Perhaps, when I have written the book, you won’t give it a second thought. But meanwhile, the memories I send you now, so far away from you in every sense, inebriated as you are with feasting and flowers, will bring a refreshing breeze to play upon the feverish round of your endless revelry. On the day you go back there, if you ever do go back, and we sit together again, kicking up stones with our feet and visions in our thoughts, perhaps we shall talk about those other breezes that life elsewhere has to offer. Imagine, if you like, that my mind is fixed on that unknown little corner of the world because you once stepped into it, or in order to avert my gaze from the dazzling glare of precious stones and fevered expectation that accompanies your every movement, or because I have sought you out in vain in all the places smiled upon by fashion. So you see, you always take the lead in my thoughts, as you do in the theatre!

Do you also recall that old man at the tiller of our boat? You owe it to him to remember, because he saved you a dozen times from soaking your fine blue stockings. He died down there, poor devil, in the town hospital, in a huge white ward, between white sheets, chewing white bread, assisted by the white hands of the Sisters of Charity, whose only weakness was their failure to comprehend the string of woes that the wretched fellow mumbled forth in his semi-barbaric dialect.

But if there was one thing he would have wanted above all else, it was to die in that shaded little corner beside his own hearth, where he had slept for so many years ‘below his own roof’, which is why, when they carried him away, he was in tears, whining as only the old are able to.

He had spent his whole life between those four walls, looking out on that lovely but treacherous sea with which he had had to wrestle every day of his life to extract what he needed to survive without coming to a watery end. And yet for that brief moment in time when he was silently relishing his place in the sun, huddled on the thwart of the boat with his arms round his knees, he wouldn’t have turned his head to admire you, and you would have looked in vain into those spellbound eyes for the proud reflection of your beauty, as when so many of the high and mighty bow their heads as they make way for you in the fashionable salons, and you see your reflection in the envious eyes of your best women friends.

Life is rich, as you see, in its inexhaustible variety, and you can enjoy that part of its richness that has come your way just as you please.

Take that young woman, for instance, who peeped out from behind the pots of basilico when the rustling of your dress set off a clamour in the street. When she espied your famous face in the window opposite she beamed as though she too were dressed in silk. Who knows what simple joys filled her thoughts as she stood at that window behind the fragrant basilico, her eyes fixed intently on the house opposite, bedecked with branches of vine. And the laughter in her eyes would not have turned later into bitter tears in the big city, far away from the four walls that had witnessed her birth and watched her grow up, if her grandfather hadn’t died in the hospital, and her father hadn’t drowned, and her family hadn’t been scattered by a puff of wind that had blown right through it – a puff of ruinous wind, which had carried one of her brothers off to prison on the island of Pantelleria, or ‘into trouble’, as they say in those parts.