Meanwhile, from the convent, Concetta was attempting to pay court, so to speak, to her mother. She would frequently send her gifts, such as sweet pizzas, topped with confectionery, that her mother refused to taste and passed on to us; or strips of white silk on which a red heart pierced by an arrow had been embroidered. These bits of embroidery transported to the house a redolence of the domesticity and piety of a monastic enclosure, and the mother would throw them into a corner with a gesture of ironic contempt. At Easter a cardboard box arrived, containing a figurine of a nun made of sweet pastry, more than forty centimetres tall, wearing a habit made of chocolate. It was the product of a collective effort by the whole convent, and they had not failed to include such realistic details as the thin rope around her waist from which a minuscule cross was hanging, done in red sweets. At the sight of this nun the mother was overcome with sheer, cold fury, and ordered that it should be thrown into the fire. Her other two daughters obeyed, though not without a pang of regret.

In the evening, behind the grates of the convent, Concetta would hold a cross in her hands and look at the star-studded sky. She would fantasize that the stars were the lit windows of her future abode, trying to imagine which one of them belonged to her future spouse’s room. Concetta had reached the age of twenty-three. And it was at this time that she fell ill with typhus and died.

The sisters rushed to inform me breathlessly that Concetta was in her final agony, and to beg me to persuade her mother to visit her at least this one last time. I ran to the widow’s home, but quickly realized that Angela had already made up her mind to go, and that she only pretended to need to be begged to do so. With pupils sparkling, and two vermilion stains on her cheeks, she walked ahead of me towards the convent, and without even stopping to acknowledge the nun who acted as doorkeeper, swept upstairs to her daughter’s cell with the proprietorial air of a mistress. To the murmuring nuns who came to her side it seemed that she was saying, ‘Out of my way, she’s my daughter and mine alone; I’m the only one with any right to cry for her.’ She approached the bed, and in the theatrical, passionate manner that my female compatriots assume when afflicted, she exclaimed: ‘Ah, my little Concetta, my own Concetta!’, and kneeling down by the side of the bed she grasped her daughter’s hands and showered them with a flurry of kisses.