Eugenia, still holding on to the eyeglasses with her hands, went to the entrance to the courtyard to look outside into Vicolo della Cupa. Her legs were trembling, her head was spinning, and she no longer felt any joy. With her white lips she wished to smile, but that smile became a moronic grimace. Suddenly the balconies began to multiply, two thousand, a hundred thousand; the carts piled with vegetables were falling on her; the voices filling the air, the cries, the lashes, struck her head as if she were ill; she turned, swaying, towards the courtyard, and that terrible impression intensified. The courtyard was like a sticky funnel, with the narrow end towards the sky, its leprous walls crowded with derelict balconies; the arches of the basement dwellings black, with the lights bright in a circle around Our Lady of Sorrows; the pavement white with soapy water; the cabbage leaves, the scraps of paper, the garbage and, in the middle of the courtyard, that group of ragged, deformed souls, faces pocked by poverty and resignation, who looked at her lovingly. They began to writhe, to become mixed up, to grow larger. They all came towards her, in the two bewitched circles of the eyeglasses. It was Mariuccia who first realized that the child was sick, and she tore off the glasses, because Eugenia, doubled over and moaning, was throwing up.

‘They’ve gone to her stomach!’ cried Mariuccia, holding her forehead. ‘Bring a coffee bean, Nunziata!’

‘A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’ cried Aunt Nunzia, her eyes popping out of her head, running into the basement room to get a coffee bean from a can in the cupboard; and she held up the new eyeglasses, as if to ask God for an explanation. ‘And now they’re wrong, too!’

‘It’s always like that, the first time,’ said the Amodios’ maid to Donna Rosa calmly. ‘You mustn’t be shocked; little by little one gets used to them.’

‘It’s nothing, child, nothing, don’t be scared!’ But Donna Rosa felt her heart constrict at the thought of how unlucky they were.

Aunt Nunzia returned with the coffee bean, still crying: ‘A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’ while Eugenia, pale as death, tried in vain to throw up, because she had nothing left inside her. Her bulging eyes were almost crossed with suffering, and her old lady’s face was bathed in tears, as if stupefied. She leaned on her mother and trembled.

‘Mamma, where are we?’

‘We’re in the courtyard, my child,’ said Donna Rosa patiently; and the delicate smile, between pity and wonder, that illuminated her eyes, suddenly lit up the faces of all those wretched people.

‘She’s half blind!’

‘She’s a halfwit, she is!’

‘Leave her alone, poor child, she’s dazed,’ said Donna Mariuccia, and her face was grim with pity, as she went back into the basement apartment that seemed to her darker than usual.

Only Aunt Nunzia was wringing her hands:

‘A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’