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By Root 1447 0

doesn't know from what guitar: to summon Lucianos and Maria Maddalenas to their classes, with their braids down. Where, in fact, a little later they ran, with a pack of dictionaries: and some were already out: and on foot, or on the tram, which meant they had a bit of money: alone, or in bunches, like so many little flights of sparrows, of little wrens: after drying their ears in haste, and perhaps even washing them a bit: yes, their ears: indispensable organ of all study. Dong, dong, dong, dong. The bell, the old woman on her swing, hurled out that bumblebee signal, from the pendulum, with all her heart, at every blow with full ass that she gave it, to be able to take the forward thrust. And gradually, it became more full-bodied every time, this admonition, emphasizing the air, magnifying the wave: until she, the grandmother, spun it out for you a bit en sourdine: to not stir too badly the little darlings, the Nanninas or the rumpled Romolettos: who from a nonentity of an alarm clock in angry trills would have got the scarlatina poor babies! A sweetness in her heart, to hear her, the old granny! That perorating cautiousness brought the evil closer by degrees, in a subdued modulation: no, not oil: the evil of reawakening to knowledge: to recognition and to reliving the truth of every day: which is that, immediately after the cold water, there is school waiting, and the teacher with his zeros in readiness. She, the grandmother of all, uncovered with her slow caress the little heads, the black curls of the boys, of the girls: she parted their eyelids, just barely, drawing from them, with the clean tip of the counterpane, the veil of the fugitive dreams. It took her a half hour to wax, very slowly, and another half hour to wane. She descended, little by little, into her calmed silence. Which was the silence of the offices and the tasks at their beginning, the chilblains on the penmanship. With that great portrait of Him hanging on the wall: a mug, who because he was born stupid, seems to want to take his revenge on all.

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A few curious faces, of two or three loafers with their hands in their pockets, and with three gaping mouths under the black questioning of their eyes, received and then surrounded, at Marino, the car "of the Roman police" when it honked twice, poh! poh! before the main gate of the fort. In the frame of a window, on high, behind a rusty grating, the face of a young man appeared, with two stars on his gray canvas collar, one here and one there. He vanished. A few minutes: and the gates opened. The willing and bumpy car, after some great pushing and reversing and turns forward, with several jolts and starts which one wouldn't have hoped for, even from her, finally drove through that arch of triumph, which it had devoured the countryside to gain. And it had been, the road to the fort, a narrow, climbing road, all compact cobbles, between spurred walls which retained the shadow patched with lichens, on the old peperino, of strange pools and cockades, blue-green, yellow. The cobbles slippery. A slab at the corner: Via Massimo d'Azeglio. Ingravallo got out of the car, imitated by his followers. The sentry said: "The sergeant is out on a search party; the corporal was sent to I Due Santi, on that crime business." Meanwhile another soldier appeared. Higher in rank, or older, after a not prompt and rather soft clicking of heels (these gentlemen were from the police) and a raising of the head which announced more explicitly and more elegantly that he had come to attention, he handed Ingravallo a bluish envelope which, on being torn open, produced a sheet of paper,

folded over twice. Santarella, therein, communicated that he had sent Pestalozzi to la Pacori, accompanied by a soldier, for further checking; he, with another man, was out to follow the tracks of the fugitive Enea, alias Iginio, which was how they called Retalli. He had some hopes of overtaking him, that is to say, of catching him and of handcuffing him, to bring him, handcuffed, to the barracks: not however, a certainty. Ingravallo, more