A week earlier, she had gone with her aunt to an optician on Via Roma. There, in that elegant shop, with its polished tables and a marvellous green reflection pouring in through a blind, the doctor had measured her sight, making her read many times, through certain lenses that he kept changing, entire columns of letters of the alphabet, printed on a card, some as big as boxes, others as tiny as pins. ‘This poor girl is almost blind,’ he had said then, with a kind of pity, to her aunt, ‘she should no longer be deprived of lenses.’ And right away, while Eugenia, sitting on a stool, waited anxiously, he had placed over her eyes another pair of lenses, with a white metal frame, and had said: ‘Now look into the street.’ Eugenia stood up, her legs trembling with emotion, and was unable to suppress a little cry of joy. On the pavement, so many well-dressed people were passing, slightly smaller than normal but very distinct: ladies in silk dresses with powdered faces, young men with long hair and bright-coloured sweaters, white-bearded old men with pink hands resting on silver-handled canes; and, in the middle of the street, some beautiful automobiles that looked like toys, their bodies painted red or teal, all shiny; green trolleys as big as houses, with their windows lowered, and behind the windows so many people in elegant clothes. Across the street, on the opposite pavement, were beautiful shops, with windows like mirrors, full of things so fine they roused a kind of longing; some shop boys in black aprons were polishing the windows from the street. At a café with red and yellow tables, some golden-haired girls were sitting outside, legs crossed. They laughed and drank from big coloured glasses. Above the café, because it was already spring, the balcony windows were open and embroidered curtains swayed, and behind the curtains were fragments of blue and gilded paintings, and heavy, sparkling chandeliers of gold and crystal, like baskets of artificial fruit. A marvel. Transported by all that splendour, she hadn’t followed the conversation between the doctor and her aunt. Her aunt, in the brown dress she wore to Mass, and standing back from the glass counter with a timidity unnatural to her, now broached the question of the cost: ‘Doctor, please, give us a good price … we’re poor folk …’ and when she heard ‘eight thousand lire’ she nearly fainted.

‘Two lenses! What are you saying! Jesus Mary!’

‘Look, ignorant people …’ the doctor answered, replacing the other lenses after polishing them with the glove, ‘don’t calculate anything. And when you give the child two lenses, you’ll be able to tell me if she sees better. She takes nine diopters on one side, and ten on the other, if you want to know … she’s almost blind.’

While the doctor was writing the child’s first and last name – ‘Eugenia Quaglia, Vicolo della Cupa, at Santa Maria in Portico’ – Nunziata had gone over to Eugenia, who, standing in the doorway of the shop and, holding up the glasses in her small, sweaty hands, was not at all tired of gazing through them: ‘Look, look, my dear! See what your consolation costs! Eight thousand lire, did you hear? A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’ She was almost suffocating. Eugenia had turned all red, not so much because of the rebuke as because the young woman at the cash register was looking at her, while her aunt was making that observation which declared the family’s poverty. She took off the glasses.