Giovannino and Serenella crept up to the table. There was tea, milk, and sponge cake. They had only to sit down and help themselves. They poured out two cups of tea and cut two slices of cake. But somehow they did not feel at all at ease, and sat perched on the edge of their chairs, their knees shaking. And they could not really enjoy the tea and cake, for nothing seemed to have any taste. Everything in the garden was like that: lovely but impossible to enjoy properly, with that worrying feeling inside that they were only there through an odd stroke of luck, and the fear that they'd soon have to give an account of themselves.

It was, as usual, a mistake of my father's. He had had a boy sent down from a village in the mountains to look after our goats. And the day the boy arrived, my father insisted on asking him to eat with us.

My father does not understand the things that divide people, the difference between a dining room like ours, with its inlaid furniture, dark-patterned carpets, and majolica plates, and those homes of theirs, with smoky stone walls, beaten-earth floors, and newspapers black with flies draped over the mantelpieces. My father always goes about among them with that jolly, ceremonious air of his, and if they invite him to eat when he is out shooting, as they all do, he insists on eating off the same dirty dish; then in the evening they all come to him to settle their disputes. We, his own sons, don't take much part, though. Perhaps my brother, with that air of silent complicity he has, may occasionally be given some rough confidence; but I'm too well aware of the difficulties of communication between human beings, and sense at every minute the gulfs that separate the classes, the abysses that politeness opens up under me.

To protect him I tried to turn the conversation away from him, so I read aloud an item of news from the paper, something that could only interest my parents, about a vein of mineral ore discovered in a part of Africa where certain friends of ours lived. I had deliberately chosen an item that could have no conceivable connection with our guest and was full of names unknown to him; I did this not to make his isolation weigh on him more, but so as to dig a moat around him, as it were, give him a breathing space, and distract my parents' besieging attentions for a moment. Perhaps he, too, misinterpreted my move. Anyway, it had the opposite effect. My father went rambling on with a story about Africa, confusing the boy with a tangle of strange names of places, peoples, and animals.

My mother now went into the attack, with a very sweet, "And how old are you, Giovannino?"

The number the boy gave rang out like a shout. He repeated it slowly. "What's that?" said our grandmother and repeated it wrongly. "No, this," and everyone began shouting it in her ear. Only my brother was silent. "A year older than Quinto," my mother now discovered; and this had to be repeated all over again to my grandmother. These were the things I could not bear, which shamed me to the bottom of my heart, for my sake and his; this comparing of him and me, he who had to look after goats to make a living and stank of ram and was strong enough to fell an oak, and I who spent my life on a sofa by the radio reading opera librettos, who would soon be going to the university and disliked flannel next to my skin because it made my back prickle. This injustice, these things lacking in me to be him and lacking in him to be me, gave me a sharp feeling of our being, he and I, two incomplete creatures hiding, diffident and ashamed, behind that soup bowl.

That whole afternoon and evening we were persecuted by the memory of the goatherd. We had supper in silence by the dim light of the chandelier and could not free ourselves of the thought of him alone in the hut on our land. Now he must have finished the soup in the can in which he had heated it up, and was lying on the straw almost in the dark, while down below the goats could be heard moving about and bumping one another and munching grass. The goatherd would go outside and there would be a slight mist over toward the sea and damp air and a little spring gurgling gently in the silence. The goatherd would head for it along paths covered with wild ivy, and drink, though he was not thirsty. Fireflies could be seen appearing and vanishing in what seemed like a great compact swarm. But he would move his arm in the air without touching them.

Zeffirino didn't know quite what to think. Seeing a lady cry was a thing that made your heart ache. But how could anyone be sad in this enclosure of sea crammed with every variety of fish to fill the heart with desire and joy? And how could you dive into that greenness and pursue fish when there was a grown-up person nearby dissolved in tears? At the same moment, in the same place, two yearnings existed, opposed and unreconcilable, but Zeffirino could neither conceive of them both together, nor surrender to the one or to the other.

My mother doesn't make any noise, but she is already up, too, in the big kitchen, poking the fire, peeling things with those hands that become blacker and more scarred all the time, polishing glasses and furniture, jabbing at the laundry. This, too, is a protest against us, her doing housework always in silence and managing it all without any maids.

"Sell the house, and we'll spend the money," I say with a shrug when they start pestering me about how things can't go on like this. But my mother continues toiling silently, day and night, till there's no telling when she sleeps; and meanwhile the cracks in the ceilings widen and lines of ants trace the walls, and weeds and brambles keep growing higher in the rank garden. Soon nothing will be left of our house but a ruin covered with vines. In the morning, however, mother doesn't come and tell me to get up because she knows it's no use anyway, and that silent attention to the house crumbling around her is her way of persecuting us.

"There isn't time for cakes," said Dritto, pushing him aside. "We've got to hurry." And he went ahead, twisting the beam of his flashlight around in the dark. Everywhere it touched it lit up rows of shelves, and on the shelves rows of trays, and on the trays rows of cakes of every conceivable shape and color, tarts filled with cream that glittered like candle wax, piles of sugar-coated buns, and castles of almond cakes.

It was then that a terrible worry came over Baby, the worry of not having time to eat all he wanted, of being forced to make his escape before he had sampled all the different kinds of cakes, of having all this land of milk and honey at his disposal for only a few minutes in his whole life. And the more cakes he discovered, the more his anxiety increased, so that every new corner and every fresh view of the shop that was lit up by Dritto's flashlight seemed to be about to shut him off.

He flung himself at the shelves, choking himself with cakes, cramming two or three inside his mouth at a time, without even tasting them; he seemed to be battling with the cakes, as if they were threatening enemies, strange monsters besieging him, a crisp and sticky siege which he must break through by the force of his jaw. The slit halves of the big sugared buns seemed to be opening yellow throats and eyes at him, the cream horns to be blossoming like flowers of carnivorous plants; for a horrible moment Baby had the feeling that it was he who was being devoured by the cakes.

Baby, meanwhile, in order to have both hands free, had constructed a kind of lampshade from tray cloths and pieces of nougat. He then espied some large cakes with "Happy Birthday" written on them. He circled them, studying the plan of attack; first he reviewed them with a finger and licked off a bit of chocolate cream, then he buried his face inside and began biting them from the middle, one by one.

But he still felt a kind of frenzy, which he did not know how to satisfy; he could not discover any way of enjoying everything completely. Now he was crouching on all fours over a table laden with tarts; he would have liked to lie down in those tarts, cover himself with them, never have to leave them. But five or ten minutes from now it would be all over; for the rest of his life pastry shops would be out of bounds to him again, forever, like when he was a child squashing his nose against the windowpane. If only, at least, he could stay there three or four hours ...

[...] Baby seemed beside himself; he was biting into doughnuts, picking at raisins, licking syrups, plastering himself all over and leaving sticky marks on the showcases and counters. He found that he no longer had any desire for cakes—in fact a feeling of nausea was beginning to creep up from the pit of his stomach—but he refused to take it seriously, he simply could not give up yet. And the doughnuts began to turn into soggy pieces of spongecake, the tarts to flypaper, the cakes to asphalt. Now he saw only the corpses of cakes lying putrefying on their marble slabs, or felt them disintegrating like turgid glue inside his stomach.