"There!" said Nanna, when she had kissed him, "I couldn't help it. It will wash off, dear. It won't prevent the flower-smelling kisses of the golden girls who will pick you up like a sugar plum."
Anania made no protests, but this thrust into reality restored his moral equilibrium and cancelled the burning sensation given him by the kiss of Agata.
When he got home he opened Nanna's parcel, and found it contained thirteen soldi (half-pence).
"I hope you've been to your godfather," said Aunt Tatàna.
"I'm going at once after dinner," he replied.
But after dinner he went into the courtyard and stretched himself on a mat under the elder tree, round which buzzed the bees and the flies. The air was warm. Between the boughs Anania saw great white clouds floating across the blue heaven. An infinite sweetness fell from those clouds. It seemed a rain of warm milk. Distant memories, wandering, changing, like the clouds, passed through his mind confused with recent impressions. Now he was back in the dreary landscape guarded by the sounding pines, where his father had ploughed and sown the padrone's corn. The sounding of the pines is like the voice of the sea. The sky is deeply, monotonously blue. Anania remembered the lines—whose? Baudelaire's perhaps?—
"Blue the colour of her eyes,
Deep and empty as the skies."
The eyes of Margherita? No, that was an insult to her! But it was satisfactory to be able to quote such an original verse—
"Blue the colour of her eyes,
Deep and empty as the skies."
Who is that behind the pine-tree? The postman with the red whiskers! On his head he wears a crow with outstretched wings. It is pecking hard at the poor man's forehead.