‘What time did this happen?’ I asked, disturbed by a presentiment.

The assistant hesitated: it was not yet night, but he couldn’t say precisely. But then, yes, now he remembered: just a few seconds before Trachi pulled the chains from the wall the time had rung from the bell-tower, and the boss said to him, in dialect so that Trachi wouldn’t understand: ‘It’s already seven o’clock! If all my clients were as currish as this one …’

Seven o’clock!

It wasn’t difficult, unfortunately, to follow Trachi’s furious flight; even if no one had seen him, there were conspicuous traces of the blood he had lost, and the scrapes made by the chains on tree trunks and on rocks by the side of the road. He hadn’t headed towards home, or towards the De Simones’: he had cleared the two-metre wooden fence that surrounds the Chiapasso property, and crossed the vineyards in a blind fury, making a path for himself through the rows of vines, in a straight line, knocking down stakes and vines, breaking the thick iron wires that held up the vine branches.

He reached the barnyard and found the barn door bolted shut from the outside. He easily could have opened it with his hands; instead, he picked up an old thresher, weighing well over fifty kilos, and hurled it against the door, reducing it to splinters. Only six cows, a calf, chickens and rabbits were in the barn. Trachi left immediately and, still in a mad gallop, headed towards Baron Caglieris’s estate.

It was at least six and a half kilometres away, on the other side of the valley, but Trachi got there in a matter of minutes. He looked for the stable: he didn’t find it with his first blow, but only after he used his hooves and shoulders to knock down many doors. What he did in the stable we know from an eyewitness, a stable boy, who, at the sound of the door shattering, had had the good sense to hide in the hay, and from there he had seen everything.

Trachi hesitated for a moment on the threshold, panting and bloody. The horses, unsettled, shook their heads; tugging on their halters. Trachi pounced on a three-year-old white mare; in one blow he broke the chain that bound her to the trough, and dragging her by this same chain led her outside. The mare didn’t put up any resistance; strange, the stable boy told me, since she had a rather skittish and reluctant character, nor was she in heat.

They galloped together as far as the river: here Trachi was seen to stop, cup his hands, dip them into the water, and drink repeatedly. They then proceeded side by side into the woods. Yes, I followed their tracks: into those same woods and along that same path, to that same place where Teresa had asked me to take her.

And it was right there, for that entire night, that Trachi must have celebrated his monstrous nuptials. There I found the ground dug up, broken branches, brown and white horsehair, human hair and more blood. Not far away, drawn by the sound of her troubled breathing, I found the mare. She lay on the ground on her side, gasping, her noble coat covered with dirt and grass. Hearing my footsteps she lifted her head a little, and followed me with the terrible stare of a spooked horse. She was not wounded, but exhausted. She gave birth eight months later to a foal: in every way normal, I was told.