Difficult Loves Read Online Free PDF Page B

down over the medlar trees; but when I heard women laughing and a distant child calling, back I came up here. That was the last time; now I'm up here alone. Well, I get frightened of making a mistake every now and again, as you do. And so, like you, I go on as I was before.
    You're afraid of me, of course, and you're right. Not because of that affair, though. That, whether it ever happened or not, was so many years ago it doesn't matter now, anyway.
    That woman, that dark woman who came up here to scythe —I had only been up here a short time then and was still full of human emotions—well, I saw her working high on the slope and she hailed me and I didn't reply and passed by. Yes, I was still full of human emotions then, and of an old resentment, too; and because of that old resentment—not against her, I don't even remember her face—I went up behind her without her hearing me.
    Now, the tale as people tell it is obviously false, for it was late and there wasn't a soul in the valley and when I put my hands around her throat no one heard her. But I would have to tell you my story from the beginning for you to understand.
    Ah, well, let's not mention that evening any more. Here I live, sharing my lettuce with snails that perforate the leaves, and I know all the places where toadstools grow and can tell the good ones from the poisonous; about women and their poisons I don't think any more. Being chaste is nothing but a habit, after all.
    She was the last one, that dark woman with the scythe. The sky was full of clouds, I remember, dark clouds scudding along. It must have been under a hurrying sky like that, on
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    slopes cropped by goats, that the first human marriage took place. In contact between human beings there can only, I know, be mutual terror and shame. That's what I wanted, to see the terror and shame, just the terror and shame, in her eyes; that's the only reason I did it to her, believe me.
    No one has said a word about it to me, ever; there isn't a word they can say, since the valley was deserted that evening. But every night, when the hills are lost in the dark and I can't follow the meaning of an old book by the light of the lantern, and I sense the town with its human beings and its lights and music down below, I feel the voices of you all accusing me.
    But there was no one to see me there in the valley; they say those things because the woman never returned home.
    And if dogs passing by always stop to sniff at a certain spot, and bay and scratch the ground with their paws, it's because there's an old moles' lair there—I swear it, just an old moles' lair.
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    BIG FISH, LITTLE FISH
    Zeffirino's father never wore a proper bathing suit. He would put on rolled-up shorts and an undershirt, a white duck cap on his head; and he never moved from the rocky shore. His passion was limpets, the flat mollusks that cling to the rocks until their terribly hard shell virtually becomes part of the rock itself. Zeffirino's father used a knife to prize them loose. Every Sunday, with his bespectacled stare, he passed in review, one by one, all the rocks along the point. He kept on until his little basket was full of limpets; some he ate as he collected them, sucking the moist, hard flesh as if from a spoon; the others he put in a basket. Every now and then he raised his eyes to glance, somewhat bewildered, over the smooth sea, and call, "Zeffirino! Where are you?"
    Zeffirino spent whole afternoons in the water. The two of them went out to the point; his father would leave him there, then go off at once after his shellfish. Stubborn and motionless as they were, the limpets held no attraction for Zeffirino; it was the crabs, first and foremost, that interested him, then polyps, medusas, and so on, through all the varieties of fish. In the summer his pursuit became more difficult and ingeni-
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    ous; and by now there wasn't a boy his age who could handle a spear gun as well as he could. In the water, those stocky kids, all