red wherever the sun was warm or the people
liked to laugh.

From time to time I thought of my mother: I sent her money. I shivered a
little when I saw a Madonna, for all Madonnas have the smile that our
mother has for our infancy. I thought of her, but I never went home. I
was Pipistrello the champion-wrestler. I was a young Hercules, with a
spangled tunic in lieu of a lion-skin. I was a thousand years, ten
thousand leagues, away from the child of Orte. God is just. It is just
that I die here, for in my happy years I forgot my mother. I lived in
the sunlight--before the crowds, the nervous crowds of Italy--singing,
shouting, leaping, triumphing; and I forgot my mother alone in the old
chamber above the Tiber--quite alone, for my grandam was dead. That I
have slain what I have slain--that is nothing. I would do the same thing
again had I to live my life again. Yes, without pause or mercy would I
do it. But my mother--she has lived alone, and she is mad. That is my
crime.

I was a tall, strong youth, full of courage and handsome to the eye of
women: I led a life noisy and joyous, and for ever in movement. I was
what my father had been before me. So they all said. Only I liked to
finger a book, and my father never had looked inside one, and out of
remembrance of the belief of my mother I uncovered my head as I passed a
church or saw a shrine, and to do this had not been in my father's
habits. In these years I made a great deal of money--a great deal, at
least, for a stroller--but it went as fast as it came. I was never a
vicious man, nor a great gambler or drinker, yet my plump pieces soon
took wing from my pocket, for I was very gay and I liked to play a
lover's part. My life was a good life, that I know: as for the life of
the rich and of the noble, I cannot tell what it is like, but I think it
is of a surety more gloomy and mournful than mine. In Italy one wants so
little. The air and the light, and a little red wine, and the warmth of
the wind, and a handful of maize or of grapes, and an old guitar, and a
niche to sleep in near a fountain that murmurs and sings to the mosses
and marbles,--these are enough, these are happiness in Italy. And it is
not difficult to have thus much, or was not so in those days. I was
never very poor, but whenever money jingled in my purse I treated all
the troop and half the town, and we laughed loud till daybreak.

I was never aught save Pipistrello--Pipistrello the wrestler, who jumped