Vaguely the word “crucifixion” went through her mind. Many people, many women, had surely been crucified since the greatest tragedy the world had ever known. What had they felt, they who were only human, they who could not see the face of the Father, who could—some of them, perhaps—only hope that there was a Father? What had they felt? Perhaps scarcely anything. Perhaps merely a sensation of numbness, as if their whole bodies, and their minds, too, were under the influence of a great injection of cocaine. Her thoughts again returned to the parrot. She wondered where it had been bought, whether it had come with Antonio from America.
Presently she reached the tramway station and stood still. She had to go back to the “Trattoria del Giardinetto.” She must take the tram here, one of those on which was written in big letters, “Capo di Posilipo.” No, not that! That did not go far enough. The other one—what was written upon it? Something—“Sette Settembre.” She looked for the words “Sette Settembre.”
Tram after tram came up, paused, passed on. But she did not see those words on any of them. She began to think of the sea, of the brown body of the bathing boy which she had seen shoot through the air and disappear into the shining water before she had gone to that house where the green parrot was. She would go down to the sea, to the harbor.
She threaded her way across the broad space, going in and out among the trams and the waiting people. Then she went down a road not far from the Grand Hotel and came to the Marina.
There were boys bathing still from the breakwater of the rocks. And still they were shouting. She stood by the wall and watched them, resting her hands on the stone.
How hot the stone was! Gaspare had been right. It was going to be a glorious day, one of the tremendous days of summer.
The nails driven through the green lemon like nails driven through a cross—Peppina—the cross cut on Peppina’s cheek.
That broad-shouldered man who had come in at the door had cut that cross on Peppina’s cheek.
Was it true that Peppina had the evil eye? Had it been a fatal day for the Casa del Mare when she had been allowed to cross its threshold? Vere had said something—what was it?—about Peppina and her cross. Oh yes! That Peppina’s cross seemed like a sign, a warning come into the house on the island, that it seemed to say, “There is a cross to be borne by some one here, by one of us!”
And the fishermen’s sign of the cross under the light of San Francesco?