Nothing Is Yours

Chapter One: The Boathouse Roof

The summer she turned ten, Marta Ferraro learned that the sea at Portobasso had three colors.

Near the rocks it was brown, thick as broth, and it left a rim of grey scum on everything it touched. Farther out, past the pipe that came down from the cement works, it turned a bright and unnatural green, the green of hard candy, of medicine bottles. And then, far beyond that, where nobody from Portobasso ever swam, it became blue. Properly blue. The blue in the tourism posters at the ferry office in Naples, the blue people paid money to see.

"That's not ours," Giulia Cataldo said, when Marta pointed at it. "That belongs to Capri."

They were lying on their stomachs on the roof of the old boathouse, on tar paper soft with heat, and the roof smelled of pitch and salt and, faintly, of the dead things the tide left underneath it. The boathouse had belonged to a fisherman called Zi' Peppino, who had drowned before either of them was born, and nobody had ever claimed it, so the children of Portobasso had claimed it instead. You climbed up by the drainpipe and the window ledge. Marta had needed three weeks to work up to the climb. Giulia had done it on the first afternoon she saw it, in sandals, laughing.

Behind them stood the quarter: eight concrete blocks the color of old teeth, set down in the nineteen-sixties on land nobody wanted, wedged between the shore and the Cementeria Ausonia, whose whistle went at seven in the morning and one in the afternoon and six at night. The cement works put a fine grey dust on the laundry. Silvana Ferraro, Marta's mother, hung the sheets out anyway and swore at them when she brought them in, as though the sheets had chosen to be dirty.

Marta lived in Block C, third floor, at the end of the open corridor the neighbors called the ballatoio, where the washing lines and the voices and the smell of everybody's dinner all ran together. Giulia lived three doors along.

Three doors was close enough to hear things.

"Give me your hand," Giulia said.

Marta rolled onto her side. Giulia was sitting up now, cross-legged, her knees grey with roof dust, and she was holding a paring knife.

"Where did you get that?"

"My mother's drawer. She won't notice, she doesn't notice anything." Giulia turned the blade so the sun ran along it. She was ten and a half, six months older, and she wore those six months like a rank. "We're going to be blood sisters. I saw it in a film. You cut here"—she drew a line across her own palm with her fingernail—"and then we press them together, and then it's for life. It can't be broken. Not even if we want to break it."

"Why would we want to break it?"

"We wouldn't. That's the point." Giulia's eyes were very dark and very steady. "Everything else can be taken away from you. Not this. This is the one thing they can't take."

Marta looked at the knife and thought, quite clearly, that she did not want to be cut. She thought about tetanus, which Padre Cosimo had once given a whole lesson on, and about her mother's face if she came home with a bandaged hand, and about the fact that she did not actually need blood to know she loved Giulia; she had known that since the day Giulia had walked up to her in the school yard, aged six, and announced that Marta's shoes were ugly and that they were going to be friends.

"Go on, then," Marta said.

Giulia cut her own palm first, without any hesitation at all, and too deep. The blood came up fast and dark. She looked at it with a kind of satisfaction, then held the knife out.

Marta took it. She set the edge against her skin. Her hand would not move.

"You're shaking," Giulia said.

"I know."

"Do you want me to do it?"

And Marta, later—years later, in a studio four hundred kilometers north, with a bowl half-thrown on the wheel in front of her and the phone ringing and ringing—would remember that she had said yes. That she had held her hand out flat and turned her face away and let Giulia open it for her, and that Giulia had not been gentle, and that the whole of her life afterward had somehow been contained in that small choice.

They pressed their palms together. It hurt more than the cut. Giulia gripped hard, lacing their fingers, grinding the wounds against each other, and she was grinning, her teeth white in her brown face.

"Now say it," she said. "Say: I'm yours and you're mine."

"I'm yours and you're mine."

"For always."

"For always."

The cement whistle blew, one o'clock, and the sound came across the flat water and bounced off the blocks, and down below on the shingle two boys were throwing stones at a floating drum, and Marta Ferraro was as happy as she had ever been.

They climbed down. Giulia sucked her palm and spat pink onto the stones. On the walk home she stole two apricots from a crate outside Rosaria's shop, and gave Marta the bigger one, and told her a long story about a woman in Block A who kept her dead husband's teeth in a glass, and Marta laughed until her stomach ached, and it was only when they reached the bottom of the stairs of Block C that Giulia went quiet.

Donato Cataldo's voice was coming down the stairwell. Not shouting. That was the frightening part. Donato did not shout; he asked questions in a low, reasonable voice, over and over, and the silences between the questions got shorter and shorter until something happened.

Giulia's face changed. It did not become afraid. It became flat and bright, like water going hard.

"Come to mine," Marta said.

"No." Giulia was already climbing. "He's better if I'm there."

Marta stood on the second-floor landing and listened to Giulia go up and along the corridor, and heard the door open and Giulia say, loudly, cheerfully, "Papà, there's a man downstairs asking for you," which was a lie, and which worked, because the questions stopped and boots came out onto the ballatoio and Marta had to flatten herself against the wall in the dark of the landing while Donato Cataldo went past her, smelling of wine and hair oil, a heavy man with a soft voice who lent money at forty per cent to people who had nowhere else to go.

That was Giulia. Ten years old, and she put herself between her father and the room like a stone in a doorway.

Marta went home. Her own kitchen was warm and loud with the sewing machine. Silvana sat at it with her back curved, feeding collars under the needle, a heap of grey cotton on one side and a smaller heap on the other, forty lire a collar from a workshop in Torre Annunziata that paid late and complained always.

"Where were you?"

"With Giulia."

"That family." The needle chattered. "Your hand."

"I cut it on a nail."

Silvana stopped the machine. She took Marta's wrist and turned it over and looked at the straight, deliberate line across the palm, and Marta understood that her mother knew exactly what she was looking at, and that she was not going to say so, and that this was a kind of contempt worse than any punishment.

"Wash it with salt," Silvana said, and let go.

On the windowsill was a coffee tin where Marta kept the coins she earned running errands for the old women in Block B—five hundred lire here, two hundred there. She had been saving for a bicycle for eleven months. That evening the tin was on the table, open, and lighter.

"Mamma."

"The electricity is due."

"That was mine."

Silvana looked up. She was thirty-four years old that summer and her face was already set into the expression it would wear for the rest of her life, an expression that said the world had made her a promise once and had broken it and she would never, ever stop keeping score.

"Nothing here is yours," she said. "You just hold it for a while. Remember that and you'll be spared a lot of disappointment."

Later, when the flat was dark, Marta heard her father come in from the late shift. Enzo Ferraro moved through the rooms the way a big man moves when he is trying not to wake anyone, which is to say badly, knocking the chair, catching the door. She got up and found him on the little balcony with his shirt open and a glass of water, and, on his knee, folded inside the newspaper, a paperback with the cover half torn off.

He read poems. He had done since he was a boy, and he did it secretly, because on the docks it would have been a joke and in his own kitchen it would have been worse. When he had drunk one glass of wine and not two, he would recite in a low voice, the words coming out of him carefully, like a man carrying eggs.

"Sit down," he said. "Listen. This one's about a boy who watches the world from a window and never goes out into it. It's the saddest thing ever written and it's beautiful, and don't tell your mother I read it to you."

He recited. Marta didn't understand all of it. She understood that her father, who unloaded ships, had a room inside him that nobody was allowed into, and that he had just let her stand in the doorway of it.

She held her bandaged hand against her chest, and out beyond the rocks the water lay flat and green, and somewhere three doors along Giulia Cataldo was lying awake, listening for footsteps.