She had a room, she
said, where I could rest; there was also food, such as it was, cheese,
and wine, and - -
"Fruit?" I queried.
"Ah, you like fruit? Well, we may not so much as speak about it just
now - the cholera, the doctors, the policeman, the prison! I was going to
say salami."
Salami? I thanked her. I know Calabrian pigs and what they feed on,
though it would be hard to describe in the language of polite society.
Despite the heat and the swarms of flies in that chamber, I felt little
desire for repose after her simple repast; the dame was so affable and
entertaining that we soon became great friends. I caused her some
amusement by my efforts to understand and pronounce her language - these
folk speak Albanian and Italian with equal facility - which seemed to my
unpractised ears as hopeless as Finnish. Very patiently, she gave me a
long lesson during which I thought to pick up a few words and phrases,
but the upshot of it all was:
"You'll never learn it. You have begun a hundred years too late."
I tried her with modern Greek, but among such fragments as remained on
my tongue after a lapse of over twenty years, only hit upon one word
that she could understand.
"Quite right!" she said encouragingly. "Why don't you always speak
properly? And now, let me hear a little of your own language."
I gave utterance to a few verses of Shakespeare, which caused
considerable merriment.
"Do you mean to tell me," she asked, "that people really talk like that?"
"Of course they do."
"And pretend to understand what it means?"
"Why, naturally."
"Maybe they do," she agreed. "But only when they want to be thought
funny by their friends."
The afternoon drew on apace, and at last the pitiless sun sank to rest.
I perambulated Spezzano in the gathering twilight; it was now fairly
alive with people. An unclean place; an epidemic of cholera would work
wonders here. . . .
At 9.30 p.m. the venerable coachman presented himself, by appointment;
he was to drive me slowly (out of respect for his horse) through the
cool hours of the night as far as Vaccarizza, on the slopes of the Greek
Sila, where he expected to arrive early in the morning. (And so he did;
at half-past five.) Not without more mirth was my leave-taking from the
good shopwoman; something, apparently, was hopelessly wrong with the
Albanian words of farewell which I had carefully memorized from our
preceding lesson.
