"And your cousin? Where is your cousin? Take me to her. Come on." He seemed seized, really, by the mania to catch somebody, not to go back, empty-handed, to the barracks. A ring — and what a ring! — he had. All right. But now a suspect was needed, an accomplice, male or female, if not the guilty party in person.
"But I. ." the girl whimpered again, forgetting the umbrella where she had placed it.
"Come on, that's enough. Show me where she is": and he opened the door, inviting her, with the other hand, to make use of both the step and the exit. Lavinia went outside first.
"At the railroad crossing," Zamira then hissed into his ear. But the private also heard her. Still, under her malevolent forehead, the pernicious light of her gaze was not spent. "She's the niece of the signal-keeper: at the crossing. That's where she lives."
"Which crossing?"
"The road to Castel de Leva, to the bridge; then to the left, the crossing at Casal Bruciato": she seemed a deaf-mute, explaining herself with her fingers, with the aphonous movement of her lips. She didn't want Lavinia to hear her, from the road. Farafilio stumbled over the step: "Careful!" she said, maternally: and repeated: "On the road to Divino Amore. Almost to the bridge. Then to the left."
And with that little thrust, with that viaticum, she succeeded in getting off the two comrades, with their four great boots. They would have plenty of dust to swallow! Old Nick had heard the boiling of her prayers, had graciously listened to her reiterated invocations and her pleas.
"Take care of the machine!" the corporal shouted to her again, from outside: as her gaze sharpened in meanness: "at the bridge of Divino Amore!" she shouted, as if to strike again at the rear guard of the vanquished. What fireworks exploded in their wake, what ejaculations, while the glass door was still open behind the departing men, history, past-mistress of life, has not troubled to record.
IX
THE Divino Amore bridge! Easier said than done! a mile and a half, and even more: a good forty minutes' walking: and with the girl, and with the shoes she was wearing. An apparition of the sun, a disk, an ephemeral or faint sphere, with fleeting veils of vapor on its face, so that it looked like the yoke of an egg seen through the white: tepid, at times, or soft; then, in some sudden yawn of the day, between one cloud and the following, reawakened, restored and randy, astride that gallop of the sirocco: flight and journey, from the Pontus, of all the cloud bank, huddled, slapping its flank against the spikes of the Apennine. The road was only one, luckily, except for the first part, however: the highway, the Appia, then at a right angle, the local road, for Falcognana. Taking the opportunity of that angle, a path went off diagonally into the countryside: too muddy an itinerary still, through the fallow fields that were of a damp, new green, water-soaked: and, here and there, as if sugared by the frost. If she came up this way, Camilla Mattonari, so Lavinia said, they were sure to run into her, walking along the asphalt, or at least on the dry part, to be precise, of the road from Falcognana. A buggy, which overtook them after they had turned in that direction, allowed the corporal to make Lavinia climb in, and the private after her. When the happy couple had been seen aboard, he turned back towards the little tavern at the corner, to ask somebody for the loan of a bike: otherwise, he would go back up to Zamira's, to recover his steed. The Farafilio, serious and round of face as of bottom, didn't seem wholly displeased by his superior's inspiration, which spared him the walk, however hygienic it may have been, and granted him the tepid contiguity of the girl's thigh, though, helasl, keine Rose ohne Dornen, the thrill was shared with the driver on the other side, that is, the side of her other thigh. Despite the odor, promptly perceived and appreciated, of feminine vitality, and the disturbing co-seating in the vehicle, of such a "supple" and "nice" young lady, the stern soldier, be it said to his praise, was obdurate, yes, obdurate in being, or at least seeming, the most legally and militarily agnostic of carabinieri of the whole legion, in that wakening March of the Castelli. The descent was slow, among the new plantations of some vines (still barren) which broke the meadows. They reached a crossroads, with the horse, already in sight of the bridge known as the Divino Amore bridge, with which the above-praised local road passes over the Velletri line of the railway. Divine Amore proper, a little church of ancient date, here and there replastered, and two hovels leased to the sun by the Latium of the guardian Princes Torlonia, and Castel di Leva, which flanks and dominates them, and looks around through the empty eyes of the Torraccio tower, and girds or girded them with a wall, are about three miles from the bridge. There, at the crossroads, Pestalozzi was able to overtake, on a bicycle, the excursion companions he had sent on ahead, displaying on his outstretched arm his chevrons which seemed a patent, a driving license exceptionally granted him, for such an unfluent vehicle. The bike was a music box, with a creak-creak in its hubs. It was like a machine with broken teeth for eating torrone: but there was not much in the way of torrone around those parts! The driver went ah to the horse, to hold him back a little and, in the meanwhile, leaning to the right, he was wringing the brake handle, as more and more, on the rims, the two brake blocks slid until they creaked. The horse, going downhill, disputed as best he could, then finally having sustained with his scrawny rump the successive jerks of the harness, when they arrived, one after the other, on his two buttocks, like the slaps of the sea against the innocence of the beach; he aimed definitively at the solid part of the road, without raising again in a trot, now spent, his forelegs; he skidded a little on all fours: and stopped, turning his head only slightly at the tug of the reins, as if to say: "I'd like to see you pulling a buggy! you have to try to stop me now, just when we're going so well." Plunged forward the three heads of the travelers, the brimming jiggling teats, the desirable throat and the face and slightly hysterical pallor of Lavinia as if in an attack of vomiting: as happens to everything that is not properly packaged, crated and nailed into a system: and travels, however, on its own, as if forward at random. Pestalozzi got off the bicycle. From the Falcognana road, which crosses, with the Divinio Amore bridge, the half-trench of the railroad a few hundred yards further down, at that point the road for Casal Bruciato broke off: which descends, even today, with a broad curve, to cross the same train track on the same level. On the roof of the yellow signal-man's house there weighed, uncertain and broken in parts, a smoke, though they could not see if it had come from a chimney: it was dispelled, as if with effort, in March: to depict, in that rising search of its own nonbeing, the poverty that had generated it: or to dissolve in the rustic solitude that pang of daily need that those who feel it are wont to call hunger. The perennial, insisted name, the desperate diphthong of the horned owl had fallen silent in the night: had died with the dawn. From an unseen elm, now, perhaps from a Roman oak surviving the axe in the emptiness of the countryside, the intermittent appeal, the unreachable, imploring iambus of the cuckoo. In foretelling the new fronds to the earth it seemed to recall the eternal, lost seasons, to ache with spring.
