IV + 

That summer came a series of rather bad air raids, and Fabio was openly afraid. He would sit in the office under the pavement, praying, with his fingers stuffed in his ears, or begging Teresa to take him to the Tube, where Rosa had gone with the twins. Teresa, however, despised such precautions. + 

“If we die, we die,” was her motto. “The Tube is for mothers with little children, not for old men like you and old women like me. No, I will not let you go to the Tube,” she would say. Then Fabio would begin to cry. + 

The raids added much to his misery, for now he could never go to sleep. “Do you think they will come tonight?” he would enquire, peering anxiously up at the sky. + 

Nor could he be sure that they would not come by day⁠—there had been a bad daylight raid⁠—and sometimes now, while he kneaded his dough, he would pause to listen, mistaking the whirr of the wheels for an aeroplane. He began to suffer from stupefying headaches and a full, tight feeling in his head; the dough he was kneading would go round and round, and with it the machines and the room. If he stood in a draught he would feel his lumbago, that terrifying pain across his back⁠—supposing a raid should come at that moment and catch him unable to move⁠— + 

But one day in October, the God of his lumbago drew nearer, becoming the God of his soul; and Fabio’s old knees gave under him, and his head fell forward and lay upon the table, and his cheek lay buried deep in the flour that his weak hands had failed to mix. + 

That was how they found him two hours later⁠—just a little, old bundle that had once been a man, with flour on its clothes, on its hands, on its face; flour, too, on its halo of white hair. All foolish weakness he had been, that Fabio, and very often afraid; afraid of Teresa, afraid of God, and latterly terribly afraid of the Germans. He had little enough to tell of himself, now that he must face St. Peter at the Gate⁠—but perhaps he said: “I tried to make pasta⁠—I did try very hard to make pasta⁠—” + 