Tilted thus, it abuts, with its well frequented cafés, its pottery shops, on Via Etnea; beyond which, flat as a pancake, stretches the other half of the piazza, its pavements supporting the most precious of all the burdens with which the soil of Catania is weighted, to wit, the marble statue of our much venerated Vincenzo Bellini, in which he is depicted seated and smiling and surrounded by four of his celebrated protagonists, all with their mouths wide open in the process of scattering to the four winds the divine music of their creator. Here converge various alleyways, some lined with market stalls, some with brothels; and here also are the station approaches. And here more than anywhere the sirocco rubs his sweaty belly, and keeps the cobblestones covered with slithery mud.

But the Puglisi residence rose in the most lofty and luminous part of the piazza, so that in wintertime its window-panes admitted the dazzle of the snows of Mount Etna a-shimmer in the sunlight.

Barbara’s mother, Signora Agatina, a vast, vociferous, dilapidated woman, had a dread of the cold, so often the cause of a nose blocked to suffocation-point, and when she discerned a draught of cold air she turned upon it the look of a trapped game-bird facing a gun-barrel. For this reason she had cajoled her husband into installing central heating – the first ever in Catania.

This was the object of much criticism by the friends of the family, particularly because Notary Puglisi was considered the most respectable and level-headed man in town, related by ties of blood to other highly estimable notaries and to priests, all persons who for at least a century past had, along Via Etnea, been recipients of those obsequious salutations which the citizens of Catania bestow upon integrity, decorum, and absence of vices or debts.

And indeed, to take a closer look at the first and only eccentricity of a respected gentleman, and to glean personal knowledge of it, almost every day these family friends came flocking, with their nannies and their suckling infants, to spend a couple of hours in that insufferable heat; which they left with faces all splodged with red, as if one and all, from grand-dad to grandchild, had suffered a volley of slaps. But in the end they found it quite the normal thing, and one or two of them even installed this “central heating” themselves. “We ought to have know that a man like Puglisi could never have done anything irresponsible,” they said.

Barbara spent her girlhood in this summer-and-winter hothouse, singing and skipping along the corridors, but never out of earshot of a voice down the passage: “Don’t you go getting too close to them radiators!” Or alternatively, when she dared to set foot on the wooden steps that led up to the attic, a second voice: “DON’T YOU DARE GO UP TO PAPÀ FRANCESCO!”

Papà Francesco, Signora Agatina’s father, was of course the grandfather of Barbara, but was called “papà” on account of the respect owed to his wealth and blue blood. It was not known which king had created him Baron of PaternÒ, because he himself had a hatred of books, even those which, blazoning forth all the fesses and hatchments of heraldic science, discoursed upon his family coat of arms.

Once Agatina was married off he was left with one decrepit old retainer, alone in his ancient palazzo with its marble pillars and statues supporting wrought-iron lanterns, fronting on an unfrequented piazza in the middle of which the old man could observe the rearing equestrian statue of one of the “continental usurpers”, King Umberto I.

His forehead pressed against the window-panes, this nobleman devoted a great deal of time to detesting that statue.

“Tell me, Paolino,” said he, addressing the old retainer, long since punch-drunk from having obeyed, though with the utmost respect, so many practically insane commands, “is it that I can’t think straight, or does that chap there really have the mug of an ill-bred colt?”

“His visage is that of an ill-bred colt,” was the man’s invariable reply.

But came the time when the municipal authorities had plane-trees planted all round the piazza, and right in the face of the palazzo sprouted burly trees which went into transports of joy at growing up into the most luminous sky in the world.

The baron succumbed to blacker and blacker rage, as the rooms of his palace were shrouded in ever densening shadows. He protested, he wrote screeds to the papers, he pestered the authorities, both lay and religious: the Hon. Carnazza MP and his rival the Hon. De Felice MP, although he blushed to the core at having to mount the stairs of these men who spoke from the standpoint of fishmongers, janitors and such… But the trees were stronger than he was, and continued to soar upwards without a care in the world.

There came a night, however, when the old retainer, furtive and muffled up to the eyes, slank forth from the palazzo, approached the trees and, one by one, subjected them to certain occult treatments known only to him. This ceremony was repeated for a month; and lo, those sturdy, waving fronds which only a thunderbolt could prevent from seeing the year 2000, started to yellow at the very tips through which they imbibed the light.

