So they went back to Aci Trezza in silence, with their heads down. Bastianazzo had hastily tidied up the Provvidenza so as to go and wait for them at the top of the street, but when he saw them coming along like that, all crestfallen and with their boots in their hands, he didn’t have the heart to open his mouth, and went home with them in silence. La Longa immediately rushed to shut herself straight in the kitchen, as though she couldn’t wait to be alone with her pots and pans, and padron ’Ntoni said to his son: ‘Go and have a word with the poor creature, she can’t take any more.’

The next day they all went back to the station at Aci Castello to see the convoy of conscripts on their way to Messina, and they waited over an hour behind the railings being jostled by the crowd. At last the train came, and they saw all those boys flapping their arms about, with their heads sticking out of the train windows, like cattle on their way to market. There was so much singing, laughing and general din that it was almost like the feast day at Trecastagni, and amid the hubbub and racket the earlier sense of pain was almost forgotten.

‘Goodbye, ’Ntoni!’ ‘Goodbye, mother!’ ‘Goodbye, and remember what I told you.’ And there at the roadside was Sara, comare Tudda’s girl, apparently cutting grass for their calf; but comare Venera, known as ‘la Zuppidda’, the lame, was spreading the rumour that in fact she had come to say goodbye to padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni, who she used to talk to over the garden wall, she herself had seen them as sure as she would wind up before God her maker. Certain it is that ’Ntoni waved goodbye to Sara, and she stood there with her sickle in her hand staring at the train until it moved off. La Longa felt she personally had been cheated of her own goodbye; and for a long time afterwards, every time she met Sara in the square or at the wash-place, she turned her back on her.

Then the train had left, whistling and roaring in such a way as to drown everyone’s songs and goodbyes. And when the onlookers had gone their own ways, there was just a group of women left, and the odd poor soul who carried on standing up against the railings without quite knowing why. Then gradually even they ambled off, and padron ’Ntoni, guessing that his daughter-in-law must have a bitter taste in her mouth, treated her to two centesimos worth of lemon water.

To comfort La Longa, comar Venera la Zuppidda came out with: ‘Now you may as well resign yourself — for five years you’ll just have to act as though your son were dead, and shut him out of your mind.’

But they continued to think about him, in the house by the medlar-tree, sometimes because of an extra bowl that La Longa kept coming across when she set the table, sometimes because of a running bowline for securing the rigging which ’Ntoni could do better than anyone else, or when a rope had to be pulled as taut as a violin string, or a hawser hauled up by hand when you really needed a winch. Between his puffings and pantings, his grandfather would interpolate remarks like ‘Here’s where we could do with ’Ntoni,’ or ‘I haven’t got that boy’s wrist, you know.’ And as his mother plied her comb rhythmically across her loom she would remember the pounding of the engine which had taken her son away, a pounding which had stayed with her, amid all that bewilderment, and whose insistent beat seemed to be with her still.

His grandfather had some odd ways of comforting himself, and others: ‘After all, let’s be honest: a bit of soldiering will do that boy good. He always did prefer loafing about of a Sunday to using that good pair of arms of his to earn an honest crust.’

Or: ‘When he’s tasted the salt bread you eat elsewhere, he’ll stop complaining about the soups he gets at home.’

At last ’Ntoni’s first letter arrived from Naples, and it set the whole neighbourhood buzzing. He said that the women in those parts wore silken skirts which swept the ground, and that on the quay you could watch Pulcinella, and they sold pizza at two centesimos, the sort rich people ate, and that you couldn’t exist without money, it wasn’t like being at Aci Trezza, where you couldn’t spend a brass farthing unless you went to Santuzza’s wine shop. ‘We’d better send that greedy boy some money to buy himself some pizza,’ said padron ’Ntoni grudgingly; ‘It’s not his fault, that’s just how he is; he’s like a codfish, which would swallow a rusty nail given a chance. If I hadn’t held him at the font with my own arms, I’d swear don Giammaria had put sugar in his mouth instead of salt.’

When comare Tudda’s Sara was at the wash-place, the Mangiacarrubbe girl kept saying:

‘I can just imagine it! Women dressed in silks simply waiting to get their hands on padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni. They don’t have that kind of booby there.’

The others guffawed, and from then on the more disgruntled girls called him the booby.

