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By Root 1351 0

who was, on the contrary, the Omnivisible pig, hailed savior of Italy, omnipresent in his tickling, in every kind of tickling: impotent as he was to achieve anything whatsoever, and even less his verbose braggings. There dripped azure pearls, tears of aloe, of terebene and vodka: the head thrown back, the hair lost in the night, with the two fingers, thumb and index, each with a yellow topaz, raising her skirt, in front, revealing to one and all that she was wearing underwear. She was wearing it, the sainted woman: yes, yes, she was. The wild rape had taken that path, which was the path of duty, for him and for his scenting scariness, climbing up her thighs now like ivy, fat and trembling in his terror, making her laugh and laugh in silly cascades, raving at his tickling: there: they were made of cardboard and plaster, her underpants, that time. Because once, in life, they had put a plaster cast on the trap.

The sergeant sped on, with a dry crackling, in the direction of I Due Santi, with the private grabbing his waist, blinking his eyelids at the oncoming wind, bothered by the dust. Disappointment wakened him abruptly. The time in which we would say that dreams extend has, instead, the diaphragming rapidity of a Leica's click, is measured in lightning segments of time, by fractions of the fourth degree on the orbital time of the earth, commonly known as solar time, the time of Caesar and of Gregory. And lo, now, beyond the flotilla of clouds that was skirting the rocks of the east, the opal became rose, the rose thickened and was stratified in carmine: the lividness everywhere, to the north, of broken day: then, at last, from the ridge, the splendid eyelash: a dot of fire, in a peak of the ridge of the Ernici or the Simbruni the unbearable pupil: the straight, arrowing gaze of the handsome Apollo, the spotlight. The gray latitudes of Latium were clarified, made plastic, emerging, purple-clad, almost like crumbling milestones of time, fragments of towers without names.

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When the bam-bam-bam died out at I Due Santi, in a brief skid of the wheels, which the brakes quickly hindered, then blocked, the private found himself on the ground standing, as if he had fallen there: a mountain bear: stretching, from right to left, the lower edge of the olive-drab tunic, which was revealed to be an extremely short garment, over the rotund opulences of his anthropological type. To the right of the Appia, for those who went on in the direction of Albano, the door of opaque or colored panes to a little store, whose threshold of gray and worn peperino, on the outside, was at the level of the still damp asphalt. Opposite the door, to the left of the road that ascended straight and calm, between the mouths of the two connecting roads, one of which had brought them here from the barracks and the town, the low wall of a garden or a vineyard or something of the sort: above which there protruded, somewhat disheveled in the muggy dripping of the morning, the tops of some dried reeds. The wall was broken by a tall shrine, with two eaves and curlicues of pale stucco on the front. Two tumblers, and in them some primulas and periwinkles, consecrated to devotional use, flowered and colored the stone of that kind of window's sill: from which the Divinity, a bit stunned in the head, leaned out as if from a pulvinar over the bustle of the Appia. Framed by the jambs and the slightly cockeyed arch, the old painting, its color quite faded and chalky, demanded all one's attention: the Fara Filiorum Petri{53} gazed at it, though stupefied by sleep and dazed by the novelty of this excursion. Two figures, surely saints—he argued from the data: that is, dressed in clothes that weren't the pants-and-jacket of ordinary men, and their pates behaloed: of which the one, without beard, smaller, was dark and bald: the other, hard and boney, with a white blob on his chin, like a spoonful of lime, and thick hair halfway down his forehead, white, or once white, inside the halo's yellow circle. Those two little short cloaks, bunched like a bandoleer on the