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45
Larissa stays upstairs, bathing her daughter’s wounds. She won’t be down until the child sleeps, and even then there will be no communication with her self-seeking husband. Or with the women who hedged their bets by going to mass before they showed their faces.
Donatella lies on her side and stares at the air, inert. No recoil when Larissa touches her cuts, her bruises, with the salt-water cloth and the aloe cut from the cemetery garden. Remains passive as her mother unfurls her limbs, one by one, and rubs a flannel along them to wipe away the dirt.
And, down in the street, the party goes on for all the world as though the world is still intact.
Mercedes, standing in the window as her mother does what she can, watches and hates. From here she can see the deck of the Princess Tatiana. The evening meal laid out on the table, a great sweating jug of something cold covered by a cloth. A glass lying on its side, broken.
Matthew and Tatiana, standing by the gunwale, watching the same scene play out from the other side.
Laughing, and chatting like spectators at a cockfight.
It was you, she thinks. I know it was.
Donatella lies on the side of her that is less bruised, and stares at the air. And at night, in the enfolding dark, Mercedes crawls into her bed and wraps her arms about her. Breathes the feral scent of her despair.
August comes, and the wind drops. Sailboats lie becalmed and the yacht people bask on their deck-top loungers. Donatella’s bruises turn purple, then brown, then yellow, then fade away, and the breaks in her skin turn to scars. Her wrist, bound tightly by Larissa the night they brought her back, was badly sprained, not broken – no thanks to St James. And her nose – well, now the swelling has gone, if you glimpsed her without knowing her history you would just assume she had inherited Phoenician blood.
But something has broken inside her. She no longer sings about the house, no longer teases Mercedes. That ready smile has disappeared. She is forbidden, of course, from serving in the restaurant. Her father will not even look her in the eye if he passes her in the family quarters. And she sits on a hard chair in the sala and watches the world pass by, and utters not a word.
And, two weeks past St James’s Day, she stands up, puts a shawl over her tangled hair and goes out, her head held high, to face the world.
