Add to all this that I can no longer afford to keep you in Rome…”

“But where’s all the money gone?”

“In ten years’ time we’ll have an orange-grove worth the best part of a million. But as things stand today we’re down to your mother having to cadge a spot of cash off the caretaker. I’ve sold all I had to buy this orange-grove, I’ve raised a loan from the bank, and – I’ve planted ten thousand young orange-trees… It’ll be worth a fortune, tomorrow! But as things stand today what it costs me is this” – and he stretched his arms wide – “and what I get out of it’s this” – and he narrowed the span to a slit. “But there! The darling could steal the very bread from my mouth…”

“What darling?” enquired Antonio, with a touch of rancour.

“My darling orange-grove… O Antonio, if only you could see her – she’s such a beauty! Even more beautiful than you are… eh, what? That’s to say… The fact is that it’s bleeding us white! What fiend was it that made me tie this millstone round my neck?… No, no… what on earth am I saying?… Blessed be the day I thought of buying it, and blessed be the notary who signed the Deed! But I’m rambling, I’m rambling again…” He clutched his temples with his right hand, raised his eyes, and all in one breath and like someone forced to walk a tightrope and taking a sprint at it rather than fall, cried, “In the five years you’ve been in Rome you haven’t managed to get your arse moving at all! You’ve already frittered away a hundred thousand lire, and my heart bleeds to think of it!”

“It’s not my fault,” mumbled Antonio. “Lots of young chaps have got into the Diplomatic without exams or anything. But me, I’ve been promised the sun, moon and stars, then whenever I check in to see how my application is going along they seem to wake up with a start, as if they’d never set eyes on me before!”

“But Whatsit… feller there… the minister, calls himself a Count (my foot!), didn’t he put himself out for you at all?”

“Let us not speak of the minister! He has behaved the worst of the lot.”

“You bet!” cried his father, knocking the pipe in his hand against his leg and smothering his trousers with an avalanche of ash and glowing embers. “If you go and poke his wife!”

“That’s simply not true,” said Antonio mildly.

“I don’t need you to tell me if it’s true or not!” retorted his father. “But what I do say is – Great God, what is his name? – that Count feller – he has more horns on his head than a trugful of snails. They all do it right under his nose and he’s never noticed a damn thing. It took my fool of a son to go all the way from Catania to make him jealous!”

“But it’s not true he’s jealous!” roared Antonio, puce in the face this time from sheer vexation. “It’s not true I’m his wife’s lover! What more do I have to say? It’s just not true!”

His father tilted his chin and looked down his nose.

“Be that as it may,” he said. “I have no wish to pry into your affairs. That notwithstanding, how do you explain the fact that a man like Blockhead, a damp squib if ever I saw one, who, if I were his father, would have me kneeling in the dirt for shame, has become Party Secretary of Catania, while you’ve been incapable of getting one of your little tarts to procure you a chair at the Foreign Ministry let alone the desk to go with it?”

At this point a masterful voice was heard intoning from the direction of the terrace.

“Signor Alfio, my dear Signor Alfio, I am informed that your son has arrived from the capital…”

Avvocato Ardizzone. And the Lord alone knows how grandiose were his gesticulations from the balcony, since a flock of birds fled in panic past the study window.

“Let’s get back to the terrace,” said Signor Alfio, and hastily added: “Bear in mind that the Avvocato thinks you’re the lover of the whatsit… ummm… ah yes, the Countess… If he asks you if it’s true, don’t say either yes or no. In any case don’t say no as definitely as you did to me: he’d end up believing you!”

Out on the terrace they found Antonio’s mother whipping up another egg for her son. The Avvocato was leaning over the balcony, draped in his peignoir. At his side, his daughter Elena, a thirty-six-year-old spinster who, following her trip to Switzerland (or so the story went in Catania), was eager at all costs to make it known that her “misadventure” had been “put to rights.”

“What account have you to render to us concerning the Eternal City?” apostrophized the Avvocato. “What is afoot in that fetid sewer which the Duce would be well advised to raze to the ground? We Sicilians ill thought-of as ever, I presume? It’s all because we have brains, brains and to spare. We could hand ’em out to that lot, and enough over for the other Party that acts so high-falutin!”

This harangue was interrupted by Elena, bursting through a thicket of simpers to cry, “Signora Rosaria, do take a look at the length of your son’s eyelashes! How can he have such beauties. They’re not lashes at all, they’re fans! Isn’t it true, Daddy, they look like ostrich-feather fans?”

“A pox on the woman!” muttered Signor Alfio under his breath, wheeling back indoors without a word to anyone.

