The traps were effective too and caught the rats live. One evening, annoyed that my efforts and successes were not even acknowledged by Romitelli, as if he were merely required to read the books, and the rats, equally, to eat them, I decided to put two live ones in his desk drawer before I went home. I hoped to disrupt his usual, dull reading session at least once. However it was not to be. When he opened the drawer and the two beasts burst forth noisily before his eyes, he turned to me, who was already weak with laughter, and said,

“What was that?”

“Two rats, Signor Romitelli.”

“Ah, rats,” he said tranquilly.

It was their home, he was used to them, and he went back to his reading as if nothing had happened.

In the Treatise on Orchards by Giovan Vittorio Soderini, it says that fruit ripens “partly in the heat and partly in the cold, since the heat, and this is so in all cases, is strong enough to soften the flesh and is the basic means of ripening”. Giovan Vittorio Soderini was perhaps unaware that greengrocers have discovered another “means of ripening”. In order to sell their produce at higher prices, they pick their apples, peaches and pears before they have reached the right stage when they are wholesome and delicious, and instead manufacture a kind of ripeness themselves by bruising the fruit.

This was the way I, still green and unripe, came to maturity.

In the briefest time, I became a new person. When Romitelli died, I was alone, boredom gnawing at me, in this little, out-of-the-way church, amongst all those books. I was terribly lonely, yet at the same time did not feel like company. I could have got away with spending just a few hours a day there, but I was ashamed to show my face in the village in my sorry state; home was like a prison-cell to me, and so I avoided it, telling myself I was better off here in the church. But what could I do to keep myself occupied? I could of course hunt mice, but was it going to be enough? The first time I caught myself leafing through a book, taken down at random, almost unconsciously, from one of the shelves, I shuddered in horror. Was I then, to end up like Romitelli, feeling obliged to read, to compensate, as librarian, for all those who did not use the library? I flung the book aside. But then I picked it up again; and yes, I too started reading, and I too used only one eye, since the other had ideas of its own.

I read a little of everything, in a disorganised fashion, but mainly books on philosophy. They are weighty tones and yet the man who feeds on them and absorbs them, lives in the clouds. They addled my brain even further, and it was already fairly unstable. When my head spun, I would close the library and take to a hidden pathway, along a solitary stretch of sand.

The sight of the sea made me fall into a kind of trance, which eventually became intolerably oppressive. I sat on the beach and tried not to look at the sea, keeping my head down, but I could hear the crash of the waves all along the coast, whilst the thick, heavy sand trickled slowly through my fingers, and I murmured to myself:

“This is how it will be, until I die, with no change, ever…”

The fixed quality of my existence began to give rise to strange, sudden ideas, almost flashes of insanity. I would leap to my feet as if to shake them from me physically, and walk along the beach; but then I would watch the sea, sending its sleepy, weary waves, endlessly towards the strand. I would look along the lonely beach and would cry out loud in rage, shaking my fists:

“Why, why, why?”

Then my feet would get wet.

The sea would push the odd wave a little further in as if to admonish me:

“See my dear chap? What do you gain by asking why? Go back to the library. Salt water ruins shoe leather and you have no money to waste. Get back to the library and leave philosophy alone. You too should be reading how Birnbaum (John Abraham) had an octavo leaflet printed in Leipzig in 1738: doubtless it will be as much use to you as philosphy.”

However, one day, a messenger came to tell me that my wife’s pains had started and I should hurry home. I ran like a deer, but mainly to escape from my own company. I did not want to spend even a moment alone, thinking how I was about to have a child, in the state I was, a child!

As soon as I arrived, my mother-in-law gripped my shoulders and turned me round in the opposite direction.

“A doctor! Run! Romilda’s dying!”

One’s instinct is to stay, I feel, on receiving similar news so suddenly, but no,

“Hurry!” My legs felt numb. I did not know where to turn. Somehow I ran, and cried out “A doctor! A doctor!” and people stopped and expected me to stop too and explain what had happened. I felt tugs at my sleeve, saw pale, worried faces in front of me. I shunned them all: “A doctor! A doctor!”

Meanwhile, the doctor was already at the house. When, breathless and in a tragic state, having gone round all the chemists, I returned home, desperate and raving, the first little girl had already been born; they were struggling to bring the other into the light of day.

“Two!” I can still see them now, side by side, in the cradle, scratching one another with hands that were so dainty, yet armed with sharp talons, as if prompted by some savage instinct, arousing both revulsion and pity. They were even more miserable than those two cats I used to find in the traps every morning.