Meanwhile there approached, really, the puff-puff at full tilt: its headlights aglow even in this daytime hour against the darkness of each new tunneclass="underline" the only train of the morning, in that direction. It was coming up from Ciampino, all black, with the self-importance of a nasty fireman, sending up into the heavens cannonades of brown smoke from its spout and then, all of a sudden, white steam, certain comical foof-foofs which seemed so many shots inspiring one to say, "but what's come over you? What have they done to you?" and below, from a pair of cylindrical bags, one here, one there, as if it had a mustache on the ground floor. Whirled and somersaulted, gleaming and greasy, the connecting rod and, like a maddened knife grinder's, the crank, with an odor of burnt oil, in the tragic ascent of the grade constructed by Engineer Negroni. It was like a man who plants himself in front of you, wants to call you a bastard to your face, and unable to run because of gout, he spurts out his anger at you from his nose, and at the same time, from his feet. Beyond the house then, on the gray path flanking the flight of the gravel, two or three highly frightened and yet— more insolito—unhurried hens prepared to follow the track in accelerated fluttering: to cross it then, in flight, at the most opportune moment, with the cowcatcher upon them, and above the cowcatcher, the headlights, with that suicide premediation that distinguishes their species. The Maremmano hound or spinone hurled himself forward: one could believe he wanted to choke or self-guillotine himself with his collar, a slender ring of iron where his hair stood up, in wrath: and, the chain taut, he began to yelp and bark again in reiterated, frenetic explosions: as if he declaimed impetuous verses of Foscolo without understanding their sense, nor even their nonsense, to a public overcome with sleepiness; meaning to reawaken tbem all and to summon them to repentance and vigilance, nor to forgive sleepiness to the least of them. The demoniac idiot, in doing this, became lost between his sparse, distorted incisors and the ferocity of his canines and omitted from his lips, in whitish ribbons at each new jerk of his head, a pulpy drool like bechameclass="underline" in the arsis of such dewy rage, raising bloodshot bestial eyes to heaven, as if to invoke the approval of the supernal Beasts, the gods of his race, and to propitiate their chief divinity, and to encourage their consent to new and more foolish hendecasyllables. That which, cretin that he was, he considered his inderogatable duty amid the shoes and the puttees of the carabinieri. Those bilious petards of his rancor were lacerating his accursed gullet, of which— at moments — to the soldiers' hesitation, he exposed the cavernous flush, like the gaping jaws of helclass="underline" and seeing the fowl running before the streaming black monster, his vehemence was redoubled to the point of paroxysm and seemed, at a certain point, resolved to follow and even to compete with the hysterical biddies: but solidity of chain and charity of cord, or indeed string, restrained him, though not without effort. For which the hothead went on bobbing, without idea and with no gain for himself or for others, at every explosion from his throat: cerberus on leave upon earth and on the hills, where he had planted himself to work, guzzling their unmerited light, the gentle air of their open sky:
coeli jucundum lumen et auras. The puff-puff was just about ready to pass. The wind which rose from the swamps seemed tired, its wing drooped in the daylight: but a whirr, again, of a wren, from a bush up to the rusty rainspout, or the broken flight, higher, and the conjugal cries, in reply, of two nestless jays. The girl with the potato face brushed the two characters aside, as if they were cards with a low face-value, and in a gesture of intolerance like a maiden rudely accosted, twisting her head in a grimace, she advanced with her instrument, to the platform: where, having grasped the implement with a steady hand and in a posture of attention, she planted it against her belly, at precisely forty-five degrees. That rolling pin with green skin now blossomed from her person, and it was, from its rough trunk, a sprout of exceptional vigor, and to hell with who might or might not see it: it was a standard not hers. The engine driver's blackened face was already thrust from his cab, to note the color of that bud. A stage Moor, an Othello with a black skier's cap. The puff-puff was the mixed train: the only one that came by in the morning: pieced together with three freight cars, of various age and structure, and two passenger cars: where the faces, the mops, and the shining eyes and mouths of the more impudent and the happier, or of some dope with more prestige than usual, gleamed at or hung from the windows, snickering. Or they leaned out, some of them, with half their chest and arms, in the gallant farewell of a waving hand. They mouthed with shining, lascivious mouths fugitive madrigals to the girclass="underline" their words were indistinct, but certainly filth: they were a swarm of soldiers discharged at that time, in that era, but even in another era, the same would have occurred. "He has his stick straight!" Cocullo was able to reconstruct, after a moment, in the rattling of the train that was already passing, and he clenched his teeth, paling with contempt and reddening higher up, between cheeks and chin. And they would have added another refrain for the carabinieri: if the train, which seemed utterly out of breath, hadn't gone so slowly. It was heard now creaking in the brake block and grating in its undergreased threadings, in descent: the Negroni grade, number 71, was followed, after the straight stretch of the station, by the counterslope of grade number 73, still Negroni's work: which had the fame of offering itself like a moorish odalisque filled with participating consents to the untangled enthusiasm of the mechanism whereby the puff-puff, freed from suffering and now silent in whistle and piston, would abandon itself, freewheeling, to the Mussoline glory of a first-rate derailing with consequent disabling of its own features and others', if it had not provided for the contrary, in fact, with its brakes. The air had become somnolent and seemed to stagnate over the ground. The little train was disappearing, made smaller, towards tall caravans of clouds: among the reminiscent shadows, fragments, crumbling walls, of a history not its own. The plumes of smoke which it had left behind after the bridge (of Divine Love) and before reaching the station, at the altitude, barely, of a swallow's flight, had been dispersed a bit from their track and hung now, white and useless, on the damp green of the unploughed fields. The hens, as they did every day, had survived the drama: for years, now, the ex-pupils of Melpomene had arranged in an algolagniac, theatrified ritual, in a scene "for Nordic tourists" the most foreseeable and preventative breaches of their first and youthful error of clucking and squawking for a mere nothing in an hebephrenic crescendo: and they had adapted themselves, instead, in a carefully chosen poetics, to silence and to the vagotonic pallors of the mystes. Their orphic initiation, little by little, had become perfected to mastery: it had reached the climax of a pictorial wisdom, forgetting the acoustic bravuras of puberty. A half-extinguished or dozing and nevertheless always available and recovered voluptuousness reawakened them every day, with the toiling up of the train and with the whistle, to the familiar fiction: to the artificial excitement of the victim whom no one threatens, to the precipitous fluttering and dash along the track and the breach, to the attempt at flight (will Delagrange fly?),{65} to the simulated suicide with the headlights upon them and the concomitant dispensing of a couple of bonbons, puff-puff passing. Though feigned was the orgiastic movement, the little gift could not be feigned: thus, as in the theater, feigned passions release kisses that are not pretense and the cuckolds of the stage seem to be, a majority of times, cuckolds in fact. Every day, every morning. Then, no sooner had the locomotory entity completed its apparition, released its huffs, then, having unwound the reel of their obligatory fright, they went on scratching about as if nothing had happened: and as if they were uprooting a weed, with a plunge and a prompt recovery of the head, the neck, pecking from the earth the rare worms.