The widow, who had not heard what the two men were saying, raised her head. Her little face had grown lined and yellow. In one second, the years that had gone by peacefully without being able to furrow her forehead, had taken their revenge.

‘Giacobbe,’ she said, ‘we don’t need witnesses. We don’t need to call anyone. Won’t I be enough?’

Giacobbe raised himself again and looked at Isidoro. Isidoro looked at him. ‘She’s right,’ he said.

A great calm seemed to spread through the strange yellowish room. The sick man lay back quietly and began to doze. The widow took Isidoro’s advice and she too went to lie down. The tall cupboard once more loomed gravely out of the darkness, while the ceiling with its clouds pressed down on the silence of the room as if on a deserted field. In their impassive calm all the objects in the room seemed to echo Isidoro’s words – ‘Only earthly things.’

Orlei’s municipal doctor, Dr Puddu, was a huge, puffy, coarse-looking man. Once, he too had nursed great ideals, but fate had set him down in this lonely village, where the people were seldom ill, and he had taken to drink, first just to keep himself warm, later because he developed a taste for wines and spirits. Now he was a complete alcoholic, and the inhabitants of Orlei had no more respect for him.

Giacobbe now complained of a pain in his side. As Dr Puddu cauterized the hand bitten by the tarantula he talked to the sick man in a rough, grating voice.

‘Fool. People don’t die of such things. But if you die it’ll be the way an ass dies.’

Crumbling angrily, Anna-Rosa watched the doctor. She had become fractious. Anything to do with the invalid angered her. She seemed to have grown old since the previous night. Her once pretty little face was now more and more lined and yellow. Her brother’s revelation had altered her physically and morally. Day and night she wondered in numb amazement how Giacobbe could ever have killed a man.

‘He’s as gay and gentle as a lamb. Blessed souls in Purgatory, how could he have done it? Our father was not a thief, he was a devout man, always gay and so light-hearted and teasing that if any of his friends were feeling depressed they would come to visit him.’

Thinking of her dead father, her expression softened. But then a horrendous cloud darkened her mind, and her whole face wrinkled up with horror at a new thought.

‘Supposing that merry old man, that saintly old man, had also committed some crime!’