“Is he ferocious?”
Turlendana, smiling, answered, “No.”
“Well,” Binchi-Banche went on, reassured, “there is the house of Rosa Schiavona.” Both turned towards the Pescaria, and then towards Sant’ Agostino, followed by the crowd. From windows and balconies women and children leaned over, gazing in astonishment at the passing camel, admiring the grace of the white ass, and laughing at the comic performances of Zavali.
At one place, Barbara, seeing a bit of green hanging from a low loggia, stretched out his neck and, grasping it with his lips, tore it down. A cry of terror broke forth from the women who were leaning over the loggia, and the cry spread to other loggias. The people from the river laughed loudly, crying out, as though it were the carnival season and they were behind masks:
“Hurrah! Hurrah!”
They were intoxicated by the novelty of the spectacle, and by the invigourating spring air. In front of the house of Rosa Schiavona, in the neighbourhood of Portasale, Binchi-Banche made a sign to stop.
“This is the place,” he said.
It was a very humble one-story house with one row of windows, and the lower walls were covered with inscriptions and ugly figures. A row of bats pinned on the arch formed an ornament, and a lantern covered with reddish paper hung under the window.
This place was the abode of a sort of adventurous, roving people. They slept mixed together, the big and corpulent truckman, Letto Manoppello, the gipsies of Sulmona, horse-traders, boiler-menders, turners of Bucchianico, women of the city of Sant’ Angelo, women of wicked lives, the bag-pipers of Atina, mountaineers, bear-tamers, charlatans, pretended mendicants, thieves, and fortune-tellers. Binchi-Banche acted as a go-between for all that rabble, and was a great protégé of the house of Rosa Schiavona.
When the latter heard the noise of the newcomers, she came out upon the threshold. She looked like a being generated by a dwarf and a sow. Very diffidently she put the question: