Last Comes the Raven: And Other Stories
Author: Italo Calvino
Date: 2021-06-15 13:25:54+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Literary; Short Stories (Single Author)
Description: The first complete English-language edition of one of Calvino’s important early short story collections Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection—one of Calvino’s earliest—take place in a World War II–era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In the title story, a compact masterpiece of
Publisher: HarperCollins

Contents

Title Page

Contents

Copyright

Editor’s Note

Adam, One Afternoon

A Ship Loaded with Crabs

The Enchanted Garden

Dawn in the Bare Branches

From Father to Son

Man in the Wasteland

The Master’s Eye

Lazy Sons

A Goatherd at Luncheon

The Bagnasco Brothers

The House of the Beehives

The Same Thing as Blood

The Wait for Death in a Hotel

Anguish in the Barracks

Fear on the Footpath

Hunger at Bévera

Going to Headquarters

Last Comes the Raven

One of the Three Is Still Alive

Animal Woods

Minefield

Seen in the Cafeteria

Theft in a Pastry Shop

Dollars and Old Whores

The Adventure of a Soldier

Sleeping like Dogs

Desire in November

A Judge Is Hanged

The Cat and the Policeman

Who Put the Mine in the Sea?

About the Author

Connect with HMH

Footnotes

First Mariner Books edition 2021

Copyright © 1994 by Palomar S.r.l. e Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano

Copyright © 2002 by The Estate of Italo Calvino and Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano

First published in Italy by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A. as Ultimo viene il corvo

“Dawn in the Bare Branches,” “From Father to Son,” “The Master’s Eye,” “The Bagnasco Brothers,” “The Same Thing as Blood,” “The Wait for Death in a Hotel,” “Anguish in the Barracks,” “Seen in the Cafeteria,” “A Judge Is Hanged,” “The Cat and the Policeman,” and “Who Put the Mine in the Sea?”translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. Copyright © 2021 by the Estate of Italo Calvino.

All translations by William Weaver first appeared in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s 1984 edition of Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino. Copyright © 1983, 1984 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

“Last Comes the Raven” translated by Ben Johnson. Originally published in The Paris Review. Copyright © 1954 by The Paris Review. Used by permission of the Wylie Agency LLC.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Cover design by Peter Mendelsund & Oliver Munday

ISBN 978-0-544-14670-9
eISBN 978-0-544-23087-3
v1.0521

Editor’s Note

All translations by Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright also appear in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s 1984 edition of Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino, and were previously published in the collection Adam, One Afternoon and Other Stories (London: Collins, 1957; London: Secker & Warburg, 1983). The story “Dollars and Old Whores” was previously titled “Dollars and the Demimondaine.”

Adam, One Afternoon

The new gardener’s boy had long hair kept in place by a piece of cloth tied around his head with a little bow. He was walking along the path with his watering can filled to the brim and his other arm stretched out to balance the load. Slowly, carefully, he watered the nasturtiums as if pouring out coffee and milk, until the earth at the foot of each plant dissolved into a soft black patch; when it was large and moist enough he lifted the watering can and passed on to the next plant. Maria-nunziata was watching him from the kitchen window and thinking what a nice calm job gardening must be. He was a young man, she noticed, though he still wore shorts and that long hair made him look like a girl. She stopped washing the dishes and tapped on the window.

“Hey, boy,” she called.

The gardener’s boy raised his head, saw Maria-nunziata, and smiled. She laughed back at him, partly because she had never seen a boy with such long hair and a bow like that on his head. The gardener’s boy beckoned to her with one hand, and Maria-nunziata went on laughing at the funny gesture he’d made, and began gesturing back to explain that she had the dishes to wash. But the boy beckoned again, and pointed at the pots of dahlias with his other hand. Why was he pointing at those dahlias? Maria-nunziata opened the window and stuck her head out.

“What’s up?” she asked, and began laughing again.

“D’you want to see something nice?”

“What’s that?”

“Something nice. Come and see. Quickly.”

“Tell me what.”

“I’ll give it to you. I’ll give you something very nice.”

“But I’ve got the dishes to wash, and the signora’ll come along and not find me.”

“Do you want it or don’t you? Come on, now.”

“Wait a second,” said Maria-nunziata, and shut the window.

When she came out through the kitchen door the gardener’s boy was still there, watering the nasturtiums.

“Hello,” said Maria-nunziata.

Maria-nunziata seemed taller than she was because of her high-heeled shoes, which were awful to work in, but she loved wearing them. Her little face looked like a child’s amid its mass of black curls, and her legs were thin and childlike, too, though her body, under the folds of her apron, was already round and ripe. She was always laughing, either at what others or she herself said.

“Hello,” said the gardener’s boy. The skin on his face, neck, and chest was dark brown, perhaps because he was always half naked, as now.

“What’s your name?” asked Maria-nunziata.

“Libereso,” said the gardener’s boy.

Maria-nunziata laughed and repeated, “Libereso . . . Libereso . . . What a funny name, Libereso.”

“It’s a name in Esperanto,” he said. “In Esperanto it means ‘liberty.’ ”

“Esperanto,” said Maria-nunziata. “Are you Esperanto?”

“Esperanto’s a language,” explained Libereso. “My father speaks Esperanto.”

“I’m Calabrian,” exclaimed Maria-nunziata.

“What’s your name?”

“Maria-nunziata,” she said, and laughed.

“Why are you always laughing?”

“Why are you called Esperanto?”

“Not Esperanto, Libereso.”

“Why?”

“Why are you called Maria-nunziata?”

“It is the Madonna’s name. I’m named after the Madonna, and my brother after Saint Joseph.”

“Senjosef?”

Maria-nunziata burst out laughing. “Senjosef! Saint Joseph, not Senjosef, Libereso!”

“My brother,” said Libereso, “is named Germinal and my sister Omnia.”

“That nice thing you mentioned,” said Maria-nunziata. “Show it to me.”

“Come on, then,” said Libereso. He put down the watering can and took her by the hand.

Maria-nunziata hesitated. “Tell me what it is first.”

“You’ll see,” he said, “but you must promise me to take care of it.”

“Will you give it to me?”

“Yes, I’ll give it to you.” He had led her to a corner of the garden wall. There the dahlias standing in pots were as tall as the two of them.

“It’s there.”

“What is?”

“Wait.”

Maria-nunziata peeped over his shoulder. Libereso bent down to move a pot, lifted another by the wall, and pointed to the ground.

“There,” he said.

“What is it?” asked Maria-nunziata. She could not see anything; the corner was in shadow, full of wet leaves and garden mold.

“Look, it’s moving,” said the boy. Then she saw something that looked like a moving stone or leaf, something wet, with eyes and feet: a toad.

“Mamma mia!”

Maria-nunziata went skipping away among the dahlias in her high-heeled shoes. Libereso squatted down by the toad and laughed, showing the white teeth in the middle of his brown face.

“Are you frightened? It’s only a toad! Why are you frightened?”

“A toad!” gasped Maria-nunziata.

“Of course it’s a toad. Come here,” said Libereso.

She pointed at it with a trembling finger. “Kill it.”

He put out his hands, as if to protect it. “I don’t want to. It’s so nice.”

“A nice toad?”

“All toads are nice. They eat the worms.”

“Oh!” said Maria-nunziata, but she did not come any nearer. She was chewing the edge of her apron and trying to watch out of the corners of her eyes.

“Look how pretty it is,” said Libereso, and put a hand on it.

Maria-nunziata approached, no longer laughing, and looked on, openmouthed. “No! No! Don’t touch it!”

With one finger Libereso was stroking the toad’s gray-green back, which was covered with slimy warts.

“Are you mad? Don’t you know they burn when you touch them, and make your hand swell up?”

The boy showed her his big brown hands, the palms covered with a layer of yellow calluses.

“Oh, it won’t hurt me,” he said. “And it’s so pretty.”

Now he’d taken the toad by the scruff of the neck like a cat and put it in the palm of his hand. Maria-nunziata, still chewing the edge of her apron, came nearer and crouched down beside him.

“Mamma mia!” she exclaimed.

They were both crouching down behind the dahlias, and Maria-nunziata’s rosy knees were grazing the brown, scratched ones of Libereso. Libereso cupped his other hand over the back of the toad and caught it every now and again as it tried to slip out.

“You stroke it, Maria-nunziata,” he said.

The girl hid her hands in her apron. “No,” she said firmly.

“What?” he said. “You don’t want it?”

Maria-nunziata lowered her eyes, glanced at the toad, and lowered them again quickly. “No,” she said.

“But it’s yours. I’m giving it to you.”

Maria-nunziata’s eyes clouded over. It was sad to refuse a present—no one ever gave her presents—but the toad really did revolt her.

“You can take it home if you like. It’ll keep you company.”

“No,” she said.

Libereso put the toad back on the ground, and it quickly hopped away and squatted under the leaves.

“Good-bye, Libereso.”

“Wait a minute.”

“But I must go and finish washing the dishes. The signora doesn’t like me to come out in the garden.”

“Wait. I want to give you something. Something really nice. Come with me.”

She began following him along the gravel paths. What a strange boy this Libereso was, with that long hair, and picking up toads in his hands.

“How old are you, Libereso?”

“Fifteen. And you?”

“Fourteen.”

“Now, or on your next birthday?”

“On my next birthday. Feast of the Annunciation.”

“Has that passed yet?”

“What, don’t you know when the Feast of the Annunciation is?” She began laughing.

“No.”

“The Feast of the Annunciation, when there’s the procession. Don’t you go to the procession?”

“Me? No.”

“Back home there are lovely processions. It’s not like here, back home. There are big fields full of bergamots, nothing but bergamots, and everyone picks bergamots from morning till night. I’ve got fourteen brothers and sisters and they all pick bergamots; five died when they were babies, and then my mother got tetanus, and we were in a train for a week to go to Uncle Carmelo’s, and eight of us all slept in a garage there. Tell me, why do you have such long hair?”

They had stopped.

“Because it grows like that. You’ve got long hair, too.”

“I’m a girl. If you wear long hair, you’re like a girl.”

“I’m not like a girl. You don’t tell a boy from a girl by the hair.”

“Not by the hair?”

“No, not by the hair.”

“Why not by the hair?”

“Would you like me to give you something nice?”

“Oh, yes.”

Libereso began moving among the arum lilies, budding white trumpets silhouetted against the sky. Libereso looked into each, groped around with two fingers, and then hid something in his fist. Maria-nunziata had not gone into the flower bed, and was watching him with silent laughter. What was he up to now? When Libereso had looked into all the lilies, he came up to her, holding one hand over the other.

“Open your hands,” he said.

Maria-nunziata cupped her hands but was afraid to put them under his. “What have you got in there?”

“Something very nice. You’ll see.”

“Show me first.”

Libereso opened his hands and let her look inside. His palm was full of multicolored rose chafers, red and black and even purple ones, but the green were the prettiest. They were buzzing and slithering over one another and waving little black legs in the air. Maria-nunziata hid her hands under her apron.

“Here,” said Libereso. “Don’t you like them?”

“Yes,” said Maria-nunziata uncertainly, still keeping her hands under her apron.

“When you hold them tight they tickle. Would you like to feel?”

Maria-nunziata held out her hands timidly, and Libereso poured a cascade of rose chafers of every color into them.

“Don’t be frightened; they won’t bite you.”

“Mamma mia!” It hadn’t occurred to her that they might bite her. She opened her hands and the rose chafers spread their wings and the beautiful colors vanished and there was nothing to be seen but a swarm of black insects flying about and settling.

“What a pity. I try to give you a present and you don’t want it.”

“I must go wash the dishes. The signora will be cross if she can’t find me.”

“Don’t you want a present?”

“What are you going to give me now?”

“Come and see.”

He took her hand again and led her through the flower beds.

“I must get back to the kitchen soon, Libereso. There’s a chicken to pluck, too.”

“Pooh!”

“Why pooh?”

“We don’t eat the flesh of dead birds or animals.”

“Why, are you always in Lent?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what do you eat, then?”

“Oh, all sorts of things—artichokes, lettuce, tomatoes. My father doesn’t like us to eat the flesh of dead animals. Or coffee or sugar either.”

“What d’you do with your sugar ration, then?”

“Sell it on the black market.”

They had reached some climbing plants, starred all over with red flowers.

“What lovely flowers,” said Maria-nunziata. “D’you ever pick them?”

“What for?”

“To take to the Madonna. Flowers are for the Madonna.”

“Mesembryanthemum.”

“What’s that?”

“This plant’s called Mesembryanthemum in Latin. All flowers have Latin names.”

“The Mass is in Latin, too.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

Libereso was now peering closely between the winding branches on the wall.

“There it is,” he said.

“What is?”

It was a lizard, green with black markings, basking in the sun.

“I’ll catch it.”

“No.”

But he inched toward the lizard, very slowly, with both hands open; a jump, and he’d caught it. He laughed happily, showing his white teeth. “Look out, it’s escaping!” First a stunned-looking head, then a tail slithered out between his closed fingers. Maria-nunziata was laughing, too, but every time she saw the lizard she skipped back and pulled her skirt tight about her knees.

“So you really don’t want me to give you anything at all?” said Libereso rather sadly, and very carefully he put the lizard back on the wall; off it shot. Maria-nunziata kept her eyes lowered.

“Come on,” said Libereso, and took her hand again.

“I’d like to have a lipstick and paint my lips red on Sundays to go out dancing. And a black veil to put on my head afterward for benediction.”

“On Sundays,” said Libereso, “I go out to the woods with my brother, and we fill two sacks with pinecones. Then, in the evening, my father reads out loud from Kropotkin. My father has hair down to his shoulders and a beard right down to his chest. And he wear shorts in summer and winter. And I do drawings for the Anarchist Federation windows. The figures in top hats are businessmen, those in caps are generals, and those in round hats are priests. Then I paint them in watercolors.”

They came to a pond with round water-lily leaves floating on it.

“Quiet, now,” commanded Libereso.

Under the water a frog could be seen swimming up with sharp little strokes of its green legs. It suddenly surfaced, jumped onto a water-lily leaf, and sat down in the middle.

“There,” cried Libereso, and put out a hand to catch it, but Maria-nunziata let out a cry—“Ugh!”—and the frog jumped back into the water. Libereso began searching for it, his nose almost touching the surface.

“There it is.” He thrust in a hand and pulled it out in his closed fist. “Two of them together,” he cried. “Look. Two of them, on top of each other.”

“Why?” asked Maria-nunziata.

“Male and female stuck together,” said Libereso. “Look what they’re doing.” And he tried to put the frogs in Maria-nunziata’s hand. Maria-nunziata wasn’t sure whether she was frightened because they were frogs or because they were male and female stuck together.

“Leave them alone,” she said. “You mustn’t touch them.”

“Male and female,” repeated Libereso. “They’re making tadpoles.”

A cloud passed over the sun. Suddenly Maria-nunziata began to feel anxious.

“It’s late. The signora must be looking for me.”

But she did not go. Instead they went on wandering around, though the sun did not come out again. And then he found a snake, a tiny little snake, behind a hedge of bamboo. Libereso wound it around his arm and stroked its head.

“Once I used to train snakes. I had a dozen of them; one was long and yellow, a water snake, but it shed its skin and escaped. Look at this one opening its mouth; look how its tongue is forked. Stroke it—it won’t bite.”

But Maria-nunziata was frightened of snakes, too.

Then they went to the rock pool. First he showed her the fountains and opened all the jets, which pleased her very much. Then he showed her the goldfish. It was a lonely old goldfish, and its scales were already whitening. At last: Maria-nunziata liked the goldfish. Libereso began to move his hands around in the water to catch it; it was very difficult, but when he’d caught it Maria-nunziata could put it in a bowl and keep it in the kitchen. He managed to catch it, but didn’t take it out of the water in case it suffocated.

“Put your hands down here; stroke it,” said Libereso. “You can feel it breathing. It has fins like paper and scales that prickle. Not much, though.”

But Maria-nunziata did not want to stroke the fish either.

In the petunia bed the earth was very soft, and Libereso dug about with his fingers and pulled out some long, soft worms.

But Maria-nunziata ran away with little shrieks.

“Put your hand here,” said Libereso, pointing to the trunk of an old peach tree. Maria- nunziata did not understand why, but she put her hand there; then she screamed and ran to dip it in the pool. For when she had pulled her hand away it was covered with ants. The peach tree was a mass of them, tiny black Argentine ants.

“Look,” said Libereso, and put a hand on the trunk. The ants could be seen crawling over his hand, but he didn’t brush them off.

“Why?” asked Maria-nunziata. “Why are you letting yourself get covered with ants?”

His hand was now quite black, and they were crawling up his wrist.

“Take your hand away,” moaned Maria-nunziata. “You’ll get them all over you.”

The ants were crawling up his naked arm and had already reached his elbow.

Now his whole arm was covered with a veil of moving black dots; they reached his armpit, but he did not brush them off.

“Get rid of them, Libereso. Put your arm in water!”

Libereso laughed, while some ants now even crawled from his neck onto his face.

“Libereso! I’ll do whatever you like! I’ll accept all those presents you gave me.” She threw her arms around his neck and started to brush off the ants.

Smiling his brown-and-white smile, Libereso took his hand away from the tree and began nonchalantly dusting his arm. But he was obviously touched.

“Very well, then, I’ll give you a really big present, I’ve decided. The biggest present I can.”

“What’s that?”

“A hedgehog.”

“Mamma mia! The signora! The signora’s calling me!”

Maria-nunziata had just finished washing the dishes when she heard a pebble beat against the window. Underneath stood Libereso with a large basket.

“Maria-nunziata, let me in. I want to give you a surprise.”

“No, you can’t come up. What have you got there?”

But at that moment the signora rang the bell, and Maria-nunziata vanished.

When she returned to the kitchen, Libereso was no longer to be seen. Neither inside the kitchen nor underneath the window. Maria-nunziata went up to the sink. Then she saw the surprise.

On every plate she had left to dry there was a crouching frog, a snake was coiled up inside a saucepan, there was a soup bowl full of lizards, and slimy snails were making iridescent streaks all over the glasses. In the basin full of water swam the lonely old goldfish.

Maria-nunziata stepped back, but between her feet she saw a great big toad. And behind it were five little toads in a line, taking little hops toward her across the black-and-white-tiled floor.

A Ship Loaded with Crabs

The boys from Piazza dei Dolori had their first swim of the summer on an April Sunday, when the blue sky was brand-new and the sun was young, carefree. They went running down the steep narrow alleys, waving their patched jersey trunks, some already in clogs clattering over the paving stones, most of them without socks, to spare themselves the nuisance, afterward, of putting them back on wet feet. They ran to the pier, jumping over the nets spread out on the ground and lifted by the callused feet of the fishermen, squatting to mend them. Along the rocks of the breakwater, the kids stripped, excited by that sharp smell of old, rotting seaweed and by the flight of the gulls trying to fill the sky, which was too big. Hiding clothes and shoes in the hollows of the rocks and setting the baby crabs to flight, they began to jump from rock to rock, barefoot and half naked, waiting for one of their number to make up his mind and dive in first.

The water was calm but not clear, a dense blue with harsh green glints. Gian Maria, known as Mariassa, climbed to the top of a high rock and blew his nose against his thumb, a boxer’s gesture he had.

“Come on,” he said. He pressed his hands together, held them out in front of himself, and plunged headlong. He surfaced a few yards farther out, spouting water, then playing dead.

“Cold?” they asked him.

“Boiling,” he yelled, and started making furious strokes to keep from freezing.

“Hey, gang! Follow me!” said Cicin, who considered himself the chief, though nobody ever paid any attention to him.

They all dived in: Pier Lingera made a somersault, Bombolo took a belly whopper, then Paulò, Carruba, and last of all Menin, who was scared to death of the water and jumped in feet first, pinching his nose with his fingers.

Once in the water, Pier Lingera, who was the strongest, ducked the others one by one; then they all ganged up and ducked Pier Lingera.

Gian Maria alias Mariassa suggested, “The ship! Let’s go on the ship!”

A vessel still lay in the harbor, sunk by the Germans during the war to block access. Actually there were two ships, one above the other; the visible one rested on a second, completely submerged.

“Yeah, let’s!” the others said.

“Can we climb up on it?” Menin asked. “It’s mined.”

“Balls. Mined!” Carruba said. “The Arenella guys climb on it whenever they like and play war.”

They started swimming toward the ship.

“Gang! Follow me!” said Cicin, who wanted to be the leader. But the others swam faster and left him behind, except for Menin, who swam frog-style and was always last.

They reached the ship, whose flanks rose from the water, black with old tar, bare, and moldy, the stripped superstructures profiled against the fresh blue sky. A beard of stinking seaweed rose to cover the ship from the keel; the old paint was peeling in great flakes. The boys swam all around it, then paused a while below the poop, to look at the almost erased name: Abukir, Egypt. The anchor chain, stretched obliquely, swayed now and then with the jabs of the tide, its enormous rusted links creaking.

“Let’s stay here,” Bombolo said.

“Come on,” Pier Lingera said, already gripping the chain with his hands and feet. He scrambled up like a monkey, and the others followed him.

Halfway up, Bombolo slipped and hit the water with his belly; Menin couldn’t make it, so two of the others had to pull him up.

On board, they began wandering around that dismantled ship in silence, looking for the wheel of the helm, the siren, the hatches, the lifeboats, all the things there were supposed to be on a ship. But this ship was as barren as a raft, covered only with whitish gull dung. There were five of them, five gulls, perched on a railing; when they heard the barefoot steps of the band, they took flight, one after the other, in a great flapping of wings.

“Hey!” Paulò cried, and threw after the last gull a rivet he had picked up.

“Gang! Let’s go to the engine room!” Cicin said. It would surely be more fun to play among the machines or in the hold.

“Can we go down to the other ship, underneath?” Carruba asked. That would have been great: to be down there, all sealed off, with the sea around them and over them, like being in a submarine.

“The one underneath is mined!” Menin said.

“You’re mined!” they said to him.

They started down a companionway. After a few steps, they hesitated: at their feet the black water began, rustling in the enclosed space. Standing still and mute, the boys from Piazza dei Dolori looked at it; in the depths of that water there was the black glint of colonies of sea urchins, slowly unfolding their spines. And the walls on every side were encrusted with limpets, their shells dripping green algae; the iron of the walls seemed eroded. And there were crabs teeming at the edge of the water, thousands of crabs of every shape and every age, which scuttled on their curved, spoked legs, and opened their claws, and thrust forward their sightless eyes. The sea slapped dully in the space of the iron walls, licking those flat crab bellies. Perhaps the entire hold of the ship was full of groping crabs, and one day the ship would move on the crabs’ legs and walk through the sea.

The boys came up on deck again, at the prow. Then they saw the little girl. They hadn’t seen her before, though it was as if she had always been there. She was a little girl of about six, fat, with long curly hair. She was all sunburned, wearing only little white shorts. There was no telling where she had come from. She didn’t even look at them, totally concerned with a jellyfish that was lying on its back on the wooden deck, the flabby festoons of its tentacles spread out. With a stick the little girl was trying to turn it upright.

The Piazza dei Dolori boys stopped all around her, gaping. Mariassa was the first to step forward. He sniffed.

“Who’re you?” he said.

The girl raised the pale blue eyes in her dark, plump face; then she resumed working the stick as a lever under the jellyfish.

“She must be one of the Arenella gang,” Carruba said; he knew them.

The Arenella boys let some girls come with them to swim or play ball, and even make war with reed weapons.

“You,” Mariassa said, “are our prisoner.”

“Gang!” Cicin said. “Take her alive!”

The little girl went on poking at the jellyfish.

“Battle stations!” Paulò yelled, as he happened to look around. “The Arenella gang!”

While they had been involved with the girl, the Arenella boys, who spent their whole day in the sea, had come swimming underwater and silently climbed the anchor chain; now they appeared over the railings. They were short, stocky kids, light as cats, with shaved heads and dark skin. Their trunks weren’t black and long and floppy like those of the Dolori boys but consisted of a single length of white canvas.

The battle began. The Piazza dei Dolori boys were thin, all nerves, except for Bombolo, who was a fatty; but they had a fanatical fury when they swung their fists, hardened by endless brawls in the little streets of the old city against the gangs from San Siro and the Giardinetti. At first the Arenella kids had the advantage, because of the surprise element; but then the Dolori gang perched on the ladders and there was no dislodging them. They wanted to avoid, at all costs, being forced to the railing, where it would be easy to dump them into the drink. Finally Pier Lingera, who was the strongest of the bunch and also the oldest and who hung out with them only because he had been kept back in school, managed to force one of the Arenella boys to the edge and push him into the sea.

Then the Dolori gang took the offensive, and the Arenella kids, who felt more at home in the water and, being sensible, had no notions about honor in their heads, one by one eluded their enemies and dived in.

“Come and get us in the water. We dare you!” they yelled.

“Gang! Follow me!” yelled Cicin, who was about to dive.

“Are you crazy?” Mariassa held him back. “In the water they’d win hands down!” And he started shouting insults at the fugitives.

The Arenella boys began to splash water up from below; they splashed so hard there wasn’t a place on the ship that wasn’t wet. Finally they got tired of that and swam out to sea, heads down and arms arched, surfacing every now and then to breathe, in little spurts.

The Piazza dei Dolori boys had remained masters of the field. They went to the prow; the little girl was still there. She had succeeded in turning over the jellyfish and was now trying to lift it on the stick.

“They left us a hostage!” Mariassa said.

“Hey, gang! A hostage!” Cicin was all excited.

“You cowards!” Carruba shouted behind the other bunch. “Leaving your women in the enemies’ hands!”

They had a highly developed sense of honor around Piazza dei Dolori.

“Come with us,” Mariassa said, and started to put a hand on her shoulder.

The girl motioned him to keep still; she had almost succeeded in lifting the jellyfish. As Mariassa bent over to look, the girl pulled up the stick, with the jellyfish balanced on it, pulled it up, up, and slammed it into Mariassa’s face.

“Bitch!” Mariassa yelled, spitting and putting his hands to his face.

The little girl looked at them all and laughed. Then she turned, went straight to the top of the prow, raised her arms, joining her fingertips, did a swan dive, and swam off without looking back. The Piazza dei Dolori boys hadn’t moved.

“Say,” Mariassa asked, touching one cheek, “is it true that jellyfish make your skin burn?”

“Wait and find out,” Pier Lingera said. “But the best thing would be to dive in right away.”

“Let’s go,” Mariassa said, starting off with the others. Then he stopped. “From now on we have to have a woman in our gang, too! Menin! Bring your sister!”

“My sister’s a dummy,” Menin said.

“That doesn’t matter,” Mariassa said. “Come on!” And he gave Menin a shove, pushing him into the water because he didn’t know how to dive. Then they all dived in.

The Enchanted Garden

Giovannino and Serenella were strolling along the railroad tracks. Below was a scaly sea of somber, clear blue; above, a sky lightly streaked with white clouds. The railroad tracks were shimmering and burning hot. It was fun going along the tracks, there were so many games to play—he balancing on one rail and holding her hand while she walked along on the other, or else both jumping from one sleeper to the next without ever letting their feet touch the stones in between. Giovannino and Serenella had been out looking for crabs, and now they had decided to explore the railroad tracks as far as the tunnel. He liked playing with Serenella, for she did not behave as all the other little girls did, forever getting frightened or bursting into tears at every joke. Whenever Giovannino said, “Let’s go there” or “Let’s do this,” Serenella followed without a word.

Ping! They both gave a start and looked up. A telephone wire had snapped off the top of the pole. It sounded like an iron stork shutting its beak in a hurry. They stood with their noses in the air and watched. What a pity not to have seen it! Now it would never happen again.

“There’s a train coming,” said Giovannino.

Serenella did not move from the rail. “Where from?” she asked.

Giovannino looked around in a knowledgeable way. He pointed at the black hole of the tunnel, which showed clear one moment, then misty the next, through the invisible heat haze rising from the stony track.

“From there,” he said. It was as though they could already hear a snort from the darkness of the tunnel and see the train suddenly appear, belching out fire and smoke, the wheels mercilessly eating up the rails as it hurtled toward them.

“Where shall we go, Giovannino?”

There were big gray aloes down by the sea, surrounded by dense, impenetrable nettles, while up the hillside ran a rambling hedge with thick leaves but no flowers. There was still no sign of the train; perhaps it was coasting, with the engine cut off, and would jump out at them all of a sudden. But Giovannino had now found an opening in the hedge. “This way,” he called.

The fence under the rambling hedge was an old bent rail. At one point it twisted about on the ground like the corner of a sheet of paper. Giovannino had slipped into the hole and already half vanished.

“Give me a hand, Giovannino.”

They found themselves in the corner of a garden, on all fours in a flower bed, with their hair full of dry leaves and moss. Everything was quiet; not a leaf was stirring.

“Come on,” said Giovannino, and Serenella nodded in reply.

There were big old flesh-colored eucalyptus trees and winding gravel paths. Giovannino and Serenella tiptoed along the paths, taking care not to crunch the gravel. Suppose the owners appeared now?

Everything was so beautiful: sharp bends in the path and high, curling eucalyptus leaves and patches of sky. But there was always the worrying thought that it was not their garden, and that they might be chased away any moment. Yet not a sound could be heard. A flight of chattering sparrows rose from a clump of arbutus at a turn in the path. Then all was silent again. Perhaps it was an abandoned garden?

But the shade of the big trees came to an end, and they found themselves under the open sky facing flower beds filled with neat rows of petunias and convolvulus, and paths and balustrades and rows of box trees. And up at the end of the garden was a large villa with flashing windowpanes and yellow-and-orange curtains.

And it was all quite deserted. The two children crept forward, treading carefully over the gravel: perhaps the windows would suddenly be flung open, and angry ladies and gentlemen appear on the terraces to unleash great dogs down the paths. Now they found a wheelbarrow standing near a ditch. Giovannino picked it up by the handles and began pushing it along: it creaked like a whistle at every turn. Serenella seated herself in it and they moved slowly forward, Giovannino pushing the barrow with her on top, beside the flower beds and fountains.

Every now and then Serenella would point to a flower and say in a low voice, “That one,” and Giovannino would put the barrow down, pluck it, and give it to her. Soon she had a lovely bouquet.

Eventually the gravel ended and they reached an open space paved in bricks and mortar. In the middle of this space was a big empty rectangle: a swimming pool. They crept up to the edge; it was lined with blue tiles and filled to the brim with clear water. How lovely it would be to swim in!

“Shall we go for a dip?” Giovannino asked Serenella. The idea must have been quite dangerous if he asked her instead of just saying, “In we go!” But the water was so clear and blue, and Serenella was never afraid. She jumped off the barrow and put her bunch of flowers in it. They were already in bathing suits, since they’d been out for crabs before. Giovannino plunged in—not from the diving board, because the splash would have made too much noise, but from the edge of the pool. Down and down he went with his eyes wide open, seeing only the blue from the tiles and his pink hands like goldfish; it was not the same as under the sea, full of shapeless green-black shadows. A pink form appeared above him: Serenella! He took her hand and they swam up to the surface, a bit anxiously. No, there was no one watching them at all. But it was not so nice as they’d thought it would be; they always had that uncomfortable feeling that they had no right to any of this and might be chased out at any moment.

They scrambled out of the water, and there beside the swimming pool they found a Ping-Pong table. Instantly Giovannino picked up a paddle and hit the ball, and Serenella, on the other side, was quick to return his shot. And so they went on playing, though only lightly tapping the ball, in case someone in the villa heard them. Then Giovannino, in trying to parry a shot that had bounced high, sent the ball sailing away through the air and smack against a gong hanging in a pergola. There was a long, somber boom. The two children crouched down behind a clump of ranunculus. At once two menservants in white coats appeared, carrying big trays; when they had put the trays down on a round table under an orange-and-yellow-striped umbrella, off they went.

Giovannino and Serenella crept up to the table. There was tea, milk, and sponge cake. They had only to sit down and help themselves. They poured out two cups of tea and cut two slices of cake. But somehow they did not feel at all at ease, and sat perched on the edge of their chairs, their knees shaking. And they could not really enjoy the tea and cake, for nothing seemed to have any taste. Everything in the garden was like that: lovely but impossible to enjoy properly, with that worrying feeling inside that they were only there through an odd stroke of luck, and the fear that they’d soon have to give an account of themselves.

Very quietly they tiptoed up to the villa. Between the slits of a Venetian blind they saw a beautiful shady room, with collections of butterflies hanging on the walls. And in the room was a pale little boy. Lucky boy, he must be the owner of this villa and garden. He was stretched out on a chaise longue, turning the pages of a large book filled with figures. He had big white hands and wore pajamas buttoned up to the neck, though it was summer.

As the two children went on peeping through the slits, the pounding of their hearts gradually subsided. Why, the little rich boy seemed to be sitting there and turning the pages and glancing around with more anxiety and worry than their own. Then he got up and tiptoed around, as if he were afraid that at any moment someone would come and turn him out, as if he felt that that book, that chaise longue, and those butterflies framed on the wall, the garden and games and tea trays, the swimming pool and paths, were only granted to him by some enormous mistake, as if he were incapable of enjoying them and felt the bitterness of the mistake as his own fault.

The pale boy was wandering about his shady room furtively, touching with his white fingers the edges of the cases studded with butterflies; then he stopped to listen. Giovannino’s and Serenella’s hearts, which had returned to a regular beat, now pounded harder than ever. Perhaps it was the fear of a spell that hung over this villa and garden and over all these lovely, comfortable things, the residue of some injustice committed long ago.

Clouds darkened the sun. Very quietly Giovannino and Serenella crept away. They went back along the same paths they had come on, stepping fast but never at a run. And they went through the hedge again on all fours. Between the aloes they found a path leading down to the small stony beach, with banks of seaweed along the shore. Then they invented a wonderful new game: a seaweed fight. They threw great handfuls of it in each other’s faces till late in the afternoon. And Serenella never once cried.

Dawn in the Bare Branches

It doesn’t usually freeze around here, except that in the morning the lettuce heads awaken numbed and slightly pale, and the earth has a gray, almost lunar crust, which responds mutely to the hoe. In December, little yellow leaves begin to color the ground at the foot of the trees, and gradually cover it like a light quilt. Winter is more a transparency of air than cold, and in that air hundreds of red bulbs light up on the skeletal branches: persimmons.

That year the small orchard was like a suite of balloon sellers, their wares suspended in the air: nine on that forked branch, six on that crooked one, up there at the top there seemed to be some missing, but maybe it was the empty space where the leaves had fallen; the ones toward the south were redder, they would ripen first. Every morning, like that, Pipin il Maiorco surveyed his eight trees, checking to see if any fruit was missing, weighing with his eyes the load on the branches, mentally converting the load into money, imagining the money hanging on the bare branches in place of the fruit: greasy, fluttering hundred- and thousand-lire bills, and not, unfortunately, disks of silver and gold that would have sparkled in the branches.

Better to have coins than paper—coins could be buried in a small jar at the foot of a wall instead of moldering and getting eaten by mice. But silver or paper, the circuit always ended there, in money; it could turn again, be transformed into phosphate, into cyanamid, become juice of the earth, a force climbing up through the roots, the sweet juice of tomatoes, bitter of artichokes: then, inevitably, it got back to money.

“Cheer up, Maiorco, you’ll see, once the war’s over, how high Italian money will go!” It was Saltarel speaking, the Venetian who lived up in the houses in Paraggio; he was passing along the mule track while Pipin was hoeing the terraces above. He stopped hoeing and turned his short dove-gray beard toward him: “You serious, Venetian?” The other started laughing scornfully and speaking Venetian, explaining what use the money would serve; Maiorco remained crouching on the ground, disappointed, making bewildered gestures of protest. You could understand the phylloxera that sickens the vines, the fly that shrivels the olives, the snail that makes holes in the lettuce, but money—what beast could gnaw the government money to make it worthless? Already threatening the harvests were woodworms that ate the roots, cochineals and snails on the leaves, beetles in the flowers, caterpillars in the fruit; nothing was missing but that mysterious beast that could ruin the richest harvests, protected by countless attentions, when they had already been sold—when it came to the money! The “Venetians” were poor wandering folk, émigrés from those parts in the years of the crisis, people who would all sooner or later end up in the city as street sweepers, like the “Neapolitans,” that is, the Abruzzesi, their cronies: that was why they talked like that.

There were already too many beasts that inserted themselves between Pipin il Maiorco and the fruits of his land, and the most insidious was a beast against which insecticides and poisons were of no avail, a nocturnal beast with the hands of a man and the gait of a wolf: thieves. The countryside was swarming with thieves: vagrants without land and without work. Someone had certainly passed through the persimmons during the night: a stranger, trampling the rows of garlic. Pipin examined the trees branch by branch, uneasy. There, on the fifth tree, an entire full branch was broken, hanging down—so that someone could pick one fruit, from a branch covered with still-unripe fruit. “Throne of God!” Maiorco shouted, raising his fists at the houses of Paraggio, high up on the hill, a row of one-story mold-colored houses—like the cork villages in the crèches—which looked as if they would have tumbled down into the valley if only he had shouted a little louder.

Pipin il Maiorco went to Paraggio holding the broken branch like a walking stick, with all the persimmons attached, and he pounded it hard on the ground so they would hear him. Saltarel’s wife came to the door, red-faced, toothless: “Have you already cut down your Christmas tree, Pipin? Careful, you need a pine, not a persimmon.”

The tips of Maiorco’s mustache vibrated like a cat’s. “If I catch whoever is coming to my land to steal my persimmons,” he said, “I’ll shoot him! Tonight I’ll load the gun with salt pellets!”

The oldest of the “Venessia” came out: Cocianci.

“As long as you’re there, put some oil in, too, Maiorco,” he said. “That way you’ll have a salad.”

And all the Venetians, in the doorways of their hovels, began sneering at Maiorco as he went off cursing.

If only they had been red enough to pick and allowed to ripen in the house; but no, they had to be left on the trees, at the mercy of those people who had the vice of stealing in their bones, like hunger, who tore off branches and then, having taken a bite and finding the fruit bitter, would trample them on the ground.

They’d have to stand guard over the persimmons at night, with a gun: Pipin would be there from sunset to midnight, his wife would relieve him from midnight to dawn.

Pipin and his wife lived in a soot-covered cottage decorated with braids of garlic, and with rabbit cages around instead of vases of flowers. Bastianina la Maiorca worked as hard as her husband, turning the earth with a pitchfork after he had broken it up with the hoe; both had faces and arms the color of the turned earth: she scruffy, in a dress that looked like a sack, her feet in heavy boots; he shoeless, a tattered vest over his bare chest, as downy as a cactus, his beard and mustache like a small gray dove set on that harshly lined face.

The terraces where the persimmons grew were beyond the mule track, in a damp, shady place above a stream. Maiorco got there at dark with his muzzleloader, with which forty years earlier he had hit a fox. In the dark the trees seemed like enormous birds roosting on a single leg. Observing the fruit-laden branches within range of his gun, Pipin felt a sense of sweet security, as of a child with a toy under his pillow.

The rushing of the stream gave texture to the silence; distances, in the dark, were only the barking of far-off dogs. As the ear adapted, sounds of laughter and songs could be heard coming from the houses of the Venetians, in Paraggio; as the eye adapted, you could see the glow of the lighted fires of the evening gathering. The Venetians sang and danced at night: Cocianci’s fat granddaughter began dancing with her skirts in the wind while all the men beat time with their hands. Then old Cocianci, still seated, embraced her around the thighs: so many disgusting things happened at night, among the Venetians. Saltarel got drunk and beat his wife every night, saying she was a mare, and his wife would never go to the police to show her bruises. At a certain hour, as the songs faded, the Venetians came out, creeping toward Maiorco’s terraces: here they all were on the wall above, jumping down on him; Cocianci’s fat girl, thighs bared, began dancing before him, while the old man stole the persimmons. Stop: it’s trouble if you start in with a waking dream—right away you fall asleep. Keep eyes and ears alert, rather: the wind rising through the reeds by the stream could be a thief approaching. No: up there the songs and laughter continued, everything was deserted and still.

