Then the woman’s shoulder came between us and the priest. “There come times—” he said. He clattered at the dish. When the woman spoke to him in that shrill, rapid patois he thrust his chair back and for an instant we saw his driven eyes across her arm. “There come times—” he said, raising his voice.
Then she drowned the rest of it, getting completely between us and Don and I stopped looking and heard them leave the room. The steps ceased. Then we could hear only the wind.
“It was the burial service,” Don said. Don was a Catholic. “That grace was.”
“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Yes. It was the burial service. He got mixed up.”
“Sure,” I said. “That’s it. What do we do now?” Our packs lay in the corner. Two packs can look as human, as utterly human and spent, as two shoes. We were watching the door when the woman entered. But she wasn’t going to stop. She didn’t look at us.
“What shall we do now, signora?” Don said.
“Eat.” She did not stop. Then we could hear the wind again.
“Have some wine,” Don said. He raised the carafe, then he held it poised above my glass, and we listened. The voice was beyond the wall, maybe two walls, in a sustained rush of indistinguishable words. He was not talking to anyone there: you could tell that. In whatever place he was, he was alone: you could tell that. Or maybe it was the wind.
Maybe in any natural exaggerated situation — wind, rain, drouth — man is always alone. It went on for longer than a minute while Don held the carafe above my glass. Then he poured. We began to eat. The voice was muffled and sustained, like a machine might have been making it.
“If it were just summer,” I said.
“Have some wine.” He poured. We held our poised glasses. It sounded just like a machine. You could tell that he was alone. Anybody could have. “That’s the trouble,” Don said. “Because there’s not anybody there. Not anybody in the house.”
“The woman.”
“So are we.” He looked at me.
“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
