From the city’s bell-towers the stroke of nine o’clock came to his ears, and so he set out for the centre of town, where other young men stroll in the piazza or sit in cafés, trying to brush women from their minds like flies from their noses.

He kept walking and every five paces he turned around to look back at that corner. He met two or three very young couples, swaying from side to side on the pavement like little drunkards, and clasping each other or separating depending on whether they were in or out of the areas of shadow between the street lamps. Carlo envied these boys with their girls, but then he said to himself: I wonder if they’re going to do what we would have done if only she’d come. Otherwise there’s no reason to envy them.

He made a slight detour to drink from the fountain in the park. He drank deeply then, raising his head, looked back one last time at that corner and saw a tall girl appear, as tall as she, with a canary-yellow jacket – then a fashionable colour and she had the same kind of jacket – and she was walking quickly towards the grade crossing.

He dashed away from the fountain, giving a long whistle in the girl’s direction as he ran along the path in the park. The old people, their legs comfortably outstretched on the gravel, hastily drew them back under the benches as he ran past whistling again.

The girl did not turn around nor slow her pace; he ran faster, almost bumping into the dispatcher, who was about to lower the barriers for the last arriving train. He jumped across the tracks and came up behind the girl.

She was walking stiffly and rapidly past the gasworks, and he stopped, for he had just realized that it wasn’t she, but another girl with more or less the same build and wearing the same kind of jacket. But by the time he realized this, he had already whistled a third time and the girl, hearing him, looked back over her shoulder without stopping and saw him standing in the middle of the street, his arms drooping at his sides. She turned her head and proceeded still more rapidly towards the dark end of the street.

He was out of breath and failed to see the man whom the dispatcher saw bend down to pass under the barriers and run up behind Carlo. But instead of hitting Carlo from behind, the man circled halfway around until he was ahead of him and with bony fingers clutched Carlo’s biceps – all this without saying a word.

At that moment Carlo knew nothing about him except that his name was Attilio, that he had been a soldier in Greece, then a prisoner in Germany, and people said he had come back with TB.

Carlo in his turn clutched the other man’s arms and they began to struggle. Looking over Attilio’s shoulder, he had a brief glimpse of the girl, who had shrunk into a doorway in an effort to hide but was betrayed by the exposed edge of her yellow jacket.