He crumpled the pleats of my skirt in his fingers. ‘There is a woman in this village whom I have loved very much. It’s ridiculous to call her a woman; she’s not a woman, she’s just a child, nothing but a scruffy little animal. She’s the daughter of a local peasant. Two years ago I cured her of a bad bout of pleurisy. She was fifteen at the time. Her family is poor; not just poor but mean too; they have a dozen children and wouldn’t dream of buying medicine for her. So I paid for the medicine, and after she got better, I would go and look for her in the woods where she would go to gather wood and I would give her a little money, so that she could buy herself something to eat. At home she had nothing but bread and salted potatoes; she didn’t see anything unusual in this – her brothers and sisters, her mother and father, and most of their neighbours all lived like this. If I’d given her mother money, she would have quickly hidden it away in her mattress and wouldn’t have bought a thing. But I soon saw that the girl was ashamed of buying things, afraid that her mother would find out what was happening, and I realized that she too was tempted to hide the money away in her mattress as she had always seen her mother do, even though I told her that if she did not eat properly, she could get ill again and die.

‘I started taking food to her myself every day. To begin with she was ashamed to eat in front of me, but she soon got used to it and she would eat and eat, and when she was full she would stretch out in the sun, and we would spend hours like that, just the two of us. I got an extraordinary pleasure from watching her eat – it was what I most looked forward to during my day – and later when I was alone, I would think about what she had eaten and what I would bring her the next day. It was like this that I started making love to her. Whenever I could I would go to the woods and wait for her, and she would come; I didn’t even know why she came, whether it was to eat or to make love, or out of fear that I would get angry with her. Oh how I waited for her! When passion is penetrated by pity and remorse you’re done for; it becomes an obsession. I would wake up at night and think about what would happen if I made her pregnant and had to marry her, and the idea of having to share the rest of my life with her filled me with horror. Yet at the same time I couldn’t bear to imagine her married to another person, in somebody else’s house, and the love that I felt for her was unbearable, it took all my strength away. When I saw you I thought that by tying myself to you I would be freeing myself from her, maybe I would forget her because I didn’t want her. I didn’t want Mariuccia; it was a woman like you that I wanted, a woman like me, who was mature and responsible. I could see something in you that made me think you might forgive me, that you would agree to help me, and so it seemed to me that if I behaved badly with you, it wouldn’t matter, because we would learn to love each other, and all this would go away.’