532
PARTISAN REVIEW
Meanwhile, having gone back to his sleeping place, Marco–
valdo pressed the bedraggled clump of ranunculi to his nose,
trying to fill his sense of smell to the brim with their perfume,
but he could press very little from those almost odorless £lowers.
Still the fragrance of dew, of earth, and of trampled grass was al–
ready a great balm. He dispelled the obsession of garbage and
slept.
It
was dawn.
His waking was a sudden explosion of sun-filled sky above
his head, a sun that virtually obliterated the leaves, then restored
them gradually to his half-blinded sight. But Marcovaldo could
not stay because a shiver had made him jump up: the spatter of a
hydrant, which the city gardeners use for watering £lower beds,
made cold streams trickle down his clothes. And all around, trams
were clamoring, trucks going to market, handcarts, pickups, and
workers on motorbikes rushing to factories, and the metal shutters
of shops being yanked up, and the blinds being rolled up at house
windows whose panes were glittering. His mouth and eyes sticky,
his back stiff, and one hip bruised, bewildered, Marcovaldo rushed
to work
A SATURDAY OF SUN, SAND, AND SLEEP
"For your rheumatism," the Public Health doctor had
said, "this summer you should take some sand treatments." And
so, one Saturday afternoon, Marcovaldo was exploring the banks
of the river, looking for a place where the sand was dry and in the
sun. But wherever there was sand, the river was only a clank of
rusty chains; dredgers and derricks were at work: machines as old
as dinosaurs digging into the river and emptying giant spoonfuls
of sand into the contractors' dump trucks parked there among the
willows. The conveyor line of buckets rose erect and descended
overturned, and the cranes lifted on their long necks pelicanlike
gullets spilling gobbets of the black muck of the riverbed. Marco–
valdo bent to touch the sand, crushed it in his palm; it was wet, a
mush, a mire: even where the sun had formed a dry and crumbling
crust, an inch below it was still damp.
Marcovaldo's children, whom their father had brought
along hoping to put them to work covering him with sand,
