if they were going to pick up the deceased: and with some reluctance, too. "La Crocchiapani, that stupid girl, has already heard us coming," thought Ingravallo, "and she's peeking at us, for sure." In fact, as they were later to ascertain, she was observing them from the window, behind the almost-closed shutters, where the sound of the car had led her to station herself. When Ingravallo raised his face and Runzato whistled, then shouted: "Police! Let us in! Open the door!" the house, the first and the smallest, had a policeman at every corner. Kids, chickens, two women, two mongrel dogs with tails curled up like a bishop's crook, revealing all their beauty: couldn't stop looking, barking. Gleaming, black eyes, stunned in the wonder of the faces, and the almost tattered poverty of the clothes. "Who's here?" Di Pietrantonio prudently asked: "How many people? Are there any menfolk?" "There's a girl, with her father," said the nearer of the peasant women, who had come closer, as if to save their children, or a hen more in danger. This house, of Tina Crocchiapani's, was a little square, slightly separated from the flock: a little, closed door with the number 3, on the ground floor. Before the threshold some slabs of stone, rather hollowed by footsteps, and shoes, and nails. No voice, within. Opaque, somnolent years, after the pink of the inaugural wash, had given the walls a faded squalor, and, on the side toward the north wind a dark rust, shadows: which was the corner to which these gentlemen had come first. At the eaves there was no pipe nor any wooden apparatus, known as gableboard: so that the roof tiles, along the edge, seemed to Don Ciccio, stumps, or depicted in cross-section, they made a sort of wavy pleating along the margin of the roof, a rustic ornate. A few blades of grass from the earth deposited here and there on the tiles, under the wind's auspices. An occasional drop fell, radiating, once detached from the tiles that had become black with the years; and dropped heavily, as if it were of mercury, to wound again, to penetrate, all around, the dampened compactness of the earth. A window was opened, then shut: the maddened hens cluck-clucked. Too yielding the roof's slopes, or too shapeless, they seemed to descend in waves, they had been softened by the rains and then baked again and as if swollen in the heat: they charged their masons with lack of skill in their art: or else, in the garret the tree trunk which served as a beam was twisted. One would think that, under the earthy insistence of that covering, all the rotten apparatus, one fine day, would give way and fall and crash in a ruin: or the whole roof fly away, rather, at a gust of strong wind, like a rag, no sooner than the squall hit it. The wooden shutters, at the windows, one closing, one slamming: without paint of any kind and already putrid or splintered in the weather, in the steady evaporation of the years. Instead of glass, greased paper, on a frame, or a rusty piece of corrugated iron.
The little door opened a crack. When it was completely open Ingravallo found himself facing ... a face, a pair of eyes! gleaming in the penumbra: Tina Crocchiapani! "Her! Her!" he meditated, not without a composite beating of the heart: the stupendous maidservant of the Balduccis, with black gleams under her coal-black lashes, where the Alban light became tangled, broke, iridescent (the white tablecloth, the spinach) from the black hair gathered on her forehead, like the work of Sanzio, from the blue— dangling from lobes and on the cheeks—earrings: with that bosom! which Foscolo would have certified as a brimming bosom, in a troubadoric-mandrillian access, of the kind that have made him immortal in Brianza. At supper with the Balduccis, at Signora Liliana's! The field of the black and silent goddess, for her, who had been so cruelly separated from all things, from the lights and phenomena of the world! And she, she was the one, the one (the pathway of time became confused and lost) who had presented the filled and badly tilted oval of the plate, a whole leg, all the