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Whisked off to the dining hall. I will learn that these eggplants are served nearly cold and still crisp with a wild marjoram-sharpened raw tomato sauce. I will learn that they are purposefully not served hot from the pan but left to cool so that the flavors mingle and intensify. Too, I will learn of my alarming capacity to gorge upon them.
    I am crazed by now with the need to get in there and cut and pat and plunge myself. I lean fetchingly against the doorway, scuttle about the perimeters of the room, daring to enlarge my advance but never entering the main territory. I am invisible. The widows interrupt their chanting and praying only to laugh or to weep. They pray over each other, over the worktables, over the fires. They pray over the eggplants and the knives and the flat-bread dough rising outside the kitchen door. Incantations, exhortations. Curses. As widows and farmers pass to and fro before me, I ask if there’s anything I might do. I ask twelve thousand times. More smiles. More back-handed fluttering of fingers. They don’t understand me. I’m sure they simply don’t understand. I mount a campaign to communicate with monosyllabic cries of joy and curiosity and hand gestures of rolling, stirring, chopping. This brings two of the widows to where I stand near the door. Gently they push me out into the greater light, look hard at my face. Shaking their heads, they leave me there and go back to work. What is it? What did they see? I am the new girl in town, even with my crown of braids. I start back on the path to the villa, hardly glancing at the pastry-making widows along the way. They’ll never learn my
truc
for pistachio biscotti. Nor the one for the olive-oil cake with the heartful of almond paste. I touch my braids. I try out the chant that they sing most often. I sing it louder. It hardly matters not being able to participate. Being here is everything. I do not notice that Tosca stands in the main doorway of the villa as I approach it.
    “Are you menstruating?”
    Rather than her riding clothes, she wears a lovely black dress made of something like faille, I think, a sheath that ends just above the ankles, no sleeves, her smooth, muscular arms darker even than the tawny skin of her face. Bare feet in silk sabots with a thin, high heel. Coiled and plaited more extravagantly than it was the day before, her hair smells like orange blossoms. The emerald is at her throat. We meet, nearly head-on, as I am entering and she is leaving. Now it’s I who doesn’t understand.
    “Are you menstruating?” she repeats crossly.
    “Do you mean right this moment?”
    “Yes, right this moment. The women will neither permit you to touch the food nor do they want you to pass through the kitchen. They believe you’re menstruating. If you are, your presence will bring down a curse upon the food and perhaps even upon they who are foolish enough to admit you into their sanctum in such a state.”
    The awkwardness I’d felt moments before has escalated to hot embarrassment.
    “That’s medieval.”
    “It’s much older than that. Still valid, though. So, are you menstruating?”
    “Well, not exactly. Sometimes, lately, my menses are, you know,
irregular.
”
    “They could tell by looking into your eyes. I admonish you to please stay out of the kitchen. Here there is no trifling with the sacred.”
    She walks past me, stops a few meters out into the garden, turns head and shoulders ’round to say, “A chant comes from the back of the throat rather than the diaphragm. It’s not at all like singing. You’re gorgeous with the braids, by the way.”
    The least she might have done was to point me in the direction of the red tent, I think as I watch the long black figure of her until she’s out of sight. I think further: Here I am twice expatriated. First from America. Now from Venice. Here is like no other place. Once again, I am a beginner.

CHAPTER IV
    I T WAS GOOD THAT I HADN’T WORRIED FOR F ERNANDO . I T SEEMS that