“Good-night, Mariuccia! it is cold, we must hurry.”
“Andiamo presto: Let us hasten; I too am in fretta (a hurry); we must carry the infant to the church to-night.”
There was no getting rid of Mariuccia; the lid of the chest clap-clapped with every step she took; the thing smelt of mortality.
“Where did the chest come from?”
“’Gnora, a few years ago when they built the railway an ancient cemetery was disturbed. The bones of those who had been buried were all put into the new graveyard, and such of the coffins as were whole were stored in that old ruined church. When the very poor have need, they help themselves. I am taking this to my cousin, but I would not have it known by the neighbors, so I waited till dark, and, as you see, I am taking it home by the quietest way.”
We were at last at our own door.
“Buona notte, Mariuccia.”
“Felicissima notte, ’Gnora.”
J. says things have changed very little since he made his first trip through the Abruzzi in the early eighties. He with two other artists went first to Saracinesco, where they stayed at the house of Belisario, the son of an old model of Fortuny’s (the great Spanish painter). They had heard about the place from another Roman model called Fagiolo or the Bean. When Fagiolo was a boy, his father gave him a large bag of beans one morning and sent him out to plant a field. It was a fine, bright day, and the boy, meeting other boys, decided to put off his work till afternoon and went off birds’-nesting. Suddenly the sun began to set and he realized that he had done nothing with the beans. He hurried to the field, and digging one deep hole buried all the beans; then he went home.
“You are late, my son. Where have you been?” asked the father.