There’re only a few trees growing here. On scorching days it can be hard to find shade. In the afternoons a torrid light pours into every crevice like water. It’s like a flood, and when it comes they take shelter under a young ash tree up on the hill. The earth they sit on is bare and worn like an old piece of furniture.
It all starts after Mass. The priest drives away in his tiny Fiat, while the rest of them walk a mile and a half down a dusty road. At ten in the morning the shadows are longer than the people, and cling to their left legs. They sit in a loose circle; they confer, and in the end two of them go to the little store a few dozen yards away. They buy cheap fruit wine, borrow a glass, get cigarettes as well. The sky is hard and unblemished, and the wine is called Di’Abolo.
At noon they can barely fit on their island of shade. When they go to bring successive bottles, the gold buckles on their shoes and the silver chains around their necks heat up as if in a fire, and everything around is swathed in a brightness such as some people see at the moment of their death: great empty cattle sheds, a black windowless house, fences, fields of nettles, the horizon, white shacks under blood-red roof tiles, children running with metal hoops, dogs, laundry hanging dead on the line, dust trailing behind a motorcycle, and all the other everyday things, licked by an invisible flame. Objects quiver, ripple, and look as if their moments are numbered. They’re like grainy moving photographs in which there’s more blackness than light.
But the men don’t see any of this, because the vertical rays have already entered their skulls, and inside things are the same as outside. One of them says to another, “You go get more this time.” “No. This time you go.” Eventually one of them rises and moves off. He is utterly dark against the background of the sky. The wine is called Di’Abolo. It has a red, black, and orange label.
If at three in the afternoon they call you over to have a drink with them, don’t be certain it’s actually you they’re calling. When you sit down among them it’ll turn out they were talking to someone else entirely.
Then it’s evening and sleep catches up with them in mid-sentence or mid-gesture. They assume old, preferred poses: on their back, on their side, curled into a ball. They look a bit like travelers who’ve forgotten to make a campfire. When the sun dips behind the crest of the hill, they’ll start to cool down like the rest of the world, and soon their white shirts will be the only bright things in the pale blue light of dusk.
Toward the end their children appear. They poke about among the bodies in search of small change. They gather the empty bottles and exchange them in the store for orangeade.