“Plus the fact that they were restricted to religious subjects.”
“Yes, sir. Then you think there is something to my theory?”
“Sure. I think it is a little more complicated, though.”
“Naturally, sir. It’s just my preliminary theory.”
“Do you have any other theories on art, Jackson?”
“No, sir. That bambini theory is as far as I’ve thought it through. What I wish is, though, they would paint some good pictures of that high country up around the rest center at Cortina.”
“Titian came from up there,” the Colonel said. “At least they say he did. I went down the valley and saw the house where he was supposed to be born.”
“Was it much of a place, sir?”
“Not so much.”
“Well, if he painted any pictures of that country up around there, with those sunset color rocks and the pines and the snow and all the pointed steeples—”
“Campaniles,” the Colonel said. “Like that one ahead at Ceggia. It means bell tower.”
“Well, if he painted any really good pictures of that country I’d sure as hell like to trade him out of some of them.”
“He painted some wonderful women,” the Colonel said.
“If I had a joint or a roadhouse or some sort of an inn, say, I could use one of those,” the driver said. “But if I brought home a picture of some woman, my old woman would run me from Rawlins to Buffalo. I’d be lucky if I got to Buffalo.”
“You could give it to the local museum.”
“All they got in the local museum is arrow heads, war bonnets, scalping knives, different scalps, petrified fish, pipes of peace, photographs of Liver Eating Johnston, and the skin of some bad man that they hanged him and some doctor skinned him out. One of those women pictures would be out of place there.”
“See that next campanile down there across the plain?” the Colonel said. “I’ll show you a place down there where we used to fight when I was a kid.”
“Did you fight here, too, sir?”
“Yeah,” the Colonel said.
“Who had Trieste in that war?”
“The Krauts. The Austrians, I mean.”
“Did we ever get it?”
“Not till the end when it was over.”
“Who had Florence and Rome?”
“We did.”
“Well, I guess you weren’t so damned bad off then.”
“Sir,” the Colonel said gently.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the driver said quickly. “I was in the Thirty-Sixth Division, sir.”
“I’ve seen the patch.”
“I was thinking about the Rapido, sir, I didn’t mean to be insolent or lacking in respect.”
“You weren’t,” the Colonel said. “You were just thinking about the Rapido. Listen, Jackson, everybody who’s soldiered a long time has had their Rapidos and more than one.”
“I couldn’t take more than one, sir.”
The car went through the cheerful town of San Dona di Piave. It was built up and new, but no more ugly than a middle western town, and it was as prosperous and as cheery as Fossalta, just up the river, is miserable and gloomy, the Colonel thought. Did Fossalta never get over the first war? I never saw it before it was smacked, he thought. They shelled it badly before the big fifteenth of June offensive in eighteen. Then we shelled it really badly before we retook it. He remembered how the attack had taken off from Monastier, gone through Fornace, and on this winter day he remembered how it had been that summer.
A few weeks ago he had gone through Fossalta and had gone out along the sunken road to find the place where he had been hit, out on the river bank. It was easy to find because of the bend of the river, and where the heavy machine gun post had been, the crater was smoothly grassed. It had been cropped, by sheep or goats, until it looked like a designed depression in a golf course. The river was slow and a muddy blue here, with reeds along the edges, and the Colonel, no one being in sight, squatted low, and looking across the river from the bank where you could never show your head in daylight, relieved himself in the exact place where he had determined, by triangulation, that he had been badly wounded thirty years before.