His people had always been prudent, responsible administrators of the Municipality or one or other of its institutions, peerless notaries, keepers of the most delicate secrets; the faces of whom (graced with pointed goatees), imprinting themselves on the retinas of dying men already immured in frivolity and cynicism towards the things of this world, recalled them to feelings of duty towards such matters as properties, livestock, houses, and money in the bank.

The women had always been beyond the reproach even of their confessors. Their eyes were as cold as they were beautiful, and fledgling preachers, launching into their tirades against women, would by hook or by crook avoid them, for fear of losing the thread and wandering off at a tangent. One of these women, simply by turning up at her country place after dark, had caused a knavish farmhand to hurl himself into the watertank. Mistresses in their own house they were, to the extent that not a few ovens, asthmatic in their habits, consented to draw only if they were present. Women capable of sitting up night and day by the bedside of an old, sick maidservant, and performing for her the most menial of services. Men and women, then, of the most out-of-this-world normality.

Except that when they were born “different” (something that had occurred three times in a hundred years) they were not content with becoming artists or layabouts or playboys or scientists, like most who are not run-of-the-mill, but became raving lunatics apt to do some damn-fool thing from one moment to the next.

This lack of intermediate stages and nuances between those three unbridled Puglisis and the infinite number of other Puglisis, prudent and decorous, saw to it that the propriety of the family was in no wise tarnished. Those three constituted the exceptions that proved the rule. The vital thing was that such an exception should not occur again; and for this reason all the Puglisi clan would eye the earliest actions of their children with suspicion, and were unable to love them until that mysterious medley of mewlings and kickings gave place to the first signs of the future notary or the future mistress of the house.

In marrying the daughter of the baron of Paternò, our good notary Giorgio Puglisi was aware that he was marrying into the family of a man slightly out of the ordinary. But at that time the baron differed from others only in that he told people to their faces exactly what he thought of them; wealth, on the other hand, which was the greatest proof of respectability a man could offer, spoke highly in the baron’s favour. Thus did the notary comfort and console himself. On his wedding day, however, in church, as he knelt before the altar with his bride at his side, the baron leant towards him and spoke into his ear: “I’ll burst if I hold it in a moment longer: you look to me exactly like a turkey.”

Our good notary blanched; but his common sense immediately suggested the following line of argument: “It’s no use crying over spilt milk, and an irreparable mistake should not be thought of as a mistake, since that would be not only useless but harmful. God forbid that I should judge this old fellow to be an eccentric! What he said he said out of affection for me – and in any case, no one heard. As for my descendants… God will surely come to my aid.

And in this connection he remembered how frequently the priests had beamed upon him and said, “May God reward you!”

The first few years of this marriage were very happy. In 1914 Barbara was born, and in 1920 the baron withdrew into his garret, leaving the notary to administer his entire fortune; a circumstance which would have filled the latter’s cup of joy to the brim had not Barbara, in that same interval of time, manifested signs of this strange mania for spending hours on end peering through the door at her silent, immobile grandpapa. What depths of curiosity could, in a six-year-old child, be appeased by staring for so long at an old gargoyle? What emotions were there in that small eye glued to the door: gratification, mockery, fear, cruelty, compassion?

One day the monkish uncle, seating himself with solemnity, drew her between his knees and attempted to probe her with questions as subtle and almost imperceptible as the corner of a handkerchief removing a speck from an eye. But he got nothing out of her. Some years later Barbara developed a similar fascination for the sound of swallows accidentally trapped in the chimney stack. Thoroughly battered by the swinging cowl at the top, they were powerless to resist the suction which drew them down the flue until, after endless struggles, it laid them in the spent ashes of the grate, where Barbara grabbed them up more dead than alive.

This new eccentricity on his daughter’s part alarmed the good notary. At this rate, where would it all end? He donated two thousand lire towards the foundation of an orphanage, and only a few years elapsed before God sent his thank-you letter. For that same Barbara, on whose account they had nursed so many and great apprehensions, had become the most normal, respectable girl you could possibly hope for, to the extent of resembling, at one and the same time, about a dozen of the notary’s female forebears.

“Do you remember, dear,” asked the notary of his wife, as he shed tender looks upon Barbara, “when my mother used to sit there knitting away? Just that same expression on her lips!… Remember Aunt Mariannina winding her alarm clock? The very same pout!… And when my sister Maria laid the table? Why, she’d pick up the glasses four at a time with her fingers inside ’em, exactly like Barbara!”

Barbara learnt to paint and to play the violin; she frequented the theatre, concerts, lectures, and all this without compromising herself one jot or tittle either with art or with ideas of which she remained as innocent as the day she was born.

But strangled as she was by this sedateness, she too was unhappy-happy, as all young people are: she too was breathless to know her future; when she looked at the sky at night, and heard neither sound nor voice vouchsafed her from it, she too was dismayed to think that the cosmos was a barren waste; she too, doucely or in desperation, prayed to God; and at sixteen years of age, when nature’s aesthetes, devoured by the passion for beauty that torments their senses, already have hollow cheeks, pinched noses and bags under their eyes, she was a picture of all that is fresh and fair.

IV

IN 1933 THE PUGLISI FAMILY were threatened by a legal manoeuvre which would have trimmed their riches by three quarters. A mayor who was no respecter of persons had taken it into his head to commandeer the waters of the River Pomiciaro (which belonged to the baron), for the use of the municipality.

On learning this scandalous news the notary packed his wife and daughter off to the theatre, sent the maids to do the shopping, shut the windows tight and gave vent to the following outburst: “Thieves! Blackguards! They’re stealing my stuff!”

He then set off helter-skelter for Rome, and in this city destitute of persons to treat him with due respect he languished whole days in anterooms, until it dawned on him that only one particular minister, Count K., could possibly rescue him, using the technique of bawling down the telephone – as he was wont to do in moments of wrath – a torrent of oaths directed at this mayor. Thus it came about that he reached the conclusion, the moment he returned to Catania, that Antonio, a close friend of that minister, was a handsome young chap indeed, and an excellent match for his daughter.

As for Barbara, scarcely had she been informed that she was to marry Antonio, and that to think about him was consequently now quite proper, than she began to dream about him, as if in the flesh, although she had set eyes on him only once or twice, and that very fleetingly; and to suffer strange emotions when her girl-friends came to call… For on such occasions her mother exhorted her to flaunt in the sunlight of the balcony the very sheets in which she would henceforth be enveloped by night with the Adonis of the city.

The betrothal was celebrated strictly “Family Only”, so Antonio’s pal d’Agata had to rest content with making his presence felt over the telephone:

“Is your fiancée with you there?”

“No, ’cos the telephone’s in a room miles away from the drawing-room, and Mr Notary is dead-set against Barbara and me going off on our own.”

“Have you kissed her yet?”

“Good Lord no!”

“God preserve us! And when are you going to do it?”

A smile crept over Antonio’s face: “Goodbye my friend, goodbye now,” and with that he returned to the drawing-room.

There he was embraced and kissed by three distinct monsignori who’d tucked their dangling crucifixes into the black satin sashes with which their waists were swathed; and he was hugged paternally by Father Rosario. Everyone present was shouting and drumming their coffee-spoons on their saucers. A myriad of sounds met and clashed between room and room: the radiogram, the piano and (since it was nearing Christmas) the shepherds with their bag-pipes, who must have made their way up the back stairs, and perhaps even ensconced themselves in the kitchen. Rain had already arrived to lash at the windows, and low clouds scudded over the roof of the lawcourts, masking Mount Etna.

When the clock on the lawcourts announced the hour of seven, Barbara cried, “We simply have to go up and visit grandpapa! It would give him so much pleasure, poor old dear.”

A small platoon, composed of the notary himself, Signora Agatina, Father Rosario and the betrothed couple, clambered the dark stairway and all but tiptoed into the tiny chamber.

Backed up against the wall, they stood in total silence round the old man, while he, propped up on his excuse for a bed, kept head bowed and eye fixed on his own two hands, crouched like two dry crabshells on the turn-down of the sheets.

Antonio waited for someone to say something or do something, to give him a cue. But no one either spoke or moved: they might have been looking at a funerary marble.

All of a sudden in swept Signor Alfio yelling “But what the…” (he lowered his voice abruptly) “what the devil are you up to here?”

The nonagenarian baron raised his eye towards the newcomer, painfully forced his lips apart, and croaked, “The trees!… Alderman, you!…” Whereat he keeled over as if at a puff of wind. In the person of Signor Alfio he had recognized one of the aldermen at the time the Town Hall had presumed to plant plane-trees in front of his house.

“Off with you, off with the lot of you! Back downstairs!” urged the notary. “I’s a mere nothing. I’ll deal with it. Agatina and I will deal with it.