ACROSS the RIVER and INTO the TREES by ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“How is the motor doing?” the Colonel asked. He could hear her sounding like a stricken tank or T.D., ex­cept the noises were in miniature from the lack of power.

“So-so,” the boatman said. He moved his free hand in a parallel motion.

“You ought to get the smallest model Universal puts out. That’s the best and lightest small marine engine I know.”

“Yes,” the boatman said. “There are quite a few things I should get.”

“Maybe you’ll have a good year.”

“It’s always possible. Lots of pescecani come down from Milano to gamble at the Lido. But nobody would ride twice in this thing on purpose. As a boat, it is fine, too. It is a well built, pleasant boat. Not beautiful as a gondola is, of course. But it needs an engine.”

“I might get you a jeep engine. One that was condemned and you could work it over.”

“Don’t talk about such things,” the boatman said. “Things like that don’t happen. I don’t want to think about it.”

“You can think about it,” the Colonel said. “I’m talk­ing true.”

“You mean it.”

“Sure. I don’t guarantee anything. I’ll see what I can do. How many children have you got?”

“Six. Two male and four female.”

“Hell, you mustn’t have believed in the Regime. Only six.”

“I didn’t believe in the Regime.”

“You don’t have to give me that stuff,” the Colonel said. “It would have been quite natural for you to have believed in it. Do you think I hold that against a man after we’ve won?”

They were through the dull part of the canal that runs from Piazzale Roma to Ca’Foscari, though none of it is dull, the Colonel thought.

It doesn’t all have to be palaces nor churches. Certainly that isn’t dull. He looked to the right, the starboard, he thought. I’m on the water. It was a long low pleasant building and there was a trattoria next to it.

I ought to live here. On retirement pay I could make it all right. No Gritti Palace. A room in a house like that and the tides and the boats going by. I could read in the mornings and walk around town before lunch and go every day to see the Tintorettos at the Accademia and to the Scuola San Rocco and eat in good cheap joints be­hind the market, or, maybe, the woman that ran the house would cook in the evenings.

I think it would be better to have lunch out and get some exercise walking. It’s a good town to walk in. I guess the best, probably. I never walked in it that it wasn’t fun. I could learn it really well, he thought, and then I’d have that.

It’s a strange, tricky town and to walk from any part to any other given part of it is better than working cross­word puzzles. It’s one of the few things to our credit that we never smacked it, and to their credit that they re­spected it.

Christ, I love it, he said, and I’m so happy I helped de­fend it when I was a punk kid, and with an insufficient command of the language and I never even saw her until that clear day in the winter when I went back to have that small wound dressed, and saw her rising from the sea. Merde, he thought, we did very well that winter up at the juncture.

I wish I could fight it again, he thought. Knowing what I know now and having what we have now. But they’d have it too and the essential problem is just the same, except who holds the air.

And all this time he had been watching the bow of the beat-up beautifully varnished, delicately brass-striped boat, with the brass all beautifully polished, cut the brown water, and seen the small traffic problems.

They went under the white bridge and under the un­finished wood bridge. Then they left the red bridge on the right and passed under the first high-flying white bridge. Then there was the black iron fret-work bridge on the canal leading into the Rio Nuovo and they passed the two stakes chained together but not touching: like us the Colonel thought. He watched the tide pull at them and he saw how the chains had worn the wood since he first had seen them. That’s us, he thought. That’s our monument. And how many monuments are there to us in the canals of this town?

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