One of them plumped herself down on his lap, and fishing around among his medals, through his shirt and beneath his vest, drew forth a tuft of hair which with deft fingers she formed into a tiny plait. All the girls were keen to give it gentle tweaks, and all the men, with the sole exception of Antonio, vied with each other in cracking jokes about it that but thinly, yet brazenly, veiled their intended flattery.

“No one could take you for a woman!” declared a sycophantic Lorenzo Calderara.

At this point in came large trayfuls of brandy and gin. Eyes began to glisten bibulously amid the fog of cigarette smoke. The Deputy Secretary-General twice rose to his feet to go upstairs with the same girl, then once again to go with the madame of the Pensione; she however, politely but firmly, refused.

“My dear Nedda, are we going to have to banish you to some backwater?” said Lorenzo Calderara, his voice pitched midway between ribaldry and reprimand, leaving it uncertain which of the two was a fake.

“Right then, arrest me!” retorted Madame, trying to make a joke of it.

The Deputy Secretary-General for his third sortie, had to make do with another of the girls, whose pleasant face had previously, though briefly, been disfigured with pique on seeing the middle-aged madame given preference.

When the Deputy Secretary-General made his reappearance in the room, his bemedalled chest open to the winds and one arm round the bare flanks of the girl, he was hailed with applause.

“If it is not an indiscreet question,” said Antonio’s cousin, Edoardo Lentini, “may I enquire how old you are?”

“My dear chap,” replied the bigwig, “I’m pretty long in the tooth… Go on and guess!”

“Twenty-five! Twenty-four!” cried those who thought it opportune to butter him up by assuring him how young he looked.

“Forty! Forty-two!” wagered those wishing to bestow on him a contrasting pleasure – that of publicly denying any possibility that, in his case at least, it had required long years to rise to such heights in politics.

“Thirty-two!” was his curt reply.

“Heavens!” exclaimed the first lot. “You’re such a wow with the women we’d never have thought you a day over twenty-five!”

“By Jove!” ejaculated the others. “Only thirty-two and already Deputy Secretary-General of the Party?”

They went on to speak of Youth, which under the new regime had taken over the “helm of the State”. The ministers, the mayors, the Party Secretaries, were all without exception youthful, and the most youthful of all was… Whereupon they all lowered their voices, with a painful effort removed the sozzled smirks from their faces, stiffened in their chairs at the memory of how many times they had sprung to attention as they pronounced that title; and they named the name of Italy’s most potent and powerful personage.

Such conversation had become insufferable, not least because it demanded a sort of earnestness that was riotously banished from their faces by the flush of exhilaration and liquor.

To create a diversion a young police inspector snatched up one of the girls and dumped her on the lap of Lorenzo Calderara, who enjoyed what was (in Catania) the mortifying reputation of never having gone with a State prostitute.

They all set to a-clapping and a-shouting, while the girl poured a host of come-hitherings into the ear of Calderara, who contrived to give a sickly smile as he turned red as a turkey-cock.

“Get a move on!” bawled the Deputy Secretary-General (to whom a few hasty words had been addressed by a bony individual whose dismal species of diplomacy – known with a fantasy to match its aptness as hunchback-heartedness – had, from his constant whispering in people’s ears, resulted in a perpetual stoop). “Get a move on, Lorenzo, do your stuff! The Party Secretary of Catania has to be a man!… You take my meaning, I suppose?… And you, comrade Elena, will thereafter report to me in person!”

The company, with the exception of Antonio, leapt to their feet to heave Calderara out of his chair and spur him from the room along with the girl.

“Don’t push!” objected Calderara. “Hey there, that’s enough of that. I’ll go on my own two feet! Stop it!”

All present thereupon turned their eyes to the Deputy Secretary-General. Had they overstepped the mark with the man who from tomorrow onwards would have all their destinies in his hands?

“Let him alone,” said the Deputy Secretary. “He’ll go on his own two feet.”

“He’s not going anywhere!” This sudden shriek from the madame.

An outburst that caused all faces to swivel in her direction, and little by little to drain of their hilarity.

“He’s not going!… Mother of God, are you trying to force me to use foul language?… He’s not going!”

