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 Grandfather 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
