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then in a voice much gentler than before. “Come on, I’ll wake you in good time for Signor di Cicciano in the morning. You’ll be fit for nothing at this rate.” He crouches down beside the bed and strokes my hair back away from my face, saying in little more than a whisper, “I know you’re tough, Signora—God knows, you need to be—and I know that you pride yourself on the fact that you never cry, but let’s do our best to keep it that way, eh? We don’t want any unnecessary cause for tears, do we? Come on, let’s both get some sleep and get ourselves ready for tomorrow.”
    I feel Modesto’s hands underneath me, freeing the blankets from under my body, and then a comforting warmth as he pulls them up and over me. I hear him moving about my chamber. He reaches under the covers, picks up each of my hands, one by one, and wipes the sticky juice from them with a damp cloth. He dries both carefully. I am almost asleep as he leaves the room, but he might have said as he goes, or perhaps I am dreaming it, “Bloody whores. God—there are times when I’m almost glad I’m a eunuch.”

Three
    Shaking his head in amused disbelief, Modesto went down to the kitchen. With the cook away, only cold ash lay in the fireplace, and there was a chill in the air. A brightly painted plate, on which lay several slices of cold pigeon, stood next to three large flat loaves of bread on the longest of the shelves, and half a dozen thickly glazed sardines stared mournfully up at the edge of their tin-glazed dish. Among the clutter on the table stood several bottles of wine, one uncorked, which Modesto now picked up; he drank straight from the bottle and wiped his chin on his sleeve. Sitting down on a long bench at the side of the table, he put his head in his hands.
    He sat lost in thought for some moments, then, the heaviness of his eyelids confirming the lateness of the hour, he stood, stretched, and left the room. Climbing the stairs to a long, low room at the top of the house, he put his candle down on the table and crossed to the windows. He closed and fastened the shutters. Heeling off his shoes, he pulled his knife from his belt and laid it on the table in front of the candle. He unfastened his doublet, pulling the laces through the holes and easing open the stiffened front. Leaving the doublet still laced to his hose, he stepped out of the whole thing in one piece and hung it all over the chest at the end of his bed; the empty legs of the hose lay on the floorboards like flaccid brown snakeskins. Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he cupped a hand around his genitals and rubbed, unsticking where the soft flesh had been crumpled inside his hose, and wondered as he did so if he would ever be able to touch himself without remembering.
    ***
    When his mother’s first scream wakes him, he is upstairs in the cramped and damp-smelling room in which they all sleep. He, Sofia, and Giulia are well used to the ineptly smothered creaks and cries of their parents; for a long while, Modesto thought his father was hurting his mother every night, and he would lie wide-eyed in the dark beside his sisters with cold threads of terror creeping through his head, listening to his mother’s guttural groans and his father’s grunts. At those moments, he hated his father. He knows now, though, what it is that his parents do, and when he hears his mother scream downstairs, he feels no fear, just wonders why it is that they are coupling down there instead of in their bed.
    But the second scream is sharper, and now Modesto is afraid.
    â€œNo! You shan’t do it!” Her voice is high and thin.
    â€œAgnese, stop it! The decision has been made, and they have come to do it tonight. We need the money.”
    â€œI won’t let them. Oh, God, please, Giuseppe, please stop them. They’ll kill him…”
    â€œWe will have to take her away—she will scare the boy. It