At Sant' Angelo he changed to an autobus and finally, toward noon, arrived at the crossroads of Casalino.
It was one of those freakish days in late spring when the air seems to belong to July. The sun brassy hot, the wind at a standstill. No one was anywhere in sight except a carter, a big loutish fellow with an ear trumpet hanging on a string around his neck.
"Hey, boy," the man called out. "For two hundred lire I carry you ... wherever."
Giorgio felt of the two hundred lire in his pocket. Did the man sitting in that rickety old cart have X-ray eyes to make up for his bad ears?
"No, no, thank you," Giorgio replied. "Only a few kilometers I must walk." He started to explain where he was going, and perhaps if the driver seemed friendly he might even confide that the two hundred lire had been saved for a special sugar bowl in a special cupboard in a special house in Monticello. But he stopped short as his eye fell upon the mare hitched to the cart. She had something of the look of his Imperiale, only finer-boned and more Arab. She was a gray, flecked with brown, but too thin by far and her coat dry and harsh.
He wondered if it was the way she jibbed her head and nervously pawed the earth, or just the general look of her that put him in mind of Imperiale. Or was it the wide-set eyes, so dark and smoldering?
"Excuse," he said, stepping up close to the man and mouthing his words slowly, "but the mare—is she by Sans Souci?"
"Eh?" The driver adjusted his ear trumpet, cocking his head in puzzlement. "Eh?"
"I say, is she by Sans Souci?"
"Si, si. She for sale."