For her master, on the other hand, that absolute dedication represented indispensable control over the only person in the world that he needed.

Leonia too had been a beauty in her day: age had given her a matronly air, and silence had had no effect other than to fill her out, to make her look solemn and somewhat mysterious. And so it was that the two silent ones enjoyed excellent health, and appeared to be thriving and satisfied with their lot.

The concierge of their building would limit himself to remarking that each of the occupants of apartment number seven was no less cracked than the other. The one who couldn’t seem to get over their behaviour was his wife, poor thing: never in a thousand years could she have been persuaded that a phenomenon such as this was acceptable. ‘The Lord gave us the gift of speech,’ she would always repeat: ‘Why refuse it?’ She was speaking as one who honoured this divine gift to the full. And the other residents, on encountering the silent ones, would turn their heads and scrutinize them from head to foot, in an eloquent mutism of their own.

There had been certain panic-inducing occurrences in the apartment building: a small fire that had been brought quickly under control, a theft, or rather two; gas leaks, and a flood caused by a burst water pipe – together with instances of more serious, collective panic. It had been impossible by any means to gain access to that apartment, or in any way to persuade its residents to come out of it. In addition to the standard lock, Benedetto Vai’s door was reinforced by another with twelve pins, a chain and three enormous bolts – and further defended by two buttresses that made it as solid as the wall in which it was set.

There was something heroic as well as ascetic in this bizarre hermeticism.

If we were to trace back to his birth all that a man’s character has become, we would have in Benedetto Vai’s case to say immediately that he was an excessively tranquil and smiling child. And we have a more telling clue: he was inclined, from infancy, to substitute words with a smile: a smile that with age had become extinguished from his lips, but which had seemed so sweet and gentle as to signify to others an eloquent contentment, and to provide its wearer with an infallible means of isolating himself.

In the vastness and depths of life one is sometimes compelled to follow a strange turning, as when a masterpiece is revealed and shaped.

He tended not to speak with his father, but rather more with his mother, whose only son was the source of all of her joy and happiness. ‘My darling Betto,’ she would say, with infinite tenderness: ‘my golden-haired Bettino, my golden boy’.

At school his taciturn character had become more pronounced. He would often resort to a companion to distance himself from and ward off the others en masse, at the same time maintaining extremely cold relations with him, and a sense of mystery to his own smiling appearance, so as not to prompt or encourage any of that spontaneous intimacy or friendship which in the ardour of youth often wells up and escapes unchecked. In the end he managed to alienate every single one of them.