Three days later the child died, and Costantino received news of this at once. Hiding away, he wept silently while putting on a good face to his cellmates. When the prisoner with the sick lover heard about the Sardinian’s tragedy, he wept in a strange manner, like a squawking hen. His face, which looked like an old, grey child’s, became so ludicrous when he wept that the man from Abruzzo, who had quarrelled with his brother, burst out laughing. His neighbour stuck an awl in his thigh, and he leapt up with a shout of pain but did not protest.

Costantino stared at his companion, bewildered. Then he shook his head and went back to work. Silence fell and the Northerner calmed down. The low room filled with a reflected glow from the courtyard, and the intense heat drew a pungent smell from the leather and from the prisoners’ sweating hands and feet. The thirteen men in the workshop were under continuous vigil by a red-moustached warder, who looked like a sheepdog guarding a flock. Identically dressed, with shaven heads, and a slightly vacant expression on their faces, the prisoners all looked alike, as if they were brothers or relatives of some sort. But never as on that day had Costantino felt so out of sympathy with his companions, so set apart by misfortune.

He stitched and stitched, hunched over, a shoe that he held between his knees on his leather apron. From time to time he inspected the shoe carefully, then he went back to sewing, tugging fiercely at the needle with both hands. Now that the baby was dead he had to work. Had he loved the child a lot? He did not know. Perhaps not much. He had only seen him once, through the iron bars of the visitors’ room in Nuoro, crying in Giovanna’s arms. The baby had a small red face, downy like a ripe apricot, and dark blue eyes like grape pips that gleamed beneath his fringed cap. During the conversation the child had cried and shrieked, terrified of the silent, impassive warders, and of the iron bars which he grabbed at with his little hands.

Costantino had no other memory of his little Martino. As the years went by, he had always imagined him red-faced and sobbing, his dark blue eyes hidden by the fringe of the red cap. Casting his mind into the future, he imagined Martino tall and slim, driving the cart, riding a horse, sowing and ploughing, a comfort and help to his mother. How the prisoner longed to return home! Whenever he realized the hope was vain, his thoughts turned to his son. He loved the child more through his love for Giovanna than with the selfish affection that is born of habit and proximity.