“They’re from a very old and honorable tree,” he said. “You will never taste a sweeter fruit. And when you eat of it, you will be filled with ideas. Yes, even one such as you, Quirinus Calvino, who barely learned to read.”
“I don’t want it,” I said, when what I really wanted to tell him was not to call me by name. I could not bear that he knew my name.
He said, “Everyone will want it. They will eat and eat and be filled with understanding. Why, learning how to speak another language will be as simple as, oh, learning to build a bomb. Just one bite of the apple away. What about the lighter? You can light anything with this lighter. A cigarette. A pipe. A campfire. Imaginations. Revolutions. Books. Rivers. The sky. Another man’s soul. Even the human soul has a temperature at which it becomes flammable. The lighter has an enchantment on it, is tapped into the deepest wells of oil on the planet, and will set fire to things for as long as the oil lasts, which I am sure will be forever.”
“You have nothing I want,” I said.
“I have something for everyone,” he said.
I rose to my feet, ready to leave, although I had nowhere to go. I couldn’t walk back down the stairs. The thought made me dizzy. Neither could I go back up. Lithodora would have returned to the village by now. They would be searching the stairs for me with torches. I was surprised I hadn’t heard them already.
The tin bird turned its head to look at me as I swayed on my heels, and blinked, the metal shutters of its eyes snapping closed, then popping open again. It let out a rusty cheep. So did I, startled by its sudden movement. I had thought it a toy, inanimate. It watched me steadily and I stared back. I had, as a child, always had an interest in ingenious mechanical objects, clockwork people who ran out of their hiding places at the stroke of noon, the woodcutter to chop wood, the maiden to dance a round. The boy followed my gaze, and smiled, then opened the cage and reached in for it. The bird leaped lightly onto his finger.
“It sings the most beautiful song,” he said. “It finds a master, a shoulder it likes to perch on, and it sings for this person all the rest of its days. The trick to making it sing for you is to tell a lie. The bigger the better. Feed it a lie, and it will sing you the most marvelous little tune. People love to hear its song. They love it so much, they don’t even care they’re being lied to. He’s yours if you want him.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I said, but when I said it, the bird began to whistle: the sweetest, softest melody, as good a sound as the laughter of a pretty girl, or your mother calling you to dinner. The song sounded a bit like something played on a music box, and I imagined a studded cylinder turning inside it, banging the teeth of a silver comb. I shivered to hear it. In this place, on these stairs, I had never imagined I could hear something so right.
He laughed and waved his hand at me. The bird’s wings snapped from the side of its body, like knives leaping from sheaths, and it glided up and lit on my shoulder.
“You see,” said the boy on the stairs. “It likes you.”
“I can’t pay,” I said, my voice rough and strange.
“You’ve already paid,” said the boy.
Then he turned his head and looked down the stairs and seemed to listen. I heard a wind rising. It made a low, soughing moan as it came up through the channel of the staircase, a deep and lonely and restless cry. The boy looked back at me. “Now go. I hear my father coming. The awful old goat.”
I backed away and my heels struck the stair behind me. I was in such a hurry to get away I fell sprawling across the granite steps. The bird on my shoulder took off, rising in widening circles through the air, but when I found my feet it glided down to where it had rested before on my
shoulder
and I began
to run back up
the way I had come.
I
climbed
in haste for
a time but soon
was tired again and
had to slow to a walk.
I began to think about what
I would say when I reached the
main staircase and was discovered.
“I will confess everything and accept
my punishment, whatever that is,” I said.
The tin bird sang a gay and humorous ditty.
It
fell
silent
though as
I reached the
gate, quieted by
a different song not
far off: a girl’s sobs.
I listened, confused, and
crept uncertainly back to where
I had murdered Lithodora’s beloved.
I heard no sound except for Dora’s cries.
No men shouting, no feet running on the steps.
I had been gone half the night, it seemed to me but
when I reached the ruins where I had left the Saracen
and looked upon Dora it was as if only minutes had passed.
I
came
toward
her and
whispered
to her, afraid
almost to be heard.
The second time I spoke
her name she turned her head
and looked at me with red-rimmed
hating eyes and screamed to get away.
I wanted to comfort her, to tell her I was
sorry, but when I came close she sprang to her
feet and ran at me, striking me and flaying at my
face with her fingernails while she cursed my name.
I meant
to put my
hands on her
shoulders to hold
her still but when I
reached for her they found
her smooth white neck instead.
Her
father
and his
fellows and
my unemployed
friends discovered
me weeping over her.
Running my fingers through
the silk of her long black hair.
Her father fell to his knees and took
her in his arms and for a while the hills
rang with her name repeated over and over again.
Another
man, who held
a rifle, asked me
what had happened and
I told him-I told him-
the Arab, that monkey from the
desert, had lured her here and when
he couldn’t force her innocence from her
he throttled her in the grass and I found them
and we fought and I killed him with a block of stone.
And
as I
told it
the tin bird
began to whistle
and sing, the most
mournful and sweetest
melody I had ever heard
and the men listened until
the sad song was sung complete.
I
held
Lithodora
in my arms as
we walked back down.
And as we went on our way
the bird began to sing again as
I told them the Saracen had planned
to take the sweetest and most beautiful
girls and auction their white flesh in Araby-
a more profitable line of trade than selling wine.
The bird was by now whistling a marching song and the
faces of the men who walked with me were rigid and dark.
Ahmed’s
men burned
along with the
Arab’s ship, and
sank in the harbor.
His goods, stored in a
warehouse by the quay, were
seized and his money box fell
to me as a reward for my heroism.
No
one
ever
would’ve
imagined when
I was a boy that
one day I would be
the wealthiest trader
on the whole Amalfi coast,
or that I would come to own the
prized vineyards of Don Carlotta, I
who once worked like a mule for his coin.