In their place, wealthy families put up new statues, while the poor stuck simple crosses on their family graves. The parish priest conducted obsequies in the cemetery chapel for three nights, ending with a great purification service.

And so, after the execution of all these acts, the dead stopped haunting the city, and the cemetery became soothed, plunging into the quiet reverie of previous years.

Then various stories began to circulate about what had happened, and slowly a legend developed in connection with the gravedigger, Giovanni Tossati, now nicknamed John Hyena.

Contributing considerably to these stories was the death of one of the gravedigger’s helpers soon after the reconstruction of the cemetery. This person made a most interesting statement on his deathbed, which suddenly clarified Tossati’s disappearance and spared the authorities a fruitless search for the supposedly fugitive criminal.

This confession, travelling from mouth to mouth, was spread widely about the region and, coloured with the exuberant imagination of the populace, with time entered into the circle of those gloomy tales which, stemming from nowhere, unreel their black thread on the spinning wheel of All Souls’ Day evenings and frighten the children.

Giovanni Tossati had turned up at Foscara approximately twenty years earlier. Shabbily dressed, almost in rags, he immediately provoked suspicion, and the council even wanted to expel him from the city. Soon, though, he managed to gain the confidence of the inhabitants and the authorities, to whom he presented himself as an impoverished stonemason and sculptor of monuments. Given a trial examination, he demonstrated excellent skills and a seasoned hand in his craft. So, not only was he allowed to stay, but, owing to his oddly persistent pleas, he was appointed gravedigger of the main cemetery. From then on his job was to create monuments and bury the dead. He maintained that, for him, the simultaneous fulfilment of these two duties was an inseparable whole, that the rites for the dead were interwoven tightly with sepulchral art, and that he wouldn’t be able to erect a monument to a deceased person if he couldn’t bury him with his own hands. That’s why later, even though his fame spread widely, he never accepted any of the more profitable positions offered from other regions; he immortalized the memory of the dead exclusively at his cemetery.

At first this eccentricity gave cause for jokes and derision, but in time people got used to the whims of the artist-gravedigger, as the works emerging from under his chisel soon earned praise from even the most knowledgeable of the cognoscenti. The previously modest cemetery became, in a dozen years or so, a sepulchral masterpiece and the pride of Foscara, which in turn became the envy of other cities.

From a ragged lazzarone, Tossati was transformed into a respected and wealthy citizen, a person of influence and prominence. Eventually he was elected chairman of the city council. Holding such a high office, he no longer personally dug graves, but now directed a large number of helpers, whom he taught in a truly novel manner. Tossati introduced into the burial trade a series of original improvements, cutting the work in half and quickening its tempo. He was no less faithful, though, to his old principles; he didn’t neglect any burial and personally supervised the affair. After the corpse had been lowered into the grave, Tossati himself shovelled the first lump of earth onto the coffin, leaving the rest of the work to his labourers. In this manner his gravedigging functions took on, to a certain extent, a symbolic character, eliciting a pleasing memory of his former role; and not for all the money in the world would he abandon this particular custom.

Now, in general, Tossati was a strange person. His very appearance called attention to itself. Tall, broad-shouldered, his face wide and dreary, he was constantly smiling with a mysterious curl on his lips. His eyes were enigmatic, downcast. Maybe this downward gaze had adapted to his habit of bowing his head toward the ground, which he seemed to be carefully examining. The townspeople jokingly said that Tossati was sniffing for corpses.

Despite the renown of the gifted sculptor, the gravedigger was, in truth, not liked. People feared him and got out of his way. A superstition even developed that a meeting with him at an early hour of the day was a bad omen.

So, when after ten years in Foscara he decided to get married, none of the female inhabitants wanted to give him her hand. They were not tempted by Giovanni’s vast prosperity, nor were they enticed by the promise of a life of affluence. In the end, he married a poor workwoman from a neighbouring village, an orphan given as a favour for an unfavourable fate.

But he didn’t find happiness in family life. After a year of marriage his wife gave him twins: the first was stillborn; the second had been strangely formed in its mother’s womb. This freak, dissimilar to any human baby, died on the third day after its birth. The broken-hearted woman disappeared one day, and all searches for her were in vain.

From then on he lived alone next to the cemetery in his white brick-walled house, and saw the townspeople mostly at funerals. Yet his windows were lit up late into the night, and neighbours frequently heard drunken shouts of people emanating from his home.

Nearly every night Tossati had some guests; but they were certainly not inhabitants of Foscara – at least no one in the city boasted of going there. Carriages drove up in front of the gravedigger’s house, sometimes lavish coaches; strange people from unknown places would get out and go inside.