“Tell me something that’s not a joke.”
“All right.”
“Did you hear the same thing I think I heard up there?”
“No spika. I love Italy. I love Mussolini.” The woman brought the wine. She set it on the table and was turning away. “Ask her,” I said. “Why don’t you?”
“All right. I will.—You have military in the house, signora?”
The woman looked at him. “It is nothing, signor. It is my nephew returned.”
“Finished, signora?”
“Finished, signor.”
“Accept our felicitations. He has doubtless many friends who will rejoice at his return.” She was thin, not old, with cold eyes, looking down at Don with brusque attention, waiting. “You have a funeral in the village today.” She said nothing at all. She just stood there, waiting for Don to get done talking. “He will be mourned,” Don said.
“Let us hope so,” she said. She made to go on; Don asked her about lodgings. There were none, she answered with immediate finality. Then we realized that the bell had ceased. We could hear the steady whisper of the wind in the leaves overhead.
“We were told that the priest—” Don said.
“Yes? You were told that the priest.”
“That we might perhaps find lodgings there.”
“Then you would do well to see the priest, signor.” She returned to the house. She strode with the long stride of a man into the firelight, and disappeared. When I looked at Don, he looked away and reached for the wine.
“Why didn’t you ask her some more?” I said. “Why did you quit so soon?”
“She was in a hurry. Her nephew is just home from the army, she said. He came in this afternoon. She wants to be with him, since he is without ties.”
“Maybe she’s afraid he’ll be drafted.”
“Is that a joke too?”
“It wouldn’t be to me.” He filled the glasses. “Call her back. Tell her you heard that her nephew is to marry the priest’s ward. Tell her we want to give them a present. A stomach pump. That’s not a joke, either.”
“I know it’s not.” He filled his glass carefully. “Which had you rather do, or stay at the priest’s tonight?”
“Salut,” I said.
“Salut.” We drank. The leaves made a dry, wild, continuous sound. “Wish it was still summer.”
“It would be pretty cold tonight, even in a barn.”
“Yes. Glad we don’t have to sleep in a barn tonight.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad, after we got the hay warm and got to sleep.”
“We don’t have to, though. We can get a good sleep and get an early start in the morning.”
I filled the glasses. “I wonder how far it is to the next village.”
“Too far.” We drank. “I wish it were summer. Don’t you?”
“Yes,” I emptied the bottle into the glasses. “Have some wine.” We raised our glasses. We looked at one another. The particles in the wind seemed to drive through the clothing, through the flesh, against the bones, penetrating the brick and plaster of the walls to reach us. “Salut.”
“We said that before,” Don said.
“All right. Salut, then.”
“Salut.”
We were young: Don, twenty-three; I, twenty-two. And age is so much a part of, so inextricable from, the place where you were born or bred. So that away from home, some distance away—space or time or experience away—you are always both older and eternally younger than yourself, at the same time.
We stood in the black wind and watched the funeral—priest, coffin, a meager clump of mourners—pass, their garments, and particularly the priest’s rusty black, ballooning ahead of them, giving an illusion of unseemly haste, as though they were outstripping themselves across the harsh green twilight (the air was like having to drink iced lemonade in the winter time) and into the church. “We’ll be out of the wind too,” Don said.
“There’s an hour of light yet.”
“Sure; we might even reach the crest by dark.” He looked at me. Then I looked away. The red tiles of the roofs were black, too, now. “We’ll be out of the wind.” Then the bell began to toll again. “We don’t know anything. There’s probably not anything. Anyway, we don’t know it. We don’t have to know it. Let’s get out of the wind.” It was one of those stark, square, stone churches, built by those harsh iron counts and bishops of Lombardy. It was built old; time had not even mellowed it, could not ever mellow it, not all of time could have. They might have built the mountains too and invented the twilight in a dungeon underground, in the black ground. And beside the door the bicycle leaned. We looked at it quietly as we entered the church and we said quietly, at the same time:
“Beaver.”
“He’s one of the pallbearers,” Don said. “That’s why he came home.” The bell tolled. We passed through the chancel and stopped at the back of the church. We were out of the wind now, save for the chill eddies of it that licked in at our backs. We could hear it outside, ripping the slow strokes of the bell half-born out of the belfry, so that by the time we heard them, they seemed to have come back as echoes from a far distance. The nave, groined upward into the gloom, dwarfed the meager clot of bowed figures. Beyond them, above the steady candles, the Host rose, soaring into sootlike shadows like festooned cobwebs, with a quality sorrowful and triumphant, like wings. There was no organ, no music, no human sound at all at first. They just knelt there among the dwarfing gloom and the cold, serene, faint light of the candles. They might have all been dead. “It’ll be dark long before they can get done,” Don whispered.
“Maybe it’s because of the harvest,” I whispered. “They probably have to work all day. The living can’t wait on the dead, you know.”
“But, if he was as rich as they told us he was, it seems like …”
“Who buries the rich? Do the rich do it, or do the poor do it?”
