The rain that was falling was very heavy. It was as if God had decided to hang a watery curtain from the sky; a curtain that, unlike normal ones, you couldn’t pull aside to see what was behind it. So, inevitably, we saw everything distorted by the tiny kaleidoscopes of that magical rain. That was probably why none of us saw him fall: the rain had blocked our view. None of us, except Rallou. Only she had seen him, to tell the truth! But Rallou was a very shy child by nature and spoke little or not at all. So we were used to not paying much attention to her. When she turned and looked at us very carefully and very seriously with her big eyes, she said: “I just saw an ange… angel fall to the earth. The rai… rain probably swept him away,” we barely gave her a fleeting glance and then turned away, each of us distracted, back to our own piece of glass, so as not to lose count of the raindrops.

That was the game we played while waiting for the storm to pass: We counted the raindrops. What else could we do, after all? Our teacher had made it clear: no ball games in the classroom, not even remotely. And our yard, as usual, was a lake. So, after we had played hangman, told various jokes, and teased Toto a thousand times or more about his hat, his torn bag, his uncle the swindler, and after he had cursed us a thousand times or more, stuck out his tongue at us just as many times, and threatened, showing us his fists, that he would throw us to the ground to eat mud, we were bored and sat sulking with our noses pressed against the glass, staring at the watery curtain.