“It was his destiny.  God had said to him, ’Go into the sea and end yourself.’”

She gesticulated with vehemence.  “What did he go in for, if he did not know how to swim—?”

A young lad, a stranger in the district, the son of a mariner, repeated contemptuously, “Yes, what did he go in for?  We, yes, who know how to swim—­” ...

Other people joined the group, gazed with cold curiosity, then lingered or passed on.  A crowd occupied the railroad embankment, another gathered on the crest of the promontory, as if at a spectacle.  Children, seated or kneeling, played with pebbles, tossing them into the air and catching them, now on the back and now in the hollow of their hands.  They all showed the same profound indifference to the presence of other people’s troubles and of death.

Another woman joined the group on her way home from mass, wearing a dress of silk and all her gold ornaments.  For her also the harassed custodian repeated his account, for her also he indicated the spot in the water.  She was talkative.

“I am always saying to my children, ’Don’t you go into the water, or I will kill you!’ The sea is the sea.  Who can save himself?”

She called to mind other instances of drowning; she called to mind the case of the drowned man with the head cut off, driven by the waves all the way to San Vito, and found among the rocks by a child.

“Here, among these rocks.  He came and told us, ’There is a dead man there.’  We thought he was joking.  But we came and we found.  He had no head.  They had an inquest; he was buried in a ditch; then in the night he was dug up again.  His flesh was all mangled and like jelly, but he still had his boots on.  The judge said, ’See, they are better than mine!’ So he must have been a rich man.  And it turned out that he was a dealer in cattle.  They had killed him and chopped off his head, and had thrown him into the Tronto."...

She continued to talk in her shrill voice, from time to time sucking in the superfluous saliva with a slight hissing sound.

“And the mother?  When is the mother coming?”

At that name there arose exclamations of compassion from all the women who had gathered.

“The mother!  There comes the mother, now!”

And all of them turned around, fancying that they saw her in the far distance, along the burning strand.  Some of the women could give particulars about her.  Her name was Riccangela; she was a widow with seven children.  She had placed this one in a farmer’s family, so that he might tend the sheep, and gain a morsel of bread.

One woman said, gazing down at the corpse, “Who knows how much pains the mother has taken in raising him!” Another said, “To keep the children from going hungry she has even had to ask charity.”

Another told how, only a few months before, the unfortunate child had come very near strangling to death in a courtyard in a pool of water barely six inches deep.  All the women repeated, “It was his destiny.  He was bound to die that way.”