Costantino strode on. After years of brutal oppression, spent among corrupt men, within ugly walls where the air itself was imprisoned, he was crossing open spaces, tramping over grass and rocks. As he climbed the mountains that surged up from the valleys, the horizon opened in front of him and the sky spread out, infinite and gentle as freedom itself, but never in prison had he experienced the intense sadness that filled him as darkness fell from the free sky. Why was he walking? Where was he walking to? He had been light-hearted at the beginning of his journey, he had felt that he was heading towards a place where he had found a little joy. Now he could not understand any of that. In the inconclusive dusk that hid the distances, his journey seemed pointless. He no longer had a homeland, home, or family. He would never arrive at any destination. He felt as if he were lost in an endless ashy waste, like the sky above his head where stars twinkled like fires lit by solitary wayfarers, each unknown to the next, lost as he was in the empty freedom of a desert.

He did not depress himself by thinking about Giovanna, his lost happiness, or the misery that fate had unjustly sent him. Those sorrows had so marked the very core of his being that he seemed to have forgotten them, as a man forgets the jacket he has put on. But there was a faint regret still for the material things he had lost and would never regain.

He remembered with intensity the yard in front of Giovanna’s house, the stones of the little wall where they used to sit together on summer evenings. Above all he remembered the high, wide bed where he used to lie beside her after the weary day. Now it was as if he was returning, tired after one of those long days, but he no longer had anywhere to go home to and rest.

Reaching the top of a slope, he sat down and opened his pack. Night had fallen, clear and diaphanous. To the east, between the mountains that hid the sea, the sky paled in the limpid light of the moon’s dawn. The Milky Way lay across it like a white deserted street. In the strange light the scrub looked like a flock of black sheep, and the vast silence was disturbed only by the prolonged sob of the cuckoo.

Costantino ate and drank, then he lay on his back on the brow of the hill and for a moment contemplated the deep solitude of the bright street that furrowed the sky. Then he closed his eyes and, feeling the benefit of the food, the wine, and the repose, grew happy again as at the start of his journey.