The interior of the vehicle was suffocatingly hot and Anania sat beside the driver. He was overwhelmed by memories which almost made him forget the fever of the last few days. He was living again in a distant day, seeing once more the driver with the yellow moustache and the swollen cheeks, who had cracked his whip just as the small thin driver sitting at his side now cracked his.
As the coach neared Mamojada, the vividness of his recollections became almost painful. In the arch made by the coach's hood was depicted the same landscape which Anania had seen that day, his little head drooping on her knee; the same melancholy sky of unvaried blue was stretched above. A sudden breeze swept over the green country with its strong undulating lines and rows of wild bushes. Here and there the violet gleam of water was just visible. The whistle of marsh birds was heard. A shepherd, bronze against a luminous background, watched the horizon.
Here was the Cantoniera. The coach stopped for a few minutes. Sitting on the doorstep carding black wool with iron combs was a woman in the costume of Tonara—swathed in rough cloths like an Egyptian mummy. Three ragged and dirty children were playing or rather quarrelling at a little distance. At a window appeared the gaunt and wan face of a sick woman, who looked at the coach with two great hollow greenish eyes, heavy with fever. The desolate Cantoniera seemed the habitation of hunger, of sickness, of dirt. Anania's heart tightened. He knew perfectly the sad drama which had been played twenty-two years ago in that lonely place, set in that wild fresh landscape which would have been so pure but for the unclean passage of man.
He sighed. And he looked at the shepherd with the dark sarcastic face, erect against the blinding background of sky, and thought that even that poetic figure was a barbarous conscienceless being—like his father, like his mother, like all the creatures scattered over that stretch of desolate earth, in whose minds bad thoughts developed by fatal necessity, like evil vapours in the atmosphere.
The coach resumed its journey. Here was Mamojada hidden in the green of walnuts and gardens; its campanile drawn clear upon the tender blue, as in a conventional water colour. But as the coach moved further along the dusty road, the picture took a darker and a drearier tint. In front of the small black houses, built into the rock, was a group of characteristic figures, all ragged and dirty; pretty women with glossy hair, looped round their ears, sewing or suckling their infants; two Carabinieri; a bored student—from Rome like Anania; a peasant, an old noble who was contadino as well—gossiping, grouped together before a carpenter's workshop, the door of which was hung with bright coloured sacred pictures.
The student knew Anania and went at once to meet him and introduce him to the rest of the company.
"You also are at your studies in Rome?" said the peasant noble, thrusting out his chest and speaking with dignity. "Yes? Then I suppose you know Don Pietro Bonigheddu, a nobleman and head of a department in the Court of Exchequer."
"No," replied Anania, "Rome is a big place and one can't know every one."
"Just so," said the other, with scornful gravity, "but every one knows Don Pietro. He's a rich man. We are relatives. Well, if you do meet him, give him greetings from Don Zua Bonigheddu."
"I will remember," said Anania with an ironical bow. He made the tour of the village with his friend; then set forth again in the coach which resumed its journey. After half an hour's amusement, he fell back again into his memories. Here was the little ruined church, here the garden, here the commencement of the rise to Fonni, here the potato plantation beside which Olì and her child had sat down to rest. Anania remembered the woman hoeing with her skirt kilted up between her legs, and the white cat which had darted at the green lizard gliding over the wall. The picture in the arch of the hood became brighter, the background more luminous. The grey pyramid of Monte Gonare, the cerulean and silver lines of the chain of the Gennargentu were cut into the metal of the sky. Every minute they were nearer and more majestic. Ah yes! Now Anania really breathed his native air—some strange, some atavic instinct seemed to possess him.