‘That’s fine, just fine. I have a great deal of respect for the old families. Their memory is … miniscule, of course, but still it’s greater than the others’. It’s as much of physical immortality as your sort can hope for. Think about getting married soon, Corbera, seeing as how your sort haven’t found any better way to survive than scattering your seed in the strangest places.’

He was definitely trying my patience. ‘Your sort.’ Who was that? The whole contemptible herd that was not fortunate enough to be Senator La Ciura? Who’d attained physical immortality? You’d never know it from looking at his wrinkled face, his sagging flesh …

‘Corbera di Salina,’ he continued, undeterred, ‘You don’t mind if I call you tu, as I do with my students in their fleeting youth?’

I professed to be not only honoured but delighted, and I was. Moving beyond questions of names and protocol, we now spoke of Sicily. It had been twenty years since he’d set foot on the island, and the last time he’d been ‘down there,’ as he called it in the Piedmontese manner, he’d stayed a mere five days, in Syracuse, to talk to Paolo Orsi about the alternating choruses in classical theatre.

‘I remember they wanted to take me in a car from Catania to Syracuse; I accepted only when I learned that at Augusta the road passes far from the sea, whereas the train follows the coastline. Tell me about our island. It’s a beautiful places, even if it is inhabited by donkeys. The gods once sojourned there – and perhaps in some endless Augusts they return. But don’t on any account speak to me about those four modern temples of yours, not that that’s anything you’d understand, I’m sure.’

So we spoke about eternal Sicily, the Sicily of the natural world; about the scent of rosemary on the Nebrodi Mountains and the taste of Melilli honey; about the swaying cornfields seen from Etna on a windy day in May, some secluded spots near Syracuse, and the fragrant gusts from the citrus plantations known to sweep down on Palermo during sunset in June. We spoke of those magic summer nights, looking out over the gulf of Castellammare, when the stars are mirrored in the sleeping sea, and how, lying on your back among the mastic trees, your spirit is lost in the whirling heavens, while the body braces itself, fearing the approach of demons.

The senator had scarcely visited the island for fifty years, and yet his memory of certain minute details was remarkably precise. ‘Sicily’s sea is the most vividly coloured, the most romantic of any I have ever seen; it’s the only thing you won’t manage to ruin, at least away from the cities. Do the trattorias by the sea still serve spiny urchins, split in half?’

I assured him that they did, though adding that few people ate them now, for fear of typhus.

‘And yet they are the most beautiful thing you have down there, bloody and cartilaginous, the very image of the female sex, fragrant with salt and seaweed. Typhus, typhus! They’re dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality. In Syracuse I demanded that Orsi order them immediately. What flavour! How divine in appearance! My most beautiful memory of the last fifty years!’