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One day Mercedes sees Donatella standing by a table whose diners have just left, holding something in her hand and frowning.
‘What’s up?’ she asks, and comes over to look.
It’s an American dollar. No, two American dollars.
They don’t get wages in the restaurant, because, obviously, the restaurant is their whole family’s living. So two American dollars is something of an event in their lives.
‘It’s weird,’ says Donatella. ‘This is, like, the third time this has happened.’
‘Did they just forget it?’
‘No,’ she replies. ‘I caught them as they were leaving this time, and tried to give it back.’
‘And they didn’t take it?’
‘No! It’s weird! They just waved me off and said, “No, it’s for you!”’
‘Like a gift or something?’
Donatella nods. ‘Yes.’
‘Foreigners are weird.’
‘They are,’ says Donatella. She tucks the money into her bra. ‘Don’t tell Dad,’ she says. ‘That’s five dollars I’ve got now.’
On her day off, she goes up to the new pharmacy and buys a tube of black stuff with a brush in that you paint all over your eyelashes, and a bottle of Pepsi-Cola for her sister. Mercedes drinks the whole thing all herself, in the garden at her grandmother’s house, and nothing has ever tasted so good.
A whole new city rises from the cliffs as the harbour wall rises from the sea. A huge hotel with a fountain in its lobby. Apartment blocks with balconies, one, two, three – then five, then fifteen. A plasa that will be surrounded by shops, and a funicular railway that will lead directly to it from the marina, so the rich don’t have to use their feet. She’s learning new English words, new phrases, that the school has never thought to teach them. High-end. Six-star. Premium luxe. Bidet. A huge glittering restaurant is built across the end of the Via del Duqa, cutting it off to pedestrians: glass walls and terrace looking out on marina and ocean. Sergio spends hours each day watching it rise, a gleam in his eye.
‘I must talk to el duqa,’ he says. As though such a thing has ever happened before. ‘They’ll need someone to run that.’
‘We already have a restaurant,’ says Larissa. ‘You’d still be making food for strangers and cleaning up their shit.’
And then she closes her mouth, for she’s seen his eyes turn dark, and she’s had enough of his discipline for one lifetime.
On the eastern cliff, a magnificent house begins to form with a commanding view of the whole Mediterranean. Glass doors the size of walls and a tower of its very own. He’s going to paint it yellow, says the grapevine. Imagine! A yellow house! But then the apprentices descend on Kastellana Town, and one by one the crumbling façades are stripped and sanded and coated with fresh new stucco, and each one is painted a different colour, and some are yellow, some are turquoise, some are pink like salmon.
It’s lovely, say the young ones. Our capital is like a rainbow! And the solteronas purse their lips and the old people mutter that they might as well be in Italy.
And Mercedes grows, and Donatella grows, and Larissa gets sadder and angrier, and three St James’s days pass them by, and the Yacht People begin to arrive. And with them, the summer holiday when she is twelve, the girl who will change her life.
11
The New Capri: same-same. But different.
First he builds a helipad. Then he builds a road. It’s hard underfoot and the tarmac soaks up the heat and blasts it back up again. But it protects the suspension of the castle limousine, so it is a good thing. And then that boat, the Princess Tatiana, moors up in the harbour, cramping the fishing fleet, and the duke brings the big man who lives on it to the church on Christmas Day to announce that their island home is to become the New Capri and the big man is going to be its architect.
‘What’s a capri, anyway?’ Mercedes asks as they walk home through the gathering dusk. Candles burn in windows to welcome the infant Jesus, and the scent of spice and roasting meat drifts through the cracks around the windows and doors.
‘I’ve no idea,’ says Larissa. ‘Some kind of boat?’
‘It’s an island,’ says Donatella. ‘Off Italy.’
‘Why can’t we just be an old Kastellana?’ asks Mercedes.
‘Because rich people go there,’ says Donatella. ‘It was all goats and fishing boats, and now it’s full of palaces.’
‘Oh, really?’ says Sergio, perking up. ‘Palaces?’
