He felt that those feathered bodies were genuinely imbued with air and countryside and the different hours of the day: add to this aesthetic reason a sentimental one: for a long time, in his childhood devoid of siblings and friends, Odone had played with a hen. His mother had bought it to kill and eat; but Odone had cried and begged so much that Signora Rachele had finally agreed to keep it alive and let it roam freely about the house, like a dog. From that day on, as well as sucking its warm eggs, the boy had company; and even his mother ended up enjoying watching the way the bird leapt against the glass door of the kitchen, where it was shut in on the rare occasions that she had visitors; and when, sweaty and panting, she came back from the market carrying her shopping basket, Cò-Cò (as mother and son had agreed to call the hen) would run to meet her, beak open, wings outspread and fluttering. ‘And they say hens are stupid,’ Signora Rachele would say admiringly. But often she would become irritated, seeing her son talking to a fowl as if it were a person: that struck her as almost a sign of idiocy. For Odone, on the other hand, the hours he spent with the hen were truly his, he would make the bird ‘sit’ (perch) next to him on the steps leading from the kitchen to the dining room, brick steps that turned strangely red in the sunset and reminded him of those of ante-purgatory, as he had seen them depicted in a sacred image; he would clasp the hen to his heart so tightly that it shrieked, thinking with joy that he had so much time ahead of him to live and enjoy in this world (and then he would still have eternity); he would talk to Cò-Cò of journeys and adventures, of joys to come, of everything, in short, that went through his head. But after two years of domestic seclusion and excessively tasty and warming food, the heart of this strange companion of a sacrificed, ecstatic childhood burst (according to a female neighbour who knew about such things) – burst from being too fat (it looked like an odalisque); in short, it died, and was buried by its friend. Odone would have liked another immediately; a wish his mother absolutely refused to grant: he was already too old for that kind of diversion: his stamp album and an occasional stroll with her were – had to be – sufficient recreation. But a wish ungranted is a wish protracted; and Odone recalled it now as he stood looking at these cages of poultry with his first wages in his pocket. There was one animal in particular that he liked: a really beautiful specimen, with a tiny expressive head, shiny black plumage and a long arched tail, which reminded Odone of the feathers on the caps of the Italian Bersaglieri. He asked the price, at first more out of curiosity than with the firm intention of acquiring it (God knows how much he thought it cost); and the poultry merchant, surprised because this customer was not the usual sex and age, answered rudely, and as if certain of taking his breath away: ‘Three Kronen and fifty heller.’