Pipin felt terribly alone sometimes, on those bits of land of his, amid the creatures, creatures above, below, and all around that wanted to consume the countryside with him in it: underground was a mass of worms, on the ground were mice, in the sky only swallows; then tax collectors, speculators in fertilizers, thieves. Before the earth he felt a vague sense of impotence, as if he could never possess it completely, as when one dreams of possessing a woman and can’t. A big black grindstone, the earth, which breaks down and transforms everything, whose mysterious juices rise from the soil up through the roots, to swell the persimmons at the tips of the branches with sugar and tannin; a grindstone of soil continuing on and on infinitely, still his, into the center of the world where the other pyramid of earth begins of the other Pipin Maiorco, Pipin Maiorco of the antipodes. Pipin Maiorco would have liked to sink into the earth with his whole body, breathe it, carry into it all his money in a jar, and his house, all his things, the rabbits, his wife: then he would feel safe. He would have liked to live underground, in the warm dark earth that he dug deep into with the hoe. But these were thoughts of a sleeper: he was sleeping.

The moonless night seemed to be halted in the middle of time. Would midnight never arrive? Maybe his wife hadn’t waked and would leave him there till morning. Pipin shook himself; he walked under every tree to look at the fruit, as if while he was half asleep it could have been stolen from right under his nose. But maybe, as his gaze moved from the first to the second, to the third persimmon tree, a monkey was steadily jumping from tree to tree, putting the fruit in a sack, unseen. A hundred monkeys were hidden in the branches, disgusting monkeys, hairless, with the sneering face of Saltarel, who mocked him.

Look, a light was approaching over the fields: was it real or was it a trick of the monkeys? Should he wake up or shoot them? “Pipin! Pipin!” The voice of his wife, soft. “Bastiana!” It was the change of shift, she was arriving with the lantern; Pipin handed her the gun and went off to sleep.

The Maiorca carried the gun like a soldier, walking back and forth along the terrace. She had yellow eyes, at night, like an owl: even if the devil had come to scare her she would know that it was a bush. Suddenly she saw a stone hopping along the path. She touched it with her foot: it was soft, like flesh. A toad, it was: they looked at one another for a while, the woman and the toad, then it continued in one direction and she in another.

The next day Bastianina said that the second shift was harder and that that night she was entitled to the first. Pipin agreed; she came to wake him at midnight and threw him out of bed. On the way, as he was closing behind him the gate that opened into the persimmon orchard, Pipin heard footsteps on the mule track: who was wandering around the countryside at that hour? It was Saltarel.

“Maiorco, you’re waiting for the owl at this hour with the gun?”

“For the owl, yes,” answered Pipin, “the owl that steals my persimmons.”

So they know it, he thought, and they won’t come tonight.

“But where are you coming from at this hour, Venetian?”

“From buying oil. Tomorrow we’re going with Cocianci to Piedmont and we’re bringing down rice.”

They had started working the black market, the Venetians.

“Good luck, Venetian.”

“Happy hunting, Maiorco.”

If he listened intently from the persimmon orchard, everything was silent. Even in the houses of the Venetians, not a light or a voice. Saltarel wasn’t beating his wife tonight; but maybe at that moment old Cocianci was in bed with his fat granddaughter. Pipin thought of his own still-warm bed, with Bastiana snoring. They wouldn’t come that night, they knew he was standing guard, and in the morning they were to leave early for Piedmont. There: Pipin would go home to sleep—quietly, so as not to wake his wife—then as soon as dawn broke he would come and take a look.

He went home, slipped very softly between the sheets, beside his wife, who would have snored even if a horse had climbed into bed. But he couldn’t sleep; what would happen if he didn’t wake at dawn and his wife found him in bed? And if other thieves had come? Suddenly he wondered if he had left the gate open: Saltarel had seen him close it, the Venetians wandered around all night like cats, if they found it open they would know that he had left. Pipin couldn’t close his eyes: it was torture to stay in bed like that, unable even to turn over for fear of waking his wife, while the thieves walked all over his land. But why didn’t he get up, why didn’t he go see? Already the sky was starting to lighten; at the first cockcrow he would get up. But listen, on the mule track, the sound of footsteps coming down: who in the world, at that hour? Cocianci and Saltarel certainly, setting off for Piedmont. Footsteps that were almost running, heavy: they must be laden, laden with containers of oil, laden with baskets of persimmons just stolen, which they were going to sell in Piedmont! Pipin jumped out of bed, grabbed the gun, went out.

The gate, closed; he breathed. Approaching the orchard, however, he couldn’t see the red of the fruit; there were other trees in the way, reeds, olives. Now, turning the corner around this wall, here he would be able to see, he would be reassured. He rounded the wall. There was a sensation of emptiness. His beard and mustache, that small gray dove, spun around as if they were about to take flight from his mouth. In the livid air of dawn the trees raised a spiderweb of bare branches to the sky. Not a fruit was left hanging. “Throne of God!” the man shouted, shaking his fists at the orchard.

At home the Maiorca was getting up.

“Pipin, did you have a good guard shift?”

Pipin sat on a stool with the gun still over his shoulder, head bent.

“What’s wrong, Pipin, why don’t you answer?”

Pipin was silent, he didn’t lift his head.

“How much do you think persimmons are going for this year, on the market?”

I have to make her shut up, Pipin thought.

“How much do you think we’ll get?”

Pipin stood up. He took a piece of wood, the kind you use to tighten the ropes of a pack saddle.

“I say we’ll fill thirty baskets,” the woman continued.

Pipin saw the gatepost; he left the stick for the saddle and grabbed the post.

“A year like that we’ve never had, right, Pipin?”

Then Pipin il Maiorco began to beat her.

From Father to Son

Not many oxen in our area. There are no pastures for them to graze, no big fields to be plowed: there’s only dry brush to feed on and short strips of earth that you can’t break up without a hoe. And then oxen and cows, broad and placid as they are, would be out of place in these narrow, steep valleys; here you need lean, sinewy beasts that can walk over the rocks—mules and goats.

The Scarassas’ ox was the only one in the valley, and it wasn’t out of place. It was stronger and more obedient than a mule, a small squat stocky ox, a beast of burden; its name was Morettobello. The two Scarassas, father and son, earned their living with the ox, making trips for the various landowners in the valley, hauling sacks of grain to the mill, or palm leaves to the shipping agents, or sacks of manure from the farmers’ cooperative.

That day Morettobello was swaying under a load balanced on the two sides of the pack saddle: olive wood logs to sell to a customer in the city. From the ring that pierced the soft black nostrils the slack rope grazed the ground and ended up in the limp hands of Nanin, the son of Battistin Scarassa, who was gangling and scrawny like his father. They were a strange pair: the ox, with its short legs and low, broad stomach, like a toad, walked warily under the load; Scarassa, his long face bristling with red hairs, his wrists exposed by sleeves that were too short, seemed to have two knees in each leg as he walked, his pants filling like sails when the wind blew, as if there were no one inside.

It was spring that morning; that is, there was in the air that sudden sense of discovery you feel one morning each year, when you remember something that has been as if forgotten for months. Morettobello, usually so tranquil, was restless. Nanin, looking for him in his stall that morning, had found him gone; he was wandering around the middle of the field, his eyes lost. Now, on the road, Morettobello every so often stopped, raised his nostrils, pierced by the ring, and sniffed the air with a brief bellow. Nanin gave a tug on the rope along with a guttural word in the language that’s used between men and oxen.

Every so often Morettobello seemed gripped by a thought: he had had a dream that night, so he had left the stall and in the morning was lost in the world. He had dreamed of forgotten things, as of another life: vast grassy plains and cows, cows, cows as far as the eye could see, who advanced, mooing. And he had also seen himself, running right in the middle of that herd of cows as if seeking. But something held him back, red pincers stuck in his flesh kept him from getting through the herd. In the morning, on the road, Morettobello felt the pincers’ red wound still burning in him, like an ineffable desperation in the air.

On the streets all you could see were boys dressed in white with a gold-fringed band on their arms, and girls dressed like brides: it was confirmation day. At the sight, something darkened in the depths of Nanin’s soul, like an ancient, furious fear. Was it perhaps because his son and daughter would never have those white clothes for confirmation? They must surely have cost a lot. Then a rage, a yearning possessed him, to have his children confirmed, too: he saw the boy in the white sailor’s outfit, the gold-fringed band on his arm, the girl with the veil and train in the shadowy, glittering church.

The ox snorted: he remembered the dream, he saw the herd of galloping cows, as if in a zone outside of memory, and he was right in the middle, struggling to keep up. Suddenly, on a small rise in the midst of the throng of cows, the great bull, red like the pain of the wound, its sicklelike horns touching the sky, appeared and charged at him, bellowing.

In the square in front of the church, the children who were being confirmed began running around the ox. “An ox! An ox!” they cried. An ox was an unusual sight in that area. The boldest ventured to touch his stomach, the more expert looked at him under the tail: “He’s neutered! Look at him! He’s neutered!” Nanin started shouting, punching the air to drive them away. Then the children, seeing him so gangling, scrawny, and ragged, began to make fun of him and taunt him with his nickname: “Scarassa! Scarassa!,” which means “vineyard stake.”

Nanin felt that old fear becoming more vivid, more tormenting. He saw other boys dressed for confirmation who were taunting him, who were taunting not him but his father, gangling, scrawny, and ragged like him, the day his father had taken him to be confirmed. And he felt again, just as intensely, the shame he had felt for his father, seeing the boys jumping around and throwing at him rose petals trampled by the procession, calling him “Scarassa.” That shame had accompanied Nanin his whole life, had filled him with fear at every glance, every laugh. And it was all his father’s fault; what had he inherited from him but poverty, stupidity, the clumsiness of the gangly person? He hated his father, now he understood it, because of the shame he’d made him feel as a boy, because of all the shame, the poverty of his life. And at that moment he was afraid that his children would be ashamed of him as he was of his father, that one day they would look at him with the hatred that was at that moment in his eyes. He decided: I’ll buy myself a new outfit, too, for their confirmation day, a checked suit, flannel. And a white canvas cap. And my wife will also have to buy a new dress, of good-quality fabric, big enough to fit her even when she’s pregnant. And we’ll all go together, in our fine clothes, to the church square. And we’ll buy ice cream from the ice cream cart. But a yearning remained that he didn’t know how to satisfy, after buying the ice cream, after passing through the market dressed in their Sunday best, a yearning to do, to spend, to show off, to make up for that childish shame of his father that had been with him throughout his life.

When he got home, he led the ox to the stall and took off the pack saddle. Then he went to eat: his wife and children and old Battistin were already at the table gulping down a fava bean soup. Old Scarassa, Battistin, was fishing out the favas with his fingers, sucking them, and throwing away the skins. Nanin paid no attention to their conversation. “The children have to be confirmed,” he said.

His wife looked up, with her pinched face, her untidy hair. “And the money for the clothes?” she asked.

“They’ll have to have nice clothes,” Nanin continued without looking at her. “The boy in a sailor suit, with gold fringe on his arm, the girl like a bride, with the train and the veil.”

The old man and the wife looked at each other openmouthed.

“And the money?” they repeated.

“And I’ll buy myself a checked flannel suit,” Nanin continued, “and you a dress of good-quality fabric, big enough to fit you even when you’re pregnant.”

His wife had an idea. “Oh! You found a way to sell the Gozzo property.”

The Gozzo property was an inherited field, stony and brush-covered, on which they had to pay taxes but from which they earned nothing. Nanin was annoyed that they believed that: he was saying absurd things, but he was adamant, angry.

“No, I haven’t found anyone. But we have to have all that,” he insisted, without looking up from his bowl. The others were already full of hopes: if he had found a way to sell the Gozzo property, everything he’d said was possible.

“With the money from the land,” said old Battistin, “I can have the hernia operation.”

Nanin felt he hated him.

“You’ll drop dead with your hernia!” he shouted.

The others were watching to see if he was going crazy.

Meanwhile, in the stall, the ox Morettobello had gotten untied, knocked down the door, gone out to the field. Suddenly he entered the room, stopped, and let out a long, lamenting, desperate bellow. Nanin got up cursing and chased him back to the stall, hitting him with a stick.

He returned. They were all silent, even the children. Then the boy asked, “Papa, when will you buy me a sailor suit?”

Nanin looked at him, eyes just like those of his father, Battistin.

“Never!” he shouted.

He slammed the door and went to bed.

Man in the Wasteland

Early in the morning you can see Corsica: it looks like a ship laden with mountains, suspended out there on the horizon. If we lived in another country it would have inspired legends, but not here: Corsica is a poor land, poorer than ours; nobody has ever gone there and nobody has ever given it any thought. If you see Corsica in the morning it means the air is clear and still and there’s no rain in the offing.

On one of those mornings, at dawn, my father and I were climbing up the dry, stony gullies of Colla Bella, with the dog on a chain. My father had encased his chest and back in scarves, coats, a hunting jacket, vests, knapsacks, canteens, cartridge belts; from all this, a white goatee emerged; on his legs he wore an old pair of scratched-up leather puttees. I had on a threadbare, too-tight jerkin that left my wrists and waist exposed and trousers, also tight and threadbare; and I took long strides like my father, but with my hands dug into my pockets and my long neck pulled down between my shoulders. Both of us carried old hunting guns, a fine make but neglected and streaked with rust. The dog was a harrier, ears drooping till they swept the ground, a short bristling coat on its bones that seemed to scrape the skin. Behind him he dragged a chain that might have served for a bear.

“You stay here with the dog,” my father said. “From here you can keep an eye on both trails. I’ll go to the other, and when I get there I’ll give you a whistle. Then you turn the dog loose. Watch out: a hare can slip past in a second.”

My father continued up the stony track, and I crouched down on the ground with the dog, whimpering because he wanted to follow. Colla Bella is a height rising from the pale shore, all barren terrain, weeds hard to crop, crumbling walls of ancient embankments. Farther down, the black haze of the olive groves begins; farther up, the tawny woods, made patchy by fires, like the backs of mangy old dogs. Everything lazed in the gray of the dawn as in a half opening of still-sleepy eyelids. At sea no outlines could be distinguished; the water was striped by shafts of mist for all its breadth.

My father’s whistle came. Released from the chain, the dog set off in great zigzags up the stony bed, snapping the air with yelps. Then, silent, it began to sniff the ground and ran off, still sniffing diligently, its tail erect, a rhomboid white spot under it that seemed illuminated.

I kept the gun aimed, resting on my knees, and my eyes aimed, resting on the intersection of the trails, because a hare can slip past in a second. Dawn was revealing colors, one by one. First the red of the wild arum berries, the reddish slashes on the pine trees. Then green, the hundred, the thousand greens of the fields, bushes, woods, which a short time before had been uniform: now, instead, a new green appeared every moment, distinct from the others. Then the blue: the loud blue of the sea which deafened everything and made the sky turn wan and timid. Corsica vanished, engulfed by the light, but the border between sea and sky did not become firm: it remained that ambiguous, confused zone frightening to look at because it does not exist.

All of a sudden houses, roofs, streets were born at the foot of the hills, along the sea. Every morning the city was born like this from the realm of shadows, all at once, tawny with tiles, sparkling with glass, lime-white with stucco. The light every morning described it in the smallest details, narrowed its every doorway, enumerated all its houses. Then the light moved up along the hills, revealing more and more particulars: new terraces, new houses. It arrived at Colla Bella, yellow and barren and deserted, and it discovered a house up there as well, isolated, the highest house before the woods, within range of my gun, the house of Baciccin the Blissful.

In shadow, the house of Baciccin the Blissful seemed a heap of stones; around it there was a dirt terrace, caked, gray, like the surface of the moon, from which rose scrawny plants, as if he cultivated poles. There were some wires stretched, for laundry, it seemed; but they were his vineyard of consumptive, skeletal vines. Only a slender fig tree seemed to have the strength to support its leaves, writhing under the weight, at the edge of the terrace.

Baciccin came out; he was so thin that to be seen he had to stand in profile; otherwise all you saw was his mustache, gray and bristling. He was wearing a woolen balaclava helmet and a homespun suit. He saw me waiting and came over.

“Hare, hare,” he said.

“Hare. As usual,” I answered.

“Shot at one this big last week on that track. Close as here to there. Missed.”

“Bad luck.”

“Bad luck, bad luck. I’m not one for hare anyway. I’d rather stand under a pine tree and wait for thrush. In one morning you can get five or six shots.”

“So you shoot your dinner, Baciccin.”

“That’s right. But then I miss them all.”

“It happens. It’s the cartridges.”

“The cartridges, the cartridges.”

“The ones they sell are no good. Make your own.”

“That’s right. I do make my own. Maybe I make them wrong.”

“Ah, you have to have the knack.”

“That’s right, that’s right.”

Meanwhile he had assumed a position, his arms folded, in the center of the crossing and was not going to move. The hare would never go by if he stood in the way like that. I’ll tell him to move, I thought; but I didn’t tell him, and I sat there waiting all the same.

“No rain, no rain,” Baciccin said.

“Corsica: did you see it this morning?”

“Corsica. All dry, Corsica.”

“A bad year, Baciccin.”

“Bad year. Planted beans. Did they grow?”

“Did they grow?”

“Did they grow? No.”

“They sold you bad seed, Baciccin.”

“Bad seed, bad year. Eight artichoke plants.”

“Damn.”

“Tell me what I got from them.”

“You tell.”

“All died.”

“Damn.”

Costanzina, the daughter of Baciccin the Blissful, came from the house. She could have been sixteen: olive-shaped face, eyes, mouth, nostrils, shaped like an olive; and braids down her back. She must have had olive-shaped breasts, too: all the same style; like a statuette, wild as a she-goat, wool socks up to her knees.

“Costanzina,” I called.

“Oh!”

But she did not come closer; she was afraid of frightening the hares.

“Hasn’t barked yet, hasn’t flushed it,” Baciccin said.

We pricked up our ears.

“He hasn’t barked. No use going away yet,” and he went off.

Costanzina sat down beside me. Baciccin the Blissful had started wandering around his bleak terrace, pruning the scraggy vines; every now and then he would stop and come back to talk.

“What’s new around Colla Bella, Tancina?” I asked.

The girl began to recount, dutifully: “Last night I saw the hares over there, jumping in the moonlight. They went ‘Hee! Hee!’ Yesterday a mushroom sprouted behind the oak. Poisonous, red with white spots. I killed it with a stone. A big yellow snake came down the path at noon. She lives in that bush. Don’t throw stones at her; she’s harmless.”

“Do you like living on Colla Bella, Tancina?”

“Not in the evening. The mist comes up at four o’clock, and the city disappears. Then, at night, you can hear the owl cry.”

“Scared of owls?”

“No. Scared of bombs, planes.”

Baciccin came over. “The war? How’s the war going?”

“The war’s been over a good while, Baciccin.”

“Fine. What’s taken the war’s place, then? Anyway, I don’t believe it’s over. Whenever they used to say that, it would start up again—every time, in some different way. Am I right?”

“Yes, you’re right . . . Which do you like best, Tancina, Colla Bella or the city?” I asked.

“In the city there’s the shooting gallery,” she answered, “trams, people shoving, movies, ice cream, the beach with umbrellas on it.”

“This girl,” Baciccin said, “isn’t all that crazy about going to the city. The other one liked it so much she never came back.”

“Where is she now?”

“Hmph.”

“Hmph. We need rain.”

“That’s the truth. Need rain. Corsica, this morning. Am I right?”

“You’re right, yes.”

In the distance there was an explosion of yelps.

“Dog’s flushed a hare,” I said.

Baciccin came and stood in the trail, his arms folded.

“He’s hunting. A good hunter,” he said. “I had a dog, a bitch name of Cililla. She’d trail a hare for three days. Once she flushed him at the top of the wood and chased him two yards in front of my gun. I fired twice. Missed.”

“You can’t get a hit every time.”

“Can’t. Well, she went on after that hare for two hours . . .”

They heard two shots, but then the yelping began again, coming closer.

“. . . two hours later,” Baciccin resumed, “she brought the hare back to me, like before. I missed it again, goddamnit.”

All of a sudden a hare appeared, darting along the trail. It came almost to Baciccin’s legs, then swerved into the bushes and disappeared. I hadn’t even had time to take aim.

“Damnation!” I yelled.

“What’s wrong?” Baciccin asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

Costanzina hadn’t seen it either; she had gone back into the house.

“Well,” Baciccin went on, “you know that bitch kept chasing that hare and bringing it back to me over and over until I hit it? What a dog!”

“Where is she now?”

“Ran off.”

“Well, you can’t win every time.”

My father came back with the panting dog. He was cursing.

“Missed by a fraction of an inch. This close. A big one. Did you see him?”

“Not a thing,” Baciccin said.

I slung the gun over my shoulder and we started on our way down.

The Master’s Eye

“The master’s eye,” his father said to him, pointing to his eye, an old eye, without lashes, between wrinkled lids, round as a bird’s eye, “the master’s eye fattens the horse.”

“Yes,” said the son, and remained sitting on the edge of the rough wooden table, in the shade of the spreading fig tree.

“So,” said the father, still holding his finger under his eye, “go to the grain fields and keep a watch on the mowing.”

The son’s hands were buried in his pockets. A breath of wind ruffled the back of his short-sleeved shirt.

“I’m going,” he said, and stood still. The hens pecked at the remains of a fig trampled on the ground.

Seeing his son surrender to indolence like a reed in the wind, the old man felt his fury increasing from minute to minute: he dragged sacks out of the warehouse, mixed fertilizer, let orders and curses fall on stooping men, threatened the chained dog whimpering under a cloud of flies. The master’s son didn’t step aside or take his hands out of his pockets; he stood with his gaze on the ground and his lips set to whistle, as if disapproving of such a waste of energy.

“The master’s eye,” said the old man.

“I’m going,” said the son, and, in no hurry, he went.

He walked along the vineyard path, hands in his pockets, scarcely lifting his heels. His father watched him for a while, standing, legs apart, under the fig tree, his big fists clasped behind his back; several times he was about to shout something at him, but he remained silent and went back to mixing fistfuls of fertilizer.

Walking, the son looked again at the colors of the valley, listened again to the hornets buzzing in the orchards. Every time he returned to his village, after months spent idling in distant cities, he rediscovered the air and the deep silence of the land like a forgotten recollection of childhood and, at the same time, with remorse. Whenever he came back to his land it was as if he were expecting a miracle: I will return and this time everything will have a meaning, the strips of green sloping down the valley of my farm, the unchanging gestures of men at work, the growth of every plant, of every branch—a frenzy for this land will seize me, too, like my father, until I am no longer able to part from it.

The grain grew on some terraces above a steep rocky bank, where it struggled to thrive, a yellow rectangle in the middle of the gray wasteland, with two black cypresses, one above and one below, that seemed to be standing guard. In the grain were men and the movement of scythes; little by little the yellow disappeared, as if annihilated, and, underneath, the gray reemerged. The master’s son climbed up the bare bank by way of the shortcuts, a blade of grass between his teeth; from the terraces where the grain grew the men had certainly seen him coming and had commented on his arrival. He knew what the men thought of him: The old man is mad but his son is a fool.

“Hello,” said U Pé as he arrived.

“Hello,” said the master’s son.

“Hello,” said the others.

And the master’s son answered, “Hello.”

There: everything there was to say between them had been said. The master’s son sat down at the edge of the terrace, hands in his pockets.

“Hello,” another voice said, from the terrace above: it was Franceschina, who was gleaning. He said again, “Hello.”

The men reaped in silence. U Pé was an old man with yellow skin that fell in wrinkles over his bones; U Ché was middle-aged, hairy, and thickset; Nanin was young, a lanky redhead; he was wearing a sweaty shirt, and a sliver of bare back appeared and disappeared at every stroke of the scythe. Old Girumina, crouched on the ground like a big black hen, was gleaning. Franceschina was on the higher terrace and was singing a song from the radio. Every time she bent over her legs were visible up to the backs of her knees.

The master’s son felt ashamed to be there standing guard, straight as a cypress, idle, in the midst of all those workers. Now, he thought, I’ll tell them to give me a scythe for a moment and I’ll have a go. But he remained quiet and motionless, gazing at the ground bristling with the hard yellow stalks of the cut grain. Anyway, he wasn’t capable of swinging the scythe, and would have made a poor showing. Gleaning: that he could have done, women’s work. He bent over, picked up two stalks, threw them in old Girumina’s black apron.

“Be careful not to trample where I haven’t harvested yet,” said the old woman.

The master’s son sat down again on the side, chewing a piece of straw.

“More this year than last year?” he asked.

“Less,” said U Ché, “every year less.”

“There was the freeze in February,” said U Pé. “You remember the freeze in February?”

“Yes,” said the master’s son. But he didn’t remember.

“There was that hailstorm in March,” said old Girumina. “You remember March?”

“It hailed,” said the master’s son, still lying.

“In my opinion it was the drought in April,” said Nanin. “Remember the drought?”

“All April,” said the master’s son. He didn’t remember anything.

Now the men had started discussing rain and frost and drought: the master’s son was out of all this, detached from the doings of the land. The master’s eye. He was only an eye. But what’s the use of an eye, just an eye, detached from everything? It doesn’t even see. Certainly if his father had been there he would have buried the men in curses, he would find the work badly done, slow, the harvest ruined. He almost felt the need of his father’s cries for those fields, as when you see someone shoot and feel the need to hear an explosion in your eardrums. He would never shout at the men and the men knew it, so they continued to work lazily. But certainly they preferred his father to him, his father who made them work hard, his father who made them sow and harvest grain on those steep banks, made for goats—he was one of them, his father. He wasn’t, he was a stranger who ate off their work; he knew they despised him, maybe hated him.

Now the men had resumed a conversation begun before he arrived, about a woman of the valley.

“So they said,” went old Girumina, “with the priest.”

“Yes, yes,” said U Pé. “The priest had said to her, If you come I’ll give you two lire.”

“Two lire?” said Nanin.

“Two lire,” said U Pé.

“So,” said U Ché.

“What will two lire from then get you now?” asked Nanin.

“A mess,” said U Ché.

“Damn,” said Nanin.

They all laughed at the story of that woman; the master’s son smiled, too, but he didn’t really understand the meaning of those stories, the loves of bony, mustached, black-dressed women.

Franceschina, too, would become like that. Now she was gleaning, on the highest terrace, singing a song from the radio, and every time she bent over her skirt rose, exposing the white skin at the backs of her knees.

“Franceschina,” Nanin shouted, “would you go with a priest for two lire?”

Franceschina was standing up on the terrace, with the bundle of stalks hugged to her chest.

“Two thousand?” she cried.

“Damn, she says two thousand,” Nanin told the others, bewildered.

“I don’t go with priests or with bourgeois types,” cried Franceschina.

“With soldiers, yes?” shouted U Ché.

“Not even with soldiers,” she answered, and went back to picking up stalks.

“Nice legs, Franceschina has,” said Nanin, looking at her.

The others looked, too, and agreed.

“Nice and straight,” they said. The master’s son looked, too, as if he hadn’t already looked before, and gave a nod of assent. Also, he knew they weren’t nice legs, they were muscular and hairy.

“When are you going for your military service, Nanin?” asked Girumina.

“Damn it, they want men who’ve already been declared unfit to pass the medical exam,” said Nanin. “If the war doesn’t end they’ll call me, too, even with a weak chest.”

“Is it true that America has entered the war?” U Ché asked the master’s son.

“America,” said the master’s son. Maybe now he would be able to say something. “America and Japan,” he said, then was silent. What else could one say?

“Who’s stronger, America or Japan?”

“They’re both strong,” said the master’s son.

“And is England strong?”

“Oh, yes, it’s strong, too.”

“And Russia?”

“Russia’s strong, too.”

“Germany?”

“Germany, too.”

“And us?”

“It will be a long war,” said the master’s son. “A long war.”

“At the time of the other war,” said U Pé, “there was a cave in the woods where there were ten deserters.” And he pointed up toward the pines.

“If it keeps going a while,” said Nanin, “I say we’ll end up in the caves ourselves.”

“But,” said U Ché, “who knows how it will end.”

“All wars end like this,” said U Pé. “Those who have have.”

“Those who have have,” said the others.

The master’s son, chewing his straw, began climbing up the terraces, up to Franceschina. He looked at the white skin at the back of her knees when she bent over to pick up the stalks. Maybe with her it would be easier; he would imagine he was courting her.

“Do you ever go to the city, Franceschina?” he asked. It was a stupid way of starting a conversation.

“Sometimes I go on Sunday afternoon. If there’s a fair I go to the fair, otherwise to the movies.”

She had stopped working. That wasn’t what he wanted: if his father had seen! Instead of keeping an eye on things, he was getting the women to talk on the job.

“Do you like going to the city?”

“Yes, I like it. But basically when you come home at night what have you got. Monday it starts again, and those who have have.”

“Yes,” he said, biting the straw. Now he had to leave her alone, otherwise she wouldn’t go back to work. He turned and went down.

On the terraces below, the men had almost finished, and Nanin was tying up the sheaves in the tarp to carry down on his back. The deep sea facing the hills was beginning to turn violet on the side where the sun set. The master’s son looked at his land, all stones and hard stubble, and understood that he would always be desperately estranged from it.

Lazy Sons

At dawn my brother and I are asleep, faces buried in the pillows, and already our father’s hobnail tread can be heard as he moves around the rooms. When he gets up, our father makes a lot of noise, deliberately perhaps, and he sees to it that he has to go up and down the steps, in his cleated boots, at least twenty times, never for any reason. Maybe this is his whole life, a waste of energy, a great useless exertion; and maybe he does it as a protest against the two of us—we get him so angry.

My mother doesn’t make any noise, but she is already up, too, in the big kitchen, poking the fire, peeling things with those hands that become blacker and more scarred all the time, polishing glasses and furniture, jabbing at the laundry. This, too, is a protest against us, her doing housework always in silence and managing it all without any maids.

“Sell the house, and we’ll spend the money,” I say with a shrug when they start pestering me about how things can’t go on like this. But my mother continues toiling silently, day and night, till there’s no telling when she sleeps; and meanwhile the cracks in the ceilings widen and lines of ants trace the walls, and weeds and brambles keep growing higher in the rank garden. Soon nothing will be left of our house but a ruin covered with vines. In the morning, however, Mother doesn’t come and tell me to get up, because she knows it’s no use anyway, and that silent attention to the house crumbling around her is her way of persecuting us.

My father, on the contrary, is already flinging open our window at six o’clock, in hunting jacket and puttees, and yelling at us: “I’m going to take a stick to you two! Bums! Everybody works in this house but the pair of you! Pietro! Get up if you don’t want me to hang you! And make that gallows bird of a brother, Andrea, get up, too!”

In our sleep, we have already heard him approaching; digging our heads into the pillows, we don’t even roll over. We protest now and then with grunts when he doesn’t let up. But he soon goes away; he knows it’s all useless, this is all a play he puts on, a ritual ceremony, a refusal to admit defeat.

We grope our way back into sleep; most times my brother hasn’t even waked up, he’s become so used to this and he doesn’t give a damn. Egotistic and insensitive, that’s my brother: sometimes he makes me mad. I act the same way he does, but at least I understand that it’s not right, and I’m the first to be discontent. Still I keep on, though with anger. “Dog,” I say to my brother Andrea, “you dog, you’re killing your father and mother.” He doesn’t answer: he knows I’m a hypocrite and a clown, and nobody’s a bigger do-nothing than me.

Ten, maybe twenty minutes later, my father’s at the door again, in a stew. Now he uses a different method: kindly, almost indifferent invitations, a pathetic farce. He says, “Well, who’s coming to San Cosimo with me? The vines have to be tied.”

San Cosimo is our farm. Everything is drying up and there’s no manpower or money to keep it running.

“The potatoes have to be dug. Are you coming, Andrea? Well? Are you coming? I’m speaking to you, Andrea. We have to water the beans. Are you coming?”

Andrea raises his mouth from the pillow. “No,” he says, and goes back to sleep.

“Why not?” My father continues his farce. “It was all settled. Pietro? Are you coming, Pietro?”

Then he explodes again and calms down again and talks about the things to be done at San Cosimo, as if it were understood that we’re going. That dog, I think of my brother, that dog, he could get up and give the poor old man some satisfaction, at least this once. But I myself feel no urge to get up, and I make an effort to be immersed again in my sleep, by now disturbed.

“Well, hurry up. I’ll wait for you,” our father says, and goes off as if we were now in agreement. We hear him pacing and fuming downstairs, preparing the fertilizer, the sulfate, the seeds to be taken up there; every day he sets out and comes back laden like a mule.

We are thinking he’s already gone when he yells again, from the foot of the stairs: “Pietro! Andrea! For God’s sake, aren’t you ready yet?”

This is his final outburst; then we hear his hobnailed footsteps behind the house, the gate slams, and he goes off along the path, hawking and spitting.

Now we could have a good long sleep, but I can’t manage to doze off; I think of my father, burdened, climbing up the track spitting, and afterward at work, in a rage with the tenants who steal from him and let everything go to rack and ruin. And he looks at the plants and the fields, where the insects gnaw and burrow all over, and at the yellowing leaves and the thick weeds, all the work of his life that is falling to pieces like the sustaining walls of the terrace that crumble more with every rain; and he curses his sons.

“Dog,” I say, thinking of my brother, “you dog.” Then I prick up my ears and from below I can hear something clatter to the floor, a falling broomstick. My mother is alone in that enormous kitchen, and daylight is just brightening the windowpanes, and she is slaving for people who turn their backs on her. As I am thinking this, I fall asleep.

It’s not yet ten o’clock when Mother starts yelling from the stairs, “Pietro! Andrea! It’s ten already!” She sounds very angry, as if she were irritated by something extraordinary, but it’s the same every morning. “Awright . . .” we yell back. And, awake by now, we stay in bed another half-hour, to become used to the idea of getting up.

Then I start saying, “Come on, Andrea, wake up. Let’s get up, all right? Andrea, come on, start getting out of bed.” Andrea grunts.

Finally, with a lot of huffing and stretching, we’re on our feet. Andrea walks around in his pajamas with an old man’s movements, his hair all disheveled and his eyes half blind, and he’s already licking a paper to roll a smoke. He smokes at the window, then begins to wash and shave.

Meanwhile he has started grumbling, and little by little the grumbling gives way to singing. My brother has a baritone voice, and though in company he is always mournful and never sings, when he’s alone, shaving or taking a bath, he strikes up one of those cadenced tunes of his in a grim voice. He doesn’t know any songs, so he always comes forth with a Carducci poem he learned as a child: “On Verona’s castle strikes the noonday sun . . .”

I’m getting dressed on the other side of the room, and I act as chorus, joylessly, but with a kind of violence: “And the green Adige flows murmuring into the open country . . .”

My brother continues his chant to the end, not overlooking a single stanza, as he washes his head and brushes his shoes. “Black as an old raven, and with eyes of coal . . .”

The more he sings, the more I’m filled with anger, and I also start singing fiercely: “Ill luck is mine, and an evil beast has bitten me . . .”

This is the only time we make noise. Afterward we’re quiet for the whole day.

We go downstairs and warm up some milk, then dip bread into it and eat noisily. Mother hovers over us and talks, complaining, but without insistence, about all the things that have to be done, the chores that could be performed. “Yes, yes,” we answer, forgetting immediately.

As a rule I don’t go out in the morning. I stay home, dawdling in the halls with my hands in my pockets, or I arrange my library. I haven’t bought any new books for some time: it would take money; besides, I’ve lost interest in too many things, and if I started reading again I’d want to read everything, and I don’t feel up to it. But I keep arranging the few books I have on the shelf: Italian, French, English; or else by subject—history, philosophy, fiction—or else I put all the bound volumes together, with the fine editions and the shabby books elsewhere.

My brother, on the contrary, goes to the Caffè lmperia and watches the billiards game. He himself doesn’t play, because he doesn’t know how; he stays there for hours and hours, looking at the players, following the balls in fancy triple shots, smoking, never getting excited, never betting, since he has no money. Sometimes they let him keep score, but often his mind wanders and he makes mistakes. He transacts a little deal or two, enough to pay for his smokes. Six months ago he filed an application with the Aqueduct Administration for a job that would support him, but he hasn’t followed it up; for the present he gets enough to eat, anyway.

At dinner my brother arrives late, and both of us eat in silence. My parents are always arguing about expenses and income and debts and about how to manage with two sons who aren’t earning anything; and our father says, “Look at your friend Costanzo, look at your friend Augusto.” Our friends aren’t like us: they’ve formed a partnership, buying and selling the timber rights to some woods, and they’re always out and about on business, dealing and bargaining, sometimes with our father, too; they earn piles of money and soon will own their own truck. They’re crooks and our father knows it; still, he would like us to be like them rather than the way we are. “Your friend Costanzo earned such-and-such an amount on that deal,” he says. “See if you can go in with them, too.” But our friends hang around with us in their free time, and they never suggest deals to us; they know we’re lazy and good-for-nothing.

In the afternoon, my brother goes back to sleep: there’s no figuring out how he manages to sleep so much, but he does. I go to the movies: I go every day. If they’re showing a film I’ve already seen, then I don’t have to make any effort to follow the story.

After supper, stretched out on the sofa, I read some long, translated novels people lend me; often, as I read, I lose the thread of the plot and can never make heads or tails of it. My brother gets up as soon as he’s eaten and leaves, to watch the billiards game.

My parents go straight to bed because they get up early in the morning. “Go to your room; you’re wasting electricity here,” they say to me as they climb the stairs. “I’m going,” I say, and remain lying there.

I’m already in bed and have been sleeping for a while when my brother comes back, around two. He turns on the light, stirs around the room, and has a last smoke. He tells me what’s going on in the city, expresses kindly opinions of people. This is the hour when he is really awake and glad to talk. He opens the window to let the smoke out; we look at the hill with the lighted road and the dark, clear sky. I sit up in bed and, carefree, we chat for a long time about trivial things, until we’re sleepy again.

A Goatherd at Luncheon

It was, as usual, a mistake of my father’s. He had had a boy sent down from a village in the mountains to look after our goats. And the day the boy arrived, my father insisted on asking him to eat with us.

My father does not understand the things that divide people, the difference between a dining room like ours, with its inlaid furniture, dark-patterned carpets, and majolica plates, and those homes of theirs, with smoky stone walls, beaten-earth floors, and newspapers black with flies draped over the mantelpieces. My father always goes about among them with that jolly, ceremonious air of his, and if they invite him to eat when he is out shooting, as they all do, he insists on eating off the same dirty dish; then in the evening they all come to him to settle their disputes. We, his own sons, don’t take much part, though. Perhaps my brother, with that air of silent complicity he has, may occasionally be given some rough confidence, but I’m too well aware of the difficulties of communication between human beings, and sense at every minute the gulfs that separate the classes, the abysses that politeness opens up under me.

When the boy came in, I was reading the paper. My father began fussing over him. What was the point? He’d only get all the more confused. But he didn’t. I raised my eyes and there he was in the middle of the room, with his heavy hands and his chin on his chest, though looking straight ahead of him, stubbornly. He was a goatherd boy of about my own age, with compact, wooden-looking hair and high features—forehead, nose, cheeks. He wore a dark military shirt with its top button straining over his Adam’s apple, and a crumpled old suit out of which his big knobbly hands and great boots, lifting slowly on the gleaming floor, seemed to overflow.

“This is my son Quinto,” said my father. “He’s in high school.”

I got up and put on a smile; my outstretched hand met his and we immediately moved apart without looking each other in the face. My father had already begun saying things about me that no one could want to hear—how long I still had at school, how I’d once killed a squirrel when we were out shooting in the area the goatherd came from—and I kept on shrugging my shoulders as if to say, “Me? No, really!” The goatherd stood there mute and still, showing no sign of following; every now and again he gave a quick glance toward one of the walls or curtains, like an animal looking for an opening in a cage.

