Collected Stories

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Sure. What better chance could she have wanted, have asked for? He was in here at least five minutes. And he just back from the army after three years. The first day he is home, and then afternoon and then twilight and then darkness. You saw her there. Didn’t you see her up there?”

  “He locked the door. You know he locked it.”

  “This house belongs to God: you can’t have a lock on it. You didn’t know that.”

  “That’s right. I forgot you’re a Catholic. You know things. You know a lot, don’t you?”

  “No. I don’t know anything. I no spika too. I love Italy too.” The woman entered. She didn’t bring anything this time. She came to the table and stood there, her gaunt face above the candle, looking down at us.

  “Look, then,” she said. “Will you go away?”

  “Go away?” Don said. “Not stop here tonight?” She looked down at us, her hand lying on the table. “Where could we stop? Who would take us in? One cannot sleep on the mountain in October, signora.”

  “Yes,” she said. She was not looking at us now. Through the walls we listened to the voice and to the wind.

  “What is this, anyway?” Don said. “What goes on here, signora?”

  She looked at him gravely, speculatively, as if he were a child. “You are seeing the hand of God, signorino,” she said. “Pray God that you are too young to remember it.” Then she was gone. And after a while the voice ceased, cut short off like a thread. And then there was just the wind.

  “As soon as we get out of the wind, it won’t be so bad,” I said.

  “Have some wine.” Don raised the carafe. It was less than half full.

  “We’d better not drink any more.”

  “No.” He filled the glasses. We drank. Then we stopped. It began again, abruptly, in full stride, as though silence were the thread this time. We drank. “We might as well finish the broccoli, too.”

  “I don’t want any more.”

  “Have some wine then.”

  “You’ve already had more than I have.”

  “All right.” He filled my glass. I drank it. “Now, have some wine.”

  “We ought not to drink it all.”

  He raised the carafe. “Two more glasses left. No use in leaving that.”

  “There aren’t two glasses left.”

  “Bet you a lira.”

  “All right. But let me pour.”

  “All right.” He gave me the carafe. I filled my glass and reached toward his. “Listen,” he said. For about a minute now the voice had been rising and falling, like a wheel running down. This time it didn’t rise again; there was only the long sound of the wind left. “Pour it,” Don said. I poured. The wine mounted three quarters. It began to dribble away. “Tilt it up.” I did so. A single drop hung for a moment, then fell into the glass. “Owe you a lira,” Don said.

  The coins rang loud in the slotted box. When he took it up from the table and shook it, it made no sound. He took the coins from his pocket and dropped them through the slot. He shook it again. “Doesn’t sound like quite enough. Cough up.” I dropped some coins through the slot; he shook the box again. “Sounds all right now.” He looked at me across the table, his empty glass bottom-up before him. “How about a little wine?”

  When we rose I took my pack from the corner. It was on the bottom. I had to tumble Don’s aside. He watched me. “What are you going to do with that?” he said. “Take it out for a walk?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Past the cold invisible eaves the long wind steadily sighed. Upon the candle the flame stood like the balanced feather on the long white nose of a clown.

  The hall was dark; there was no sound in it. There was nothing in it save the cold smell of sunless plaster and silence and the smell of living, of where people have, and will have, lived. We carried our packs low and close against our legs like we had stolen them. We went on to the door and opened it, entering the black wind again. It had scoured the sky clear and clean, hollowing it out of the last of light, the last of twilight. We were halfway to the gate when we saw him. He was walking swiftly back and forth beside the wall. His head was bare, his robes ballooning about him. When he saw us he did not stop. He didn’t hurry, either. He just turned and went back beside the wall and turned again, walking fast. We waited at the gate. We thanked him for the food, he motionless in his whipping robes, his head bent and averted a little, as a deaf man listens. When Don knelt at his feet he started back as though Don had offered to strike him. Then I felt like a Catholic too and I knelt too and he made the sign hurriedly above us, upon the black-and-green wind and dusk, like he would have made it in water. When we passed out the gate and looked back we could still see, against the sky and the blank and lightless house, his head rushing back and forth like a midget running along the top of the wall.

  IV

  THE CAFÉ was on the lee side of the street; we sat out of the wind. But we could see gusts and eddies of trash swirl along the gutter, and an occasional tongue of it licked chill across our legs, and we could hear the steady rushing of it in the high twilight among the roofs. On the curb two musicians from the hills—a fiddler and a piper—sat, playing a wild and skirling tune. Now and then they stopped to drink, then they resumed the same tune. It was without beginning and seemingly without end, the wild unmusic of it swirling along the wind with a quality at once martial and sad. The waiter fetched us brandy and coffee, his dirty apron streaming suddenly and revealing beneath it a second one of green baize and rigid as oxidized copper. At the other table five young men sat, drinking and ringing separately small coins onto the waiter’s tray, which he appeared to count by the timbre of the concussion before tilting them into his waistcoat in one motion, and a long-flanked young peasant woman stopped to hear the music, a child riding her hip. She set the child down and it scuttled under the table where the young men sat, they withdrawing their legs to permit it, while the woman was not looking. She was looking at the musicians, her face round and tranquil, her mouth open a little.

