Having looked for a good while at the incomparably beautiful glasses, with an admiration and gratification that appeared to be inexhaustible and which provoked in the mind of the woman an unbearable anguish, Benedetto Vai began to dedicate himself to emptying his cupboard of the thousands of useless things that had accumulated there. He threw everything away with disdain, and after having dusted the shelves he arranged the glasses in a row on the topmost one, deriving great joy from the sight of them, looking and looking again at them once they were inside, as if he were reluctant to lose sight of them by closing the cupboard door. And he would carry one with him to the window so as to examine it against the light, to savour the fragility of its material, its ingenious design, the exquisite workmanship. They really were exceptionally beautiful: execution, form and material coming together in a harmonious and perfect whole.

Glowering like a beast about to pounce on its prey, while he delighted in admiring his glasses, Leonia paced around him.

Some time later, at the same hour, Benedetto Vai arrived home with a second bundle, this time an extremely heavy one which he also placed, as was his habit, on the table in the bedroom.

When he began to unwrap it, it revealed twelve antique plates of a most prestigious make, magnificently gilded, with stunning hand-painted miniature flowers. He could not get enough of looking at them, of placing them in every possible light and in every possible position so as to be able to enjoy them to the full.

So the drinking was going to be accompanied by something solid – drink naturally goes with something to nibble on – a dessert probably, those plates undoubtedly suggested nothing less than a full entertainment. The arrival of a third package, a few days later, caused the woman to be even more taken aback. Was he hosting a lunch? The new dinner plates were splendid, the quality of the painting and gilding seemed exceptional. A lunch for whom? She wanted to look into the faces of those who would come to eat in a house where for twenty years an iron rule of silence had reigned. Leonia continued to glower, and became ever more sullen. The matter could not end there. At the right moment she too would open the floodgates, to make up for having stayed silent for so long. The neighbours had been right all along, and if everyone said so it had to be true: the master she had so recklessly loved, and followed blindly in every respect, was nothing other than a madman, a mental case fit for an asylum who just happened to be living in normal society.

The master brought still more packages to the house. Twelve small glasses no less elegant than the others, engraved with images of flying doves. How delightful, what miraculous craftsmanship: prodigious; a dream.

Nowadays the master did nothing else during the day but open and close his cupboard in order to admire, dust and rearrange to their advantage the extraordinarily beautiful objects that could be found inside: to accord each one an appropriate place, always more apposite, so as to facilitate and reduce the risk of removing and returning them.