Then my father changed the subject and began walking around the room talking about certain varieties of vegetables grown up in those valleys. He kept asking the boy questions, while the goatherd, with his chin on his chest and his mouth half shut, kept on saying he did not know. Hidden behind the newspaper, I waited for the food to be served. But my father, having made his guest sit down, brought him a cucumber from the kitchen and began cutting it up in small pieces in his soup plate, for him to eat as an hors d’oeuvre, my father told him.

Now my mother came in, tall, dressed in black with lace trimmings, her smooth white hair rigidly parted. “Ah, here’s our little goatherd boy,” she said. “Have you had a good trip?” The boy did not get up or reply, but just raised his eyes to my mother in a look full of uncomprehending distrust. I felt wholeheartedly on his side; disapproving of the tone of affectionate superiority my mother was using, I even found myself preferring my father’s manner, his rather servile affability, to her aristocratic condescension. And then I hated that possessive tu by which my mother addressed the boy; if she’d been using dialect like my father it might have been all right, but she was talking Italian to the poor goatherd, an Italian cold as a marble wall.

To protect him I tried to turn the conversation away from him, so I read aloud an item of news from the paper, something that could only interest my parents, about a vein of mineral ore discovered in a part of Africa where certain friends of ours lived. I had deliberately chosen an item that could have no conceivable connection with our guest and was full of names unknown to him; I did this not to make his isolation weigh on him more, but so as to dig a moat around him, as it were, give him a breathing space, and distract my parents’ besieging attentions for a moment. Perhaps he, too, misinterpreted my move. Anyway, it had the opposite effect. My father went rambling on with a story about Africa, confusing the boy with a tangle of strange names of places, peoples, and animals.

Just as the soup was being served, my grandmother appeared in her wheelchair, pushed by my poor sister, Cristina. They had to shout loudly in her ear to tell her what was happening. My mother, indeed, made a formal introduction: “This is Giovannino, who is going to look after our goats. My mother. My daughter, Cristina.”

I blushed with shame at hearing him called Giovannino, little Giovanni; how different that name must have sounded in the rough dialect of the mountains; certainly it was the first time he heard himself called it in that way.

My grandmother nodded with matriarchal calm. “Fine, Giovannino, let’s hope you don’t let any goats escape, eh!” My sister, Cristina, who treats all our rare visitors as people of great distinction, now muttered “Delighted” in a terrified way, half hidden behind the back of the wheelchair, and she held her hand out to the youth, who shook it heavily.

The goatherd was sitting on the edge of his chair, but with his shoulders back and his hands spread on the tablecloth, looking at my grandmother as if fascinated. The old woman was sunk in her big armchair, with mittens half covering bloodless fingers that made vague movements in the air, a tiny face under its network of wrinkles, spectacles turned toward him as she tried to make out some shape in the confused mass of shadows and colors transmitted by her eyes, and spoke an Italian that sounded as if she were reading out of a book. It must all have seemed so different to him from the other old women he had met that perhaps he thought he was face-to-face with a new species of human being.

My poor sister, Cristina, had not moved from her corner. As usual when she saw a new face, she now advanced into the middle of the room, her hands joined under the little shawl drawn over her deformed shoulders, her head streaked with premature gray, her face marked with the boredom of her reclusive life. Raising her clear eyes toward the windows, she said, “There’s a little boat on the sea, I saw it. And two sailors who kept rowing and rowing. And then it passed behind the roof of a house and no one saw it anymore.”

I wanted our guest to realize my sister’s unfortunate state at once, so that he would take no more notice of her. I jumped up and, with a forced animation that was quite out of place, exclaimed, “But how can you have seen men in a boat from our windows? We’re too far away.”

My sister went on looking out of the window—not at the sea but at the sky. “Two men in a boat. Rowing and rowing. And there was a flag, too, the tricolor flag.”

Then I realized that as the goatherd listened to my sister he did not seem so uneasy and out of place as he seemed to be with the rest of us. Perhaps he had finally found something that came into his experience, a point of contact between our world and his. And I remembered the idiots who are often to be met in mountain villages, who spend their hours sitting on thresholds amid clouds of flies, and sadden the village nights with their wails. Perhaps this family misfortune of ours, which he understood because it was well known to his own people, brought him closer to us than my father’s eccentric jollity, the women’s maternal and protective airs, and my own awkward detachment.

My brother arrived late as usual, when we already had spoons in our hands. The instant he came in he took in everything at a glance; before my father had explained and introduced him as “My son Marco, who’s studying to be a notary,” he had already sat down to eat, without blinking an eyelid, without looking at anyone. His cold spectacles were so impenetrable they seemed black; his depressing little beard stood out spruce and stiff. He gave the impression of having greeted everyone and excused himself for being late, and even perhaps of having smiled at the guest, instead of which he had not opened his mouth or wrinkled his smooth forehead with a single line. Now I knew that the goatherd had a powerful ally on his side, an ally who would protect him and make every retreat possible for him in the atmosphere heavy with awkwardness which only he, Marco, knew how to create.

The goatherd was eating, bent over his bowl of soup, slurping it noisily about in his mouth. Now we three males were with him in leaving obvious manners to the women: my father from natural expansive noisiness, my brother from imperious determination, I from ill grace. I was pleased with this new alliance, this rebellion of us four against the women. Certainly the women disapproved of us all at that moment, and avoided saying so only in order not to humiliate the family in front of the guest, and vice versa. But did the goatherd realize this? Definitely not.

My mother now went into the attack, with a very sweet “And how old are you, Giovannino?”

The number the boy gave rang out like a shout. He repeated it slowly. “What’s that?” said our grandmother, and repeated it wrongly. “No, this,” and everyone began shouting it in her ear. Only my brother was silent. “A year older than Quinto,” my mother now discovered, and this had to be repeated all over again to my grandmother. These were the things I could not bear, which shamed me to the bottom of my heart, for my sake and his: this comparing of him and me, he who had to look after goats to make a living and stank of ram and was strong enough to fell an oak, and I who spent my life on a sofa by the radio reading opera librettos, who would soon be going to the university and disliked flannel next to my skin because it made my back prickle. This injustice, these things lacking in me to be him and lacking in him to be me, gave me a sharp feeling of our being, he and I, two incomplete creatures hiding, diffident and ashamed, behind that soup bowl.

It was then that our grandmother asked, “And have you already done your military service?” This question was ridiculous; his class had not yet been called, he had scarcely passed his first checkup. “A soldier of the pope,” said my father, one of those jokes of his that no one understood and which he had to repeat twice. “They made me ‘returnable,’ ” said the goatherd. “Oh,” said our grandmother, “refused”; and her voice expressed disapproval and regret. Even if he is, I thought, why make so much of it? “No. ‘Returnable.’ ” “And what does that mean, ‘returnable’?” This had to be explained. “Soldier of the pope, ha ha! Soldier of the pope,” my father laughed. “Oh, I hope you aren’t ill,” said my mother. “Ill on the day of the medical,” said the goatherd, and luckily my grandmother did not hear.

My brother raised his head from his plate then and through his spectacles gave the guest almost a direct glance, a glance of complicity, while his little beard moved slightly at the corners of his lips in a hint of a smile, as if to say, “Let the others be; I understand you and know all about these things.” It was with these unexpected signals of complicity that Marco attracted sympathy; from now on the goatherd would always turn to him and answer every question with a glance in his direction. And yet I guessed that at the root of this apparent shy humanity of my brother, Marco, there lay both the servility of our father and the aristocratic superiority of our mother. And I thought that by allying himself with him the goatherd would not be any less alone.

At this point I thought of something to say that might perhaps interest him, and I explained that I had had my military service deferred until the end of my studies. But now I had brought out the tremendous difference between us two: the impossibility of a common link even about things that seemed everyone’s fate, like military service.

Just then my sister came out with one of her remarks: “And will you go into the cavalry, sir, excuse me?” This would have passed unobserved if my grandmother had not taken up the subject. “Ah, the cavalry nowadays . . .” The goatherd muttered something about alpini. We realized, my brother and I, that we had at that moment an ally in our mother, who certainly found this subject silly. But why did she not intervene, then, to change the conversation? Luckily my father had stopped repeating, “Ah, a soldier of the pope,” and now asked if mushrooms were growing in the woods.

We went on thus for the whole length of the meal, with us three poor boys fighting our war against a cruel, torturing world without being able to recognize one another as allies, full of mutual fears. My brother ended by making a grand gesture, after the fruit: he took out a pack of cigarettes and offered one to our guest. They lit up without asking if they were disturbing anyone; and this was the fullest moment of solidarity created during that meal. I was excluded because my parents had forbidden me to smoke till I left school. My brother was satisfied now; he got up, inhaled once or twice, looking down at us, then turned around and went out as silently as he had come.

My father lit his pipe and turned on the radio for the news. The goatherd was looking at the instrument, his hands open on his knees and his eyes staring and reddening with tears. Certainly those eyes were still seeing his village high above the fields, the lines of mountains, and the thick chestnut woods. My father did not let us listen to the radio—he was criticizing the United Nations—and I took advantage of this to leave the dining room.

That whole afternoon and evening we were persecuted by the memory of the goatherd. We had supper in silence by the dim light of the chandelier and could not free ourselves of the thought of him alone in the hut on our land. Now he must have finished the soup in the can in which he had heated it up, and was lying on the straw almost in the dark, while down below the goats could be heard moving about and bumping one another and munching grass. The goatherd would go outside and there would be a slight mist over toward the sea and damp air and a little spring gurgling gently in the silence. The goatherd would head for it along paths covered with wild ivy, and drink, though he was not thirsty. Fireflies could be seen appearing and vanishing in what seemed like a great compact swarm. But he would move his arm in the air without touching them.

The Bagnasco Brothers

I’m away from home for months at a time, sometimes years. Every so often I return, and my house is always at the top of the hill, its old red stucco making it visible from a distance amid the olive trees, which are thick as smoke. It’s an old house, with vaulted arches like bridges, and Masonic symbols painted on the walls by my ancestors to keep the priests away. My brother’s at home, too; like me he travels around the world, but he goes home more often than I do, and when I return I always find him there. As soon as he arrives he gets busy digging out his shooting jacket, his homespun vest, his leather-seated pants; he chooses the pipe that draws best and he smokes.

“Oh,” he says when I arrive, and maybe it’s years since we’ve seen each other and he didn’t expect me. “Hello,” I say, and this is not because there’s ill will between us—if we met in another city we’d greet each other warmly, maybe even with a pat on the shoulder; “Well, well!” we’d say—but because it’s different at our house, at our house that is the custom.

Then we both enter the house, hands in pockets, silent, a little ill at ease, and suddenly my brother starts talking as if the conversation had just been interrupted.

“Last night,” he says, “Giacinta’s son almost came to a bad end.”

“Shot him, you should have,” I say, though I don’t know what it’s about. Also, we’d like to ask each other where we’re coming from, what job we’re doing, if we’re making money, if we have a wife, children, but there’s time to ask later; now it would be contrary to our habits.

“You know that Friday night it’s our turn for the water from the Long Well,” he says.

“Friday night it is,” I assure him, though I don’t remember and maybe never knew.

“You think we get the water every Friday night?” he says. “They’ll send it all in their direction if you’re not around to keep watch. Last night I go past, it must have been eleven, and I see someone running with a hoe: the flow had been turned toward Giacinta’s.”

“Shot him, you should have!” I say, and already I’m full of rage: for months and months I’d forgotten that the problem of the water from the Long Well existed. In a week I’ll be gone again and I’ll forget about it again, although now I’m bursting with rage because of the water they’ve stolen from us in the past months and will steal in those to come.

Meanwhile I wander up and down the stairs and through the rooms, with my brother behind me puffing on his pipe, up and down the stairs and through the rooms, where guns old and new are hanging along with powder flasks and hunting horns and chamois heads. The stairs and the rooms smell stale and worm-eaten and have Masonic symbols on the walls instead of crucifixes. My brother tells me about everything the tenant farmers steal, about the harvests that go bad, about other people’s goats that feed in our fields, about our woods where the whole valley goes to gather wood. And I go pulling out of closets jackets, leggings, vests with long pockets for holding cartridges, and I take off my wrinkled city clothes and look at myself in the mirrors all rigged out in leather and homespun.

Soon afterward we go down along the mule track with the double-barreled guns over our shoulders, to try some shooting, on the wing or stationary. We haven’t gone a hundred paces when a hail of gravel hits our necks, hurled hard, likely from a slingshot. Instead of instantly turning around, we pretend not to notice and continue, keeping an eye on the vineyard wall above the track. Amid the leaves, gray with sulfur, the face of a boy peeks out, a round red face with a crowd of freckles under the eyes, like a peach eaten by aphids.

“Good God, they even set the children against us!” I say, and start cursing them.

The boy looks out again, makes a rude noise with his tongue, and runs away. My brother takes off through the gate of the vineyard and starts chasing him between the rows of vines, trampling the seedlings, with me behind, until we catch him between us. My brother grabs him by the hair, I by the ears. I realize I’m hurting him, but I keep pulling, and the more I hurt him the angrier I get, and we shout, “This is for you, and the rest will be for your father, who sent you.”

The boy is crying; he bites my finger and runs away. A woman in black appears at the end of the rows; he hides his head in the folds of her apron and she starts shouting at us, waving her fist: “Cowards! Picking on a child! The same bullies as always. Someone’ll pay you back, you can be sure!”

But we’ve already gone on our way, shrugging our shoulders—you don’t respond to women.

Then we meet two men coming toward us loaded with bundles of sticks, bent double by the weight.

“Hey, you two”—we stop them—“where did you get that wood?”

“Wherever we wanted,” they say, and would like to keep going.

“Because if you took it from our woods we’ll make you take it back, and hang you from the trees besides.”

They’ve put their bundles down on the wall and are looking at us, sweating in the sackcloth hoods that protect their heads and shoulders.

“We don’t know what’s yours or not yours. We don’t know you.”

In fact they look like new people, maybe unemployed folk who’ve started collecting wood. One more reason to introduce ourselves.

“We’re the Bagnasco brothers. Never heard of us?”

“We don’t know anything about anyone. We got the wood in the town’s woods.”

“It’s prohibited in the town’s. We’ll call a guard and have you put inside.”

“Oh, now we know who you are,” one of them bursts out. “You don’t want us to know who you are, always ready to cause trouble for poor people. But someday it’ll stop!”

I begin, “What will stop?” Then we decide to let it go, and we set off, swearing at each other.

Now, when my brother and I are in some other place, we talk with the tram drivers, with newspaper sellers, give a smoke to whoever asks for it, ask for a smoke from someone passing by. Here it’s different, here we’ve always been like this, we go around with the double-barreled guns and make trouble everywhere.

The tavern at the pass is where the Communists meet; outside is a board where newspaper clippings and other notices are tacked up. Going by, we see a poem posted there saying that the rich people are always the same, and the ones who were bullies in the past are the brothers of the ones who are now. “The brothers” is underlined because it all has a double meaning against us. We write on the page “Cowards and liars.” Then we sign: “Giacomo Bagnasco and Michele Bagnasco.”

And yet when we’re away we eat at the cold oilcloth-covered tables where other men who work far from home eat, and with our nails we dig out the soft part of the sludgy gray bread, and then our neighbor at the table talks about what’s in the newspaper, and we, too, say, “There are still bullies in the world! But one day things will be better.” Now, here, we couldn’t say that; here is the land that doesn’t produce, the tenant farmers who steal, the laborers who sleep on the job, the people who spit at us when we pass because we won’t work our land, and—they say—all we’re good for is exploiting others.

We reach a place where the wood pigeons should be passing, and we look for two spots to wait in. But right away we get tired of keeping still, and my brother points out a house where some sisters live, and whistles to one who’s his lover. She comes down: she has a big bosom and hairy legs.

“Say, see if your sister Adelina will come, too, because here’s my brother, Michele,” he says to her.

The girl goes back inside and I ask my brother, “Is she pretty? Is she pretty?”

My brother doesn’t give his opinion. “She’s fat. She’s easy.”

The two come out, and mine really is big and fat, and for an afternoon like this she’ll do fine. First they want to make a fuss and say they can’t be seen with us or they’ll make enemies of the whole valley, but we tell them don’t be stupid, and we take them to that field, to the place where we were waiting for the wood pigeons. In fact every so often my brother finds a way to fire a shot; he’s used to taking the girl hunting.

After I’ve been there a while with Adelina I feel another hail of gravel land between head and neck. I see the boy with freckles running away, but I don’t feel like chasing him and I swear at him.

In the end the girls say they have to go to the blessing.

“Go ahead, and don’t get in our way again,” we say.

Then my brother explains that they’re the two biggest whores in the valley and they’re afraid that if other young men see them with us they won’t go with them anymore, out of spite. I shout at the wind, “Whores!” But really I’m sorry that only the two biggest whores in the valley will go with us.

All the people waiting for the blessing are standing in the church square, in front of Saints Cosimo and Damian. They make way for us, and glower at us, even the priest, because we Bagnascos haven’t been to Mass for three generations.

As we pass we hear something drop nearby. “The boy!” we cry, and are about to start chasing him. But it’s a rotten medlar that has fallen from a branch. We go on walking, kicking the stones.

The House of the Beehives

It’s difficult to see from far away, and even if someone has already been here once he won’t remember the way back; there was a path here at one time, but I made brambles grow over it and wiped out every trace. It’s well chosen, this home of mine, lost in this bank of broom, with a single story that can’t be seen from the valley, and covered in a chalky whitewash with windows picked out in red.

There’s some land around I could have worked and haven’t; a patch for vegetables where snails munch the lettuce is enough for me, and a bit of terraced earth to dig up with a pitchfork and grow potatoes, all purple and budding. I only need to work to feed myself, for I’ve got nothing to share with anyone.

And I don’t cut back the brambles, either the ones now clambering over the roof of the house or those already creeping like a slow avalanche over the cultivated ground; I’d like them to bury everything, myself included. Lizards have made their nests in the cracks of the walls, ants have scooped out porous cities under the bricks of the floor; I look forward every day to seeing if a new crack has opened, and think of the cities of the human race being smothered and swallowed up by weeds.

Above my home are a few strips of rough meadow where I let my goats roam. At dawn, dogs sometimes pass by, on the scent of hares; I chase them off with stones. I hate dogs, with their servile fidelity to man; I hate all domestic animals, their pretense of having sympathy with human beings just so they can lick the remains off greasy plates. Goats are the only animals I can stand, for they don’t expect intimacy or give any.

I don’t need chained dogs to guard me. Or even hedges or padlocks, those horrible contraptions of humans. My field is studded with beehives, and a flight of bees is like a thorny hedge that only I can cross. At night the bees sleep in the bean husks, but no man ever comes near my house; people are afraid of me and they are right, not because certain tales they tell about me are true—lies, I say, just the sort of thing they would tell—but they are right to be afraid of me, I want them to be.

When I go over the crest in the morning, I can see the valley dropping away beneath and the sea high all around me and the world. And I see the houses of the human race perched on the edge of the sea, shipwrecked in their false neighborliness; I see the tawny, chalky city, the glittering of its windows and the smoke of its fires. One day brambles and grass will cover its squares, and the sea will come up and mold the ruins into rocks.

Only the bees are with me now; they buzz around my hands without stinging me when I take the honey from the hives, and settle on me like a living beard; friendly bees, ancient race without a history. For years I’ve been living on this bank of broom with goats and bees; once I used to make a mark on the wall at the passing of each year; now the brambles choke everything. Why should I live with men and work for them? I loathe their sweaty hands, their savage rites, their dances and churches, their women’s acid saliva. But those stories aren’t true, believe me; they’ve always told stories about me, the lying swine.

I don’t give anything and I don’t owe anything; if it rains at night I cook and eat the big snails slithering down the banks in the morning; the earth in the woods is scattered with soft, damp toadstools. The woods give me everything else I need: sticks and pinecones to burn, and chestnuts; and I snare hares and thrushes, too, for don’t think I love wild animals or have an idyllic adoration of nature—one of man’s absurd hypocrisies. I know that in this world we must devour one another and that the survival of the fittest holds; I kill only the animals I want to eat, with traps, not with guns, so as not to need dogs or other men to fetch them.

Sometimes I meet men in the woods, if I’m not warned in time by the dull thuds of their axes cutting down trees one by one. I pretend not to see them. On Sundays the poor come to gather fuel in the woods, which they strip like the speckled heads of aloes; the trunks are hauled away on ropes and form rough tracks, which gather the rain during storms and provoke landslides. May everything go to similar ruin in the cities of the human race; may I, as I walk along one day, see chimney tops emerging from the earth, meet parts of streets falling off into ravines, and stumble on strips of railroad track in the middle of the forest.

But you must wonder if I don’t ever feel this solitude of mine weighing on me, if some evening, one of those long twilights, I haven’t gone down, without any definite idea in my head, toward the houses of the human race. I did go, one warm twilight, toward those walls surrounding the gardens below, and climbed down over the medlar trees; but when I heard women laughing and a distant child calling, back I came up here. That was the last time; now I’m up here alone. Well, I get frightened of making a mistake every now and again, as you do. And so, like you, I go on as I was before.

You’re afraid of me, of course, and you’re right. Not because of that affair, though. That, whether it ever happened or not, was so many years ago it doesn’t matter now anyway.

That woman, that dark woman who came up here to scythe—I had only been up here a short time then and was still full of human emotions—well, I saw her working high on the slope and she hailed me and I didn’t reply and passed by. Yes, I was still full of human emotions then, and of an old resentment, too; and because of that old resentment—not against her, I don’t even remember her face—I went up behind her without her hearing me.

Now, the tale as people tell it is obviously false, for it was late and there wasn’t a soul in the valley and when I put my hands around her throat no one heard her. But I would have to tell you my story from the beginning for you to understand.

Ah, well, let’s not mention that evening anymore. Here I live, sharing my lettuce with snails that perforate the leaves, and I know all the places where toadstools grow and can tell the good ones from the poisonous; about women and their poisons I don’t think anymore. Being chaste is nothing but a habit, after all.

She was the last one, that dark woman with the scythe. The sky was full of clouds, I remember, dark clouds scudding along. It must have been under a hurrying sky like that, on slopes cropped by goats, that the first human marriage took place. In contact between human beings there can only, I know, be mutual terror and shame. That’s what I wanted, to see the terror and shame, just the terror and shame, in her eyes; that’s the only reason I did it to her, believe me.

No one has said a word about it to me, ever; there isn’t a word they can say, since the valley was deserted that evening. But every night, when the hills are lost in the dark and I can’t follow the meaning of an old book by the light of the lantern, and I sense the town with its human beings and its lights and music down below, I feel the voices of you all accusing me.

But there was no one to see me there in the valley; they say those things because the woman never returned home.

And if dogs passing by always stop to sniff at a certain spot, and bay and scratch the ground with their paws, it’s because there’s an old moles’ lair there—I swear it, just an old moles’ lair.

The Same Thing as Blood

The night the SS arrested their mother the boys went to have dinner at the Communist’s house. The Communist lived in a cottage halfway up the hill; you climbed a path between olive trees and walls. The night became thick, gray, as if in a hurry, as if it wished to cancel out everything. On the way, the brothers were attentive to the dogs barking on the valley floor; it could mean the SS, who were coming to look for them, or their mother, who was returning, already free, or their father, or someone else who was coming to say something, something that would explain. But the dogs were barking at the soup; the children in the cottages in the valley were shouting, banging their spoons on their bowls.

The rhythm of things had changed, the senses too slow, the thoughts too swift. Had changed suddenly. The older brother and the Communist were coming down from the woods. With the younger brother, they’d been in Rovere del Fariseo, transporting medicines for Giglio’s unit. Waiting for them under the oak were Giglio and Magro, with a pistol hidden under his jacket. Giglio was based in Rocche del Corvo; he carried out raids on his own with a few men, allied with one group and then another, but always doing as he pleased. Sitting under the oak, they had talked, about how to treat the rashes you get on your legs from sleeping on straw, and about how the disbanded partisans in the area needed to join the units and stop wandering through the woods like thieves. Then they had been shown a good hiding place, a den, where five men could sleep. Coming back through the woods they had met a girl who was herding goats and the younger brother had lingered with her. Throughout the woods they continued to hear him singing with her, jumping down the banks of pines with the goats.

Then, at the Bicocca, all the inhabitants of the seven houses were outside their doors. Walter was there, too.

He said, agitated, “You don’t know what happened down there?”

“What happened down there?”

“It’s bad. The SS arrested your mother. Your father went to see if they’ll free her.”

Then the air had become tense and charged, as when the Black Brigade came up and you could hear machine-gun volleys amid the olive trees. A crowd of questions in the eardrums, in the throat. The green faces of spies appeared and disappeared in memory like bursting bubbles. The brother who was returning happily, singing the shepherd girl’s song, suddenly heard the story and stopped.

Now there was this new fact, and all the things of before had changed, this new fact was mixed up inside them, their mother carried off by the Germans. And the brothers became like children again, though they were grown boys, with books, with girls, with bombs, and yet they were children again, hit in the child part of them, hit in their mother. Now they would be taken by the hand, they would walk, lost, children without their mama. But there were many things to do: hide the bombs, the guns, the magazines, the rifles, the medicines, the leaflets, hide them in the hollows of the olive trees and behind the stones of the walls, so that the Germans wouldn’t come up there to search, looking for them. And wonder how and when and why, wonder aloud and in thought, without ever resolving anything.

In the house amid the olive trees where they had been evacuated, their half-blind ninety-year-old grandmother was a big black question waiting. There was a long history of wars in her, in her pitilessly clear memory: there was Curtoza, there was Mentana, wars with trumpets, wars with drums; now they had to explain to her about the SS, about the war that took away mothers. Better to cobble together a story about an earlier-than-expected blackout, a blockade set up by the Germans in the city, which had kept her daughter from returning, sent her son-in-law down to keep her company.

But the house was a forest of questions, and the brothers preferred to go up and have dinner at the Communist’s. That day the Communist had butchered a calf for Biondo’s band and had cooked the tripe: he had invited them to eat with him. The brothers went up talking about killing.

The Communist’s house was a single low room; seen from the outside, at night, it looked like a heap of stones. The butchered calf was hanging on an olive tree a short distance away. Inside, the house was dark, with no candles. The brothers sat at the low table, mute, on two tree stumps. The Communist’s woman filled their plates with tripe in sauce and olives. The brothers stuck their forks blindly into the heavy food. Near the ceiling there was a rustling sound, like wings beating: in the darkness of a niche the brothers could make out the Communist’s falcon, Langàn, captured in the mountains in spring, a souvenir of the camp in Langàn, legendary in the memory of the old partisans, and of the great battle lost in July.

The child, sitting on the woman’s lap, began to laugh at the falcon; it wasn’t their child, but the son of a carabiniere who, fleeing, had entrusted him to the Communist. Then they began to talk, first about hiding the calf until Biondo’s men came to get it, then about the whys and hows, who had been the informer.

The Communist was a short man, with a large bald head, who had traveled the world and was skilled in every trade. He was a man who knew the bad and the good of life, he saw things go badly but knew that one day they would be better, he was a worker who had read books, a Communist. He worked by the day on the farms, because the air of the city was no longer good for him; and he worked well, he was knowledgeable about sowing, about vegetable gardens. But even more he liked sitting on walls and talking about the things that are lost in the world, about coffee that is burned in Brazil, about sugar thrown into the sea in Cuba, about cases of meat that rot on the docks in Chicago. And his memories of a life marked by poverty, emigrations, carabinieri; memories of a man kicked around by life, a man who is interested in everything, in the bad and the good in the world, and who thinks about it.

When they went through the fields—the older brother carrying a book or two, hiding in streams if the Black Brigade should come up, the younger always looking for pistol bullets, machine-gun magazines—they’d meet him coming along the paths holding the carabiniere’s child by the hand and explaining to him the names of the plants: a small bald man in wrinkled black clothes. And then they began to have conversations: with the older he discussed Lenin and Gorky, with the younger gun calibers, automatic weapons.

Now a silence swollen with blood and rage surrounded the brothers, and the words sank into it. Only the woman could provide a little warmth in that darkness, and she tried to cheer them. She was a woman still young, slightly faded, one of those women whose sweetness makes no distinctions between a mother’s and a lover’s, as if that boundary didn’t exist in them; she was a companion of the Communist, a woman who has understood why people suffer and goes to the city with guns in her shopping bag.

When they finished eating, the brothers and the Communist took the path through the woods, with blankets over their shoulders, heading off to sleep in the hiding place that Giglio had showed them. Passing through the vineyards they heard footsteps in the darkness, and the younger cried, “Halt! Stop or I’ll shoot!” while the others hit him on the back to shut him up. But it was Walter, coming to join them, to sleep in the cave, too.

The younger brother and Walter were inseparable, always roaming the countryside armed with guns, following the tracks of the Fascists, and acting like bullies with the evacuees, valiant with the girls. The older brother was a dreamier type, like a guest from another planet, maybe not even capable of loading a gun. He was capable of explaining what democracy is, and communism, he knew the histories of revolutions, poems against tyrants—things also useful to know, but there would be time to learn them later, when the war was over. And his brother and Walter, after listening to him for a little while, began to argue again over a holster or a girl.

But now the two brothers had a thing in common, and something had changed in them: the interest in the life they were leading, the stakes, no longer outside them but in their depths, in their blood. The struggle, the hatred of the Fascists, were no longer what they had been—for the older a thing learned in books, encountered in life as if by chance, for the younger an act of bravado, a walk along the mule track carrying bombs to scare the girls—but were now the same, a thing in their blood, as deep in them as the meaning of mother, a thing determined once and for all, which would be with them throughout their lives.

It was also the cold, when they went down into the den, that made them curl up close to each other. They wanted to sleep, a heavy sleep that would bury them, that would cancel out the dreams they had, imagining the hotels where the Germans hold their prisoners, where the SS pace corridors kept lighted all night. From now on they would carry that offense in the most childlike depths of their souls, avenging themselves, continuing to avenge themselves even when mother and father returned, offended to the roots of their life, for all their life. And what frightened them most was the thought of waking up the next day and suddenly remembering what had happened.

The next day the older brother was sitting in the barren land between the farms and the woods when ships appeared on the sea and began to bombard the city. They always began at that hour: first you saw the shot like a spark on the ship, then you heard it take off, then the arrival. He was waiting for his brother, who hadn’t returned, having gone down for news. What they’d heard so far wasn’t reassuring: their mother detained by the Germans as a hostage, their father, stricken by an attack of his illness, admitted to the hospital.

The city was spread out below him beside the sea, the city now forbidden to him, with the smell of death for him in the circuit of its streets. And in the heart of the city his mother a prisoner. And cannon shots, like fists, from the flat blue striped sea, as if from a void, against his city, against his mother.

A powder magazine must have exploded in the city: you could hear a rapid succession of booms that did not come from the sea. Soon a cloud rose over the houses, with black dots swirling at the top; the explosions filled the valley. If the smoke thinned, the devastated houses could be glimpsed collapsing into ruin.

Then the boy thought of himself, ragged, hunted through the woods, his father in the hospital, his mother a prisoner, his city and his house being destroyed before his eyes, his brother who didn’t return and perhaps had been captured; and yet he felt almost tranquil, as if in the right, in the normal, as if life for him were normal just as it was at that moment.

His brother arrived with a container of polenta and better news: his father was playing sick in order not to be imprisoned and to get himself guarded in the hospital, so that they would let the mother go; the mother was a hostage and sent word to be careful and not to worry about her; down below the torpedo boats of the Tenth Flotilla[*] had exploded and destroyed half the town.

Giglio had come up with him, full of enthusiasm at seeing the bombardment, like the bad soul he was, and was pounding his fist on his palm, shouting, “Come on! Come on! Get going! Knock it all down! My house first of all! All the Fascists dead! All the others safe! Some wounded! Get going! My house first!”

The next day they went with the Communist to Biondo’s camp, to take him the meat from the calf. The men were armed to the teeth; they went down to the city every night, to provoke gunfights.

They roasted a quarter of the calf on the spit and began eating it all together around the fire. They talked of comrades killed and tortured, of Fascists executed and to be executed, of the Germans one might be able to eliminate.

“But,” said the older brother, “it’s better if we don’t touch the Germans. Because my mother is among the hostages and it’s better not to play around.” Yet there was something in the words he said that didn’t convince even him, a kind of renunciation, as if he had at that moment abandoned his mother to those who had captured her. And he was ashamed of the silence that followed.

On the way back, talking to his brother, he said, “I don’t feel like going on with this life of deluxe rebels. Either we’re partisans or we’re not. One of these days we ought to take the mountain path and go up and join the brigade.”

His brother said he had already thought that.

Then, returning, they stopped at Rocche del Corvo, to whistle for Giglio. And while they waited for him, sitting on the edge of the gully, the Communist was wondering how the rocks had formed, and the gullies, and the mountains, and how old the earth was. And together they discussed the rock strata, the ages of the earth, and when the war would be over.

The Wait for Death in a Hotel

At a certain hour of the morning the wives of the prisoners would arrive and start to gesture, their faces turned up toward the windows. From the top floor the men leaned out to ask, to answer; and the women’s hands, below, and the men’s hands, above, seemed to want to reach each other through those few meters of empty air. The big hotel, recently demoted to a barracks and prison, had no features, like bars or perimeter walls, that would help the mind make that sense of lost freedom concrete. Only that vertical distance between them, short but also desperate, remained to feed their anguish, between those with their feet in the flower beds, still masters of themselves, and the others, who’d been led up there as if already to a land of no return.

Every so often one of the prisoners at the window turned toward the hallway and called a name: “Ferrari! Ferrari! Your wife’s down there!” The one who’d been called made his way to the already crowded window and began to smile faintly, make gestures intended to be resigned.

Diego never looked out; his family was far away, scattered by the war. He was tired of that uninterrupted ripple of predictions, hypotheses, good news and bad that the coming and going in the hotel garden pushed up there. Seeping into him along with the weariness of his nerves was a taste for letting go, drifting toward ruin or an always-hoped-for miraculous salvation, a wish for summers spent lying on the sand at the edge of the water, a wish deposited by too many summers of water and sand, which had led him, a lazy and inexperienced youth, here, to his first useful summer, now ending.

But time was a spiderweb of tense nerves, a puzzle that could be put together into countless shapes, all without meaning. Bewildered, men who had been captured at random on the streets walked back and forth on the linoleum of the bare rooms, where the white lips of sinks and bidets, stopped up with putrid water, sneered.

The day before, when he was brought there from the prison fortress, where he had been for a day and a night with other men, now perhaps killed, it had seemed to him that he was being exhumed, arriving in the airy hotel, with around him the warmth of those men who were ignorant and quick to hope. He had laughed and joked, finding them again; Michele, the comrade with whom he had been captured, was also among the prisoners in the hotel. Meeting again, they greeted each other gladly, healthy and united, after a day and a night when, separated, each had feared for the other. Diego felt moved and at the same time stronger, caressing Michele’s rough coat, the large, smooth bald head that came up to his chest. Michele giggled nervously, with his bad teeth, and asked, “What do you say, Diego, will we cheat the Nazis?” Diego said, “I say we’ll do it. We’ll cheat the entire Third Reich.” “Even Von Ribbentrop?” “Even Von Ribbentrop. Even Von Brautchitsch. Even Dr. Goebbels.” And they had squatted near a cold radiator to dispel their nervousness in laughter and jokes (they still didn’t know that many of those captured with them had already been killed), and Diego felt the contentment of one who comes out of prison after years inside.

The prison was an old fortress at the port, where the German antiaircraft artillery was later installed. The cell where they were locked up had served as a disciplinary pen for German soldiers; on the walls were phrases written in German by homosexuals: “Mein lieber Kamarad Franz, My dear comrade Franz, I’m locked up in here and you are far away from me.” “Mein lieber Kamarad Hans, Life was happy when you were near.”

There were twenty of them in the narrow cell, lying on the floor one beside the other. An old man with a white beard, dressed like a hunter, the father of one of them, got up every so often in the night, climbed over the bodies, and went to urinate in a corner, with an effort. The bucket in the corner was perforated with rust holes; in a short time, the old man’s urine soaked the floor of the cell, under their bodies, like a river. Inhuman howls of command, as of men who wish to become wolves, rose from the echoing spaces of the fort at every change of guard.

The barred window looked onto the cliff; all night the sea thundered, driven against the rocks, like blood in the arteries and thoughts in the whorls of a skull. And each of them had in mind the corner he shouldn’t have turned, so he wouldn’t have ended up in there: Diego, the corner that, turning with Michele to escape the roundup, had put him face-to-face with the Germans outfitted for war, stopping passersby in the middle of the street a few meters away, as in the opening scene of a film.

It was a chain of sensations and images that continued to tell in his mind like a rosary, to persuade him again that it couldn’t have happened otherwise: while he was locked up in a cell with the writings of German homosexuals on the walls and the old man who went on peeing in the dark; and now, amid the flaking stuccowork of the hotel’s top story, suspended between death and life, with men lying on the floor as if overcome by vertigo.

Every day a certain number of them were sorted out: to life or to death. In the morning the marshal and Pelle-di-Biscia, Snakeskin, came up with a bundle of documents in hand; those whose documents were given back were free and they left. They could be seen embracing their wives and going off arm in arm, trampling the plants in the flower beds, under the rain of envious gazes.

At night, on the other hand, a lead-gray truck with armed soldiers sitting in it stopped in front of the hotel; the marshal and Snakeskin came up and called out other names, and every night some of them went away surrounded by the helmets of those soldiers. The next day their women would stand below the windows and ask, and then go from one command to the next entreating the interpreters: no one knew where they had been taken. Other women would speak of shots heard at night, from the evacuated areas of the port.

For Diego and Michele, too, this was the choice: freedom or death. Either their documents were acknowledged to be in order, and then it was the big swindle of the whole Reich, to be recounted in the cottages at night accompanied by the laughter of comrades, or it was the lead-gray truck that disappeared amid the damaged houses near the dock, Snakeskin having been the informer.

Snakeskin had reviewed them as soon as they arrived, lining up in front of the hotel, to see if he recognized any former comrades. As he walked he rubbed his hands, which must be sweaty: Snakeskin, a slender youth in the close-fitting uniform, wetting parched, smiling lips with drool. He was pale, with a thin mustache of yellowish fuzz and cold-reddened nostrils and eyelids. His eyes sparkled with emotion at feeling that he, a slender youth, was the judge of the lives of these men, who held their breath at his every word, his every gesture.

They were moments of intoxicating triumph, but always crowded with anguish; every time he appeared in the hotel hallways the inmates swarmed around to ask him, to urge him; they called him by name: “Tullio, Tullio.” He looked at those men who were docile around him, but he saw hatred emerging sharp-edged behind their humility; to one he had said, “Today you court me, tomorrow you’ll shoot me in the back.”

Snakeskin sometimes saved, sometimes killed: he was capricious and evasive. Many had known him before, when he was one of them, and had believed they were lost, seeing that they were interrogated in his presence: he had pretended not to know them. Others who hoped he would be merciful thanks to old favors or friendships had seen him bare his teeth against them, put them in play like mice. Snakeskin sometimes seemed lost on the pathway of blood, sometimes prey to remorse.

Inspecting them, he had stopped in front of Michele and said, “We two have seen each other somewhere.” Michele had pulled in his neck as if a cold drop had rolled down his back, and on his face was a dazed expression of ignorance.

Diego sat on the tile floor of the hall with his hands on his knees. Michele was next to him, looking out the window. He was waiting for his wife, who had gone to speak to Luciano, an interpreter for the SS who worked for the committee and had undertaken to get them out. Michele’s wife was much younger than he, a girl bride. She had big cloudy gray eyes, something severe in her face, which was crowned by smooth black hair, something cheerful in her thin body, in the short lilac dress. Seeing her, you were sorry that life was what it was, painful and obscene, and that everything was not settled and peaceful. Diego would have liked to wander with a woman like that through sunny places without injustices.

He said, “When it’s all over, if we survive, I want to come back to this hotel for a week, after it reopens to tourists.” Michele didn’t answer. Diego said, “I’ll lie on the floor right here as I am now, in the middle of all those respectable rich people, who’ll think I’m mad.”

