The Day of the Owl Read Free Page A

sunk a centimetre, in spite of all the trucks that use it; while other streets, made by much bigger contractors, look like a camel's back after only a year ... Had he a criminal record? Yes, in nineteen forty ... here we are, in nineteen forty, the third of November, nineteen forty ... He was travelling on a bus - he doesn't seem to have much luck with buses - and people were discussing the war we had just declared on Greece;
    someone said: "We'll suck it dry in a fortnight" - he meant Greece. Colasberna said: "What is it} An egg?" There was a Blackshirt on the bus who reported him ... What? ... Sorry, you asked me if he had a criminal record and I, with the file in front of me, say he had ... All right, then, he hadn't a criminal record ... Me?... A Fascist? When I see fasces I touch wood ... Yes, sir. Yours to command.'
    He replaced the telephone on its hook with the delicacy of exasperation and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. 'This one's been a partisan,' he said. 'I would have the luck to hit on someone who's been a partisan!'

    *

    The two surviving Colasberna brothers and the other members of the Santa Fara Co-operative Building Society were waiting for the captain to arrive. They were all sitting in a row, dressed in black; the brothers had black woollen shawls over their shoulders, and bloodshot eyes; they were unshaven in sign of mourning. Motionless they sat in the waiting-room of the Carabinieri Station of S., their eyes riveted to a coloured target painted on the wall with the ironic wording: UNLOAD FIREARMS HERE . They felt an overwhelming shame at being in such a place and at having to wait. Compared to shame, death is nothing.
    Sitting apart from them, perched on the edge of her chair, was a young woman. She had come in after them and wanted to see the sergeantmajor, so she told the orderly. The reply was that the sergeantmajor was busy and the captain was on his way. 'I'll wait,' she said, and sat on the edge of her chair, fidgeting with her fingers so that it made the others nervy to look at her. They knew her by sight; she was the wife of a tree-pruner from another village who had come from near-by B. to settle down in S. after the war, married here, and now in this poverty-stricken place - what with his wife's dowry and his job - was considered well-off.
    'She's had a row with her husband and has come to make a charge,' thought the members of the Santa Fara Co-operative Society, and the thought helped take their minds off that burning shame of theirs.
    There came a sound of a car pulling up in the courtyard, and of the engine cutting off, then the click of heels down the passage. Into the waiting-room came the captain, for whom the warrant-officer opened the door of his own office with a salute so stiff and a head held so high that he seemed to be inspecting the ceiling. The captain was young, tall and fair-skinned. At his first words the Santa Fara members thought, with a mixture of relief and scorn, 'A mainlander.' Mainlanders are decent enough but just don't understand things.
    Again they sat down in a row in front of the sergeantmajor's desk. The captain sat in the desk-chair with the sergeantmajor standing beside him, and on the other side, crouched over the typewriter, sat Carabiniere Sposito. Sposito had a baby face, but the brothers Colasberna and their associates were in holy terror of his presence, the terror of a merciless inquisition, of the black seed of the written word. 'White soil, black seed. Beware of the man who sows it. He never forgets,' says the proverb.
    The captain offered his condolences and apologized for summoning them to the barracks and for keeping them waiting. Again they thought: 'A mainlander; they're polite, mainlanders,' but they still kept a wary eye on Carabiniere Sposito whose hands were lightly poised over the keyboard of the typewriter, tense and silent as a hunter lying in wait for a hare in the moonlight, his finger on the trigger.
    'It's odd,' said the