I felt myself drawn to the chest by Alberi’s gaze, turned triumphantly on me. I went slowly over to it with the stool, less than an inch at a time, but I knew that when I got within a yard of it (such was the law) I would find myself, in a single bound, made captive and gasping for breath.

But there was still hope for salvation. Giovanni, perfectly recovered from the fatigue of his tough struggle, had shown up by the chest, which he no longer had to fear, as he had already been in it (this, too, was law down there). He was standing up straight, right in the light, looking at times at Alberi, who was gasping and making threats, and at times at me, as I was slowly approaching the chest.

‘Giovanni!’ I shouted. ‘Help me keep him in there … I’ll pay you.’

The entire cave resounded with my shout, and it seemed like a scornful laugh. I understood. It was no use begging. Neither the first person nor the second person who had gotten into the chest was meant to die in it, but the third person was. This, too, was a law of the cave, which, like all the other laws, was the ruin of me. And it was hard to have to acknowledge it hadn’t been made just then to harm me in particular. It, too, stemmed from that darkness and that light. Giovanni didn’t even answer, and he shrugged to convey to me his distress at being unable to save me or sell me salvation.

And then I screamed again: ‘If there’s no other way, take my daughter. She’s sleeping right here. It will be easy.’ These shouts, too, were brought back by a tremendous echo. I was befuddled by them, but I shouted for my daughter again: ‘Emma! Emma! Emma!’

And in fact Emma’s answer came to me from the depths of the cave, the sound of her still childish voice: ‘Here I am, Daddy, here I am.’

It seemed to me I hadn’t answered right away. Just then there was a violent start caused, so I thought, by my leap into the chest. ‘This daughter,’ I thought, ‘always slow when it comes to obeying.’ This time her slowness was going to be the ruin of me, and I was full of rancour.

I woke up. That was the start. The leap from one world to the other. My head and my trunk were off the bed, and I would have fallen had my wife not come to hold me up.

‘Were you dreaming?’ she asked me.

And then, moved: ‘You were calling your daughter. You see how you love her?’

At first, I was dazzled by that reality in which it seemed to me that everything was twisted and perverted. And I said to my wife, who certainly had to know everything as well:

‘How will we ever win our children’s forgiveness for having given them this life?’

But she, in her simplicity, said: ‘Our children are delighted to be alive.’