Moscardino Read Free Page B

head between the door and the door-frame.
    The women of Terrina go to bed as God made ’em, naked.
    Our house had no curtains, and the rooms are not dark at night. Don Lorenzo saw her naked, white, white, with her legs long. My
grandfather seemed like a monster crouched over her, clamped to her belly, looking into her eyes.
    The abbé stood there till the dead came to life, ill augured witness of my mother’s procreation.
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    Cleofe, do you like me?
    A’ you? replied Cleofe bashfully as if asking it of herself, Do you like me?
    That was after she got over her terror, and she had not cried out, feeling resistance was useless, and even if she had wanted to, had not the strength to cry out. Love had pinned down her arms, annulled and made useless the strength of her strong body. Her breath so caught in her lungs that she had no breath, and could make no movement of denial.
    Cleofe found herself in his arms as a bird willingly in the mouth of a serpent, forgetting its possession of wings. Neither wanted to weep nor could help it.
    Cleofe, do you like me?
    A’ you?
    He was calm now, and looked into her tobacco-coloured eyes, held her head firm with his two hands on her cheeks and felt the blood beat in her temples, felt it in the pads of his fingertips, felt the warm breath
coming from Cleofe’s mouth that his hands distorted. Cleofe had the sea’s tempest in her ears, felt the wind bringing winter now, over the house roof, in the tops of the trees that guard it.
    In the courtyard was the well-curb with twisted ironwork over it, and the stone edge gone mossy, the cord looped over a hook, the well bucket hooped with iron shrunk on as a wheel-rim.
    The well went a hundred yards down. Town perched on a mountain, the well, bored through clay and rock, narrow and crooked, down, down, through the cracks, through the tufts of nettle and pellatory.
    When they drew water, the pulley wheel turned: Chio, kao, kao. The drops of the well bucket, coming up jerkily, echoed the clink.
    Grumpy stopped his ears because the gi-gi of the pulley set his teeth on edge as sour lemon or when he heard pumice scraped on the marble sink. But since he was now domiciled in the courtyard he was drawn on by the curiosity to look into the well, drawn by the clear clink of the pulley that was like a bell struck by the subterranean spirits, so, little by little, with one ear, then with both he could stand hearing the turn of the pulley without feeling gooseflesh.
    He looked down the well trembling and saw only darkness, not even water which the spirits had covered with lead, with a cloud-coloured mantle that was passing over the sky.
    Grumpy thought he saw a river churning down there at the well-bottom,
and thought he could hear a noise like that of the mill-race when the motive wheel moves in a sawmill. But he saw only a slab of lead and heard only the wandering of his own voice losing itself in the void beneath him.
    When he grew bolder he threw stones into the well and saw circles shake on the water and saw his face in frightened reflection, deformed and recomposed in the whirlpool, submerged in the ripples as little by little the spirits restrained the water under their leaden mantles.
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    He began to take his meals on the green well-curb, casting a glance now and then into the deep at the swarming of shadows heaped like clouds, but smaller, a comic dwarf leaning there on his elbows the better to hide.
    And he began to wind the well cord over the hook and the well crane, a hundred yards of it, bendable but shriveled stiff like a steel wire.
    Grumpy made a regular skein round and united as the circles of the well water, smiling now and again. Thus he learned to look pleasant.
    The abbé preferred to dawdle about under the orange trees which were also there in the courtyard aligned at the far end, clipped low so that the branches should not spread over the wall. If he looked down
the well it made him dizzy, things swam before his