no, no dog, they cost too much. A buggy: "the vet from Albano," the little man informed. He drove calmly, ruddy, a cigar butt spent in his lips, with threadbare gloves. After a little more than a mile and a half on the Anzio road, they had to take a right: "this way, this way, towards Santa Fumia," their guest said. Over the Santa Fumia bridge towards Tor di Gheppio and then towards Casal Bruciato. The muddy little road went downhill, then hardened: the tracks dilated into puddles, brimming, against the light, with livid water, molten blue-silver lead, where the wing of a dab-chick was seen, black, or of a scattered jay. It seemed that, a little later, they had to become lost in the lands, in the mire. They crossed instead the tracks (of the Velletri line) at a level, similar to the one a mile to the north, near the Divino Amore bridge. Blades of grass, between the two tracks, rose here and there from the breach, between one tie and the next (of oak), as if the line were of no further use, after having been used, for one year, by Pius the Ninth. Strands of smoke lay still in midair, motionless, clotted there by magic: remains of a barely dissolved apparition: white, like cotton batting, or of an unreal white, like steam. The smoked outline of the little train was diminishing at that moment towards a distant arch: it accredited in itself, in its vanishing, the perspective flight of the two converging rails: and it resembled the Prince of Darkness, and the cabin of the last car, the rail, when it is freed from the enchantress and disappears with a hiss through its portals, under the black vaulted arch, into the mountain; and in the silence of the countryside and in the mute stupefaction of all things, at a goat's hoof-print that has remained to seal the mire and a wisp of sulphur in the air. "Tor di Gheppio's over there," the willing little man said, pointing, "towards the palace farm. Crocchiapani lives there, in one of those houses you can see, the little bunch on the left." Emerging then from the undulations of that clay bare of trees, which the fallow land made green in patches, a tower's pointed tip stood out against the sky, like a shard, an ancient tooth of an ancient jaw of the world. The houses of the living, mute in the distance of the cultivated land, stood before it: but a little more in this direction. They drove down.
"Pavona? The station?" Ingravallo asked.
"The town of Pavona is there," the guest pointed again: "down there, see? That's the station. If you cross the fields it's maybe twenty-five minutes: if you walk fast. But we'd get all wet."
"And the Rome-Naples line?"
"There," and he turned: "it's two, maybe even three miles: you just keep going straight, with the car. On our way back, then, if you have to go to Pavona, after Tor di Gheppio, then we could do down to Casal Bruciato, and take the Ardeatina there. If we go off in that direction, towards Ardea, right away, hardly more than a mile, we get to Santa Palomba—where those antennas are over there (he pointed them out), you can see them everywhere, even from Marino. There, if you want, you cross the road to Solforata and Pratica di Mare: so, for Palazzo, we can come straight up to Pavona. The whole thing, from Casal Bruciato, is maybe four and a half, five miles, maybe not even. With the car, maybe fifteen minutes." "All right," said Ingravallo, in whom all this toponymy had produced more clenching of the jaws: "now we'll go to Tor di Gheppio." They set off, they went: to the spot where the little man said, after spurts of water and various jolts, they got out. They left the car with the driver, who also got out and went off to one side for a moment, on his own. They started walking along the path which proceeded straight and not excessively muddily towards the three houses. They proceeded in so-called Indian file, one after the other, Private First-Class Runzato first of all, then Di Pietrantonio, then Don Ciccio with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat: and they looked like a school of grave-diggers, all so black in the clear, open day, as