‘No,’ said Giacobbe. As the lyre played on, and the women sang, he told Isidoro in a few brief words how the accident had happened. ‘I was asleep,’ he said, ‘when I felt a prick like the sting of a wasp. I woke, sweating to find I’d been stung by a horrible tarantula. I saw it with these very eyes, but it had climbed the wall and was out of reach. I hope the devil bites it, the bitch. I came back to the village and now I’m scared I’m going to die. It’s what I’ve been afraid of for a long time.’

‘We are all going to die when our hour comes,’ Isidoro said, gravely.

‘Yes, we’re all going to die,’ agreed one of the friends. But this was no comfort to Giacobbe Dejas.

‘My legs feel crushed to bits,’ he said dolefully. ‘And my backbone! It’s as if someone had struck it with an axe. I’m dying, dying!’

The village people came out into the street and stood there quietly, as if watching a funeral pass by. Giacobbe’s eyes clouded over. He stumbled and leaned heavily on Isidoro.

The women trotted along like fillies, and their melancholy song floated out in the cold evening silence, broken by the strident tone of the lyre.

At last they reached the little widow’s house where, in the centre of the kitchen, on a stone hearth, a fire burned. Several pairs of breeches hung drying in front of the oven, a huge, vaulted affair with a hole at the top to let the smoke out. The oven took up one entire corner of the room. It had a square doorway, big enough for a man to crawl in. Giacobbe ducked, climbed inside and lay down. Through the opening, the soles of his shoes could be seen, their hobnails shining in the fire’s reflection.

Still chanting, the women gathered round the hearth while the firelight flickered and glinted on their yellow bodices and white blouses. In Anna-Rosa’s shiny pink face, her round open mouth looked like a little black oven. The blind man had felt the heat of the fire and he approached it slowly, still playing. Reaching the hearth, he placed his bare foot on the hot stone.

‘Watch you don’t burn yourself, boy,’ Isidoro cried.

Hardly were the words out of his mouth when the lyre-player leapt backwards shaking his scorched foot. For a moment he stopped playing. The women danced on, their tall figures swaying about the fireplace. They might have been intoning a funeral dirge around a prehistoric tomb.

After a while, Anna-Rosa said, ‘Come out now.’