But Antonio had to wait until the Avvocato’s complexion had ebbed from puce to pallid, betokening that the vein of his eloquence had, at least for the moment, run dry. Thereafter he had to allow himself to be kissed on the forehead and the eyelids by his mother, acting under the direction of the mature spinster who with nervous little giggles thus urged her on from the balcony:

“There’s where you must kiss him! Lower, lower… Let’s see if it tickles him there… Higher up, higher up! Heavens, what a bristly chin! Rasps like sandpaper, I’d say!”

But Antonio was left to himself at last, to gaze at leisure at the much-loved roofs of Catania: the black rooftops, the flowerpots, the skeletal fig-trees and the washing also, around which, at sunset, the March wind carried the kick of a mule; to gaze at the church domes glittering on feast-day evenings like golden mitres; at deserted tiers of open-air theatres and pepper-trees in the Public Gardens; this very sky, low and homely as a ceiling, in which the clouds arranged themselves in old familar patterns; and Mount Etna crouched between the sea and the heart of Sicily – upon its paws, its tail, its back, dozens of black townlets that had contrived to struggle up.

He went into his own room, where what was left of his odours of five years before bade him welcome like a dog faithfully waiting with its nose to the crack under the door… Here, in the two bookcases, were the sturdy volumes in which he had done his earliest reading, from which he had derived fabulous pleasure, until amorous daydreams abruptly put a stop to that. Here were the walls submerged in pictures, prints, hangings, crucifixes, holy-water stoops… and here, in the middle of the room, was the wash-stand with its swing mirror which (watch it!) you had to take care not to tip too far back in case the bottom came shooting forwards and knocked over all the pots and bottles: and here was the quilt, the hot-water bottle, the hand-warmer, the bed-warmer… Antonio stretched out on his back, fell asleep, and two hours later woke up with a tear on his cheek. What had he dreamt? It didn’t come back to him, but he felt an overpowering urge to give full vent to a flood of tears that someone seemed to have choked back in his throat.

“Come now!” he said to himself, ‘I swear to my crucifix there on the wall that I’ll never come over all moody and morose again.”

The same evening, in an effort to overcome his moodiness, he accepted a bizarre invitation from a cousin and good friend of his, Edoardo Lentini.

Just arrived from Rome to install Lorenzo Calderara in his post as local Party Secretary was the Deputy Secretary-General of the whole Fascist Party in person, a man with a chest entirely smothered with medals and a penchant for prostitutes. Having been apprised of this foible of his, a bunch of sycophants had strained every nerve to arrange a night out in the manner most agreeable to a personage so highly provided with power both for good and for ill. As a result of these efforts, at eleven o’clock precisely the “Pensione Eros” shut its doors in the face of its regular customers, who immediately began to howl insults, boot at the doors and hurl stones; with the result that a squad of policemen, disguised as raw recruits, turned up pretending to be so drunk as playfully to stroke the cheeks of the crowd with their revolver-barrels, and chivvied the customers from the alleyway. Half an hour later these same cops, fed up with playing drunk and getting curses and worse from every youth who came round the corner, rose up in the full strength of their officialdom, ordering all and sundry to “Move along now, move along!”

“Watch it! I’ve got your number!” was the retort of several of those addressed, their coat collars turned up high to conceal their faces.

Meanwhile, in the dining-salon of the “Pensione Eros” blazed many hundreds of candle-power, porcelain and crystal sparkled behind the glass doors of dressers, marble-topped tables groaned beneath heaps of officers’ coats and cloaks and caps and fezes.

Antonio was introduced to the Deputy Secretary of the Party as “a friend of Countess K”.

“So Comrade,” said the bigwig, “the stories we hear about you are true, eh?”

“Stories, what stories?” mumbled Antonio reddening, as Lorenzo Calderara whispered in his ear, “For heaven’s sake don’t be too familiar with him! Address him formally. And incidentally, why the hell aren’t you wearing your Party Badge?”

“The story goes,” continued the bigwig, “that you have prodigious success with women. What about you, now?” he added, turning to the four girls ringed around him, the two taller resting their elbows on the shoulders of the shorter, and each through gossamer veils displaying her particular pussy, “let’s hear your opinion. Could you fancy this sort of specimen?”

The four women allowed their gaze to rest for a moment upon Antonio, and despite the fact that they scarcely thought this the most propitious moment for frankness, two of them – the prettiest and the least endowed – in that one moment managed to fall in love.

“So, what d’you think? D’you fancy a specimen of this sort?” And with a swift, insolent movement he thrust back Antonio’s cuffs revealing the delicacy of the wrists. “Or d’you go for a man like me?” And he rolled up his own sleeves, displaying two hairy, bulging forearms.

The girls, unwilling to admit the truth, gawked wide-eyed at such wrists as his, crying out in a superfluity of wonderment.