A Small Place in Italy by Eric Newby Page B

time saying, so far as either of us could understand, how happy he was to see us.
    But what was more extraordinary, so far as I was concerned, was that, when he began the pumping treatment he said, perfectly audibly, after having more or less cut me dead up to now, ‘Adesso ricordo!’ (‘Now I remember!’)
    What he said was mysterious, if not ambiguous. Unless I knew, which I now did without a shadow of doubt, that he, Attilio, and the old man in the mountains of twenty-odd years ago were not one and the same, I would have thought that when he said, ‘Adesso ricordo!’ he was remembering that time, whereas what he was presumably referring to was our brief encounter five months ago. I gave up. Two storytellers, both of whom could make things, both of whom were religioso , one of whom, possibly both of whom prayed by their bedsides, although there must be, I realized, whole hordes of little old men in Italy who do just that, were more than I could cope with. Eventually the whole thing was resolved when I asked Signora Angiolina if Attilio had ever gone away from home during the war. She said categorically no, he hadn’t. I was sorry I asked. Perhaps it would have been better if it had remained a mystery but short of having a sphinx on the premises at I Castagni I could hardly complain.
    Anyway I didn’t care. What he had just said to me gave me the same feelings of pleasure that I would experience in the futurewhen Signora Angiolina said to me ‘Hai fatto bene!’ To be remembered by Attilio was different from being remembered by any Tom, Dick or Harry, or even General de Gaulle. He never enlarged on what he meant again. Now, however, to show where his sympathies lay, he attached himself, as it were, to our suite and prepared to walk with us in the procession.
    It was at this moment that the priest gave some kind of inconspicuous signal, but one that was sufficient to set the whole thing in motion, and we all began to move uphill with the priest in the van, flanked by the acolytes, followed by Christ nailed to the Cross and the two men carrying the black and silver banner flapping madly in the wind, and behind them the main body of whom I was certainly the only Protestant present, snuffling and sneezing, for a number of them had already contracted nasty colds, sometimes chanting, sometimes reciting the rosary or saying various Lenten prayers, but somehow contriving not to do all these at the same time, which would have resulted in pandemonium.
    The priest, although he looked rather old, was fearfully fit. He led us at what amounted to a trot into the teeth of the freezing wind and zoomed us through the winding streets and alleys, flanked by secretive-looking houses that made up Fosdinovo, mediaeval streets and alleys in which, this Friday afternoon, almost every house had at least one window with a candle burning in it, to welcome the procession.
    Some windows were draped in funereal Lenten black, others were less lugubrious with white lace curtains and some were positively jolly with flowers displayed in them. We passed an ancient Malaspina theatre that was no longer a theatre and a Malaspina Mint that was no longer a mint. It only minted fifty genuine coins in its entire history. The rest, which were exported to Genova and France, were all false.
    And there were shops, some of them minute, also illuminatedwith candles. Shops that sold wine, spades, handsaws and other ironware, hand-knitted socks with the natural grease still in them, and magazines giving the latest low-down on what was currently going on with the Grimaldis in the Principality of Monaco, events on which all Italy was hooked.
    And we passed a caffè from the windows of which some of the male occupants looked out on the procession with the curious, slightly derisory air with which men in Italy look out of the windows of caffès at religious processions. That is if they are agnostic, communist, or simply not taking part in the procession for their own