Lavinia begged the corporal to leave her "outside," to wait. "Outside where?" There, or rather: "here. Otherwise they'll start thinking that I. . that I turned my own cousin in."
After some negotiation the corporal consented, reluctantly: and he added a word or two suitable to the occasion: cards on the table. He engaged the buggy for the return trip: set the bicycle against the bank, which at that point, beyond the dip in the road, marked the rise of the grassy land again: he charged the driver to guard it. Having arrived with the trusty Farafilioro, at milestone 20, they were received by the furious barking of a lousy mutt whose eyes they could barely see, but whose spare, canine teeth they saw with fear, he was so fanged and hairy, half-spinone, half-Maremmano hound{64} and half sonofabitch (this was Cocullo's ideogram), but fortunately, on a chain. An old woman appeared, contrary to all credible hypotheses, in that panorama of deconsecrated railway; she tried to calm him, to silence him, then came to the bar: which interrupted the road, to signify, if not quite the imminence, at least the expectation of an extraordinary phenomenon: that is, the black passage of the train, the puffing of steam above and below, marvelous fluid, which confers virtue and locomotory quality to freight, even in ascent, as well as to train 181, half-freight, half-passenger: which, in fact, already gasping, announced the slippery play of its crankings up up up pup pup pup from le Frattocchie, overwhelming the distant imploration of the cuckoo: and at signal kilometer 20, it would be equally victorious over the grade: a miracle of art, an unterminated four per cent incline, but all curves and countercurves, of the late nineteenth century. At the house, known to some as Casal Bruciato, it was awaited every day, once a day, with the algebraic certitude and the trepidation of spirit that, at the speculum of Arcetri or the Mount Palomar Observatory, every seventy-five years, attend the recurrence of Halley's comet. The old woman, decrepit though she was, must have understood at once that this unwanted olive drab-and-black visit. . looked for all the world as if it were aiming at her house! so she sewed up, without parting them again, the two bloodless rims of her lips, the two curly hairs embellishing here and there the jawing of her chin, and left to them, to the Brothers Grim, the initiative of paying their respects, to the older and higher in rank of the two. In the meanwhile, without giving any outward sign nevertheless, she made an effort to swallow the event, this, of the three arrivals, which she most feared and abhorred in the torment of her viscera: by hastily recommending herself in prayer to Sant'Antonio di Padova loving miracle-worker for all of us, and also, however, in another plea to the good offices (automatic in her former days) of the plexus haemorroidalis medii. She arrived, in fact, at the deliberate constriction of the more celebrated rectal rings, extenuated though they were by advanced age: not entirely inoperative, though more and more crumbling with the years, were the so-called Houston valves, chiefly the super-valve of Kohlrausch, nor the semilunars of Morgagni. The desperate attempt to block the ampulla, whose constricted extreme ahi ahi ahi already the olive drab-black-silver trauma was affecting, in concomitance with the shrill whistle ahi ahi of the arriving engine, achieved nothing more than the release of a few drops, rather phobic, plonk, on the platform of Casal Bruciato: free on board, yes, F.O.B. Casal Bruciato, though some may say and, however, write C.I.F. (cost insurance free) and some P.L.O.P. The providential lack, under the crotch of the old woman, of that pair of tubular correctives of nakedness which our most exquisite reporters today habitually call "intimate garments," allowed the event to fall out on to the pavement, unobserved by the Grims. Filing forward, one after the other, by the pedestrian passage to one side of the bar, the carabinieri advanced in silence on the platform with heavy, nailed footsteps to the door of the house: as if they were unaware of the woman, believing her engaged in the exercise of public duties and by now dealing with the train. But they were deceived: they encountered there the potato-white face and the resolute bursting forth of a girl who had taken up, from a bench, a kind of rolling pin for preparing pasta in the home, but wrapped in a red and green cloth: and at that moment more green than red.