The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

that way.
    Bernardo, who had grown into a skinny ginger cat, hunted at dawn and dusk, the feline witching hours, but he always found me after dark, purring and rubbing against my leg. I cuddled him to my chest and the newly softened thing inside me responded as much as I would allow. Bernardo accepted whatever morsels I saved for him, and then he let me pet him and coo into his small, pointed ear. He slept nestled under my arm, and I took comfort from the livingwarmth of him against my body. I ignored Marco’s frigid stares and caustic remarks. After all, poor Marco slept alone.
    Marco and I would never discuss anything so feebleminded as the love of an animal. We limited our conversations to scheming and bragging. The most intimate thing I confessed to Marco was my wish to stow away and sail to Nubia. I didn’t have the faintest idea where Nubia might be, but, remembering my honeyed mornings with La Canterina and her soulful canzoni , I thought the place would be worth finding. Stowing away had always been one of my favorite fantasies, until Domingo, the taciturn, pimpled boy from the Spanish port of Cádiz, described the fate of stowaways in lurid detail.

CHAPTER IV
T HE B OOK OF D REAMS
    D omingo always stood with his arms crossed and his hands tucked into his armpits. Self-consciousness made him stare at his feet when he spoke, and he didn’t speak so much as mumble and shrug. One afternoon, Marco, Domingo, and I found a bag of barely nibbled chestnuts in a trash heap and we shared them happily while we strolled along the docks, admiring the ships. I mentioned my plan to stow away, and Domingo dug his hands deeper into his armpits. He said, “Boh!” Marco and I looked at him.
    Domingo mumbled, “I was nine, maybe ten, when I hid on a Spanish galleon. It was bound for Constantinople with a stop in Venice. On the second day at sea, a sailor found me hiding inside a coil of rope. He pulled me out, and the sailors shoved me around.” Domingo shrugged with one shoulder. “They were laughing. I thought it was a game. Then one of them hit me.” He scowled at the harbor. “They forced me to carry the slop buckets and fed me from the garbage. I hauled rope until my hands bled and scrubbed the deck with salt water that ran red from my cuts and blisters. Some of them kicked me every time they saw me. I don’t know why they did that, but I learned to move fast.”
    Domingo’s dull eyes came alive and his face, normally placid and flat, twisted with a surge of rage. “There was a rigger … a hairy animal with rotted teeth who … who …” He swallowed hard and bit his lip. “One night he caught me while I hung over the side retching from the motion of the sea and …” Domingo squeezed his eyes shut. “He held me over the side and ripped off my pants … he did it right there! Right there! ”
    As suddenly as it had come, the animation in his face disappeared, and his voice returned to its usual monotone. “I don’t remember the rest of the voyage, but when we docked in Venice they threw me off the ship.” He kicked at the ground. “Venice is no worse than Cádiz. I can pick pockets here as well as there.”
    Marco and I exchanged a look, and then Marco gave him a friendly jab. “I’m glad you’re here, Domingo. When my whore mother disappeared I was, what, about five? I would have starved without you.”
    Marco always called his mother a whore. Of course she was, but that’s not what bothered him. The fact that she had abandoned him and kept his twin sister, Rufina, was the thing that stung. She kept the girl because a shock of red hair would bring a high price on the street. He’d never seen either of them again, but Marco thought that if he could find Rufina, he could save her from a life of degradation. “That stinking puttana left me for dead and made Rufina a whore, but I’ll show her. I’m not dead and I’ll get Rufina back. You’ll see.” Marco could barely feed himself, much less a sister,