“I don’t want to get married! But… you happened to leave a letter from your father at my house, and I’ve read it.”

“What letter?” asked Antonio, horror-struck.

“A letter from your father telling you to get back at once to Catania to meet the young lady they mean to marry you off to.”

“I don’t believe you managed to decipher my father’s hand-writing!” stammered Antonio. “I can’t even make it out myself…”

“But that’s not what I’m crying for… I’ve already told you I don’t want to marry you. I’m all right on my own and… and don’t want to marry anyone.”

“So what are you getting at?” said Antonio, panic-stricken.

“I love you I love you! In heaven’s name can’t you understand? I love you!”

Antonio’s face took on the pallor of death and he slumped, he practically collapsed, onto a sofa.

The girl glided to his side, bringing with her the tender fragrance of her angora woollies and powdered neck. Shaken with sobs, she insinuated beneath his chin that fair brow on which, at Embassy receptions, there always glittered a small diamond crucifix. With her little frightened hand she sought for the heart beneath his dressing-gown, as if to see whether such a thing as a heart could ever beat there.

Far from just beating, Antonio’s heart was at full gallop. Astride this runaway steed he sped towards the blackest anguish.

Luisa no longer knew what she was doing, she had lost all control of herself, she was aghast, ashamed, to discover her hand wandering frantically beneath Antonio’s robe.

“I won’t make any demands!” she sobbed. “Don’t worry, I promise that! I won’t make any trouble for you… I’m an honest woman, I’m not like the others!”

“On the contrary,” said he, clutching at the desperate expedient of playing it tough and nasty, grabbing her by the wrists to hold her off a little and looking her straight in the face. “You are like the others!”

Luisa frowned, scattering attractive, kittenish wrinkles around her eyes and nose: “What do you mean? You don’t know what you’re saying!” Then, all in a rush, “What are you thinking of? I’m a virgin, I tell you, I’m a virgin!”

Antonio forced an ironic smile, something that came with difficulty and caused him displeasure, because he was a simple-hearted young man and could distinguish a truth from a falsehood.

“Even if I married the most bigoted and ridiculous of you Sicilians,” continued Luisa in a more muted, a more measured voice, “he would have nothing to reproach me for. I know that when your women go to hotels in Taormina for the first night of their honeymoon they squawk like hens having their necks wrung. I wouldn’t squawk even if you killed me, but anyway… I’d have a right to… But why have you gone all pale? What’s the matter? Are you expecting someone? Is there someone at that door?”

A spot of colour crept back into Antonio’s cheeks. A faint noise had come from the bedroom door, as of a bodily weight falling against it.

“Is there a woman in there?” demanded Luisa in a hushed voice.

“Yes,” answered he, casting down his eyes.

Luisa regained her poise, rose from the sofa, retrieved her handbag from a table, extracted a compact, peered at a pair of eyes that had turned to steel, dried them, then erased all traces of tears with two dabs of a powder-puff.

“Goodbye then,” she said. “Forgive me.”

And she made her exit.

Antonio sped to the bedroom door, flung it open, and was kissed almost smack on the mouth by his poodle which, impatient of release, leapt up at him with a strangled yelp.

He fondled its ears, tried to calm it, rocked its head to and fro as from among its riotous curlicues it shot him adoring glances. He then stretched out on the sofa, plopping the dog down on top of him, muzzle between front paws, while now and again it darted out its tongue to lick his chin and he, throwing back his head, skilfully evaded it.

In this way passed some hours. The sky over Villa Borghese darkened… A crow flapped in and out of the clouds, emitting at each wheel of its flight a muffled caw.

Tenderly Antonio lifted the dozing dog and deposited it on the carpet. He then stretched himself lavishly and got up. A glance at the window, and beyond the Pincio the mist had thickened, as if the Tiber were filling the air with the vapour of its breath. The buildings glimpsed through the trees of the park had taken on a yellower tint. Down below in the street, at the corner of Via Pinciana and Via Sgambati, in the guise of a young man waiting for his girl, stood the inevitable plain-clothes policeman, motionless, bare-headed, hat in hand: and hidden in the hat the inevitable love-story he was reading to allay the endless tedium of protecting the life of a man whose car flashed by only once every couple of months.

“Lord, how dreary Rome is!” thought Antonio. And donning his overcoat and giving a rub to the tummy of his dog, which in expectation had already rolled onto its back with its legs in the air, he left the house.

Thus ended the first part of a day which Antonio was destined to remember for many a long year.

Either that same day or (as is more likely) the next, Antonio paid a call on his uncle, Ermenegildo Fasanaro, his mother’s brother, who lived in one of the new suburbs.

This said uncle strode up and down the sitting-room, his silk shirt hanging out and his unknotted necktie beforked onto a paunch plumped out by his fifty years.

“Best thing for you to do is get back to Catania,” stated this uncle, pausing every so often by the window, his bulk blocking out now the bend in the Tiber around Villa Glori, now the slopes of the hill.

“What d’you think you’re doing here in Rome? Trying to find out if there’s any end to ‘that business’? Well let me tell you, there isn’t. You’re on the job night and day, you’re burning the candle at both ends, your cheeks get hollower and hollower and you’re always dropping off like a cat that’s been out all night on the tiles… Hell and dammit! Where women are concerned you have to ration it out, lead ’em up the garden path. It’s easy enough to take them in if you use a bit of gumption. I’m pretty sure you’re one of those fellows who’d give a fortune to make a good score every night, eh? Or am I wrong.”

“Well, to tell the truth I…”

“In one way, mind you, you’re right. Women stroke you with one hand while they tot up the sums with the other. But what the deuce! it’s so easy to spin ’em a yarn. All it takes is a spot of technique. Not that there aren’t some pretty crafty ones who haggle over details, but that’s the cunning of a fool, because your clever woman knows she has to keep on her toes in other ways. Your job is to know when you’ve had enough. That’s all there is to it… It’s the clean contrary of what we’re told by the Pig who rules over us… Incidentally, is it true that he has a stomach ulcer?”

“Uncle, I have no idea!”

“Word has it that he has a stomach ulcer… In fact yesterday, sitting in a café, I heard a naval officer at the next table whispering behind his hand to a colleague of his, ‘We’re home and dry: it’s not an ulcer, it’s cancer!’ I’m pretty sure they were talking about him. No? Do you say not?”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“For heaven’s sake, you’ve no interest in politics at all! You don’t give a fig for it. I bet you’ve never read Karl Marx…”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well don’t.