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.
The brief caravan of the tympanic importuning, rail-roadward, having passed, and almost extinguished the mad animality in calamitous growls and snarls, teeth clenched in rage: I'll show you, I will, Pestalozzi also forgot the old woman: behind or within whose empty and badly hung skirt, tatters with appendices of threads, he had seemed to hear some devilment grumbling, or some toad gargling. There was no evil spell, as at the sorceress's shop, but perhaps jactura: preterintentional. Yes. And he interpellated the girl directly. "Are you Mattonari Camilla?" He recognized her as a seamstress of I Due Santi, but hadn't known her name: the least elect, the least "friendly." He drew from his pocket, twice folded over, and slowly unfolded with official decorum, the sheet: in legalitarian justification of his question: the list of topazes already displayed in the shop. "Yes," she said. She was a medium-sized dumpy girl with pale gray skin that looked like greasy paper: a flat, rather potato-like face, little eyes, tan, drowned in the redundance of suet. "Do you recognize this?" and he put the ring under her nose.
"How should I know? Why should I recognize it?" she shrugged.
"Your cousin Mattonari Lavinia states . . . that she was lent it by you."
"No, no, she's a big liar. I don't have anything to do with it."
"That she picked it out," he improvised, "from the others that you have."
"That liar! The nerve! She probably got it from her boy friend. I've never had a ring like this in my life . .."
"Like this! You mean, however, that you have others, or