Free All Our Yesterdays by Natalia Ginzburg Page B

suffered when it was taken out shooting, because it had never been a sporting dog and the noise of firing frightened it, and also it was hot and it was good for it to plunge into the river. After bathing he would drag off Anna and Giustino to drink grenadine in the village square, and then they would wander round the shops, and Cenzo Rena would buy everything that could be bought in a small village like that, corkscrews and cheese and straw hats, and many yards of unbleached calico to make himself drawers. And the village seemed transformed since he had been there to wander round it. It no longer seemed a tedious village of flies and dust, but it seemed all at once to have turned into an amusing, strange place where there was something strange and amusing to be bought in every shop. Every now and then Giustino would say feebly that perhaps he ought to go back home and get on with his work. But Cenzo Rena told him not to do any work, that it was useless, that the schools in Italy were badly organized and that they made boys study a lot of things that served no purpose in life. He himself had never had any desire to study, and yet now he was quite satisfied with the way in which he had spent his life. All they had taught him at school he had forgotten, the ablative absolute, if he thought about the ablative absolute he found nothing but a black hole and he was frightened of it. And nobody had ever asked him about the ablative absolute when he went to Constantinople or London to arrange sales of shipping. He had found a job which allowed him to make long journeys, and then he would return to his own home, in a small village in the South, and there he could spend his time with the contadini and listen to them, for there was no one who was so well worth listening to as contadini. Giustino and Anna would have to come and visit him in his house for a little, it was a house and not a castle, and there were no towers, goodness only knows how those towers had arisen out of the old man’s head. In the village they called it the castle because they had called it so for years and years. It was the home of his family, an extremely old house, and all he had done was to rearrange it a little. There were no towers, there was just a kind of terrace on the roof, which from a distance might possibly look like a tower, but it was just a terrace and he had put a telescope up there to look at the stars. For a long time he would be travelling, and then he would go back home and he was always pleased to see his own house again, high up on the hill, with the pine wood behind it and below it a tumbled mass of rocks. It was a house without any carpets, he could not be bothered with carpets, and he liked to hear his footsteps echoing through the big rooms. Certainly he had made money from his job as well, but that was not important. It was not important because he could lose the whole of that money at one stroke without blinking an eyelid. He had no special needs. He needed only a little brandy and a few cigarettes, and he begged Anna and Giustino never to let him want for them, even if he suddenly became very poor and ended up in rags on a bench in a public garden. Perhaps they would then be rich and important and would come to his bench in a motor-car with a few bottles of brandy.
    One evening when Cenzo Rena had gone with Giustino to dance on the platform they came home very late and they were both drunk, they both felt ill and Signora Maria had to get up and make coffee and lemonade for them. Next day Cenzo Rena stayed in bed, he was gloomy and green in the face and complaining. The doctor with the chicken-feather hair came to see him, and there was nothing wrong with him, it was just that the wine had made him ill. But the doctor with the chicken-feather hair told Ippolito that there was a scandal in the village, because Cenzo Rena when he was drunk during the dance had started annoying a girl, the daughter of the Superintendent of Police, and