“He is the very image of Peppino,” I replied; but I noticed that he also had Brancaccia’s blue eyes, and was promising to have her black hair.
We arrived at the Albergo della Madonna (con giardino) and Peppino took me up to my room. Brancaccia had been before us, and had put an enormous bunch of flowers in water on the table to greet me. I went out on the balcony, just to make sure that the panorama was still there, and, after putting myself straight, descended into the garden, where I found Peppino waiting for me, and where we were to have tea in the English manner—”sistema Inglese,” as Brancaccia said.
The English system is not always in working order at a moment’s notice, so we had time for a walk round. The afternoon breeze was conducting a symphony of
perfumes, and, as we strolled among the blossoms that were the orchestra, we could identify the part played by each flower; sometimes one became more prominent, sometimes another, but always through the changing harmonies we could distinguish the stately canto fermo of the roses, counterpointed with a florid rhythm from the zagara. If Flaubert had been writing in Sicilian, he could have said “una corona di zagara,” or, in English, “a wreath of orange-blossoms,” and he need not have worried himself to death by trying to elude the recurrent “de” of “une couronne de fleurs d’oranger.” There was also music of another kind coming from a passero solitario (the blue rock thrush) who was hanging in a cage in a doorway. We spoke to him, and he could not have made more fuss about us if we had been the King of Italy and the Pope of Rome paying him a visit.
I said, “Aren’t you pleased with your beautiful garden, Peppino?”
He replied, “Yes, and other things too. Sometimes I am cross with my life; but I think of Brancaccia and the baby, and I look around me, and then I says to myself, ‘Ah, well, never mind! Be a good boy!’“
Presently we came to a fountain which, when I turned a tap, twisted round and round, spouting out graceful, moving curves, and the drops fell in the basin below and disturbed the rose-leaves that were sleeping on the water. I also found an image of the Madonna and Bambino in a corner, with an inscription in front promising forty days’ indulgence to anyone who should recite devoutly an Ave before it. I understood this as well as one who is not a Roman Catholic can be said to understand such a promise, and better than I understood another image to which Peppino called my attention. It was a small coloured crockery S. Giuseppe, standing on the top of the wall and looking into the garden, protected by a couple of tiles arranged over him as an inverted V, and held in place by dabs of mortar.
I said, “Why do you keep your patron saint on the wall like that?”
He replied that it had nothing to do with him. The land over the wall belongs to the monks, and they put the saint up to gaze into the garden in the hope that Peppino’s father might thereby become gradually illuminated with the idea of giving them a piece of his land; they wanted it to join to their own, which is rather an awkward shape just there. The influence of S. Giuseppe had already been at work four years, but Peppino’s father still remained obstinately unilluminated.
Carmelo brought the tea and set a chair for Ricuzzu, who has his own private meals like other babies but likes to sit up to the table and watch his father and mother having theirs, occasionally honouring their repast by trying his famous six—or is it seven?—teeth upon a crust, which he throws upon the ground when he has done with it. So we all four sat together in the shade of the Japanese medlar-tree and talked about the changes in the town since my last visit.