Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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DON MA TTEO’S MISSION
71
DON MATTEO’S MISSION
One afternoon the old priest, Don Matteo, inserted
his feet into newly polished shoes, put on a newly
brushed soutane, and laid his cloak in the most
effective folds. His face shone as he went up the
street, and when he distributed blessings to the old
women spinning by the doorposts, it was with
gestures as graceful as if he had scattered roses.
The street along which Don Matteo was walking
was spanned by at least seven arches, as if every
house wished to bind itself to a neighbor. It ran
small and narrow down the mountain; it was half
street and half staircase; the gutters were always
overflowing, and there were always plenty of
orange-skins and cabbage-leaves to slip on. Clothes hung
on the line, from the ground up to the sky. Wet
shirt-sleeves and apron-strings were carried by the
wind right into Don Matteo’s face. And it felt
horrid and wet, as if Don Matteo had been touched
by a corpse.
At the end of the street lay a little dark square,
and there Don Matteo saw an old house, before
which he stopped. It was big, and square, and
almost without windows. It had two enormous
flights of steps, and two big doors with heavy locks.
And it had walls of black lava, and a “loggia,”
where green slime grew over the tiled floor, and
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