“But I hate these shoes. They keep me from doing what I want.”
A seemingly throwaway quote that occurs very early in the narrative, there is more here than meets the eye. Consider this foreshadowing as it reveals the fundamental nature of the personality of the story’s protagonist. She is inherently rebellious, curious, non-conforming and unconcerned with traditional gender conventions. Her mother’s reply is typically maternal: “High shoes make sure young ladies behave properly.” Which is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that fails to capture and park Donata’s imagination.
“Answer that one question and I’ll you a pair of zoccoli. Why buy rather than borrow?”
“I want to own them so that I can use them over and over.”
Noé is a young man whom Donata meets when she takes the opportunity of having a twin sister to masquerade as a boy and explore the mean streets of Venice undercover. It is a plot at least as old Shakespeare, but one that has such robust potential that it probably will never die out completely. Also significant, of course, is that we are still dealing with the issue of shoes. The say that clothes make the man, but when you really start to think about it, identity is really tied more concretely to footwear than to clothing. In the masquerade here as a boy, the issue of shoes is directly connected to gender through juxtaposition with the mother’s maternal advice concerning high shoes: zoccoli are clogs made of wood and leather.
Laura, my twin, sits facing me, with our big sister Andriana beside her. Laura stretches out her right foot so that her shoe tip clunks against mine. She's grinning under the white veil that hides her face, I'm sure of that. The very idea of my being a perfect lady is absurd. I grin back, though, of course, Laura cannot see my face, either.
This story is, essentially, a tale of rebellion, but it is also underneath that driving them an interesting story of genetics. It is not simply for the purpose of plot machination that the protagonist is a twin sister. The twins—Laura and Donata—do not fit the typical stereotype of real life twins who dress alike and act alike nor are they an example of the good twin/evil twin. Although sharing certain aspects, they twins in the sense of looking alike, but not acting like, much less thinking alike. In fact, they come across more like non-twin sisters than anything. So, in effect this story is an examination of twins from a perspective that is rarely utilized in fiction.
