“Caspita!” he kept repeating. “Caspita!” (It was his favourite expression of astonishment, an odd, old-fashioned word.) “Who would have thought it? After all this time!”
“And all the eternity of the war as well,” I said.
But when the first ebullition of surprise and pleasure subsided, the look of melancholy came back.
“It gives me the spleen,” he said, “to see you again; still travelling about; free to go where you like. If you knew what life was like here....”
“Well, in any case,” I said, feeling that I ought, for the Countess’s sake, to make some sort of protest, “in any case the war’s over, and you have escaped a real revolution. That’s something.”
“Oh, you’re as bad as Laura,” said the Count impatiently. He looked towards his wife, as though hoping that she would say something. But the Countess went on with her sewing without even looking up. The Count took my arm. “Come along,” he said, and his tone was almost one of anger. “Let’s take a turn outside.” His wife’s religious resignation, her patience, her serenity angered him, I could see, like a reprimand—tacit, indeed, and unintentionally given, but none the less galling.
Along the weed-grown paths of what had once, in the ancient days of splendour, been the garden, slowly we walked towards the farm. A few ragged box-trees grew along the fringes of the paths; once there had been neat hedges. Poised over a dry basin a Triton blew his waterless conch. At the end of the vista a pair of rapes—Pluto and Proserpine, Apollo and Daphne—writhed desperately against the sky.
“I saw your father yesterday,” I said. “He looks aged.”
“And so he ought,” said Fabio murderously. “He’s sixty-nine.”
I felt uncomfortably that the subject had become too serious for light conversation. I had wanted to ask after the Colombella; in the circumstances, I decided that it would be wiser to say nothing about her. I repressed my curiosity. We were walking now under the lea of the farm buildings.