"They say plenty. Always have and always will. Like any other town."
"What do you say?" Don said.
"I don't say. You don't either."
"No."
"It's no skin off of my back. If they want to drink, I serve them; if they want to talk, I listen. That keeps me as busy as I want to be all day."
"You're right," Don said. "It didn't happen to you."
The waiter looked up the street; it was almost full dark.
He appeared not to have heard. "Who sent for the cop, I wonder?" Don said.
"When a man's got jack, he'll find plenty of folks to help him make trouble for folks even after he's dead," the waiter said. Then he looked at us. "I?" he said. He leaned; he slapped his chest lightly. He looked quickly at the other table, then he leaned down and hissed: "I am atheist, like in America," and stood back and looked at us. "In America, all are atheists. We know." He stood there in his dirty apron, with his long, weary, dissolute face while we rose in turn and shook hands with him gravely, the five young men turning to look. He flipped his other hand at us, low against his flank. "Rest, rest," he hissed. He looked over his shoulder at the young men.
"Sit down," he whispered. He jerked his head toward the doorway behind us, where the padrona sat behind the bar.
"I've got to eat, see?" He scuttled away and returned with two more brandies, carrying them with his former sloven, precarious skill, as if he had passed no word with us save to take the order. "It's on me," he said. "Put it down."
"Now, what?" Don said. The music had ceased; from across the street we watched the fiddler, fiddle under arm, standing before the table where the young men sat, his other hand and the clutched hat gesticulant. The young woman was already going up the street, the child riding her hip again, its head nodding to a somnolent rhythm, like a man on an elephant. "Now, what?"
"I don't care."
"Oh, come on."
"No."
"There's no detective here. He never saw one. He wouldn't know a detective. There aren't any detectives in Italy: can you imagine an official Italian in plain clothes for a uniform?"
"No."
"She'll show us where the bed is, and in the morning early..."
"No. You can, if you want to. But I'm not."
He looked at me. Then he swung his pack onto his shoulder. "Good night. See you in the morning. At the cafe yonder."
"All right." He did not look back. Then he turned the corner. I stood in the wind. Anyway, I had the coat. It was a shooting coat of Harris tweed; we had paid eleven guineas for it, wearing it day about while the other wore the sweater.
In the Tyrol last summer Don held us up three days while he was trying to make the girl who sold beer at the inn. He wore the coat for three successive days, swapping me a week, to be paid on demand. On the third day the girl's sweetheart came back. He was as big as a silo, with a green feather in his hat. We watched him pick her over the bar with one hand.
I believe she could have done Don the same way: all yellow and pink and white she was, like a big orchard. Or like looking out across a snowfield in the early sunlight. She could have done it at almost any hour for three days too, by just reaching out her hand. Don gained four pounds while we were there.
V
THEN I CAME into the full sweep of the wind. The houses were all dark, yet there was still a little light low on the ground, as though the wind held it there flattened to the earth and it had been unable to rise and escape. The walls ceased at the beginning of the bridge; the river looked like steel. I thought I had already come into the full sweep of the wind, but I hadn't. The bridge was of stone, balustrades and roadway and all, and I squatted beneath the lee of the weather rail. I could hear the wind above and beneath, coming down the river in a long sweeping hum, like through wires. I squatted there, waiting. It wasn't very long.
He didn't see me at first, until I rose. "Did you think to have the flask filled?" he said.
"I forgot. I intended to. Damn the luck. Let's go back "
"I got a bottle. Which way now?"
"I don't care. Out of the wind. I don't care." We crossed the bridge. Our feet made no sound on the stones, because the wind blew it away. It flattened the water, scoured it; it looked just like steel. It had a sheen, holding light like the land between it and the wind, reflecting enough to see by.
But it swept all sound away before it was made almost, so that when we reached the other side and entered the cut where the road began to mount, it was several moments before we could hear anything except our ears; then we heard.
It was a smothered whimpering sound that seemed to come out of the air overhead. We stopped. "It's a child," Don said. "A baby."
"No: an animal. An animal of some sort." We looked at one another in the pale darkness, listening.
"It's up there, anyway," Don said. We climbed up out of the cut. There was a low stone wall enclosing a field, the field a little luminous yet, dissolving into the darkness. Just this side of the darkness, about a hundred yards away, a copse stood black, blobbed shapeless on the gloom. The wind rushed up across the field and we leaned on the wall, listening into it, looking at the copse. But the sound was nearer than that, and after a moment we saw the priest. He was lying on his face just inside the wall, his robes over his head, the black blur of his gown moving faintly and steadily, either because of the wind or because he was moving under them, And whatever the sound meant that he was making, it was not meant to be listened to, for his voice ceased when we made a noise. But he didn't look up, and the faint shuddering of his gown didn't stop. Shuddering, writhing, twisting from side to side something. Then Don touched me. We went on beside the wall. "Get down easier here," he said quietly.
The pale road rose gradually beneath us as the hill flattened.
The copse was a black blob. "Only I didn't see the bicycle."
"Then go back to Cavalcanti's," I said. "Where in hell do you expect to see it?"
"They would have hidden it. I forgot. Of course they would have hidden it."
"Go on," I said. "Don't talk so goddamn much."
"Unless they thought he would be busy with us and wouldn't..." he ceased and stopped. I jolted into him and then I saw it too, the handlebars rising from beyond the wall like the horns of a hidden antelope. Against the gloom the blob of the copse seemed to pulse and fade, as though it breathed, lived. For we were young, and night, darkness, is terrible to young people, even icy driving blackness like this.
Young people should be so constituted that with sunset they would enter a coma state, by slumber shut safe from the darkness, the secret nostalgic sense of frustration and of objectless and unappeasable desire.
"Get down, damn you," I said. With his high hunched pack, his tight sweater, he was ludicrous; he looked like a clown; he was terrible and ugly and sad all at once, since he was ludicrous and, without the coat, he would be so cold.
And so was I: ugly and terrible and sad. "This damn wind. This damn wind." We regained the road. We were sheltered for the moment, and he took out the bottle and we drank. It was fiery stuff. "Talk about my Milan brandy," I said. "That damn wind. That damn wind. That damn wind."