’Ntoni also sent a photograph of himself, all the girls at the wash-place had seen it, because comare Tudda’s Sara let them pass it round from hand to hand, under their aprons, and the Mangiacarrubbe girl was sick with jealousy. He looked like the archangel Michael in flesh and blood, with those feet of his resting on the carpet, and that curtain at his head, like the one behind the Madonna at Ognina, and so handsome, sleek and clean that his own mother wouldn’t have recognised him; and poor La Longa couldn’t see enough of the carpet and the curtain and that column against which her son was standing so stiffly, with his hand scratching the back of a fat armchair; and she thanked God and his saints that they had placed her son in the midst of all that finery. She kept the portrait on the chest-of-drawers, under the glass dome with the statue of the Good Shepherd — to whom she told her beads — said la Zuppidda, and she thought she’d got a real treasure there on that chest-of-drawers, while in fact sister Mariangela la Santuzza had another one just like it, for anyone who cared to look, given her by compare Mariano Cinghialenta, and she kept it nailed on the counter in the wine-shop, behind the glasses.

But after a bit ’Ntoni got hold of a lettered comrade, and then he let fly with complaints about the wretched life he led on board ship, his superiors, the discipline, the thin soup and tight shoes. ‘That letter isn’t worth the twenty centesimos it cost to send,’ grumbled padron ’Ntoni. La Longa lost patience with all those scrawls, which looked like fish-hooks and couldn’t possibly say anything good. Bastianazzo shook his head as if to say no, it wasn’t right, if it had been him he would have covered that paper with cheerful things only, to make people feel better — and he thrust out a finger as thick as a rowlock pin — if only out of consideration for La Longa, who couldn’t seem to resign herself, and was like a mother cat that has lost her kittens. Padron ’Ntoni went in secret to have the letter read out to him by the chemist, and then by don Giammaria, who was a man of the opposite persuasion, so as to hear both sides, and when he was convinced that the letter was indeed as it had first seemed, he repeated to Bastianazzo and his wife:

‘Didn’t I say that that boy ought to have been born rich, like padron Cipolla’s son, so he could scratch his stomach all day long without doing a hand’s turn?’

Meanwhile it had been a bad year and fish had virtually to be given away like alms, now that Christians had learned to eat meat on Fridays like so many Turks. Furthermore there weren’t enough hands left at home to manage the boat, and at times they had to take on Menico della Locca, or someone else. Because the king’s trick was to take boys away for conscription when they were ready to earn their own bread; but as long as they were a drain on family resources, you had to bring them up yourself, so they could be soldiers later; and in addition to all this Mena was nearly seventeen and was beginning to turn young men’s heads when she went to mass. ‘Man is fire, and woman the straw; the devil comes, and blows.’ That was why the family from the house by the medlar-tree had to sweat blood to keep the boat seaworthy.

So, to keep things going, padron ’Ntoni had arranged a deal with zio Crocifisso Dumb-bell, a deal in connection with some lupins which were to be bought on credit and resold at Riposto, where compare Cinghialenta had said there was a boat loading up for Trieste. Actually the lupins were not in the peak of condition; but they were the only ones in Trezza, and the artful Dumb-bell also knew that the Provvidenza was wasting good sun and water moored up there by the wash-place, not doing anything; that was why he persisted in acting dumb. ‘Eh? Not a good deal? Leave it then! But I can’t make it one centesimo less, so help me God!’ and he shook his head in such a way that it did indeed resemble a bell without a clapper. This conversation took place at the door of Ognina church, on the first Sunday in September, the feast of the Virgin Mary, and all the people from the nearby villages were there, including compare Agostino Piedipapera, or Duckfoot, who was so bluff and blithe that he managed to bring about an agreement on the price of two onze and ten per salma, to be paid on the never at so much a month. Things always turned out like that for zio Crocifisso, he could always be wheedled into agreeing because, like some girls, he couldn’t say no. ‘That’s it. You simply can’t say no when you should,’ sniggered Piedipapera, ‘You’re like those…’ and he said what he was like.

When La Longa heard about the deal with the lupins, after supper, when they were sitting chatting with their elbows on the tablecloth, her mouth fell open; it was if she could feel that huge sum of forty onze weighing physically on her stomach.