"Maybe she's afraid he'll be drafted."
"Is that a joke too?"
"It wouldn't be to me." He filled the glasses. "Call her back. Tell her you heard that her nephew is to marry the priest's ward. Tell her we want to give them a present. A stomach pump. That's not a joke, either."
"I know it's not." He filled his glass carefully. "Which had you rather do, or stay at the priest's tonight?"
"Salut," I said.
"Salut." We drank. The leaves made a dry, wild, continuous sound. "Wish it was still summer."
"It would be pretty cold tonight, even in a barn."
"Yes. Glad we don't have to sleep in a barn tonight."
"It wouldn't be so bad, after we got the hay warm and got to sleep."
"We don't have to, though. We can get a good sleep and get an early start in the morning."
I filled the glasses. "I wonder how far it is to the next village."
"Too far." We drank. "I wish it were summer. Don't you?"
"Yes." I emptied the bottle into the glasses. "Have some wine." We raised our glasses. We looked at one another. The particles in the wind seemed to drive through the clothing, through the flesh, against the bones, penetrating the brick and plaster of the walls to reach us. "Salut."
"We said that before," Don said.
"All right. Salut, then."
"Salut."
We were young: Don, twenty-three; I, twenty-two. And age is so much a part of, so inextricable from, the place where you were born or bred. So that away from home, some distance away space or time or experience away you are always both older and eternally younger than yourself, at the same time.
We stood in the black wind and watched the funeraclass="underline" priest, coffin, a meager clump of mourners pass, their garments, and particularly the priest's rusty black, ballooning ahead of them, giving an illusion of unseemly haste, as though they were outstripping themselves across the harsh green twilight (the air was like having to drink iced lemonade in the winter time) and into the church. "We'll be out of the wind too," Don said.
"There's an hour of light yet."
"Sure; we might even reach the crest by dark." He looked at me. Then I looked away. The red tiles of the roofs were black, too, now. "We'll be out of the wind." Then the bell began to toll again. "We don't know anything. There's probably not anything. Anyway, we don't know it. We don't have to know it. Let's get out of the wind." It was one of those stark, square, stone churches, built by those harsh iron counts and bishops of Lombardy. It was built old; time had not even mellowed it, could not ever mellow it, not all of time could have. They might have built the mountains too and invented the twilight in a dungeon underground, in the black ground.
And beside the door the bicycle leaned. We looked at it quietly as we entered the church and we said quietly, at the same time: "Beaver."
"He's one of the pallbearers," Don said. "That's why he came home." The bell tolled. We passed through the chancel and stopped at the back of the church. We were out of the wind now, save for the chill eddies of it that licked in at our backs. We could hear it outside, ripping the slow strokes of the bell half-born out of the belfry, so that by the time we heard them, they seemed to have come back as echoes from a far distance. The nave, groined upward into the gloom, dwarfed the meager clot of bowed figures. Beyond them, above the steady candles, the Host rose, soaring into sootlike shadows like festooned cobwebs, with a quality sorrowful and triumphant, like wings. There was no organ, no music, no human sound at all at first. They just knelt there among the dwarfing gloom and the cold, serene, faint light of the candles. They might have all been dead. "It'll be dark long before they can get done," Don whispered.
"Maybe it's because of the harvest," I whispered. "They probably have to work all day. The living can't wait on the dead, you know."
"But, if he was as rich as they told us he was, it seems like..."
"Who buries the rich? Do the rich do it, or do the poor do it?"
"The poor do it," Don whispered. Then the priest was there, above the bowed heads. We had not seen him at first, but now he was there, shapeless, blurring out of the shadows below the candles, his face like a smudge, a thumb print, upon the gloom where the Host rose in a series of dissolving gleams like a waterfall; his voice filled the church, slow, steady, like wings beating against the cold stone, upon the resonance of wind in which the windless candles stood as though painted. "And so he looked at her," Don whispered.
"He had to sit across the table from her, say, and watch her. Watch her eating the food that made her change from nothing and become everything, knowing she had no food of her own and that it was his food that was doing it, and not for him changing. You know, girls: they are not anything, then they are everything. You watch them become everything before your eyes. No, not eyes: it's the same in the dark. You know it before they do; it's not their becoming everything that you dread: it's their finding it out after you have long known it: you die too many times. And that's not right. Not fair. I hope I'll never have a daughter."
"That's incest," I whispered.
"I never said it wasn't. I said it was like fire. Like watching the fire lean up and away rushing."
"You must either watch a fire, or burn up in it. Or not be there at all. Which would you choose?"
"I don't know. If it was a girl, I'd rather burn up in it."
"Than to not be there at all, even?"
"Yes." Because we were young. And the young seem to be impervious to anything except trifles. We can invest trifles with a tragic profundity, which is the world. Because, after all, there's nothing particularly profound about reality.
Because when you reach reality, along about forty or fifty or sixty, you find it to be only six feet deep and eighteen feet square.
Then it was over. Outside again, the wind blew steadily down from the black hills, hollowing out the green glass bowl of the sky. We watched them file out of the church and carry the coffin into the churchyard. Four of them carried iron lanterns and in the dusk they clotted quietly antic about the grave while the wind leaned steadily upon them and upon the lantern flames, and blew fine dust into the grave as though all nature were quick to hide it. Then they were done.
The lanterns bobbed into motion, approaching, and we watched the priest. He crossed the churchyard toward the presbytery at a scuttling gait, blown along in his gusty black.
The soldier was in mufti now. He came out of the throng, striding also with that long-limbed thrust like his aunt. He looked briefly at us with his bold surly face and got on the bike and rode away. "He was one of the pallbearers," Don said. "And what do you think of that, signori?"
"No spika," I said. "I love Italy. I love Mussolini."
"You said that before."
"All right. Salut, then."
Don looked at me. His face was quite sober. "Salut," he said. Then he looked toward the presbytery, hitching his pack forward. The door of the presbytery was closed.
"Don," I said. He stopped, looking at me. The mountains had lost all perspective; they appeared to lean in toward us.