Having broken the wine flasks and all the glasses, they dispersed, shouting back their last insults through the poplar grove.
Ciavola, Ristabilito, the geese, and La Brevetta were left alone in the yard. The latter, filled with shame, rage, and confusion, his tongue still biting from the acridness of the aloes, was unable to speak a word. Ristabilito stood looking at him pitilessly, tapping the ground with his toe as he stood supported on his heels, and shaking his head sarcastically, then he broke out with an insinuating sneer:
“Ha! ha! ha! ha! Good, good, La Brevetta! Now, tell us how much you got for the pig. Did you get ten ducats?”
VII THE IDOLATERS
I
The great sandy square scintillated as if spread with powdered pumice stone. All of the houses around it, whitened with plaster, seemed red hot like the walls of an immense furnace whose fire was about to die out. In the distance, the pilasters of the church reflected the radiation of the clouds and became red as granite, the Windows flashed as if they might contain an internal conflagration; the sacred images possessed personalities alive with colour; the entire structure, beneath the splendour of this meteoric twilight, assumed a more lofty power of dominion over the houses of Radusani.
There moved from the streets to the square groups of men and women, vociferating and gesticulating. In the souls of all, superstitious terror was rapidly becoming intense; in all of those uncultivated imaginations a thousand terrible images of divine chastisement arose; comments, passionate contentions, lamentable conjurations, disconnected tales, prayers, cries mingled with the ominous rumbling of an imminent hurricane.
Already for many days that bloody redness had lingered in the sky after the sunset, had invaded the tranquillity of the night, illuminated tragically the slumber of the fields, aroused the howls of the dogs.
“Giacobbe! Giacobbe!” cried several while waving their arms who previous to this time had spoken in low voices, before the church, crowded around a pilaster of the vestibule. “Giacobbe!”
There issued from the main door and approached the summoners a long and lean man, who seemed ill with a hectic fever, was bald upon the top of his head, and crowned at the temples and neck with long reddish hair.