Oh! the clean thread of time, of the Alban time and her own, unwound from the distaff of her divining like truth from an oracle. Murky or serene, but all summoned to her foresight, the days and the events seemed to orbit around her, to rise and vanish in her. To her, then, from that so fearful expectation of the multitude it was only right to prick the long study of the believers, derive from every consultation her little lire, from every delay of the miracle an increment for the faith, from every most secret vapor the aurora borealis of an improbable summoned back to probability. Why yes, indeed, who would ever have thought that? Despite the gratitude and the scared respect by which she was generally surrounded — collective hope and religiosity, Orphic sense of mystery and of the transcendence in the great heart of the people — despite her diplomas and degrees, Oriental and Occidental, and after infinite seances, after all those abracadabras with the skull on her table, and the respected needlework of more than ten years, her girls around her, poor babies, mending or knitting or sewing on rows of buttons, why yes, that's right, who would ever have thought it? Don't do good if you are not prepared to receive evil. Even Zamira. The base skepticism of the carabinieri persisted in surrounding her with the usual, unseemly suspicion through which they. . many times, succeed in ruining the lives of seers, embittering the souls of card-readers: and even of the most respectable seamstresses. And that is: they thought, indeed they were sure, that she was an ex-whore (and no one could shake them from this opinion), widow, from year to year, of about fifteen former reserve captains in retirement: whose traces, little by little, from one autumn to the next, had become evanescent, from Marino and Ariccia. Having given herself, as the years passed and her incisors with them, to an ever more sly and bold madamship, with its epicenter, in fact, at I Due Santi, in a kind of cellar under the workshop-tavern: cellar or half-basement room that had light, perhaps even sunshine, from the garden. The garden — a few turnip greens, also disheveled: an occasional cabbage, its leaves stripped off by the sirocco, made wormy by Pieridae: with a dour hen, flapping there from time to time, checked by a string that was all gnarls, to lay eggs out of season — was at a level lower than the normal altitude of the road, the Via Appia. The cellar, or half-basement room, was equipped with a urinaclass="underline" and, more, with a cot: which however creaked at a mere nothing, the bastard, and had the tegument of a "counterpane" of faded green: damasked by undecipherable maculations which, in their authentic obscurity, had a baroque tendency: a full, pompous baroque of the first jet of imagination, though it was washed and dried in the garden, the coverlet: and it seemed to deny even hypo-thetically any belated, neoclassical restraint. Attached to the wall, to one side of the little bed, you could see a really sweet oleo: a nice bunch of naked girls, at their medical exam, and a doctor with a little black goatee, looking at them one by one, but dressed like an ancient Roman, without eyeglasses, and with sandals instead. He had stuck his thumb in the hole of a little board, and with the other fingers of the same hand was grabbing a bunch of brushes, to paint with iodine who knows what part of their skin, if he found some pimple on any of them. It opened, this little drawing room or examination room, through a door provided with latch and chain, into the sanctum or oracular receptacle, properly speaking. There bloomed the prophecies and the responses (after working hours) of the seamstreess-sibyclass="underline" when all the girls were upstairs, on the other hand, at that hour of sewing and clickety-clack, well, at that time, the magical apparatus was visited by some large rats, using all the caution due the situation. Rats half as long as your arm came tiptoeing in, sniffing, those sons of bitches! with mustaches on them! ready to scent a ghost's sheet two palms away in the dark, and the smell of cheese, at a mile, all the way from the house of the garbage man, who kept their whole family at full board. But they had to be content with a bare smell of that manna, unable to reach it in any other way than with their olfactory sense: they whiffed the Idea, an invisible Presence. The presence of good mountain pecorino, a whole cheese of the days before the Empire landed on us: yes, right on the neck. A trestle in the darkness. A cast-iron stove, A country fireplace: a kettle over it, hanging from a chain: and a fine pot, in one corner, in the midst of such rags! a kind of copper pot which, in a few years' time, would fall prey to the Immortal Fatherland, War-Bearing, shoulder to shoulder with the Twotone Bruder, at a mere sign from the Deuce, the adored Doo-chay: thief of saucepans and pots of all peoples: with the excuse of making war on England.
There was everything you could want. A place, in short, this workshop of Zamira's whose like you would never find, still less its better, for distilling a drop, a single and splendid drop of the eternally prohibited or eternally unlikely Probability. Jerseys to be dyed, trousers to be mended: the moths devour the owclass="underline" but some of it was always left, the eyes of the owl live, knowing topazes motionless in the night, in time, surviving the ruins of time. A point of contact of the vital compossibilities: magic, knitting, tailoring, trousering, wine from the Castelli and even from Bitonto (a keg, with a tap: two demijohns, rubber siphons), cheese and beans in April, the grandson of the mustachioed chief rat, rummaging inside the skull, in the cellar, that is to say in the "dyeing room"! in the cranium, where he had entered and where he would come out by an eye, an empty socket, naturally. Packs of cards on the table, the astrologicheral tarot cards: hourglass, cabala of lottery and pentacle: a stuffed owl, with a pair of eyes on him! And pecorino, in a big cupboard, and flasks of oiclass="underline" ah. . locked and barred so that not even a rat.. no, not even with Zamira! they had had it. They could die of frustration, poor darlings! Abracadabra puffety-poo.