I
A GREAT MAN’S WIFE
It was in February, and the almond-trees were beginning to blossom on the black lava about Diamante.
Cavaliere Palmeri had taken a walk up Etna and had brought home a big almond branch, full of buds and flowers and put it in a vase in the music-room.
Donna Micaela started when she saw it. So they had already come, the almond-blossoms. And for a whole month, for six long weeks, they would be everywhere.
They would stand on the altar in the church; they would lie on the graves, and they would be worn on the breast, on the hat, in the hair. They would blossom over the roads, in the heaps of ruins, on the black lava. And every almond-flower would remind her of the day when the bells rang, when Gaetano was free and happy, and when she dreamed of passing her whole life with him.
It seemed to her as if she never before fully understood what it meant that he was shut in and gone, that she should never see him again.
She had to sit down in order not to fall; her heart seemed to stop, and she shut her eyes.
While she was sitting thus she had a strange experience.