Michele was still looking out; he didn’t turn. Then he spun around and said hurriedly, as if it were about to slip his mind, “Diego, if you want bread my wife brought some. She gave it to a soldier who’ll give it to us.”

Diego asked, “Your wife came? Did she speak . . . ?”

Michele didn’t look him in the face; he kept his gaze on the ceiling. “Listen, Diego, for me there’s nothing more to do. Snakeskin sold me. Luciano told my wife. She’s down there weeping.” So Michele spoke; in his words was the simplicity of things long feared once they’ve happened.

Michele began walking up and down the hall, hands in his pockets, heavy-lidded eyes open, enormous. Sometimes others spoke to him and he looked at them in a daze, as if he had to return from boundless distances to get back to the subjects of their conversation. Maybe he was thinking of emptiness, as if to get used to not existing.

Diego followed Michele’s pacing from afar, as if worried that the others, in their ignorance, would disturb that walking death agony: a hint of their conversations—the conversations of living men—would be enough to make him suddenly desperate for lost life. He alone of them knew that that man was walking in the hallway toward death, now only a thousand, two thousand steps away. It was his death vigil: he was a dead man walking in his mortuary chapel, in that hallway with the flaking stucco ceiling roses and the faded imprints of mirrors above the marble hearths.

Watching Michele, Diego thought about him: an old companion, Michele, a good man, even with all his faults—not very courageous, not very in line with the party. They had argued often, because of that mania of Michele’s for pontificating and wanting always to be right, with the pompousness of the self-taught man.

Now Michele was walking along the hallway with his hands in his coat pockets, his big bald head pulled down between his shoulders, his big bovine eyes lost in space, as if bewildered by the enormity of what was about to be taken away from him. He was a poor, short, bald man, in an old overcoat, with a three-day beard, but Diego seemed to see in him, in those bovine eyes, in that slow, preoccupied walk, a threatening force of nature. Michele would continue to walk like that even after death; the next day he would enter, through the window, the rooms where the German officers were carousing, grown very large but still in his threadbare overcoat, hands in the pockets, bald head with the bovine gaze lost in space, and he would walk at that slow pace of his over the tablecloths stained with spumante, in silence, in front of the lighted Christmas trees, the sparkling iron crosses, the ostentatious nudity of breasts and buttocks, amid the terror of the German officers and the cries of the women. And so he would go on walking, even when the war was over, and the rich would not have peace in their houses or joy in their families, for that short, immeasurable man would enter through the windows to cross their rooms; and on the tables around which peace and war are decided and in all the places where people forbid or take away or lie, where they preach what is false and worship unjust gods, the shadow of that man killed at night on the dock would appear.

Some of the prisoners spoke of men hanged by the Germans; Diego saw Michele hanging from a lamppost at the port, his eyes enormous, his hands still in his pockets. And it seemed to him that it was all men who had killed Michele, all of them, an offense without limits that would take every joy from life, to be expiated forever and ever.

Above the ripples in the water where Michele had disappeared only his empty overcoat floated, arms spread like a cross. The bell of the red buoy in the middle of the harbor, stirred by the waves, tolled for his murdered comrade. Under the water the cable that kept the buoy anchored ended in a slip knot, with Michele’s head in it. But Michele’s head was floating, green with seaweed, the eyes wide; he gave a howl. The old father dressed as a hunter got up in the night and began to urinate, groaning, looming over all of them. The rivers overflowed; all men, bad and good, were submerged. The old man’s organs, weary because they had produced all men, now drowned the universe. Snakeskin alone fled over the earth in search of safety, rubbing his sweaty hands, damp from the putrid water in the hotel’s bidets. But every coffin was occupied by a dead man, whom he had murdered; the flood surrounded him on all sides, swept him away into a vortex.

The truck was late that evening, and they all said with relief that it wouldn’t come. Michele waited looking out into the dusk. Four tourist buses arrived instead, driven by German soldiers. The prisoners were agitated, wondering, hypothesizing. Immediately the marshal came up with the list and called them one by one. Michele and Diego were called together with the others, with the false names they had given; in fact the marshal mangled Michele’s name, as if he had never heard it.

The prisoners were divided into four groups and loaded one by one onto the buses. Diego and Michele again found themselves neighbors, still part of that crowd almost jealous of the injustice endured. Among the men’s anxious voices a name circulated whose origin no one knew: Marassi, Marassi. They’re taking us to Marassi. But the name almost reassured Michele and Diego; it meant leaving the anguish of approaching death, equivocal Snakeskin, the known places full of traps.

Diego felt Michele’s rough coat under his fingers, the blood returning to their veins. He said, “Did I tell you that Luciano is a liar? Did I tell you?” and Michele repeated, “What a liar, I’ll say!” with a smile that was already freer, as if he were appreciating a joke.

And the two comrades understood that from now on, whatever their destination, blood, howls, exhaustion, they would have known the bloody taste of being alive and of sharing pain, like bread. A rough taste of life would accompany them, in the screaming underground passages of Marassi, in the desolate encampments of the north, until their return.

Anguish in the Barracks

This was how the illness began: he’d see the Frisian horse on the stairs, with a load of barbed wire, and think it contained a threatening and allusive meaning about his future. But even before, more than once, the sight of his cot had been enough to torment him, that uncomfortable skeletal cot, which seemed to want to announce something, something he didn’t understand, a message of despair, of impotence. Four, five, six cots, then his, then another two or three or four cots. They were thoughts that made no sense: he realized it.

And yet, one, two, three cots, maybe January, February, March, June, July, what had happened to him in July? Then that empty cot, why? August, September, October, November. Something ended in November: the war? life?

And then you had to consider that the first five cots belonged to the older men, soldiers who had responded to the draft order, some of whom hadn’t even stopped serving as soldiers on September 8th,[*] and now stood guard and went around armed; in the other cots instead were the draft evaders, the ones who’d been rounded up like him, and who swept and carried garbage. Then there was the mystery of that empty, folded-up cot, August, April? Where certainly something hoped for or feared was hidden, peace, death, but also something secret and hostile, which couldn’t be understood.

Or, starting at the back, the years of war: forty, forty-one, two, three, four, why was forty-four empty? And he was forty-five: what meaning was there in all that?

He lay on the folded-up cot, his back against the side bars, his feet on the chain that held it closed. Now he would think calmly, be logical: there was no reason to get so distressed, he had only to wait patiently for the business of his family to be resolved, for his father to be freed; then desert, return to the unit, for the moment try to get sick leave, a way out of military service, a legal means of “disengaging”; keep his eyes open in order not to be sent “upstairs” to the company that carried out the roundups, and at the slightest hint of a transfer to the north or the south be ready for flight, hoping it would go as he wanted.

Only that: and then the cart for transporting the garbage had a ramshackle and friendly air, it taught you to see the lighter side of things, even if it was painful, because later everything would be resolved. Stop, he was back at the beginning: the illness of symbols, the way to madness.

The illness, if he thought about it, had begun in prison, the night after he was captured: the sound of the sea outside, like the buzz of airplanes, the hope and fear of a bombardment that would free them or bury them. But it was the sea in confusion, without rhythm, without outlet: life, a blind and chaotic thing. From then on, things and men were no longer themselves but symbols.

The prison cells, the dingy offices, the nervous faces of the German and Fascist officers, the grand, ravaged hotels crammed with the fearful throng of hostages, the barracks, finally, with its distressing geometry of stairways, corridors, and deserted dormitories, its obtuse and pale inhabitants, all strings in a net of despair that was tightening around the world.

Now the panes of the big window were square and painted dark blue, but the third one in the second row was missing, and the next to last had a big crack: and that was painful, terrible. Impossible to resist the temptation to follow the fly that moved from one pane to the next, and to wonder where it would stop. It was the same calculation that kept recurring. The end of the war and death. But which would arrive first?

The men in the barracks were united by a common cowardice, sluggish, ignorant minds, flat-nosed faces, obliged to use a vulgar language that humiliated themselves. Their conversations were about pay, about the good life they would have in the “republic,”[*] better than any other life possible then, and about the fact that life in the barracks and in particular in the depot company was better than in any other section. They magnified this love of theirs for the pay and the life of the company as if to convince themselves that they couldn’t live without staying in it.

The boy, caught in a roundup and living in their midst, felt that heavy breath of cowardice thicken around him, merging with a secret inclination of his, and the dusty climbing plant that as it grew covered the walls of the courtyard covered him, too, an insertion of solidarity between him and them, nailing him to those walls, to those cots.

Upstairs was the company of men who carried out the roundups, or rather unconsciousness. They had better rations, better pay, frequent leaves. They returned at all hours, carousing on the stairs; those on the floor below could often hear records of singing and music. Unconsciousness emanated from every word of theirs, from every gesture, a willed unconsciousness, maintained by necessity, strictly enforced, so that they wouldn’t think about what they were doing. Often they went out early in the morning, dutiful, some armed with machine guns; they returned in the evening or the next day; they never fought, nor did they encounter “rebels”; but they sacked chicken coops and always captured some haggard draft evader, who came to enlarge the company on the floor below.

The men upstairs were hated even by the older men in the depot company; their superficiality was regarded with rancor by men who spent hours calculating and discussing earnings and dangers; envy embellished their advantages with sinister predictions. Then in the dormitory discussions began about those in the mountains and the English, about who would arrive first, and how if those in the mountains arrived first maybe all their soldiers would be killed, but they weren’t doing any harm, and so it wasn’t right; and how if, on the other hand, the English arrived first, they would treat the soldiers better than the rebels, and would keep the soldiers to be soldiers with them and put the rebels in jail.

Then, when the war was over, many of them would return to Sicily, to Calabria, to Puglia, to houses left twenty months ago by some of the men, by some fifteen, as far away as if they were at the end of a very long dark tunnel in which a mole moved slowly, digging to reunite them: the war. At that point, the men began to conjecture about when the war would end, and they all agreed that it would last for many years more; and the mule driver with the yellow face came out saying that it would never end, but the end of the world would come first, and he fantasized a whole story in which Jesus Christ and Noah’s dove emerged from his incomprehensible howling.

A majority of the older men were southerners, hardened by years in the army into a dull astuteness, accustomed to letting themselves be tossed about from Africa to Russia with a sort of wary fatalism. The northerners among them had learned to use their locutions and repeated them with exasperating monotony. The boy who had been rounded up became enraged listening to them join in the incomprehensible discussions. If I stay much longer with them, he thought, I’ll understand their whining. I, too, will get in the habit of saying “Fuck, signor lieutenant,” and “Your sister’s a real piece of ass.” That thought was enough to make him shudder, get up from the cot, and wander through the corridors and storerooms.

But the helmets lined up in piles were as useless and stupid as the mule driver with the yellow face.

The soldiers’ favorite conversations were about the goods they had carried off on September 8th and about how they’d managed to steal them, to keep them safe from the officers and the Germans, and about the money they had made selling them. The mule driver with the yellow face, who on September 8th hadn’t carried off even a blanket, was silent, ashamed, while a former waiter from San Remo recounted how he had escaped to France with ten gold pounds in a jockstrap. But envy was transformed into hatred toward the officers who’d been able to make off with the regiments’ cash and hadn’t shared it with the soldiers. “When the next September 8th comes,” everyone said, “we’ll keep a sharper eye out.” And they made plans and castles in the air about the goods they’d carry off on the second September 8th, on the millions they’d make.

Their life was like that: a succession of gray years, like a marching column, and every so often a September 8th, a breaking of ranks, a free-for-all, a scramble, knapsacks loaded up with stuff from the government, and then a return to ranks, to wait for another September 8th, to repeat the game. The boy who had been rounded up was lying on the uncomfortable folded-up cot, and the conversations of the soldiers were dusty above him, like the spiderwebs on the ceiling.

His memory moved to other men, other conversations, conversations of men sitting around fires, men whose soles were tied on with wire, whose ripped pants were sewed up with wire, whose faces bristled with wire in their beards, men with iron equipment in their hands: men with submachine guns, men with machine guns, men with sniper guns. Every so often the name of one of those men echoed in the solders’ conversations, with an accent of mystery, of legend, of fear: only for him those names had a face, a voice. He would have liked to shout in the soldiers’ fearful faces: “Yes, I know Lungo! And Bill! And Mingo! And the Zanzara! I know them all! Two weeks ago I was sitting by the fire with Mingo, whom you dream of at night. I was sharing a cigarette with Strogoff, the one who came all the way down here to the city to free the prisoners, scaring you for a month. I ate frittelle with the Sheriff, who has no more rifling in the barrel of his gun because of shooting at you! At the battle of Baiardo I carried ammunition to Bufera. I’m one of them!”

He would have liked to shout all that. I’m one of them. But then, if he was one of them, what was he doing there? And with violent momentum memory frenetically revived scenes and sensations to reawaken something that was asleep in him, force him out of his torpor.

The roadway below, with the line of Germans ascending warily, and the pounding of the machine-gunner’s heart against the gunstock, waiting, and every shrub flowering with eyes in ambush. Then a dense crackling that gives the go-ahead, a gilded dust that rises on the roadway, on the Germans, who fall down, rush off the road, commands shouted by the hoarse voices of the unit leaders encountering German curses, with the Venetian and Lombard voices of the bersaglieri, bursts of gunfire, ta-boom, hand grenades, ragged partisans sweeping over the road to plunder the tanks dripping with blood.

On sentry duty at night, you enter the big hut for a moment, to light a cigarette in the half-spent coals, while your comrades are snoring on the straw and scratching themselves in their sleep; then, outside, you wait for a shooting star to make a wish, always the same one, while in the distance, relentlessly constant, the cannons rumble on the front.

At night, when the lights in the barracks were lit and only the guards remained in the cold dormitories, the boy who’d been rounded up thought of the cold mist that rises every evening in the mountains, of the Fascist prisoners, barefoot, with a laugh of fear between their teeth, who would like to make themselves useful, scrub potatoes, fetch water or wood: Let them come with us for wood, let them come into the forest, in the mist, let them advance into the mist that will muffle the shot.

Other men, other conversations in the mountains, men who walk, go hungry, shoot, but not for obligation or pay, or amusement at what they do, men who have become bad by dint of being good, men who now, at night, around the chestnut fire, sing songs learned in jail, serious as if they were singing church hymns. And conversations of old men about the war in Spain, about strikes where soldiers fired shots, conversations of a secret life and jails, conversations of men who suffer from the law and want to remake it, not like dogs on a chain, not like him now.

And memory would drink up the recollections, as soon as they appeared, with fear almost, as if they could be seen by the others, by the officers, betray him, report him, “the rebel.” The barracks, enormous monument of injustice become law, still loomed over him with its stone stairs, its peeling doors, its shabby offices, its Frisian horses, condemning those imprudent surges of memory.

The others who’d been rounded up became increasingly sluggish and gray, too, worn into resignation, indifference, and in the interrogations each had an excuse for evading the draft, a margin of legality to hold on to: an expired badge from the Todt organization, the air force that had never been summoned, the recovery from pleurisy. He alone was as if naked in his crude situation as one outside the law, and he felt around him the padded warmth of legality and men who were basking in it, already content.

The barracks chained him in the geometry of corridors, stairs, terraces; soon he, too, would think that as long as the government pays it’s better to be on the side of the government and avoid trouble for the family, that in the “republic” you’re better off than in the “monarchy,” because there’s no need to be careful in front of the officers, you eat in the mess, and you can sell the covers for the barracks equipment without paying for them; soon he, too, would laugh at the obscene remarks of the lieutenant with the eyeglasses when he mocked the mule driver with the yellow face.

The partisans evaporated in memory like a myth, a memory of ancient ages of man; giant generators of new laws, distant from him as, at night, the mountains appeared distant from the barracks, beyond the broken panes of the big windows. The wall separating the barracks from the countryside that sloped down in terraces was the boundary between two categories of the soul. The fence that the colonel had had built to prevent attacks by the rebels was a wall of iron that rose in his conscience.

Then came days filled with anxiety, in which rumors of transfer circulated, of lists that someone had seen in the orderly office, of the men rounded up who would be sent to Monza or Treviso or Bolzano. He felt the circle tightening around him, the day approaching when his instinct for preservation would force him to emerge from his torpor, would dictate the most propitious moment for flight.

He waited passively, every day feeling more like the butt on the floor of the dormitory, pushed by strokes of the broom. And the things of the barracks appeared to him like daisies whose petals you’d pluck to grasp a secret, ambiguous horoscopes telling his future, the Frisian horse on the stairs was inside him, objects and faces succeeded one another before his eyes like chapters in a story, and you didn’t know where or when it would end.

Later there were tense days when it seemed that the transfer was imminent and the names on the first list were called and his wasn’t there. Because there was another list, of men who would leave in two weeks, and he was among those. So waking from the anguish was put off, there was still time to hope for the Great Advance that would free everyone overnight, of the Great Bombardment that would kill all the inhabitants of the barracks except him, of the leg that by chance would be broken and would keep him in the hospital until the end of the war, of his father who might have been freed and with all the family would have been able to find safety from the reprisals . . .

The morning of the first group’s departure, three or four were missing at the roll call, quiet, resigned youths whom one wouldn’t have expected to escape. Those remaining, guarded by some old armed soldiers who would be their escort, sat in the dormitory, heads bent, waiting for the truck, a veil of tears in the depths of their eyes and voices. He wandered among them: the cots, unadorned by blankets, were anxious, uneasy forebodings.

It was then that the lieutenant with the eyeglasses entered, fat snub-nosed face, nodded to him to approach; certainly he wanted to send him to sweep the stairs. He said, “Come on, hurry, get your stuff ready, you’re going, too, the order came from the command.”

A veil of blood over his eyes, then everything was frighteningly clear, as in a world of mirrors: the lieutenant, the words he’d said, the useless protests, his resigned comrades, the bleak room, his picking up stuff with trembling hands and putting it in the knapsack, his history, his weakness, the sadness of his fate, everything was what it was, pitilessly that.

The illness of symbols took hold of him again on the journey in the truck, but without relief. The truck was the world and life, the men different, without pity for one another, bourgeois types who spoke of the things they’d do when the war was over, they’d buy a car and not travel by truck anymore, the lieutenant with the eyeglasses, who laughed, saying, “If peace should break out now!” A note of fear in his ignorant southerner’s accent.

The fat kid from Oneglia who looked around at every stop, sniffing out a way to escape, was a part of him, of his mind still cautiously wakened; the old Venetian soldier who was always on him with the musket under his arm (Cecchetti was the name of that bastard) was also a part of him, his dominant cowardice. The other comrades of misfortune, full of desolate resignation, were the weight of his impotence. And in their midst, stupid and fortunate even in his name, the fat, unconscious human beast, the bespectacled Lieutenant Coronati, who joked with the drivers in the language of the south.

The breakdown of the truck sounded like a warning. The last symbol was the hotel where they stopped for breakfast, with tidy English prints on the walls, a chloroformed atmosphere like an operating room, a limbo where souls await judgment.

When they were led on foot to the nearby town and, since there was a delay in repairing the truck, somewhat dispersed to buy food in the shops, the nightmare suddenly ceased: the road that led to the fields was a road that led to the fields, the Venetian turning back to wait for the others was the Venetian turned back, the fat boy from Oneglia whom he asked “Shall we escape?” and who answered “Come on” was the fat boy from Oneglia, the earth that ran under their steps was the earth that ran under their steps, the corner of the wall that separated them from the view of the others was a corner of a wall, the run over the hill was a beautiful, radiant, anxious run over the hill.

The first sentence he said to the other, walking now only quickly along a lane that led upward, was “Now I can tell you, I’m a partisan.” “Me, too,” said the other. “What unit are you in? What’s your name?” They said their noms de guerre, the bands they’d belonged to, the known comrades, the actions they had taken part in.

He was going up the hill now with the other, his military coat unbuttoned, content, content even if they could recapture him and shoot him at any moment: the gray barracks no longer existed for him, submerged in the depths of consciousness. The grasses and the sun and they who were walking, coats unbuttoned, amid the grasses and the sun were a new symbol, airy and enormous, they were what, without understanding, men often call freedom.

Fear on the Footpath

At a quarter past nine, just as the moon was rising, he reached the Colla Bracca meadow; at ten he was already at the juncture of the two trees; by half past twelve he’d be at the fountain; he might reach Vendetta’s camp by one—ten hours of walking at a normal speed, but six hours at the most for Binda, the courier of the first battalion, the fastest courier in the partisan brigade.

He went hard at it, did Binda, flinging himself headlong down shortcuts, never making a mistake at crossroads that all looked alike, recognizing stones and bushes in the dark. His firm chest kept the same rhythm of breathing; his legs went like pistons. “Hurry up, Binda!” his comrades would say as they saw him from a distance climbing up toward their camp. They tried to read in his face whether the news and orders he was bringing were good or bad; but Binda’s face was shut like a fist, a narrow mountaineer’s face with hairy lips on a short bony body more like a boy’s than a youth’s, with muscles like stones.

His was a tough and solitary job, being woken at all hours, sent out even to Serpe’s camp or Pelle’s, having to march in the dark valleys at night, accompanied only by a French tommy gun, light as a little wooden rifle, hanging on his shoulder; and when he reached a detachment he had to move on to another or return with the answer; he would wake up the cook and grope around in the cold pots, then leave again with a panful of chestnuts still sticking in his gullet. But it was the natural job for him, because he never got lost in the woods and knew all the paths, from having led goats about them or gone there for wood or hay since he was a child; and he never went lame or rubbed the skin off his feet scrambling about the rocks, as so many partisans did who’d come up from the towns or the navy.

Glimpses caught as he went along—a chestnut tree with a hollow trunk, blue lichen on a stone, the bare space around a charcoal pit—linked themselves in his mind to his remotest memories: an escaped goat, a polecat driven from its lair, the raised skirt of a girl. And now the war in these parts was like a continuation of his normal life; work, play, hunting, all turned into war: the smell of gunpowder at the Loreto bridge, escapes down the bushy slopes, minefields sown with death.

The war twisted closely around and around in those valleys like a dog trying to bite its tail; partisans elbow to elbow with bersaglieri and Fascist militia; each side alternating between mountain and valley, making wide turns around the crests so as not to run into one another and find themselves fired on; and always someone killed, either on hill or in valley. Binda’s village, San Faustino, was down among fields, three groups of houses on each side of the valley. His girl, Regina, hung out sheets from her window on days when there were roundups. Binda’s village was a short halt on his way up and down, a sip of milk, a clean vest ready washed by his mother; then off he had to hurry, in case the Fascists suddenly arrived, for there hadn’t been enough partisans killed at San Faustino.

All winter it was a game of hide and seek: the bersaglieri at Baiardo, the militia at Molini, the Germans at Briga, and in the middle of them the partisans squeezed into two corners of the valley, avoiding the roundups by moving from one to the other during the night. That very night a German column was marching on Briga, had perhaps already reached Carma, and the militia were getting ready to reinforce Molini. The partisan detachments were sleeping in stalls around half-spent braziers; Binda marched along in the dark woods, with their salvation in his legs, for the order he carried was “Evacuate the valleys at once. Entire battalion and heavy machine guns to be on Mount Pellegrino by dawn.”

Binda felt anxiety fluttering in his lungs like bats’ wings; he longed to grasp the slope two miles away, pull himself up it, whisper the order like a breath of wind into the grass and hear it flowing off through his mustache and nostrils till it reached Vendetta, Serpe, Gueriglia; then scoop himself out a hole in the chestnut leaves and bury himself in it, he and Regina, first removing the cones that might prick Regina’s legs; but the more leaves he scooped out, the more cones he found—it was impossible to make a place for Regina’s legs there, her big soft legs with their smooth thin skin.

The dry leaves and the chestnut cones rustled, almost gurgled, under Binda’s feet; the squirrels, with round, glittering eyes, ran to hide at the tops of the trees. “Be quick, Binda!” the commander, Fegato, had said to him when giving him the message. Sleep rose from the heart of the night, there was a velvety feel on the inside of his eyelids; Binda would have liked to lose the path, plunge into a sea of dry leaves and swim in them until they submerged him. “Be quick, Binda!”

He was now walking on a narrow path along the upper slopes of the Tumena valley, which was still covered with ice. The widest valley in the area, it had high sides wide apart; the one opposite him was glimmering in the dark, the one on which he was walking had bare slopes scattered with an occasional bush from which, in daytime, groups of partridges rose fluttering. Binda felt he saw a distant light, down in lower Tumena, moving ahead of him. It zigzagged every now and again as if going around a curve, vanished, and reappeared a little farther on in an unexpected spot. Who on earth could it be at that hour? Sometimes it seemed to Binda that the light was much farther away, on the other side of the valley, sometimes that it had stopped, and sometimes that it was behind him. Who could be carrying so many different lights along all the paths of lower Tumena—perhaps in front of him, too, in higher Tumena—winking on and off like that? The Germans!

Following on Binda’s tracks was an animal roused from deep back in his childhood; it was coming after him, would soon catch up with him: the animal of fear. Those lights were the Germans searching Tumena, bush by bush, in battalions. Impossible, Binda knew, although it would be almost pleasant to believe it, to abandon himself to the blandishments of that animal from childhood, which was following him so closely. Time was drumming, gulping in Binda’s throat. Perhaps it was too late now to arrive before the Germans and save his comrades. Already Binda could see Vendetta’s hut at Castagna burned out, the bleeding bodies of his comrades, the heads of some of them hanging by their long hair on branches of larch trees. “Be quick, Binda!”

He was amazed at where he was, for he seemed to have gone such a little way in such a long time; perhaps he had slowed down or even stopped without realizing it. He did not change his pace, however; he knew well that it was always regular and sure, that he mustn’t trust the animal that came to visit him on these night missions, wetting his temples with its invisible fingers slimy with saliva. Binda was a healthy lad, with good nerves, cool in every eventuality; and he held on to all his power to act even though he was carrying that animal around with him like a monkey tethered to his neck.

The surface of the Colla Bracca meadow looked soft in the moonlight. Mines! thought Binda. There were no mines up there, Binda knew; they were a long way off, on the other slope of the mountain. But now Binda began thinking that the mines might have moved underground from one part of the mountain to the other, following his steps like enormous underground spiders. The earth above mines produces strange funguses, disastrous to knock over; everything would go up in a second, but each second would become as long as a century and the world would have stopped as if by magic.

Now Binda was going down through the wood. Drowsiness and darkness drew gloomy masks on the tree trunks and bushes. There were Germans all around. They must have seen him pass the Colla Bracca meadow in the moonlight; they were following him, waiting for him at the entrance to the wood. An owl hooted nearby: it was a whistle, a signal for the Germans to close in around him. There, another whistle; he was surrounded! An animal moved behind a bush of heather; perhaps it was a hare, perhaps a fox, perhaps a German lying in the thickets keeping him covered. There was a German in every thicket, a German perched at the top of every tree, with the squirrels. The stones were pullulating with helmets, rifles were sprouting among the branches, the roots of the trees ended in human feet. Binda was walking between a double row of hidden Germans, who were looking at him with glistening eyes from among the leaves; the farther he walked, the deeper he penetrated their ranks. At the third, the fourth, the sixth hoot of the owl, all the Germans would jump to their feet around him, their guns pointed, their chests crossed by Sten-gun straps.

One named Gund, in the middle of them, with a terrible white smile under his helmet, would stretch out huge hands to seize him. Binda was afraid to turn around in case he saw Gund looming above his shoulders, Sten gun at the ready, hands open in the air. Or perhaps Gund would appear on the path ahead, pointing a finger at him, or come up and begin walking silently along beside him.

Suddenly he thought he must have missed the way; yet he recognized the path, the stones, the trees, the smell of musk. But they were stones, trees, musk from another place, far away, from a thousand different faraway places. After these stone steps there should be a short drop, not a bramble bush. After that slope a bush of broom, not of holly; the side of the path should be dry, not full of water and frogs. The frogs were in another valley, near the Germans; at the turn of the path there was a German ambush waiting and he’d suddenly fall into their bands, find himself facing the big German named Gund who is deep down in all of us, and who opens his enormous hands above us all, yet never succeeds in catching us.

To drive away Gund he must think of Regina, scoop a niche for Regina in the snow; but the snow is hard and frozen—Regina can’t sit on it in her thin dress; nor can she sit under the pines—there are endless layers of pine needles; the earth beneath is all anthills, and Gund is already above, lowering his hands to their heads and throats, lowering still . . . He gave a shriek. No, he must think of Regina, the girl who is in all of us and for whom we all want to scoop a niche deep in the woods—the girl with big hips, dressed only in hair that falls down over her shoulders.

But the pursuit between Binda and Gund is nearing its end; Vendetta’s camp is now only fifteen, twenty minutes away. Though Binda’s thoughts run ahead, his feet go on placing themselves regularly one in front of the other so he won’t lose breath. When he reaches his comrades his fear will have vanished, canceled even from the bottom of his memory as something impossible. He must think of waking up Vendetta and Sciabola, the commissar, to explain Fegato’s order to them; then he’ll set off again for Serpe’s camp.

But would he ever reach the hut? Wasn’t he tied by a wire that dragged him farther away the nearer he got? And as he arrived wouldn’t he hear ausch ausch from Germans sitting around the fire eating up the remaining chestnuts? Binda imagined himself arriving at the hut to find it half burned out and deserted. He would go inside: empty. But in a corner, huge, sitting on his haunches, with his helmet touching the ceiling, would be Gund, with his eyes round and glistening like the squirrels’ and his white toothy smile between damp lips. Gund would make a sign to him: “Sit down.” And Binda would sit down.

There, a hundred yards off, a light! It was them! Which of them? He longed to turn back, to flee, as if all the danger were up there in the hut. But he walked on quickly, his face hard and closed like a fist. Now the fire suddenly seemed to be getting too near—was it moving to meet him?—now to be getting farther off—was it running away? But it was motionless, a campfire that had not yet gone out, as Binda knew.

“Who goes there?”

He did not quiver an eyelash. “Binda,” he said.

Sentry: “I’m Civetta. Any news, Binda?”

”ls Vendetta asleep?”

Now he was inside the hut, with sleeping comrades breathing all around him. Comrades, of course; who could ever have thought they’d be anything else?

“Germans down at Briga, Fascists up at Molini. Evacuate. By dawn you’re all to be up on the crest of Mount Pellegrino with the heavies.”

Vendetta, scarcely awake, was fluttering his eyelids. “God,” he said. Then he got up, clapped his hands. “Wake up, everyone, we’ve got to go out and fight.”

Binda was now sucking at a can of boiled chestnuts, spitting out the bits of skin sticking to them. The men divided up into shifts for carrying the ammunition and the tripod of the heavy machine gun. He set off. “I’m going on to Serpe’s,” he said. “Be quick, Binda!” exclaimed his comrades.

Hunger at Bévera

The front had stopped there, as it had in ’40, except that this time the war did not end and there seemed no chance that things would move. People did not want to do as they had in ’40, load a few rags and chickens onto a cart and set off with a mule in front and a goat behind. When they got back in ’40 they had found all their drawers overturned on the floor and human excrement in the cooking pots; for Italians, when soldiers, don’t bother whether the damage they do is to friends or enemies. So people stayed on, with the French shells hitting their houses day and night and the German shells whistling over their heads.

“One day or another, when they really decide to advance,” people said, and had to go on repeating this to each other from September 1944 to April 1945, “they’ll put their backs into it, those blessed Allies will.”

The valley of Bévera was full of people, peasants and also refugees from Ventimiglia, and they had nothing to eat; there were no reserves of food, and flour had to be fetched from the town. And the road into the town was under shellfire night and day.

By now they were living more in holes than in houses; one day the men of the village collected in a cave to decide what to do.

“What we’ll have to do,” said the man from the Committee of Liberation, “is take turns going down to Ventimiglia to fetch bread.”

“Fine,” said another. “So one by one we’ll all be blown to bits on the way.”

“Or if not, the Germans will get us one by one and off we’ll go to Germany,” said a third.

And another asked, “What about an animal to transport the stuff? Will anyone offer theirs? No one’ll risk it who still has one. Obviously whoever gets through won’t come back, any more than animals or bread.”

The animals had already been requisitioned, and anyone who’d saved his kept it hidden.

“Well,” said the man from the committee, “if we don’t get bread here, how are we going to live? Is there anyone who feels like taking a mule down to Ventimiglia? I’m wanted by the Fascists down there or I’d go myself.”

He looked around; the men were sitting on the floor of the cave with expressionless eyes, scooping at the tufa with their fingers.

Then old Bisma, who’d been down at the end, looking around with his mouth open and not understanding anything, got up and went out of the cave. The others thought he wanted to urinate: he was old and needed to fairly often.

“Careful, Bisma,” they shouted after him. “Do it under cover.”

But he did not tum around.

“As far as he’s concerned they might not be shelling at all,” someone said. “He’s deaf and doesn’t notice.”

Bisma was more than eighty and his back seemed permanently bent under a load of faggots—all the faggots he had hauled throughout his life from woods to stalls. They called him Bisma because of his mustaches, which had once, they said, looked like Bismarck’s; now they were a pair of scraggy white tufts that seemed about to fall off at any moment, like all the other parts of his body. Nothing fell off, though, and Bisma dragged himself along, his head swaying, with the expressionless and rather mistrustful look that deaf people have.

He reappeared at the mouth of the cave. “Eeee!” he was calling.

Then the others saw that he was dragging his mule behind him and that he’d put on its pack saddle. Bisma’s mule seemed older than its master; its neck was flat as a board and hung to the ground, and its movements were cautious, as if the jutting bones were about to break through its skin and appear through the sores, black with flies.

“Where’re you taking the mule to, Bisma?” they asked.

He swayed his head from side to side, with his mouth open. He couldn’t hear.

“The sacks,” he said. “Give them to me.”

“Hey,” they exclaimed. “How far d’you think you’re going to get, you and that old bag of bones?”

“How many pounds?” he asked. “Well? How many pounds?”

They gave him the sacks, indicating the number of pounds on their fingers, and off he set. At every whistle of a shell the men peered out from the threshold of the cave, at the road and at that bent figure drawing farther away; both the mule and the man riding on the pack saddle seemed to be swaying and looked as if they might fall down at any minute. The shells were falling ahead of them, raising a thick dust, pitting the track in front of the mule’s cautious steps; and when they fell behind Bisma did not even turn around. At every shell fired, at every whistle, the men held their breath. “This one’ll get him,” they said. Suddenly he vanished altogether, wrapped in dust. The men were silent; when the dust settled they would see a bare road, without even a trace of him. Instead both reappeared like ghosts, the man and the mule, and went hobbling slowly along. Then they got to the last turn in the road and moved out of sight. “He won’t make it,” said the men, and turned their backs.

But Bisma kept riding along the stony road. The old mule kept putting its hoofs down uncertainly on the surface pitted with flints and new holes; its skin was stretched tight from the burning of the sores under the pack saddle. The explosions made no impression on it; it had suffered so much in its life that nothing could make any impression on it anymore. It was walking along with its muzzle bent down, and its eyes, limited by the black blinkers, were noticing all sorts of things: snails, broken by the shelling, spilling an iridescent slime on the stones; anthills ripped open and the black-and-white ants hurrying hither and thither with eggs; torn-up grasses showing strange hairy roots like trees.

And the man riding on the pack saddle was trying to keep himself upright on the thin haunches, while all his poor bones were starting in their sockets at the roughness of the road. But he had lived his life with mules, and his ideas were as few and as resigned as theirs; it had always been long and tiring to find his bread, bread for himself and bread for others, and now bread for the whole of Bévera. The world, this silent world which surrounded him, seemed to be trying to speak to him, too, with confused boomings that reached even his sleeping eardrums, and strange disturbances of the earth. He could see banks crumbling, clouds rising from the fields, stones flying, and red flashes appearing and disappearing on the hills; the world was trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots. And the silence, the terrible silence of his old age, was ruffled by those distant sounds.

The road at the mule’s feet sent out huge sparks, its nostrils and throat filled with earth, a hail of splintered stones hit the man and the mule from the side while the branches of a big olive tree whirled in the air above. Yet the man wouldn’t fall unless the mule fell. And the mule held on, its hoofs rooted in the torn-up earth, its knees just not giving way.

In the evening, up at Bévera, someone shouted, “Look! It’s Bisma coming back! He’s made it!”

Then the men and women and children came out of the houses and caves and saw the mule at the last turn of the road, coming ahead more bent than ever under the weight of sacks, and Bisma behind, on foot, hanging on to its tail so that they couldn’t tell whether he was pushing or being pulled.

Bisma had a great welcome from the people of the valley when he got in with the bread. It was distributed in the big cave; the inhabitants passed through one by one while the man from the committee handed out a loaf a head. Near him stood Bisma, munching his loaf with his few teeth and looking around at everyone.

Bisma went to Ventimiglia the next day, too. His mule was the only animal the Germans were sure not to want. He went down every day to fetch bread, and every day he passed unhurt through the shells; he must have made a deal with the devil, they said.

Then the Germans evacuated the left bank of the Bévera River, blew up two bridges and a piece of road, and laid down mines. The inhabitants were given forty-eight hours to leave the village and the area. They left the village but not the area: back they went into their holes. But now they were isolated, caught between two fronts, with no way of getting supplies. It meant starvation.

When they heard the village had been evacuated, the Black Brigade came up. They were singing. One of them was carrying a tin of paint and a brush. On the walls he wrote: They shall not pass. We go straight ahead. The Axis does not give way.

Meanwhile the others were wandering around the streets with Sten guns on their shoulders, glancing at the houses. Then they began breaking in a door or two with their shoulders. At that moment Bisma appeared on his mule. He appeared at the top of a road on a slope and came down between two rows of houses.

“Hey, where are you going?” said the men of the Black Brigade.

The old man did not seem to see them; the mule went on putting one wobbly leg in front of the other.

“Hey, we’re talking to you!” The haggard, impassive old man, perched on that skeleton of a mule, seemed a ghost issued from the stones of the uninhabited and half-ruined village.

“He’s deaf,” they said.

The old man looked at them, one by one. The Black Brigade men went down a side alley. They reached a little square where the only sounds were water trickling in the fountain and distant guns.

“I know there’s stuff in that house,’ said one of the Black Brigade, pointing. He was only a boy, with a red blotch under his eye. The echo among the houses of the empty square repeated his words one by one. The boy made a nervous gesture. The one with the brush wrote on a ruined wall: Honor Is Struggle. A window that had been left open was banging and making more noise than the guns.

“Wait,” said the boy with the red blotch to two others who were pushing at a door. He put the mouth of his Sten gun against the lock and fired a burst. The lock, all burned out, gave way. At that moment Bisma reappeared from the direction opposite the one where they’d left him. He seemed to be promenading up and down the village on that ruin of a mule.

“Wait till he’s passed,” said one of the Black Brigade, and they stood in front of the door looking indifferent.

Rome or Death, wrote the man with the brush.

Very slowly, the mule crossed the square; every step seemed to be its last. The man riding it appeared to be on the point of falling asleep.

“Go away,” shouted the boy with the blotch. “The village is evacuated.”

Bisma did not turn around, intent on piloting his mule across that empty square.

“If we see you again,” went on the same boy, “we’ll shoot.”

We shall win, wrote the man with the brush.

Now only Bisma’s decrepit back could be seen above the black legs of the mule, which seemed almost halted.

“Let’s go down there,” decided the Black Brigade men, and they turned under an arch.

“Hey. No time to lose. Let’s begin with this house.” They opened it up, and the boy with the blotch entered first. The house was empty, with nothing in it but echoes. They wandered around the rooms and came out again.

“I’d like to set fire to the whole village, I would,” said the boy with the blotch.

We shall go straight ahead, wrote the other man.

At the end of the little alley Bisma reappeared. He advanced toward them.

“Don’t,” said the Black Brigade men to the boy with the blotch, who was taking aim.

Duce, wrote the other man.

But the boy with the blotch had fired a burst. They were mown down together, the man and the mule, but they remained on foot. It seemed as if the mule had fallen on its four hoofs and still, black spindly legs, all in one piece. The Black Brigade stood looking on; the boy with the blotch had loosened the Sten gun from its strap and was picking his teeth. Then they bowed together, man and mule, and seemed about to take another step; instead they fell down in a heap.

