• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1465 0

light, from a screened bulb, tinged at its top, in a stripe, a little below the surviving roughness of the cordon at the pinnacle. Six twenty-five by the clock in the tower: the same as his own, exactly. To accompany him he had summoned this private, who was already weighing down the rear part of the seat with his behind and was about to draw his feet into the boat, too, clasping his superior by the waist, with both hands, and awaiting the motor's first explosion. Pestalozzi with his right foot, pressed down: he reiterated the starter. The cylinder began at last to gurgle, the whole machine to tremble, to beat its wings. The sentry saluted, at attention: the threshold was passed. The turn did not occasion falls. But they weighed, the two of them, on the tires. The cobbles were slippery, a steep slope: a little skin of mire, in some places, made it even more dangerous. The mare with the two riders on her withers rolled down, under restraint, grumbling, it bore to the right, then to the left towards the gate of the town, between black peperino walls and shadows, beneath little square windows, armed with rusty iron bars to incarcerate the darkness. An occasional civic lamp swayed its greeting to the fleeting men, in that dark and stony poverty of the village: a bracket coming from the lichened walls, which sloped back, like the curtains of a fort: electric flower of the willing budgets, ultimate sob from the bowels of the vice-mayor for the ante-lucan solitude of a street from which the north wind precipitates, whistling, at night: or the sirocco slows there and dies, three nights later. They descended to the gate of the town.

Once past the arch, the road started spreading out towards the Appian: it went among olive groves barely silvered by the dawn and the prone skeletons of vines in the vineyards. Then it was thrown back, like a stole, over the damp shoulders of the hill. At the first curve the view also turned back.

Pestalozzi raised his head for a moment, cut the motor, put on the brake, stopped their course, with a certain caution: he paused for a couple of minutes, to cast the morning's horoscope.

It was dawn, even later. The peaks of the Algido, the Carseolani and the Velini unexpectedly present, gray. Sor-atte, sudden magic, like a fortress of lead, of ash. Beyond the passes of Sabina, through small openings, portholes that interrupted the line of the mountain's crest, the sky's revival manifested itself in the distance by thin stripes of purple and more remote and fiery dots and splendors of sulphur yellow, of vermilion: strange lacquers: a noble glow, as if from a crucible of the depths. The north wind of the day before had died away, and here, to alternate the auguries, the hot slavering on skin and face, the gratuitous and now subsiding breath of a sirocco's lashing. Further on, from behind Tivoli and Carsoli, flotillas of horizontal clouds, all curled with cirrus, with false ribbons of saffron, hurled themselves, one after the other, into battle, filed joyously towards their shredding: whither? where? who knows? but surely where their admiral ordered them, to get it in the neck, as ours orders us, all their little sails within the range of the winds. Labile, changing galleys, tacked at a high, unreal height, in that kind of overturned dream which is our perception, after waking at dawn, tacked along the ashen cliffs of the mountains of the Equi, the whitened nakedness of the Velino, the forewall of the Marsica. Their journey resumed, the driver obeyed the road, the machine addressed the curves, bending with the two men. The opposite half of the weather there, above the shore of Fiumicino and Ladispoli, was a brown-colored flock, shading into certain leaden bruises: gravied sheep pressed, compact, meshed in the ass by their dog, the wind, the one that turns the sky rainy. A roll of thunder, rummm, son-of-a-gun! had the nerve to raise its voice, too: on March the 23rd!

The sergeant pressed down with his foot, accelerating towards the fountain. From the right, where the plain was dense with dwellings and went