[...] Giuma knew nothing of the child that was inside her. They lay down and made love in the bushes by the river, and then they were silent with their faces in the grass and Anna hunted for words in which to tell him of the child that was inside her. But she looked at Giuma’s face in the grass and allowed all the words to escape from her. It seemed to her that she had become grown-up since the moment when she realized she was to have a baby, and it seemed to her that he, on the contrary, was still a little boy, with his heat-flushed face and his rumpled hair. He started to complain of how Emanuele would never let him touch the car, he would begin shrieking every time he saw him go near the garage. If they had had the car perhaps they might have been able to go and swim in the lake, it was a tepid, dirty pool but perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad to take a dive into it once in a way. But they couldn’t go there on foot. He himself, in any case, would be leaving in a short time, Mammina had arranged for the villa up above Stresa and in a short time would be coming back to fetch him, she had also arranged for a tutor to give him lessons, in October he was to take his final exams.