That night the people of the village came to take them away. Bisma they buried; the mule they cooked and ate. It was tough meat, but they were hungry.

Going to Headquarters

It was a sparse wood, almost destroyed by fire, gray with charred tree trunks amid the dry reddish needles of the pines. Two men, one armed, the other unarmed, were zigzagging down between the trees.

“To headquarters,” the armed man was saying. “To headquarters, that’s where we’re going. Half an hour’s walk at the most.”

“And then?”

“Then what?”

“Then will they let me go?” said the unarmed man. He was listening to every syllable of every reply as if searching for a false note.

“Yes, they’ll let you go,” said the armed man. “I hand them the papers from battalion, they enter them on their list, then you can go home.”

The unarmed man shook his head, looking pessimistic. “Oh, they take a long time, these things do. I know . . .” he said, perhaps just to hear the other man repeat “They’ll let you go at once, I tell you.”

“I was hoping,” the unarmed man went on, “I was hoping to be home this afternoon. Ah, well, patience.”

“You’ll make it, I tell you,” replied the armed man. “Just a few questions, and they’ll let you go. They’ve got to cross off your name from the list of spies.”

“Have you got a list of spies?”

“Of course we have. We know ’em all, the spies. And we get ’em, one by one.”

“And my name’s on it?”

“Yes, your name, too. They must cross it off properly now, or you risk being taken again.”

“Then I really should go there myself, so I can explain the whole thing to them.”

“We’re going there now. They have to look into it properly to check.”

“But by now,” said the unarmed man, “by now you all know I’m on your side and have never been a spy.”

“Exactly. We know all about it now. You don’t have to worry now.”

The unarmed man nodded and looked around. They were in a big clearing, scattered with fallen branches and mangy pines and larches killed by fire. They had left, refound, and lost the path again, and were walking apparently at random among the scattered pines through the wood. The unarmed man did not know this area. Evening was creeping up in thin layers of mist. Down below, the woods were lost in the dark. It worried him, their leaving the path; the other seemed to be walking at random. He tried bearing right, hoping to find the path again; the other also bore right, apparently at random. Then the unarmed man turned wherever the walking was easier, with the armed man following him.

He decided to ask, “But where’s the headquarters?”

“We’re going toward it, “ replied the armed man. “You’ll soon see it now.”

“But what place, what area is it, more or less?”

“Well,” he replied, “one can’t say headquarters is in any place or area. Headquarters is wherever it is. You understand?”

He understood; he was a person who understood things. But he asked, “Isn’t there a path to it?”

The other replied, “A path? You understand. A path always goes somewhere. One doesn’t get to headquarters by paths. You understand.”

The unarmed man understood; he was a person who understood things, an astute man.

He asked, “D’you often go to headquarters?”

“Often,” said the armed man. “Yes, often.”

He had a sad face, with a vacant look. Apparently he didn’t know those parts very well. Every now and again he seemed lost, yet he went walking on as if it did not matter.

“And why have they told you to take me along today?” asked the unarmed man, scrutinizing him.

“That’s my job, to take you along,” he replied. “I’m the one who takes people along to headquarters.”

“You’re their courier, are you?”

“That’s right,” said the armed man. “Their courier.”

A strange courier, thought the unarmed man, who doesn’t know the way. But, he thought, today he doesn’t want to go by the paths in case I realize where the headquarters is, for they don’t trust me. A bad sign, their not trusting me yet, the unarmed man couldn’t help thinking. But though it was a bad sign, it did mean that they really were bringing him to headquarters and intended to let him go free.

Another bad sign, apart from this, was that the woods were getting thicker and thicker. Then there was the silence and this gloomy armed man.

“Did you take the secretary along to headquarters, too? And the brothers from the mill? And the schoolmistress?” He asked this question all in one breath, without stopping to think, for it was the decisive question, the question that meant everything; the secretary of the commune, the brothers from the mill, the schoolmistress, were all people who had been taken away and never returned, of whom nothing more had ever been heard.

“The secretary was a Fascist,” said the armed man. “The brothers from the mill were in the militia, the schoolmistress worked with the Fascists.”

“I just wondered, since they never came back.”

“What I mean is,” insisted the armed man, “they were what they were. You’re what you are. There’s no comparison.”

“Of course,” said the other. “There’s no comparison. I only asked what had happened to them out of curiosity.”

He felt sure of himself, the unarmed man did, enormously sure of himself. He was the astutest man in the village; it was difficult to get the better of him. The others, the secretary and the schoolmistress, had not come back; he would come back. “I big Kamerad,” he would say to the German sergeant. “Partisan not kaput me. I kaput all partisans.” Perhaps the sergeant might laugh.

But the burned trees seemed interminable and ambiguous and his thoughts were surrounded by darkness and the unknown, like the bare spaces in the middle of these woods.

“I don’t know about the secretary and the others. I’m the courier.”

“They’ll know at headquarters, though?” insisted the unarmed man.

“Yes. Ask them at headquarters. They’ll know there.”

Dusk was falling. He had to walk carefully in the undergrowth, watching where his feet went in case they slipped on rocks hidden under the thick scrub, and watching where his thoughts went, too, as they followed each other in growing disquiet, in case they suddenly plunged headlong into panic.

Surely if they’d thought him a spy they would never have let him go through the woods like this, alone with this man who didn’t seem to be taking any notice of him at all; he could have escaped from him anytime he wanted. Suppose he tried to escape now—what would the other man do?

As he wound down among the trees the unarmed man began to draw a little way off, to bear left when the other bore right. But the armed man went on walking almost, it seemed, without taking any notice of him; down through the sparse woods they went, now some distance from each other. Sometimes they even lost sight of each other, hidden by trunks and shrubs; then suddenly the unarmed man would turn around and see the other above him.

If they let me free for a moment, this time they won’t get me again, the unarmed man had thought till then. But now he surprised himself thinking, If I manage to escape, then this time . . . And already in his mind he saw Germans, columns of Germans, Germans in trucks and armored cars, a sight that meant death for the others and safety for him, who was an astute man, a man no one could get the better of.

Now they were out of the glades and undergrowth and entering thick green woods, untouched by fire; the ground was covered with dry pine needles. The armed man had remained behind; perhaps he had taken another route. Then, very cautiously, his tongue between his teeth, the unarmed man hurried his pace, pushing deeper into the thick woods, flinging himself down slopes, among the pine trees. He was escaping, he suddenly realized. He had a moment of panic; but he realized also that he’d got too far away now and that the other must have noticed he was trying to escape and was sure to be following him. The only thing to do was go on running, for things might be ugly if he came within the other’s range again after trying to escape.

He turned at the sound of a footstep above him; a few yards away the armed man was coming toward him with his calm, indifferent pace. His gun was in his hand. He said, “There must be a shortcut this way,” and gestured the other to go ahead of him.

Everything then went back to the way it was before: an ambiguous world, where things might go completely wrong or completely right; the wood thickening instead of thinning out, this man who’d almost let him escape without a word.

He asked, “Does it go on forever, this wood?”

“Just around the hillside and there we are,” said the other. “Bear up, you’ll be home by tonight.”

“Are they sure to let me go, just like that? I mean, won’t they keep me there as a hostage, for instance?”

“We aren’t Germans; we don’t take hostages. At the most they might take your boots as hostages: we’re all nearly barefoot.”

The man began to grumble as if his boots were the one thing he was frightened of losing, but at heart he was pleased; every detail of his future, good or bad, helped to restore a slight feeling of confidence.

“Well,” said the armed man. “Since you hold by your boots so much, let’s do this: you put on mine until we get to headquarters, and since mine are all in pieces they won’t take them off you. I’ll put on yours, and when I come back with you I’ll hand them over again.”

Even a child would have realized this was just a trick. The armed man wanted his boots; all right, the unarmed man would give him whatever he wanted; he was a man who understood, and felt pleased at getting off so cheaply. “I great Kamerad,” he’d say to the German sergeant. “I give them boots and they let me go.” Perhaps the sergeant would let him have a pair of knee boots like the ones German soldiers wore.

“Then you don’t hold anyone hostage? Not even the secretary and the others?”

“The secretary had three of our comrades taken; the brothers from the mill went on roundups with the militia; the schoolmistress went to bed with the men of the Tenth Flotilla.”

The unarmed man halted. He said, “You don’t by any chance think I’m a spy, too? You haven’t by any chance brought me here to kill me?” And he bared a few teeth as if in a smile.

“If we thought you a spy,” said the armed man, “I wouldn’t do this.” He snapped back the safety catch of the gun. “And this.” He put it to his shoulder and made a motion as if about to fire at him.

There, thought the spy. He’s not firing.

But the other never lowered his gun; he pressed the trigger instead.

In salvos, it fires in salvos, the spy just had time to think.

And when he felt the bullets hitting him like fiery fists that never stopped, the thought still crossed his mind, He thinks he’s killed me, but I’m alive.

He fell face downward, and the last shot caught him with a vision of stockinged feet and his boots being pulled off.

So he remained, a corpse in the depth of the woods, his mouth full of pine needles. Two hours later he was already black with ants.

Last Comes the Raven

The stream was a net of limpid, delicate ripples, with the water running through the mesh. From time to time, like a fluttering of silver wings, the dorsum of a trout flashed on the surface, the fish at once plunging zigzag down into the water.

“Full of trout,” one of the men said.

“If we toss a grenade in, they’ll all come floating to the top, bellies up,” said the other; he detached a grenade from his belt and started to unscrew the baseplate.

Then the boy, who had stood aside looking on, walked over, a mountain youth with an apple look to his face. “Let me have it,” he said, taking the rifle from one of the men. “What does he want to do?” the man said, intending to reclaim the rifle. But the boy was leveling it at the water, in search of a target, it seemed. If you shoot, you’ll only scare the fish away, the man started to say, but he did not have time. A trout had surfaced, flashing, and the boy had pumped a bullet into it as though having anticipated the fish’s exact point of appearance. Now, with its white underside exposed, the trout floated lifeless on the surface. “Cripes,” the men said. The boy reloaded the rifle and swung it around. The air was crisp and tensed: one could distinguish the pine needles on the opposite bank and the knitted texture of the stream. A ripple broke the surface: another trout. He fired: now it floated dead. The men glanced briefly at the fish, briefly at the boy. “He shoots well,” they said.

The boy swung the barrel again, into the air. It was curious, to think of it, that they were encompassed by air, actually cut off from other things by meters of air. But when the boy aimed the rifle, the air then became an invisible straight line stretching from the muzzle to the thing . . . to the hawk, for instance, floating above on wings that seemed scarcely to move. As he pressed the trigger, the air continued crystalline and clear as ever, but at the upper end of the line the kestrel folded its wings, then dropped like a stone. The open breech emitted a fine smell of powder.

He asked for more cartridges. The number of men watching had now swelled behind him on the bank of the stream. The cones at the top of the pine trees on the other bank—why were they visible and yet out of reach? Why that empty span between him and them? Why were the cones, although a part of him, in the chamber of his eye—why were they there, so distant? And yet if he aimed the rifle that empty span was clearly a deception: he touched the trigger and at that instant a cone, severed at the stem, fell. The feeling was one of caressive emptiness: the emptiness of the rifle bore, which extended off into the air and was occupied by the shot, straight to the pinecone, the squirrel, the white stone, the flowering poppy. “He doesn’t miss a one,” the men said, and no one had the audacity to laugh.

“Come, come along with us,” the leader said. “You give me the rifle, then,” the boy returned.

“All right. Certainly.”

So he went.

He left with a haversack filled with apples and two rounds of cheese. His village was a patch of slate, straw, and cattle muck in the valley bottom. And going away was wonderful, for at every turn there was something new to be seen: trees with cones, birds flitting among the branches, lichen-encrusted rocks, everything in the shaft of the false distances, of the distances occupied by gunshot that gulped up the air between. But he wasn’t to shoot, they told him; those were places to be passed in silence, and the cartridges were for fighting. But at a certain point a leveret, frightened by the footsteps, scampered across the trail, amid shouts and the bustle of the men. It was just about to vanish into the brake when the boy stopped it with a shot. “A good shot,” the leader himself conceded, “but this is not a pleasure hunt. You’re not to shoot again, even if you see a pheasant.”

But scarcely an hour had elapsed before there were more shots from the column.

“It’s the boy again!” the leader stormed, going forward to overtake him.

The boy grinned with his rosy and white apple face.

“Partridges,” he said, displaying them. They had burst up from a hedge.

“Partridges, crickets, or whatever else, I gave you fair warning. Now let me have the rifle. And if you make me lose my temper once more, back to the village you go.”

The boy sulked a little; it was no fun to be hiking without a rifle, but as long as he remained with them he might hope to have it again.

In the night they bedded down in the chalet of herdsmen. The boy awakened immediately the sky grew light, while the others still slept. He took their finest rifle and loaded his haversack with cartridges and went out. The air was timorous and crisp, as one may discover it in the early morning. Not far from the house stood a mulberry tree. It was the hour in which jays were arriving. There, he saw one! He fired, ran to pick it up, and stuffed it into his haversack. Without moving from where the jay had fallen, he looked about for another target. A dormouse! Startled by the first shot, it was scurrying toward safety in the crown of a chestnut tree. Dead, it was simply a large mouse with a gray tail that shed shocks of fur at touch. From beneath the chestnut tree he sighted, in a field off below him, a mushroom, red with white prickles and poisonous. He crumbled it with a shot, then went to see if really he had got it. What fun it was, going from one target to another like that: one might in time go all the way round the world! He spied a large snail on a rock; he sighted on its shell, and going over to it noticed nothing but the shattered rock and a spot of iridescent spittle. Thus did he wander from the chalet, down through unfamiliar fields.

From the stone he saw a lizard on a wall, from the wall a puddle and a frog, from the puddle a signboard on the zigzagging road, and beneath it: beneath it men in uniform advancing on him with arms at the ready. When the boy came forth with his rifle, smiling, his face rosy and white like an apple, they shouted, raising their guns. But the boy had already seen and fired at one of the gold buttons on the chest of one of them. He heard the man scream, and then bullets, in a hail and single shots, whistling over his head: he had already flattened to the ground behind a pile of rocks on the hem of the road, in a dead angle. The rock pile was long and he could move about, and he was able to peep out from unexpected points, see the flash of the soldiers’ musketry, the gray and gloss of their uniforms, and fire at a chevron, at an insignia. Then quickly scramble along the ground to fire from a new position.

Then he heard a burst of fire behind him, raking over his head into the ranks of the soldiers: his companions had appeared on the rescue with machine guns. “If the boy hadn’t awakened us with his firing . . .” they were saying.

Covered by his companions, the boy was better able to see. Suddenly a bullet grazed his cheek. He turned: a soldier had got to the road above him. He threw himself into the drainage ditch, gaining shelter again, at the same time firing; the bullet, though failing to hit the soldier, glanced off his riflestock. Now, from the sounds that he heard, he could tell that his adversary’s rifle had jammed; the soldier flung it to the ground. Then the boy rose up. The soldier had taken to his heels and the boy fired at him, popping an epaulette into the air.

The boy gave chase. The soldier dashed into the woods, at first vanishing but presently reappearing within range. The boy burned a crease in the dome of the soldier’s helmet, next shot off a belt loop. One after the other, they had meanwhile come into a dale, to which they were both of them strangers, and where the din of the battle was no longer heard. In time, the soldier found himself without any more trees before him, instead a glade overgrown with knotted thicket clumps. And the boy was himself about to come out of the woods.

In the middle of the clearing stood a large rock. The soldier barely made it, jumping behind and doubling up with his head between his knees. There, for the time being, he felt, he was out of danger; he had some grenades with him, and the boy would have to maintain a respectful distance; he could do no more than keep him pinned down with his rifle, ensuring that he did not escape. Certainly, had it been possible for him simply to dive into the thickets, he would be safe, able then to slide down the heavily bearded slope. But there was that open tract to cross. How long would the boy wait? And would he continue to keep his rifle trained on him? The soldier decided to try an experiment: he put his helmet on his bayonet and stuck it out from behind the rock. There was a shot and the helmet, pierced through, bowled along the ground.

The soldier kept his wits; doubtless aiming at the rock and the area around it was quite easy, but the soldier would not get hit if he was nimble enough. Just then a bird raced overhead, a hoopoe perhaps. One shot and it fell. The soldier wiped sweat from around his neck. Another bird, a missel thrush, went over: it fell, too. The soldier swallowed. This was very likely a flyway, for other birds continued to go over, all of them different, and as the boy fired, they fell. A thought came to the soldier: If he’s watching birds, then he can’t be watching me. Just as he fires I’ll jump for the bushes. But it might be well to test his plan first. He picked up his helmet and placed it back on the tip of his bayonet. Two birds flew over this time: snipes. Waiting, the soldier regretted wasting so fine an occasion on the test. The boy fired at one of the snipes; the soldier raised his helmet. A second shot rang out and he saw the helmet leap into the air. The soldier’s mouth tasted of lead; he had no sooner noticed this than the second bird fell. He must not lose his head: behind the rock with his grenades, he was safe. And why, then, even though hidden, couldn’t he try to get the boy with a grenade? He lay on his back and, taking care not to be seen, stretched back his arm, primed his strength, and pitched the grenade. A good throw; it would go some distance; but describing only half of a parabola, still in midair, it was exploded by a rifle blast. The soldier flattened himself against the ground to escape the shrapnel.

When next the soldier raised himself, the raven had come.

He saw, circling lazily above him, a bird, a raven perhaps. The boy would certainly shoot it down. But no shot followed. Was the raven perhaps too high? And yet he had brought down higher and swifter birds than that. Finally he fired: now it would drop. No. Unperturbed, it continued to soar in the sky, slowly, round and round. A pinecone toppled from a nearby tree. Had he taken to shooting at pinecones? One by one, as he hit them, the cones fell, striking with a dry crunch. At each report the soldier glanced up at the raven: was it falling? Not yet. Lower and lower, the black bird continued to circle overhead. Could it be, really, that the boy didn’t see it? Or perhaps the raven didn’t exist at all, was only a hallucination. But perhaps—perhaps a man near death sees all the birds fly over . . . and when he sees the raven it means that the hour has come. In any case, he must tell the boy, who went on shooting at mere pinecones.

The soldier rose to his feet and pointed up at the black bird.

“There’s the raven!” he shouted in his own language. The bullet struck him through the heart of the spread eagle embroidered on his jacket.

The raven came down slowly, wheeling.

One of the Three Is Still Alive

Three naked men were sitting on a stone. All the men of the village were standing around them and facing a bearded old man.

“. . . and they were the highest flames I’ve ever seen in the mountains,” the old man with the beard was saying. “And I said to myself, How can a village burn so high? And the smell of smoke was unbearable and I said to myself, How can smoke from our village stink like that?”

The tallest of the three naked men, who was hugging his shoulders because there was a slight wind, gave the oldest a dig in the ribs to get him to explain; he still wanted to understand, and the other was the only one who knew a little of the language. But the oldest of the three did not raise his head from between his hands, and now and again a quiver passed along the vertebrae on his bent back. The fat man was no longer to be counted on; the womanish fat on his body was trembling all over, his eyes were like windowpanes streaked by rain.

“And then they told me that the flames burning our houses came from our own grain, and the stink was from our sons being burned alive; Tancin’s son, Gé’s son, the son of the customs guard . . .”

“My son Bastian!” shouted a man with haunted eyes. He was the only one who interrupted, every now and again. The others were standing there silent and serious, with their hands on their rifles.

The third naked man was not of exactly the same nationality as the others; he came from a part where villages and children had been burned at one time. So he knew what people think about those who burn and kill, and should have felt less hopeful than the others. Instead of which there was something, an anguished uncertainty, that prevented him from resigning himself.

“Now, we’ve only caught these three men,” said the old man with the beard.

“Only three!” shouted the haunted-looking man; the others were still silent.

“Maybe among them, too, there are some who aren’t really bad, who obey orders against their will, maybe these three are that sort . . .”

The haunted-looking man glared at the old man.

“Explain,” whispered the tallest of the three naked men to the oldest. But the other’s whole life now seemed to be running away down the vertebrae on his spine.

“When children have been killed and houses burned one can’t make any distinction between those who’re bad and those who aren’t. And we’re sure of being in the right by condemning these three to death.”

Death, thought the tallest of the three naked men. I heard that word. What does it mean—“death”?

But the oldest one took no notice of him, and the fattest now seemed to be muttering prayers. Suddenly the fattest had remembered he was a Catholic. He had been the only Catholic in the company, and his comrades had often made fun of him. “I’m a Catholic,” he began muttering in his own language. It was not clear whether he was begging for salvation on earth or in heaven.

“I say that before killing them we should . . .” exclaimed the haunted-looking man, but the others had got to their feet and were not listening to him.

“To the Witch’s Hole,” said one with a black mustache. “So there won’t be any graves to dig.”

They made the three get up. The fattest put his hands over his front. Nothing made them feel more under accusation than being naked.

The peasants led them up along the rocky path, with rifles in their backs. The Witch’s Hole was the opening of a vertical cave, a hole that dropped right down into the belly of the mountain, down, down, no one knew where. The three naked men were led up to the edge, and the armed peasants lined up in front of them; then the oldest of them began screaming. He screamed out despairing phrases, perhaps in his own dialect; the other two did not understand him. He was the father of a family, the oldest was, but he was also the least worthy, and his screams had the effect of making the other two feel annoyed with him and calmer in the face of death. The tall one, though, still felt that strange disquiet, as if he were not quite certain of something. The Catholic was holding his joined hands low; it was not clear whether this was to pray or to hide his front.

Hearing the eldest one screaming made the armed peasants lose their calm; they wanted to have done with the business as soon as possible, and began to fire scattered shots without waiting for an order. The tall one saw the Catholic crumple down beside him and roll into the precipice; then the oldest of them fell with his head back and vanished, dragging his last cry down the walls of rock. Between the puffs of gunpowder the tall one saw a peasant struggling with a blocked bolt; then he, too, fell into the darkness.

A cloud of pain in the back like a swarm of stinging bees prevented him from losing consciousness at once; he had fallen through a briar bush. Then tons of emptiness weighed down on his stomach, and he fainted.

Suddenly he seemed to be back on a height, as if the earth had given a great heave; he had stopped. His fingers were wet and he smelled blood. He must be crushed to bits and about to die. But he did not feel himself getting weaker, and all the agonies of the fall were lively and distinct in his mind. He tried to move a hand, the left one; it responded. He groped along the other arm, touched his pulse, his elbow, but the arm did not feel anything; it might have been dead, for it only moved if raised by the other hand. Then he had the sensation of holding the wrist of his right arm in both hands; this was impossible. He realized that he was holding someone else’s arm; he had fallen on the dead body of one of the other two. He prodded the fat flesh of the Catholic; that soft cushion had broken his fall. That was why he was alive. That was one reason; also, he remembered now, he had not been hit but had flung himself down beforehand; he could not remember if he had done it intentionally, but that was not important now. Then he discovered that he could see; some light filtered down there in the depths, and the tallest of the three naked men could make out his own hands and those sticking out of the heap of flesh beneath him. He turned and looked up; at the top was an aperture full of light—the opening of the Witch’s Hole. First it hurt his eyes like a yellow flash; once they got used to it, he could see the blueness of the sky, far away from him, twice as far as the earth’s crust.

The sight of the sky plunged him into despair; it would certainly be better to be dead. There he was with his two dead companions at the bottom of a very deep pit, from which he could never get out again. He shouted. The streak of sky above became fringed with heads. “One of them’s alive!” they said. They threw something down. The naked man watched it dropping like a stone, then hit against the wall, and heard an explosion. There was a niche in the rock behind him, and the naked man squeezed into it; the well was full of dust and pieces of splintered rock. He pulled at the body of the Catholic and held it up in front of the niche; it was starting to fall apart, but there was nothing else he could use to shelter himself. He was just in time: another grenade came down and reached the bottom, raising a spray of blood and stones. The corpse broke up; now the naked man had no defense or hope. In the patch of sky appeared the white beard of the big old man. The others had drawn to one side.

“Hey!” called the big man with the beard.

“Hey!” replied the naked man, from the depths.

And the big man with the beard repeated, “Hey!”

There was nothing else to say between them.

Then the big man with the beard turned around. “Throw him a rope,” he said.

The naked man did not understand. He saw some of the heads leaving and the ones remaining making signs at him, signs of assurance, not to worry. The naked man looked at them with his head stuck out of the niche, not daring to expose himself altogether, feeling the same disquiet as when he had been sitting on the stone during the trial. But the peasants were not throwing grenades anymore; they were looking down and asking him questions, to which he replied with groans. The rope did not come, and one by one the peasants left the edge. Then the naked man came out of his hiding place and looked at the distance separating him from the top, the walls of sheer naked rock.

At that moment appeared the face of the haunted man. He was looking around and smiling. Then he moved back from the edge of the Witch’s Hole, aimed his rifle into it, and fired. The naked man heard the bullet whistle past his ear; the Witch’s Hole was a narrow shaft and not quite vertical, so things thrown in rarely reached the bottom, and bullets easily hit a layer of rock and stopped there. He squatted in his refuge, with foam on his lips, like a dog. Now up there all the peasants were back and one was unwinding a long rope down the shaft. The naked man watched the rope coming down but did not move.

“Hey!” the one with the black mustache shouted down. “Catch hold of it and come up.”

But the naked man stayed in his niche.

“Come on; up you go,” they shouted. “We won’t do you any harm.”

And they made the rope dance about in front of his eyes. The naked man was frightened.

“We won’t do you any harm. We swear it,” the men were saying, trying to sound sincere. And they were sincere; they wanted to save him at all costs so as to be able to shoot him all over again; but at that moment they just wanted to save him, and their voices had a tone of affection, of human brotherhood.

The naked man sensed all this, and anyway he had little choice; he put a hand on the rope. But then among the men holding it he saw the head of the man with the haunted eyes, and he dropped the rope and hid himself. They had to begin convincing him, begging him, all over again; finally he decided and began going up. The rope was full of knots and easy to climb; he could also catch hold of jutting bits of rock. As the naked man moved slowly up toward the light, he saw the heads of the peasants at the top becoming clearer and bigger. Then the man with the haunted eyes reappeared all of a sudden and the others did not have time to hold him back; he was holding an automatic gun and began firing it at once. At the first burst the rope broke right above the naked man’s hands. He crashed down, knocking against the sides, and fell back on the remains of his companions. Up there, against the sky, he saw the man with the beard waving his arms and shaking his head.

The others were trying to explain, in gestures and shouts, that it was not their fault, that they’d punish that madman, and that they were going to look for another rope and bring him up again. But the naked man had lost hope now; he would never be able to return to the earth’s surface; he would never leave the bottom of this shaft, and he would go mad there drinking blood and eating human flesh, without ever being able to die. Up there, against the sky, there were good angels with ropes, and bad angels with grenades and rifles, and a big old man with a white beard who waved his arms but could not save him.

The armed men, seeing him unconvinced by their fair words, decided to finish him off with hand grenades, and began throwing them down. But the naked man had found another hiding place, a narrow horizontal crack in the rock where he could slip in and be safe. At every grenade that fell he crawled deeper into this crack, until he reached a point where he could not see any more light. He went on dragging himself along on his stomach like a snake, with darkness and the damp slimy rock all around him. From being damp the rock surface beneath him was now getting wet, then covered with water; the naked man could feel the cold trickle running under his stomach. It was the passage opened under the earth by the rains coming down through the Witch’s Hole: a long narrow cavern, a subterranean drain. Where would it end? Perhaps it would lose itself in blind caves in the belly of the mountain, or perhaps it would funnel the water through narrow little channels that would issue into springs. And his body would rot away there in a drain and infect the waters of the springs, poisoning entire villages.

The air was almost unbreathable; the naked man felt the moment coming when his lungs would no longer be able to hold out. Instead, the flow of water was increasing, getting deeper and quicker; the naked man was now slithering along with his whole body underwater and could clean off the crust of mud and of his own and others’ blood. He did not know whether he had moved far or not; the complete darkness and that slithering movement had deprived him of all sense of distance. He was exhausted. Before his eyes luminous shapeless forms were beginning to appear. The farther he advanced, the clearer these shapes became, taking on definite though continuously transforming edges. Supposing it was not just a dazzle inside the retina of his eyes but a light, a real light, at the end of the cavern? He had only to close his eyes, or look in the opposite direction, to make certain. But anyone who stares at a light has a dazzled feeling at the roots of his eyes even if he shuts his lids or turns his gaze; he could not distinguish between the light outside and the lights in his own eyes, and remained in doubt.

He noticed something else new, by touch: the stalactites. Slimy stalactites were hanging from the roof of the cave and stalagmites coming up from the ground on the verges of the water, where they were not eroded. The naked man began pulling himself along by the stalactites above his head. And as he moved he noticed that his arms, from being folded to grasp the stalactites, were gradually straightening out, which meant that the cave was getting bigger. Soon the man could arch his back and walk on all fours, and the light was becoming less uncertain; he could tell now whether his eyes were open or shut, and he was beginning to make out the shapes of things, the arch of the roof, the droop of the stalactites, the black glitter of the current.

Finally he was walking erect, up the long cave toward the luminous opening, with the water to his waist—still hanging on to the stalactites, though, to keep himself straight. One stalactite seemed bigger than the others, and when the man seized it he felt it opening in his hand and a cold soft wing beating on his face. A bat! It flew off, and the other bats hanging with their heads down woke up and flew away; soon the whole cave was full of silent flying bats, and the man felt the wind from their wings around him and their skin brushing against his forehead and mouth. He walked on in a cloud until he reached the open air.

The cave came out into a torrent. Once again the naked man was on the crust of the earth, under the sky. Was he safe now? He must take care not to make any mistakes. The torrent was running silently over white and black stones. Around it was a wood full of twisted trees; all that grew in the undergrowth was thorns and brambles. He was naked in wild and deserted parts, and the nearest human beings were enemies who would pursue him with pitchforks and guns as soon as they saw him.

The naked man climbed a willow tree. The valley was all woods and shrub-covered slopes, under a gray hump of mountain. But at the end of it, where the torrent turned, there was a slate roof with white smoke coming up. Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.

Animal Woods

On days of Fascist roundups the woods might have been a fairground. Off the paths, among the bushes and trees, there was a constant passage of families urging along a cow or a calf, and old women leading a goat on a rope, and girls with a goose under one arm. Some of them were even escaping with their rabbits.

Wherever one went, the thicker the chestnut woods, the more one ran into heavy-bellied bulls and tinkling cows, which were finding it difficult to move on those rocky slopes. Best off were the goats, but perhaps the happiest were the mules, which just this once could move without carrying a burden and go cropping leaves along the alleys. The pigs went rooting about in the ground, pricking their snouts all over with chestnut husks; the chickens roosted in the trees and frightened the squirrels; the rabbits, which after centuries of cages had forgotten how to dig themselves lairs, took refuge in hollow tree trunks, where they were sometimes bitten by squirrels.

That morning a peasant named Giuà Dei Fichi was gathering fuel in a remote corner of the woods. He knew nothing about what was happening in the village, for he had left the evening before, intending to gather mushrooms in the morning, and had slept in the middle of the woods in a hut used, in autumn, for drying chestnuts.

So as he was chopping a dead tree trunk with a hatchet be was surprised to hear a vague tinkling of bells far and near through the woods. He stopped chopping and heard voices getting closer. “Oo-u,” he shouted.

Giuà Dei Fichi was a short, tubby little man, with a face like a full moon, dark of skin and flushed with wine; he wore a green conical hat with a pheasant’s feather stuck in it, a shirt with big yellow spots under a homespun jerkin, and a red scarf around his tubby stomach to hold up trousers covered with deep-blue patches.

“Coo-u!” came the reply, and between the green lichenous rocks appeared a close friend, a peasant with a mustache and a straw hat, dragging behind him a big, white-bearded goat.

“What’re you doing here, Giuà?” asked his friend. “The Germans’ve reached the village and are going around to all the animal stalls!”

“Oh!” shouted Giuà Dei Fichi. “They’ll find my cow, Coccinella, and take her off!”

“Hurry up and you may still be in time to hide her,” advised his friend. “We saw the column as it was coming up through the valley and we took off at once. But they may not have reached your place yet.”

Giuà left his firewood, hatchet, and basket of mushrooms and rushed off. As he ran through the woods he met rows of ducks that scattered quacking between his feet, and flocks of sheep marching compactly side by side without moving to let him through, and children and old women who shouted, “They’ve reached the Madonnetta! They’re searching the homes above the bridge! I saw them turning the last corner before the village!” Giuà Dei Fichi speeded up his short legs and went rolling down the slopes like a ball and panting up the hills with his heart in his mouth.

On and on he ran till he reached the top of a hill from which opened a view of the village. A great expanse of tender early morning air, a misty ring of hills, and in the middle the village, knobbly houses all stone and slate, heaped on top of one another. And through the thin air came the sounds of shouts in German and of fists banging against doors.

“Oh dear! The Germans are already in the houses!”

Giuà Dei Fichi was trembling all through his arms and legs; a bit of a tremor he already had from drinking, and more now came over him at the thought of his cow, Coccinella, the one possession he had in the world, about to be taken away from him.

Very quietly, cutting through fields, keeping under cover of vines, Giuà Dei Fichi drew near the village. His little house was one of the last, on the outskirts, in the middle of a green mass of pumpkins, where the village merged into vegetable patches; possibly the Germans might not have reached it yet.

Peeping around each corner, Giuà made his way into the village. He saw an empty street with the usual smells of hay and stalls; those new noises were coming from the middle of the village—inhuman voices and the stamping of iron-clad feet. There his house was—still shut up. The door of the stall on the ground floor was closed, and so was the one to the rooms at the top of the worn outside staircase, with its clumps of basil planted in cooking pots filled with earth. A voice from inside the stall said, “Mooooo.” It was Coccinella recognizing the approach of her owner. Giuà blushed with pleasure.

But now from under an arcade resounded a tramp of feet; Giuà hid in a doorway, sucking in his round paunch. It was a German, with the look of a peasant, wrists and neck jutting out of his short tunic, and long, long legs and a big gun as long as himself. He had left the others to try to find something on his own; besides, the look and smells of the village reminded him of things he knew well. So he was walking along sniffing the air and looking around with a yellow, porkish face under the peak of his squashed cap. At that moment Coccinella lowed: “Mooo.” She could not understand why her master had not arrived yet. The German quivered in his shrunken clothes and at once made for the stall; Giuà Dei Fichi held his breath.

He saw the German beginning to kick violently at the door; he’d break it in soon for sure. Then Giuà slipped around the corner behind the house, went to the haystack, and began groping about under the hay. There he’d hidden his old double-barreled shotgun, with a full belt of cartridges. Giuà loaded the gun with a couple of shots, strapped the belt around his tummy, then very quietly, with the gun at the ready, went and hid behind the door of the stall.

The German was coming out, pulling Coccinella along behind him on a rope. She was a fine red cow with black markings (that was why she was called Coccinella[*]), a young, affectionate, punctilious cow; she did not want to be taken away by this man she did not know, and was balking; the German had to pull her along by the halter.

Giuà Dei Fichi looked on, hidden behind a wall. Now, it should be said that Giuà was the worst shot in the village. Never had he succeeded in hitting, even by mistake, a squirrel, let alone a hare. When he shot at sitting thrushes, they didn’t even bother to move from the branch. No one wanted to go shooting with him, for he was apt to hit other men’s behinds. He couldn’t aim: his hands always trembled.

Now he pointed the gun, but his hands were trembling and the barrel of the shotgun waved about in the air. He tried to aim at the German’s heart, but what he saw through the sights was the cow’s rump. Oh dear! thought Giuà. Suppose I fire at the German and kill Coccinella? So he didn’t dare fire.

The German was moving along very slowly with this cow; she could sense the nearness of her master and was refusing to be dragged. Suddenly the German realized that his fellow soldiers had already evacuated the village and were disappearing down the road. He tried to catch up with them, pulling that stubborn cow after him; and Giuà followed him at a distance, jumping behind bushes and walls and pointing his shotgun every now and again. But he could not manage to keep the weapon steady, and the German and the cow were always too near each other for him to dare fire a shot. Must he let the German take her away?

To reach the column in the distance, the German took a shortcut through the woods. Now it was easier for Giuà to trail him by hiding among the tree trunks. And perhaps now the German would begin walking farther away from the cow so that it would be possible to shoot at him.

Once in the woods, Coccinella seemed to lose her reluctance to move, and since the German was apt to get lost among the paths which he could scarcely make out, she even began guiding him and deciding whenever two paths crossed. Before long the German realized he was not on the shortcut to the main road but in the middle of a thick woods; both he and the cow were lost, in fact.

Giuà Dei Fichi, his nose scratched by branches, his feet soaked by rivulets he’d stumbled into, was still following along behind, among flapping birds taking flight and frogs croaking in the mud. It was even more difficult to aim among the trees, with all those obstacles around and that wine-red-and-black rump, which seemed always to be there under his eyes.

The German was already looking in alarm at the thickness of the woods and wondering how he could get out when he heard a rustling in an arbutus bush and out came a fine red pig. At home he’d never seen pigs wandering about in the woods. He loosened the rope on the cow and began following the pig. As soon as Coccinella felt herself free she trotted off into the woods, which was, she sensed, full of friendly creatures.

Now was the moment for Giuà to shoot. The German was fussing around the pig, clutching at it to keep it still, but it slipped away.

Giuà was about to press the trigger when nearby appeared two small children, a little boy and a little girl, wearing woolen caps with pompoms and long stockings. Big tears were dropping from their eyes. “Aim carefully, Giuà, please,” they said. “If you kill the pig we’ll have nothing left!” Giuà Dei Fichi felt the gun dancing about in his hands again; he had such a soft heart and was too easily moved, not by having to kill that German but by having to risk the pig that belonged to those two poor little children.

The German was swaying about among the rocks and bushes, gripping the pig, which was wriggling about and grunting, “Ghee . . . ghee . . . ghee . . .” Suddenly the pig’s grunts were answered by a “baaa” and out from a cave trotted a little lamb. The German let the pig go and ran after the lamb. What strange woods, he thought, with pigs in bushes and lambs in caves. And he caught the lamb, which was bleating at the top of its voice, by a leg, hitched it up on his shoulder like the Good Shepherd, and started off. Very quietly Giuà Dei Fichi followed. “This time he won’t escape. This time he’s had it,” he said to himself, and was just about to fire when a hand raised the barrel of his gun. It was an old shepherd with a white beard, who was now holding out his clasped hands toward him and saying, “Giuà, don’t kill my little lamb; kill the German, but don’t kill my little lamb. Aim well, just this once, aim well!” But Giuà was completely confused by now, and couldn’t even find the trigger.

The German on his way through the woods was making discoveries that left him openmouthed: chickens perched in trees, guinea pigs peering from hollow trunks. It was a complete Noah’s ark. He saw a turkey spreading its tail on the branch of a pine. At once he put up his hand to catch it, but the turkey gave a little skip and went to perch on a branch higher up, still spreading its tail. The German left the lamb and began climbing up the pine. But for every layer of branches he reached, the turkey went up another layer, without looking in the least put out, still preening itself, its hanging wattles aflame.

Giuà moved under the tree; there was a leafy branch on his head, two others on his shoulders, and one tied to the barrel of his gun. But then a plump young woman with a red handkerchief tied around her head came up to him. “Giuà,” she said, “listen to me. If you kill the German I’ll marry you; if you kill the turkey I’ll bump you off.” Giuà, still a bachelor though no longer young, and very modest, blushed scarlet; his gun began waving around like a spit.

The German was still climbing and had reached the smallest branches; suddenly one of them broke under him and down he fell. He very nearly fell right on top of Giuà Dei Fichi, who did this once see straight and get away in time. But on the ground Giuà left all the branches that had been hiding him, so the German fell on them and did not hurt himself.

