Carlo made no move to pull him up and prop him in a sitting position against the wall of the gasworks, for he couldn’t stand the smell. With Attilio lying on the ground, he forgot that he had understood him and opened his mouth to yell: What the hell’s the matter with you? But he remembered in time that he had understood and closed his mouth again.

The train was near – judging by the sound it made, it was passing over the bridge. He looked down the street in search of the girl. She had left the shelter of the doorway and was standing in the middle of the street, looking from a distance at that heap of black-and-white rags that was Attilio lying on the pavement; then very slowly and cautiously she approached the two of them.

Now Carlo could leave; he turned his back on Attilio and went to the grade crossing. The dispatcher was looking intently at the track where the train would arrive, but Carlo could see that he was watching him out of the corner of his eye. The dispatcher said nothing to him, and anyway he would have had to yell. The train went by with all its lights falling on Carlo; the passengers at the windows saw the expression on his face, and who knows what they may have thought.

He walked away. With his arms crossed over his chest, he felt his muscles, which ached as though still encircled by iron rings, while before his eyes was Attilio’s pale, infected skin, and he was thinking that he would never again be the same as he was before this struggle. He stayed out of the light as he walked, his eyelids, mouth and knees trembling. An attack of nerves, and yet he felt that never again would he be able to feel nervous tension, since his nerves had been broken by clasping Attilio’s skinny arms.

And still before his eyes the whiteness of that skin. To drive it away, he concentrated on imagining in the void his girlfriend’s body, naked, healthy and beneficent, but it refused to take shape and remained a white cloud added to and extending Attilio’s skin.

He went to the bar of the railroad station but did not go inside; he signalled to the bartender from the doorway and ordered a brandy, a medicinal brandy if they had any.

While he waits for them to bring him the brandy, he sees a yellow jacket appear from the path in the park. It is Attilio’s girl, walking much more slowly than before. She sees him, stops to think of something, and then comes up to him, still looking at the ground and with a guarded step. So Carlo has time to study her body, a very ordinary body but one that aspires to be possessed only by a healthy man.

Now here she is. She looks at him with blue eyes and says in a disagreeable voice, ‘It was good of you not to hit him with your fists.’