It looks quite differently now, he thought. I suppose it is because the distances are all changed. Everything is much smaller when you are older. Then, too, the roads are better now and there is no dust. The only times I used to ride through it was in a camion. The rest of the times we walked. I suppose what I looked for then, was patches of shade when we fell out, and wells in farm yards. And ditches, too, he thought. I certainly looked for plenty of ditches.
They made a curve and crossed the Tagliamento on a temporary bridge. It was green along the banks and men were fishing along the far shore where it ran deep. The blown bridge was being repaired with a snarl of riveting hammers, and eight hundred yards away the smashed buildings and outbuildings of what was now a ruined country house once built by Longhena showed where the mediums had dropped their loads.
“Look at it,” the driver said. “In this country you find a bridge or a railway station. Then go half a mile from it in any direction and you find it like that.”
“I guess the lesson is,” the Colonel said, “don’t ever build yourself a country house, or a church, or hire Giotto to paint you any frescoes, if you’ve got a church, eight hundred yards away from any bridge.”
“I knew there must be a lesson in it, sir,” the driver said.
They were past the ruined villa now and onto the straight road with the willows growing by the ditches still dark with winter, and the fields full of mulberry trees. Ahead a man was pedalling a bicycle and using both his hands to read a paper.
“If there are heavies the lesson ought to say a mile,” the driver said. “Would that be about right, sir?”
“If it’s guided missiles,” the Colonel said. “Better make it two hundred and fifty miles. Better give that cyclist some horn.”
The driver did, and the man moved over to the side of the road without either looking up or touching his handlebars. As they passed him, the Colonel tried to see what paper he was reading, but it was folded over.
“I guess a man would do better now not to build himself a fine house or a church, or to get who did you say it was to paint frescoes?”
“Giotto, I said. But it could be Piero della Francesca or Mantegna. Could be Michelangelo.”
“Do you know a lot about painters, sir?” the driver asked.
They were on a straight stretch of road now and were making time so that one farm blended, almost blurred, into another farm and you could only see what was far ahead and moving toward you. Lateral vision was just a condensation of flat, low country in the winter. I’m not sure I like speed, the Colonel thought. Brueghel would have been in a hell of a shape if he had to look at the country like this.
“Painters?” he answered the driver. “I know quite a little about them, Burnham.”
“I’m Jackson, sir. Burnham’s up at the rest center at Cortina. That’s a fine place, sir.”
“I’m getting stupid,” the Colonel said. “Excuse me, Jackson. It is a fine place. Good chow. Well run. Nobody bothers you.”
“Yes, sir,” Jackson agreed. “Now the reason I asked you about painters, is these madonnas. I thought I ought to see some painting so I went to that big place in Florence.”
“The Uffizi? The Pitti?”
“Whatever they call it. The biggest one. And I kept looking at those paintings until madonnas started to run out of my ears. I tell you, Colonel, sir, a man who hasn’t been checked out on this painting can only see just about so many madonnas and it gets him. You know my theory? You know how crazy they are about bambinis and the less they got to eat the more bambinis they got and that they have coming? Well, I think these painters were probably big bambini lovers like all Italians. I don’t know these ones you mentioned just now, so I don’t include them in my theory and you’ll put me straight anyway. But it looks to me like these madonnas, that I really saw plenty of, sir, it looks to me like these just straight ordinary madonna painters were sort of a manifest, say, of this whole bambini business, if you understand what I mean.”