This figure, together with another, and for an entirely different reason, illustrated in the fairy tale of the ‘Twelve Dancing Princesses’, occupied a special place for me. In this one, a soldier of fortune guarded the bedroom of twelve princesses who had caused the king, their father, to become suspicious, because the soles of his daughters’ shoes were always pristine. This soldier, shrewdly pouring into his beard the drugged wine the girls offered him each evening, managed to discover the lake-filled underground realms where the princesses descended at midnight, through a trapdoor and down a swirling spiral staircase, in order to go dancing on an island with their young lovers. And those twelve, revealing their naked shoulders to the soldier, their abundant hair pulled up, were no less fascinating and palpable than the most beautiful of my older cousins who in that moment – shoulders, hips, delicate chest, all transparent as the sunlight penetrated her white dress – was heading towards the spigot concealed beneath a small iron hatch, which magically liberated, as if from the centre of the earth, a fountain of water gushing on to the lawn. There with my cousins it was easy to believe in every word of the story, to comprehend almost a parallel version, hearing those delectable creatures with their silken skin, their almond eyes, whispering as they drank their tea under the Cedar of Lebanon, with their ladyfingers and their langues de chat biscuits, sitting in their green chairs covered in paint bubbles, (certain, in their naivety, that no one would understand what they were saying): ‘We had fun last night, didn’t we?’ ‘Oh, how amusing it is to sneak behind the back of that poor soldier!’ ‘Let’s hope Papa doesn’t suspect anything!’ ‘Don’t be silly, he has no idea …’ In the book, of course, they sounded completely different, breathed a different air; certainly the real life of my beautiful cousins was a life of fun until the midnight curfew, the hour at which, like the poor drugged sentinel, I had to go to sleep between the two high rails of my brass bed; the hour of provocation and delirium, which I didn’t get a real taste of until the following day, when I would spell out the words, my finger on the page, while seated at the edge of a bed of rust-coloured zinnias, so engrossed a stream of saliva fell from the corner of my mouth. I was following the twelve princesses as they made their way down the twists and turns of the spiral staircase towards the centre of the earth, like the twelve hours that head towards the dark and fluid midnight of life … But suddenly from the garden I heard my mother’s voice meekly questioning the cook who was standing at the kitchen window: ‘Cook, have you done the shopping? You know how important it is that the professor …’ I imagined her large, dazzling and anxious eyes, while I, without distinguishing one woe from another, listened to that other sweet, bewitched creature, Anatrella of ‘The Three Oranges’, floating in the castle moat beneath the windows of the royal kitchens: