“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.
“Si. 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
