From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant Read Free Book Online Page A

Unwin. “Arrive at what? I never get up in the morning without forcing myself to get out of bed, and without tears in my eyes. I have had to stop shaving sometimes because I could not see for tears. I’ve watched the sun rising through the tears of a child left in his first school. If ever I had taken a day in bed nothing would have made me get up again. Not my children, not my life, not my country. How I have envied Carmela, here – hearing her singing at her work.”
    “Well, and how about you, Carmela?” said the clergyman, quite glad to turn his attention to her, it seemed.
    Carmela put her spoon down and said simply, “I have just eaten my way into heaven.”
    “Then I haven’t entirely failed,” the clergyman said.
    Mr. Unwin laughed, then blew his nose. “Let me give you a lift, Padre,” he said. “Think twice about staying. If I were you I would get on that coal boat with the others.”
    T hey left Carmela at what they both seemed to think was a bus stop. Mr. Unwin set her case down and pressed money into her hand without counting it, as he had done last August.
    “The children will miss you,” he said, which must have been the Unwins’ way of saying goodbye.
    As soon as the car was out of sight she began to walk. There
was
a bus, but it was not here that it stopped for passengers. In any case it would not be along until late afternoon, and it did not go as far as Castel Vittorio. Within half an hour she was in a different landscape – isolated, lonely, and densely green. Afarmer gave her a ride on a cart as far as Dolceacqua. She passed a stucco hotel where people sometimes came up from the coast in August to get away from the heat. It was boarded up like the villas she had left behind. After Dolceacqua she had to walk again. The villages along the valley were just as they’d been a year ago. She had forgotten about them. She did not want to lose the taste of the ices, but all she had kept was the look of them – the pink-orange, the pale green, the white with flecks of vanilla, like pepper. She shifted her cardboard suitcase with its rope strap from hand to hand. It was not heavy but cumbersome; certainly much lighter than one of the twins. Sometimes she stopped and crouched beside it in a position of repose she had also forgotten but now assumed naturally. This was a warm clear June day, with towering clouds that seemed like cream piled on a glass plate. She looked up through invisible glass to a fantastic tower of cream. The palms of the coast had given way to scrub and vineyards, then to oaks and beeches and Spanish chestnut trees in flower. She remembered the two men and their strange conversation; they were already the far past. A closer memory was the schoolhouse, and Dr. Barnes and Mussolini and the King in wooden frames. Mr. Unwin weeping at sunrise had never been vivid. He faded first. His tears died with him. The clergyman blushed like a girl and wished Mr. Unwin would stop talking. Both then were lost behind Dr. Chaffee in his dark suit stumbling up the hill. He lifted his hand. What she retained, for the present, was one smile, one gesture, one man’s calm blessing.

The Moslem Wife

    I n the south of France, in the business room of a hotel quite near to the house where Katherine Mansfield (whom no one in this hotel had ever heard of) was writing “The Daughters of the Late Colonel,” Netta Asher’s father announced that there would never be a man-made catastrophe in Europe again. The dead of that recent war, the doomed nonsense of the Russian Bolsheviks had finally knocked sense into European heads. What people wanted now was to get on with life. When he said “life,” he meant its commercial business.
    Who would have contradicted Mr. Asher? Certainly not Netta. She did not understand what he meant quite so well as his French solicitor seemed to, but she did listen with interestand respect, and then watched him signing papers that, she knew, concerned her for life. He was renewing