Meanwhile they had stopped at the barber’s to have a glass of absinthe. They said that a great sea battle had been fought, and that ships as big as the whole of Aci Trezza had gone down, brim full of soldiers; in short a whole rigmarole, so that it seemed as though they were telling the story of Orlando and the paladins of France on the front at Catania, and the people stood listening with their ears flapping, thick as flies.

‘Maruzza la Longa’s son was on the Re d’ltalia too,’ commented don Silvestro, who had come up to listen.

‘I’m going to tell my wife,’ said mastro Turi Zuppiddo immediately, ‘because I don’t like long faces between friends and neighbours.’

But meanwhile la Longa remained blissfully ignorant, poor thing, and she was laughing and enjoying herself among friends and relatives.

The soldier carried on chatting with anyone who would listen, making play with his arms like a preacher. ‘Yes, there were Sicilians there too; there were people from all over. But in any case when the alarm is sounded on the gundeck, you don’t have much thought for where people come from, and rifles all speak the same way. They’re all good lads! and with plenty of guts. Listen, when you’ve seen what these eyes have seen, and how those boys did their duty, you can wear this cap over your ear, by the Virgin Mary!’

The young man’s eyes were shining, but he said it was nothing, it was because he’d been drinking. ‘She was called the Re d‘Italia, a ship like no other, all armoured — if you can imagine a corset like you women wear, but a corset of iron, that’s what she had, so that you could fire cannon shots on her without doing any damage. She went to the bottom in a moment, and she was lost to sight for the smoke, which was like the smoke of twenty brick kilns, can you imagine?’

‘There was chaos in Catania,’ added the chemist. ‘Everyone was crowding around the people who were reading the papers, it was like a party.’

‘The papers are just so many printed lines,’ pronounced don Giammaria.

‘They say it’s been a bad business; we’ve lost a great battle,’ said don Silvestro. Padron Cipolla too had come up to see what the crowd was about. ‘Do you believe all this?’ he sniggered at last. ‘It’s just talk to make people pay out a soldo for the paper.’

‘But everyone says we’ve lost!’

‘What?’ asked zio Crocifisso, putting his hand to his ear.

‘A battle.’

‘Who has lost it?’

‘Me, you, Italy, everyone, in fact,’ answered the chemist.

‘I haven’t lost anything,’ said Dumb bell shrugging; ‘now it’s compare Piedipapera’s business, and he can deal with it,’ and he looked towards the house by the medlar tree where they were making merry.

‘You know what it’s like?’ concluded padron Cipolla, ‘it’s like when the Aci Trezza town council was fighting for land with the Aci Castello town council. What good did it do us, you and me?’

‘It did us some good,’ exclaimed the chemist, red in the face. ‘It did… what boors you are…’

‘Those who will suffer are all the poor mothers,’ somebody hasarded; zio Crocifisso, who wasn’t a mother, shrugged his shoulders.

‘I’ll tell you what it’s like in two words,’ the other soldier went on meanwhile. ‘It’s like at the wine shop, when people get worked up and throw plates and glasses amidst all the smoke and shouting. You’ve seen that? Well, that’s just what it’s like. At first, when you’re on the barricading with your rifle in your hand, in all that great silence, all you hear is the pumping of the engine, and it seems to you that that sound is happening to you, in your own stomach: nothing more. Then, at the first cannon shot, and as the pandemonium begins, you want to start dancing too, and chains wouldn’t hold you back, like when the violin starts in the wine shop, after you’ve eaten and drunk, and you stick out your rifle wherever you see anything human at all, amid the smoke. On land it’s quite another thing. A bersagliere who was coming back with us to Messina was telling us that you can’t hear the crack of gun-shots without feeling your feet tingling with the desire to rush forward with your head down. But the bersaglieri aren’t sailors, and they can’t imagine how you manage to stay in the rigging with your foot steady on the rope and your hand steady on the trigger, despite the pitching of the ship, while your mates are falling around you like rotten pears.’

‘Heavenly Virgin,’ exclaimed Rocco Spatu. ‘I’d like to have been there too, to give them a taste of my fists.’

All the others stood listening, all agog. The other young man then told them how the Palestro had blown up — ‘burning like a pile of wood, when she passed near us, and the flames were as high as the foremast peak. But all those boys were at their posts, on the gundeck or on the topgallant bulwark. Our commander asked whether they needed anything. ‘No thanks very much,’ they replied. Then she went to Larboard and no one saw her again.’

‘This business of being roasted to death doesn’t sound so good,’ concluded Rocco Spatu, ‘but I’d have liked the fighting part.’ And as she was going back to the wine shop Santuzza said to him:

‘Tell them to come along here, those poor lads, they must be thirsty, after all that journeying, and they could do with a bit of decent wine. That Pizzuto poisons people with his absinthe, and he doesn’t mention it at confession. Some people have their consciences behind their backs, poor things!’

‘They strike me as so many madmen,’ said padron Cipolla, blowing his nose thoughtfully. ‘Would you get yourself killed if the king told you to go and do so for his sake?’

‘Poor things, it’s not their fault,’ observed don Silvestro.