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When they reached the Square, Peppone and his men got out of the truck, surrounded the
little man and forced their way through the crowd to the platform. The little man climbed onto it
and found himself face to face with two thousand men, all wearing the red handkerchief.
He turned to Peppone who had followed him on to the platform. "Excuse me," he inquired,
"but have I by any chance come to the wrong meeting?"
"No," Peppone reassured him. "The fact is that there are only twenty-three Liberals in the
whole district and they don't show up much in a crowd. To tell you the truth, if I had been in your
place, it would never have entered my head to hold a meeting here."
"It seems obvious that the Liberals have more confidence in the democratic discipline of the
Communists than you have," replied the little one.
Peppone looked disconcerted for a moment, then he went up to the microphone.
"Comrades," he shouted. "I wish to introduce to you this gentleman who will make you a speech
that will send you all off to join the Liberal Party."
A roar of laughter greeted this introduction and as soon as it died down the little man began
speaking.
"I want to thank your leader for his courtesy," he said, "but it is my duty to explain to you that
his statement does not express my wishes. Because if at the end of my speech you all went to
join the Liberal Party, I would feel it incumbent upon me to go and join the Communist Party, and
that would be against all my principles."
He was unable to continue, because at that moment a tomato whistled through the air and
struck him in the face.
The crowd began jeering, and Peppone turned white. "Anyone who laughs is a swine!" he
shouted into the microphone, and there was immediate silence.
The little man had not moved and was trying to clean his face with his hand. Peppone was a
child of instinct and quite unconsciously was capable of magnificent impulses; he pulled his
handkerchief from his pocket, then he put it back again and unknotted the vast red kerchief from
his neck and offered it to the little man.
"I wore it in the mountains," he said. "Wipe your face."
"Brave, Peppone!" thundered a voice from the first foor window of a neighboring house.
"I don't need the approval of the clergy," replied Peppone arrogantly, while Don Camillo bit
his tongue with fury at having let his feelings get the better of him.
Meanwhile, the little man had shaken his head, bowed and approached the microphone.
"There is too much history attached to that handkerchief for me to soil it with the traces of a
vulgar episode that belongs to the less heroic chronicles of our times," he said. "A handkerchief
such as we use for a common cold suffices for such a purpose."
Peppone flushed scarlet and also bowed, and then a wave of emotion swept the crowd and
there was vigorous applause while the hooligan who had thrown the tomato was kicked off the
Square.
The little man resumed his speech calmly. He was quiet, without any trace of bitterness;
smoothing off corners, avoiding contention. At the end he was applauded, and when he stepped
down from the platform a way was cleared before him.
When he reached the far end of the Square and found himself beneath the portico of the
Town Hall, he stood helplessly with his suitcase in his hand, not knowing where to go or what to
do. At that moment Don Camillo hurried up to Peppone who was standing just behind the man.
"You've lost no time, have you, you Godless rascal, in making up to this Liberal priest-eater."
"What?" gasped Peppone, turning toward the little man. "Then you are a priest-eater?"
"But ..." stammered the man.
"Hold your tongue," Don Camillo interrupted him.
"You ought to be ashamed, you who demand a free church in a free state!"
The little man attempted to protest, but Peppone cut him short before he could utter a word.
"Brave!" he bawled. "Give me your hand ! When a man is a priest-eater he is my friend, even if he
is a Liberal reactionary!"
"Hurrah!" shouted Peppone's satellites.
"You are my guest!" said Peppone.
"Nothing of the kind," retorted Don Camillo. "This gentleman is my guest. I am not a boor who
fires tomatoes at his adversaries!"
Peppone pushed himself menacingly in front of Don Camillo. "I have said that he is my
guest," he repeated fiercely.
"And as I have said the same thing," replied Don Camillo, "it means that if you want to come
to blows with me about it, I'll give you those due to your ruffian Dynamos!"
Peppone clenched his fists.
"Come away," said Brusco. "In another minute you'll be boxing with the priest in the public
Square!"
The question was settled in favor of a meeting on neutral territory. All three of them went out
into the country to luncheon with Gigiotto, a host completely indifferent to politics, and thus even
the democratic encounter led to no results of any kind.
Return to Contents
On the River Bank
Between one and three o'clock of an August afternoon, the heat in those fields of hemp and
buckwheat can be both seen and felt. It is almost as though a great curtain of boiling glass hung a
few inches from your nose. If you cross a bridge and look down into the canal, you find its bed dry
and cracked, with here and there a dead fish, and when you look at a cemetery from the road
along the river bank you almost seem to hear the bones rattling beneath the boiling sun. Along
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