  “Let’s have some wine,” Don said.

  “All right,” I said. “I like Italy,” I said. We had another brandy. The woman was trying to cajole the child from under the table. One of the young men extracted it and gave it back to her. People stopped in the street to hear the music, and a high two-wheeled cart, full of fagots and drawn by a woman and a diminutive mule, passed without stopping, and then the girl came up the street in her white dress, and I didn’t feel like a Catholic any more. She was all in white, coatless, walking slender and supple. I didn’t feel like anything any more, watching her white dress swift in the twilight, carrying her somewhere or she carrying it somewhere: anyway, it was going too, moving when she moved and because she moved, losing her when she would be lost because it moved when she moved and went with her to the instant of loss. I remember how, when I learned about Thaw and White and Evelyn Nesbitt, how I cried. I cried because Evelyn, who was a word, was beautiful and lost or I would never have heard of her. Because she had to be lost for me to find her and I had to find her to lose her. And when I learned that she was old enough to have a grown daughter or son or something, I cried, because I had lost myself then and I could never again be hurt by loss. So I watched the white dress, thinking, She’ll be as near me in a second as she’ll ever be and then she’ll go on away in her white dress forevermore, in the twilight forevermore. Then I felt Don watching her too and then we watched the soldier spring down from the bike. They came together and stopped and for a while they stood there in the street, among the people, facing one another but not touching. Maybe they were not even talking, and it didn’t matter how long; it didn’t matter about time. Then Don was nudging me.

  “The other table,” he said. The five young men had all turned; their heads were together, now and then a hand, an arm, secret, gesticulant, their faces all one way. They leaned back, without turning their faces, and the waiter stood, tray on hip—a squat, sardonic figure older than Gran
dfather Lust himself—looking also. At last they turned and went on up the street together in the direction from which he had come, he leading the bicycle. Just before they passed from sight they stopped and faced one another again among the people, the heads, without touching at all. Then they went on. “Let’s have some wine,” Don said.

  The waiter set the brandies on the table, his apron like a momentary board on the wind. “You have military in town,” Don said.

  “That’s right,” the waiter said. “One.”

  “Well, one is enough,” Don said. The waiter looked up the street. But they were gone now, with her white dress shaping her stride, her girl-white, not for us.

  “Too many, some say.” He looked much more like a monk than the priest did, with his long thin nose and his bald head. He looked like a devastated hawk. “You’re stopping at the priest’s, eh?”

  “You have no hotel,” Don said.

  The waiter made change from his waistcoat, ringing the coins deliberately upon the table. “What for? Who would stop here, without he walked? Nobody walks except you English.”

  “We’re Americans.”

  “Well.” He raised his shoulders faintly. “That’s your affair.” He was not looking at us exactly; not at Don, that is. “Did you try Cavalcanti’s?”

  “A wineshop at the edge of town? The soldier’s aunt, isn’t it? Yes. But she said—”

  The waiter was watching him now. “She didn’t send you to the priest?”

  “No.”

  “Ah,” the waiter said. His apron streamed suddenly. He fought it down and scoured the top of the table with it. “Americans, eh?”

  “Yes,” Don said. “Why wouldn’t she tell us where to go?”

  The waiter scoured the table. “That Cavalcanti. She’s not of this parish.”

  “Not?”

  “Not since three years. The padrone belongs to that one beyond the mountain.” He named a village which we had passed in the forenoon.

  “I see,” Don said. “They aren’t natives.”

  “Oh, they were born here. Until three years ago they belonged to this parish.”

  “But three years ago they changed.”

  “They changed.” He found another spot on the table. He removed it with the apron. Then he examined the apron. “There are changes and changes; some further than others.”

  “The padrona changed further than across the mountain, did she?”

  “The padrona belongs to no parish at all.” He looked at us. “Like me.”

  “Like you?”

  “Did you try to talk to her about the church?” He watched Don. “Stop there tomorrow and mention the church to her.”

  “And that happened three years ago,” Don said. “That was a year of changes for them.”

  “You said it. The nephew to the army, the padrone across the mountain, the padrona … All in one week, too. Stop there tomorrow and ask her.”

  “What do they think here about all these changes?”

  “What changes?”

  “These recent changes.”

  “How recent?” He looked at Don. “There’s no law against changes.”

  “No. Not when they’re done like the law says. Sometimes the law has a look, just to see if they were changed right. Isn’t that so?”

  The waiter had assumed an attitude of sloven negligence, save his eyes, his long face. It was too big for him, his face was. “How did you know he was a policeman?”

  “Policeman?”

  “You said soldier; I knew you meant policeman and just didn’t speak the language good. But you’ll pick it up with practice.” He looked at Don. “So you made him too, did you? Came in here this afternoon; said he was a shoe-drummer. But I made him.”

  “Here already,” Don said. “I wonder why he didn’t stop the … before they …”

  “How do you know he’s a policeman?” I said.

  The waiter looked at me. “I don’t care whether he is or not, buddy. Which had you rather do? think a man is a cop and find he’s not, or think he’s not a cop, and find he is?”

  “You’re right,” Don said. “So that’s what they say here.”