“The poor do it,” Don whispered. Then the priest was there, above the bowed heads. We had not seen him at first, but now he was there, shapeless, blurring out of the shadows below the candles, his face like a smudge, a thumb print, upon the gloom where the Host rose in a series of dissolving gleams like a waterfall; his voice filled the church, slow, steady, like wings beating against the cold stone, upon the resonance of wind in which the windless candles stood as though painted. “And so he looked at her,” Don whispered. “He had to sit across the table from her, say, and watch her. Watch her eating the food that made her change from nothing and become everything, knowing she had no food of her own and that it was his food that was doing it, and not for him changing. You know: girls: they are not anything, then they are everything. You watch them become everything before your eyes. No, not eyes: it’s the same in the dark. You know it before they do; it’s not their becoming everything that you dread: it’s their finding it out after you have long known it: you die too many times. And that’s not right. Not fair. I hope I’ll never have a daughter.”
“That’s incest,” I whispered.
“I never said it wasn’t. I said it was like fire. Like watching the fire lean up and away rushing.”
“You must either watch a fire, or burn up in it. Or not be there at all. Which would you choose?”
“I don’t know. If it was a girl, I’d rather burn up in it.”
“Than to not be there at all, even?”
“Yes.” Because we were young. And the young seem to be impervious to anything except trifles. We can invest trifles with a tragic profundity, which is the world. Because, after all, there’s nothing particularly profound about reality. Because when you reach reality, along about forty or fifty or sixty, you find it to be only six feet deep and eighteen feet square.
Then it was over. Outside again, the wind blew steadily down from the black hills, hollowing out the green glass bowl of the sky. We watched them file out of the church and carry the coffin into the churchyard. Four of them carried iron lanterns and in the dusk they clotted quietly antic
about the grave while the wind leaned steadily upon them and upon the lantern flames, and blew fine dust into the grave as though all nature were quick to hide it. Then they were done. The lanterns bobbed into motion, approaching, and we watched the priest. He crossed the churchyard toward the presbytery at a scuttling gait, blown along in his gusty black. The soldier was in mufti now. He came out of the throng, striding also with that long-limbed thrust like his aunt. He looked briefly at us with his bold surly face and got on the bike and rode away. “He was one of the pallbearers,” Don said. “And what do you think of that, signori?”
“No spika,” I said. “I love Italy. I love Mussolini.”
“You said that before.”
“All right. Salut, then.”
Don looked at me. His face was quite sober. “Salut,” he said. Then he looked toward the presbytery, hitching his pack forward. The door of the presbytery was closed.
“Don,” I said. He stopped, looking at me. The mountains had lost all perspective; they appeared to lean in toward us. It was like being at the bottom of a dead volcano filled with that lost savage green wind dead in its own motion and full of its own driving and unsleeping dust. We looked at one another.
“All right, damn it,” Don said. “You say what to do next, then.” We looked at one another. After a while the wind would sound like sleep, maybe. If you were warm and close between walls, maybe.
“All right,” I said.
“Why can’t you mean, all right? Damn it, we’ve got to do something. This is October; it’s not summer. And we don’t know anything. We haven’t heard anything. We don’t speak Italian. We love Italy.”
“I said, all right,” I said. The presbytery was of stone too, bleak in a rank garden. We were halfway up the flagged path when a casement beneath the eaves opened and somebody in white looked down at us and closed the shutter again. It was done all in one movement. Again we said together, quietly:
“Beaver.” But it was too dark to see much, and the casement was closed again. It had not taken ten seconds.
“Only we should have said, Beaverette,” Don said.
“That’s right. Is that a joke?”
“Yes. That’s a joke.” A wooden-faced peasant woman opened the door. She held a candle, the flame leaning inward from the wind. The hall behind her was dark; a stale, chill smell came out of it. She stood there, the harsh planes of her face in sharp relief, her eyes two caverns in which two little flames glittered, looking at us.
“Go on,” I said. “Tell her something”
“We were told that his reverence, signora,” Don said, “that we might—” The candle leaned and recovered. She raised the other hand and sheltered it, blocking the door with her body. “We are travelers, en promenade; we were told—supper and a bed …”
When we followed her down the hall we carried with us in our ears the long rush of the recent wind, like in a sea shell. There was no light save the candle which she carried. So that, behind her, we walked in gloom out of which the serrated shadow of a stair on one wall reared dimly into the passing candle and dissolved in mounting serrations, carrying the eye with it up the wall where there was not any light. “Pretty soon it’ll be too dark to see anything from that window,” Don said.
“Maybe she won’t have to, by then.”
“Maybe so.” The woman opened a door; we entered a lighted room. It contained a table on which sat a candle in an iron candlestick, a carafe of wine, a long loaf, a metal box with a slotted cover. The table was set for two. We slung our packs into the corner and watched her set another place and fetch another chair from the hall. But that made only three places and we watched her take up her candle and go out by a second door. Then Don looked at me. “Maybe we’ll see her, after all.”
“How do you know he doesn’t eat?”
“When? Don’t you know where he’ll be?” I looked at him. “He’ll have to stay out there in the garden.”
“How do you know?”
“The soldier was at the church. He must have seen him. Must have heard—” We looked at the door, but it was the woman. She had three bowls. “Soup, signora?” Don said.
