The following morning, the July sun poured defiantly through the kitchen windows, transforming every grain of dust into a tiny, suspended spark. Belinda felt a lightness upon her that almost frightened her; it was as if, for the first time in years, her kidneys were no longer two dark stones embedded in her side. On the table, the grains of gold extracted from Azzurra's pointe shoes glowed with a light of their own—warm, almost pulsating. They could not remain like that, naked and secret. They had to be fixed in time.
They decided to go to Mastro Alfio. His workshop was located in a dead-end alley near the Cathedral of Messina, a cavern that smelled of centuries and smoke. Alfio was a man you could not forget: stocky, with a prominent belly that dangerously strained the buttons of a threadbare velvet vest, he proudly displayed a "half-moon" of shiny scalp, fringed by a few rebellious white hairs that looked like electrified silver threads. But it was his eyes that captured one's attention: two vivid emeralds of an unnatural green, peering at the world with the precision of a hawk.
Though he had lived in Messina all his life, Alfio had never lost his Catanese accent—a guttural, vibrant cadence that turned every sentence into a verdict. "Trasiti, trasiti..." (Come in, come in...) he exclaimed as they entered, without removing the pipe from his teeth. When he smiled, two solid gold canines flashed among teeth yellowed by the constant smoke of strong tobacco—a remnant of an old family fashion that made him look like a pirate from another era. "V'haiu fattu aspettari? (Did I keep you waiting?) Come, Belinda, let me see what you brought me; Elia has been bending my ear about it on the phone!"
Belinda placed the Eye of Horus and the gold grains on the blackened oak counter. Alfio put on his magnifying loupe, which looked like a cyclopean third eye, and began to examine the metal. The silence in the workshop was broken only by the ticking of an old wall clock and the crackling of the pipe. The goldsmith took a grain with his tweezers, held it close to his eyes, and then sniffed it with an almost animalistic gesture.
"Figghia mia... this is no mined gold," he said in that Catanese accent, dragging out the vowels as if savoring a secret. "This is metal that has wept. Do you feel the weight? It is dense as a sin, yet shines like an answered prayer. I have seen nothing like it in fifty years of trade. It seems to have passed through the fire of a soul, not a furnace."
Belinda looked at Elia, then at Azzurra, who watched Mastro Alfio with the same devotion one reserves for a priest.
"I want this gold to go into my sister's amulet, Alfio," Belinda said with a firm voice. "And I want a twin piece to be born for Azzurra. It must be a protection. It must remind them both that lead can be conquered."
Alfio took a deep drag of his pipe, enveloping himself in a cloud of bluish smoke. His green eyes shimmered with a new intensity. "E allora facciamola, questa magia," (Then let us make this magic,) he grunted, beginning to prepare the blowtorch. The blue flame leaped to life, roaring in the silence of the workshop, ready to melt history and transform it into destiny.