- The witch is dead! The witch is dead! – the boy had shouted early in the morning.
- Another time? – everyone thought, and they stayed in bed, nice and warm.
A few hours later when, just to make sure, the mayor and the curate went up into the hills to check, there could be no doubt:
Donna Flora really was dead.
The black and blue marks that covered the old woman's body didn't make any impression on him.
- And now? Should we give her a funeral? – asked the curate, who couldn't hold the question back any longer.
- For her? That slut? The one who brought sickness to the village? – the mayor shouted – like her husband we should treat her, like her husband. With an empty coffin.
An empty coffin.
In Gitruzzi time is an infinite ritual: Donna Flora is a young woman, suffering as she carries her husband's coffin.
The men follow her, their down-turned faces are a good excuse to look at her legs.
- And now? – they ask, desirous – what will Donna Flora do now? –
At the centre of the procession the women's words – He died on the ship, on the ship! – He died at work, he was a minister in Argentina – On the ship, I tell you. Argentina he never even saw, that one.
Donna Flora's empty coffin slowly comes down towards the cemetery: the old woman's body had been burnt up in the hills. No one in the village had wanted to carry it, the funeral cart is drawn by the mayor's ox.
- Take it to be slaughtered afterwards – was his brother's advice before the funeral. – But who will ever eat that ugly brute from now on? – he had answered.
The smoke of the burnt body gives off a sickly-sweet smell that follows the funeral procession.
No music, no voices.
- The witch is dead! Donna Flora is dead!
But who was Donna Flora?
Everyone in the village knew her – my compliments to your mum, lucky the man who marries you! – the smith would shout after her when he saw her walking by quickly in the morning just after dawn.
Donna Flora was the most beautiful woman that had ever been seen: blue eyes and black hair, long legs and supple back. All of Gitruzzi turned its head when she passed, it seemed that almost half the men had asked to marry her, but she had married late, at almost thirty years old, to a distant cousin: Gino, handsome Gino, Gino the bread-baker.
For two years they were deeply in love, they wrote each other poems and love letters, they exchanged promises and vows.
Then one day Gino decided to go away.
- Why should we stay on here, Donna Flò, living this shitty life? going hungry, begging for a piece of bread?
A princess I want to make of you, a princess. There in Argentina normal houses don't even exist, everyone lives in villas, and that's where I want to take you. I'll go away and come back and I'll take you with me, and what a life Donna Flò, what a life!-
And she had hugged him tight, holding her breath in the hope she would suffocate on top of him so she wouldn't be left alone.
Gino sent her a letter every month, he wrote her that it was almost all ready, that he was about to return, that he had only to choose the floor tiles and the entrance hall for the villa. He was a cook in Argentina, and he made good money. He wanted to open a restaurant, and she would help him.
The last letter arrived a year later.
- I am far away, Donna Flò, and I've lost your face. Here in Argentina there's plenty of work, all you want: dishwasher, errand boy, factory worker, maybe waiter. The life of luxury? That doesn't exist Donna Flò, even in Argentina. I can't come back to the village like this, with everyone asking me – So Gì, you fool, you've left a paradise to come back here? – but you, why in the world would you want to come to Argentina?
I've found a girl here, a good girl, she is the daughter of a man who comes from our part of the world. I'm going to get married, Donna Flò, and so should you.
Here or there, Italy or Argentina: it's sad to say, but there is no paradise. –
In her husband's empty coffin Donna Flora had put the twelve letters: no one should ever know.
- Are you sad Donna Flò, are you sad? – her friends asked her without pause.
But she didn't feel sad: - there is no paradise – she continued to repeat, and the curate who was walking behind her and heard it all quickly made the sign of the cross.
- Donna Flora's age of gold was after Gino's death. For two years she was a wonder: tall, always dressed in black, and enormously generous. –
The postman still remembers her, as he touches his dry lips with his fingers.
- Here I kissed her. Here! – pointing to his lips again, wetting them with his tongue – Me! I kissed Donna Flora!-
Past the paint factories, past the pig dung-heaps (where the little kids went to see the big ones kissing), past the old fountain, Gitruzzi came to an end.
To the right of a church in ruins, in the square with the fountain, Donna Flora had her kissing booth.
- Just one more, Donna Flò, just one! – the mayor's brother begged, and she smiled at him and gave him another kiss.
She hardly spoke any more, Donna Flora: she laughed and kissed, kissed and laughed and her lips were always wet, she dried them only when the day was drawing to a close and she went home alone.
- Me, too! Me, too! – shouted the smith's boy – I'm not that young, after all! –
One small kiss, and then she really had finished.
At home she found a package with the shopping, five or six love letters, a chocolate ricotta-cheese cake.
She had taken the kissing booth after Gino's funeral, every afternoon from four o'clock to ten the village men came to find her mouth, her lips, her tongue.
She kissed and kissed and kissed and then went back home alone.
The men made sure she found the shopping, the letters and the cake, and everything went on like that, for almost two years.
No one in Gitruzzi has ever forgotten the day Gino came back: he had grown fatter in Argentina, and he walked more clumsily. In his words could be heard a tinge of a Spanish accent.
At first the man who kept the coffee shop didn't recognize him, then he started to shout so the whole village knew.
- Gino has come back! The dead man has come back!-
Gino left right away, he had only wanted to see the place where he was born before leaving again, but that evening Donna Flora did not find the shopping and the cake waiting for her, and five boys were shouting insults: - Slut! Witch! Slut! –
Donna Flora fled into her house, frightened.
The next day she didn't go back to the kissing booth, but stayed shut up in her house, in silence: she, too, had heard.
Her physical decline was rapid and inexorable: at thirty-three years old she looked like fifty, at forty sixty-five, when she died she was an “old woman” of forty-eight.
The last years of her life were horrible: she had twelve illegitimate children with twelve different men, she suffered from hysterical crises in her sleep, and mornings she woke up covered with black and blue marks.
- It's St. Anthony – she said – It's St. Anthony that persecutes me –
The village did not want to have anything more to do with her.
- She's a witch, a prostitute – said the men, and meanwhile they were thinking about the empty kissing booth and the times they had gone there, too.
Before she died Donna Flora had asked to be buried right there, near the kissing booth.
Instead she was burnt on the hillside, and her coffin lay empty next to the empty coffin of her husband Gino.
On the wooden tombstone, the uncertain writing of an unknown hand:
“There is no paradise”.