In the market place at Abbiategrasso the women were in a dither. "And this man in Milan," one of them was saying, "can tell, simply by touching a photograph, whether the person in the picture is dead or alive." At the edge of the chattering group dark-eyed, eleven-year-old Antonio Costa listened entranced. He decided to go home and try the trick himself.
Carefully Antonio bandaged his eyes with torn bits of his mother's undershirt and started caressing a picture of his cousin, a war prisoner long unheard from. Nothing happened. Antonio burst out crying, then he remembered something said in the...