Montalbano recalled how in now distant times, when the sea withdrew, it would leave behind only sweet-smelling algae and beautiful shells that were like gifts to mankind. Now it only gave back our own rubbish.

Unwell? I was fine, as good as one might feel in such circumstances. No, my friend, I merely pretended to faint. I’m a good actress. Actually, a thought had come into my mind: if a terrorist, I said to myself, were to blow up this church with all of us inside, at least one-tenth of all the hypocrisy in the world would disappear with us. So I had myself escorted out.

Don’t you read mystery novels?” “Not very often. Anyway, what does that mean, ‘mystery novel’? What is a ‘detective novel’?

He was convinced he would keep his word. Not because he feared for his health, but because one cannot break a promise made to one’s guardian angel. And he resumed the climb.

But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average at least once every four sentences? Maybe, though the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old – for every now and then one must, yes, look reality in the eye and call things by their proper names – we feel more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us.

Giulio was against our meeting. He didn’t want me getting mixed up in things that, in his opinion, were no concern of mine. For decades the respectable people here did nothing but repeat that the Mafia was no concern of theirs but only involved the people involved in it. But I used to teach my pupils that the see-nothing, know-nothing attitude is the most mortal of sins. So now that its my turn to tell what I saw, I’m supposed to take a step back?

He swam and he wept.

Moltabano, for a moment, felt moved. That astonishing, wholly feminine capacity for deep understanding, for penetrating one’s feelings, for being at once mother and lover, daughter and wife.

I had a little friend, a peasant boy, who was younger than me. I was about ten. One day I saw that my friend had put a bowl, a cup, a teapot and a square milk carton on the edge of a well, had filled them all with water, and was looking at them attentively. ‘“What are you doing?” I asked him. And he answered me with a question in turn. ‘“What shape is water?” ‘“Water doesn’t have any shape!” I said, laughing. “It takes the shape you give it.”’ At.

As they ate, they spoke of eating, as always happens in Italy.