However, when she learned that a lady found herself in the area, a lady of whom many years before it had been said that she was an old flame of the general’s, she did not fail to invite her to visit. It must have been a strange encounter: highly refined, serious and at the same time faintly ridiculous, with the kind of absurdity that makes everything human. That day they, too, spoke at length. They spoke until, beyond the windows, the garden took on a certain violet tinge. Then, somewhat surprised, her visitor rose. At that point she was able to make out, beyond the ploughed field and the vineyards, fleeting trails of smoke.

‘Ah, his old ducks,’ she said suddenly, looking out on that rural squalor. She said it with a smile, as someone looking at an old childhood portrait discovers in that image the little defects of a person to whom one wishes well.

‘What’s that? You mean to say even ‘then’ he went hunting?’ asked Signora Nodier, she too coming to the windows. And looked at her with a smile, for her visitor too was a little failing of the general’s.

‘Yes, but a dreadful hunter, then,’ her visitor said, laughing. ‘Not everyone wanted him around. They even found excuses to avoid him. Once they went so far as to invite him on the wrong day … Luckily, he never found out.’

‘He never confessed as much to me,’ Signora Nodier brought out, after briefly consulting her memories. ‘But I think I always suspected that was the case.’ And she added, as if to herself, ‘He took it too seriously to be good at it.’

‘Almost solemnly,’ her visitor added.

‘True, true,’ agreed Signora Nodier, almost grateful for a conclusion that made the general come alive. ‘Absolutely true, solemn.’

And the pair of them began to talk of his defects: in such a way that they didn’t seem to be speaking of one who was dead or alive, but of a myth, of the presence of one who combined a little of each, of life and death. Neither did either of them realize that the death, as well as other even sadder events, had taken place barely half a year earlier.

Signora Nodier considered that day one of the most important, and most ‘hers’.

She was to know another such, and more important still.

One evening two years later, as the oldest of the maids was ironing, there was a ring at the gate. Against the garden lamp one could see snowflakes falling, and in between, rain. It was deep winter. After looking out the window, she said, turning to the young maid, ‘You go, Agata,’ and the other returned to the other ironing.

She had to get up a few moments later, however, for though panting from her run across the garden, and though her feet were wet and a few flakes of snow clung to her hair, Agata reappeared smiling and excited, chattering about someone who stood outside the door. Then a soldier came in. Then a dog. The old woman immediately recognized the dog as the general’s Scottie.