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By Root 1464 0

than a little cross, took off his hat, to allow his head to get a bit of air, clenched his teeth: two hard knobs on the two jaws, halfway from the ears, gave him, under his black mop a kind of bulldog's muzzle, already illustrated on more than one occasion. The two carabinieri were not the least impressed. The carabinieri, in peace time, and nuns, at all times, know how to draw from their respective disciplines that durable steadiness which indemnifies them to the jolt of current events, if not even to the quakes of history, for which events or history, however, it may turn out, they give as much as any history merits: that is, not to damn. "Do you know whether Crocchiapani Assunta," Ingravallo asked, "about whom I sent a communication on the twentieth, has already been questioned at her home?" "No, sir."

"And why not? Do you know where she is? I mean, do you know the locality?"

"Tor di Gheppio, the sergeant said."

"How long does it take to get there?"

"With a car, sir, about forty minutes . . . even less . . ."

"Well, we'll start there then. Let's go."

The noncom sent for some character, who was supposed

to be familiar with that zone: a thin little man, dressed in black as Ingravallo was. They welcomed him aboard. To get the car out of the courtyard, ass frontwards, along a narrow curve and uphill, to thread it into the d'Azeglio toboggan in a forward gear, took a number of pushes in the direction opposite to that previously described. Ingravallo, blackly, continued to clench his jaws: his teeth creaked. He was mentally cursing the tires, the springs, the Fascists. If he had a flat, wouldn't he look a fool? with this new man in the car. The whole legion would laugh for thirty years. The automobile of the Rome Police: with a hernia-ed tire that goes plof, at the climax, and it's only luck if the car hasn't driven off a bridge. But the car went: it would go. It sped against the wind, with rare seeds of rain on the windows: with unforeseen jolts at certain recesses, certain bumps not yet reported by the Touring Club. Olive trees, and their fronds of ashen silver, were still not much shaken: beaded by the night's rain, or dried at the first sun, they spoke of the clear continuity of the year already adolescent, already tormented into Aries, smelling a bit of manure in the vineyards, in the brown earth of the hummocks, the slopes. A cloud passed over the grain or the fields, barely grassy: and an immediate fear gripped them, as if they were to be spent again, in winter: to that shadow, swift and yet feared, they seemed to adapt themselves helplessly, to freeze, despairing. But the wing of the sirocco, quite to the contrary, tawny and tepid, in the pale humidity of the day: more than a calf's breath in the stable. The weather, muggy, gave the augury of grain, of the battle of grain{76} and of corn and of the rearings of the Jack-ass it cared little. A late-March frost, Ingravallo thought, could upset, God unwilling, the presage: the eighty million quintals were to come down to thirty-eight. The Autarch Jawbone, for his forty-four million . . . subjects, yes, fine subjects too, had to load on grain in Toronto, where there were French become English in Canada, beg maccheroni from the redskins. And Ingravallo clenched and creaked, from rage and satisfaction joined together. They went down to Torraccio, where the sirocco, dying, became warmer: or so it seemed. They turned on to the Appia at I Due Santi, having to travel over it, retracing their steps, for a good half-mile, towards Rome, that is, to the turn-off for Falcognana. After a short stretch of this road, they encountered the Anzio road, and turned off again. The wind dropped. With the Guzzi motorbike of Sergeant Santarella and the motorized Pestalozzi, the carabiniere had suggested that a meeting was not improbable, or even almost certain: but they didn't meet at all. An ass, on the other hand, loaded with wood, and with the respective peasant on his back, one hand clutching the tail: or a little flock of about fifteen sheep, the shepherd with his green umbrella, shut: