What do you think? After all…”

“After all,” took up Edoardo, “not everyone can be like you!” And he gave a wink, that left his fine brow as unfurrowed and inexpressive as the sole of a foot.

The thought that women existed, their tiny hands, their pink feet, their white throats, their enticing skirts, dispelled all melancholy. Edoardo let out a yell that caused that glimmer of female face behind the window-grating to vanish, blown out like a candle in the wind.

“Three cheers!” he cried, taking advantage of the empty street. “Others may have freedom, but Italy has women!”

A day or two after this promenade Antonio, having learnt that the Deputy Secretary-General had returned to Rome, paid a visit to the headquarters of the Fascist League to have a word with Lorenzo Calderara. As the telephone had summoned the usher into the interior of a phone-booth, and since he had already been sitting in the waiting-room for an hour, he walked up to the Party boss’s door and pushed it open. He caught a glimpse of Calderara’s head nose downwards on a divan, the brow aflame, the veins taut as whipcords… The penny dropped, he wished to see no more, but tiptoed away with the air of one who has asked a question and received a brutally downright answer, when a few casual words would have more than sufficed.

“Kindly tell him I’m positively glad not to have set eyes on him these last ten years!”

This was the message Antonio received via the pharmacist Salinitro from his old schoolmate Angelo Bartolini, who lived like a hermit in the environs of Catania, close to a tiny railway station where every other day passed the little chugger-train on its tour of Mount Etna. This was the only noise likely to disturb the meditations of an amiable fellow whose kind-heartedness now found its sole outlet in cherishing his loathing of the times he lived in.

“Why’ he glad not to have set eyes on me for ten years?” asked Antonio, pausing with the pharmacist on the pavement of Via Etnea. “Personally, I’ve always been particularly fond of him.”

“Because he’s heard you’re going to be made Party Secretary of some place or other.”

“It’s a lie!” cried Antonio. “Tell him it’s four years since I paid up for my Party Card, and that one of these days I’m going to shut myself away in the country and…”

At that moment who should emerge from a side-street but Barbara Puglisi with her mother. The girl was bearing a missal and walking with a slight stoop, hugging to her bosom, and concealing in the sweetest manner possible, the exuberance and surge of her youth. A gentle nudge from her mother notified her that she might allow her gaze, albeit attenuated by modesty, to recover both perception and alertness. Barbara permitted her oval face, lapped in violet lace, an imperceptible movement to the left; a more noticeable movement she imparted to her eyes, revealing their dazzling whites; and she espied Antonio gazing at her. A slight stumble detached her from her mother and led her very close to the young man. He inhaled the sweet scent of her veil, of her skin warmed by a swift rush of blood, of tortoise-shell hairpins, of clothes which had long kept company with a pot-pourri which no woman in Rome had ever possessed: it stung his flesh, it pricked him to the quick. He stood stock-still, tracing the course of that species of serpent which had penetrated his nervous system and was biting at its very roots.

“My God!” he muttered. “Could this be…”

“You’re leaving me in the dark,” said the pharmacist.

Antonio’s answer was to throw his arms around the man’s neck and hug him.

“I’m still more in the dark,” exclaimed the other.

“Tell friend Angelo,” cried Antonio in tones of elation “that in no time at all I’m going to marry that girl you saw passing just now… and that I’m delighted at the prospect!”

So saying he rested his eyes upon the statue of the Madonna up there on the church of the Carmine, and retained them there devoutly, as one who, in an act of thanksgiving, presses his forehead to the ground before an altar.

“And what about your political opinions? What shall I tell friend Angelo about those?” enquired the other.

“Oh, those… What do they matter?” replied Antonio, grasping the pharmacist’s hand in both of his.

That very same evening he entered his parents’ bedroom and announced that he was all agog to marry Barbara.

His father, beside himself with joy, rushed in his long johns out onto the terrace and summoned Avvocato Ardizzone to announce the gladsome tidings.

“Rara avis!” replied the old lawyer, actuated merely by the wish to pronounce, in open air and cavernous voice, the phrase he had learnt two hours previously; the which, there in the darkness, amongst the jumbled encumbrance of chimney-pots and the glint of star-lit balustrades, was perfectly meaningless. “Rara avis!” My most hearty congratulations and felicitations thereupon!”

But his daughter Elena, who had heard Signor Alfio’s words from her place of concealment behind the shutters of the French windows, clutched at a heart that writhed like a fish in the net, and was by no means of her father’s opinion.

“He’s been and gone and done it!” she murmured, at first in a tone of voice that struggled to appear bantering, but that gradually gave place to rage. “He’s gone and done it! That’s the way they carry on here in Catania! Go off and marry a girl they’ve never clapped eyes on and take not a mite of notice of their next-door neighbour!”

“Elena, my dear!” exclaimed her father, administering a great shove with his shoulder to get her back behind the shutter from which she was elbowing to emerge.

“Yes, it’s true, it’s true! When you have a young girl right under your nose, you might at least glance at her, before committing a bloomer in another neighbourhood!”

“But Elena!…”

“The fact is that I’m hapless, hapless, I was born hapless! The stars do not favour me, the saints do not sweat for me, it was not my lot – and my father, instead of hankering after the Senate, might have…”

“Elena, Elena, Elena!” shrieked the old man in three different keys, going wildly off pitch on the last Elena!, as if clappering a cracked bell. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Elena, come now, Elena, Elena!”

Another crack in his voice. Then he turned to Signor Alfio with, “Do forgive me, kind friend. Please have the condescension to pardon me and once again accept my… my… Good night, dear friend.”

And the old lawyer flung the French windows to with a tremendous clatter.

Quite early next morning Elena hurled down onto the Magnano terrace three bulky volumes of love-journals in which, along with sketches, pressed butterflies, violets, palm-leaves – all things which had lived and flourished fifteen years before – was pasted a photograph of Antonio astride a wooden rocking-horse: the only copy of that photo, the loss of which had saddened Signora Rosaria.

These journals plummeted onto the terrace while Antonio was engaged in watering the pots of cacti. He did not lose his composure but continuing to sprinkle water among prickles and petals, he turned the pages with his toe, his eye lighting here and there upon a sentence containing words in capital letters. For example: “I would let HIM walk on my FACE,” or “From three o’clock until eight always thinking the same THING,” or else “What RINGS under his EYES today.” He then peeled off the photograph so long sought by his mother and threw the remains in the dustbin.

Two days later these fervent phrases were the playthings of the caretaker’s kids in the entrance to the courtyard. Elena, who, we must suppose, felt the beating of those fragments of her heart wherever they chanced to be, rushed headlong down the many flights of the building and swooped like a vulture on those unwitting urchins who were passing around paper hats and boats adorned with words which, could they but have read them, might have put a sudden end to their innocence. Elena, in every case with one quick snatch, succeeded in yanking away the paper and tweaking the fingers holding it; then she flew back up the stairs, wails and caterwaulings in her wake.

That night she knocked back a glass of water in which she had dissolved a couple of dozen sulphur match-heads, and at dawn was convinced she was at death’s door. However, it sufficed for her to vomit into a terracotta pot while her poor mother supported her head, and her father, in an agony of fright, delivered harangues to Death, Life, Honour and Madness – all of whom he most likely saw drawn up in front of him – for her to be as right as rain again.

Same day, at lunch at the Magnano’s… Signor Alfio to Antonio, having of course recounted the occurrence in their neighbours’ house: “What is it you do to these women, eh?”

His mother: “He doesn’t need to do a thing. It’s they who have the hot pants on ’em, not him!”

To forestall further troubles, the engagement to Barbara Puglisi was hastened on, and in the course of one week Antonio found himself up to the eyebrows in the traditions of an old-established Catanian family.

The residence of the foremost notary in Catania, Giorgio Puglisi, was situated in Piazza Stesicoro, opposite the old law-courts, above the roof of which Mount Etna, looking almost next door in the absence of anything to obstruct the view, spreads her enormous wings, white as a swan’s in the winter time, and mauve throughout other seasons of the year. This section of the piazza has been subjected to a deep excavation which brought to light the arches of a Roman theatre, rimed with mildew and pierced by passageways that vanish into the entrails of the city. These diggings, approached down a narrow flight of grass-grown steps, are fenced off by cast-iron railings along which any urchin who passes by at the trot will jaggle his stick with a clangour akin to that of shop-front shutters hauled down in a hurry.

This eastern part of the piazza keels over like the deck of a ship which has latterly received a broadside, conforming as it does to the shape of a crater which opened up here in ancient times. It is the starting-point of a road that scrambles, strident with the screech of tram-brakes (so fearful is the incline), towards the upper and more salubrious zones of the city.