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By Root 1380 0

tripe, one upon the other, like rolled-up rugs, gentle anatomies of skinned kid, red-white, the pointed tail, but ending in its tuft, to signify—beyond contradiction—its nobility: "I'll give it all to you for four lire," the vendor was saying, holding it up in midair: all, that is a half: and the white clumps of romaine, or curly salad greens, live chickens with the eyes peering from a single side, and who see, each one, a quarter of the world, live hens, still and huddled in their cages, black or Belgian or straw-ivory Paduans: yellow-green dried peppers, or red-green, which made your tongue sting just to look at them, and made saliva come into your mouth: and then walnuts, Sorrento walnuts, hazlenuts from Vignanello, and piles of chestnuts. Farewell, farewell, a long farewell. The women, the plump housewives: dark shawl, or grass-green, a safety pin, undone, ouch!, to prick the teat of the neighbor a moment: cosi fan tutte. Self-moving pudges, they ambulated with effort from one stand and from one umbrella to the next, from the celery to the dried figs; they turned, they rubbed their respective asses one against the other, groping to open a path, with brimming bags, they choked, gasped, fat carp in a pool trap where the water, little by little recedes, jammed, wrung, trapped for life with all their fat in the eddies of the great comestibles fair.

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Don Ciccio, in the meanwhile, had not been wasting time, either. Having got home at half-past midnight. "Monday March twenty-one, San Benedetto da Norcia," enunciated the calendar from its nail (year's end offering from the baker opposite) with the leaf of two days earlier which Sora Margherita had forgotten to rip off. A big drop of molten metal, the half-hour, from the clock of Santa Maria delle Neve. He went to bed, fell asleep, snored heavily, postponing all further deduction to the morning. When the angry trill broke loose, all of a sudden, in the silence of the sleeping house, bursting unexpected from that old turnip of an alarm clock self-moving on the marble (of the table) to announce the new headaches of the day, there, two knocks, discreet, from the landlady at the door, authenticated the furious admonition of the imbecile: despite the great longing that he had, in his head, to turn over and go on sleeping, they—clock and landlady's summons— dragged him to his feet at six. He slipped, hard-assed, and used to fall from the side of the bed, ker-plonk, like a peasant, on his heels. Stocky, and of sturdy legs, which appeared hairy from the knees down, from the straw-yellow nightshirt with little red parallel lines which bedecked him at night, he used also to repent ipso facto, even before he had appreciated it with his waking mind, that thud: which resounded on the plank floor, despite the wormy little rug, and announced his activist rising to the neurasthenic engineer on the floor below, by waking him with a start. Not even the north wind of the night, as he came home, nor, once in bed, the speedy breeze of dreams had been able to rumple the lambskin mop: black, pitchy, curly and compact: which re-resplendent in the new light, whatever Pestalozzi may have thought, did not require brilliantine. The knotty legs, the portion visible, emitted, indeed, arrowed perpendicular to the skin their hair, equally black, saturated with electricity: like lines of force of a Newtonian or Coulombian field. His eyes still closed, or almost, he slipped on his old slippers: which seemed to wait for him like two little animals crouched on the parquet: waiting for his feet to each his own. He stretched, looking like a guappo recovering consciousness, chain-yawned eight or nine times, until he had dislocated, or almost, his nevertheless mighty mandibles. He concluded each time with a o-am! which seemed definitive and yet wasn't, inasmuch as he began again, immediately afterwards. Tears dropped from his left eye, then his right, slowly slowly, squeezed one after the other by the consecutive yawns, like the two halves of a lemon successively used by the oyster vendor. He gave