Moscardino by Enrico Pea Page A

came back sidling up and sniffing and moving off with odd movements such as I had observed in unbroken colts.
    Catch me if you can, she seemed to say to her fiancé, who looked at her with infantile patience as engaged lovers who play at having secrets and excuse the capriciousness and coaxings as if happy to be more childish than they actually are,
    to reduce themselves to greater weakness despite their having double the strength of the weak female,
    they come to playing blind man’s buff
    in the hedge like butterflies, like the blondine Pomeranian and Foscolo.

    My grandfather sent me to call our neighbor and when we got back the fiancés were already married, behind a rosebush.
    There you are, old cock, right there in the bed where the violets bloom in April.
    But now it is winter and the hummock is green and the rosebush is a bundle of thorns.
    But do you think those dry twigs haven’t love sap under the ground? Do you think they haven’t subterranean witnesses to their amours, like us watching Foscolo and his blondine?
    And do you think this grass — fur hasn’t an amorous hook — up under the ground?
    You will see, after their pregnancy, their sons will be born, thick on the hills as sand in a riverbed. Believe me, old sock, we are the ugliest of the lot. We are all dogs of one breed or another.
    Foscolo was now standing quiet, almost asleep with his black muzzle on the yellow Pom’s neck.
    That’s it, Buck, that’s how your father begot you. And that’s how you’ll beget yours when you’re married.
    We are all dogs of one sort or another. It’s a shame to talk like that to a kid nine years old, said the peasant.
    Tell him with cleaner words, you old bugger, if you can find ’em. How did you come into this world?
    And now take away Foscolo and keep him on chain.

    Foscolo is no more use now.
    Nothing is holy save the field where he has planted his seed, for continuity, or if you like, for immortality.
    If we were talking of Buck’s seed I would say immortality. Man is made in God’s image; and one should burn incense to him.
    The old neighbor looked bewildered and scandalized. He looked at me, and moved his shut fist over his mouth, lifted his elbow to ask if granddad was drunk.
    I shook my head.
    He shut his mouth. Opened his eyes extra wide. Shrugged his shoulders and went off full of suspicion taking Foscolo with him, tied with his leather belt.
    Grandpop picked up the bitch and said: Now we must treat her respectfully.
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    The Apuleian cock was a common and very scrawny rooster with bare scaly legs of egg yellow.
    He hadn’t even the strut of a cock that serves many hens. He was a bastard little cock who would have become a deballed and crestless capon if my grandfather hadn’t bought him from his original peasant owner.
    Nothing good about him except his white feathers.

    There was a sudden shower the day granddad bought him. The rooster with his legs tied had been chucked on the ground in the shed where we took shelter and had got his wings and belly covered with mud.
    When we got home we washed him with water and soap, and so that he shouldn’t get dirty again, we put him in a barrel to dry, and in the dark to keep him from crowing.
    The downpour had made wash-outs along the banks of the boundary lane and my grandfather noticed that the break was all stones badly piled up, round stones, chunks with no corners such as you find in furrows of fields not before plowed, and that the peasants call field bones.
    Grandpop had been going up that border drive for a long time looking at one thing and another, remembering what had been when he was a boy and went to the vineyard to get in the grapes. He got into a row with the old neighbor about a big fig tree which he had seen when new planted and which seemed to him to be too far on the other side of the boundary line.
    Now the wash-out showed how the boundary line had been shifted. Granddad