Moscardino Read Online Free Page B

grandfather off his head. She wanted all the while to get well.
    Her heart beat so hard, her legs trembled, now and again she felt a wave of heat pass over her face.
    She wanted at all costs to get well.
    She got up too soon. It was mid-September, a month of nostalgia for Cleofe, busy time in the mountains, getting ready the logs for the chestnut drying, they would smoke early this year as it had hardly rained all the summer.
    The chestnuts were beginning to ripen in their burrs. The burrs had grown big, the nuts were full and meaty. They’ll be smoking ’em early this year.
    She stood by the window. Below was an arbor with ripe grapes hanging to the lattices. The arbor stripped of leaves with the wire braces, with the fronds and tendrils still branching, the dead branches bent with the weight of grape clusters, the shoots sticking out at the top with unopened butts.

    A September already cold, though fanned with scirocco, a few reddish clouds, rain’s sheeplets feeding in grassless meadow.
    Heaven calm, but unlit, a grey dampness pervading the house and a will to let the eyes close.
    My grandfather held her up by the balustrade, and she looked down into the courtyard or gazed at the light gallop of far clouds going mountainward.
    The square orange flowers that had given fragrance in springtime were now dark balls in the lighter leaves.
    In the tubs from Montelupo the small flowers were drowned, the water sloshing to the brim was tinted with the red cinnabar brick paint. My grandfather drew her from the balcony into his arms, put his palms against her shoulders, rubbed the backs of her hands, stroked down her arms, her flanks, her legs down to her feet, and lamented: Cleofe, you are too lovely, you are what is driving me mad, my despair, lifelong despair. Cleofe, I shall have no peace, I shall have no peace as long as you are alive . . . and I am alive. Cleofe, death is good. Death is good.
    Cleofe repeated: death, and turned her eyes away, and toward the child in its cradle; which, awakened by the noise, kicked and screamed. To die. My grandfather had a knife in his hands. Cleofe, I can’t kill you.
    He fell on the knife, slitting his belly.

    The first person to reach the door was “that woman,” who had kissed Grumpy by the well-curb.
    Then the doctors who put my grandpa in a straight waistcoat and sewed up his stomach.
    He was off his head and didn’t notice he was being carried away.
    When Sabina, the woman who had kissed Grumpy at the well-curb, came in and saw my grandfather with his stomach slit, twitching on the ground, she ran to call her padrone, Don Pietro, Pietro Galanti who lived next to us and whose house had two doors, one on the tiled street and the other giving onto the courtyard toward the well. The abbé Don Lorenzo walked behind Sabina bobbing along to catch up. He went up Don P.G.’s stairs while she was calling the priest, he fetched out the silver crucifix and the stole and the surplice and the box with the holy objects that was in the downstairs cupboard.
    It was not the first time he had scurried to death beds with Don Pietro Galanti and these were the things necessary on such occasions.
    Then he fixed Don Galanti’s tunic from behind and helped him to get on with the job as if it were perfectly ordinary and in no way alarming even if the slit stomach belonged to his brother.
    Don Lorenzo stood still before Cleofe, smiled, stared at her quite a while with his hands in the folds of his soutane, quite calmly. Now, at any rate the disemboweled was in the hands of all those doctors and
could no longer jump on him and tweak the hairs out of his tonsure as he had done in times past.
    If you want to see your brother before they take him away . . . He may die . . . up on that mountain near Lucca . . . tied up the way they have got him . . . all that way on a stretcher . . . Signora Pellegrina, I wouldn’t like my presentiment to come true . . . wouldn’t it be