Vittorio suddenly appeared in Giada's inn in Tribiano. He appears aged, a thin and emaciated body, an absent expression. Giada and Nives listen to him as he talks about being abandoned by Angela, his wife. Giada and Nives both have a good reason to hate him. Running away with Angela, Vittorio had repudiated Giada, his first girlfriend and at the same time he had stolen from Nives the only woman with whom that shy and grumpy man had ever really been in love.
The meeting with Vittorio soon reawakened the old passion in Giada. Walking through the countryside, hand in hand, in love again, the two meet a mysterious woman, intent on praying in front of a small cross, known in the village as "the woman who prays" because she usually spends her nights in that place.
Don Paolo, the old parish priest of the village, shows Vittorio the register of the deceased kept in the parish, a long line of individuals exterminated by a terrible disease, capable of causing first the loss of memory and then madness and finally death. It tells of Angela, who returned to the village immediately after having fled from Vittorio, because she was expecting a child. She confesses the terrible revenge that Nives is about to consume against Vittorio, by marrying Giada.
The "praying woman" accompanies Vittorio to the old village cemetery.
Here, among abandoned tombs and looming vegetation, he tells of a secret that has its roots in the last century, when very few families lived in the village and Tribiano