21

After dinner, François, Gilbert, and Blanca ran to Uncle Lazzi's house. Half of the villagers were already there. The guys squeezed closer to the table, at which sat the owner, Umberto Lazzi, and a stranger strikingly similar to him. He was short, but broad-shouldered and muscular, and over a linen shirt he wore an unusual-looking leather jacket. His swarthy smiling face was overgrown with a beard and was dotted with wrinkles, his eyes glinted slyly from under a cap of disheveled hair. A white scar ran across the right cheek, on which an earring dangling on the earlobe cast a glare.

François and Blanca, like everyone else, stared in amazement at the strange stranger. None of them had seen anything like it before. Roberto did not seem to notice the surprised looks, cheerfully and calmly telling his story to those around him. Slowly and with humor, he told how he ran away from home as a boy, how in Genoa he became a cabin boy on a merchant ship bound for Marseille, and how over the year