“No. He wasn’t moving fast enough when he passed us up yonder, for it to have been her.” Then the woman spoke: “It is so, signori. Rest yourselves.” She went back into the house. We slipped our packs and sat down. We looked at the bicycle.
“Cavalry,” Don said. “Wonder why he came the back way.”
“All right,” I said.
“All right what?”
“All right. Wonder.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Sure. That’s a joke. It’s because we are old. We lie in the draft. That’s a joke too.”
“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?”
