“It’s over. Perhaps if he had done it with someone else …”

“So you know who the woman is?” I asked.

She nodded her head several times, between sobs, and covered her face in her hands.

“A mere girl!” she cried, flinging out her arms. “And the mother! The mother encouraged it, you realise? Her own mother!”

“You don’t need to tell me,” I said. “Look, read this,” and I handed her the letter.

Oliva looked at it as if stunned. She took it and then asked me what it meant. She could only just read, and her gaze enquired whether it was really necessary for her to make such an effort at that particular moment.

“Read,” I insisted.

So she dried her eyes, unfolded the paper and started to decipher the handwriting, very slowly, mouthing the words. After the first few lines, her eyes darted to the signature and she stared at me, astonished.

“You?”

“Give it to me,” I said, “I’ll read it out to you, all of it.” But she clutched the letter to her breast.

“No!” she cried. “You’re not having it back. This is useful to me now.”

“What use can it be to you!” I asked her, smiling bitterly.

“I suppose you want to show it to him, do you? In the whole of this letter there is not one word which would prevent your husband from believing what he is delighted to believe anyway. They have tricked you nicely, and that’s all there is to it.”

“You’re right,” groaned Oliva, “he clenched his fists in my face and said I had better be careful not to put his niece’s honour in doubt.”

“You see?” I said, laughing bitterly, “See? You can’t gain anything by denials. You have to be careful. In fact, you must tell him yes, it’s true, definitely true, that he can have children.”

Why then, a month later, did Malagna beat up his wife in a rage and, still foaming at the mouth, burst into my house, screaming that he wanted compensation because I had dishonoured and ruined his niece, a poor orphan? He went on to say that in order to avoid a scandal, he had been prepared to keep it quiet. He had intended to take pity on the poor girl, as he had no children, and would have kept the child when it was born, as if it were his own. But now that God had finally decided to give him the consolation of a legitimate son from his own wife, he could not, in all conscience, be a father as well to the child his niece was expecting.

“You will provide for her! You will make reparations!” he concluded, choking with fury. “And immediately! Obey me immediately! Don’t make me say more or do anything I regret.”

Let us pause for thought, having reached this point. I have lived a little. To be thought a fool, or …. worse, would not really have been too great a misfortune for me. As I have said, I am beyond normal life, and nothing has much importance for me any more. So, if I discuss the problem at all, it is the logical angle only that interests me.

It seems obvious that Romilda cannot have actually told her uncle a lie. Otherwise, why should Malagna immediately have beaten his wife and accused her of betraying him and blamed me in front of my mother for having assaulted his niece?

Romilda in fact, insists that shortly after our outing to La Stia, she confessed to her mother the love which now bound her indissolubly to me, and her mother flew into a rage and screamed that she would never ever consent to her marrying a good-for-nothing already teetering over the precipice. Now that she had brought upon herself the worst ill that a young girl can, her provident mother had no other course but to make the best of this misfortune. What this course was is not difficult to guess. When Malagna came at the usual time, the mother went away, with some excuse, and left the girl alone with her uncle. Romilda then, she says, wept hot tears, threw herself at his feet, told him of her troubles and what her mother had asked of her. She begged him to intervene, to persuade her mother to take a more honest line, since she belonged to someone else and wanted to remain faithful to him.

Malagna took pity on her, but only to a certain extent. He told her she was still a minor, and therefore was the responsibility of her mother, who could, if she so wished, bring a law suit against me. Even he, in all conscience, could not have felt able to approve a marriage with an idler of my ilk, a wastrel with no sense, and he would not offer such advice to her mother. He said that it was only right that she should sacrifice something to righteous maternal indignation and that in any case it would turn out for the best for her. He concluded that the best he could do – and this only on condition that it was kept strictly secret – was to provide for the child, and be its father in fact, since he had no son and had been wanting one for so long.

Is it possible to be more honest than this, I ask myself? Everything he had stolen from the father he was to give back via the son.