A car passed. ‘It looks like a seicento.’ Then another, looking like a millecento, and then another. ‘They keep cars like ours for amusement; they buy them for their kids like people back home buy bicycles for theirs.’ Two deafening motorbikes passed, one chasing the other. It was the police, they couldn’t afford to make any mistakes – thank goodness that they’d stayed off the road.

And there, finally, were the signs. They looked along the road in both directions, stepped on to it and went near enough to them to read: Santa Croce Camarina/Scoglitti.

‘Santa Croce Camarina: I’ve heard of the place before.’

‘It sounds familiar to me too; and even Scoglitti rings a bell.’

‘Maybe one of our relatives lived there – perhaps it was my uncle, before he moved to Philadelphia. If I remember rightly he was living in a different city before Philadelphia.’

‘My brother also lived some place before heading for Brucchilin … But I really can’t remember what it was called. And anyway, we’re saying ‘Santa Croce’, we’re saying ‘Scoglitti’, but we’ve no idea how they pronounce these words here: American isn’t pronounced like it’s written.’

‘That’s true, and the great thing about Italian is just that: it sounds exactly like it’s written … But we can’t spend the night out here, we’ve got to take a risk. The next car that passes, I’m stopping. I’ll just say ‘Trenton?’ … People are more polite here … Even if we don’t understand what they’re saying they’re bound to point, to give a sign, and that way we’ll work out where to find this blasted Trenton.’

Around the curve, twenty metres away, a cinquecento emerged: the driver saw them dart out with their arms raised, waving for him to stop. He slammed on the brakes, cursing: he didn’t think it could be a hold-up in an area as quiet as this, and opened the door thinking that they wanted a lift.

‘Trenton?’ one of them asked.

‘Che?’ asked the driver.

‘Trenton?’

‘What effing Trenton are you on about!’ the driver exclaimed, cursing.

‘He speaks Italian,’ they both said, looking at each other to see what to do next: if perhaps the time had come to reveal their situation to a fellow countryman.

The driver shut the door and switched the engine back on. The car jerked forwards: and only then did he shout out to the two men standing in the road like statues, ‘Drunkards, drunken cuckolds, cuckolds and sons of—’ The rest was drowned out as he accelerated away.

There was a protracted silence.

‘Now I remember,’ said the one, a moment later, who’d thought the name Santa Croce sounded familiar, ‘my father went to Santa Croce Camarina one year when things had gone badly in our region. He went there for the harvesting.’

Then they flung themselves down as if they had been knocked into the ditch at the side of the road. There was no hurry, after all, to deliver the news to the others that they had disembarked in Sicily.