But Joe taught him more than I had done at ten years old, for which the old man upbraided me again as he would have done in my baby days.
I can see him standing in his shabby cassock beneath his pergola with the sun filtering through the vines on to the hanging bunches of purple fruit, and shaking his finger at me with mock solemnity as of yore.
“When she was four years old she told me I spoke English like a Spanish cow,” said he, quoting a Genoese proverb. “But she taught me badly.”
And then he related—what I refused at first to translate—how he had had to whip me for stealing his currants.
“Grapes she might have had—but English currants, they require watering.”
And grapes we had too, as many as we could devour. In their natural form Joe could pluck and eat them gladly too; but when it came to the sour wine which the Prevosto had made from them and with which he served him at table, I am bound to confess that my husband risked disgracing me by spilling it on the brick floor when his host’s back was turned; and on one occasion he even went so far as to pour a whole half fiasco through the little window which separated the refectory from the church, where he bespattered the marble pavement behind the high altar.
But these delinquencies remained a secret, and “Giò” became the old man’s loved and patient instructor and friend.
“Tor bay or not tor bay,” I seem to hear him painfully enunciating: and then Joe finishing Hamlet’s familiar soliloquy in slow, even tones as they passed up the vineyards. Pleasant climbs they were through sweeping chestnut-woods and beside trickling trout-streams that grew to rushing torrents after a thunderstorm; climbs that ended perhaps at some mountain sanctuary whence the white cities of the plain could be seen beyond a sea of gently lowering ridges and crests; or sometimes only at some hamlet beside the stony bed of the wandering river, where the old man would bid him wait while he mumbled his “Office” or went in “to see an ill” in one of the thatched cottages adorned with hanging fringe of golden maize-cones that cluster around the village fountain. It was here that one evening, when I had been my husband’s companion, the village sempstress came forth to greet us—she who had made my own and my sister’s new cotton frocks on that great occasion when the Prevosto had begged for us, as the “cleanest children in the village,” to strew flowers before the Archbishop when he came for the Confirmation.
I reminded the old priest of it and he said: “Yes, yes! And the Archbishop asked if you were Protestants and I answered ‘Certainly! but their parents did not refuse because we are Catholics: we all pray to the same God.’”