‘Here you are,’ said the shepherd. ‘I’m bringing him back. He was out in the heat of the sun, on his way to Martina, who eats little boys instead of bread.’

‘Go on with you!’ said Giovanna. ‘Don’t say things like that to a child.’

‘I say them to grown-ups too, because Martina eats them as well. Watch out she doesn’t eat you, Giovanna Era. You look like a ripe peach. No, a peach is yellow. Let’s see. You look like a …’

‘A prickly pear!’ she laughed.

‘How’s Bachisia? And when did you last hear from Costantino?’

At this, Giovanna’s face grew serious and she said, with an air of mystery, that she had not had any news from the prisoner for a long time.

‘Is Isidoro Pane around? I must talk to him.’

‘He’s around,’ she said, going back to her sewing.

Giacobbe walked off thoughtfully down the street towards Isidoro Pane’s house, if the place could be called a house.

Isidoro, who fished for trout and eels as well as for leeches, when the opportunity presented itself, was seated in the shade of his hovel, mending a net. The hut stood out towards the fields a little apart from the rest of the village. It was a prehistoric structure made of small pieces of slate and roofed with cane and tiles, on which a reddish lichen grew.

The afternoon had been burning hot but the sun was now sinking. Not a leaf stirred on the dusty trees, rigid in the hot, empty village. Streaked here and there by slanting shadows, the yellow plain gasped in the blood-red sunset, and the distant, almost peacock-blue mountains and the huge purple-veiled sphinxes surged up into a fiery sky. Far off, in the vast silence, a blackbird sang. Prickly pear bushes with hard, blackish leaves and a hedge of wild locust, in which were entwined tall hairy nettles and pale-leaved henbane, surrounded the fisherman’s hovel. From the door, where he sat, the distant horizon lay as empty and misty as the sea. A strong smell of stubble and dry asphodel filled the air. Tree stumps, brushwood, bits of straw and dry leaves covered the earth, so that Giacobbe was able to approach silently, without Isidoro raising his head from his work.

‘What are you doing?’ Giacobbe said.

The fisherman looked up at Giacobbe but did not reply. Giacobbe sat beside him on the ground, legs crossed, and examined the net the fisherman was sewing with a large, rusty needle.

‘It looks to me,’ Giacobbe laughed, ‘as if the fish will be able to go in and out of that as they please.’

‘Let them go in and out as they please, my little chicken,’ replied Isidoro, imitating Giacobbe’s phrase. ‘Why are you in the village? Have you left your job?’