Later — when word of what had happened got about and, in variously garbled versions, was for a time the common property of the entire nation — a television crew set up a satellite dish in a clearing on the hillside at the back of the Faigano property, paying what in local terms amounted to a small fortune for the temporary rights to a few square metres of land so poor, so barren, so utterly useless, that it had virtually ceased to exist on anyone’s mental map of the vicinity. People scratched their heads and murmured, ‘They paid that? For il Bric Liserdin? ’, seemingly as shocked by this anomaly as they had been by the thing itself.

That was how it was always referred to: ‘the thing’, as though it had nothing more to do with them than the metal bowl which the outsiders from Milan trucked in and mounted for a fat fee on the steep, scrub-covered hillside where rocks perpetually shouldered their way to the surface like moles, infesting the ground on which Gianni and Maurizio’s ancestors had expended such futile labour, its only produce the stones used for terracing the slopes on the other side of the hill, the vineyards with the good exposure.

But the exposure that the television people wanted, contrary to every natural law, was apparently right there in that arid wasteland, with line of sight towards some heavenly body, invisible to the naked eye, which they claimed hung in space like the frescoed angels in the local church, motionless above the moving earth, gathering up all the villagers’ chat, blather and evasions and then beaming it down again so that they could watch themselves later, being interviewed live at the scene of the tragedy.

He himself couldn’t be interviewed, of course, even later. The man they would have paid far more than they gave the Faigano brothers, in return for being able to ask exactly what he had seen and how it had felt, had to watch the whole charade and bite his tongue and pretend that he was just like everyone else, knowing no more than what he heard in the street and saw on television.