Padre Topes

The youngest of the friars, nicknamed Padre Topes for his timid little mouse's figure, his long pale snout, and small shining eyes, was barely twenty-two or twenty-three years old, though he looked older: he prayed and kept silent always; he was in the odor of sanctity, and it was said he was a virgin.

Padre Topes, then, whose true name was Padre Zuànne, prayed, kept silent, and worked continually.

An infinite solitude enveloped the small blackish convent that was beginning to crumble into ruin: age-old woods of holm oaks, rocks of strange profiles that in the glaucous twilights seemed enormous sphinxes' heads; thickets of holly and ferns of a yellowish green surrounded the convent and covered the flanks of the pyramidal mountain.

Who knows?

"Thank you, thank you, thank you," the crows seemed to say in their hoarse cry, greeting the strange little friar.

"He will become a saint; a saint like Saint Francis," said Fra Chircu, the guardian, who at night would weep and torment himself because by day he could not help getting drunk.

Once, however, Padre Topes fell into mortal sin.

One day, in early April, while the little friar stood at the window contemplating the blue sky studded with small clouds that looked like rose petals, Fra Chircu called him and ordered him to leave the next day on the begging round.

Usually, at that time of year, the Sardinians are very poor, but to the friars they always give something.

Frate Topes set out early in the morning: the sky was all silver, the wood damp, the dry brown leaves covering the ground glistened with dew.

A sweet scent of violets and narcissus enveloped the friar, who smiled, blissful.

Enough — having arrived at the foot of the mountain, before the village, black and silent as a schist quarry, the friar rested beneath the low branches of a holm oak, near which a spring bubbled.

He looked at her and was not troubled at all by her presence and her lovely smile; on the contrary, he asked her whom he might turn to about the horse.

The weather was splendid; mild and soft: the sun, already warm but veiled by milky vapors, flooded with voluptuous warmth the green countryside, very fresh, flowering with daisies and buttercups, with pennyroyal and gentians.

The little friar traveled with pleasure, greeting with childlike joy all the people he met: sometimes he would plunge into the tall warm grass, while the horse grazed, and he felt a poignant sweetness, similar to the ecstasies he felt in the convent when he prayed, dreaming of paradise.

In short, one night he arrived late in a village.

He knocked at the first little door he saw.

"What do you want?" she asked brusquely, looking at him in astonishment.

"Such and such," he said what he wanted.

The young woman hesitated a moment, knitting her very thick black eyebrows; then she brought the friar and his laden horse into a little courtyard adjoining the house.

"I am a woman alone," she said, helping to unload the saddlebags, and laughing a little mockingly, "but I hope people won't gossip if I let you sleep here."

"No, certainly not!" replied Frate Topes, smiling.

"God forbid; no!"

"Yes; in every sheepfold they gave me the new cheese — may the Lord bless the flocks."

"Amen!" said the woman, laughing.

She had a strange bearing; and her shining gaze and her mocking laugh were almost frightening.

"No, no."

He refused everything; but she insisted with such grace, caressing and insinuating, that he ate a sweet and then drank a glass of wine, mellow and strong as the scent of the aromatic scrub that surrounded the convent; then he drank another, then a small glass of a liqueur, red and burning like the sky at sunset seen from the window of his cell; then still another.

"And tell me, then, from which convent are you?"

She was dressed with studied elegance; she wore a bodice that, in the reflection of the lamp, glittered with beads and gold spangles; her black hair was parted over her forehead and coiled about her ears, shining with scented oil; and finally she gave off a scent of violet that made the friar's head spin.