As he fell he saw a hare on the path. But no, it wasn’t a hare; it was round and paunchy and did not run away when it heard a noise, but settled down on the ground. It was a rabbit; the German took it by the ears. He walked on, with the rabbit struggling and twisting about in all directions, so that in order not to let it escape he had to keep jumping about with his arm raised. The woods were full of lowing, bleating, and screeching. At every step were new things to be seen: a parrot on a holly branch, three goldfish wriggling in a spring.

Giuà, from astride the high branch of an ancient oak, was following the German’s dance with the rabbit. But it was difficult to aim at him because the rabbit was constantly changing position and getting in between. Giuà felt a pull at a corner of his jerkin; it was a little girl with braids and a freckly face. “Don’t kill the rabbit, Giuà, please. I don’t mind if you shoot the German, though.”

Meanwhile the German had reached a place covered with gray stones spotted with blue and green lichen. There were only a few bare pines growing there, and nearby opened a precipice. A hen was scratching about in the carpet of pine needles covering the ground. When the German began running after the hen, the rabbit escaped.

It was the thinnest, oldest, and scraggiest hen he had ever seen. It belonged to Girumina, the poorest old woman in the village. Now the German had it in his hands.

Giuà was lying on top of the rocks and had constructed a pedestal of stones for his shotgun. He had even put up a sort of little fortress, with only a narrow slit for the barrel. Now he could fire without having any scruples: even if he killed that scraggy hen, little harm was done.

But now old Girumina came up to him, wrapped in her ragged black shawls, and began saying persuasively, “Giuà, it’s bad enough that a German should take away my hen, the last thing I possess in all the world. But it’s much worse that you should be the one to kill it.”

Giuà began trembling more than ever before because of the great responsibility weighing on him. But he pulled himself together and pressed the trigger.

The German heard the shot and saw the chicken wriggling in his hands lose its tail. Another shot, and the chicken lost a wing. Was it bewitched, this chicken, that it exploded every now and again and was falling to pieces in his hands? There was another explosion and the chicken was completely featherless, ready for roasting, and yet it still went on flapping its one wing. Seized with terror, the German was holding the chicken away from himself by the neck. Giuà’s fourth cartridge cut the neck off right under his hand and left him holding the head, which was still moving. He flung it aside and ran away. But he could not find any more paths. Near him was that rocky precipice. The last tree before the precipice was a carob, and in its branches the German saw a big cat crouching.

By now he was beyond feeling any surprise at seeing domestic animals scattered in the woods, and he put out a hand to stroke the cat. Then he took it by the nape of the neck, hoping to please it and hear it purr.

For some time now the woods had been plagued by a savage wild cat that killed birds and sometimes even got into the henhouses in the village. The German, who was expecting to hear it purr, suddenly saw the cat fling itself at him with its fur on end, and felt its claws slashing into him. In the struggle that followed both man and beast rolled over the edge of the precipice.

So it was that Giuà, a hopeless shot, was feted as the greatest partisan and huntsman in the village. And poor Girumina was bought a brood of newly hatched chicks at the expense of the community.

Minefield

“Mined” was exactly what the old man had said, waving an open hand before his eyes, as if he were wiping a clouded pane. “All along there, didn’t know exactly where. They came and mined it. We were in hiding.”

The man in the baggy trousers had glanced for a moment at the slope of the mountain, then at the old man standing erect in the doorway.

“But since the end of the war,” he had said then, “there’s been time to do something about it. There must be some kind of path. Somebody must know.”

You know it well, old man, the younger man had thought, too, because the old man was surely a smuggler and knew the frontier terrain like the bowl of his pipe.

The old man had looked at the patched, baggy trousers, the other man’s limp, torn knapsack, the layer of dust covering him from hair to shoes, bearing witness to the miles he must have covered on foot. “Nobody knows just where,” the old man had repeated. “The pass. It’s a minefield.” Then he made that gesture, as if there were a clouded glass between himself and everything else.

“Hey, I can’t be all that unlucky, can I? To go and step right on a mine?” the younger man had asked, with a smile that seemed to set the old man’s teeth on edge as an unripe persimmon would.

“Huh,” the old man had said then. Only that: Huh.

Now the younger man was trying to remember the tone of that huh. Because it could have been a huh, I should think not, or a huh, you never can tell, or a huh, nothing more likely. But the old man had uttered only a huh without any special intonation, as blank as his gaze, bleak as this mountain terrain, where even the grass was short and tough as an ill-shaven human beard.

The trees along the slopes could never grow taller than the brush; every now and then there was a twisted, rubbery pine, situated so as to cast as little shade as possible. The man was now walking along the remnants of climbing trails, gnawed away year after year by the encroaching bushes and trodden only by smugglers’ footsteps, an animal tread that leaves little imprint.

“Damn this land,” the man said. “I can’t wait to be on the other side.” Luckily he had already taken this route once, before the war, and he could do without a guide. He also knew that the pass was a broad, high gap, and they couldn’t mine the whole thing.

So he had only to be careful where he set his feet: a spot with a mine underneath must surely look different somehow from all other spots. Somehow: loose dirt, stones artfully arranged, fresher grass. Over there, for example: you knew immediately there could be no mines. No mines? What about that slab of slate lying askew? That bare patch in the middle of the field? And that tree across the path? But the pass was still far ahead. There couldn’t be any mines, not yet. He walked on.

Perhaps he would have preferred to cross the mined zone at night, crawling in the darkness, not to elude the border guards—these places were safe from them—but to elude the fear of the mines, as if the mines were great dozing beasts that could waken at his passing. Marmots, enormous marmots curled up in underground lairs, with one acting as a sentry on top of a rock, the way marmots do, to give the alarm with a hiss on seeing him.

At that hiss, the man thought, the minefield blows up, the enormous marmots fall on me and tear me to pieces with their teeth.

But never had a man been chewed by marmots, and never would he be blown up by mines. It was hunger that prompted these thoughts; he knew it. The man knew hunger, the tricks the imagination plays in times of hunger, when everything seen or heard assumes a meaning associated with food and chewing.

The marmots did exist, however. You could hear the hissing—“ghee . . . gheeeee . . .”—from up in the spills of rock. If I could succeed in killing a marmot with a stone, the man thought, and roast it on a stake . . .

He thought of the greasy smell of marmot, but without nausea; hunger gave him an appetite even for marmot fat, anything that could be eaten. For a week he had been lurking around farms, approaching shepherds to beg a loaf of brown bread, a cup of clotted milk.

“If only we had some for ourselves. We don’t have anything,” they would say, pointing to the bare, smoke-darkened walls, decorated only with a string or two of garlic.

He came within sight of the gap before he was expecting it and felt a twinge of amazement, almost of fear, at once: he wasn’t expecting the rhododendrons to be in bloom. He had thought he would find the gap bare, so he could study every stone, every bush before taking a step forward. Instead he was plunged up to his knees in a sea of rhododendrons, a uniform, impenetrable sea from which only the humps of the gray stones surfaced.

And under it, the mines. “Don’t know exactly where,” the old man had said. “All along there.” And then he had passed those open hands through the air. The younger man now thought he could see the shadow of those hands fall on the expanse of rhododendrons, spreading out until it covered them.

He had chosen a route along a winding crevasse flanking the broad gap, uncomfortable for walking but also uncomfortable to mine. Farther up, the rhododendrons thinned out, and among the rocks you could hear the “ghee . . . ghee . . .” of the marmots, as unrelenting as the sun on the back of his neck.

Where there are marmots, he thought, heading in that direction, it’s a sign there are no mines.

But this reasoning was erroneous: there were antipersonnel mines, devised to kill men, and the weight of a marmot would not be enough to trip them. He had recalled the name of the mines at this moment, antipersonnel, and it frightened him.

Personnel, he repeated, human beings.

That name was suddenly enough to frighten him. Certainly if they mined a pass it was in order to make it completely useless. He had better turn back, question the men of the area more closely, try some other way.

He turned to retrace his steps. But where had he set his foot before? The rhododendrons stretched out behind him, a vegetable sea, impenetrable, with no trace of his passage. Perhaps he was already in the heart of the minefield, and a misstep could destroy him; he might as well go forward.

This damned land, he thought. Damned right to the end.

If only he had a dog, a big dog, heavy as a man, to send ahead. Instinctively he clicked his tongue, as if urging a dog to run. I have to be my own dog, he thought.

Maybe a stone would do. There was one near him: big, but he could lift it. It was just right. He grabbed it with both hands and flung it ahead of himself as far as he could throw, uphill. The stone fell not far away and rolled back toward him. He could only try his luck, as he was doing.

He was already in the higher part of the gap, among the treacherous dry, rocky stream beds. The colonies of marmots had heard the man and were in a state of alarm. Their screams pierced the air like cactus spines.

But the man no longer thought of hunting the animals. He had realized that the gap, broad at its mouth, had gradually narrowed and now was only a passage between cliffs and brush. Then the man understood: the minefield could only be here. This was the only spot where a certain number of mines, placed at the correct interval, could block all passing. Instead of terrifying him, this discovery gave him a strange serenity. Very well: he now found himself in the middle of the minefield, that was sure. Now there was nothing to do but continue climbing, at random, and let what would happen, happen. If it was his fate to die that day, he would die; if not, he would walk between one mine and the next and would be saved.

He formulated this thought about fate without any conviction: he did not believe in fate. If he took a step it was because he could not do otherwise; it was because the movement of his muscles, the course of his thoughts, led him to take that step. But there was a moment when he could take this step or that one, when his thoughts were in doubt, his muscles taut but without direction. He decided not to think, to let his legs move like a robot’s, to set his feet on the stones without looking; but he had the nagging suspicion that it was his volition that decided whether he would turn right or left, place his foot on this stone or that.

He stopped. He felt a strange inner craving, compounded of hunger and fear, which he could not allay. He searched his pockets: he was carrying a little mirror, the memento of a woman. Maybe this was what he wanted: to look at himself in a mirror. In the little piece of murky glass an eye appeared, red and swollen, then a cheek, the beard caked with dust, then his parched, chapped lips, his gums redder than the lips, then the teeth . . . Still, the man would have liked to see himself in a big mirror, see himself whole. To run that little piece of mirror over his face and see an eye, an ear did not satisfy him.

He went on. I haven’t encountered the minefield so far, he thought. By now it must be another fifty paces, forty . . .

Every time he set his foot down, feeling the ground beneath him hard and steady, he heaved a sigh. One step is taken, another, and another. This slab of marl seemed a trap, but, no, it’s firm; this clump of heather isn’t concealing anything; this stone . . . the stone sank two inches beneath his weight. “Gheee . . . ghee . . .” went the marmots. Go ahead: the other foot.

The earth became sun, the air became earth, the “gheee” of the marmots became thunder. The man felt an iron hand grasp him by the hair, at the nape. Not one hand, a hundred hands seized him, each by the hair, and tore him head to foot, the way you tear up a sheet of paper, into hundreds of little pieces.

Seen in the Cafeteria

I knew immediately that something would happen. The two looked at each other across the table, eyes expressionless, like fish in an aquarium. But it was clear that they were strangers, mutually unfathomable, two animals unknown to each other, each studying and distrusting the other.

She had arrived first: she was an enormous black-garbed woman, certainly a widow. A country widow who had come to the city on business, that was how I immediately placed her. Such types also come to the cheap people’s cafeterias where I eat: wholesale or retail black marketeers with a taste for economy left from when they were poor, who, every so often, remembering that their pockets are full of thousand-lire notes, have a burst of extravagance that inspires them to order tagliatelle and steak, while the rest of us, skinny bachelors who eat with a meal ticket, gaze enviously and down spoonfuls of soup. The woman must be a wealthy black marketeer; seated, she occupied one side of the table and was pulling out of her bag white rolls, fruit, cheeses carelessly wrapped in paper, and spreading them out on the tablecloth. Meanwhile, mechanically, with black-rimmed fingers, she was picking off grapes and bits of bread and putting them in her mouth, where they disappeared in a quiet chewing.

It was then that he approached, saw the unoccupied seat with a corner of the tablecloth still uncluttered. He asked, “May I?” The woman looked at him fleetingly, chewing. He asked again, “Excuse me . . . May I?” The woman spread her arms and let out a grunt, her mouth full of chewed bread. The man thanked her by tipping his hat and sat down. He was a tidy, threadbare old man in a starched collar, wearing an overcoat although it wasn’t winter, and with the wire of a hearing aid dangling from his ear. Immediately, at first sight, one felt uneasy for him, for the courteousness that was visible in every gesture. He was certainly a fallen aristocrat, who had tumbled suddenly from a world of compliments and ceremony into a world of shoving and fists in the side, where he understood nothing, as he went on bowing amid the crowd in the people’s cafeteria as if at a court reception.

Now they were facing each other, the newly rich and the formerly rich, animals unknown to one another: the woman broad and short, with big hands resting on the tablecloth like the claws of a crab, and a movement like the breathing of a crab in her throat; the old man sitting on the edge of his chair, elbows squeezed to his hips, gloved hands stiffened by arthritis, and small blue veins bulging in his face, as on a rock eroded by lichens.

“Pardon my hat,” he said. The woman looked at him with the yellow of her eyes. She understood nothing about him.

“Pardon me,” the man repeated, “if I keep my hat on. There’s a little breeze.”

The large widow then produced a smile in the corners of her mouth—which was coated with an insectlike down—almost without moving her facial muscles, a swallowed smile, like a ventriloquist’s. “Wine,” she said to the waitress passing by.

At that word the gloved old man blinked: he must have had a liking for wine; the veins at the tip of his nose testified to long, serious drinking bouts, like a gourmet’s. But he had surely had to give up drinking long ago. Now the large widow was dipping pieces of white bread in a glass of wine, and was chewing and chewing.

The old man with the gloves must have suffered some moments of shame, as if he were courting a woman and were afraid of appearing miserly. “Wine for me, too!” he said.

Immediately he regretted having said it, thinking that he might use up his pension before the end of the month and would have to fast for days and days with his coat on in the cold of his garret. He didn’t pour the wine into the glass. Maybe, he thought, I can give it back without touching it, say that I lost the desire, and not pay for it.

And he really had lost the desire, along with the desire to eat; he stirred his spoon around the tasteless soup, chewing with his few teeth, while the large widow gobbled forkfuls of buttery macaroni.

Let’s hope they’ll be quiet now, I thought, and one or the other finishes soon and leaves. I don’t know what I was afraid of. They were both monstrous beings, charged with a mutual and terrible hatred under that lazy appearance of crustaceans. I imagined a fight between them, monsters slowly tearing each other to pieces in the marine depths.

Already the old man was almost besieged by the widow’s food, scattered in its wrappings all over the table: confined to a corner with the tasteless soup and two thin rolls he’d got with the meal ticket. He was about to pull his rolls even further toward himself, as if fearing that they would get lost in the enemy camp, but with a wrong move of his gloved, stiffened hand he knocked a piece of cheese and it fell on the floor.

The widow was enormous in front of him: she sneered.

“I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry . . .” said the gloved man. The widow looked at him the way one looks at a new animal; she didn’t answer.

There, I thought, now he’ll shout Enough! and tear off the tablecloth!

Instead he bent over and made some clumsy gestures under the table in search of the cheese. The large widow watched him for a while, then, almost without moving, dropped one of her enormous paws to the floor, pulled up the piece of cheese, wiped it off, brought it to her insectlike mouth, and swallowed it even before the old man in the gloves had reemerged.

Finally he got up again, pained by the effort, red with confusion, his hat askew and the wire of the hearing aid crooked.

There, I thought, now he’ll grab the knife and kill her!

Instead he seemed unable to find a way of consoling himself for the poor showing he was convinced he’d made. And a wish to talk possessed him, to discourse on anything, just to dissipate the uncomfortable atmosphere. But he couldn’t say a word that didn’t originate in that discomfort, that wasn’t an apology.

“That cheese,” he said. “Really a pity . . . I’m sorry . . .”

Humiliating him with silence wasn’t enough for the large widow; she wanted to really crush him.

“It’s very important to me,” she said. “In Castel Brandone I have rounds of that cheese like this,” and she made a gesture. But it wasn’t the breadth of the gesture that struck the gloved old man.

“Castel Brandone?” he said, and his eyes sparkled. “I was a second lieutenant at Castel Brandone! In ’95, for the shooting. You who are from there surely know the Counts Brandone D’Asprez!”

The widow no longer merely sneered: she laughed. She laughed and turned around to see if the other diners had noticed how ridiculous that man was.

“You won’t remember,” the old man continued, “you certainly won’t remember . . . but that year the king came to Castel Brandone for the shooting. There was a reception at the castle of the D’Asprez! And it was then that the incident I’m going to tell you about took place . . .”

The large widow looked at the clock, ordered a plate of liver, and resumed eating in a hurry, without listening to him. The old man in the gloves understood that he was speaking only for himself, but he didn’t stop: he would have made a bad showing if he’d stopped, he had to finish the story he’d begun.

“His Majesty entered the hall, which was all illuminated,” he continued, with tears in his eyes. “And on one side were the ladies in evening dresses, who curtseyed, and on the other all of us officers at attention. And the king kissed the hand of the countess and greeted this one and that. Then he approached me . . .”

The two small carafes of wine were next to each other on the table: the widow’s almost finished, the old man’s still full. The widow absentmindedly poured wine from the full carafe and drank. The old man, although in the heat of the story, noticed: there, now there was no longer hope, he’d have to pay for it. And maybe the large widow would drink it all. But it wouldn’t be polite to point out the mistake, maybe she would be upset. No, it wouldn’t be polite.

“And His Majesty asked me, And you, lieutenant? Just like that, he asked me. And I, at attention: Second Lieutenant Clermont De Fronges, Majesty. And the king: Clermont! I knew your father, he said, a fine soldier! And he shook my hand . . . He said exactly that: a fine soldier.”

The large widow had finished eating and stood up. Now she was digging in her purse, which she had placed on the other chair. She was leaning over, and above the table you could see only her rear end, the enormous rear end of a fat woman, covered in black fabric. Old Clermont De Fronges had before him that large, moving rear end. He went on speaking, his face transfigured: “The whole room, chandeliers lighted, mirrors . . . And the king shook my hand. Bravo, Clermont De Fronges, he said to me . . . And all the ladies in evening dresses . . .”

Theft in a Pastry Shop

When Dritto got to the place where they were to meet, the others had already been waiting some time. There were two of them, Baby and Uora-Uora. The street was so silent that the ticking of the clocks in the houses could be heard. With two jobs to do, they’d have to hurry to get through them by dawn.

“Come on,” said Dritto.

“Where to?” they asked.

But Dritto was never one to explain about any job he was going to do.

“Come on now,” he replied. And he walked along in silence, through streets empty as dry rivers, with the moon following them alongthe tramlines, Dritto ahead, gazing around with those restless yellow eyes of his, his nostrils moving as if they were smelling something peculiar.

Baby was called that because he had a big head like a newborn baby and a stumpy body; also perhaps because of his short hair and pretty little face with its small black mustache. All muscle, he moved so softly he might have been a cat; there was no one like him at climbing up walls and squeezing through openings, and Dritto always had good reason to take him along.

“Will it be a good job, Dritto?” asked Baby.

“If we bring it off,” answered Dritto—a reply that didn’t mean much.

Meanwhile, by a devious route that only he knew, he had led them around a corner into a yard. The other two soon realized that they were going to work on the back of a shop, and Uora-Uora pushed ahead in case he was left as lookout. It always fell to Uora-Uora to be lookout man; he longed to break into houses, search around, and fill his pockets like the others, but he always found himself standing guard on cold streets, in danger from police patrols, his teeth chattering in the cold, and chain-smoking to calm his nerves. Uora-Uora was an emaciated Sicilian, with a sad mulatto face and wrists jutting out of his sleeves. When on a job he always dressed up in his best, God knows why, complete with hat, tie, and raincoat, and if forced to run for it, he’d snatch up the ends of his raincoat as if spreading wings.

“You’re lookout, Uora-Uora,” said Dritto, dilating his nostrils. Uora-Uora took off quietly; he knew Dritto and the danger signal of those dilating nostrils, which would move quicker and quicker until they suddenly stopped and he whipped out a revolver.

“There,” Dritto said to Baby. He pointed to a little window high off the ground, a piece of cardboard in place of a broken pane.

“You climb up, get in, and open for me,” he said. “Be sure not to put on the lights: they’ll be seen from outside.”

Baby pulled himself up on the smooth wall like a monkey, pushed in the cardboard without a sound, and stuck his head through. It was then that he became aware of the smell; he took a deep breath and up through his nostrils wafted an aroma of freshly baked pastry. It gave him a feeling of shy excitement, of remote tenderness, rather than of actual greed.

Oh, what a lot of pastries there must be in here, he thought. It was years since he had eaten a proper piece of pastry, not since before the war perhaps. He decided to search around till he found them. He jumped down into the darkness, kicked against a telephone, got a broomstick up his trouser leg, and then hit the ground. The smell of pastry was stronger than ever, but he couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

Yes, there must be a lot of pastries in here, thought Baby.

He reached out a hand, trying to feel his way in the dark, so he could reach the door and open it for Dritto. Quickly he recoiled in horror; he must be face-to-face with some animal, some soft slimy sea thing perhaps. He stood there with his hand in the air, a hand that had suddenly become damp and sticky, as if covered with leprosy. Between the fingers had sprouted something round and soft, an excrescence, maybe a tumor. He strained his eyes in the dark but could see nothing, not even when he put his hand under his nose. But he could smell, even though he could not see; and he burst out laughing. He realized he had touched a tart and was holding a blob of cream and a crystallized cherry.

At once he began licking the hand and groping around with the other at the same time. It touched something solid but soft, with a thin covering of fine sugar—a doughnut! Still groping, he popped the whole of it into his mouth and gave a little cry of pleasure on discovering it had jam inside. This really was the most wonderful place; whatever way he stretched out his hand in the dark, it found new kinds of pastry.

Suddenly he became aware of an impatient knocking on a door nearby; it was Dritto waiting to be let in. As Baby moved toward the sound, his hands bumped first into a meringue and then into an almond cake. He opened the door and Dritto’s flashlight lit up his little face, its mustache already white with cream.

“It’s full of pastries here!” exclaimed Baby, as if the other did not know.

“There isn’t time for pastries,” said Dritto, pushing him aside. “We’ve got to hurry.” And he went ahead, twisting the beam of his flashlight around in the dark. Everywhere it touched it lit up rows of shelves, and on the shelves rows of trays, and on the trays rows of pastries of every conceivable shape and color, tarts filled with cream that glittered like candle wax, piles of sugar-coated buns, and castles of almond cakes.

It was then that a terrible worry came over Baby, the worry of not having time to eat all he wanted, of being forced to make his escape before he had sampled all the different kinds of pastries, of having all this land of milk and honey at his disposal for only a few minutes in his whole life. And the more pastries he discovered, the more his anxiety increased, so that every new corner and every fresh view of the shop that was lit up by Dritto’s flashlight seemed to be about to shut him off.

He flung himself at the shelves, choking himself with pastries, cramming two or three inside his mouth at a time, without even tasting them; he seemed to be battling with the pastries, as if they were threatening enemies, strange monsters besieging him, a crisp and sticky siege which he must break through by the force of his jaw. The slit halves of the big sugared buns seemed to be opening yellow throats and eyes at him, the cream horns to be blossoming like flowers of carnivorous plants; for a horrible moment Baby had the feeling that it was he who was being devoured by the pastries.

Dritto pulled him by the arm. “The till,” he said. “We’ve got to open the till.”

At the same time, as he passed, he stuffed a piece of multicolored sponge cake into his mouth, a cherry off a tart, and then a brioche—hurriedly, as if anxious not to be distracted from the job at hand. He had switched off his flashlight.

“From outside they could see us clearly,” he said.

They had now reached the front of the pastry shop, with its showcases and marble countertops. Through the grilled shutters the lights from the street entered in streaks; outside they could see strange shadows on the trees and houses.

Now the moment had come to force the till.

“Hold this,” said Dritto, handing the flashlight to Baby with the beam pointing downward so that it could not be seen from outside.

But Baby was holding the flashlight with one hand and groping around with the other. He seized an entire plum cake and, while Dritto was busy at the lock with his tools, began chewing it as if it were a loaf of bread. But he soon tired of it and left it half eaten on the marble slab.

“Get away from there! Look what a filthy mess you’re making,” hissed Dritto through clenched teeth; in spite of his trade he had a strange respect for tidy work. Then he couldn’t resist the temptation either and stuffed two pastries, the kind that were half sponge and half chocolate, into his mouth, though without interrupting his work.

Baby, meanwhile, in order to have both hands free, had constructed a kind of lampshade from tray cloths and pieces of nougat. He then espied some large cakes with “Happy Birthday” written on them. He circled them, studying the plan of attack; first he reviewed them with a finger and licked off a bit of chocolate cream, then he buried his face inside and began biting them from the middle, one by one.

But he still felt a kind of frenzy, which he did not know how to satisfy; he could not discover any way of enjoying everything completely. Now he was crouching on all fours over a table laden with tarts; he would have liked to lie down in those tarts, cover himself with them, never have to leave them. But five or ten minutes from now it would be all over; for the rest of his life pastry shops would be out of bounds to him again, forever, as when he was a child squashing his nose against the windowpane. If only, at least, he could stay there three or four hours . . .

“Dritto,” he exclaimed, “suppose we hide here till dawn, who’ll see us?”

“Don’t be a fool,” said Dritto, who had now succeeded in forcing the till and was searching around among the notes. ‘We’ve got to get out of here before the cops show up.”

Just at that moment they heard a rap on the window. In the dim moonlight Uora-Uora could be seen knocking on the blind and making signs to them. The two in the shop gave a jump, but Uora-Uora motioned for them to keep calm and for Baby to come out and take his place, so that he could come in. The other two shook their fists and made faces at him and gestured for him to get away from the front of the shop if he didn’t want his brains blown out.

Dritto, however, had found only a few thousand lire in the till, and was cursing and blaming Baby for not trying to help him. But Baby seemed beside himself; he was biting doughnuts, picking at raisins, licking syrups, plastering himself all over and leaving sticky marks on the showcases and counters. He found that he no longer had any desire for pastries—in fact a feeling of nausea was beginning to creep up from the pit of his stomach—but he refused to take it seriously, he simply could not give up yet. And the doughnuts began to turn into soggy pieces of sponge cake, the tarts to flypaper, the cakes to asphalt. Now he saw only the corpses of pastries lying putrefying on their marble slabs, or felt them disintegrating like turgid glue inside his stomach.

Dritto, meanwhile, was cursing and swearing at the lock on another till, forgetful of pastries and hunger. Suddenly from the back of the shop appeared Uora-Uora, swearing in his Sicilian dialect, which was quite unintelligible to either of them.

“The cops?” they asked, already pale.

“Change of guard! Change of guard!” Uora-Uora was croaking in his dialect, trying hard to explain how unjust it was to leave him standing out in the cold while they gorged themselves with pastries inside.

“Go back and keep watch, go and keep watch!” shouted Baby angrily, the nausea from having eaten too much making him feel savage and selfish.

Dritto knew that it was only fair to Uora-Uora to make the change, but he also knew that Baby would not be convinced so easily, and without someone on guard they couldn’t stay. So he pulled out his revolver and pointed it at Uora-Uora.

“Back to your post right now, Uora-Uora,” he said.

Desperately, Uora-Uora thought of getting some supplies before leaving, and gathered in his big hands a small pile of little almond cakes with nuts.

“And suppose they catch you with your hands full of pastries, you fool, what’ll you tell them?” Dritto swore at him. “Leave them all there and get out.”

Uora-Uora burst into tears. Baby felt he hated him. He picked up a cake with “Happy Birthday” written on it and flung it in Uora-Uora’s face. Uora-Uora could easily have avoided it, but instead he extended his face to get the full force, then burst out laughing, for his face, hat, and tie were all covered in cream cake. Off he went, licking himself right up to his nose and cheeks.

At last Dritto succeeded in forcing the till and was stuffing into his pocket all the notes he could find, cursing because they stuck to his jammy fingers.

“Come on, Baby, time to go,” he said.

But Baby could not leave just like that; this was a feast to be talked over for years to come with his cronies and with Tuscan Mary. Tuscan Mary was Baby’s girlfriend; she had long smooth legs and a face and body that were almost horselike. Baby liked her because he could curl himself up and wind around her like a cat.

Uora-Uora’s second entrance interrupted the course of these thoughts. Dritto quickly pulled out his revolver, but Uora-Uora shouted, “The cops!” and rushed off, flapping the ends of his raincoat. Dritto gathered up the last few notes and was at the door in a couple of leaps, with Baby behind.

Baby was still thinking of Tuscan Mary, and it was then that he remembered he might have taken some pastries for her; he never gave her presents, and she might make a scene about it. He went back, snatched up some cream rolls, thrust them under his shirt, then, quickly realizing that he had chosen the most fragile ones, looked around for some more solid things and stuffed those into his bosom, too. At that moment he saw the shadows of policemen moving on the window, waving their arms and pointing at something at the end of the street; one of them aimed a revolver in that direction and fired.

Baby squatted down behind a counter. The shot did not seem to have hit its target; now they were making angry gestures and peering inside the shop. Shortly afterward he heard them finding the little door open and then coming in. Now the shop was teeming with armed policemen. Baby remained crouching there, but meanwhile he found some candied fruit within arm’s reach and chewed at slivers of citron and bergamot to calm his nerves.

The police had now discovered the theft and also found the remains of half-eaten pastries on the shelves. And so, distractedly, they, too, began to nibble little pastries that were lying about—taking care, though, to leave the traces of the thieves. After a few moments, becoming more enthusiastic in their search for evidence, they were all eating away heartily.

Baby was chewing, but the others were chewing even more loudly and drowned out the sound. All of a sudden he felt a thick liquid oozing up from between his skin and his shirt, and a mounting nausea from his stomach. He was so dizzy with candied fruit that it was some time before he realized that the way to the door was free. Later the police described how they had seen a monkey, its nose plastered with cream, swing across the shop, overturning trays and tarts; and how, by the time that they had recovered from their amazement and cleared the tarts from under their feet, he had escaped.

When Baby got to Tuscan Mary’s and opened his shirt, he found his whole chest covered with a strange sticky paste. And they stayed till morning, he and she, lying on the bed, licking and picking at each other till they had finished the last crumb of pastry and blob of cream.

Dollars and Old Whores

It was after supper and Emanuele was flicking a flyswatter against the windowpane. He was thirty-two years old and plump. His wife, Jolanda, was changing her stockings to go out.

Through the window could be seen the rubble patch where the old warehouse used to be; across it opened a view of the sea, between houses sloping downhill; the sea was darkening, and a slow wind was surging up through the streets. Six sailors from the Shenandoah, an American torpedo boat anchored outside the port, entered a tavern called The Tub of Diogenes.

“There are six Americans at Felice’s,” said Emanuele.

“Officers?” asked Jolanda.

“Sailors. Better. Hurry up.” He pushed back his hat and twisted around, groping for the sleeve of his jacket.

Jolanda had fastened her garter and was now tucking in the straps of her brassiere, which were sticking out in front.

“Ready? Let’s go.”

Because they trafficked in dollars, Emanuele and Jolanda wanted to ask the sailors if they had any to sell; they were a respectable pair, though, for all their trafficking.

On the deserted rubble patch an odd palm tree or two planted to improve the area were rustling in the wind, as if desolate and disconsolate. And in the middle of the patch stood the brightly lit construction called The Tub of Diogenes, put up by an ex-serviceman called Felice, with the town council’s permission and in spite of protests that it spoiled the neighborhood. It was shaped like a barrel; inside were a bar and tables.

Emanuele turned to Jolanda. “Now, you go in first and start talking to them, and ask them if they’d like to change any dollars. They’re more likely to say yes to you at once. Then I’ll come in and clinch the deal.”

A strategist, Emanuele. Off Jolanda went.

At Felice’s the six sailors were lined along the bar from end to end, and all those white trousers and elbows leaning on the marble made it seem as if there were twelve of them. Jolanda approached and saw twelve eyes fixed on her, rotating in rhythm with closed, chewing, grunting mouths. Most of them, in loose white tunics and with those caps perched on their heads, looked overgrown yet badly developed, but there was one near her, over six feet tall, with apple cheeks and a neck like a pyramid, whose uniform molded him as if he were naked; he had round eyes with pupils that turned all around without ever touching the rims. Jolanda hid a strap on her brassiere that kept popping out.

From behind the bar, Felice, a chef’s hat perched above swollen, sleepy eyes, was busy refilling glasses and seeing that all went well. From his cobbler’s face, its chin perpetually dark in spite of shaving, came a grin of greeting. He spoke English, Felice did, and Jolanda whispered, “Felice, will you just ask them if they want to change any dollars?”

Felice, forever grinning and evasive, replied, “Ask ’em yourself,” and told a young waiter with tar-black hair and an onion-shaped face to bring out more trays of pizza and fried potatoes.

Jolanda was now surrounded by those long white chewing figures, exchanging inhuman grunts as they watched her.

“Please,” she said in English, gesticulating. “Me to you lire, you to me dollars?”

They went on chewing. The big one with the bull neck smiled; he had the whitest teeth, so white that no gaps showed between.

A broad, short sailor, with a face as dark as a Spaniard’s, now came toward her. “Me to you dollars,” he said in Italian, also gesticulating. “You to me bed.”

Then he repeated it all in English, and the others gave long muffled laughs, still chewing and keeping their eyes fixed upon her.

Jolanda turned toward Felice. “Felice,” she said, “explain to them.”

“Whisky and soda,” said Felice in his peculiar English, rolling some glasses on the marble top of the bar. His grin would have been nasty if he had not sounded so sleepy.

The giant sailor spoke; his voice rang out like an iron ring on a buoy buffeted by waves. He ordered Jolanda a drink, then took the glass from Felice’s hand and held it out to her; it seemed incredible that the fragile stem of the glass didn’t break in those huge fingers.

Jolanda did not know what to do. “Me lire, you dollars,” she repeated.

But the others had already learned Italian. “You bed,” they cried. “Bed, dollars.”

At this moment in came the husband, to see the circle of restless backs and hear his wife’s voice coming from somewhere in the midst of them. He went up to the bar. “Hey, Felice, tell me, will you . . .” he began.

“What can I get you?” asked Felice with his tired grin. His chin, shaved only two hours earlier, was already getting stubbly.

Emanuele tipped his hat back from his sweating forehead and began making little jumps to try to see over the wall of backs.

“My wife—what’s she doing?”

Felice climbed on a bench, stuck out his chin, then jumped down.

“She’s still in there,” he replied.

Emanuele loosened the knot of his tie a little to breathe more freely.

“Tell her to come out,” he said.

But Felice was busy scolding the onion-faced boy for leaving dishes without fried potatoes on them.

“Jolanda?” called her husband, and tried to push in between two Americans; he got a dig on the chin and another in the stomach, and was soon out, jumping up and down around the group again. From the thick of it all a rather tremulous little voice replied, “Emanuele?”

He shouted back, “How’s it going? . . .”

“It looks,” said her voice, as if she were talking on the telephone, “it looks as if they don’t want lire . . .”

He kept his calm, but started drumming on the counter. “They don’t?” he cried. “Then come on out.”

“Coming,” she replied, and tried to make a little dive through that hedge of men. But there was something holding her back; she glanced down and saw a big hand placed against her, a big, strong, gentle hand. Before her was standing the giant with the apple cheeks, his teeth gleaming like the whites of his eyes.

“Please . . .” she begged softly, trying to loosen his hand, and called out to Emanuele, “Just coming . . .” Instead she stayed there in the middle of them.

“Please,” she kept on repeating. “Please.”

Felice put a glass under Emanuele’s nose.

“What can I get you?” he asked, lowering his head in its chef’s hat and leaning on the bar, his ten fingers splayed out.

Emanuele was staring into space. “Wait . . . I’ve got an idea . . . Wait,” he said, and left.

Outside, the streetlamps were already lit. Emanuele ran across the street, went into the Café Lamarmora, and looked all around. Only the regulars were there, playing cards. “Come and join us, Manuele,” they called out. “What’s up, Manuele?” But he had already hurried out; he ran on without stopping till he reached the Paris Bar. There he made a round of the tables, beating a fist against the palm of his hand. Finally he whispered in the bartender’s ear. The man said, “Not here yet—later tonight, maybe.” Emanuele hurried out. The bartender burst out laughing and went over to tell the cashier.

At Giglio’s La Bolognese, the old tart from Bologna had hardly stretched out her legs under the table—her varicose veins were beginning to hurt—when Emanuele arrived, with his cap on the hack of his head, panting so hard she could not understand what he wanted.

“Come on,” he cried, pulling her by the hand. “Come on, quick, it’s urgent.”

“Manuelino, kid, what’s up with you?” asked La Bolognese, opening wide eyes surrounded by latticed wrinkles under a black fringe. “After all these years . . . What is up with you, sweetie?”

But he was already pulling her along by the hand, and she was hobbling behind, her swollen legs hampered by the tight petticoat halfway up her thighs.

In front of the movie theater they ran into Mad Maria accosting a corporal.

“Hey, you come along, too. I’ll take you to some Americans.”

Mad Maria did not need telling twice; she left the corporal with the flick of a finger and started running along beside Emanuele, her red hair flying in the wind and her eyes piercing the darkness with anticipation.

The situation had not changed much in The Tub of Diogenes. There were several empty bottles on Felice’s shelf, the gin had all gone, and the pizzas just being finished. The two women bustled in, Emanuele urging them along from behind; when the sailors found them suddenly pushed into their midst, they shouted cries of greeting. Exhausted, Emanuele slumped onto a stool. Felice poured him a stiff drink. One of the sailors broke away from the group and came and slapped Emanuele on the back, while the others gave friendly glances in his direction. Felice began telling them something about Emanuele.

“Well,” asked Emanuele. “How am I doing?”

Felice gave his eternally sleepy grin. “Oh, you’ll need at least six . . .”

Things were not improving, in fact; Mad Maria was hanging around the neck of a lanky sailor with a face like a fetus and squirming in her green dress like a snake trying to change its skin; La Bolognese had the short Spaniard buried in her bosom and was cosseting him in a motherly way.

But Jolanda did not appear. That enormous back, always in front, prevented anyone from seeing her. Emanuele made nervous signs to Mad Maria and La Bolognese to keep moving around, but they seemed oblivious of everything.

“Oooh . . .” said Felice, glancing over Emanuele’s shoulders.

“What’s that for?” Emanuele asked, but the bartender was busy scolding the boy for not drying the glasses quickly enough. Emanuele turned around and saw more sailors arriving. There must have been fifteen of them. The Tub of Diogenes was soon full of drunken soldiers. Mad Maria and La Bolognese flung themselves into the middle of the melee, Maria jumping from one sailor’s neck to the other, swirling her monkey legs in the air, and the other, with a constant smile painted in lipstick, gathering the lost ones to her breast like a broody hen.

Once Emanuele caught a sudden glimpse of Jolanda milling about in the midst of it all; then she vanished again. Every now and then Jolanda felt she was going to be trampled underfoot by the crowd around her, but each time she found beside her the giant sailor with the flashing white teeth and eyes, and each time she felt safe without knowing why. Moving gently, the man always kept beside her; his big body in its tight white uniform must have had muscles as smooth as a cat’s; his chest rose and fell slowly, as if full of the great air of the sea. Suddenly that voice of his, booming like a buoy, began producing words one by one in a peculiar rhythm; he burst out into song, and they all began swaying and turning as if to a dance band.

Meanwhile, Mad Maria, who knew every corner of the place, was pushing and kicking her way toward a small door at the back of the bar, arm in arm with a sailor who had a mustache. At first Felice did not want this door to be opened; but the whole mass of them were pushing behind and finally rammed it in.

Emanuele, crouching on top of his stool, was following the scene with misty eyes.

‘What’s in there, Felice? What’s in there?” But Felice did not reply; he was worrying because there was nothing more to eat or drink.

“Go to Valkyria’s and ask ’em to lend us something to drink,” he said to the onion-faced boy. “Anything, even beer. And cakes. Hurry, now.”

