GRIGIA
17
There were, indeed, peculiar people living at the head of
this
valley. Their forefathers had come here from Germany, to work in the
mines, in the times when the bishops of Trent were mighty, and
they were still like some ancient weathered German boulder flung
down in the Italian landscape. They had partly kept and partly for–
gotten their old way of life, and what they had kept of it they them–
selves probably no longer understood. In the spring the mountain
torrents wrenched away the earth from under them, so that there
were houses that had once stood on a hill and were now on the
brink of an abyss; but nobody lifted a finger to contend with the
danger, and by a reverse process the new age was drifting into their
houses, casting up all sorts of dreadful rubbish. One came across cheap,
shiny cupboards, oleographs and humorous postcards. But sometimes
too there would be a saucepan that their forebears might well have
used in Luther's time. For they were Protestants; but even though it
was doubtless no more than this dogged clinging to their beliefs that
had prevented their being Italianized, they were certainly not good
Christians. Since they were poor, almost all the men left their wives
shortly after marrying and went to America for years on end; when
they came back, they brought with them a little money they had
saved, the habits learned in urban brothels, and the irreligion, but
not the acuity, of civilization.
Right at the beginning Homo heard a story that interested him
extraordinarily. Not long before-it might have been some fifteen
years previously-a peasant who had been away for a long time
came home from America and bedded with his wife again. For a
while they rejoiced because they were reunited, and they lived without
a care until the last of his cash had melted away. Then, when the
rest of his savings, which had been supposed to come from America,
still failed to arrive, the peasant girded himself up and-as all the
peasants in this district did-went out to earn a living as a peddler,
while his wife continued to look after the unprofitable smallholding.
But he did not come back. Instead, a few days later, on a smallholding
some distance from the first, the peasant returned from America,
reminded his wife how long it had been, exactly to the day, asked to
be given a meal exactly the same as that they had had on the day
he left, remembered
all
about the cow that no longer existed, and got
on decently with the children sent him by Heaven during the years