  “They say plenty. Always have and always will. Like any other town.”

  “What do you say?” Don said.

  “I don’t say. You don’t either.”

  “No.”

  “It’s no skin off of my back. If they want to drink, I serve them; if they want to talk, I listen. That keeps me as busy as I want to be all day.”

  “You’re right,” Don said. “It didn’t happen to you.”

  The waiter looked up the street; it was almost full dark. He appeared not to have heard. “Who sent for the cop, I wonder?” Don said.

  “When a man’s got jack, he’ll find plenty of folks to help him make trouble for folks even after he’s dead,” the waiter said. Then he looked at us. “I?” he said. He leaned; he slapped his chest lightly. He looked quickly at the other table, then he leaned down and hissed: “I am atheist, like in America,” and stood back and looked at us. “In America, all are atheists. We know.” He stood there in his dirty apron, with his long, weary, dissolute face while we rose in turn and shook hands with him gravely, the five young men turning to look. He flipped his other hand at us, low against his flank. “Rest, rest,” he hissed. He looked over his shoulder at the young men. “Sit down,” he whispered. He jerked his head toward the doorway behind us, where the padrona sat behind the bar. “I’ve got to eat, see?” He scuttled away and returned with two more brandies, carrying them with his former sloven, precarious skill, as if he had passed no word with us save to take the order. “It’s on me,” he said. “Put it down.”

  “Now, what?” Don said. The music had ceased; from across the street we watched the fiddler, fiddle under arm, standing before the table where the young men sat, his other hand and the clutched hat gesticulant. The young woman was already going up the street, the child riding her hip again, its head nodding to a somnolent rhythm, like a man on an elephant. “Now, what?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “No.”

  “There’s no detective here. He never saw one. He wouldn’t know a detective. There aren’t any detectives in Italy: can you imagine an official Italian in plain clothes for a uniform?”

  “No.”

  “She’ll show us where the bed is, and in the morning early—”

  “No. You can, if you want to. But I’m not.”

  He looked at me. Then he swung his pack onto his shoulder. “Good night. See you in the morning. At the café yonder.”

  “All right.” He did not look back. Then he turned the corner. I stood in the wind. Anyway, I had the coat. It was a shooting coat of Harris tweed; we had paid eleven guineas for it, wearing it day about while the other wore the sweater. In the Tyrol last summer Don held us up three days while he was trying to make the girl who sold beer at the inn. He wore the coat for three successive days, swapping me a week, to be paid on demand. On the third day the girl’s sweetheart came back. He was as big as a silo, with a green feather in his hat. We watched him pick her over the bar with one hand. I believe she could have done Don the same way: all yellow and pink and white she was, like a big orchard. Or like looking out across a snowfield in the early sunlight. She could have done it at almost any hour for three days too, by just reaching out her hand. Don gained four pounds while we were there.

  V

  THEN I CAME into the full sweep of the wind. The houses were all dark, yet there was still a little light low on the ground, as though the wind held it there flattened to the earth and it had been unable to rise and escape. The walls ceased at the beginning of the bridge; the river looked like steel. I thought I had already come into the full sweep of the wind, but I hadn’t. The bridge was of stone, balustrades and roadway and all, and I squatted beneath the lee of the weather rail, I could hear the wind above and beneath, coming down the river in a long sweeping hum, like through wi
res. I squatted there, waiting. It wasn’t very long.

  He didn’t see me at first, until I rose. “Did you think to have the flask filled?” he said.

  “I forgot. I intended to. Damn the luck. Let’s go back—”

  “I got a bottle. Which way now?”

  “I don’t care. Out of the wind. I don’t care.” We crossed the bridge. Our feet made no sound on the stones, because the wind blew it away. It flattened the water, scoured it; it looked just like steel. It had a sheen, holding light like the land between it and the wind, reflecting enough to see by. But it swept all sound away before it was made almost, so that when we reached the other side and entered the cut where the road began to mount, it was several moments before we could hear anything except our ears; then we heard. It was a smothered whimpering sound that seemed to come out of the air overhead. We stopped. “It’s a child,” Don said “A baby.”

  “No: an animal. An animal of some sort.” We looked at one another in the pale darkness, listening.

  “It’s up there, anyway,” Don said. We climbed up out of the cut. There was a low stone wall enclosing a field, the field a little luminous yet, dissolving into the darkness. Just this side of the darkness, about a hundred yards away, a copse stood black, blobbed shapeless on the gloom. The wind rushed up across the field and we leaned on the wall, listening into it, looking at the copse. But the sound was nearer than that, and after a moment we saw the priest. He was lying on his face just inside the wall, his robes over his head, the black blur of his gown moving faintly and steadily, either because of the wind or because he was moving under them. And whatever the sound meant that he was making, it was not meant to be listened to, for his voice ceased when we made a noise. But he didn’t look up, and the faint shuddering of his gown didn’t stop. Shuddering, writhing, twisting from side to side—something. Then Don touched me. We went on beside the wall. “Get down easier here,” he said quietly. The pale road rose gradually beneath us as the hill flattened. The copse was a black blob. “Only I didn’t see the bicycle.”