“Sì. Soup.”
“Good. We have come far.” She set the bowls on the table. “From Milano.” She looked briefly over her shoulder at Don.
“You’d better have stayed there,” she said. And she went out. Don and I looked at one another. My ears were still full of wind.
“So he is in the garden,” Don said.
“How do you know he is?”
After a while Don quit looking at me. “I don’t know.”
“No. You don’t know. And I don’t know. We don’t want to know. Do we?”
“No. No spika.”
“I mean, sure enough.”
“That’s what I mean,” Don said. The whisper in our ears seemed to fill the room with wind. Then we realized that it was the wind that we heard, the wind itself we heard, even though the single window was shuttered tight. It was as though the quiet room were isolated on the ultimate peak of space, hollowed murmurous out of chaos and the long dark fury of time. It seemed strange that the candle flame should stand so steady above the wick.
III
SO WE DID NOT see him until we were in the house. Until then he had been only a shabby shapeless figure, on the small size, scuttling through the blowing dusk at the head of the funeral, and a voice. It was as though neither of them was any part of the other: the figure in blowing black, and the voice beating up the still air above the candles, detached and dispassionate, tireless and spent and forlorn.
There was something precipitate about the way he entered, like a diver taking a full breath in the act of diving. He did not look at us and he was already speaking, greeting us and excusing his tardiness in one breath, in a low rapid voice. Still, without having ceased to speak or having looked at us, he motioned toward the other chairs and seated himself and bowed his head over his plate and began a Latin grace without a break in his voice; again his voice seemed to rush slow and effortless just above the sound of the wind, like in the church. It went on for some time; so that after a while I raised my head. Don was watching me, his eyebrows arched a little; we looked toward the priest and saw his hands writhing slowly on either side of his plate. Then the woman spoke a sharp word behind me; I had not heard her enter: a gaunt woman, not tall, with a pale, mahogany-colored face that might have been any age between twenty-five and sixty. The priest stopped. He looked at us for the first time, out of weak, rushing eyes. They were brown and irisless, like those of an old dog. Looking at us, it was as though he had driven them up with whips and held them so, in cringing and rushing desperation. “I forget,” he said. “There come times—” Again the woman snapped a word at him, setting a tureen on the table, the shadow of her arm falling across his face and remaining there: but we had already looked away. The long wind rushed past the stone eaves; the candle flame stood steady as a sharpened pencil in the still sound of the wind. We heard her filling the bowls, yet she still stood for a time, the priest’s face in the shadow of her arm; she seemed to be holding us all so until the moment—whatever it was—had passed. She went out. Don and I began to eat. We did not look toward him. When he spoke at last, it was in a tone of level, polite uninterest. “You have come far, signori?”
“From Milano,” we both said.
“Before that, Firenze,” Don said. The priest’s head was bent over his bowl. He ate rapidly. Without looking up he gestured toward the loaf. I pushed it along to him. He broke the end off and went on eating.
“Ah,” he said. “Firenze. That is a city. More—what do you say?—spirituel than our Milano.” He ate hurriedly, without finesse. His robe was turned back over a flannel undershirt, the sleeves were. His spoon clattered; at once the woman entered with a platter of broccoli. She removed the bowls. He reached his hand. She handed him the carafe and he filled the glasses without looking up and lifted his with a brief phrase. But he had only feinted to drink; he was watching
my face when I looked at him. I looked away; I heard him clattering at the dish and Don was looking at me too. Then the woman’s shoulder came between us and the priest. “There come times—” he said. He clattered at the dish. When the woman spoke to him in that shrill, rapid patois he thrust his chair back and for an instant we saw his driven eyes across her arm. “There come times—” he said, raising his voice. Then she drowned the rest of it, getting completely between us and Don and I stopped looking and heard them leave the room. The steps ceased. Then we could hear only the wind.
“It was the burial service,” Don said. Don was a Catholic. “That grace was.”
“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. It was the burial service. He got mixed up.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s it. What do we do now?” Our packs lay in the corner. Two packs can look as human, as utterly human and spent, as two shoes. We were watching the door when the woman entered. But she wasn’t going to stop. She didn’t look at us.
“What shall we do now, signora?” Don said.
“Eat.” She did not stop. Then we could hear the wind again.
“Have some wine,” Don said. He raised the carafe, then he held it poised above my glass, and we listened. The voice was beyond the wall, maybe two walls, in a sustained rush of indistinguishable words. He was not talking to anyone there; you could tell that. In whatever place he was, he was alone: you could tell that. Or maybe it was the wind. Maybe in any natural exaggerated situation—wind, rain, drouth—man is always alone. It went on for longer than a minute while Don held the carafe above my glass. Then he poured. We began to eat. The voice was muffled and sustained, like a machine might have been making it.
“If it were just summer,” I said.
“Have some wine.” He poured. We held our poised glasses. It sounded just like a machine. You could tell that he was alone. Anybody could have. “That’s the trouble,” Don said. “Because there’s not anybody there. Not anybody in the house.”
“The woman.”
“So are we.” He looked at me.