‘Mamma went to get them on Via Roma,’ said Eugenia with a look of gratitude. ‘We paid a grand total of a good eight thousand lire, you know? Really … my aunt is …’ she was about to add ‘truly a good person’, when Aunt Nunzia, looking out of the basement room, called angrily: ‘Eugenia!’

‘Here I am, Aunt!’ and she scampered away like a dog.

Behind their aunt, Pasqualino, all red-faced and bewildered, with a terrible expression somewhere between disdain and surprise, was waiting.

‘Go and buy two candies for three lire each, from Don Vincenzo at the tobacco store. Come back immediately!’

‘Yes, Aunt.’

She clutched the money in her fist, paying no more attention to the comic, and hurried out of the courtyard.

By a true miracle she avoided a towering vegetable cart drawn by two horses, which was coming towards her, right outside the main entrance. The carter, with his whip unsheathed, seemed to be singing, and from his mouth came these words: ‘Lovely … Fresh,’ drawn out and full of sweetness, like a love song. When the cart was behind her, Eugenia, raising her protruding eyes, basked in that warm blue glow that was the sky, and heard the great hubbub all around her, without, however, seeing it clearly. Carts, one behind the other, big trucks with Americans dressed in yellow hanging out of the windows, bicycles that seemed to be tumbling over. High up, all the balconies were cluttered with flower crates, and over the railings, like flags or saddle blankets, hung yellow-and-red quilts, ragged blue children’s clothes, sheets, pillows and mattresses exposed to the air, while at the end of the alley ropes uncoiled, lowering baskets to pick up the vegetables or fish offered by peddlers. Although the sun touched only the highest balconies (the street a crack in the disorderly mass of buildings) and the rest was only shadow and garbage, one could sense, behind it, the enormous celebration of spring. And even Eugenia, so small and pale, bound like a mouse to the mud of her courtyard, began to breathe rapidly, as if that air, that celebration and all that blue suspended over the neighbourhood of the poor were also hers. The yellow basket of the Amodios’ maid, Rosaria Buonincontri, grazed her as she went into the tobacco shop. Rosaria was a fat woman in black, with white legs and a flushed, placid face.

‘Tell your mamma if she can come upstairs a moment today, Signora Amodio needs her to deliver a message.’

Eugenia recognized her by her voice. ‘She’s not here now. She went to Via Roma to get my glasses.’

‘I should wear them, too, but my boyfriend doesn’t want me to.’

Eugenia didn’t grasp the meaning of that prohibition. She answered only, ingenuously: ‘They cost a great amount; you have to take very good care of them.’

They entered Don Vincenzo’s hole-in-the-wall together. There was a crowd. Eugenia kept being pushed back. ‘Go on … you really are blind,’ observed the Amodios’ maid, with a kind smile.