ALBERTO MORAVIA
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of violets.
In
addition, the room is a complete chaos of clothes hung
on nails, dirty clothes rolled up, old slippers, socks stiff with perspiration,
crumpled paper, newspapers, empty bottles, all the things that ac–
cumulate in a room that is very rarely cleaned. One of the window
panes is broken; the sink provides nothing but the freezing cold water
of the plain. A hasty examination of the rumpled sheets and their
uncertain whiteness creates a feeling of doubt: either they were badly
washed and not ironed or else somebody has already slept there. The
traveler asks for a towel: a boy in a green and white striped robe and
a blue turban, as beautiful and sweet as a young girl, brings him a
cloth covered with smudges of black fingerprints. Patience.
Later, the traveler wanders through the rest-house waiting for
dinner. As in medieval inns, the rest-house is a bustle of servants,
scullery maids, boys; in the vast murky kitchen, around an immense
black stove in which a red fire blazes, crackling like a blacksmith's forge,
preparations advance in that particular patriarchal manner that Nievo
has described so well in the pages dedicated to the Castello di Fratta.
Meanwhile, the hungry guests wander through the halls chatting amiably,
affectionately: this is a country in which men hold hands or link
fingers and when they meet, they kiss each other on the cheek and on
the mouth. Finally, the doors of the dining room open and the guests
can enter. Still another medieval usage: there is only one long table
at which the guests sit in two rows, like monks in the refectories of
monasteries. The dining room is huge with a ceiling of gigantic white–
washed beams, all crooked and warped, and the walls painted with
decorative red, green, blue and yellow motifs: it seems to belong in an
abstract painting.
But here is the food. A group of servants goes around the table
offering enormous trays heaped with substantial and traditional dishes:
rice pilaf, stuffed egg plant, a fricassee of mutton with pieces of meat
weighing up to ten and twelve ounces immersed in a thick dark sauce,
potatoes roasted whole and other similar dishes, good though rather
heavy. On the table arranged in nice order there are bowls of tomato
and onion salad; the fruit course consists of a strange fruit that looks
like a lemon and is instead an orange, but has the sweet taste of a
tangerine. The guests eat in silence, in a kind of ritual hurry that does
not exclude an occasional smile or gesture of greeting. They tell me
that they are, for the most part, officials of the new government. The
cities of Yemen were not prepared for this influx of exiles, of Egyptian
officials of the expeditionary forces, of foreigners on business trips. The
