The magpie stood beneath a photinia shrub in the front garden, beak ajar and slightly upturned, as if it were singing in a film documentary from the silent era; but with no sound it was just a hot bird cooling itself in the shade. I turned on the sprinkler; they like to bathe in the falling drops of water. It was 42 degrees. 107 always sounded better, but you have to be of a certain age to remember Fahrenheit.
Another magpie appeared, dropping down from a power line, or someone’s roof. It was probably a sibling or a some other relative of the first. The pair were most likely descendants of a deformed bird I once knew and wrote about.
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Earlier in the afternoon I had taken the youngest teenager to her first shift at a takeaway restaurant. Before picking her up later I had sat at an open-air table outside a cafe in the mall with a drink and an Alberto Moravia novel. It’s only a kilometre and a half from home but in this heat ...
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Two Women is set in the coastal mountains south of Rome during the winter of 1943. Cesira, a widowed evacuee, and her daughter Rosetta, are virtually starving in a rustic village while they await war’s end so they can return to the shop Cesira ran in the Vicolo del Cinque in the Trastevere district of Rome.
We ate, once a day, a few boiled beans with a coffee-spoonful of lard and a little tomato paste and a small piece of goat’s flesh and a few dried figs. … our greatest resource at this time was chicory; not the chicory that is eaten in Rome, which is always the same plant and never changes, but rather any kind of herb that can be eaten.
We would get up early and, each of us armed with a small knife and a basket, would go off along the slope of the mountainside … People have no idea of how many herbs there are which can be eaten … I already knew a little about them from having gathered them when I was a child …
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Late in the afternoon when we returned the magpies were back, stalking about the lawn like a couple of croquet players. From the front garden you can see a railway line at the end of the street. I used to see old Italians, heads bent, moving slowly along the overgrown verge inside the fence beside the line, filling bags with what they’d pick: edible herbs. That was years ago; they're all gone now, of course, along with the lost art of foraging, which they had probably learned from their destitute or desperate parents during the war.
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Two Women by Alberto Moravia. First published in 1957 as La Ciociara; 1958 Secker and Warburg edition translated by Angus Davidson; my copy is the Penguin paperback edition 1961, reprinted 1964, cover drawing by Giovanni Thermes.
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