Across the River and Into the Trees

CHAPTER XXII

HE loved the market. A great part of it was close-packed and crowded into several side streets, and it was so con­centrated that it was difficult not to jostle people, unin­tentionally, and each time you stopped to look, to buy, or to admire, you formed an îlot de resistance against the flow of the morning attack of the purchasers.

The Colonel liked to study the spread and high piled cheeses and the great sausages. People at home think mortadella is a sausage, he thought.

Then he said to the woman in the booth, “Let me try a little of that sausage, please. Only a sliver.”

She cut a thin, paper thin, slice for him, ferociously, and lovingly, and when the Colonel tasted it, there was the half smokey, black pepper-corned, true flavor of the meat from the hogs that ate acorns in the mountains.

“I will take a quarter of a kilo.”

The Barone’s lunches for the shooting blinds were of a Spartan quality, which the Colonel respected, since he knew no one should eat much while shooting. He felt, though, that he might augment the lunch with this sausage, and share it with the poler and picker-upper. He might give a slice to Bobby, the retriever, who would be wet through to his hide many times, and enthusiastic still, but shaking with cold.

“Is this the best sausage that you have?” he asked the woman. “Have you nothing that does not show and is reserved for better and steadier customers?”

“This is the best sausage. There are many other sau­sages, as you know. But this is the best.”

“Then give me one eighth of a kilo of a sausage that is highly fortifying, but is not highly seasoned.”

“I have it,” she said. “It is a little new but exactly as you describe.”

This sausage was for Bobby.

But you do not say that you buy sausages for a dog in Italy where the worst crime is to be considered a fool and many people go hungry. You may give expensive sausage to a dog before a man who works for his living and knows what a dog goes through in water in cold weath­er. But you do not buy them, stating your purpose in possessing them, unless you are a fool, or a millionaire from the war and from after.

The Colonel paid for the wrapped-up package and proceeded on through the market inhaling the smell of roasted coffee and looking at the amount of fat on each carcass in the butcher section, as though he were enjoy­ing the Dutch painters, whose names no one remembers, who painted, in perfection of detail, all things you shot, or that were eatable.

A market is the closest thing to a good museum like the Prado or as the Accademia is now, the Colonel thought.

He took a short cut, and was at t…