While this was happening, Jolanda had been pushed through the little door. Inside was a small room, curtained and clean, containing a bed all made up with a blue coverlet, a washbasin, and so forth. The giant began to turn the others out of the room, calmly and firmly, pushing at them with his big hands, and keeping Jolanda behind his shoulders. But for some reason or other all the sailors wanted to stay in the little room, and for each wave that the giant sailor repulsed another wave returned—lessening each time, though, as some tired and stayed outside. Jolanda was pleased that the giant was doing this, because she was able to breathe more freely and also hide the straps that kept popping out of her brassière.

Emanuele was watching it all: he saw the giant’s bands pushing the others out of the door, and his wife vanishing so that she must certainly be inside, and the other sailors returning again and again, in waves, with one or two less in each wave, first ten, then nine, then seven. How many minutes would it take the giant to succeed in shutting the door?

Then Emanuele hurried outside again. He crossed the square in hops, as if in a sack race. There was a line of taxis in the rank with all the drivers asleep. He went from one to another, waking them and explaining what he wanted them to do, furious when they didn’t understand. One by one the taxis drove off in different directions. Emanuele went off in a taxi, too, standing on the running board.

The noise woke Baci, the old cabman on top of his box, and he hurried down to see if there was any fare to take. He quickly grasped the situation, like the old hand at the job he was, clambered back on his box, and woke up his old horse. When Baci’s cab had gone creaking off, the square was left deserted and silent, save for the noise coming from The Tub of Diogenes in the middle of the rubble patch.

At Iris’s the girls were all dancing; they were very young, with budlike mouths and tight jerseys molding their jutting breasts. Emanuele was in too much of a hurry to wait till the dance ended. “Hey, you,” he called to a girl dancing with her back pressed against a man whose hands were around her. The man turned toward Emanuele; he was a porter, with hair low on his forehead and an open shirt. “What d’you want?” he exclaimed. Another three or four stopped around him: boxers’ faces, breathing hard through their noses. “Let’s get out,” muttered Emanuele’s driver, “or there’ll be another row here, too.”

They went off to the Panther’s place: but she didn’t want to open up since she already had a client. “Dollars,” shouted Emanuele, “dollars.” She opened then, wrapped in a dressing gown, looking like an allegorical statue. They dragged her down the stairs and pushed her into the taxi. Then they picked up Babilla walking along the seafront with her dog on a leash, Belbambin at the Traveler’s Cafe with her fox fur around her neck, and Bekuana at the Hotel Pace with her ivory cigarette holder. At the Ninfea they discovered the proprietress had three new girls, who were giggling away and thought they were being taken for a ride in the country. They were all loaded in. Emanuele was sitting in front, rather overcome by the uproar made by all those women crushed in at the back; the taxi driver was only worrying if the springs would hold.

Suddenly a figure ran into the middle of the road as if wanting to be run over. He signed for them to stop; it was the onion-faced boy, laden with a crate of beer and a tray of cakes, wanting a lift. The door flew open and with a gasp the boy vanished inside, beer, cakes, and all. Off the taxi started again. Passersby stopped and stared after this taxi racing along as if it were going to an emergency room, with those screams and high voices coming from inside. Every now and again Emanuele heard a long squeak and said to the driver, “Something’s broken—can’t you hear that noise?”

The driver shook his head. “It’s the boy,” he said. Emanuele wiped the sweat from his brow.

When the taxi pulled up in front of the Tub, the boy jumped out first, holding the tray above his head and the crate under his other arm. His hair was standing on end, his eyes were open so wide they took up half his face, and he hopped away like a monkey.

“Felice,” he cried, “everything’s safe! I didn’t let them take a thing! But, oh, if you knew what they did to me, Felice!”

Jolanda was still inside the little room, and the giant was still busy pushing sailors away from the door. But by now there was only one left who insisted on trying to get in; completely drunk, he kept bouncing back on the giant’s hands. When the new arrivals made their entry, Felice, wearily surveying the scene from the top of a stool, saw the sea of white caps part and a plumed hat, a shoulder covered in black silk, a fat haunch like a pig’s, a breast draped with artificial flowers, swirling up to the surface and vanishing again like bubbles of air.

There was a sound of brakes outside, and four, five, six—an entire line of taxis arrived; from every taxi emerged women. There was the Wriggler, with her ladylike hairstyle, advancing majestically, screwing up her shortsighted eyes; there was Spanish Carmen, swathed in veils, her face hollow as a skull, twisting her bony hips like a cat; there was old Lame Joan, hobbling on her little Chinese umbrella; there was the Black Girl of Long Alley with her black woman’s hair and furry legs; there was the Mouse, in a dress covered with the logos of cigarette brands; there was Milena the drug addict, in a dress patterned with playing cards; there was Lollypop, with her face covered with spots; and Ines the Femme Fatale, in an all-lace gown.

Wheels could be heard crunching on the gravel: it was Baci’s old cab with the horse half dead; when he stopped a woman jumped out of there, too. She had a full velvet skirt trimmed with bows and lace, a bosom roped in necklaces, a black band around her throat, dangling earrings, a lorgnette, and a blond wig topped by a big romantic hat decorated with artificial roses and grapes and clouds of ostrich feathers.

More waves of sailors had arrived at The Tub of Diogenes. One was playing an accordion and another a saxophone, and women were dancing on the tables. Despite Emanuele’s efforts, there were still many more sailors than women, yet no one could reach a hand out without touching a bosom or a thigh that seemed to have got lost, since it was impossible to tell who it belonged to; there were legs in midair and bosoms knee-high. Velvety hands, creeping claws, sharply pointed red nails, quivering fingertips, were groping at tunics, caressing muscles, tickling arms. And mouths met, almost flying through the air, and clung behind ears like clams; huge lips seemed coated with scarlet almost up to the nostrils. Innumerable legs were squirming everywhere, like the tentacles of some enormous octopus, legs sliding about and colliding with haunches and thighs. Then everything seemed to melt away in the sailors’ hands, and they found themselves holding a hat trimmed with bunches of grapes, or a dental plate, or a stocking wrapped around the neck, or a sponge, or a piece of silk trimming.

Jolanda had remained alone in the little room with the giant sailor. The door was locked and she was combing her hair in front of the mirror over the washbasin. The giant went to the window and opened the curtains. Outside could be seen the dark naval area and the breakwater with a line of lights reflected in the water. Then the giant began singing an American song that went, “The day is over, the night is falling, the skies are blue, the bells are beginning to ring.”

Jolanda approached the window, too, and gazed out into the darkness; their hands met on the windowsill and remained there motionless beside each other. The big sailor went on singing in his voice of iron, “Children of God, let us sing Hallelujah!”

And Jolanda repeated, “Let us sing Hallelujah, Hallelujah!”

During all this time Emanuele was anxiously moving around among the sailors without finding a sign of his wife, pushing away the bodies of excited women who every now and then fell into his arms. Suddenly he was confronted by the group of taxi drivers, who had pushed in to get him to pay the fares shown on their meters. Emanuele’s eyes were tearful, but the drivers weren’t going to let him off without paying. Now they were joined by old Baci, who was cracking his big coachman’s whip and muttering, “If you don’t pay up, I’ll take her away again!”

Then whistles shrilled and the bar was surrounded by military police. It was the patrol from the Shenandoah with rifles and helmets. They turned out all the sailors, one by one. Then the Italian police trucks arrived and loaded up all the women they could lay hands on.

The sailors were lined up outside the bar and marched off toward the port. When the police trucks laden with women passed them on their way, there was a great shout of greetings from both sides. The giant sailor, who was in the leading file, began singing in his resounding voice, “The day is over, the sun is setting, let us sing Hallelujah, Hallelujah!”

Jolanda, squeezed inside a truck between Lollypop and the Wriggler, heard his voice getting farther away and took up the song: “The day is over, the work is done—Hallelujah!”

And they all began singing the song, the sailors and the women, one group going toward the port, the other toward the police station.

At The Tub of Diogenes Felice was beginning to pile up the tables. But Emanuele sat there slumped on a stool, his chin on his chest and his hat on the back of his head. They had been about to arrest him, too, but the American officer in charge of operations had made some inquiries and gestured for him to be left alone. And now he, the officer, had also stayed on, and there were only the two of them left in the bar, Emanuele drooping desolately on his stool and the American standing in front of him with his arms crossed. When he was certain that they were quite alone, the officer shook the plump man by an arm and began talking to him. Felice approached to act as interpreter, a broad grin on his stubbly cobbler’s face.

“Tell him that you can get him a girl, too,” he said to Emanuele.

Emanuele blinked his eyes, then let his chin fall on his chest again.

“You to me, girl,” said the officer. “Me to you, dollars.”

“Dollars! . . .” Emanuele mopped his face with his handkerchief. He got up. “Dollars,” he repeated. “Dollars.”

He and the officer left the bar together. Night clouds were flying high in the sky. From the end of the breakwater the lighthouse was winking slowly, rhythmically. The air was still full of the song: “Hallelujah!”

“The day is ending, the skies are blue, Hallelujah!” sang Emanuele and the officer as they strolled along in the middle of the street, arm in arm, in search of a haunt for an all-night spree.

The Adventure of a Soldier

In the compartment, a lady came and sat down, tall and buxom, next to Private Tomagra. She must have been a widow from the provinces, to judge by her dress and her veil: the dress was black silk, appropriate for prolonged mourning, but with useless frills and furbelows; and the veil went all around her face, falling from the brim of a massive, old-fashioned hat. Other places were free, there in the compartment, Private Tomagra noticed, and he had assumed the widow would surely choose one of them. But, on the contrary, despite the vicinity of a coarse soldier like him, she came and sat right there—no doubt for some reason connected with travel, the soldier quickly decided, a draft, or the direction of the train.

Her body was in full bloom, solid, indeed a bit square. If its upper curves had not been tempered by a matronly softness, you would have said she was no more than thirty; but when you looked at her face, at the complexion both marmoreal and relaxed, the unattainable gaze beneath the heavy eyelids and the thick black brows, at the sternly sealed lips, hastily colored with a jarring red, she seemed instead past forty.

Tomagra, a young infantryman on his first leave (it was Easter), huddled down in his seat for fear that the lady, so ample and shapely, might not fit; immediately he found himself in the aura of her perfume, a popular and perhaps cheap scent, but now, out of long wear, blended with natural human odors.

The lady sat down with a composed demeanor, revealing, there beside him, less majestic proportions than he had imagined when he had seen her standing. Her hands were plump, with tight, dark rings; she kept them folded in her lap, over a shiny purse and a jacket she had taken off to expose round white arms. At her first movement Tomagra had shifted to make space for a broad maneuvering of her arms; but she had remained almost motionless, slipping out of the sleeves with a few brief twitches of her shoulders and torso.

The railroad seat was therefore fairly comfortable for two, and Tomagra could feel the lady’s extreme closeness, though without any fear of offending her by his contact. All the same, Tomagra reasoned, lady though she was, she had surely not shown any sign of repugnance toward him, toward his rough uniform; otherwise she would have sat farther away. And at these thoughts his muscles, till now contracted and tensed, relaxed freely, serenely; indeed, without his moving, they tried to expand to their greatest extension, and his leg—its tendons taut, at first detached even from the cloth of his trousers—settled more broadly, tightening the material that covered it, and the wool grazed the widow’s black silk. And now, through this wool and that silk, the soldier’s leg was adhering to her leg with a soft, fleeting motion, like one shark grazing another, and sending waves through its veins to those other veins.

It was still a very light contact, which every jolt of the train could break off and re-create; the lady had strong, fat knees, and Tomagra’s bones could sense at every jerk the lazy bump of the kneecap. The calf had raised a silken cheek that, with an imperceptible thrust, had to be made to coincide with his own. This meeting of calves was precious, but it came at a price, a loss: in fact, the body’s weight was shifted and the reciprocal support of the hips no longer occurred with the same docile abandon. In order to achieve a natural and satisfied position, it was necessary to move slightly on the seat, with the aid of a curve in the track, and also of the comprehensible need to shift position every so often.

The lady was impassive beneath her matronly hat, her gaze fixed, lidded, and her hands steady on the purse in her lap. And yet her body, for a very long stretch, rested against that stretch of man. Hadn’t she realized this yet? Or was she preparing to flee? To rebel?

Tomagra decided to transmit, somehow, a message to her: he contracted the muscle of his calf into a kind of hard, square fist, and then with this calf-fist, as if a hand inside it wanted to open, he quickly knocked at the calf of the widow. To be sure, this was a very rapid movement, barely long enough for a flicker of the tendons; but in any case, she didn’t draw back—at least not so far as he could tell, because immediately, needing to justify that covert movement, Tomagra extended his leg as if to get a kink out of it.

Now he had to begin all over again; that patient and prudently established contact had been lost. Tomagra decided to be more courageous; as if looking for something, he stuck his hand in his pocket, the pocket toward the woman, and then, as if absently, he left it there. It had been a rapid action, Tomagra didn’t know whether he had touched her or not, an inconsequential gesture; yet he now realized what an important step forward he had made, and in what a risky game he was now involved. Against the back of his hand, the hip of the lady in black was now pressing; he felt it weighing on every finger, every knuckle; now any movement of his hand would have been an act of incredible intimacy toward the widow. Holding his breath, Tomagra turned his hand inside his pocket; in other words, he set the palm toward the lady, open against her, though still in that pocket. It was an impossible position, the wrist twisted. And yet at this point he might just as well attempt a decisive action: and so he ventured to move the fingers of that contorted hand. There could no longer be any possible doubt: the widow couldn’t have helped noticing his maneuvering, and if she didn’t draw back, but pretended to be impassive and absent, it meant that she wasn’t rejecting his advances. When Tomagra thought about it, however, her paying no attention to his mobile right hand might mean that she really believed he was hunting for something in that pocket: a railroad ticket, a match . . . There: and if now the soldier’s fingertips, the pads, seemingly endowed with a sudden clairvoyance, could sense through those different stuffs the hems of subterranean garments and even the very minute roughness of skin, pores and moles—if, as I said, his fingertips arrived at this, perhaps her flesh, marmoreal and lazy, was hardly aware that these were in fact fingertips and not, for example, nails or knuckles.

Then, with furtive steps, the hand emerged from the pocket, paused there undecided, and, with sudden haste to adjust the trouser along the side seam, proceeded all the way down to the knee. More precisely, it cleared a path: to go forward, it had to dig in between himself and the woman, a route that, even in its speed, was rich in anxieties and sweet emotions.

It must be said that Tomagra had thrown his head back against the seat, so one might also have thought he was sleeping. This was not so much an alibi for himself as it was a way of offering the lady, in the event that his insistence didn’t irritate her, a reason to feel at ease, knowing that his actions were divorced from his consciousness, barely surfacing from the depths of sleep. And there, from this alert semblance of sleep, Tomagra’s hand, clutching his knee, detached one finger, and sent it out to reconnoiter. The finger slid along her knee, which remained still and docile; Tomagra could perform diligent figures with the little finger on the silk of the stocking, which, through his half-closed eyes, he could barely glimpse, light and curving. But he realized that the risk of this game was without reward, because the little finger, scant of surface and awkward in movement, transmitted only partial hints of sensations and was incapable of conceiving the form and substance of what it was touching.

Then he reattached the little finger to the rest of the hand, not withdrawing it, but adding to it the ring finger, the middle finger, the forefinger: now his whole hand rested inert on that female knee, and the train cradled it in a rocking caress.

It was then that Tomagra thought of the others: if the lady, whether out of compliance or out of a mysterious intangibility, didn’t react to his boldness, facing them were still-seated other persons who might be scandalized by that nonsoldierly behavior of his, and by that possible silent complicity on the woman’s part. Chiefly to spare the lady such suspicion, Tomagra withdrew his hand, or rather, he hid it, as if it were the only guilty party. But hiding it, he later thought, was only a hypocritical pretext: in abandoning it there on the seat he intended simply to move it closer to the lady, who occupied in fact such a large part of the space.

Indeed, the hand groped around. There: like a butterfly’s lighting, the fingers already sensed her presence; and there: it was enough merely to thrust the whole palm forward gently, and the widow’s gaze beneath the veil was impenetrable, the bosom only faintly stirred by her respiration. But no! Tomagra had already withdrawn his hand, like a mouse scurrying off.

She didn’t move; he thought, Maybe she wants this. But he also thought, Another moment and it will be too late. Or maybe she’s sitting there studying me, preparing to make a scene.

Then, for no reason except prudent verification, Tomagra slid his hand along the back of the seat and waited until the train’s jolts, imperceptibly, made the lady slide over his fingers. To say he waited is not correct: actually, with the tips of his fingers wedgelike between the seat and her, he made an invisible push, which could also have been the effect of the train’s speeding. If he stopped at a certain point, it wasn’t because the lady had given any indication of disapproval, but, on the contrary, because Tomagra thought that if she did accept, it would be easy for her, with a half rotation of the muscles, to meet him halfway, to fall, as it were, on that expectant hand. To suggest to her the friendly nature of his attention, Tomagra, in that position beneath the lady, attempted a discreet wiggle of the fingers; the lady was looking out of the window, and her hand was idly toying with the purse clasp, opening and closing it. Was this a signal to him to stop? Was it a final concession she was granting him, a warning that her patience could be tried no longer? Was it this? Tomagra asked himself. Was it this?

He noticed that his hand, like a stubby octopus, was clasping her flesh. Now all was decided: he could no longer draw back, not Tomagra. But what about her? She was a sphinx.

With a crab’s oblique scuttle, the soldier’s hand now descended her thigh. Was it out in the open, before the eyes of the others? No, now the lady was adjusting the jacket she held folded on her lap, allowing it to spill to one side. To offer him cover, or to block his path? There: now the hand moved freely and unseen, it clasped her, it opened in fleeting caresses like brief puffs of wind. But the widow’s face was still turned away, distant; Tomagra stared at a part of her, a zone of naked skin between the ear and the curve of her full chignon. And in that dimple beneath the ear a vein throbbed: this was the answer she was giving him, clear, heart-rending, and fleeting. She turned her face all of a sudden, proud and marmoreal; the veil hanging below the hat stirred like a curtain; the gaze was lost beneath the heavy lids. But that gaze had gone past him, Tomagra, perhaps had not even grazed him; she was looking beyond him, at something, or nothing, the pretext of some thought, but anyway something more important than he. This he decided later, because earlier, when he had barely seen that movement of hers, he had immediately thrown himself back and shut his eyes tight, as if he were asleep, trying to quell the flush spreading over his face, and thus perhaps losing the opportunity to catch in the first glint of her eyes an answer to his own extreme doubts.

His hand, hidden under the black jacket, had remained as if detached from him, numb, the fingers drawn back toward the wrist: no longer a real hand, now without sensitivity beyond that arboreal sensitivity of the bones. But as the truce the widow had granted to her own impassivity with that vague glance around soon ended, blood and courage flowed back into the hand. And it was then that, resuming contact with that soft saddle of leg, he realized he had reached a limit: the fingers were running along the hem of the skirt, beyond which there was the leap to the knee, and the void.

It was the end, Private Tomagra thought, of this secret spree. Thinking back, he found it truly a poor thing in his memory, though he had greedily blown it up while experiencing it: a clumsy feel of a silk dress, something that could in no way have been denied him simply because of his miserable position as a soldier, and something that the lady had discreetly condescended, without any show, to concede.

He was interrupted, however, in his desolate intention of withdrawing his hand when he noticed the way she was holding her jacket on her knees: no longer folded (though it had seemed so to him before) but flung carelessly, so that one edge fell in front of her legs. His hand was thus in a sealed den—perhaps a final proof of the trust the lady was giving him, confident that the disparity between her station and the soldier’s was so great that he surely wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity. And the soldier recalled, with effort, what had happened so far between the widow and him as he tried to discover something in her behavior that hinted at further condescension; now he considered whether his own actions had been insignificant and trivial, casual grazings and strokings, or, on the other hand, of a decisive intimacy, committing him not to withdraw again.

His hand surely agreed with this second consideration, because before he could reflect on the irreparable nature of the act, he was already passing the frontier. And the lady? She was asleep. She had rested her head, with the pompous hat, against a corner of the seat, and she was keeping her eyes closed. Should he, Tomagra, respect this sleep, genuine or false as it might be, and retire? Or was it a consenting woman’s device, which he should already know, for which he should somehow indicate gratitude? The point he had now reached admitted no hesitation: he could only advance.

Private Tomagra’s hand was small and plump, and its hard parts and calluses had become so blended with the muscle that it was uniform, flexible; the bones could not be felt, and its movement was made more with nerves, though gently, than with joints. And this little hand had constant and general and minuscule movements, to maintain the completeness of the contact alive and burning. But when, finally, a first stirring ran through the widow’s softness, like the motion of distant marine currents through secret underwater channels, the soldier was so surprised by it that, as if he really supposed the widow had noticed nothing till then, had really been asleep, he drew his hand away in fright.

Now he sat there with his hands on his own knees, huddled in his seat as he had been when she came in. He was behaving absurdly; he realized that. With a scraping of heels, a stretching of hips, he seemed eager to reestablish the contacts, but this prudence of his was absurd, too, as if he wanted to start his extremely patient operation again from the beginning, as if he were not sure now of the deep goals already gained. But had he really gained them? Or had it been only a dream?

A tunnel fell upon them. The darkness became denser and denser, and Tomagra, first with timid gestures, occasionally drawing back as if he were really at the first advances and amazed at his own temerity, then trying more and more to convince himself of the profound intimacy he had already reached with that woman, extended one hand, shy as a pullet, toward her bosom, large and somewhat abandoned to its own gravity, and with an eager groping he tried to explain to her the misery and the unbearable happiness of his condition, and his need of nothing else but for her to emerge from her reserve.

The widow did react, but with a sudden gesture of shielding herself and rejecting him. It was enough to send Tomagra crouching in his corner, wringing his hands. But it was, probably, a false alarm caused by a passing light in the corridor, which had made the widow fear the tunnel was suddenly going to end. Perhaps; or had he gone too far, had he committed some horrible rudeness toward her, who had already been so generous toward him? No, by now there could be nothing forbidden between them; and her action, on the contrary, was a sign that this was all real, that she accepted, participated. Tomagra approached again. To be sure, in these reflections a great deal of time had been wasted; the tunnel wouldn’t last much longer, and it wasn’t wise to allow oneself to be caught by the sudden light. Tomagra was already expecting the first grayness there on the wall; the more he expected it, the riskier it was to attempt anything. Of course, this was a long tunnel; he remembered it from other journeys as very, very long. And if he took advantage immediately, he would have a lot of time ahead of him. Now it was best to wait for the end, but it never ended, and so this had perhaps been his last chance. There: now the darkness was being dispelled, it was ending.

They were at the last stations of a provincial line. The train was emptying; some passengers in the compartment had already got out, and now the last ones were taking down their bags, leaving. Finally they were alone in the compartment, the soldier and the widow, very close and detached, their arms folded, silent, eyes staring into space. Tomagra still had to think, Now that all the seats are free, if she wanted to be nice and comfortable, if she were fed up with me, she would move . . .

Something restrained him and frightened him still, perhaps the presence of a group of smokers in the passage, or a light that had come on because it was evening. Then he thought to draw the curtains on the passage, like somebody wanting to get some sleep. He stood up with elephantine steps; with slow, meticulous care be began to unfasten the curtains, draw them, fasten them again. When he turned, he found her stretched out. As if she wanted to sleep: even though she had her eyes open and staring, she had slipped down, maintaining her matronly composure intact, with the majestic hat still on her head, which was resting on the seat arm.

Tomagra was standing over her. Still, to protect this image of sleep, he chose also to darken the outside window; and he stretched over her, to undo the curtain. But it was only a way of shifting his clumsy actions above the impassive widow. Then he stopped tormenting that curtain’s snap and understood he had to do something else: show her all his own, compelling condition of desire, if only to explain to her the misunderstanding into which she had certainly fallen, as if to say to her, You see, you were kind to me because you believe we have a remote need for affection, we poor lonely soldiers, but here is what I really am, this is how I received your courtesy, this is the degree of impossible ambition I have reached, you see, here.

And since it was now evident that nothing could manage to surprise the lady, and indeed everything seemed somehow to have been foreseen by her, Private Tomagra could only make sure that no further doubts were possible; and finally the urgency of his madness managed also to grasp its mute object: her.

When Tomagra stood up and, beneath him, the widow remained with her clear, stern gaze (she had blue eyes), with her hat and veil still squarely on her head, and the train never stopped its shrill whistling through the fields, and outside those endless rows of grapevines went on, and the rain that throughout the journey had tirelessly streaked the panes now resumed with new violence, he had again a brief spurt of fear, thinking how he, Private Tomagra, had been so daring.

Sleeping like Dogs

Every time he opened his eyes he felt the acid yellow light of the big arc lamps in the ticket office glaring down at him; and he would pull up the lapels of his jacket in search of darkness and warmth. When he’d lain down he had not noticed how hard and icy the stone tiles on the floor were; now shafts of cold were infiltrating, coming up under his clothes and through the holes in his shoes, and the scarce flesh on his hips was aching, squashed between bone and stone.

But he’d chosen a good place, quiet and out of people’s way, in that corner under the stairs, so much so that after he’d been there a little time four women’s legs came high over his head and he heard voices say, “Hey, he’s taken our place.”

The man lying down heard, though he was not properly awake; a dribble was oozing from a corner of his mouth onto the bent cardboard of the little suitcase that was his pillow, and his hair had settled itself to sleep on its own, following the horizontal line of his body.

“Well,” said the same voice from above the dirty knees and the spreading bell of the skirt, “let’sput our things down. At least we can get our bed ready.”

And one of those feet, a woman’s in a boot, prodded his hips like a sniffling snout. The man pulled himself up on his elbows, blinking his stunned and aching pupils in the yellow light, while his hair, apparently taking no notice, stood straight up on its own. Then back he dropped, as if he wanted to thump his head into the suitcase.

The women had taken the sacks off their heads. A man now came up behind, put down a roll of blankets, and began to arrange them. “Hey, you,” said the older of the women to the man lying down, “move up, you can get underneath, too, then.” No answer; he was asleep.

“He must be dead tired,” said the younger of the two women, who was all bones, with the fleshy parts almost hanging as she bent down to spread the blankets and prop the sacks of flour underneath.

They were three black marketeers, on their way south with full sacks and empty tins; people whose bones had grown hard from sleeping on the floor in railroad stations and traveling in cattle cars; but they had learned to organize themselves and took blankets with them, to put underneath for softness and above for warmth; the sacks and tins acted as pillows.

The older woman tried to slip a corner of blanket under the sleeping man, but had to raise him a bit at a time because he never moved. “He must really be dead tired,” said the older woman. “Maybe he’s one of those emigrants.”

Meanwhile, the man with them, a thin man, had got between two of the blankets and pulled an end over his eyes. “Hey, come down here; aren’t you ready?” he said to the back of the younger woman, who was still bending down arranging the sacks as pillows. The younger woman was his wife, but they knew the floors of station waiting rooms almost better than their marriage bed. The two women got underneath the blankets, and the younger one and her husband lay against each other making shivering noises, while the older one was tucking up that poor sleeping wretch. Perhaps the older one was not so old, but she was trodden down by the life she led, always lugging loads of flour and oil on her head up and down in those trains; even her dress was like a sack, and her hair went in all directions.

The head of the sleeping man was slipping off the suitcase, which was too high and wrenched his neck; she tried to arrange him better, but his head nearly fell on the ground, so she propped his head on one of her shoulders and the man shut his lips, swallowed, settled further down on a softer part, and began snoring again.

They were all just getting off to sleep when a trio from southern Italy arrived, a father with a black mustache and two dark, plump daughters, all three very short; they were carrying wattle baskets and their eyes were gummed with sleep under all that light. The daughters seemed to be wanting to go in one direction and the father in another, so they were quarreling, without looking one another in the face and almost without talking, except for short phrases between clenched teeth and jerky arm movements. When they found the place under the stairs already occupied by those four, they stood looking on, more stunned than ever, until two youths in puttees with coats slung over their shoulders came up to them.

These two at once began trying to persuade the trio of southerners to put all their blankets together and make up one group with the four already there. The two youths were Venetians emigrating to France, and they made the black-market group get up and rearrange all the blankets so that the whole bunch could settle down together. It was obvious that all this was just a maneuver to get near the two girls, already half asleep; but finally they were all settled, including the older of the black-market women, who had not moved because she had that man’s head sleeping on her breast. The two Venetians had, of course, got the girls in between them, leaving the father on one side; but their hands also succeeded in reaching the other women by groping about under the blankets and coats.

Someone was already snoring, but the father from southern Italy could not manage to doze off in spite of all the sleep weighing on him. The acid yellow light burrowed right under his lids, under the hand covering his eyes, and the inhuman calls of the loudspeakers—“Slow train . . . platform . . . leaving . . .”—kept him in a state of continual restlessness. He needed to urinate, too, but did not know where to go and was afraid of getting lost in that huge station. Finally he decided to wake one of the men and began shaking him; it was the unfortunate man who had been sleeping there first of all.

“The latrine, friend, the latrine,” he said, and pulled him by an elbow, sitting up in the middle of that heap of wrapped-up bodies.

The sleeping man suddenly sat up with a start and opened his misty red eyes and rubbery mouth at that face bending over him: a little wrinkled face, like a cat’s, with a black mustache.

“The latrine, friend,” said the southerner.

The other sat there stunned, glancing around in alarm. They both kept looking at each other openmouthed, he and the man from southern Italy. The man still half asleep could not understand anything; he found that woman’s face on the floor beside him and gazed at it terror-stricken. He may have been about to let out a shriek, but then, suddenly, he buried his head in the woman’s breast again and dropped back to sleep.

The man from southern Italy got up, overturning two or three bodies, and began moving with uncertain steps along that huge, glaringly bright and cold hall. Through the windows could be seen the limpid darkness of the night and a view of geometric iron girders. He saw a dark little man, even shorter than himself, wearing a flashy crumpled suit, come up to him with a careless air.

“The latrine, friend,” the man from southern Italy asked him imploringly.

“Cigarettes, American, Swiss,” answered the other, who hadn’t understood, showing the corner of a pack.

It was Belmoretto, who spent the whole year hanging around stations and had no home or even a bed on the face of the earth, and who every now and again took a train and changed cities, wherever his uncertain trafficking in cigarettes and chewing tobacco took him. At night he ended up joining with some group sleeping in the station between trains, and so managed to lie down for an hour or two under a blanket; if not he wandered around till morning, unless he happened to run into someone who would take him home and give him a bath and some food and make him sleep with him. Belmoretto came from southern Italy, too; he was very kind to the old man with the black mustache; he took him to the latrine and waited till he had finished, so as to accompany him back. He gave him a cigarette and they smoked together, looking through eyes sandy with sleep at the trains leaving and the mounds of people sleeping on the floor down in the hall below.

“We sleep like dogs,” said the old man. “Six days and six nights since I’ve seen a bed.”

“A bed,” said Belmoretto. “Sometimes I dream of it, a bed. A lovely white bed all to myself.”

The old man went back to try to get some sleep. When he raised a blanket to make room for himself, he saw the hand of one of the Venetians on the leg of one of his daughters. He tried to pull the hand away, but the Venetian thought it was his friend trying to have a taste, too, and pushed him. The old man cursed and raised his fist over him. But the others shouted that they could not sleep, and the old man eventually climbed back to his place on his knees and got under the blankets quietly. He felt cold and curled himself up. A longing to cry came over him. Then, very cautiously, he advanced his hand among the nearest bodies and met two women’s knees, which he began to stroke.

The older of the black-market women still had resting on her breast the face of the man who looked as if he had been squashed down by tons of sleep; whenever she touched him there was no reaction, only slight signs here and there of partial reawakening. Now the woman felt a hand, a small hand all lines and calluses, on her knee, and she squeezed her legs around the hand, which stopped and was quiet at once. The old man from southern Italy could not manage to sleep but he felt happier; the soft warmth in which his little hand was wrapped seemed to be diffusing itself all over his body.

At that moment all of them felt a strange creature moving in among them, as if a dog were scooping among the blankets. One of the women screamed. The blankets were hurriedly pulled away so they could find out what it was. And in the middle of them they discovered Belmoretto, who was already snoring, his shoes off, twisted up like a fetus. He was woken by thumps on the back. “Excuse me,” he said. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

But now they were all awake and cursing, except for the first man, who was dribbling.

“My bones are breaking, my back’s freezing,” they were saying. “We ought to bust up that light and cut the cord of that loudspeaker.”

“I’ll show you how to make up a mattress, if you like,” said Belmoretto.

“Mattress!” repeated the others. “Mattress!”

But Belmoretto had already cleared a bit of blanket and begun to fold it up into pleats, in the way anyone who’s been in prison knows. They told him to stop: there weren’t enough blankets, and someone would find himself without any at all. Then they discussed how one couldn’t sleep without something under one’s head and not all of them had anything, as the southerners’ baskets weren’t any use. So Belmoretto arranged a complete system, by which every man rested his head on the leg of a woman; this was very difficult to do because of the blankets, but finally they were all arranged and a lot of new combinations resulted. A little while later, however, everything was in confusion again, because they could not keep still; then Belmoretto managed to sell everyone a Nazionale cigarette and they all began to smoke and tell one another how many nights it was since they’d slept.

“Three weeks we’ve been traveling,” said the Venetians. “Three times we’ve tried to pass this fucking frontier and they’ve turned us back. In France we’ll get into the first bed we see and sleep for forty-eight hours on end.”

“A bed,” said Belmoretto. “With newly washed sheets and a feather mattress to sink into. A warm narrow bed, to be alone in.”

“What about us, then, who’ve always led this life?” said the black-market man. “When we get home we spend a night in bed and then off we go on the trains again.”

“A warm bed with clean sheets,” said Belmoretto. “Naked, I’d get in all naked.”

“Six nights since we’ve taken our clothes off,” said the old southerner. “Since we’ve changed underclothes. Six nights we’ve been sleeping like dogs.”

“I’d creep into a house like a thief,” said one of the Venetians. “But not to steal. Just to get into a bed and sleep till morning.”

“Or to steal a bed and bring it here to sleep in,” said the other.

Belmoretto had an idea. “Wait,” he said, and off he went.

He wandered around under the arches outside till he met Mad Maria. If Mad Maria spent a night without finding a client she had to go without a meal next day, so she never gave up, even in the small hours, and went on marching up and down those pavements till dawn, with her thick red hair and her muscular calves. Belmoretto was a great friend of hers.

In the encampment at the station they were still talking about sleep and beds and the dogs’ lives they led, and waiting for the darkness to clear in the windows. Ten minutes had gone by when Belmoretto came back, with a rolled-up mattress on his shoulders.

“Down you go,” he said, rolling it out on the floor. “Half an hour’s turn for fifty lire; you can sleep two at a time. Come on, now, what’s twenty-five lire a head?”

He had rented a mattress from Mad Maria, who had two on her bed, and was now subletting it by the half hour. Other sleepy travelers who were waiting to change trains came up, looking interested.

“Down you go,” said Belmoretto. “I’ll take care of waking you. We’ll put a blanket on top of you and then no one’ll see you and you can do what you like. Down you go, now.”

One of the Venetians tried first, together with one of the girls from southern Italy. The older of the black-market women booked the second shift for herself and that poor sleeping man she was still propping up. Belmoretto had already pulled out a notebook and was jotting down the bookings, pleased as could be.

At dawn he’d take the mattress back to Mad Maria and they’d turn somersaults all over the bed till high noon. Then, at last, they’d fall asleep.

Desire in November

The cold hit the city one morning in November, under a deceitful sun in a clear calm sky; it cut like blades down the long straight streets, chasing the cats from the gutters back into kitchens with fires still unlit. People who had got up late and had not opened their windows went out in light overcoats, saying once again, “Winter’s late this year,” then suddenly shivered as they breathed the icy air. But then they thought of the coal and wood supplies laid in during summer and congratulated themselves on their own foresight.

It was a bad day for the poor, though; now they had to face problems they had so far put aside: heating, clothes. The public gardens were full of lanky young men eying the scraggy plane trees and eluding the keepers as they fingered the saws under their patched coats. A cluster of people were reading a notice about the distribution of winter undershirts and underpants by a charitable organization.

In one of the parishes the poor were told to collect these garments from a local priest, Don Grillo. Don Grillo lived in an old house with dark narrow stairs, onto which the door of his flat opened directly, with only a slip of landing. On these stairs the poor lined up on distribution days, to knock one by one on the closed door, hand their certificates and coupons to an aged and lachrymose housekeeper, and then wait on the stairs again for her to return with the meager bundle. There was a glimpse of a room inside, full of worm-eaten old furniture and a table covered with bundles, at which sat Don Grillo, looking enormous and shouting in his deep resounding voice as he jotted everything down in registers.

Sometimes the line wound down past the corners of the stairs: widows in reduced circumstances who seldom left their attics, beggars with hacking coughs, dusty countrymen stamping about in hobnailed boots, disheveled youths—emigrants from somewhere or other—who wore sandals in winter and raincoats in summer. Sometimes this slow and squalid stream spread right on down past the mezzanine floor and the glass doors of Fabrizia’s, the furriers. And the elegant women going to Fabrizia’s to have their mink or astrakhan altered had to hug the banisters to avoid brushing against the ragged crew.

On the day that flannel vests and pants were being distributed at Don Grillo’s, the line was joined by a porter, a strong old man who had a white beard streaked with blond. He was wearing a military overcoat and nothing underneath at all. Buttoned and muffled up though he was, his shins were bare and ended in a pair of boots without any socks. People would look down and stand openmouthed; he would laugh back. Under the fringe of white hair falling over his forehead he had two big, merry blue eyes and a broad, vinous, happy face.

His name was Barbagallo and his clothes had been stolen from the riverbank that summer while he was carrying loads of gravel. Till then he had got along with a few rags and a visit every now and then to prison or workhouse; but after a while he was let out of prison and escaped from the workhouse, to wander around the city and the villages nearby, loitering or doing an odd job as a porter by the hour here and there. Having no clothes was a good excuse for him to beg or to get put back in prison when he had nowhere better to go. The cold that morning had made him decide to lay hands on a suit, so he was going around naked except for that overcoat, terrifying the girls and being stopped by the police at every intersection as he was shuttled from one charity organization to another.

Once he joined the line, no one spoke of anything else; meanwhile, he was elbowing and pushing his way up the stairs, trying out every trick to get ahead.

“Yes, yes, I’m naked! D’you see? Not just my legs! Would you like me to unbutton my coat? Hey, either you let me pass or I will unbutton it! Am I cold? Never been better! Like to feel, madam, how warm I am? He’s only handing out pants, the priest? What use are they to me? I’ll take ’em, and then I’ll go and sell ’em!”

Finally he sat down in the line, on a step that was actually the landing in front of Fabrizia’s. Ladies were coming and going, showing off their furs for the first time. “Oh,” they cried, when they saw the bare legs of the old man sitting down outside.

“Now, don’t call the police, signora, they’ve already stopped me and sent me here to get myself some clothes. And anyway, I’m not showing anything, so don’t make such a fuss.”

The ladies passed hurriedly by, and Barbagallo felt himself brushed by the soft folds smelling of camphor and lily of the valley. “A fine fur, signora, unquestionably; it must be nice and warm under that!”

As each woman passed, he stretched out his hand and stroked her fur. “Help,” they screamed. Then he rubbed his cheek against the furs like a cat.

There was a confabulation inside Fabrizia’s; no one dared come out anymore. “Should we call the police?” they asked one another. “But they’ve sent him here to get clothes!” Every now and then they opened the door a crack. “Is he still there?” Once he stuck his bearded head in through the door, without getting up. “Oooh!” They nearly fainted.

Eventually Barbagallo made up his mind to go and parley with them. He got up and rang Fabrizia’s bell. Two employees opened the door, one a pale woman who was all knees, the other a girl with black braids. “Call the ladies!” “Go away,” said the pale woman. But Barbagallo did not let her shut the door. “Go and call ’em,” he said to the other girl. She turned and went away. “Good girl,” said Barbagallo.

