"If it happens, what shall I do?" he asked himself, anxiously. "I'll pretend I'm asleep. But, good Lord! what a fool I am!"
The noises in the street and in the neighbouring Piazza of the Pantheon grew fainter and fewer, as if themselves weary and retiring to a place of repose. The belated lodgers came in. Then all was silence in the house, in the street, in the city. But Anania still kept vigil. Perhaps the lamp——
"I'll put it out," he thought and got up. A noise! a rustle! Was the door opening? Oh God! He sprang back into bed, shut his eyes, waited. His heart and his throat pulsed feverishly. The door remained shut. He calmed himself and laughed. But the lamp was left still alight.
[IV]
Rome, June 1st.
"My Margherita, this moment your letter has arrived and I reply at once. At least twenty times in the last few days I have taken my pen to write to you but have not managed it. I have a great deal to tell you. First, I have moved. I fell out with Battista Daga because I caught him kissing the elder of the landlady's girls while he still makes love to the younger one. That made me sick. Besides the place was too far from the University. Now that the heat has begun the long journey to and fro is a bore. As to Daga we made it up next day. I met him close to my new rooms and he said he was coming to look me up, though first he had said he wouldn't. I'm very comfortable here. The new landlady is a Sardinian. She says she was born at Nuoro. She's nice and kind and very pious—quite maternal in her care of me. She has given me her own room, until the departure of a very beautiful English lady whom I'm to replace. This 'Miss' is extraordinarily like you. Don't be jealous though. First, because I'm violently in love with a young lady at Nuoro; secondly because 'Miss' is going away in a few days; thirdly she's as mad as a March hare; fourth she's betrothed; fifthly I'm under the care of all the saints in heaven who are hung round the walls of my room, not to mention the blessed souls in Purgatory. They are illuminated day and night by a taper, which I know not why, seems to me itself a soul at expiation (now I'm writing what you call nonsense).
"Well, I must tell you that at my new landlady's, there are two or three more foreigners, a clerk at the War Office, a Piedmontese tailor, very fashionable and refined, and a French bagman who can fire off eighty lies in eight minutes. He reminds me of your suitor, the most worshipful Signor Franziscu Carchide of Nuoro. Yesterday, for instance, while 'Miss' and the tailor were arguing about the Boer war, Monsieur Pilbert told me, half in French half in Latin, that by force of suggestion he had made the hair come out on his baby's head and in a single hour it grew an inch, then stopped growing and at last set itself Se développer naturellement. Signora Obinu—that's the landlady—has a queer little old Sardinian cook, who has been thirty years in Rome and still can't speak Italian. Poor old Aunt Varvara! She was almost ravished from Sardinia, carried off by a violent padrone, a captain of Dragons (so she calls him) who terrified her. She's black and tiny, like a jana[16] keeps her native costume jealously locked up, and wears a ridiculous gown bought in the Campo dei Fiori, and a bonnet which might have belonged to the Empress Josephine. I often visit Aunt Varvara in her dark and torrid kitchen. We talk in dialect; she weeps, and asks after all the people she knew in the island. She thinks of returning to Sardinia, though she's horribly afraid of the sea and believes the storm in which she crossed to the continent is still going on. She knows nothing of the place she's living in. Rome, for her, is just a place where everything's dear, and a field of danger in which at any moment she may be assaulted by a passing vehicle. She says the trams seem to her like awful stags (she has never seen a stag) and that she can't go to mass at the Pantheon because that church with the round hole on top, like a Sardinian oven, makes her laugh. She wants to know whether in Sardinia we still bake at home. I said yes, and she began to cry, thinking of the jokes and games in the days when she baked bread in her father's oven. Then she asked if there are still shepherds, and if they still sit on the ground under the trees. How she sighed thinking of a certain Easter banquet forty years ago at Goceano! Aunt Varvara can't bear the Englishwoman, and she in her turn regards the old thing as a savage. Sometimes while she does her cooking she sings songs in the Logudorese dialect. Also this dirge which I have heard at Nuoro:
| Dear Hearts, hush-a-bye! | Coro anninnò, anninnò |
| Tis my day to die. | Dego de partire so |
| While I linger still | E de fagher testamentu. |
| Let me make my will. |
"Then in the evening mistress and maid repeat the Rosary in dialect; and it amuses me to join in from my room, because it makes Aunt Varvara furious. She breaks off her prayers to swear at me.
"'Su diaulu chi ti ha fattu' ('Go to the devil who made you!')" she shouts, and the padrona says, changing her voice: