Moscardino Read Free Page A

locked a door on him he would jump out a window.
    The servants came, and left when they got their month’s wages.
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    Cleofe, the last of them all, came from the hills with her bundle on her head, and my grandfather opened the door for her.

    Good morning, Sir. She said it with such charm that he was moved. Cleofe blushed.
    My grandfather in his bedroom listened for the tap of her heels, it seemed like a leit-motif, life in that house’s monotony: click, tac!
    Cleofe came from the hills by Terrinca, a place known for its beautiful women. They are long in the legs, with waists square as their shoulders. They are lean, with rather long faces, that seem perhaps a bit longer because they part their hair in the middle and coil it in two braids over their ears. They have very white skin, perhaps from the milk and flour diet. Their teeth are good, their lips full like those of young children, and their eyes are dark as the chestnut rind.
    They carry baskets on their heads, old style, and take steps long as a man’s. Their cheeks dimple in smiling. Cleofe was of this breed. It seemed as if no cloud had ever passed over that clear face and no tear ever had clouded her eyes.
    How could she sleep hearing someone on tip-toe in the corridor, breathing hard at the key-hole?
    How could she have stood it long, in anxiety, her heart thumping and a lump in her throat?
    Poor devil from the hills, she felt that no such high love was for her, she avoided it, tried to be hard, and felt anchored to the spot when he looked at her.

    â€œI will go. I will go.” Another day passed and my grandfather’s face, imperious as a general’s, was there saying: Never. You can not.
    My grandfather was in pain if she went into Grumpy’s bedroom or when the abbé kept his hands in his soutane slits in her presence.
    Don Lorenzo take your hands out of your pockets. She blushed if my grandfather was there to hear her. He saw it and trembled.
    â€œI will pluck you like a dead capon!” He would have killed him but for Cleofe’s intervention. She calmed him, patting his cheek.
    Then my grandfather was taken with a mad passion and Cleofe could no longer meet his eyes without changing colour. Cleofe, do you like me?
    Nothing was said for the rest of that night, in that house.
    And yet everyone again heard the death rattle that they had heard a few days before when the doctor had got suddenly worse, and had almost sent for the confessor.
    The rooms were full of ghostly population as that night when the dead man was no longer there but seemed to come through every opened door visibly, and a voice from purgatory seemed to move lamenting in the room.
    And now the Signora Pellegrina hearing the creak of Cleofe’s door was terrified as she had been that night. And rattled her rosary and kept listening as if he had come back from purgatory and was asking relief for his soul.

    Grumpy sat with his eyes popping out the whole night, with his knees bunched up to his chest, in a bloody vision. He saw the war of ’48 and the Austrian armies marching through the city, a high tide of fire, the forest moving, women disemboweled, children trodden into the mud by the horses with barbarian riders and the deafening noise of steel weapons.
    Monstrous tale, my grandfather had told on his return.
    He saw him in uniform, at eighteen, my grandfather who had planted the liberty tree in the town square, who had run away, who had gone venturing over the world, who had forded rivers, endured marches, killed enemies, plunging a bayonet into their kidneys.
    My grandfather had upset an Austrian catafalque and slept in the dead man’s coffin.
    My grandfather scared him, made him tremble, made the house shake; what would he do now to the servant, to his mother, to Grumpy himself, to the abbé?
    The abbé perambulated up and down in the corridor. Stopped at Cleofe’s door, stayed fixed like a shadow with his hands in his pockets, with his