She didn’t want to sit down. She looked with disdain at the armchair I offered her, her eyes trained on me as if expecting the unexpected. I looked once more at the child. He was barefoot, and he stared at me, clinging to his mother’s side, as if he, too, expected something inevitable to happen. Perhaps he was trembling, perhaps he was scared, but he controlled himself with the determination children are capable of.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll see to this director, I’ll find someone among my friends who knows him. Why don’t you leave me your address.’ I motioned to offer her a pen; I wanted to see her writing. But the pen slipped from my hand, rolling on the table, and in the attempt to pick it up again, I gave it another nudge and it ended up falling on the floor. I heard a sudden cry, a shriek, and saw the child’s mouth: it was red, a commoner’s red, opened wide to reveal the few teeth among the gums. The fallen pen had ended up hurting the child’s small bare foot.

I started to panic. The boy behaved as if he couldn’t breathe, he seemed on the verge of choking. She took him roughly in her arms, without sitting down, and looked at me, stunned. I sensed a tremendous, powerful vitality, and a fear of evil that only simple people know how to convey. I rooted around for a small bottle of disinfectant and found a vial of iodine. I was about to pour a few drops on the wound, which was barely a scratch grazing that little foot, sensing that it was fruit from the maternal tree. The child caught his breath and asked, in a grown-up voice, using an incredibly reasonable tone: ‘Will it sting?’

‘A bit,’ I replied.

Then he let out another cry, even louder, baring his mouth down to his tonsils. ‘Calm down,’ I said, ‘I’ll look for a medicine that doesn’t sting,’ and I started to look for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide that I remembered keeping in a drawer.

The boy quieted down at once and waited. When I came back, I saw a drop of blood creeping out of the wound: it was thick blood, bright vermilion, a perfect drop of it.

With impressive ease the boy started shrieking: ‘Now it hurts, now it hurts.’ He pulled at his hair and scratched his cheeks. Then suddenly he turned quiet again, while his mother looked at me and him the way animals watch strangers who approach their young, a look that deems their young the strongest, most precious things on earth.

I’d placed a cotton pad on the wound, and I watched it shrinking and staunching. While I did this I was seized by a violent feeling, due to some ancient memory, and I appraised that flesh dense with blood and strength, and those two pointlessly beautiful bodies, as if they were treasures that lay buried in residual gangue: a force of nature, hidden yet thriving at some unexplored depth. Looking around, at the things I’d accumulated in so many patient, lean years, everything seemed stupid and petty. These weren’t thoughts of mine, but rather, vague impressions; I was thinking about that woman’s silent steps through city streets, and the multiplicity of her life, unshackled from any law and norm, and about her mysterious affairs. At the same time, the woman’s language – civilized, sly, cajoling – stood in contrast to those screams, the turning pale, the trembling for nothing, the sudden self-control, the fickle mutability of gypsies. That drop of blood, alive, dark-red, almost protean, multi-hued, had faintly repulsed me, like something too intense to bear. And yet it had enticed me, like a memory of lost vigour.