Moscardino Read Online Free PDF

looked in the mirror but did not recognize himself, he has seen the bare skull of death inside his face.
    He has opened his mouth to count his teeth feeling they will drop out of his violet-coloured gums one by one before long.
    He has wrapped his head in the shawl to keep out sound, to keep out visions. But the dancing lights suddenly swelled, exploded. Fire, fire, they were burning into his brain and he could not open his eyes.
    He heard that woman’s voice in his ears, a gust of warm breath on his neck, her mouth as that day at the well . . . and a going and coming through the house.
    Tomorrow thou shalt be with God.

    He no more knew which throbbed worse, skull, heart or head, it seemed as if a wind were tearing the shawl from his shoulders.
    A gust of wind, like a gust of wind, he felt two hands clutching his wrists, violently holding . . .
    and that woman’s voice . . .
    Perhaps it is a snare of the devil, and the wind is blowing . . .
    Tomorrow thou shalt be with God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph another fire burst amid the bright dancing spots.
    And the wind pulling his shawl. His head was stunned, it gurgled, flopped, thick and foamy as if the picked bones of his skull were full of red wine-must.
    Death was helping the wind tear his clothes off, must he flee naked?
    They would think he was mad, like his brother . . . They would take him to the Lucca asylum, like his brother . . .
    And another blood-puddle.
    Now they have put a cold shirt on him, they are laying him out in his coffin, they are covering him with a linen sheet, cold, rough, dampish, as when you get into bed in winter after long weeks of wind off the North Mountain, where the sun never comes for three months at a time, and the caves are full of icicles dripping.
    His legs ache. He will never be warm again.
    Jesus, Joseph, Mary, O living bread of Heaven.

    The voice of that woman attacked him, a warm gust of wind on his neck. He seemed to feel her mouth now on one ear, now on the other. He no longer sees red.
    That woman has squirted drops of ink into his eyes, she has sucked out the beast that was gurgling inside him, there in his head that is now black and empty.
    It is night now, the baby stops whimpering, Cleofe is rocking it; rock, beat, double tap the legs of the straw woven chair on the tiled floor with a dull tap.
    Cleofe looked like the Mater Dolorosa with the child Jesus. Resigned, pallid, unweeping. Unwrapped the child which stopped whimpering.
    The night leaned its hairy stomach against the windows, the panes were warm and opaque, beaded with sweat. The window frames showed white, and the divisions between the glass squares. Outside all black, everything black in the room. A single candle is not much to light a whole room. The blackness hides behind pieces of furniture and bulges out round the sides. The bed has leant its shore on the floor tiling, a wedge-shaped shadow which shows exaggeratedly wide and odd.
    It is mussed with the mattresses rolled to the top, the green and red stripes are like furrows at night in a mountain field.
    Sugar is being burnt in a pan, the air feels viscous and sticky. The
smoke passes in front of the mirror of the wardrobe and seems as if it would go on a long way into the darkness. They have washed up the blood spots with salt and water. The candle ogles, flickers onto the damp still remaining there, there is a huge patch between the bed and the window as if someone had dropped a wine flask.
    Cleofe’s shadow appears and disappears on the wall with the child at breast. Were it still you would say it melted into the paleness of the wall so vague that it seems but to continue the things about it.
    Greyness, rain without clatter.
    The sky is hooded over as far as the sea, seemed held up like a canopy by the mountains that edge the horn of Seravezza.
    The tapers of the Misericordia crowd in along the walk that is paved with thin bricks, a thick cloud of smoke a bit above hooded heads.
    When they had got the coffin