"What is your favorite dish, grandad?"

"All of them, my son. It's a great sin to say this is good and that is bad."

"Why? Can't we make a choice?"

"No, of course we can't."

"Why not?"

"Because there are people who are hungry."

I was silent, ashamed. My heart had never been able to reach that height of nobility and compassíon.

The líttle convent bell rang out merrily and playfully, like a woman's laugh.

The old man made the sign of the cross.

"May the Martyred Virgin come to our help!" he murmured. "She has a knife wound in the neck and bleeds. In the time of the corsairs…"

And the old man began embroidering on the sufferings of the Virgin, as though it were the story of a real woman, a young persecuted refugee who had come in tears with her child from the East and had been stabbed by the unfaithful.

"Once a year real warm blood runs from her wound," the old man went on. "I remember a long time ago, on her anniversary-I hadn't yet grown a moustache-people had come down from all the villages in the hills to worship the Virgin. It was the fifteenth of August. We men slept outside, in the yard; the women were inside. And in my sleep I heard the Virgin cry out. I got up in a hurry, ran to her icon and put my hand on her throat. And what do you think I saw? My fingers were red with blood…"

The old man crossed himself and looked round at the women.

"Come on, you women! We're nearly there!" he cried.

He lowered his voice.

"I wasn't married then. I prostrated myself to Her Holiness, and decided to leave this world of lies and be a monk…"

He laughed.

"Why are you laughing, grandad?"

"Isn't it enough to make you laugh, my son? The very same day, during the festival, the devil, dressed up as a woman, stood before me. It was she!"

Without turning his head, he jerked his thumb backwards and indicated the old woman behind him, who was following us in silence.

"She doesn't bear looking at now," he said; "the thought of touching her disgusts you. But in those days she was a regular flirt; she quivered with life like a fish. 'The long-lashed beauty,' they used to call her, and she well deserved the name, the little minx! But now… God rest my soul, where are her lashes now? Gone to blazes! Not a single one left!"

At that moment, just behind us, the old woman made a muffled growl like a churlish dog on a chain. But she did not say a word.

"There, that's the convent," said the old man.

At the edge of the sea, wedged between two great rocks, was the white, sparkling convent. In the middle the chapel dome, freshly whitewashed, small and round like a woman's breast. About the chapel were half a dozen cells with blue doors, three large cypress trees in the courtyard, and along the wall some sturdy prickly pears in flower.

We went faster. Melodious chanting floated down from the open door of the sanctuary, the salt air was perfumed with benjamin. The entrance door in the middle of the arch stood wide open and gave on to the clean, scented courtyard strewn with black and white pebbles. Along the walls, to the right and to the left, were rows of pots, with rosemary, marjoram and basil.

What serenity! What sweetness! The sun was going down now and the whitewashed walls were turning pink.

The little chapel, warm and rather dark inside, smelled of wax. Men and women were moving in clouds of incense, and five or six nuns, tighdy wrapped in their long black dresses, were singing: "O, Almighty God…" in their sweet, high-pitched voices. They were constantly kneeling as they sang and the rustling of their dresses sounded like birds on the wing.

I had not heard hymns sung to the Virgin Mary for many years past. During the revolt of my early youth I had passed by every church with anger and contempt in my heart. As time went on I grew less violent. Now and again, in fact, I went to religious festivals-Christmas, the Vigils, the Resurrection-and I was happy to see the child in me come to life again. The mystic fervor of my early years had degenerated into an aesthetic pleasure. Savages believe that when a musical instrument is no longer used for religious rites it loses its divine power and begins to give out harmonious sounds. Religion, in the same way, had become degraded in me: it had become art.

I went into a corner, leaned on the gleaming stall that the hands of the faithful had polished as smooth as ivory, and listened in enchantment as the Byzantine hymns came from the distant past: "Hail! heights inaccessible to the human mind! Hail! depths impenetrable even to the eyes of angels! Hail! immaculate bride, O never-fading Rose…"

The nuns once more dropped on their knees with head bowed and their dresses rustled like wings.

Mínutes went by-angels with benjamin-scented wings, bearing closed lilies in their hands and singing the beauties of Mary. The sun went down, leaving us in a downy blue twilight. I do not remember how we came to be in the courtyard, but I was alone there with the old Mother Superior and two young nuns, beneath the largest of the cypress trees. A young novice came out to offer me a spoonful of jam, fresh water and coffee, and a peaceful conversation began.

We talked of the miracles wrought by the Virgin Mary, of lignite, of the hens beginning to lay now that it was spring, of sister Eudoxia who was epileptic and continually falling down on the floor of the chapel and quivering like a fish, foaming at the mouth and tearing her clothes.

"She is thirty-five," added the Mother Superior with a sigh. "An unhappy age-very difficult! May the Holy Martyred Virgin come to her aid and cure her! In ten or fifteen years she will be cured."

"Ten or fifteen years," I murmured, aghast.

"What are ten or fifteen years?" asked the Mother Superior severely. "Think of eternity!"

I made no answer. I knew that eternity is each minute that passes. I kissed the Mother Superior's hand-a plump, white hand, smelling of incense-and departed.

Night had fallen. Two or three crows were hurrying back to their nests; owls were coming out of the hollow trees to hunt. Snails, caterpillars, worms, field-mice were coming out of the earth to be eaten by the owls.

The mysterious snake that devours its own tail enclosed me in its circle: the earth brings to life and devours her own children, then bears more and devours them in their turn.

I looked about me. It was quite dark. The last of the villagers had gone, no one could see me, I was absolutely alone. I bared my feet and dipped them in the sea. I rolled on the sand. I felt an urge to touch the stones, the water, and the air with my bare body. The Mother Superior had exasperated me with her "eternity," and I felt the word fall about me, like a lasso catching a wild horse. I made a leap to try to escape. I felt a desire to press my naked body against the earth and the sea, to feel with certainty that these beloved ephemeral things really existed.

"You exist, and you alone!" I cried in my innermost self. "O Earth! I am your last-born, I am sucking at your breast and will not let go. You do not let me live for more than one minute, but that minute turns into a breast and I suck."

I shuddered as if I felt I was running the risk of being hurled in to that anthropophagous word "eternity." I remembered how formerly-when? only a year ago-I had eagerly pondered it with closed eyes and arms apart, wanting to throw myself into it.

When I was in the first form at the state school there was a story in the reading book we used for the second half of the alphabet:

A little child had fallen into a well, said the story. There it found a marvellous city, flower gardens, a lake of pure honey, a mountain of rice pudding and multi-colored toys. As I spelled it out, each syllable seemed to take me further into that magic city. Once, at midday, when I had come home from school, I ran into the garden, rushed to the rim of the well beneath the vine arbor and stood fascinated, staring at the smooth black surface of the water. I soon thought I could see the marvellous city, houses and streets, the children and the vine arbor loaded with grapes. I could hold out no longer; I hung my head down, held out my arms and kicked against the ground to push myself over the edge. But at that moment my mother noticed me. She screamed, rushed out and caught me by my waistband, just in time…