The Cloven Viscount by Italo Calvino

Author:Italo Calvino
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

7

AROUND Pratofungo grew bushes of mint and hedges of rosemary, and it was not clear if these were wild or the paths of some herb garden. I used to wander round them breathing in the laden air and trying to find some way of reaching old Sebastiana.

Since Sebastiana had vanished along the track leading to the leper village, I remembered that I was an orphan more often. I despaired of ever getting news of her; I asked Galateo, calling out to him from the top of a tree I had climbed when he passed, but Galateo was no friend of children, who sometimes used to throw live lizards at him from treetops, and he only gave me jeering and incomprehensible replies in that treacly squeaky voice of his. Now to my curiosity to enter Pratofungo was added a yearning to see the old nurse again, and I was forever meandering around the ordoriferous bushes.

Once from a tangle of thyme rose a figure in a light-colored robe and straw hat, which walked off towards the village. It was an old leper, and wanting to ask him about the nurse I got close enough for him to hear me without shouting and said, "Hey, there, sir leper!"

But at that moment, perhaps woken by my words, right by me rose another figure, who sat up and stretched. His face was all scaly like dried bark, and he had a sparse woolly white beard. He took a whistle out of his pocket and blew a jeering blast in my direction. I realized then that the sunny afternoon was full of lepers lying hidden in the bushes; now very slowly they began rising to their feet in their light-colored robes and they walked against the sun towards Pratofungo, holding musical instruments or gardening tools with which they set up a great din. I had drawn away from the bearded man, but nearly bumped right into a noseless leper combing his hair among the laurels, and however much I went jumping off through the undergrowth I kept on running into other lepers and began to realize that the only direction I could move was towards Pratofungo, whose thatched roofs stuck over with eagles' feathers were now quite close, at the foot of the slope.

Only now and again did the lepers pay me any attention, with winks of the eye and notes of the mouth organ, but I felt that the real center of that march was myself, and that they were accompanying me to Pratofungo as if I were a captured animal. The house walls in the village were painted mauve and at a window a half-dressed woman with mauve marks on face and breasts was calling out, "The gardeners are back!" and was playing on a lyre. Other women now appeared at windows and balconies waving tom-bounties and singing, "Gardeners, welcome back!"

I was being very careful to keep in the middle of the lane and not touch anyone, but I found myself at a kind

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