The owner of the shop appeared with her clients. “How much will you give me not to unbutton my coat?” said Barbagallo. “What?” “Come on, now, no nonsense!” And he began to unbutton himself from the neck with one hand, while holding the other out. The ladies hurriedly searched about in their bags for change to give him. One, a matron heavily loaded with jewels, did not seem to be able to find any change and was watching him with her big painted eyes. Barbagallo stopped unbuttoning. “Well, then, how much will you give me if I do unbutton?” “Ha ha ha!” exploded the salesgirl with the braids. “Linda!” shouted the owner. Barbagallo pocketed the money and went out. “So long, Linda,” he said.

In the line the rumor was going around that there weren’t enough clothes for everyone.

“Me first, because I’m naked!” exclaimed Barbagallo, and succeeded in getting to the head.

The housekeeper at the door clasped her hands together on seeing him. “With nothing underneath! What’s to be done? Wait, no, don’t come in!”

“Let me pass, old girl, or I’ll tempt you to sin. Where is His Reverence?”

And he went into the priest’s room, among the Sacred Hearts bleeding away in their baroque frames, the towering cupboards and the crucifixes splayed all over the walls like black birds. Don Grillo rose from his desk and burst into a loud laugh. “Ho ho ho! And who got you up like that? Ho ho ho!”

“Tell me, Father, today is the day for flannel underclothes, but I’m here for trousers. Do you have any?”

The priest had flung himself back in his high-backed armchair and was laughing and laughing, his double chin and stomach in the air. “No, no, ho ho ho, no, I don’t have any . . .”

“I’m not asking for a pair of yours, you know . . . Well, in that case I’ll have to stay here till you telephone the bishop and have a pair sent over for me.”

“That’s it, that’s it, my son, go to the archbishop’s, go to the palace, ho ho ho, I’ll give you a note . . .”

“A note. And what about the flannel underclothes?”

The priest began turning over sets of undershirts and long johns but could not find a size large enough for Barbagallo. When they had found the biggest pair there was, Barbagallo said, “Now I’ll put them on.” The housekeeper was just in time to escape onto the landing before he took off his overcoat.

When he was naked, Barbagallo did a few exercises to warm himself up, then began to put on the underclothes. Don Grillo could not stop laughing at seeing that Garibaldi-like figure, squeezed from neck to wrists and down to the ankles into very tight shirt and pants, with boots below.

“Oooh!” cried Barbagallo, and sprang back as if he had had a shock.

“What’s the matter, what’s the matter, my son?”

“It tickles, it tickles me everywhere . . . What’s this undershirt you’ve given me, Father? I’m prickling all over!”

“Go on with you, it’s new, you know, it’s new; you’ll soon get used to it.”

“Oh, my skin’s so delicate since I’ve got used to being naked . . . Oooh, how it pricks me!” And he twisted himself around to scratch his back.

“Come on, all you have to do is wash it once and it’ll become as soft as silk . . . Now, go to the address I’ve given you and they’ll see about getting you a suit. Off with you . . .” And he pushed Barbagallo toward the door, making him put on his overcoat again.

Barbagallo made no further resistance; he was a defeated man. They shut the door behind him. He started downstairs, doubled up, complaining and scratching himself, and all those still waiting in the line asked him, “What’ve they done to you? Did they hit you? What a scandal! A priest, hitting a poor old man! What lovely pants, though. “And they looked at his shins encased in white flannel.

Barbagallo seemed to have aged about ten years; his blue eyes were swollen with tears. On his way downstairs, he passed by the door of the furriers. Suddenly he turned around, stopped his complaining, and knocked.

The salesgirl with the braids peeped out from the door. “But . . .” she said. “Look,” said Barbagallo with a smile on his still-tearful face, and pointed to the white long johns at his ankles. And the girl exclaimed, “Oh . . .”

He was inside now. “Call your mistress, go on!” The girl went out. Barbagallo leapt into a side room and locked himself in. Signora Fabrizia came, did not see him, and went back, shaking her head. “Why they don’t keep madmen shut up, I don’t know . . .”

As soon as the key had turned in the lock, Barbagallo tore off his overcoat, the undershirt, the boots, and the long johns and breathed freely, naked at last. Seeing himself reflected in a large mirror, he flexed his muscles and did some exercises. There was no heating and it was bitterly cold, but he felt very happy. Then he began to look around.

He had locked himself into Fabrizia’s storeroom. Hung on a long clothes rack were all the furs in a row. The old man’s eyes shone with joy. Furs! He began to pass his hands along them, from one to the other, as if playing a harp; then he rubbed his shoulder, his face in them. There was gray and sullen mink, astrakhan of voluptuous softness, silver foxes like grassy clouds, gray squirrel and stone martens exquisitely smooth and light, firm brown cozy beavers, good-natured and dignified rabbits, little white-speckled goats with a dry rustle, leopards with a shuddering caress. Barbagallo noticed that his teeth were chattering from the cold. He took a lamb’s-wool jacket and tried it on; it fitted him like a glove. He tied a fox fur around his hips, twisting the tawny tail to make a loincloth. Then he slipped into a sable coat that must have been made for an enormous woman, it wrapped him in such big soft folds. He also found a pair of boots lined with beaver, and then a beautiful bearskin hat; he was really comfortable. Then a muff, and he was set. He preened himself in front of the mirror for a bit; it was impossible to distinguish what was beard and what was fur.

The clothes rack was still loaded with furs. Barbagallo flung them to the ground one by one until he had a wide soft bed under him to sink into. Then he stretched out and made all the rest of the furs cascade down on top of him like an avalanche. It was so warm that it seemed a pity to fall asleep and not enjoy just lying there, but the old porter could not hold out for long and soon sank into a serene and dreamless sleep.

When he woke up he saw night through the window. All around, silence. Obviously the fur shop was closed, and he wondered how he would ever get out. He listened and thought he heard a cough in the adjoining room. A light filtered through the keyhole.

Decked with mink, silver foxes, antelopes, and a bearskin hat, he got up and slowly opened the door. The girl with the black braids was sewing, bent over a table, by the light of a lamp. Because of the value of the goods in the storeroom, Signora Fabrizia made one of the girls stay and sleep in a bed in the workroom, to give the alarm in case of theft.

“Linda,” said Barbagallo. The girl opened her eyes wide; there, standing in the shadow, she saw a gigantic human bear with its arms entwined in an astrakhan muff. “How lovely . . .” she said.

Barbagallo took a few steps up and down, peacocking like a model.

Linda said, “But now I must call the police.”

“The police!” Barbagallo was upset. “But I’m not stealing anything. What can I do with these things? Obviously I can’t go around the streets like this. I only came in here to take off my undershirt, which was prickling me.”

They arranged that he would stay the night there and leave early in the morning. What was more, Linda knew how to wash flannel so that it would stop tickling him, and she would wash his undershirt and long johns for him.

Barbagallo helped her to wring them out and put up the line, then hang them near the electric fire. Linda had some apples, which they ate.

Then Barbagallo said, “Let’s see how you look in these furs.” And he made her try them all on, in all variations, with her braids up and with her hair loose, and they exchanged impressions on the softness of the various furs against the skin.

Finally they constructed a hut entirely of furs, big enough for them both to lie under, and they went inside to sleep.

When Linda awoke he was already up and putting on the underclothes. The dawn was showing through the window.

“Are they quite dry?”

“A little damp, but I must go.”

“Do they still tickle?”

“Not a bit. I’m as comfortable as a pope.”

He helped Linda straighten up the storeroom, put on his military overcoat, and said good-bye to her at the door.

Linda stood watching him as he walked away, with the white strip of pants between his overcoat and boots, and his proud tuft of hair in the cold dawn air.

Barbagallo had no intention of asking for a suit at the archbishop’s palace; he had got a new idea—going around the squares of the surrounding villages in his underclothes, giving exhibitions of physical prowess.

A Judge Is Hanged

That morning Judge Onofrio Clerici was aware of a different atmosphere in the movement of the crowd. He crossed the city every day in a modest carriage, from his house to the courts, and down below people thronged the sidewalks, hunched shoulders wearily moving aside, swarms surrounding the black-garbed roasted-chestnut sellers, the blind shouting, “Lottery . . . millions . . . ,” books thumping mutely in the students’ square schoolbags, and snail-bitten cabbages and celery stalks sticking out of shopping bags.

Today something different seemed to be animating those tiny people: at the edges of their eyelids cold triangles of the whites of the eyes appeared, and between their lips teeth. And the bony outlines of the hunched shoulders were more clearly marked under coats and shawls; and tips of chins protruded above the necklines of sweaters and collars; and Judge Onofrio Clerici felt a growing sense of unease.

Already for weeks the chalk drawings on the walls of his house had been getting bigger and more numerous, drawings of gallows with hanged men dangling from them, and the hanged men always wore the tall, cylindrical judge’s hat, wide at the top with a pompom. Judge Onofrio Clerici had long been aware that people hated him, that they made a commotion in the courtroom during the sentencing, that widows giving their testimony yelled at him rather than at the prisoner; but he was sure of himself, and he hated them, too, that mangy rabble, not good at giving relevant answers when they testified, not good at sitting respectfully among the spectators, that rabble always burdened with children and debts and wrong ideas: the Italians.

Judge Onofrio Clerici had long known who the Italians are: pregnant women carrying scabby children; youths with bluish cheeks who without a war on are good only at being unemployed and selling tobacco in the stations; old men with asthma and hernias and hands so callused they can’t hold the pen to sign the report—a race of malcontents, whiners, and troublemakers, who if you don’t keep a tight rein on them would want everything for themselves and would install themselves everywhere, dragging their scabby tots and their hernias and trampling the roasted-chestnut shells on the sidewalks.

Luckily they, the race of well-bred people, existed, a race with smooth, sagging skin, with hairs in their nose and their ears, with buttocks as firm as bedrock on padded armchairs, a race jingling with decorations, medals, necklaces, eyeglasses, monocles, hearing aids, dentures; a race reared over the centuries in the baroque seats of the chancelleries of ancient realms; a race that knows how to make laws and apply them and have them respected to the extent that is convenient for it; a race bound by a secret understanding, by a common discovery—that the Italians are a wretched people, and in Italy it would be better if there were no Italians, or at least if they didn’t make so much noise.

Judge Onofrio Clerici arrived at the courthouse, which was old, half demolished by past bombardments, and supported by scaffoldings of rotted beams, the plaster flaking and the baroque friezes of the pediment crumbling. A crowd, pressing toward the closed entrance, was, as always at trials, kept under control by guards. It had become customary to reserve the spectators’ space for the relatives and friends of the accused and for trustworthy and respectful persons, yet every time someone from the masses managed to sneak into the courtroom and find a place on the benches at the back, disturbing the hearing with protests and shut ups. The others stayed outside, resolute, making a racket, with protests and threats, and some even held up placards; and sometimes the noise reached the courtroom, making Judge Onofrio Clerici nervous and confirming him in his hatred of these insolent Italians intruding in things they didn’t understand.

That day, however, the crowd was unusually silent and restrained, and no hostile muttering arose at the sight of Judge Onofrio Clerici as he descended from the shabby carriage and entered the courthouse through a side door.

Inside the courthouse the feeling of uneasiness in the judge’s heart subsided a little: everyone there was friendly, judges and prosecutors and lawyers, people of the respectable race, with a smile swallowed up at the corners of their mouths and a pulsing at the sides of their throats like the gills of a frog. They were placid and by now tranquil people: in the executive and in all the high positions of the state there were people like them, with drooping eyelids and froglike throats, and gradually the insolent Italians would settle down and resign themselves to the scabs and hernias they’d tolerated for centuries now.

As they waited for the start of the hearing and the members of the court were bundling into their black robes, a lawyer with warts on his face pulled out of his pocket an anti-Italian newspaper and, laughing heartily, showed the other officials grotesque cartoons in which the Italians were represented as clumsy and monstrous types, with visored caps and ridiculous cudgels. Only one of them didn’t laugh at the drawings: he was the new clerk, an old man with a cone-shaped head and a meek and deferential appearance. One at a time the magistrates turned eyes flushed with laughter to the sad, wrinkled face and the laughs died out in their froglike throats. That fellow is not to be trusted, thought Judge Onofrio Clerici.

Then the members of the court entered for the trial. The trials that Judge Onofrio Clerici presided over in those days were not the usual cases against a few poor fellows who’d done burglaries. They were cases against people who had had Italians arrested and shot in the time of a war that had been, and Judge Onofrio Clerici, hearing their cases described, was convinced that they were decent people, people who followed their own ideas, people who would be needed to hold off those clumsy Italians, still gaunt and threadbare, still with hunger in their bones and new grievances to bring up.

But Judge Onofrio Clerici had in hand the laws, the laws made by them, by the men with frog throats, even when they seemed to be made on behalf of those poor Italian devils; he knew that laws can be turned inside out at will and make black say white and white black. So he would acquit everyone, and after the trials the crowd would remain in the square until late, growing agitated, and with loud cries women in mourning wept for their men who had been hanged.

Taking his seat, Judge Onofrio Clerici examined the crowd: they seemed to be trustworthy types, men with jutting buck teeth, starched collars that cut into the scruff of their necks, eyebrows set above noses like birds of prey, and ladies with bony yellow necks supporting hats with veils. But, sharpening his gaze, the judge noted that the entire last row of benches was occupied by a rabble who had worked their way in despite the orders: pale girls with braids, cripples with their chins resting on their crutches, men with blue eyes rimmed by wrinkles, old men with eyeglasses held together with string, old women muffled in shawls. There was a little distance between that last row of benches and the next to last, and those intruders were sitting motionless, arms crossed, and they were all looking him, the judge, in the face.

That grip of unease became tighter around the heart of Judge Onofrio Clerici. There were two guards, one on either side of the bench, certainly stationed there to protect the court from possible protests by those desperate people; but their faces were different from those of the usual guards, they were pale, melancholy faces, with locks of blond hair crushed by the band of their kepis. And then that clerk who seemed to be writing on his own account, always bent over the table.

The accused was already in the cage, impassive, in a tidy, carefully ironed suit. He had neatly combed, dull gray hair that began low over his eyes and cheekbones, and very pale pupils that appeared lifeless in the slightly reddened hollows below eyelids without lashes or eyebrows; the lips were puffy but of the same color as the skin, and when they parted, large square incisors were visible. His beard was shaved, leaving a shadow like marble under the skin. His hands, calmly holding on to the bars, had broad flat fingers like rubber stamps.

The trial began. The witnesses were the usual riffraff full of complaints. They shouted, especially the women, pointing their arms at the cage: “It’s him . . . I saw him with my own eyes . . . he said, Now you’ll get yours, bandits . . . only son, my Gianni . . . so he said, You don’t want to talk, well, here, dog . . .”

People who don’t know how to give proper depositions, thought Judge Onofrio Clerici, disorderly, undisciplined people, lacking respect: after all, that man in the cage had been their superior and they hadn’t obeyed him. Now he was giving them a lesson in behavior, impassive in the cage, looking at them with those colorless pupils, denying nothing, with a faint air of boredom.

Judge Onofrio Clerici envied his placidity. The sense of unease was increasing. Outside, the hammering of workmen in the courtyard was making him nervous. Surely they were propping up the unstable edifice: through the tall, churchlike windows of the courtroom boards and planks were visible, carried by bare arms. Why in the world are they working while we’re holding a trial here? Judge Onofrio Clerici wondered, and several times he was on the point of sending the porter to tell them to stop, but each time something held him back.

Through the testimony, the scene of the most serious charge was being reconstructed: the murder of men and women and old people in the square of a town that was then set on fire. Gradually the eyes of Judge Onofrio Clerici got a clear view of the pile of corpses in the middle of the square, and he interrogated painstakingly and rigorously in order to reconstruct the scene in its smallest details. The dead had been in the square for a day and a night, and no one had been able to approach them. Onofrio Clerici thought of those bony yellow bodies in their filthy rags soaked with clotted blood, big black flies resting on their lips, on their nostrils. The spectators in the last row remained calm, who knew why; and Judge Onofrio Clerici, in order to suppress the apprehension they instilled, tried to imagine them murdered, a heap of corpses, their eyes open like holes and bloody worms in their nostrils.

“Then he approached our dead,” said one witness, a bent, bearded old man. “I saw him. And he stopped in front of them, and just like this he did to our dead what I would be disgusted to do to him: he spit.”

Judge Onofrio Clerici saw those dead Italians, already turning yellow, livid navels exposed, skirts raised over bony legs, and he felt the saliva rising to his lips. He looked at the pale, protruding lips of the accused: he felt a secret need to see a pearl of saliva emerge from between those lips. There, at the memory, the accused parted his lips, and there, above the teeth, the large square incisors, a faint foam appeared; oh, how Judge Onofrio Clerici understood the accused man’s disgust, the disgust that had led him to spit on the dead.

The defense counsel made his argument; it was that short potbellied man with all the warts on his face, who was so amused by the cartoons mocking the poor people. He boasted of the accused man’s fine qualities, his activities as a zealous official totally dedicated to safeguarding order; considering all the attenuating circumstances, he asked for the minimum sentence.

Judge Onofrio Clerici didn’t know where to look during the defense’s argument. If he looked at the spectators, he was immediately agitated by the gaze of those Italians in the back, eyes interminably staring at him. And, outside, the hammering and transport of boards wouldn’t stop . . . Now, through the windows, he saw a rope, and two hands uncoiling it, as if to see how long it was. What in the world could that rope be used for?

The public prosecutor was speaking now. He was a long-boned man, supported on the protruding angles of his hips, and he opened wide his canine jaws, crisscrossed by tendons of drool. He began to speak of the need for justice to be done for the many crimes committed in those times, and for the truly guilty to be punished; then he added that the accused was certainly not one of those, and that he could have done no less than what he had done. He ended by asking for half the sentence requested by the defense counsel.

The spectators in the first rows applauded, with a strange sound of bones and spanking. Judge Onofrio Clerici thought, Now those people there in the back will start shouting. But they remained unmoving and intent; it wasn’t clear what was wrong with them.

The court withdrew to the room next door to deliberate. From a window of that room the courtyard was clearly visible, and finally Judge Onofrio Clerici understood what the workmen had been doing out there with beams and rope. A gallows: they had built a gallows right in the middle of the courtyard. Now it was finished and it stood there, spare and black, with the noose dangling; the workmen had left.

Ignorant fools, thought Judge Onofrio. They think the accused will be condemned to death, so they built a gallows. But I’ll show them! And to teach them a lesson he proposed to the court that, by means of judicial cavils that he alone knew, the accused should be acquitted. The court approved his proposal unanimously.

It was the judge who showed the most emotion at the reading of the decision. No one batted an eye, neither the accused with his stamplike fingers clutching the bars, nor the respectable public, nor the intruders. Those pale girls with braids, those crippled soldiers, those old women in shawls were standing, heads high, with a chorus of fiery gazes.

The clerk approached so that the judge could sign the decision; the humble sadness with which he presented the papers made it seem that he was bringing him a death sentence to sign. The papers: because under the first, well, there was a second, and the clerk exposed only the bottom edge, letting the other slide over it. And the judge signed that, too. On him were the fiery gazes from the eyeglasses mended with string, from the wrinkled blue eyes. The judge was sweating.

Now the clerk was sliding the first page off, farther and farther: underneath, on the second page, Judge Onofrio Clerici read: “Onofrio Clerici, judge, guilty of insulting and deriding the rest of us poor Italians for a long time, is sentenced to death, to be hanged like a dog.” Underneath, he had signed.

The two guards with the sad fair faces had come up beside him. They didn’t touch him, however. “Judge Onofrio Clerici,” they said, “come with us.”

Judge Onofrio Clerici turned. The guards, one on one side, one on the other, without touching him led him through a door into the deserted courtyard, to the foot of the gallows.

“Get up on that gallows,” they said. But they didn’t push him. “Get up,” they said.

Onofrio Clerici ascended.

“Put your head in the noose,” they said.

The judge put his head in the noose. The two barely looked at him.

“Now kick the stool,” they said, and left.

Judge Onofrio Clerici pushed aside the stool and felt the rope knotting around his neck, his throat closing up like a fist, crushing his bones. And his eyes, like big black snails, came out of the shell of their sockets, as if the light they sought could be converted to air, and meanwhile darkness was thickening around the pillars of the deserted courtyard: deserted because that wretched Italian rabble hadn’t even come to see him die.

The Cat and the Policeman

The roundup of hidden weapons had begun in the city sometime earlier. Policemen wearing leather helmets that gave them identical, cruel faces climbed into trucks, and off they went through the poor neighborhoods, sirens blaring, to the house of a laborer or a worker, to make a mess of underwear drawers and take apart stove pipes. On those days Agent Baravino’s heart was seized by an overwhelming anguish.

Baravino was an unemployed man who had recently joined the police. Thus he had recently become aware of a secret that existed in the depths of that apparently calm and industrious city: behind the concrete walls that lined the streets, in secluded enclosures, in dark cellars, a forest of shiny, threatening weapons lay warily like the quills of a porcupine. Machine-gun deposits were mentioned, and underground repositories of bullets; there was someone, it was said, who in a room behind a walled-up door kept an entire cannon. Like traces of metals that indicate a nearby mining region, in the houses of the city pistols were found sewed inside mattresses, guns nailed under floors. Agent Baravino felt uneasy amid his people; every manhole, every scrap heap seemed to him to hold obscure threats; he often thought of the hidden cannon and he imagined it in the parlor where he had gone once as a child, in the house where his mother cleaned: one of those rooms that remain closed for years and years. He saw the cannon amid faded velvet sofas decorated with lace, its muddy wheels on the carpet and the gun mount touching the chandelier, so big it filled the room and scraped the varnish on the piano.

One night the police made a foray into the workers’ neighborhoods and surrounded an entire building. It was a large, decrepit-looking structure, as if supporting such a crowd of humanity had deformed the floors and the walls, reducing the latter to a callused, encrusted, porous old skin.

The courtyard was cluttered with garbage cans, and rusty, twisted iron railings ran along the balconies that circled it on every floor; and on these railings, and on ropes stretching from one to another, hung clothes and rags, and along the balconies were French doors with boards instead of glass, pierced by the black stove pipes, and at the end of the balconies were the toilet sheds, stacked one above the other like a flaking tower, one floor then the next, spaced out by the little windows of the mezzanine floors, rackety with sewing machines and steamy with soup, up to the top, to the attic grates, the crooked eaves, the dilapidated dormer windows, open like ovens.

A labyrinth of worn stairs traversed the body of the old building from the cellar to the roof, like black veins with innumerable branches, and, scattered as if randomly, the doors to the mezzanines and the crowded apartments opened off the stairs. The agents went up, unable to modify the grim sound of their own steps, and sought to decipher the names marked on the doors, going around and around in single file on those echoing balconies, while children and untidy women peeked out.

Baravino was in the middle, indistinguishable from the others under the automaton’s helmet that cast a crude shadow over his cloudy blue eyes; but in his heart he was confused and distressed. Some of their enemies, he had been told, enemies of them, the police, and of respectable people, were hiding in that house. With dismay Agent Baravino looked into the rooms through half-closed doors: in any wardrobe, behind any doorpost, terrible weapons could be concealed; why did every tenant, every woman look at them with a mixture of pain and anxiety? If one of them was the enemy, why couldn’t they all be? Behind the stair walls garbage thrown down into the chutes fell with a thud; couldn’t that be the weapons they were hastily getting rid of?

They entered a low room where a family was having dinner around a table with a red checked cloth. The children were yelling. Only the smallest, who was eating on his father’s knees, looked at them silently, with black, hostile eyes. “Orders to search the house,” said the sergeant, coming to attention and causing the colored ribbons on his chest to jump. “Madonna! Us poor folk! Us honest all our lives!” said an old woman, hands on her heart. The father, in his undershirt, had a broad clear face, with patches where the beard was hard to shave; he was feeding the child with a spoon. First he gave them a sidelong glance, perhaps ironic; then he shrugged his shoulders and attended to the child.

The room was full of policemen who couldn’t move. The sergeant gave useless orders and got in the way rather than directing. Apprehensively Baravino observed every piece of furniture, every cupboard. All right, that man in the undershirt was the enemy, and certainly if up until that moment he hadn’t been, he was the enemy now, irrevocably, seeing his drawers overturned and the pictures of Madonnas and dead relatives pulled off the walls. And, all right, if he was their enemy, his house was full of traps: every dresser drawer could contain machine guns taken apart in an orderly way; if he opened the cupboard doors, bayonets fixed to guns could be pointing at his chest; perhaps ribbons of gilded bullets dangled under the jackets hanging on the hangers; every pot, every pan harbored a prudent hand grenade.

Baravino moved his long, thin arms clumsily. A drawer clattered: knives? No: silverware. A schoolbag thumped: bombs? Books. The bedroom was so crammed you couldn’t get through it: two double beds, three cots, two straw mattresses lying on the floor. And at the other end of the room, sitting in a crib, was a child with a toothache who began to cry. The agent wanted to open a passageway between those beds to reassure himself; but if it was guarding an arsenal in disguise, if the barrel of a mortar was hidden under every bed?

After all that, Baravino didn’t search anywhere. He tried to open a door: it resisted. Maybe the cannon! He imagined it in the parlor of that house in his town, with a vase of artificial roses sticking out of the barrel, lace trimming on the shields, and china figurines placed innocently on the mounts. The door suddenly yielded: it wasn’t a parlor but a storeroom, full of broken straw-seated chairs and boxes. All dynamite? There! On the floor Baravino saw the marks of two wheels; something with wheels had been dragged out of the room along a narrow corridor. Baravino followed the trail. It was the grandfather, rolling the wheelchair as fast as he could. Why was that old man running away? Maybe the blanket over his legs was hiding a hatchet! I pass by and with one blow the old man splits my head in two! Instead, he was going to the toilet. What was the secret there? Baravino ran along the balcony, but the door of the toilet opened and a little girl with a red ribbon came out with a cat in her arms.

Baravino thought he should make friends with the children and ask them questions. He held out a hand to pet the cat. “Nice kitty,” he said. The cat jumped in his direction; it was a thin gray cat, with short fur, all sinews. It gnashed its teeth and leaped like a dog. “Nice kitty.” Baravino tried to pet it, as if the problem for him lay entirely in befriending the cat. But the cat dodged him and fled, every so often spinning around with malevolent glances.

Baravino bounded along the gallery, chasing it. “Kitty, nice kitty,” he said. He entered a room where two girls were working, bent over sewing machines. On the floor were piles of scraps. “Weapons?” asked the agent, and scattered the material with his foot, ending up hobbled and draped in pink and purple. The girls laughed.

He went through a passage and up a flight of stairs; sometimes the cat seemed to be waiting for him, then when he got closer it leaped up, paws parallel and rigid. He went out onto another balcony: it was obstructed by a bicycle with its tires in the air; a man in overalls was looking for a hole in a tire, submerging it in a basin of water. The cat was already on the other side. “Excuse me,” said the agent. “There it is,” said the man, and invited him to look: from the tire in the water rose countless little bubbles. “May I?” Had everything been prepared to bar the way, or toss him over the railing?

He went on. In one room there was only a cot and a bare-chested young man lying on his back, smoking, with one hand under his curly head. Suspicious look. “Excuse me, have you seen a cat?” It was a good pretext for searching under the bed. Baravino stretched out a hand and got a peck. A chicken hopped out, being raised there secretly, in spite of city ordinances. The bare-chested young man hadn’t batted an eyelid; he went on smoking, lying in bed.

Crossing a landing, the agent found himself in the workshop of a hatmaker wearing spectacles. “Search . . . order . . .” said Baravino, and a pile of hats—trilbys, straw hats, top hats—fell and scattered on the floor. The cat jumped out from behind a curtain, played for a moment with the hats, and ran away. Baravino no longer knew if he was mad at that cat or if he just wanted to be its friend.

In the middle of a kitchen an old man in a mailman’s cap with his pants rolled up was bathing his feet. As soon as he saw the agent he gestured, sneering, toward another room. Baravino looked in. “Help,” cried a nearly naked fat woman. Baravino, modest, said, “Excuse me.” The mailman sneered, hands on his knees. Baravino went back through the kitchen and onto the balcony.

The balcony was decorated with laundry hung out to dry. The agent walked along blind white corridors, in a maze of sheets; now and then the cat appeared, creeping under a hem, and disappeared, flattening itself under another. Suddenly Baravino was gripped by the fear that he was lost; maybe he had been cut off, his fellow soldiers had cleared out of the building, and he was the prisoner of that justly insulted people, prisoner of those hanging sheets. He found an opening at the end and managed to look over a low wall. Below, the well of the courtyard opened up as lights went on around the balconies. And along the railings, and up and down the stairs, Baravino saw, he didn’t know whether with relief or anxiety, policemen swarming, and he heard the orders, the cries of fear, the protests.

The cat had sat down on the wall beside him and was swishing its tail, looking down with an air of indifference. But when he moved it jumped off and disappeared up a narrow stairway that led to a garret. The agent followed: he was no longer afraid. The garret was almost empty; outside the moon was beginning to glow above the black houses. Baravino had taken off his helmet; his face was human again, the thin face of a fair-haired kid.

“Not another step,” said a voice. “You’re in range of my gun.”

A girl was squatting on the sill of the big window, wearing silk stockings and no shoes, long hair falling on her shoulders, her face made up, and in a cold voice was laboriously reading in the last light of evening a newspaper made up of drawings with a few sentences in block letters.

“Gun?” said Baravino, and grabbed her wrist as if to open the fist. As soon as she moved her arm the sweater opened over her chest, and the cat, curled into a ball, leaped out into the air toward him, Agent Baravino, gnashing its teeth. But now the agent understood that it was a game.

The cat fled to the roof, and Baravino, looking out at the low railing, contemplated it as it ran free and confident over the tiles.

“And Mary saw near her bed,” the girl continued reading, “the baronet in evening clothes with the gun pointed.”

The lights in the solitary, towerlike workers’ blocks were lit. Agent Baravino saw the enormous city below him: geometric steel constructions rose within the factory precincts, branches of clouds passed over the chimney stacks as they crossed the sky.

“Do you want my pearls, Sir Henry?” that constricted voice read painstakingly, obstinate. “No, I want you, Mary.”

As the wind rose Baravino saw before him that intricate expanse of concrete and steel; from a thousand hiding places the porcupine raised its quills. He was alone in enemy territory now.

“I have wealth and elegance, I live in a luxurious palace, I have servants and jewels, what more can I ask of life?” continued the girl, whose black hair fell over the page, decorated with sinuous women and brightly smiling men.

Baravino heard the trill of whistles and the roar of engines: the police were leaving the building. He would have liked to flee under the chains of clouds in the sky, bury his gun in a deep hole in the ground.

Who Put the Mine in the Sea?

At the villa of Pomponio, the financier, the guests were having coffee on the veranda. There was General Amalasunta, who was explaining the third world war with cups and spoons, while Signora Pomponio was saying “Frightful!” and smiling, like the cold-blooded woman she was.

Only Signora Amalasunta could allow herself to act distressed, since her husband was so bold that he immediately wanted total war on four fronts. “Let’s hope it doesn’t last too long . . .” she said.

But Strabonio, the journalist, was skeptical. “Yes, yes, all expected,” he said. “Remember, Excellency, that article of mine, last year . . .”

“Yes, yes.” Pomponio nodded; he remembered because Strabonio had written the article after a conversation with him.

“Nevertheless one mustn’t rule out . . .” said the Honorable Uccellini, the deputy, who had been unable to explain clearly the peacemaking mission of the papacy before, during, and after the inevitable conflict.

“But of course, of course, Honorable . . .” said the others in a conciliatory tone. The deputy’s wife was Pomponio’s lover and they didn’t want to upset him too much.

The sea was visible in the gaps in the striped awning, rubbing against the beach like a calm, indifferent cat, arching its back in the breeze.

A servant entered and asked if they wanted some shellfish. An old man had come by, he said, with a basket of sea urchins and limpets. The discussion moved from the danger of war to the danger of typhus; the general cited incidents in Africa, Strabonio cited incidents in literature, the Honorable agreed with everyone. Pomponio, who was something of an expert, said they should bring in the old man with the goods and he would choose.

The old man was called Bacì Degli Scogli, Bacì from the Rocks; he made a fuss with the servant because he didn’t want him to touch the baskets. There were two baskets, decrepit and moldy: one he held against his side, and as soon as he came in he dropped it on the floor; the other, which he carried on one shoulder, was evidently very heavy, making him lopsided, and he put it down carefully. A piece of burlap was tied on over the top.

Bacì’s head was covered by a white down, with no distinction between hair and beard. The small amount of exposed skin was red, as if for years the sun had been unable to tan it but only to boil and flay it; and his eyes were bloodshot, as if even the mucus had been transformed into salt. He had a short body, like a boy’s, with gnarled limbs that emerged from the holes in the old tunic, worn next to the skin, without even a shirt. His shoes he must have fished out of the sea, they were so shapeless, mismatched, shriveled. And from his person rose a strong odor of rotten seaweed. The ladies said, “How quaint.”

Bacì Degli Scogli, having uncovered the light basket, was displaying the sea urchins, piled up in a tangle of shiny black spines. With his wrinkled hands, covered with black dots where the spines had dug in, he handled the sea urchins as if they were rabbits he was picking up by the ears, and turned them over to show off the soft red pulp. Under the sea urchins was a layer of burlap and under that were the limpets, their flat bodies striped yellow and brown under the bearded, lichened shells.

Pomponio examined and sniffed. “They don’t come out of the drains in your area, right?”

Bacì smiled into his beard. “Eh, no, I’m out on the headland, you here have drains, where you swim . . .”

The guests changed the subject. They bought some sea urchins, some limpets, and charged Bacì to provide more in the coming days. In fact, they all gave him their visiting cards, so that he could make the round of their villas.

“And what do you have in that other basket?” they asked.

“Eh”—the old man winked—“a large beast. A beast I’m not selling.”

“What will you do with it, then? Eat it?”

“Eat it! It’s an iron beast . . . I have to find its owner, to give it back. Let him get rid of it, am I right?”

The others didn’t understand.

“You know,” he explained, “I separate the stuff that the sea carries ashore. In one place tin cans, in the other shoes, bones in yet another. And here comes this thing. Where do I put it? I see it moving along in the sea, half underwater and half on top, green with seaweed and rusty. Why they put these things in the sea I don’t understand. Would you like to find them under your bed? Or in a closet? I grabbed it and now I’m looking for who it is that put it there and I’ll tell him, You keep it, do me a favor!”

And as he spoke he cautiously approached the basket, untied the burlap cover, and exposed a large, monstrous iron object. The ladies didn’t understand at first, but cried out when General Amalasunta exclaimed, “A mine!” Signora Pomponio fainted.

There was a great confusion, some rushing to give the lady air, some reassuring: “Of course it’s harmless, so many years like that, drifting . . .” Someone said, “It should be taken away, the old man should be arrested.” But meanwhile the old man had disappeared, with the terrible basket.

The master of the house called the servants: “Did you see him? Where did he go?” No one could guarantee that he had left. “Search the house: open the closets, the drawers, empty the cellar!”

“Every man for himself,” shouted Amalasunta, suddenly turning pale. “This house is in danger, everyone get out!”

“Why my house?” Pomponio protested. “And yours, General, think of yours!”

“I have to go and watch over my house . . .” said Strabonio, who had remembered certain articles he’d written, then and now.

“Pietro!” cried Signora Pomponio, who had revived, throwing herself on her husband’s neck.

“Pierino!” cried Signora Uccellini, also throwing herself on Pomponio’s neck and colliding with the legitimate consort.

“Luisa!” the Honorable Uccellini observed. “Let’s go home.”

“You surely don’t believe that your house is safer?” they said to him. “Given the politics of your party, you’re in more danger than we are!”

Uccellini had a flash of genius. “Let’s call the police!”

The police stormed through the coastal city, looking for the old man with the mine. The villas of the financier Pomponio, General Amalasunta, the journalist Strabonio, and the Honorable Uccellini and others as well were guarded by armed sentries, and mine disposal units from the Engineers inspected them from cellar to attic. The diners at Villa Pomponio prepared to camp out that night.

Meanwhile a smuggler named Grimpante, who thanks to his friendships always managed to know everything, had started off on his own to track down Bacì Degli Scogli. Grimpante was a big man in a white canvas sailor’s cap; the shady affairs that took place on land and sea all passed through his hands. It was easy for Grimpante, making the rounds of some taverns in the neighborhood of the Case Vecchie, the Old Houses, to run into Bacì, who emerged drunk with the mysterious basket on his shoulder.

He invited him for a drink at the Osteria dell’Orecchia Mozzata, the Tavern of the Severed Ear, and, filling his glass, began to explain his idea.

“It’s pointless to give the mine back to the owner,” he said, “since as soon as he can he’ll put it back where you found it. Instead, if you pay attention to me, we’ll catch so many fish we can flood the markets of the whole coast and become millionaires in a few days.”

It should be known that a little brat named Zefferino, always sticking his nose into everything, had followed the two into the Osteria dell’Orecchia Mozzata, and hid under the table. And having grasped what Grimpante intended to do, he ran away and hurried to spread the word among the poor people of the Case Vecchie.

“Hey, you want to have fried fish today?”

Looking out through the narrow crooked windows were thin, disheveled women with children at their breasts, old men with ear trumpets, grandmothers peeling chicory roots, jobless young men shaving.

“And how? And how?”

“Quiet, come with me,” said Zefferino.

Grimpante, who had stopped off at his house, returned with a violin case and set out with old Bacì. They took the road that went along the sea. Behind them, on tiptoe, came the poor people of the Case Vecchie, the women still in aprons, with frying pans over their shoulders, old cripples in wheelchairs, amputees on crutches, and a pack of kids all around the throng.

When they reached the rocks on the headland, the mine was released into the sea, into a current that carried it toward the open water. Grimpante had taken out of the violin case one of those murderous weapons that fire in bursts and had placed it behind a shelter of rocks. When the mine was in range he began to fire: the shots made a wake of small jets on the water. The poor people, lying on their bellies on the road along the shore, stopped up their ears.

Suddenly a tall column of water rose from the sea where the mine had been. The noise was tremendous: the windows of the villas shattered. The surge came up to the road. As soon as the waters subsided there were the fish, floating, white bellies up. Grimpante and Bacì were casting a big net when they were overwhelmed by the crowd running toward the sea.

The poor people went into the water in their clothes, some with shoes in hand and pants rolled up, some with shoes and all, the women with skirts floating in a circle, and all grabbing the dead fish. Some fished with their hands, some with their hats, some with their shoes, some put them in their pockets, some in their bags. The boys were the quickest, but they didn’t fight: they had all agreed to divide the fish equally. In fact they took care to help the old people who every so often slipped underwater and came up with their beards full of seaweed and little crabs. The most fortunate were the lay sisters, who, advancing in pairs with their veils spread over the surface of the water, dragged the whole sea. The pretty girls every so often cried, “Oh . . . oh . . .” because a dead fish got under their skirts, and the young men dived down to try to catch it.

On the shore people started lighting fires of dry seaweed and the frying pans appeared. They all took small bottles of oil out of their pockets, and the smell of frying fish filled the air. Grimpante had sneaked away so that the police wouldn’t catch him with that firearm in his hands. But Bacì Degli Scogli, with fish, crabs, and shrimp sticking out of all the holes in his clothes, had mingled with the others and was happily eating a raw mullet.

About the Author

Italo Calvino attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.

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Footnotes

* Tenth Motor Torpedo Boat Flotilla (Decima Mas): Fascist Marines.

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* On September 8, 1943, Italy surrendered to the Allies and the Germans took over northern and central Italy, as far south as Rome. Soon afterward the Republic of Salò, with Mussolini as its head, was established by the Germans. Draft orders were promulgated, requiring men of fighting age to report to the republic for military duty.

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* A reference to the Republic of Salò.

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* “Ladybug,” in English.

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