Rustic progeny, raising perpetual bread: let them grow up, let them love. She considered her story to be at its end. The sacrifice had been performed. In purity; of which God alone is knowledge. She was happy that other men and women might gather the vital sense of the tale, deluded still, with their hot blood, in regarding it as necessary truth. The smoke rose from the houses on the far horizon. No one would have kept her spirit, or her cheer, for so long in the empty days.

But Gonzalo? Oh, the marvel of life! A continuity fulfilled. Once again, from the terrace, she seemed aware of the curve of the world: the sphere of lights, revolving; they vanished in a mist the colour of periwinkle towards the quietness of the night. On the world, bringer of grain, and of song, the tranquil lights of midsummer. She felt herself still watching it, from the terrace of her life, oh! still, for a moment, to be part of the calm evening. A sweet lightness. And, high in the sky, the sapphire of the ocean: which Alvise had contemplated, in trepidation, and Antoniotto of Noli, rounding capes of nameless reality towards the emergent dream of archipelagos. She felt drawn into the event, into the ancient flow of possibility, of continuation: like all, close to all. She had overcome the darkness through her thought, her sons, giving herself: gifts of good works and hopes for the sanctity of the future. Her consummate labour took her back on to the path of souls. She had learned, taught. Late chimes: and silence had drunk the slow-burning wick of the vigils. Dawn crept in between the lines: noble paragraphs! and she, in sleep, repeated its sentence. Generations, chirruping of springtime, game of perpetual life beneath the gaze of the towers. Thoughts had stirred thoughts, souls had stirred souls. Grieving nations ferried them towards the shores of knowledge, ships by the Dark Sea. Perhaps in this way the atrocity of her pain, to God, would not be without purpose.

She put her hands together.

Gonzalo, with his work, made enough to live on. Recently, he had been to Modetia,fn7 the seamstress at Modetia was to make him some plain woven shirts: she had, indeed, written: she would cut them with the greatest care, so obliged she felt, dear Señora, for her kindness and courtesy.

Gonzalo! Her older son had no state pension, except for a trifle, for a paltry medal: the last and most ludicrous of medals. (But this is what the experts might believe, not his mother’s certainty.) There was, in any case, no reason for him to have a state pension. His eardrums were affected, now, by an ailment other than some traumatic wound – ruined, it could be said, by some other tedium that was not the impenetrable mist of deafness. She couldn’t say how he had reappeared to her, oh!, in an ashen dawn: among the commerce and the mire of Pastrufazio, and the indomitable motor cars. He was unscathed, with few years inside the grey epaulettes he wore on his return. Perhaps his war had not been hazardous for him. He told no stories, never: he never spoke about it to anyone: certainly not to the children, when they gathered round him during a moment’s rest, warriors or admirals, grazed, hot, with tin bayonets: nor to the ladies in the villas who were, he said, among the choicest women of Pastrufazio, those most thirsty for epic sagas: and consequently the most enthusiastic imbibers of tall stories.