All Our Yesterdays Read Online Free PDF Page A

He said, Papa wants to take a long nap after lunch to-day. Papa is very old ”. Then the Signora began to get angry and to look out of the window because of Emanuele failing to arrive. Emanuele was the one who was about the same age as Ippolito, and he arrived almost at the end of lunch. He was lame, and he arrived all red and sweating from the fatigue of limping. He looked like Giuma, except that he hadn’t teeth like a wolf; he had broad, square teeth that stuck out over his lips. After lunch they wrapped the old gentleman up in a rug on the sofa and put a scarf over his eyes because otherwise he could not sleep, and then left him there.
    Anna and Giuma played ping-pong. She had told him that she did not know how to play, so certain was she now that they would not become friends, so that it did not matter to her what he might think. He said he would teach her how to play, it was easy. While they were playing the man in the slippers came and watched. He was called Franz. He was small, with light eyes and a face which was sunburnt and all furrowed. He and Giuma began punching each other and chasing each other round the garden. Anna sat and looked at them, playing idly with the ping-pong ball. The dog was not there because it had been sent to some friends of theirs in order to be mated. When it grew dark, Signora Maria called to Anna from the window and she went home.
    Her father’s funeral took place soon afterwards. Anna had imagined a real funeral with priests and white lilies and a cross. But she had forgotten that her father disliked priests. So there were no priests and no lilies. There were some of Concettina’s fianc é s, in fact the most important of them : Danilo and two or three others. Then there was the music-master who still wanted to know in what way he had offended the old man, and he asked Concettina’s fiancés and Signora Maria’s nephew if they knew. While the old man was ill he had written him letters in which he said he was consumed with regret at having offended him without knowing why, and he asked for his forgiveness whatever the reason might be. But the old man had not read any of the letters, because he was too ill.
    They buried the old man beside his wife in the cemetery and Concettina started sobbing violently. Then the people who had come said farewell, with the usual mysterious, ceremonious air, to the relations of the dead, and the latter went back home, and at home they sat down to dinner and there was macaroni and vegetables as on any other, ordinary day.
    Signora Maria made her nephew come to the house to take a bath, because he had no conveniences in the room where he lodged and the public baths were so crowded; and Concettina was annoyed and said to Ippolito that that nephew of Signora Maria’s would always be getting in their way now. Ippolito no longer had to do typewriting and read aloud, and now he was studying for his solicitor’s exams, walking up and down the terrace with a book in his hand ; each of them knew that he could do what he liked now; Giustino brought home four white mice in a cage that he had bought out of his savings and said he would tame them; and Signora Maria complained that they stank horribly. Anna believed that in a house where someone had died no one ought to laugh for a very long time : instead of which, a few days after the funeral, Concettina was laughing like a madwoman with her and Giustino, because she had made herself a false bosom with wool out of a mattress.
    There was a great freedom in the house. But it was a freedom that was a little alarming. There was no longer anyone to give orders. Every now and then Ippolito made a kind of attempt to give orders, but nobody paid any attention to him, and he would shrug his shoulders and go back and walk up and down the terrace again. He and Signora Maria quarrelled over money. Signora Maria said Ippolito was mean, and also that he was suspicious and did not trust her. There