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like birds in a cage of water.
    The wheels of the sawmills were ringed with short thick candles of ice, with filaments and drops like pin-wheels for the Madonna del Carmine, curious boughs and branchings were formed in the riverbeds as if half sculptor’s fine marble, half mottle in the rough stone ways gouging the bottom. Even the horse turds and cow droppings were made fantastic and precious between the icy mud of the cart tracks.
    So after the feast of St. Discoglio, new varnished by old Ciampino who was also church upholsterer and decorator, there reappeared after many years the fine old giardiniera wagon, six-seater all new black and yellow with the curtains of heavy linen fringed with blue.

    Grumpy was bundled up, cocoon’d with a grey shawl round his neck, such as his father had used, more grouchy he had aged so much in so short a time that many people seeing him staggering into the wagon thought of his dad, not merely because of the shawl but from facial resemblance.
    He stood beside Sabina who was in her new clothes with circular earrings and with a pink handkerchief over her head stuck on with a gold pin that looked like a nail rammed through the nape of her neck. Her face blazing, gesticulating and rolling her eyes and her hips shaking with the wobbling of the wagon. Vibrating with full contentment she alone in that vehicle felt, and was, boss, brazen, proud of feeling that she was the real boss of a six-seater with sky blue cushions covered with ticking that could carry so many people.
    In town clothes the family doctor, bachelor, red-skinned, sat opposite Don Pietro Galanti who shot knifed glances stealthily at him when turning a leaf of his breviary.
    Cleofe had the lowered curtain behind her serving as support and cushion to what was left of her saddened body.
    And the abbé Don Lorenzo next to her with his little shiny eyes, tickled the baby’s neck as it sat in Cleofe’s lap.

    Sabina and the red doctor were the live animals in that funeral coach. Their thought was clear, concealed by nothing save the conventions of the moment. She burning with the exuberance of healthy vitality, he a man of scant learning and no scruples whatever.
    Their carnal eagerness was of a certainty visible to everyone. The others moused round the same question, of flesh in heat, with tortuous imagination, and turned in on themselves in their uneasiness.
    Cleofe had her eyes on the frosted hills, on the olives shot with sunlight, which fled under her gaze as she was carried from them. She let herself be borne along as in a dream without thinking, as a soul in transmigration, as if her life were ending, gently, in beatitude, and the child which as yet had neither reason nor soul, slept cradled.
    The red poppies amid the grain flashed into Grumpy’s eyes. The red head of the medico jutted out like a flashing ball of copper, speckled now and again by rays of sun at play in the branches. Dizziness, dazzle, those splotches of sun leapt from the doctor’s red poll onto Grumpy’s hands and played over them, and onto his grey shawl, his face, and bit into him with a voluptuous malignity.
    Grumpy felt the pain almost on the surface of his skin. He had been feeling pain ever since the doctor had asked to go with them and use the sixth free seat in the carry-all.
    But as they went along this painful sensation grew more and more
unbearable till he had to scratch his hands now and again as if stung by an insect, and tap his face now and again. He had to keep from looking at the doctor’s head because he always met the watchful eyes so near him . . . as if they were right to strip Sabina stark naked.
    And as they went along and along the doctor’s eyes (Jack of Clubs) knew more and more about Sabina’s legs, now that her dress, losing its laundered stiffness, stuck to them, now that there was a hollow between leg and leg made by the weight of Sabina’s hands resting there.
    And how would Grumpy have the