“What do you mean, not going?” enquired the Deputy Secretary. “On whose orders?”

“On mine!” retorted the woman, clapping a hand to the copious bosom a-quiver beneath her quivering bodice.

Laughter was general and hearty.

“No laughing matter this, you fools!” The Deputy Secretary-General rose from his chair, retracting his chin onto his chest, flaring bloodless nostrils; a pace away from the woman he raised his head, gave her a sidelong look, as a matador sidesteps before thrusting his sword into the heart of the bull; then, like lightning, he delivered a whacking backhand that sent her crashing against the wall.

Arms milling, the woman clutched at a tapestry that instantly ripped from its moorings and fell, entombing her in a number of the edifices of ancient Rome and a considerable stretch of the Tiber.

She slithered to the floor. The girls flocked to her aid, disentwining her from the hangings. One of them put a glass of water to her lips and tipped it gently into her mouth as into a lifeless vessel.

Having drunk, the woman gave a shake to her head, scrubbed her eyes energetically with the backs of her hands and scowled, one after the other, at the men, now resettled in their places.

“Cooled off a bit, eh?” enquired Lorenzo Calderara sarcastically.

“I did it for your sake, you oaf!” the woman said brokenly from where she sat slumped on the floor.

In imitation of the Deputy Secretary a few moments before, Calderara rose from his chair, though in a far more ludicrous manner and, hand raised, advanced in his turn on the woman.

“Oh, give over now, that’s quite enough of that!” broke in one of the girls, the tallest and most splendid of them all. “Lay off!” And she gave a shove that sent him tottering backwards. “What a bloody awful evening this has been! What a lot of dead-beats! Give us a break, do!…” And here she addressed Antonio in the accents of one relinquishing a tiresome role and giving voice to her true tastes. “Come on now, duckie. ’Cor, do I ever want to get a breath of fresh air!”

These words struck the company like the blow of a mace to the midriff. They could not have been more cogently informed that they were unlovable, and that without exception all their conquests of the evening had been but a snare and a delusion.

The girl had clasped Antonio to her side, and while the involuntary undulations of her bare hips, and the equally involuntary sportings of her right hand, manifested a warm and plentiful ardour, at the rest of the company she directed a cold and haughty stare.

“It’s been a bloody awful evening for us too, I’ll have you know!” declared the Deputy Secretary-General, hefting himself out of his chair. “Let’s get out of here!”

Edoardo Lentini, anxious lest such a conquest, by making the others look small, might get his friend into trouble, amiably remarked, “Antonio’ll be coming along with us. He’s not going to stay and waste his time here…”

“Here,” retorted the girl, “he would not be wasting his time. He’d be wasting it with you lot, with all that daft rubbish you get up to just so as to get on everybody’s nerves!”

“Antonio, we must go. We shouldn’t stay here a moment longer,” said Edoardo, now with a resolute ring to his voice.

“Leave him alone!” commanded the Deputy Secretary, carefully pressing his fez down onto his glistening hair. “We’re not such tyrants as to wish to chastise the taste of tarts…”

At this Antonio freed himself from the girl’s grasp and, with a motion as indolent as it was self-assured, removed the fez from the Deputy Secretary’s head and – O unheard-of thing! – began to toss it nonchalantly from hand to hand while eyeing the open window as if he had half a mind to bung it out into the street.

Every man-jack of them went green about the gills. Lorenzo Calderara puffed up like a drowning man gulping water, his breath coming ever more laboured and spasmodic. Edoardo Lentini mouthed the paternosters he was mentally rattling off to invoke the aid of God for his friend in peril. The women alone gazed upon Antonio with emotions which (since their very natures prompted them to play it strong) ended in their making some lewd remark.

The Deputy Secretary grabbed Antonio’s arm with his brawny hand and held it fast. He raked all present with a stately glare. He glared at Antonio… Then, seized by a sudden impulse of liking for the young man, he burst out laughing.

Sighs of relief all round, except from Lorenzo Calderara, ever slow on the uptake and incapable of lightning switches from wrath to mirth without risking a veritable seizure.

“Good luck to you, young man!” cried the bigwig, readjusting the fez on his hairdo and rapping his riding-crop on Antonio’s chest.