‘Why are you staring at me like that? You’ve always been a fool, my dear boy, a little animal. Look at old Isidoro over there, calm and serene as the Pope. They’ve taken everything from you, even against the law, and you don’t even know how much you’ve lost. They’ve betrayed you, killed you, they’ve beaten you cruelly, and you stand there stupidly like a child. Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you go to that wicked woman’s house and her mother’s and her mother-in-law’s and take them by the hair and tie them to the tails of those cows they want to give you to soothe you. Set fire to their skirts and then chase the cows out into the village so that they set fire to everything? Do you understand me, you fool? Do you?’

His eyes bloodshot, he shouted in their faces, breathing foul fumes of absinthe over them. Costantino backed away, shaken by the doctor’s words. He could not control a feeling that the horrible man was right. The doctor got up to leave. Turning in the doorway to shake his umbrella, he yelled, ‘You make me want to break this over your head. Men like you deserve what they get. At least take a purge, idiot.’

‘That I will do,’ said Costantino. He laughed, but the doctor’s words left him deeply disturbed. At times he was seized by a terrible fit of despair. He wanted to leave but he did not know where to go, nor did he know what to do if he stayed on in the village.

‘I have no home,’ he thought. ‘Today they come to welcome me out of curiosity but tomorrow no one will remember me. I’m like a bird without a nest. What ought I to do? What use is the law? My indifference may even be the worst punishment for that woman.’ Nevertheless, the doctor’s words echoed in his mind. Ought he to go to that house and, like a bolt of lightning, destroy those who had destroyed his life?

‘No, Costantino,’ went on Isidoro as they ate the sausage and white bread that the neighbour had sent as a present. ‘She isn’t happy. I never look her in the face nowadays. When I see her I have the strange feeling that I’m looking at the devil. But I’m sorry for her. She has a daughter who, they tell me, is as puny and green as a beanshoot. How can the child of mortal sin be beautiful? The baby was baptized like a bastard. The priest did not go back to the house, and the people sneered in the streets.’

‘Do you remember my baby?’ asked Costantino, slicing the thick, rancid bacon. ‘He wasn’t like a beanshoot. If only he had lived!’