When there was no longer a doubt and whelks became too difficult for me to collect, Patricio insisted on cockles, of which there were sellers because cockles were found on the sandbars far from shore, where the tide came in like the hand of God.

To lose your life for mere cockles is a curse as old as the sea, and may you never hear it spoken.

Like his father, Patricio disliked garlic. He purged me of all foods, even the favored cockles, if they took on its flavor. I would whisper to him that these cloves were the pearls of the land, holding them close to my swollen belly so that he could become accustomed to their scent, but he was not to be convinced. He emptied and emptied me again until I was starving. I soon gave up on the hope of garlic and steamed the cockles open with a sliver of shallot instead. Patricio could not get enough of those briny creatures. It took buckets of them to fill us.

During the last months when we were one, Patricio confined us to sea urchins, their egg-yolk bodies scooped onto chunks of bread. Every day, to make sure that we had enough, Old Iota paid four boys to wade into the shallows at low tides, where these spiny orbs darkened the water like the shadows of gulls flying overhead. Fattened on this fare, day in and day out, I took on such weight that I could take only a few steps around the bed, an animal tied to a stake.

By then Charles—the father of Giorgio, Patricio, and soon, God willing, my blessed third—was already on another island, in waters so far away that I could not understand the distance between us. Before his ship set sail, Charles had told me the exact nautical miles between the islands of Santa Maura and Dominica, but a long string of numbers was as useless to me as the letters of an alphabet.

When I open my mouth, I can choose between two languages, Venetian and Romaic, but on paper I cannot decipher either one. When I was young, I had begged to join my elder brothers in their daily lessons, but my father refused. He said that if I ever left his house, I would enter into the House of God or the house of my husband. In either structure, there would be a man present to tell me what was written and what was important to know.

My father was not thinking about a man named Charles Bush Hearn from the island of Ireland when he told me my fate. My father was not a man of original thoughts. He repeated what came out of the mouths of other men, primarily those of nobility, minor like himself. He taught my two brothers to do the same. They all believed that this echoing made them wise and far wiser than me.

To be a daughter is another curse as old as the sea, and I was born hearing it.