‘But how will it go away?’ I said. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. Since we got married I don’t think of her any more in the way I did before, and if I see her I say hello calmly, and she laughs and goes all red, and so I tell myself that in a few years I’ll see her married to some peasant, weighed down with children and disfigured by hard work. But then something stirs inside me when I meet her, and I want to follow her to the woods again and hear her laugh and speak in her dialect, and watch her while she collects branches for the fire.’ ‘I want to meet her,’ I said. ‘You must show her to me. Tomorrow we’ll go for a walk and you can show her to me when she goes by.’ It was my first decisive act and it gave me a sense of satisfaction. ‘But don’t you feel bitter towards me?’ he asked. I shook my head. I didn’t feel bitter. I didn’t know what I felt. I was happy and sad at the same time. It was late, and when we went to have dinner we found all the food was cold: but we didn’t feel like eating anyway. We went down to the garden. It was dark and we walked for a long time on the grass. He took my arm and said, ‘I knew you would understand.’ He woke several times during the night and pulled me close, repeating, ‘You’ve understood everything!’

When I saw Mariuccia for the first time she was coming back from the fountain, carrying a bucket of water. She was wearing a faded blue dress and black socks and she was stumbling along with a huge pair of men’s shoes on her feet. When she saw me red blushes appeared on her dark face, and she spilled a little water on the steps of the house as she turned to look at me. I was so overwhelmed by this meeting that I asked my husband if we could stop, and we sat down on the stone bench in front of the church. However, just at that moment he was called away and I was left there alone. A deep discomfort came over me at the thought that perhaps I would see Mariuccia every day and that I would never be able to walk around those roads freely again. I had believed that the village where I had come to live would become dear to me, that I would belong in every part of it; now it seemed this had been taken away from me forever. And it was true. Every time I went out I would see her, either rinsing her laundry at the fountain or carrying buckets or holding one of her grubby little siblings in her arms. One day her mother, a fat peasant, invited me into their kitchen; Mariuccia stood by the door with her hands tucked into her apron; she gave me the odd sly and inquisitive look and then disappeared. When I got home I would say to my husband, ‘I saw Mariuccia today.’ He would ignore me and look the other way until one day he said to me in an irritated voice, ‘So what if you saw her? It’s all in the past, there’s no reason to discuss it any more.’