I never wished to be disobedient, but, somehow, ten minutes after I was out of her sight I was high above on some tower or belfry, with the martens and the pigeons circling about my curly head. I was so happy on high there, looking down on all the old town misty with dust, the men and women like ants on an antheap, the historic river like a mere ribbon, yellow and twisted, the palaces and the tombs all hidden under the same gray veil of summer dust! I was so happy there!—and they spoke of making me into a monk, or, if I would not hear of that, of turning me into a clerk in a notary's office!
A monk? a clerk? when all the trees cried out to me to climb and all the birds called to me to fly! I used to cry about it with hot tears that stung my face like lashes, lying with my head hidden on my arms in the grass by the old Tiber water. For I was not twelve years old, and to be shut up in Orte always, growing gray and wrinkled as the notary had done over the wicked, crabbed, evil-looking skins that set the neighbors at war! The thought broke my heart. Nevertheless, I loved my mother, and I mended my quills, and tried to write my best, and said to the boys of the town, "I cannot bend iron or leap or race any more. I am going to write for my bread in the notary's office a year hence, for my mother wishes it, and so it must be."
And I did my best not to look up to the jackdaws circling round the towers or the old river running away to Rome. For all the waters cried to me to leap, and all the birds to fly. And you cannot tell, unless you have been born to do it as I was, how good it is to climb and climb and climb, and see the green earth grow pale beneath you, and the people dwindle till they are small as dust, and the houses fade till they seem like heaps of sand. The air gets so clear around you, and the great black wings flap close against your face; and you sit astride where the bells are, with some quaint stone face beside you that was carved on the pinnacle here a thousand years and more ago, and has hardly been seen of man ever since; and the white clouds are so near you that you seem to bathe in them; and the winds toss the trees far below, and sweep by you as they go down to torment the trees and the sea, the men that work, and the roofs that cover them, and the sails of their ships in the ocean. Men are so far from you, and heaven seems so near! The fields and the plains are lost in the vapors that divide you from them, and all their noise of living multitudes comes very faintly to your ear, and sweetly like the low murmuring of bees in the white blossoms of an acacia in the month of May.
But you do not understand, you poor toilers in cities who pace the street and watch the faces of the rich.
I was to be a notary's clerk—I, called Pipistrello (the bat) because I was always whirling and wheeling in air. I was to be a clerk, so my mother and grandmother decided for me, with the old notary himself who lived at the corner, and made his daily bread by carrying fire and sword where he could through the affairs of his neighbors. He was an old rascal, but my mother did not know that: he promised to be a safe and trustworthy guardian of my youth, and she believed he had power to keep me safe from all dangers of destiny. She wanted to be sure that I should never run the risks of my father's career: she wanted to see me always before the plate of herb soup on her table. Poor mother!
One day in Orte chance gave me another fate than this of her desires.
One fine sunrise on the morning of Palm Sunday I heard the sharp sound of a screeching fife, the metallic clash of cymbals, the shouts of boys, the rattle of a little drum. It was the rataplan beating before a troop of wrestlers and jugglers who were traversing the Marche and Reggio Emilia. The troop stationed themselves in a little square burnt by the sun and surrounded by old crumbling houses: I ran with the rest of the lads of Orte to see them. Orte was in holiday guise: aged, wrinkled, deserted, forgotten by the world as she is, she made herself gay that day with palms and lilies and lilac and the branches of willow; and her people, honest, joyous, clad in their best, who filled the streets and the churches and wine-houses, after mass flocked with one accord and pressure around the play-place of the strollers.
It was in the month of April: outside the walls and on the banks of Tiber, still swollen by the floods of winter, one could see the gold of millions of daffodils and the bright crimson and yellow of tulips in the green corn. The scent of flowers and herbs came into the town and filled its dusky and narrow ways; the boatmen had green branches fastened to their masts; in the stillness of evening one heard the song of crickets, and even a mosquito would come and blow his shrill little trumpet, and one was willing to say to him "Welcome!" because on his little horn he blew the good news, "Summer is here!" Ah, those bright summers of my youth! I am old now—ay, old, though I have lived through only twenty-five years.
This afternoon, on Palm Sunday, I ran to see the athletes as a moth flies to the candle: in Italy all the world loves the saltinbanco, be he dumb or speaking, in wood or in flesh, and all Orte hastened, as I hastened, under the sunny skies of Easter. I saw, I trembled, I laughed: I sobbed with ecstasy. It was so many years that I had not seen my brothers! Were they not my brothers all?
This day of Palm, when our Orte, so brown and so gray, was all full of foliage and blossom like an old pitcher full of orange-flowers for a bridal, it was a somewhat brilliant troop of gymnasts which came to amuse the town. The troop was composed of an old man and his five sons, handsome youths, and very strong, of course. They climbed on each other's shoulders, building up a living pyramid; they bent and broke bars of iron; they severed a sheep with one blow of a sword; in a word, they did what my father had done before them. As for me, I watched them stupefied, fascinated, dazzled, drunk with delight, and almost crazy with a torrent of memories that seemed to rain on me like lava as I watched each exploit, as I heard each shout of the applauding multitudes.