Costantino could not bring himself to call him that, because in Sardinia only the nobility bore the designation ‘Don’. As a result, that day, they came to no agreement.

Next day the prisoner brought up the subject again, saying that he came from a noble family, had received an education, and that his uncle, of whose murder he was accused, after having squandered the prisoner’s own legacy, had forced him to work, to make shoes, and had shut him in a dark room. Once he’d flayed all the skin from one of Costantino’s feet. He wanted to show the foot, but Don Serafino shook his head with horror and under his breath cursed the dead man’s cruelty.

Thus Costantino managed to obtain a sheet of paper. With his blood he wrote down his hymn for the protection of convicted prisoners.

Winter came and went. One day in March a portly man called by Costantino’s cell on an inspection tour. The man had round, staring milky-blue eyes and such a short chin that his blond moustache completely covered it.

‘You there,’ he cried to the prisoner. ‘What trade can you do?’

Don Serafino’s skeleton face appeared among the party too. The prisoner, seeing him, remembered the wild stories he had invented and said he knew how to make shoes.

After a short while, the warder told Costantino that his term of solitary confinement was to be shortened and he would soon be moved from his cell. Costantino thought he owed this favour to his own good conduct, but Serafino, who believed Costantino really came from a noble family, told him in confidence that he had interceded for the prisoner to powerful people.

A few days later Costantino was put into a dormitory, and along with a number of other convicts, began work as a cobbler. He was also allowed to send word to Giovanna. He could write a letter every three months. All this made him almost happy. Then came spring, and the spirits of the convicts, who had suffered intensely from the cold, were greatly improved. In the shop where Costantino worked they were always joking. There were, however, two brothers who, having begged to be allowed to work together, quarrelled incessantly over some business deal they were trying to settle for after their release, in ten years’ time. One day they laid into each other, and one was taken away. They had to do two weeks in solitary and as soon as they saw each other again during the exercise hour – the hour of freedom that the convicts spent in the courtyard – they once more started to scuffle.

It was during that exercise hour that Costantino had become friendly with a fellow countryman, a Sardinian known as the King of Spades, perhaps because he had a triangular face, a large body and spindly legs. He was stout and pale and had had his head shaven so that he looked bald.