the image on that piece of paper at first, as I had not when Patricio’s grandaunt had given it to me as a departing gift. But Old Iota will learn to see the image for what it is. A little boy, with his father’s large round eyes and caterpillar eyebrows and his mother’s head of dark waves, who at the age of four is standing sturdy, staring straight ahead, as if to say, “Life, I await you.”

I will have no difficulties locating Old Iota. Everyone knows her and her story in Lefkada town. Her grief is her twin wherever she goes. It grips onto her hand. It clings onto her neck and her stooped back. She is, in this way, never alone. Born of grief, loss, tragedy or shame, such companions often follow the bodies of women. Men shrug theirs off by traveling afar, strangling them in foreign fields or drowning them in deeper waters.

On the ship from Cerigo to Santa Maura, Charles taught me the English word “gossip.” He told me that in our life together I must ignore gossip and avoid trading in it at all cost. I understood later that by gossip he meant these twins. He said that the inhabitants of my island, and of Santa Maura, indulged in gossip as if they were girls weak for sweets. “They will all sink under the weight of it,” he declared in his stilted, often unrecognizable Venetian.