Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino

will."
    The valley of Bévera was full of people, peasants and also refugees from Ventimiglia, and they had nothing to eat; there were no reserves of food, and flour had to be fetched from the town. And the road into the town was under shellfire night and day.
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    By now they were living more in holes than in houses; one day the men of the village collected in a cave to decide what to do.
    "What we'll have to do," said the man from the Committee of Liberation, "is take turns going down to Ventimiglia to fetch bread."
    "Fine," said another. "So one by one we'll all be blown to bits on the way."
    "Or if not, the Germans will get us one by one and off we'll go to Germany," said a third.
    And another asked, "What about an animal to transport the stuff? Will anyone offer theirs? No one'll risk it who still has one. Obviously whoever gets through won't come back, any more than animals or bread."
    The animals had already been requisitioned, and anyone who'd saved his kept it hidden.
    "Well," said the man from the committee, "if we don't get bread here, how are we going to live? Is there anyone who feels like taking a mule down to Ventimiglia? I'm wanted by the Fascists down there or I'd go myself."
    He looked around; the men were sitting on the floors of the cave with expressionless eyes, scooping at the tufa with their fingers.
    Then old Bisma, who'd been down at the end, looking around with his mouth open and not understanding anything, got up and went out of the cave. The others thought he wanted to urinate: he was old and needed to fairly often.
    "Careful, Bisma," they shouted after him. "Do it under cover."
    But he did not turn around.
    "As far as he's concerned they might not be shelling at all," someone said. "He's deaf and doesn't notice."
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    Bisma was more than eighty and his back seemed permanently bent under a load of faggots—all the faggots he had hauled throughout his life from woods to stalls. They called him Bisma because of his mustaches, which had once, they said, looked like Bismarck's; now they were a pair of scraggy white tufts that seemed about to fall off at any moment, like all the other parts of his body. Nothing fell off, though, and Bisma dragged himself along, his head swaying, with the expressionless and rather mistrustful look that deaf people have.
    He reappeared at the mouth of the cave.
    "Eeee!" he was calling.
    Then the others saw that he was dragging his mule behind him, and that he'd put on its pack saddle. Bisma's mule seemed older than its master; its neck was flat as a board and hung to the ground, and its movements were cautious, as if the jutting bones were about to break through its skin and appear through the sores, black with flies.
    "Where're you taking the mule to, Bisma?" they asked.
    He swayed his head from side to side, with his mouth open. He couldn't hear.
    "The sacks," he said. "Give them to me."
    "Hey," they exclaimed. "How far d'you think you're going to get, you and that old bag of bones?"
    "How many pounds?" he asked. "Well? How many pounds?"
    They gave him the sacks, indicating the number of pounds on their fingers, and off he set. At every whistle of a shell the men peered out from the threshold of the cave, at the road and at that bent figure drawing farther away; both the mule and the man riding on the pack saddle seemed to be swaying and looked as if they might fall down at any minute. The shells were falling ahead of them, raising a thick dust, pitting
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    the track in front of the mule's cautious steps; and when they fell behind Bisma did not even turn around. At every shell fired, at every whistle, the men held their breath. "This one'll get him," they said. Suddenly he vanished altogether, wrapped in dust. The men were silent; when the dust settled they would see a bare road, without even a trace of him. Instead both reappeared like ghosts, the man and the mule, and went hobbling slowly along. Then they got to the last turn in the road and moved out of sight.