Mr Urselli remembered him as his glass was refilled.
“Are you stayin’ here too?” he asked.
“I think I will,” said the Saint.
There was something bizarre about the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli. During the afternoon, with no more effort than was called for by attentive listening, Simon learned that both men were the scions of local families, immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the century. Not long afterwards their paths had separated. The Ursellis had taken to the big cities, merging themselves flexibly into the pace and turmoil of a rising civilization; the Intuccios, unyielding peasants for as many generations as the oldest of them could remember, had naturally sent down their roots into the soil, preferring to find their livelihood in the surroundings to which they had been born. The divergence was summed up almost grotesquely in the two men; if the Saint’s hypersensitive intuition had not been startled into alertness by the other oddities that had struck him about Urselli, he might have found himself staying on for nothing but the amusement of the human comedy which they were acting.
It was not until dinner was half finished that Intuccio’s rock-like taciturnity unbent at all. They ate in the smoky oil-lighted kitchen, the four of them together round a stained pine table, in the incense of garlic and charring wood.
Urselli prattled on in a kind of strained desperation, as if the mighty silence that welled in on them whenever he stopped was more than his nerves could stand. The older man answered only with grunts and monosyllables; the girl Lucia spoke very little, whether from shyness or habit Simon could not decide, and the Saint himself felt that he was a spectator rather than a player — at least for those early scenes. It was as a spectator that Simon watched Intuccio wind the last reel of spaghetti dexterously round his fork, and heard him interrupt Urselli’s recital of the delights of Broadway to ask, “You have done well in your business, Amadeo?”
They were speaking in Italian, the language on which Intuccio stubbornly insisted, and which Simon spoke as easily as he.
“Well enough,” Urselli answered. “It was easy for me. I must have been born for it. Buy and sell, the same as any other business — there is only the one secret — and know what you can sell before you buy.” He slapped his waist. “Here in my belt I have twenty thousand good American dollars. And you, Salvatore?”
The other drank from his wineglass and wiped his matted black beard.
“I also have no complaints. Five years ago I have much land and everyone is paying the highest prices, but I have the intelligence to see that it will not always be like that. Ebbene, I sell the farm, and presently when the prices have gone down I buy this place. It is something for me to do, and I like to stay here. I have perhaps thirty thousand dollars, perhaps a little more. We are thrifty people, and we do not have to spend money on fine clothes.”