All Our Yesterdays Read Free Page A

food, and Ippolito was always much distressed in the autumn when he had to say good-bye to the dog, but his father agreed with Signora Maria about the dog and would not hear of having it in the town. So Ippolito would have to wait patiently for him to die, his father said, and really, perhaps Ippolito did hope very much that he would die soon, perhaps this was his pet dream, to be able to go for a walk in the town with his dog.
    Ippolito listened in silence when his father spoke unkindly to him, he never answered back and his face remained quiet and pale, and at night he stayed up to type out the book of memoirs, or to read Goethe aloud when his father could not sleep. For he had the soul of a slave, Concettina used to say, and camomile in his veins instead of blood, and was like an old man of ninety, with no girls whom he liked and no desire for anything, all he could do was to wander about the countryside alone all day with the dog.
    Le Visciole was a tall, large house, with guns and horns hung up on the walls, with high beds and mattresses that rustled because they were stuffed with maize-leaves. The garden stretched down to the high road, a big, uncultivated garden full of trees ; it was no use trying to plant rosebushes or other flowers because in winter the contadino would certainly not look after them and they would die. Behind the house was the courtyard, with the farm-cart and the contadino’s cottage, and the contadino’s wife who came to her door from time to time and flung out a bucket of water, and then Signora Maria would shout out that this dirty water made the courtyard stink, and the contadino’s wife shouted back that it was clean water, quite good enough to wash Signora Maria’s face in, and so the two of them would go on quarrelling for a bit. All round, as far as the eye could see, stretched fields of corn and maize, and in the middle of them stood scarecrows, waving their empty sleeves ; vineyards and oak-trees started at the foot of the hill, and every now and then a shot would be heard from that direction, and a cloud of birds would rise and Ippolito’s dog would be heard barking, but Concettina said it barked from fright, not from a desire to catch anything. The river was some distance away, beyond the road, a bright, far-off streak amongst bushes and rocks : and the village was a little beyond it, about ten houses or so.
    In the village were the people whom the old man called “the humbugs”—the local Fascist Secretary, the Superintendent of Police, the Secretary of the Commune ; and the old man went every day to the village so that the Humbugs might see him, that they might see he was still alive and that he cut them dead. The Humbugs would be playing bowls in their shirtsleeves, ignorant that they too were in the book of memoirs ; and their wives would be sitting round the monument in the little square, knitting and suckling their babies, with handkerchiefs over their breasts. The monument was big and made of stone, a big, stone young man with a badge and a fez : the old man would stop in front of it and stick his eyeglass in his eye, and look and smile sarcastically, he would stay there for a little, looking and smiling sarcastically : and Signora Maria was afraid that some day or other the Humbugs would arrest him, and she would try to pull him away, as she had once done with the old lady in front of the hat-shop windows. Signora Maria would have liked to talk to the wives of the Humbugs, to have learnt new stitches and taught them some as well: and also to have told them that it would have been a good thing if they had washed their breasts with water that had been boiled before suckling their babies. But she never dared go near them because of the old man.
    In the summer, freckles and places where the skin had peeled were to be seen on the old man’s bald, shiny head, because he went out in the sun bareheaded ; and Concettina’s legs went golden brown,