"You might say, she was in love with him, with Diomede, that ugly old hag." Fumi looked Ines in the face again, dropping his jaw, his tongue hanging, as if he were in a spell. "And he used to listen to her secrets, then. And sometimes she even took him down to the cellar with her, so she could talk to him more in private, like. I bet she had something important to tell him all right, the shameless thing! at her age! The girls. . kept telling me I was a dope. I used to get nervous! But if you don't have the tin, you can't eat. No, I couldn't make ends meet, not at home, with that no-good dad of mine. Even the jailhouse won't keep him. So I had to swallow it, like it or not." Zamira and Diomede disappeared down the little stairway, one after the other. As to the motives of all that mysterious parleying, "nobody knows. I don't know."
"Come on, out with it. What's all the fuss about?" Ingravallo said, hard. "Stop that sobbing!" The girl under questioning, poor creature, admitted, then denied, then doubted, then supposed that the subject must have been— and she felt there was great probability of her hitting the nail on the head — a string of suggestions, or of advice "about how to make us girls fall for him, without him falling for any of us." A code, an etiquette of canny love: an initiation to controlled, bookkept gallantry, if not even to profitable gallantry. And if this were so, it meant profitable for both, "for him and for her": her, Zamira. Pestalozzi, at times, smiled, shrugged slightly, as if to say: "I realized all this long ago: only naturaclass="underline" of course."
The officials, in view of the hour, decided to understand that Diomede, the fancy-man, must act — was he charged by Zamira to do so? — as a clay pigeon, or like the decoy owl on a stick, for the beauties. The beauties, the poor Venuses of the countryside: those robust, solid girls, whose every cheap garment is to dream, in the dryness and in the unplacated light of the day, amid the brambles and the stubble, in the August sun. "Every cheap dress," Fumi thought: "grace granted by the mystery." And it was, he thought, the gilded, the vaporous mystery of the city. Clothes, ornaments, smells — from a bottle… A golden lamina, giving off such light in the night, like a symbol, like a pass to an Orphic rite: to enter there where it is celebrated, at last, the rite of living. An emotion unknown which can be known without initiation, but foretold and dreamed of (with perfumes of garlic on the breath) by the heart, at evening. A mute "thou livest! Thou shalt live!" after rapid forkfuls of fodder: from the kindled clouds of the evening, from the warm horizon's promise.
"The wicked mystery of this world," thought Ingravallo, instead. He already hated, in his heart, that character, blond though he was: and the familiar clenching of teeth, the clamping of jaws, accompanied the appearance and the not-immediate disappearance of the image. It was, in his skull of diorite, an abominable image. A filthy, a wretched thing, that braggart, that gigolo! "Ah," he brooded, "Diomede then must have acted as the persuader, the initiator: for the sacred rites of the abracadabra: the beater: the pointer, pointing out the quails and the partridge, on the hilclass="underline" a young terrier, flushing the hens from the bog." At least that was how everyone there understood it, in the great room where you could see their breath under the pears of light, drawn into a circle around the palpitation of a partridge, between the big cops and their attendants: Doctor Fumi, Ingravallo, Sergeant Di Pietrantonio, Pompeo, and Paolillo, known also as Paolino… Pestalozzi, "the cyclist." Ines did not speak out explicitly, but it seemed to them that they could nevertheless infer from her highly appreciated tale of the descent into the cave (of the enterprising blond with the more-than-Cumaean{48} sibyl), from the many though hesitant and repentant "I don't know's, I couldn't say's," it seemed to them that they could actually write in the report that Diomede Lanciani had bestowed his violent comfort (this, the girl allowed them to deduce always, was the nature of comfort, from him), also on the mature hostess-seamstress and and dyeress, cleaner of garments both military and civilian.
Yes, bestowed his comfort: despite Venus the Snooty and all the swarm of her powdered Cupids. "That old, toothless ex-cow!" thought Pestalozzi, in his sylloge, rather northern in accent, to tell the truth. It was evident by now: the blond had given repeated proof of his wisdom and valor, to the old woman: even though when it came to the obviousness, the enticements and the itineraries, Pestalozzi opined, modifying, forever known and traveled through the ages, this wisdom had proved superfluous, and the valor more necessary than ever. A valor heedless to all repulses by adverse circumstances. He had granted her the best, or the worst, of his own spirit of initiative. Yes, it was clear, now, the spirit of initiative… he had boldly insufflated it, into the sorceress: perhaps, in fact certainly, after suitable remuneration. "Because he didn't have any cash before," Ines blurted, "and then he had some."
Corporal Pestalozzi seemed indeed to remember, without difficulty, the tacit existence of Diomede: whom he had met at the wine counter of I Due Santi. He frowned. It seemed to him, at a certain moment, that he would recognize him. What? Can it be? Yes. But that very day? The silent and unexpected appearance of the youth from the stairs: a young man of singular attractiveness, to be sure, blond as an archangel, but without sword: returning from the incursion into the Abyss. The Abyss, that time, must have received the blow. A blow that deserved praise. He had in his face, a steady and pale face with slightly prominent cheekbones, he had in his clear and steadily blue gaze that sort of insolent, almost hysterical volition with which a painter, in the Marches, had studied (and taken pleasure) in perfecting the natural physiognomic notes of the winged celestial creatures: when he charged them with slightly awkward missions. Such volition, if it had to be described in words, would be graphicized in the well-known terms: "Everything has to go the right way, which before it is 'right' is my way, seeing as how I'm an archangel. And if anybody thinks different about it, I'll settle his hash right away: with this cudgel here."
Then and there, however, he hadn't seemed too convinced, exceptional creature though he was, finding himself face to face with a carabiniere corporaclass="underline" a figure that didn't suit his taste, so red and black: and which upsets everybody a little, under certain circumstances. But sly, he saw at once that the corporal had downed an orangeade: well, that was all right then.