I felt sure he could sympathise with the state of my mind, etc.
etc.
Thus I spoke while perfect innocence, mother of invention, lent wings to
my words, and while thinking all the time: You little vermin, what are
you doing here, in that chair, when you should be delving the earth or
breaking stones, as befits your kind? I tried to picture myself climbing
up Muretta with a theodolite bulging out of my pocket. A flagon of port
would have been more in my line. Calculations! It is all I can do to
control my weekly washing bill, and even for that simple operation I
like to have a quiet half hour in a room by myself. Instruments! If this
young fellow, I thought, discovers so much as an astrolabe among my
belongings, let them hang me from the ramparts at daybreak! And the
delegato, listening, was finally moved by my rhetoric, as they often
are, if you can throw not only your whole soul, but a good part of your
body, into the performance. He found the idea sufficiently reasonable.
The subordinate, as might have been expected, had nothing whatever to
do; like all of his kind, he was only in that office to evade military
service.
We drove away and, on reaching our destination, I insisted, despite his
polite remonstrances, on turning everything upside down. We made hay of
the apartment, but discovered nothing more treasonable than some rather
dry biscuits and a bottle of indifferent Marsala.
"And now I must really be going," he said. "Half-past one! He will be
surprised at my long absence."
"I am coming with you. I promised him the passport."
"Don't dream of it. To-morrow, to-morrow. You will have no trouble with
him. You can bring the passport, but he will not look at it. Yes; ten
o'clock, or eleven, or midday."
So it happened. The passport was waived aside by the official, a little
detail which, I must say, struck me as more remarkable than anything
else. He did not even unfold it.
"E stato un' equivoco," was all he condescended to say, still without a
smile. There had been a misunderstanding.
The incident was closed.
Things might have gone differently in the country. I would either have
been marched to the capital under the escort of a regiment of
carbineers, or kept confined in some rural barracks for half a century
while the authorities were making the necessary researches into the
civil status of my grandmother's favourite poet - an inquiry without
which no Latin dossier is complete.
POSTSCRIPT. - Why are there so many carbineers at Orvinio? And how many
of these myriad public guardians scattered all over the country ever
come into contact with a criminal, or even have the luck to witness a
street accident? And would the taxpayer not profit by a reduction in
their numbers?
