Quite Tired And Desiring Food, Keen Also For Rest After Those
Dispiriting Days, I Stopped, Before Reaching Medesano, At An
Inn where
three ways met; and there I purposed to eat and spend the night, for
the next day, it
Was easy to see, would be tropical, and I should rise
before dawn if I was to save the heat. I entered.
The room within was of red wood. It had two tables, a little counter
with a vast array of bottles, a woman behind the counter, and a small,
nervous man in a strange hat serving. And all the little place was
filled and crammed with a crowd of perhaps twenty men, gesticulating,
shouting, laughing, quarrelling, and one very big man was explaining
to another the virtues of his knife; and all were already amply
satisfied with wine. For in this part men do not own, but are paid
wages, so that they waste the little they have.
I saluted the company, and walking up to the counter was about to call
for wine. They had all become silent, when one man asked me a question
in Italian. I did not understand it, and attempted to say so, when
another asked the same question; then six or seven - and there was a
hubbub. And out of the hubbub I heard a similar sentence rising all
the time. To this day I do not know what it meant, but I thought (and
think) it meant 'He is a Venetian,' or 'He is the Venetian.' Something
in my broken language had made them think this, and evidently the
Venetians (or a Venetian) were (or was) gravely unpopular here.
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