Even the old man laughed. He was certainly an animal. He had a wife. And what a wife! Feeling a bit more at ease, he began to talk, even if reluctantly, but the others had been needling him to tell his story. He was an amusing old man and the idea of that scarecrow-wife amused them too.

No one had ever seen her, but everyone knew that she was spiteful and ruled with a stick. He couldn’t stay in his house even if he sat in a corner and said nothing, nor did it do any good to pretend to be asleep or sick. It was simply an impossible life, years of never being able to swallow a bite of food in peace with that ugly, poisonous, aggressive woman around. When he managed to enter the house without being seen, he would sneak into the kitchen, lift the lid off a pot, get himself a cup of soup, then fish some meatballs out of a casserole dish. Later, his wife would make one of her scenes, but eventually her outbursts stopped upsetting his stomach so much. For a long spell afterward she would, like a dragon, stand guard, and she locked everything away in the cupboards, keeping the key in her pocket.

When she felt hot, she removed the bed covers, and when she felt cold, she put them back on. But because she was fat and always sweating, the old man’s teeth chattered through the night in April and November; after the lights went off he would put on his winter coat so that his wife wouldn’t yell at him. Avaricious, she could squeeze blood from a sardine, and she caressed her coins so often, they sparkled when leaving her hands.

Finally someone said to him, ‘But why did you marry her?’ and the old man became sad and confused. For a few days afterward, he didn’t mention his wife, and he went back to expressing his passion for the landscape and praising the Malpasso. Other confessions ensued, hesitantly, as if he had to fight against a melancholic modesty. When she was in her thirties, his wife had suffered from a grave illness. Before that, oh, she had been a darling woman, a sweet, beautiful bride. In the rush of his words, he seemed to want to excuse himself for keeping her the way she was now, spiteful and tempestuous, but he had married a different woman, and, well, everyone knows about the heart’s memory … No one could have detected in that woman her old self, but he could, he who had been very happy with her for a few years. He then became dazed and pathetic. As a result of all the questions and answers, he weaved a new pleasurable plot in which the gold of youth shimmered while a white, wispy ghost sailed like a swan through the Malpasso’s smoky atmosphere.

Everyone was listening to him, especially the young people – a beautiful young bride, gentle and fresh-faced, with a velvety voice and chaste abandon. Those first years – what a beautiful young thing! – she had a long braid that fell down over her sky-blue dress and she sang. He lifted up his hands as he did when quoting Latin: She sang! It was as if by some sorcery the door to a fairy kingdom had been sealed off forever. The young people urged him on. Despite the passage of time, the intimacy they were witnessing was still an exciting elixir. They loved the beautiful woman, her white arms, her gracious devotion, her sweet perspiration. She had sweated even then, but this wasn’t what had motivated her to take the blankets off her husband. And she was often in the kitchen then too, but joyfully, shelling peas with her caressing pink fingers.