With unsteady steps, he moved towards the river. The thought of that universal flight as he moved along, occupied profoundly his brain, changed as it was by the fumes of the wine. He met two other street dogs, and as an experiment, approached them, but they too slunk away with their tails between their legs, keeping close to the wall and when they had gone some little distance, they began to bark. Suddenly, from every direction, from Bagno da Sant’ Agostino, from Arsenale, from Pescheria, from all the lurid and obscure places around, the roving dogs ran up, as though in answer to a trumpet call to battle and the aggressive chorus of the famishing tribe ascended to the moon.
Turlendana was stupefied, while a sort of vague uneasiness awoke in his soul and he went on his way a little more quickly, stumbling over the rough places in the ground. When he reached the corner of the coopers, where the large barrels of Zazetta were piled in whitish heaps like monuments, he heard the heavy, regular breathing of a beast. As the impression of the hostility of all beasts had taken a hold on him, with the obstinacy of a drunken man, he moved in the direction of the sound, that he might make another experiment.
Within a low barn the three old horses of Michelangelo were breathing with difficulty above their manger. They were decrepit beasts who had worn out their lives dragging through the road of Chieti, twice every day, a huge stage-coach filled with merchants and merchandise. Under their brown hair, worn off in places by the rubbing of the harness, their ribs protruded like so many dried shingles through a ruined roof. Their front legs were so bent that their knees were scarcely perceptible, their backs were ragged like the teeth of a saw, and their skinny necks, upon which scarcely a vestige of mane was left, drooped towards the ground.
A wooden railing inside barred the door.
Turlendana began encouragingly:
“Ush, ush, ush! Ush, ush, ush!”
The horses did not move, but breathed together in a human way. The outlines of their bodies appeared dim and confused through the bluish shadow within the barn, and the exhalations of their breath blent with that of the manure.
“Ush, ush, ush!” pursued Turlendana in a lamenting tone, as when he used to urge Barbara to drink. Again the horses did not stir, and again:
“Ush, ush, ush! Ush, ush, ush!” One of the horses turned and placed his big deformed head upon the railing, looking with eyes which seemed in the moonlight as though filled with troubled water. The lower skin of the jaw hung flaccid, disclosing the gums. At every breath the nostrils palpitated, emitting moist breath, the nostrils closing at times, and opening again to give forth a little cloud of air bubbles like yeast in a state of fermentation.
At the sight of that senile head, the drunken man came to his senses. Why had he filled himself with wine, he, usually so sober? For a moment, in the midst of his forgetful drowsiness, the shape of his dying camel reappeared before his eyes, lying on the ground with his long inert neck stretched out on the straw, his whole body shaken from time to time by coughing, while with every moan the bloated stomach produced a sound such as issues from a barrel half filled with water.