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silent as the tomb. Everyone was deeply engrossed. The librarian crept about like a phantom on his rubber-soled shoes. Nothing could be heard but the rustle of turning pages. And there I was! I recognized myself. A mirror was held up to me. My breath blurred it, like frost blurring a win,dow-pane. I felt intense emotion!) 'There is no doubt that there exist, amongst impious spirits, as many diverse tastes as exist amongst men. In fact, amongst them is a type commonly known as Vagabonds — Pianos — who are, above all, beguilers and clowns.'
    And the scholarly Canon Cristiani added a note, in 1946, at the bottom of this page of his translation: 'The word planus, which Pliny uses in the sense of a buffoon, also means vagabond or adventurer.'
    I collide with the mirror.
    A turning of the road.
    I cry out and begin to run!
    Though I start to run at the turning, it is not that I am running away. No one is chasing me. I am not being pursued. No one jumps out at me as my double might have done, and as certain Pianos or Vagabonds do, according to Cassien, who says of them: 'While some confine themselves to passing the night in harmless incubations with men, others are addicted to such fury and truculence that, not content with cruelly tearing the flesh of those they possess, they hurl themselves upon passers-by, even from afar, and perpetrate the most savage acts of violence upon them. The Evangelist has spoken, of such creatures and they are held in such fear that no one dares to walk in their path.'
    No, no one is attacking me, quite the contrary! If I start to run at this corner, it is because I am running to meet my childhood.
    A little girl....
     
    No, it's not possible! At the turning of the road, I see a door, neither large nor small, still standing. I know it well; it is all patched with bits of wood and pieces cut out of zinc plates stamped with the names of famous photographic products : Lumiere, Pathe, Gaumont, AEG, Zeiss, Agfa, Kodak, Eastman, Edison. This is the door to my paradise. I have only to move the end of a panel which pivots on a nail, slip my hand into the chink thus made, reach the bolt inside, slide it along by twisting my finger round it and at the same time dislocating my wrist, then push with my knee, and the old door yields, swings inwards with a grating sound, and the way is open.
    I go in.
    It is still the same.
    A shock.
    Deafening cicadas, heat, green oaks and lentiscus trees. Fragrant clearing, sudden silence, solitude, the enigmatic physical presence of solitude. Mourning. Asparagus. Scanty grass.
    Who is watching us? Elena and I were always struck by this half- divined presence. We would stand there frozen, hesitating on the threshold, not daring to enter. To cross the threshold. I would hold the little girl's hand, our hearts beating fast. . ..
    I kicked the door shut behind me and it shivered in all its old panels like a funeral drum-roll, while the hinges creaked and I took a few steps forward.
    Nothing in the paddock had changed. To the left, like a nest of vipers, a little house invaded by the thorns, the shoots, the tendrils, the thousand stems, the thickly meshed branches, and the thick, fleshy trunk of a rambler rose, drunk with sap and reverting to its wild state, whose inextricably tangled knots fall from the roof and the broken windows in a dark mass, heavy and perfumed, shaking itself loose like a shaggy head of hair over the collapsing balcony, which it crushes with its whole weight before plunging down into a ravine, a green valley flowing right down to the sea. To the right, at the summit of a little slope, a kind of artificial knoll split through by enormous roots which have shifted and unearthed two or three blocks of stone, part of some antique monument hidden in the ground, and a thousand-year-old pine tree, the famous umbrella pine known the world over since it figures in the foreground of that panorama of Naples, the gulf, the islands and Vesuvius, printed on millions and