Moscardino by Enrico Pea

detail.
    He laughed over his wasted life. It seemed to me odd that he would get into a passion when he talked of the Emperor of Hell with three heads of hideous colour so big he could eat a sinner in each of his three mouths at once. What excited my terrified fancy were the six black wings on the shoulders of so huge an animal, stuck fast to his midriff in ice.
    As I had heard that many people sell their souls to the devil to get money in this world, I shook with fear at night, when I thought that my grandpop in some need or other in those far countries might have sold his soul to the devil.

    Once he told me that when he was a kid and on the point of drowning he had seen the Madonna.
    That made me cry.
    We were at the hearth and it was raining. My grandfather had put out the light for economy. The room was lit by the embers. I was on the hearth with the Pomeranian bitch. My grandfather on the straw-plaited stool. I hid my teary face in the bitch’s yellow coat.
    My granddad began to mutter through his teeth, then roared at me: Take down that dog! Put down that dog!
    I set the dog on the wooden floor. My granddad got up suddenly, opened the door and drove out the dog. That is the way to bring up cowards, instead of men. If I don’t die too soon I’ll learn ye!
    Shut up the stable! Go feed the sheep! He opened the door. The water groaning in the gutters splashed on my bare head.
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    Foscolo was a small-sized black dog with rather long thin legs, pointed ears and a tail sticking up.
    Our next-door neighbor who was older than granddad and as crotchety had taught Foscolo to walk on his hind feet, to bring back stones, to hunt for a hidden handkerchief, to eat raw onions, to drink wine and hold a lighted pipe in his teeth.
    Our next and wrathy neighbor came in the evenings to sit at our fire, with a gun slung over his shoulder, with Foscolo as lictor.

    The old men got het up and talked of happenings, and I rolled about with the two dogs scraping round on the floor in the dark in the next room.
    That sole distraction, I waited for with infantile joy.
    Those two dogs were my world.
    I was convinced that they knew me by name, I noticed that certain yaps were my name, namely BUCK.
    They called me “Buck” by those yelps as I called them by their names.
    When Foscolo was tied up by the neighbor’s threshing floor, I called him: “Foscolo.” He replied with a long howl always the same, so that I knew he was tied. If on the other hand he was loose, he barked pleasantly, jumping around his old master as if asking permissions. Then I knew he was loose and continued to call him. Sometimes he did not ask permission. He came quickly through the vines, made four capers and rushed away.
    Even my granddad was fond of Foscolo, because he said our Pomeranian bitch had lost her virtue and was no longer any good as a watch dog, since the time she had been carried off with the carts that carry the wine down to the plain of Lucca.
    If you give me Foscolo, I’ll give you the bitch. Pomeranians are scarce in these parts, and I’ll give you a rooster that’s a phenomenon, they’ve promised to bring me from Apulia. It’s a cock without claws.

    It don’t scratch. You can leave it loose during seeding time. Eggs that cock makes will be wanted, you can sell ’em high everywhere.
    The old neighbor laughed in his face, with his pipe wobbling in his mouth, betting that that clawless rooster was a hoax which my educated granddad wanted to put over him a poor old contadino.
    One evening my grandfather said to our neighbor: It won’t be more than a month before Foscolo’s stopping here and I bet you won’t be able to drag him away even if you chain him and try to.
    â€œBaa’ guum, I wanna see thaat.” And he kept Foscolo on leash from thence forward.
    My yellow bitch began to dance and prance about Foscolo who also got playful. But the blondine raced off, into the shrubs, and