Once he asked his grandmother why the old great-uncle was like that.

“L’Arlecchino,” she said.

He learned early that the Harlequin was the inner fear pervading his grandmother’s life, the universal evil, an inheritance from the Europe of ten centuries ago. A child is dead from a sudden onslaught of unexpected disease? He has been taken by the Harlequin, who covets children. A woman becomes schizophrenic? The lean, devilishly-handsome demon lover has seduced her and eloped with her soul. An arm shrivels with paralysis, a man slowly fades under the ravages of tuberculosis? The Harlequin is plucking vitality from his victim, savoring the living essence like a sweetmeat.

In trying to lock him out she made him a member of her family. When Adam’s female cousins blossomed and bloomed and began to experiment with lipsticks and high pointy bras, the old woman shrieked that they would attract the Harlequin, who stole maidenheads in the night. Little by little, listening to la vecchia through the years, Adam picked up details. The Harlequin wore breeches and jacket of multicolored patches and was invisible except under the full moon, which turned his motley into a glittering suit of lights. He was voiceless but his presence could be detected by the tinkling of the bells in his fool’s cap. He carried a magic wooden sword, a kind of slapstick which he used as a wand.

The boy sometimes thought it would be a wonderful adventure to be the Harlequin, so all-powerful, so deliciously evil. When he was eleven and having his first damp nightdreams of luscious Lucy Sangano, who was thirteen, on Hallowe’en he decided that he would be the evil spirit. While the other kids ran from door to door for trick or treat he ambled slowly through the suddenly-comfortable dark, envisioning rich scenes in which he tapped the tender young buttocks of Lucy Sangano with his box-lath sword and commanded voicelessly, Show me everything.

Rosella warded off the Evil One by using four devices, of which only two, the sprinkling of holy water and the daily attendance at Mass, Adam considered harmless. Her practice of rubbing the doorknobs with garlic he thought a nuisance because of hand-stickiness, and a source of embarrassment in public school because of pungent odor, although he secretly enjoyed the last fugitive scents that remained in his sweaty palm when he held it to his nostrils late at night.

The most powerful protection was gained by tucking the two middle fingers under the thumb, extending the index and little fingers to simulate the devil’s horns and dry-spitting between them, following this with the proper words: break the evil-eye, scutta mal occhio, poo-poo-poo. Rosella performed this rite many times daily, another form of embarrassment; to some of Adam’s peers the finger-sign was a secret signal of another sort, a put-down, a disparaging token of disbelief summed up in one quick unlovely word. To these uninitiates it was hilarious to see ’Damo Silverstone’s granny gesticulating with their raffish secret sign. She cost him his first bloody nose and great resentment.