‘He’s a Maremmano, just like these swindlers who jerked us around.’

A crowd of boys gathered and started to ridicule me as if they had always known me.

‘Don’t you think he’s a Maremmano?’ said the goalie again. ‘Look at his knee socks. That’s the kind of stuff they wear in Maremma.’

‘Tomorrow I’ll wear cotton socks,’ I said. ‘I wear them every year when it gets warm.’ Then I added, ‘G. is not in the Maremma.’

At the mention of G. several adults made common cause with the boys.

‘Tell your countrymen they’re thieves,’ said a young man. The others laughed. With tears in my eyes I then tried to explain the grave error they committed by thinking that G. was located in the Maremma.

‘Is he a bit touched?’ someone asked one of my mates.

‘More than a bit,’ he replied.

The boys were shouting more loudly than before. They started pushing me, the adults no less than the boys.

A young man ran up; he was laughing and said that he had been to the river. The bull had thrown himself into the water, and the herdsmen were weeping, cursing and begging the saints and the bull, but they were unable to drag him out. At this news the attacks on me intensified.

‘He must be the son of the herdsmen’s boss if he defends them so much,’ said a girl.

‘No,’ I hollered. ‘I’m not defending them. I hate them. I have nothing to do with them. My grandfather owned farms. My mother is a lady. It was she who made these socks.’

‘They’re made of goat hair,’ said an old gentleman. One boy emitted a ‘Baa’, another a ‘Moo’, and a third gave me a punch.

I turned around. I was standing in the middle of a street that leads to the city. People were gathering behind me in a semicircle. I was crying. It must have been a long time since I had cried. I broke away from the group and leaned against a tree. Far away, on the shore of the river, I glimpsed my mates running in the opposite direction. Perhaps they were going to see the bull who had thrown himself in the river.

‘Un errore geografico’

Written in 1937 and first published in the collection Mio cugino Andrea (Vallecchi, 1943). It was then included in the collection Racconti (Vallecchi, 1958) and in the 1989 edition of Anna e Bruno e altri racconti (Rizzoli).