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my own mother had pushed me out of her belly and out of her heart, I still lived inside the grandest mamma a boy could ask: the Palazzo Espagnol. And was it any wonder that from my infancy I adored my home? That I loved that great Gothic pile like I loved nightfall and meat? The Palazzo Espagnol had become dam and sire to me, and I grew like the place: tall, narrow, impenetrable, with a constitution of stone. I took my first steps, unapplauded, across its courtyard. I spoke my first words, unheard, in its limonaia .There was not an inch of it I did not know.
    To the rest of our household the Palazzo Espagnol was a leaky battleship in which they served, sweltered and shivered as it trickled to pieces around them, for there is no cure for water and Venetians do not seek one. My family and servants did not know the joy of the tiny locked chamber by the water-gate or the cobwebbed window in our private tower from which, if you climbed one hundred and seventy-five vertiginous steps, you could see planets, and own all Venice with your eyes.
    They did not guess what secret tribute lay at the bottom of the well or buried under the rosebushes.They did not understand how the stairs smelled in the morning, or what feathery scabs you might find tucked into the toes of hundred-year-old slippers in travel trunks in the remotest ripostiglio . No, nobody loved the Palazzo Espagnol as I did.
    Most of all I loved to know that one day it would be mine.
    Even my seven-year-old sister Riva did not know the hidden place in the wine-store where black bottles perched on shelves like vultures, and what the drink inside those bottles could do to your insides, when mixed with sugar and ground-up glass.
    I was only four years old when I taught her what she did not know how.
    Gianni delle Boccole
    Twere as if my brain was ate by bears. How could I of knowed to
    save her?
    I am wiser now, but then, who would of bethought it?
    I only got but a little money to put into the hero busyness, n as for
    I git on a bad bust from
    I know as much as a tin box bout what appened to our little angel Riva. Damn it all to Hell, it will nowise come out. Them sparkling black eyes, them sturdy little legs. She were alredy a darling ovva dancer. The coffin no bigger than a hatbox on four men’s shoulders
    in the funeral gondola
    I wunt
    Buggering God
    Sor Loreta
    Then I had to contend with one Sor Andreola, who had set herself up as the most devout nun in the convent, without even mortifying her flesh so that you would notice it. She merely did smallish good works in a mightily showy way. She was clever with a needle and produced a cloak for a statue of the Virgin that the priora decreed worth six hundred Ave Marias , four hundred Salves and fifteen days of fasting. I nearly forgot to mention the fact that Sor Andreola’s skin was supposed to shine with some kind of clear light – like pearls, they claimed – though I could never see it myself. Sor Andreola was only half a year my senior, and already a professed nun.
    The other sisters spoke of her with awe. When Sor Andreola fell into one of her famous raptures the novices clustered around and imitated her. That was how much they loved Sor Andreola, who sought the admiration of foolish nuns the way the Devil seeks disciples. And this burned worse than any lye or pepper on my skin. Why was Sor Andreola an object of admiration, and I, far thinner and more devout, a vehicle for sniggering ridicule?
    I reminded myself that the Apostle Peter prophesied that in the weeks before the Last Day there would appear on earth many naysayers and mockers. They shall be the first to be struck down. And I comforted myself that Jesus, by subjecting me to the martyrdom of scorn, had called me to be more intimately united with Him than any other sister at Santa Catalina, and particularly more than Sor Andreola.
    Renewed in my resolve, I went to the infirmary. But I was not allowed to tend to the sick women as they said that the sight of my