‘Listen, you have to redo the child’s mattress. Can you come up around ten-thirty?’

‘With all my heart, but I’m only available in the afternoon, Signora Marchesa.’

‘No, Don Peppino, it has to be this morning. In the afternoon people are coming. Set yourself up on the terrace and work. Don’t play hard to get … do me this favour … Now it’s time for Mass. At ten-thirty, call me.’

And without waiting for an answer, she left, astutely avoiding a trickle of yellow water that was dripping down from a terrace and had made a puddle on the ground.

‘Papa,’ said Eugenia, following her father, as he went back inside, ‘how good the marchesa is! She treats you like a gentleman. God should reward her for it.’

‘A good Christian, that one is,’ Don Peppino answered, with a meaning completely different from what might have been understood. With the excuse that she was the owner of the house, the Marchesa D’Avanzo constantly had the people in the courtyard serving her: to Don Peppino, she gave a wretched sum for the mattresses; and Rosa was always available for the big sheets; even if her bones were burning, she had to get up to serve the marchesa. It’s true that the marchesa had placed Rosa’s daughters in the convent, and so had saved two souls from the dangers of this world, which for the poor are many, but for that basement space, where everyone was sick, she collected three thousand lire, not one less. ‘The heart is there, it’s the money that’s lacking,’ she loved to repeat, with a certain imperturbability. ‘Today, dear Don Peppino, you are the nobility, you have no worries … Thank … thank Providence, which has put you in such a condition … which wanted to save you.’ Donna Rosa had a kind of adoration for the marchesa, for her religious sentiments; when they saw each other, they always talked about the afterlife. The marchesa didn’t much believe in it, but she didn’t say so, and urged this mother to be patient and to hope.

From the bed, Donna Rosa asked, a little worried: ‘Did you talk to her?’

‘She wants me to redo the mattress for her grandson,’ said Don Peppino, in annoyance. He brought out the burner on a tripod to warm up some coffee, a gift of the nuns, and went back inside to fetch water in a small pot. ‘I won’t do it for less than five hundred,’ he said.

‘It’s a fair price.’

‘And then who will go and pick up Eugenia’s glasses?’ Aunt Nunzia asked, coming out of the bathroom. Over her nightgown, she wore a torn skirt, and on her feet, slippers. Her bony shoulders emerged from the nightgown, grey as stones. She was drying her face with a napkin. ‘I can’t go, and Rosa is ill.’

Without anyone noticing, Eugenia’s large, almost blind eyes filled with tears. Now maybe another day would pass without her eyeglasses. She went up to her mother’s bed, and in a pitiful manner, flung her arms and forehead on the blanket. Donna Rosa stretched out a hand to caress her.