“Cento, duecento cinquanta—” she would mutter, staring down at the figures; and then she would get up to pace her small office, and then she would sit down again. She would think: “If only we could get our supplies, if only we could get our supplies!” There were moments now when she would have walked to Rome in order to fetch a tin of tomatoes. Then her thoughts would begin to spin round and round like the wheels in the macaroni factory; “My pasta—my wonderful pasta—” she would murmur, and her voice would be almost tremulous with sadness. “Who can I find who will make me my pasta, now that Francesco has gone?
III
After Christmas Fabio felt a little better, and so he thought less about God. Indeed, by the New Year he had almost recovered, and this was to the good, for the factory machines were crying out loudly for attention. Fabio, so his wife had discovered since the war, had a very cunning hand with machines; he could make fine adjustments with accuracy, oiling and coaxing the while.
“Sii buono, sii bravo; suvvia!” he would coax; and then, strange to say, the machines would run smoothly, as though they wished to pleased Fabio.
That January Fabio adjusted the machines, after which they gave much less trouble; but by March there was no one in the factory to run them, for the latest acquisition had thrown up his job, preferring to make munitions. Now indeed Teresa had her back against the wall, for she could not replace the man. There was plenty of good work going those days, and better wages than she paid to be earned. Then week by week the flour was growing worse, becoming more difficult to mix; she would gladly have taken on the factory herself but that she must needs be always in the cash desk; and as for Maddalena, she was wanted in the shop, besides which she had never learnt how to make pasta. Yes, but old Fabio had—he might try to deny it, but Teresa knew that he lied. As a lad he had worked in a macaroni factory, he had told her so many times in the past, it was therefore quite useless to lie. And, moreover, it was being a deserter, a traitor to the Casa Boselli in its need.
“It is you who must make the pasta,” she told him, “it is you who must run the machines, it is you who must help me to save our business. Ma che! You are old, but you are still a man, and you know how the pasta should be made.”
“No, no,” he whimpered, “I do not know, Teresa. If I once knew, then I have forgotten—and my arms have grown weak for the kneading of flour, and my back is weak too from those horrible pains. As God is my witness I cannot do it! I am old—very old, Teresa.”
“Yes, and I too am old,” she answered harshly, “but I do not whine like a cur. I say: ‘No, I am not yet utterly defeated, and while I have breath I fight.’ ”
“But my back, my miserable back—” he pleaded, peering at her face with dim eyes.
“A little work will limber your back; a little work hurts no man,” said Teresa.
And knowing that further resistance was useless, Fabio muttered “Si, si.”
So all through that war-racked, agonizing spring Fabio tried to make pasta; tried to lift and carry and knead and roll the strange-colored flour, till his aged arms were corded with hard, blue veins. It was pitiable how little he made, considering his long hours of toil—not enough to throw to a coop of chickens, according to Teresa—but Fabio worked on in an anguish of spirit; dumb, too, because when a man had grown old what was the use of complaining? The sweat would go pouring down both his cheeks and drip into the dough unperceived; and sometimes there would come a queer singing in his ears, and long, floating black things in front of his eyes, so that he must needs stop and take off his glasses, in order to brush away those black things. But the black things would remain, and now in addition some flour would have got into his eye; and when this happened he would go to Maddalena, who would make him wet his handkerchief with the tip of his tongue, after which she would wipe out the flour.
“Poverino!” she would think as he turned to leave her. “Poverino! He grows very feeble. It is cruel to make him do such heavy work—but then Teresa is cruel.”
Yet in spite of herself she was forced to admire this woman of steel and iron, this gallant old pilot who clung to the wheel while the storm increased in fury; this woman who did not spare Fabio, it was true, but who did not spare herself either. When Maddalena wrote to Gian-Luca these days, she wrote with admiration of Teresa; but she did not tell him what she herself suspected, namely, that the Casa Boselli must go under in spite of those hands on the wheel. Not for all the world, much less for Teresa, would she have worried her man; nor would she have touched one penny of his savings for fifty Casa Bosellis. Now Maddalena also had her back to the wall, but she was fighting for Gian-Luca. He had little enough cause to be grateful, she felt, to this woman who would not love him. He had worked ungrudgingly all his young life, and what he had earned he should keep. Yes, he should keep it, though the Casa Boselli were split to bits on the rocks. For though neither Teresa nor