The glee of the baron at these signs of enfeeblement, which he was the first to notice, from his central balcony upon which the trees were wont to rest their lovely heads, knew no bounds. The ill-starred vegetable matter gradually languished and, beyond the window-panes which on windy days reflected the myriad frolics of their foliage, they espied a human face growing ever more joyous as they themselves crept nearer and nearer to death…

The scandal, on the brink of explosion, was quenched with infinite difficulty and expense. The tree-poisoner was obliged by his son-in-law to leave his palazzo and remove to Piazza Stesicoro to live with his daughter and himself. It would seem that something must have been gnawing at the old man’s conscience if he, who had always slept in a bed dating from the reign of Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, developed a penchant for garrets, unmade beds, poky little windows, and a view of church towers over rooftops…

He also became devoted to intense noise, for which reason, every time he closed a window, he rammed it to with all his might and stood there wide-eyed, ecstatic, harkening to it as if he had elicited the sweetest of sweet echoes. One day he bought a drum and (his grand-daughter hopping and skipping in a frenzy of joy) within the narrow confines of the room he perpetrated a tattoo that would have done honour to any parade-ground. But the neighbours complained, and his own dear daughter, her eyes awash with tears, implored him to relinquish this type of performance.

A compromise was arrived at. The baron would, for six days a week, restrain the tormenting urge to beat upon his drumhead. Every Sunday, however, he would have the horses harnessed, step up into his carriage, with his old manservant cradling the drum ceremoniously swathed in a scarlet cloth, and take leave of that tiresome Catania, a city which didn’t turn a hair at the screeching of trams, but threw up its hands in horror at a perfectly pleasing paradiddle.

On reaching one of his country properties in La Piana, he would alight from the carriage and, amid bowings and scrapings from his peasants, stalk in amongst the trees, faithful servitor at heel bearing the drum still wrapped in its scarlet cloth. At length he would halt, disenrobe the instrument, sling it on his shoulder, and raise skywards the two ebony drumsticks quivering with all the fervours of a week-long-thwarted drummer. Then, slap-bang, with terrible fury, the old gentleman bombarded the thing time and time again, the drumhead quaked and hollered, the hens went squawking off in all directions pursued by dogs, and the bulls slouched away, furtively eyeing the red rag lying on the ground… and the servitor yawned.

For three hours would the old baron batter his ears with his tremendous onslaught. Then he would have the instrument swathed once more in its scarlet cloth and climb into the carriage to return to Catania. The door open, and one foot on the step, he would pause for an instant and enquire of his servant; “How did it go today?”

“Magnificent,” replied the other ancient; and, holding in his left hand the exhausted drum, he extended his right to aid the exhausted drummer.

But one night the old servant rose from his bed, laid himself down on a chest in the hall, and passed away.

For a quarter of an hour the baron gazed upon the inert form of a man who had for so long obeyed his every command, whose life’s work was now done for ever and a day.

“What the hell did he do that for?” he muttered. “What the hell made him do it?” And he asked Father Rosario, his son-in-law’s brother, to pay him a visit in the garret which he had no intention of ever leaving again.

“Is there any such thing as heaven?” was his point-blank query as soon as the monk appeared in the doorway.

Father Rosario took a seat and gave a detailed description of how the kingdom of heaven was, in all likelihood, constituted.

“You’re a bunch of swindlers!” retorted the veteran, and told him to clear out and never come back.

But the very next day he started crossing himself every few seconds, secreting holy pictures under cushions, falling on his knees every time the word “death” chanced to flit through his mind, and combining hatred of the clergy with a bigotry bordering on second childhood. He believed more than the Church’s dogma required of him, but he rejected the Church itself. Simultaneously he was a rebel and a pitiable fanatic: a condition perfectly natural in one entangled, without hope of escape, in a mesh of rage and terror. His bedroom window never opened again, and therein the foul stenches stagnated at will until the time should come for them to cleanse and sweeten themselves with the fermentations of their own decay. The old man’s body grew callused with that hard, cold, fibrous matter which invests the legs of fowls. One of his eyes remained permanently shut as if the lid were glued down, the look in the other was as watery and irresolute as a lantern in a rainstorm.

He never spoke a word or gave trouble to anyone. But his brain, especially at night, was a tempest of storming thoughts, words of command, shrieks, Ave Marias, sobs.

Barbara was very much drawn to this grandfather who looked for all the world like an oversized rag doll – and, that her footfall might not reach the ears of her mother, who had forbidden her to visit him, she took off her shoes to climb the wooden stairs to the attic. There she put her face to a crack in the door, and there she stayed for ages with her crafty little eye fixed on that ancient wreck which had neither sound nor motion, not even that of breathing… and who, withered and spent as he was, still had twenty years of life left in him.

This eccentricity of Barbara’s was not popular with the family, and absolutely infuriated our good notary, who was always on the lookout for eccentricities.