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    He was trying to piece together everything he knew in a bid to understand her.
    “She speaks other languages as well. It’s all mixed up like the Tower of Babel.”
    This time, he wasn’t lying. In her state of extreme fatigue, the woman kept switching languages.
    “That’s Greek,” said the doctor.
    “But what does it mean?”
    “It means that she speaks Greek.”
    His logic was met with general admiration.
    Eventually they found out that she spoke Italian too. Feeling relieved, the doctor led the interrogation. He repeated in Sicilian everything she mumbled in near perfect Italian, which everybody understood anyway.
    The woman and child had been washed up onto the pebble beach along with a makeshift raft of planks and beams. She had put the little one in a sheltered place before setting off in search of help, climbing the path to the left of the stream. She had collapsed along the way.
    She was sitting in an armchair now, and Vango was burying his face in her chest.
    “Is he your child?” asked the doctor, deliberately overpronouncing his words.
    She attempted a smile. She was too old to have a three-year-old son.
    The doctor nodded, rather ashamed of his question. He had always been a bachelor, but given his line of work, he should have known about biological clocks.
    As a diversion, and because they were getting to the end of what she could remember, Dr. Basilio started repeating the only two French words he knew:
“Souvenez-vous, souvenez-vous . . .”
    He said these words imploringly, leaning over her.
    Other people’s languages sound like strange songs, whose music we can hum long before we can understand the lyrics. On hearing French being spoken, the audience in the inn was amused. They didn’t know what these words meant, but everyone turned to one another and said,
“Souvenez-vous,”
like old chatterboxes.
    From these two words, everyone set off on a flight of fantasy.
    “Souvenez-vous,”
said a woman to her husband as she batted her eyelids.
    “Souvenez-vous!”
    The brouhaha got louder.
    “Souvenez-vous!”
shouted Pippo Troisi as he raised his glass.
    The doctor sharply interrupted this game:
    “Be quiet!”
    A classroom silence settled on the inn.
    Once again the doctor translated into Sicilian what everybody had already understood.
    “She doesn’t know anything. She doesn’t know where she’s come from or where she’s going. She says she’s called Mademoiselle. All she knows is that the child is called Vango. That’s it. She’s the little boy’s nurse.”
    “What’s she going to do?” asked one of the innkeeper’s daughters.
    The rescued woman answered with a few words, and tears in her eyes.
    “She doesn’t know,” the doctor repeated. “She wants to stay here. She’s frightened.”
    “But what’s she going to do here? The little one’s parents must be somewhere. She should catch a boat back to her own country!”
    “What country?” asked the doctor, getting angry now.
    “You say that she speaks French.”
    “She also speaks English. And she said something in Greek. So where is her country?”
    As if to confuse things further, the woman made a few noises.
    “And that’s German,” the doctor pointed out.
    She said something else again.
    “And that’s Russian.”
    The little boy clutched his handkerchief between his fingers. Against the midnight-blue background, a large
V
embroidered in gold was visible.
V
for
Vango
.
    Gently taking that little hand in his, the doctor managed to borrow the precious handkerchief for a few seconds. Above the golden
V
, the letters of what was presumably the little boy’s family name could be made out: ROMANO .
    “That’s a local surname,” declared Carla.
    “Vango Romano,” said her sister.
    And, higher up, on the edge of the handkerchief, the doctor spotted the following mysterious French words, embroidered in small red letters, although he couldn’t understand them:

    He read them again as slowly as a child