‘She told me about her life below the sea, about bearded Tritons and glaucous caverns, but she said that these too were vain appearances and that the truth lay much deeper indeed, in the blind, mute palace of formless, eternal waters, without sparkle, without murmurs.

‘Once she told me she would be away for some time, until the evening of the following day. “I must travel far, to where I know I will find a gift for you.”

‘In fact she returned with a stupendous branch of deep red coral encrusted with shells and algae. For a long while I kept it in a drawer and every night I would kiss the spots where I recalled the Indifferent, that is the Beneficent, one had placed her fingers. Then one day my housekeeper, Maria – Bettina’s predecessor – stole it to give to one of her pimps. I later found it in a Ponte Vecchio jeweller’s shop, deconsecrated, cleaned up and smoothed to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. I bought it back and that same night threw it into the Arno: It had passed through too many profane hands.

‘She also spoke to me of the many human lovers she’d had during her thousand-year adolescence: fishermen and sailors – Greeks, Sicilians, Arabs, Capresi – including survivors of shipwrecks clinging to sodden debris, to whom she’d appeared in a flash of lightning during a storm to transform their last gasp into pleasure. “They all accepted my invitation and came to see me, some immediately, others after having lived what to them seemed a long time. Only one failed to show. He was a big beautiful young man with red hair and exceptionally white skin; I joined myself to him on a beach far away, where our sea flows into the great Ocean. He smelled of something stronger than the wine you gave me the other day. I believe that he failed to show not, surely, because he was happy, but because when we met he was so drunk as not to understand anything anymore. I must have seemed like one of his usual fisherwomen.”

‘Those weeks of high summer flew by as rapidly as a single morning; when they’d passed I realized that in fact I had lived centuries. That lascivious girl, that cruel little beast, had also been the wisest of Mothers; with her mere presence she’d uprooted faiths, dispelled metaphysics; with her fragile, often bloodstained fingers she’d shown me the path toward true eternal peace, and also toward an asceticism based not on sacrifice but on the impossibility of accepting other, inferior pleasures. I will certainly not be the second man to fail to heed her call, will not refuse this sort of pagan Grace that has been granted me.

‘In accordance with its own violence, that summer was short. Not long after August 20 the first clouds timidly gathered; a few isolated blood-warm drops of rain fell. The nights brought to the distant horizon slow mute flashes of lightning, deduced one from the other like the cogitations of a god. Mornings the dove-gray sea suffered for its hidden restlessness; evenings it rippled without any perceptible breeze, in gradations from smoke grey to steel grey to pearl grey, all extremely soft colours and more affectionate than the splendour before. Faraway shreds of fog skimmed the water; on the coasts of Greece, perhaps, it was already raining. The colour of Lighea’s mood also changed, from radiance to grey affection. She was silent more often; spent hours stretched out on a rock, staring at the no longer motionless horizon; spent less time away. “I want to stay here longer with you; if I were to take to the open sea now my marine companions would keep me there. Do you hear them? They’re calling me.” At times I truly did seem to hear a different, lower note among the seagull calls, to make out flashes of movement from rock to rock. “They’re blowing their conches, calling Lighea to the festival of the storm.”