‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Your side? Your side? What the hell, your side? Let’s see a moment.’

He lifted the blankets, uncovered Giacobbe’s hairy side, prodded it, and put his ear to it.

‘The bastard. You’re like a spoiled child,’ he said, covering him again untidily. But when Anna-Rosa accompanied him to the door, he turned and stared at her.

‘Woman,’ he said, ‘have him confess himself. He may have pneumonia.’

At dusk Giacobbe confessed. Then he sent his sister off saying, ‘Anna-Ro, Father Elias will go to the judge with you. It’s cold so go in a carriage.’

Outside it was snowing. A profoundly sad, white glow penetrated the large mysterious room whose ceiling looked like a cloud-laden sky. Father Elias studied Anna-Rosa, of whom he was very fond, because she was so like his mother. She seemed to have grown smaller than ever. A black figure in the dismal darkness of the snowy twilight, she wrinkled up her face in grief at her brother’s crime. Imagining the conflict in her poor soul, Father Elias prayed for her silently.

XV

It was May. The great, normally sombre valley of the Isalle was decked in tall grasses, flowering shrubs, and fields of barley that waved in the breeze. The clear trilling of the nightingales pierced the vast silence like the notes of a flute. Flowering thickets of narcissus and broom massed on the hill-slopes, as if intent on watching the valley floor.

The sun had just set, and the western sky was the colour of a ripe peach, while to the north and east the mountains reared up, like huge precious stones, against a lilac background.

A few hours earlier in Nuoro, Costantino Ledda had been released from prison. Now on his way home on foot, he was slowly dropping down into the valley, a small bundle on his back. Sometimes he stopped and glanced this way and that along the path. ‘The valley seems smaller,’ he thought. ‘It must be because I’ve seen the sea.’

He had aged and was pale and clean-shaven but he lacked the tragic look he had once worn. He travelled alone and on foot because he had not known the exact day of his release. If he had, some relatives or friends would surely have come to meet him. A keen impatience to see the village urged him on. Perhaps because he had been given a bottle of good wine in Nuoro he was almost cheerful. As he descended, his legs sometimes gave way, but he was not put out by so small a thing.

‘When I can’t go any further,’ he thought, ‘I’ll lie down and sleep. I have bread and wine in my bundle. What more do I need? I’m free as a bird. Once I had a wife, but now I’m a bachelor.’